“You can’t wait for inspiration.
You have to go after it with a club.”
Jack London
I was fed up. Not with the unbridled street crime and the lame Bolshevik economy, but with myself. I was finishing school and had to apply to university in the summer. I was also inevitably approaching my eighteenth birthday — the age of maturity as they say — and felt a bit nervous about that. You can be as nerdy as you want, but you have to respect your hormones. Up to that point, I would not have had much to show for myself if I had had to take part in a manhood initiation rite. You know, the usual Siberian stuff: drinking vodka by quarts, dogsled racing, wrestling with a street bear, and sleeping all night on the bare snow. Sorry guys, just kidding — none of that stuff at all.
I had no motorbike, no real girlfriend, no hangover stories — nothing that would convince tough guys who had all of these to let me into their circle. I felt that I was still dragging my childish dreams behind me. They were good, those dreams, and I simply didn’t have the heart to chuck them away. As usual, I had been spending more time with books and with my own thoughts than with company, pondering at times whether a man could be called a sociopath if it wasn’t crystal clear who was sick — him or the society he lived in.
I started to, almost physically, feel the pressure of time. At that point, I hadn’t known that my bustle about maturity was futile, for the male brain completes its development much later, by the age of thirty or so, and, from then on, begins breaking down pretty quickly. Nevertheless, I sensed that I was missing out on something essential and irrevocable.
I was too inexperienced to play love games and hoard girls’ hearts under my throne, but I felt that I had to make a strong move in my life — something impressive, almost insane. Preferably not that stunt my classmate had pulled, when, after his eighteenth birthday party, he had climbed up the drainpipe of a seven-story building and urinated from its roof onto the supporting crowd down on the ground. No, I needed something more convincing, more subtle, a bit old-school. I would spend all day long thinking about it until one sunny morning it dawned on me: it had to be an adventure!
Like the other kids, I was fascinated by adventure books. I had collected a quite sizable, thoroughly read library. Sitka Charley, Cyrus Smith, Jim Hawkins, and many other characters were frequent visitors to my secluded room. I read a lot in those days, and I mean a lot. The books I held in my hands, while lying on my old couch, varied from Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius to Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, from Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Poe to Jules Verne and James Fenimore Cooper. The Soviet censorship looked favorably upon adventure literature, as long as it didn’t criticize their ideology, and the quality of the translations was outstanding. Good books, like all things, were lacking too, but you could find them in second-hand bookshops or buy them at inflated prices on the black market. At times, my parents saved on food, but never on books. Our huge library was the only treasure we had, and I’m still happy about that fact.
However, I wasn’t just a binge reader. I would think at length about what I had read and even tried to compose my own stories. Who was the true hero: the prim Capitan Scott who buried dead ponies in snow, almost with military honors, and forced his men to pull the sleds, or the pragmatic Amundsen, who learned things from the Inuits and used dogs for transport and for food? Who would have circled the globe first if Magellan had turned back after having reached the Moluccas as he had planned?
Of all writers, my greatest inspiration was Jack London. His storylines and his unique, at times peculiar, language mesmerized me. His characters’ trails spread from Alaska to tropical seas, from private offices on Wall Street to South Asian slums. He came from a poor family and ended up being one of America’s highest-paid writers. He earned heaps of money, but lost it all and never got out of debt. London heavily criticized the establishment and, at the same time, desperately wanted to belong to it. He considered himself a dedicated socialist but wrote now and then about white supremacy. During his short life, he managed to be a bum, a worker, a prospector, a millionaire, a loving husband, and a deserted soul. He lived and died in the footsteps of his own character Martin Eden — perhaps the only book of his that I couldn’t finish: I didn’t particularly like prophetic books that ended with suicide. Jack was a man who lived to the fullest, for better or worse, but who nevertheless lived his own life. I didn’t need such intensity — just one-tenth of it.
Another writer whose books I absolutely loved was Jules Verne. The scale of his imagination was astonishing, and the accuracy with which he predicted things led to people calling him, in the French manner, a clairvoyant. For example, he foresaw not only an expedition to the moon, but also the particular takeoff and landing sites both on the Earth and on the moon, the physical dimensions of the spaceship, even the budget of the lunar expedition and, pretty closely, the names of the first astronauts to land on the moon! He predicted long-range submarines, electric guns, the television, helicopters, splash-landing in the ocean, gigantic luxury cruise ships, and what’s more, weapons of mass destruction and consumer society, which have gone hand in hand for the last few decades, as if he had been able to divine us through a crystal ball. Jules Verne was also probably the only foreign writer who wrote a dedicated fictional narrative about the Siberia of his times: Michael Strogoff, The Courier of the Czar.
In short, I had read and knew quite a lot about adventures, but my practical experience was next to nothing. So I decided to join a local tourist club.
I found it, with some difficulties, on the opposite end of the city, in a cellar buried deep under an inconspicuous apartment house. It probably used to be a community bomb shelter and, since the Cold war was over, had been converted into a recreation facility. It was a murky, poorly lit place with excellent soundproofing — pretty soon I realized why. I was put on the list by an apathetic corpulent gentleman at the entrance who looked like Jabba the Hutt that had decided to play dead after Lea’s last hug and lay low in a provincial Siberian city.
Further on, I found a maze of corridors and doorways that resembled an abandoned Martian base, ending in a spacious hall that looked like a survivalist’s last shelter where weary chairs were set in uneven rows in front of a small stage. The hall was dim too, but the stage was lit up by a couple of spotlights. Half a dozen of not particularly sociable individuals were sitting scattered in the hall with their noses buried deep in some hand-written abstracts. Nobody bid me hello, so I took a seat and had to wait about half an hour until the rest of the mob arrived.
