“Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil
and I’m not necessarily going to dismiss all of these,
as I have never found a rusty snake.”
Terry Pratchett
If you go hiking, your legs, unsurprisingly, become the most important part of your body. You can make your way through the wild without a head (easier to go through the bushes), a stomach (less food to carry), or some other organs that might seem vital in your ordinary urban life (like your middle finger, for example). However, you do need your legs on track and must treat them nicely. Otherwise, your journey will turn into torture.
My boots swallowed one mile after another, and my mind went into a kind of energy-saving state where time seems meaningless, and your brain wakes up from its trance only when something important happens. I had had enough excitement for that day. Marching through the awakening spring forest suddenly became a pleasant routine for me. The path was smooth and clearly marked. After having walked a dozen miles quite uneventfully, my brain received a signal from my left leg. I made a stop on the roadside, dropped my backpack, and sat down on a mossy boulder.
After a short examination of my lower extremities, I found a blister on the middle of my left big toe. My right leg was okay. I punctured the blister with a needle sterilized by the flame of a match and put a small sticky plaster on it. Rolled into plaster, the toe looked even better — like a baby panda wrapped in a napkin. I sat on the boulder for about twenty minutes, waiting for my feet to dry.
To pass the time, I reexamined the contents of my first-aid kit, from which the plaster had magically appeared. There were a couple of bandages, a dozen sticky plasters of various shapes and sizes, a pack of painkillers, a set of needles and thread, and a small vial with an iodine solution called “yod” in Russian.
Yod was an antiseptic widely known all over the world and definitely deserved its place in my rescue kit. For example, you can sterilize drinking water with just a drop of it. However, only in Soviet medicine had its use achieved a truly universal scale. Its salubrious properties had been exploited for treating minor injuries and traumas, bites, infected wounds, sore throat, pneumonia, childhood phobias, and even more.
Science knew of a few ways of applying this nostrum. One of them called “yodnaya setka” was when a qualified Aesculapius would use iodine to draw a grid the size of a chess board on the patient’s back. In my case, I found it excessive to use that powerful remedy for such a minor injury and saved its healing powers for more serious accidents that, hopefully, wouldn’t happen.
By the way, there were plenty of relatively harmless and mostly useless medications that were incredibly popular among the patients in those times… and the doctors too. Here are some of them:
Zelenka — a brilliant green solution which, in all fairness, was found to be effective against some types of bacteria, but, as is the case with iodine, its use was extended to treat almost any known malady. Parents in those times loved drawing green spots on their offspring.
Validol — or, scientifically speaking, menthyl isovalerate, was a very popular anti-anginal medicament. The expression, “You’ll bring me to validol!” meant “You are pushing me to a heart attack.” You may think about this medication as a pack of Mentos on steroids. “Fresh breath, healthy heart.” I would have handed out this motto for free.
There were some other methods and remedies which coexisted with “conventional” ones and whose efficiency (and safety) was never proven by science, like cupping-glass therapy, mustard plasters, autohemotherapy, subcutaneous oxygen, and so on.
Local medicine was sufficient for routine problems, such as appendicitis, hernias or ulcers, but for more complicated ailments, you had to go to Moscow or Leningrad (St Petersburg). There, unreachable and untouchable demigods under the disguise of men in white coats performed incredible feats. The medical science of those times was widely based on the immaculate “opinions” of those divine creatures rather than on pure scientific evidence. There were some people with excellent manual skills, but on the whole, Soviet medicine was lagging two to three decades behind her Western counterpart. In some particular areas such as immunology, anesthesiology, and medical genetics, the gap was even wider.
But, please, don’t get me wrong. There were plenty of talented doctors and scientists in those times. However, the lives of most of them were not beds of roses.
Some people might have heard of Dr. Christiaan Barnard, a South African doctor who performed the world’s first man-to-man heart transplant in 1967. But very few people know that Dr. Barnard twice, in 1960 and 1963, visited the Soviet Union and learned transplant techniques from Dr. Vladimir Demikhov. Barnard, as well as many other doctors, honored Demikhov as his tutor and the father of transplantology. In his own country, however, Demikhov was an outcast and faced obstruction from the medical establishment.
I can also recall Gavriil Ilizarov, one of the fathers of modern orthopedic surgery, who for years was considered a quack by the so-called “medical authorities” of those times. His contribution to world medicine cannot be overestimated, whereas he had to live all his life in exile, in a small Siberian town called Kurgan at the fringe of the boundless Kazakh steppe. However, he was a great man who had turned his dog house of a lodging into a world-class hospital. Orthopedic surgeons from all over the world would come to learn from him at his provincial medical clinic. Of course, they had to take a break in Moscow to switch planes. There, however, Ilizarov’s name still meant nothing.
