Siberian Dawn     T A B L E_T A L K Is London your cup of tea? Find out what's so great about the grand old towne in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk   R E C E N T L Y The mystic-barber of Selçuk By Gary Mex Glazner How a tonsorial teen in Turkey helped me understand the revelations of Rumi (03/04/99) Special delivery By Lindsy Van Gelder Hand delivering a postcard from the Galapagos to Italy starts a string of delightful surprises (03/03/99) Strangers in paradise By Douglas A. Konecky Batam, Indonesia, was a lot less than the brochure promised -- until two traveling musicians found the Nagoya ice cream shop (03/02/99) Mardi Gras unmasked By Zachary Karabell New Orleans' biggest bash features days of flesh, booze and flashy costumes. But what happened to the festival? (02/28/99) Railway ties By Morrie Erickson A traveler discovers the real Burma on a train to Mandalay (02/26/99)   Browse the Wanderlust Passages archives     Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		STRANDED IN SIBERIA | PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - I couldn't bear the thought of sitting in that cabin another day. Or maybe more. Who knew? If there was risk involved in going forward, what about the danger in sitting still, waiting for some snowstorm to bury us? We had no access to weather reports, and neither of us had talked to anyone coming north, although we had seen several trucks moving south. Anatoly chortled to himself when I verbalized these thoughts. He was listening to me, but his mind was set on a long sleep- and tea-filled sojourn in the cabin on that plateau. We sat in silence. A truck appeared in our rearview mirror. "Anatoly, maybe I ought to stop that truck. He seems to be ignoring the weather. Do you understand?" He did. He handed me a white metal cup. "A souvenir. Drink tea and remember Anatoly!" He jumped out and plodded through the snow, waving his blue bandanna at the approaching red Kamaz. It stopped. Anatoly talked to the driver and waved me over. I grabbed my bags. "Drink tea! Remember Anatoly!" Pavel, the driver, shifted into first and we drove off, leaving Anatoly, a tiny brown figure in the sheer whiteness behind us, waving a bandanna and moving through the snow on bandied legs. Gripping the wheel as a cowboy does the reins of a bucking stallion, Pavel was big and strapping and blond and looked to be around twenty-five. He was originally from Blagoveshchensk, near China. I liked his clear head and complete sentences. "You've been in a truck since Yakutsk with that old guy? Those old people can't restructure their thinking. I've got money to make -- I'd never sit in a truck cabin for days hoping the weather will break. It may get worse!" Kinship of age and spirit directed our conversation. Pavel thought that I should have picked a young driver, that I wouldn't understand Russia's future by socializing with the old. I wasn't sorry to have ridden with Anatoly, though; rather, I was pleased with the chance I had to get to know a Yakutian old-timer, and glad that my ride with him introduced me to Pavel, with whom I felt I could talk freely. We pounded ahead over the icy straight stretches of the plateau, as bumpy as corrugated steel, then began weaving downward in a slow descent through sopki under a sky of shifting beams of silver cast from a sun partly hidden behind the clouds. Pavel asked detailed questions about life in the States and the legal aspects of marriage. It seemed he'd had a marital problem ending with a divorce that turned out unfavorably for him; he had lost possession of his son to his ex-wife. He blamed "laws drafted by Communists" for this, and thought American judges would have been more inclined to let his son stay with him. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - At the crest of the final sopka, a glimpse of the massive, rolling steppe below dissolved our discourse on family law and replaced our good humor with a sense of foreboding. The wind began to howl, weary undulations of steppe swathed in ceaseless rushing clouds of white stretched to the horizon, and the cabin grew perceptibly colder as we descended. Pavel shifted in his seat and threw away his cigarette. "What's happening here?" I asked, awed by the sudden change in weather. The wind, now screaming through the numerous slits and crevices in the cabin, lashed at our Kamaz and drove five-story high clouds of snow across the road. Pavel's voice cracked. "This ... this is bad. Maybe we should have waited it out." The horizon had faded into white -- the sky was white and the earth was white. A glare resulting from sunlight hitting flying snow struck our eyes from every angle. Trees had diminished to scarecrow-like burned twigs. "This is bad. This is a bad place. Vasilyevka. There is radiation here. From the uranium gulag over there. Stalin had prisoners mining uranium here. The radiation is high." To the west and south, about two hundred yards off the road, remnants of shacks and prison barracks peeked up through the snow, mirage-like in the blizzard, fading with the thickening waves of white, reemerging as they thinned. I was thankful to be in a moving truck. We descended a gentle slope approaching the ruins of the gulag and stopped. Pavel's naparnik, a Yakut named Dima with a long, Genghis Khan mustache, had halted ahead of us, and ahead of him another two trucks had pulled over. Dima jumped out and slipped on the snow as he ran through the winds to our cabin. Dima shivered, the wisps of his mustache hoary with frost. "Something's happened ahead. I don't know what. We have to stay put." Pavel suggested we eat. Food was the last thing on my mind in all this radiation and snow, but I kept this to myself and forced down some ham and tea. We fell silent. Within an hour, as we all chomped glumly on biscuits and stared at the road, the wind died with a death rattle, as if it were the final breath of an expiring elder, and the snow stopped blowing, dropping to the earth with a hiss. The eye of the storm, Pavel said. In the frigid, sterile stillness, the splinters of the gulag stabbed through the white powder to the west. Above us hung a sky of thin blue air, beneath which rolled sweeping expanses of lifeless white steppe dotted with black runts of trees. We sat in uneasy silence, the kind of silence one finds amidst those waiting for news of loved ones going under the knife. N E X T+P A G E | "What kind of idiot drives a passenger car on these roads?!"