Siberia

Not exactly what you imagined, Siberia is a land of incredible places and people, and contradictions and all that jazz. “Blues” clubs (Abba, the Beatles and Jim Morrison being the closest things to that genre). Siberian bears (we’ve only met one, an imaginary medved named Sergei). Siberia has wolves, the sort that might rise up and howl in the eye of a full, gorgeous moon, of which the nights as many as they have brilliant suns lavishing the mountains and valleys and factories with intense white light. Siberia has large department stores where you can find crystal vases and Moschino eyewear and ebony-appointed samurai swords and gleaming washing machines. Siberia has desolate tundra and sometimes intense heat (see “Hot”) and often intense cold, underlaid at places by 600m of Permafrost. Siberia has Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, the world’s eighth sea containing 1/5 of the world’s fresh water, and at that size, the cleanest water you can find: that’s no commissar’s exaggeration. Also true: Siberia has thousands of factories spewing many carbon dioxide and mercury and mystery molecules into an otherwise pristine (is there an otherwise?) atmosphere and as many of other chemicals into the soil and watertables. Siberia has wizened, homeless goats who will eat cigarettes butts off the mud if you won’t share your piroshky, or your Snickers or your Pringles. Siberia has the hardest and most toothless (literally, not, not at all figuratively) and most beautiful and placid and nicest persons in Russia. The geography seems to mirror them in a certain, vague way (or vice versa)—immense wilderness punctuated by lakes and unreal mountain ranges and smokestacks and flats colored brightly and in dirt. Like places all over the former empire and like no where else in the world. Long confrontational lines at the bank. Gold in the mountains. Carts and motorcycle sidecars on the rough roads. Calm and cross-cultural, withered and obstinately progressive, in a completely apolitical way. The sales at the new supermarket. Pirated Kill Bill and Microsoft Word. Numbing chill and numbing homemade vodka and a rainbow of indigenous birds, emptiness and horror and industry and rustic pleasure and survival, braving, with ancient patience, the continual reinvention.