Then, a long ritual of handshaking began, accompanied by hugging, patting, and friendly mutual cursing. Everyone was obliged to shake hands with everyone — if somebody had been skipped, it would have been recognized as an insult. At the end of that round of mass fraternization, one man came up to me, measured me with his eyes, and said in a puzzled tone, “It must be a rookie. Hello guy.” Then he asked me to bring him a glass of water. I was a bit too old to be a cabin boy and told him something about fresh water running down in a toilet. That was the end of our acquaintanceship.
When all the fuss had subsided, we sat quietly for about a couple of hours, and weather-beaten hikers addressed us from the stage; they talked about how to survive in the Siberian wilderness, build a fire in the wind, find edible plants, orientate in the woods, and many other handy things. At first, I regretted that I hadn’t brought a notebook and a pen, but the lectures were so well-presented that I memorized nearly all of them. Then, it was time for a break. Almost all the male members went out to the surface to refresh their lungs with nicotine fumes, and the girls lively chatted and giggled in the corners. Again, I felt pretty out of place.
Toward the end of the second part, I noticed a few vague figures with cumbersome cases crawling alongside the wall at the back of the room. I had a very bad feeling about those guys. My instincts said, “Run!” But I was a new kid in that sect, so I decided to respect the place and stay until the end. My worst premonitions were proven right: those guys were so-called “bards” — amateur guitar singers that were an integral part of the tourist culture. I had a very comprehensive, so to say, omnivorous taste in music and had listened to a great variety of tunes, from Bach to The Sex Pistols. However, I was absolutely unable to bear those smug guys who sang bad lyrics of their own in a bad voice, with a bad guitar accompaniment.
Their performance was pure torture for me. The bards sang as awfully as they could, giving lengthy explanations between the songs about how deep their lyrics went and how underestimated they were. It was an endless parade of clichés, imitations, hackneyed rhymes, and allusions as graceful as an old elephant’s leg.
No wonder those minstrels had to join the tourist club and go far into the woods to perform their songs. Had they done it in a populated area, they would certainly have been slaughtered in the bloodiest way. I suspect there was a secret deal between the bards and the tourist leaders. That sort of singing would definitely scare the shit out of bears, tigers, werewolves, zombie mammoths, and even mosquitos, or any other kind of devilry that hikers could encounter on the way through the stern Siberian land. So those singers would be kept at hand as a kind of repellent.
I went to the club another couple of times but soon abandoned it. I just didn’t fit in with the company, and the bardic music made me nauseous. However, I must commend the professionalism of the instructors who gave us the lectures and the generosity with which they shared their knowledge. But my plans were very much still theory. We had to go camping soon to hone our hiking skills, but I beetled off from that club, first of all, because the bards were to join us too. Also, I took part in a few camping events that spring, but it didn’t grant me an awful lot of experience.
Finally, I had taken some practical steps on my own and made a few one-day trips to the nearby forests. I tried, quite successfully, to apply all the knowledge I had received in the cozy sound-proof cellar. I trained myself to pitch a tent, to use a map and a compass and to read all the hidden messages that the forest could send to an experienced pathfinder. Sometimes it was hard, even excruciating, work, but strangely, I never tired of it and wanted more. I even succeeded to light a flame with two sticks, as the ancient tribes would do. Fortunately, I wasn’t caught red-handed by the forest morality police, for I rubbed two pieces of wood so hard that had they been around, I would have definitely been arrested.
After those short solo raids, I started thinking about a more serious trip. I was already feeling more and more comfortable going through nature without any company. It was quite a foolish yet challenging idea. It was an axiom, an undeniable truth: never go alone into the woods. Only very experienced locals, mainly professional hunters, could travel through the Siberian wilderness without the company of a dog or a man. The local forests where I had plotted my short trips were far, far away, figuratively and literally, from the real Siberian boreal forests called taiga.
However, those desolate parts were not completely unknown spots for me. I had been there a couple of years ago when some of my classmates and I had made a two-day ski trip through the winter taiga. The expedition had been perfectly organized and secured. We had a professional instructor on board (a really tough guy, I must say), and our class teacher was the leader of the group.
We took a train to a distant point in the woods and from there started our journey. The weather was perfect — sunny, clear, no wind at all. We skied all day among shiny white hills and made an overnight stop in the mountains, at a remote log cabin.
I was so overwhelmed with impressions that I couldn’t sleep. I would shuttle all night between the freezing terrace and the warm guts of the log house that was nestled at the edge of a cliff, while the boys were trying to feel up the girls on a wall-to-wall sleeping pallet. That forbidden wilderness covered with a thick pelerine of snow glowing under the full moon light, the rocky peaks in the distance and, closer, the steep hills bestrewed with slim trunks of fir trees and the endless ski path, unwinding all alone farther and farther down the way, would come back into my dreams many years later.
Those dreams probably lured me again into the depths of that woodland ocean. However, despite all those sweet memories, I was still in doubt. Which route should I take? How long would the trip be? What would happen if I…
The answer came unexpectedly, in the middle of the night. I simply woke up and got the message — three days in the wild, no companions, just nature and me. The message itself wasn’t as important as the brand-new sense of conviction that I could do it. My hesitations evaporated. In that very moment, I was sure: The stars were on my side. The stars indeed were on my side. They hadn’t let me down as my own foolishness and overconfidence would on the forthcoming trip.
© 1995–2025 Alexander Daretsky. All rights reserved.