“There are no narrow-minded men;
there are men who have very specialized brains.”
Me
I was lying on my side in an embryonic position, feeling, unlike a normal embryo, cold and detached, with my face turned to the dying fire. Strange as it might seem, I was lying on a blanket, which meant that at some point I had climbed up the tree and brought my backpack to the ground. I had no memory of that particular event, but, somehow, it didn’t bother me. The hammock was still in the tree, but I didn’t feel personally attached to it anymore, so I decided to leave it there forever.
I looked at the haze of heat shimmering over the firebrands and then farther on, at the horizon where the new dawn was breaking, and wondered why I was there. What nightmare had brought me to this place? Did I really need this expedition? Did I want to prove something? If so, then what and to whom? I got up hastily, before the true answer emerged in my head. My feet were swollen and my legs, every muscle in them, in pain. But it was a normal, casual pain I was familiar with. I took off my socks and examined my feet. There was nothing that called for a “flying doctor,” partially because they didn’t exist in our parts. I sprinkled some cold water on my feet, waited until they dried, and put on my footwear.
There was not a cloud in the sky, and the forthcoming day promised to be warm and sunny. I brought some dry firewood, raked up the smoldering coals, and restored the fire. Mechanically, I cooked my breakfast, which included a portion of canned meat, some bread and a huge mug of hot tea with sugar. Strangely, I still didn’t feel hungry. I ate my breakfast because I had to.
You would better eat such kind of food alone, without company. Company… I thought about my friends who, undoubtedly, were having the greatest time of their lives, fishing and fooling around all day by the river and spending cold nights, three girls and two boys, in one tiny tent. Then, I thought about Redhead. There on the train, I had acted as an ill-tempered egoist. Now I saw the situation from her point of view. Without me, she probably didn’t feel comfortable in that company. I just had to put my snowflake feelings aside and be near her. Instead, I had let her down. I mused for a while on what turns boys into real men — whether it was girls with loving hands or the hardship of life. At that particular moment, I had no clear answer.
All in all, here I was, in the woods, half-way through, cold and drowsy, in need of warm sunlight like an old reptile after hibernation. I had to complete what had already been started, that is, trying to heat myself up and drinking hot tea while staring around. The horizon was clear, and the sun was rising, big and yellow, like the yolk of a dinosaur egg. I gathered my things into my backpack, put it on my shoulders, and marched determinedly back to the path.
Oh, divine Siberian nature! Let me, unworthy mortal, sing a hymn in praise of you! What part of the world can match your richness and depth of colors, your immense vastness and stern beauty, your clean waters and crisp air? Where else can you find such a riot of life, where the spell of nature’s glory has never been broken? Those deep blue skies like oceans above, and those deep blue lakes like heaven’s wells? Those bright green meadows twinkling with the ruby red of wildflowers? And diamonds of unseen size and color that slumber untouched in the Earth’s depths for time to come? Those sharp white peaks and magnificent ridges that tower over the steppes and the valleys and the woods where the beast runs, the serpent slithers, the fish swims, and the bird flies. Have you ever seen all that? Poor you, if you say no.
The trail became more difficult, as I had expected. The path weaved among big rough boulders pushed here ages ago by the glaciers of the Ice Age. The cliffs grew taller and more serrated, covered by crooked trees obstructing the sunlight. Uneven streaks of fog appeared over the cliffs, buffeted around by gusts of high wind. Cold started to creep into my bones again. I made a stop, squeezed myself into my old juvenile sweater with patches on the elbows and carried on.
Soon, I began a prolonged ascent that led me, according to the map, into a shallow gorge. The path became narrow and coarse, and spraining your ankle on those slippery rocks would have been easy business. I made another stop, opened my map, and studied it again. I had to go uphill about five miles along the gorge. Then the road went downhill for another five miles. The almost ten-mile stretch of road had the shape of a mocking tongue and strayed far northeast, giving me just a five-mile advantage if I went straight.