Another interesting example might be the story of the medical steppers. In the 1960s, a few Soviet doctors and engineers patented a number of very efficient connecting devices for abdominal and lung surgery. They used the same method your office stapler uses to bind paper sheets. Those devices made operations way easier, shorter and safer for a patient. A couple of pushy guys bought those patents from the Soviet State and established the United States Surgical Corporation (it was rebranded recently) — one of the biggest players in the medical market till this day.
I can think of other names like these. Why, you may ask, were all those brilliant people treated as underdogs? Well, it’s quite a complicated question. You have to read the immortal Lefty by Nikolai Leskov to understand it.
Having used the word “taiga” so many times, I feel obliged to give a brief description of that type of forest, without going too much into the details. Taiga, or boreal, or northern forest, is the largest community of plants and animals on Earth, second only to the oceans. Stretching throughout the Eurasian and American continents, this habitat for thousands of species of flora and fauna consists mainly of coniferous forests and enormous water resources. For example, only Lake Baikal contains about one-fifth of the world’s fresh water (I hope it’s still true).
Basically, there are two types of taiga: light and dark. The light forest mainly consists of pine and larch trees. Like the name sounds, it’s airy, spacious, full of light and would be a fitting playground for Teddy bears and pygmy pandas (sorry, silly joke again). It’s quite picturesque and usually pleasant to hike through. I thought I would have been walking through that type of forest most of the time, as one scrooge might think that his horse would have been getting old but still keeping on winning the races.
However, in the dark coniferous forest, which primarily consists of fir and spruce, the trees may stand so close together that you, as well as sunlight, cannot pass through it freely, so you have to stick to designated paths. But if on your way fir branches slap you in the face, beware — this path has been trodden by beasts. Go back and find a safer route.
Speaking of the beasts, you might have heard about all kinds of dangers that wait for man in the northern forests. As might be expected, bears, wolves, lynxes, wolverines, and poisonous snakes — those that survived human invasion and deforestation — may willingly take your life at their earliest convenience. In real life, however, this happens on extremely rare occasions. The beasts don’t like men and usually avoid their company. The exception to this rule is the time when these dangerous creatures are looking for a partner or raising their kids. In that particular period, they may mistake you for a threat to their babies or, who knows, a suitable mate, if you look and act appropriately.
But there are some dangerous things that you do have a real chance of encountering in the taiga. And if you are not prepared for it, you may simply die. These things are way more dangerous than all those animals. I’m sorry if I disappointed you, but methanol vodka and counterfeit fuses are not among them.
The first thing is the ubiquitous clouds of insects, mostly midges and mosquitoes called “ghnoos” or “moshká.” Those flying blood-suckers, whose size can vary from barely visible specks to almost 2-cm-long buzzing monsters, may cause immense suffering, blood loss, and even death from their bites. To protect yourself, you need special clothes, a mosquito net, and repellent. They usually dwell close to water — it’s vital to their life cycle — which in Siberian land means virtually everywhere. By the way, one of the reasons I chose spring for my adventure was to avoid dealing with those tiny demons and hit the road before they started to hatch.
The second deadly enemy of a traveler in the Siberian woods is the low temperature. It can be unexpectedly cold in the taiga forest even in the heat of summer, especially in the highlands. So, if you go there, you would better leave your bikini at home and squeeze some extra warm clothes and socks into your backpack. In a continental climate, you can survive about a month without food, but you can die of hypothermia in a matter of hours. I don’t mean an extreme temperature where your spit is already an icicle by the time it hits the ground. I mean moderately low temperatures, like five to ten degrees above zero, especially in windy weather. So, in those parts, never take a step without a box of matches in your pocket. If you get lost, this 19th-century invention will save your life. And if you want to really be a smartass, take a pocket survival kit with you too.
The last, but by no means least, danger in these parts is man. You can find all kinds of folks in the taiga: hikers, hunters, loggers, harvesters, or even a felon on the run. A whole bunch of creepy stories were circulating among the beginners about tourists who had met criminals in the forest and had turned up dead afterwards. It wouldn’t be pure fiction, however, considering the number of prison camps or, as they called them “zones,” which could, presumably, leak from time to time. The truth was, again, that it would happen on very rare occasions and almost all fugitives were found and sent back to jail.
There had been one particularly bloodcurdling episode where a small group of women and men had allegedly been raped, beaten to death and eaten by criminals on the run. I asked one of the instructors about this story. He didn’t even comment on it — just waved at me in annoyance and shook his head. Whatever they say, my very dear friends, Gleb, Sergey and the three girls, did have an encounter with criminals during their short camping adventure, thankfully, without being eaten or seriously hurt. I will tell this story a bit later.
Meanwhile, my feet had dried, and my stomach was feeling empty. I took a few gulps of water from my flask and listened to my body. I didn’t want any food at all. The sun was shining on my face. The sky was blue, and life was great as never before. I put my boots back on and marched northeast.
© 1995–2025 Alexander Daretsky. All rights reserved.