I studied the map more carefully. There was a dotted line going through the cliffs; it had some signs along it that I couldn’t understand. It looked like a shortcut. When I was preparing for the trip, I hadn’t noticed it. Of course, I wasn’t an absolute moron and knew that all shortcuts lead you to trouble. Maniacs, monsters, all kind of devilry just love to nest and breed near those “easy ways,” and the phrase “let’s take a shortcut” always sounded like a death sentence for a fool. At least that was what I had learned from watching foreign VHS movies that had started creeping beneath the Iron Curtain into our land of virginity somewhere in the early 1980s. But it depends on where you make your decision — sitting on your ass at your friend’s flat and watching a creepy video, or standing on the edge of a cliff in the middle of the Siberian forest, lonely and tired. I opted for the shortcut. “I always can turn back if my plan goes belly-up,” I said to myself, although I knew it was just another newborn lie.
I was never good at turning my back away from trouble. I mean, not in a heroic way. But at that particular moment, I was very far from even thinking of heroics. I just wanted to save my legs from unnecessary effort. I looked ahead. The shortcut should start somewhere over there. I walked another half a mile and finally recognized it winding on the steep face of a cliff. It didn’t look very popular among humans. It might easily have been a goat trail or an obstacle course designated for rookie bears. It was much more narrow and uneven than the path I had been walking on. But my mind was already in love with the idea of saving time and, probably effort, and spurred me ahead.
After an hour of climbing the almost vertical slope, I was out of breath and wet from sweat. The summit of the cliff didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I made a stop and looked around. The view, however, was worth the effort. From that point, I saw remote rocky ridges and cliffs that stretched, far away, to the Northwest. Those were the spurs of the huge mountains whose snowy peaks were clearly visible at the horizon. One thing was in my favor: the sun had come out again and was shining on my back, well, on my backpack.
Wiping the sweat from my face, I pondered over a short accident that had happened down there, on the vertical stretch of the cliff. Climbing up with the stubbornness of a bug meaning to escape from a glass bottle, I suddenly felt dizzy and almost fell from the face of the cliff. To be more precise, I felt, just for a fraction of a moment as if I had already been falling. But that wasn’t the strangest part. I really didn’t even notice it had happened at all. I just made a short stop and carried on. I was genuinely puzzled, even worried, about that lack of concern. It looked like, somewhere down deep inside, I didn’t care for my life at all. But a cozy couch and a meek psychologist with an accurately trimmed beard were not around, so I moved on.
I let my gaze wander once again and spotted a small tree a few yards off the path, rooted, all alone, on the weathered protrusion of a bold rock. The tree was a miniature copy of a full-grown pine with distorted branches and a curved trunk. “Poor tree, you don’t get too much food from these rocks, do you?” I said and got closer. Although it was small and deformed, coming up to just a couple of feet, it was beautiful. It looked like a tiny knight in rusty armor who had fallen under a hail of foe arrows. The pines there at the cliff, even bigger ones, had that peculiar shape because of the strong wind and lack of nutrition. I stood and gazed at the tree. I thought of the Japanese art form called “bonsai,” where people intentionally torture seedlings, cutting their brunches and wrapping their trunks into a wire and so on, in order to halt the plant’s development. The tree would then look like a downsized copy of a full-grown one. Those freak plants cost a lot of money, and rich people would decorate their rooms with those little monuments to sadism.
But this one had grown in the wild. Pine seeds have a little wing that helps them travel with the wind. Besides, the birds can hide those seeds among the rocks, using them as a stash for hungry winter months. Do you remember your parents, dear tree? Your brothers and sisters from the same pinecone as you? Some time ago, your lonely seed fell into one of these cracks, and the fight for life began. Poor plant, fed by just drops of rain and some dust brought by the wind. What power forced you to live and carry on? Who told you to cling to life so strongly as you cling to the rock? I got no answer. But it didn’t offend me. I wouldn’t talk to a stranger either. That tree was a silent rebuke to my momentary weakness and, at the same time, my greatest inspiration. My breath returned to normal, and I went back to my goat trail. Time was precious as never before, but I felt that I had learned something.
© 1995–2025 Alexander Daretsky. All rights reserved.