Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  “Nyet,” insisted Misha. Money, he explained, was nothing to him; therefore, yes, he would take us up the coast, but as his guests. I had no way of measuring the offer and began to ask predictable questions, anticipating predictable answers. The house wasn’t his, he said; he came here on the weekends from P-K with his friends to relax.

  “What do you do in the city?”

  “We are criminals,” he replied. “Even the FBI knows about us.”

  “What’d you do,” I joked naively, “sell missiles to Iran?”

  Misha narrowed his eyes and demanded to know why I asked such a question. I swore I was only kidding around, and he studied me hard for a good long minute before his demeanor changed and, clapping me on the back, he decided, I suppose, that I was good entertainment out here in the hinterlands—an American writer dropped into his lap.

  “Robert, you will write your story about me, you will put me on the cover of your magazine, you will tell the truth,” he declared matter-of-factly, an extravagant display of hubris.

  The truth, as I understood it, went something like this: Years ago Misha had committed a crime, the nature of which he refused to explain except obscurely. The old system—the Commies, I suppose—threw him in jail in Siberia for “not fitting in,” where he fell in with like-minded troublemakers sharing grandiose, if not exactly morally based, ambitions for a better life. Most significantly, he connected with his fierce partner—let’s call him Viktor, and then let’s forget that we ever called him anything.

  Gorbachev, perestroika, freedom, the implosion of the USSR, crony economics, the democracy scam—Misha and his Siberian Mafiya crew moved to Kamchatka and became underworld oligarchs. These were the days, the early ’90s, of the diki Mafiya: no rules, every man for himself, and bodies in the streets. As best I could determine, Misha and friends privatized—seized—a huge tract of state property on the coast, an expansive fiefdom containing four or five rivers plus a processing plant, and went into the caviar business. Eventually the Mafiya and the government realized they had to coexist, so now, after massive greasing, the Mafiya had all the requisite documents and licenses they needed in order to legally do what they were doing—harvesting and processing an astonishing thirty tons of caviar a season to ship to their associates in Moscow.

  “The Mafiya,” explained Misha, “is a state within a state,” and perhaps it was destined to morph into the state itself, because if the government ever tries to recover the properties and companies and concerns the Mafiya had sunk its claws into, “there will be a coup d’état,” said Misha emphatically, “and there will be a civil war.” Which was exactly the sort of dire prediction I’d been hearing from every upright citizen in Kamchatka throughout the week.

  We went inside the austere little house, where Misha sat me down at the kitchen table and smothered me in hospitality, happily watching me shovel down the grub he set out—pasta with minced pork and silver salmon dumplings. Someone appeared with a large bowl of fresh curds and whey. Bonbons? asked Misha, sticking a box of chocolates in my face. Out came a bottle of Armenian brandy. The cross-cultural we-are-all-brothers stuff proceeded splendidly until I made the mistake of cussing.

  “Robert,” Misha objected, “don’t hurt my ears with bad words. Real men,” he admonished in his lullaby voice, “don’t need to talk to each other this way.”

  In the morning, Misha double-checked the tide chart he carried folded in his wallet. “Robert, let’s have one for the road,” he said. What he meant was, Let’s have one bottle for the beginning of the road. Aspirin and vodka, the breakfast of criminals. Afterward we mounted the GTT and crawled headfirst through the hatch covers into the cavernous interior. We bucked and roared out of town, across the east-west highway and onto the much-scarred tundra, stopping long enough for Misha, Rinat, and myself to climb up on the roof, where we each wrapped a hand around safety ropes and held on as the driver slammed the beast into gear and we slopped our way forward through the bogs.

  An hour later we arrived at the coast, littered with the shabby sprawl of a government fish operation. We churned onward through the pebbly sand, the blue Sea of Okhotsk to our left, huge slabs of tundra peat eroding from coastal bluffs on our right. Misha, surveying his kingdom, took delight in pointing out the sights—white-tailed eagles swooping down out of the moody heavens, flocks of berry-fat ptarmigans tumbling clumsily out of the scrub, a pod of all-white beluga whales, scores of sea otters bobbing in the waves off a river mouth. We crossed another without a hitch and Misha happily announced that we were entering private property—his.

  We saluted the first brigade of his workers, a motley crew of caviar cowboys. They looked like—and perhaps might someday soon be—partisan rebels in their black rubber waders, filthy overcoats, stubbled faces. We cracked open another bottle of vodka, ate lunch, and Misha wanted pictures, group pictures, buddy pictures, and I took out my camera. We went on, conferring with another survivalist cell of workers farther up the coast, always a guy with a rifle or shotgun standing nearby.

  By now Misha had become a bit nervous, his bonhomie turned brittle. Somewhere up ahead was his jack-booted partner Viktor, who had outlawed alcohol in the camps. If you signed onto a brigade, if you were lucky enough to be asked, you came to work, worked yourself to numbing exhaustion, but after a twelve-day cycle of setting nets, pulling nets, tearing the roe out of thousands of now-worthless salmon, and processing the eggs into caviar, you went home with a small ­fortune—$1,500 a man. Then, and only then, you could drink your Russian self blind, for all Viktor cared.

  Twenty minutes later, we came to a pair of Ural trucks ahead on the beach. “No pictures!” Misha warned as I followed him to the dune line, toward a storm-built village of wooden-hulled shipwrecks. At this moment I had to be honest with myself about Misha’s character flaws relevant specifically to my presence there on the beach: His pride—he wanted to boast. His gregariousness—he wanted to be liked and appreciated. His generosity—he wanted everyone to understand he was a big man who looked after his own. Viktor, Misha’s partner but apparently the first among equals, had no such flaws.

  “Here is Viktor,” said Misha. It wasn’t an introduction. I glanced toward Viktor, who looked at me steadily, his round face and Asian eyes, icy with menace, and I immediately turned and walked away, careful not to acknowledge him, as he was so clearly offended by my existence. Misha had erred in bringing me here with my retinue, playing games when there was serious work to be done, caviar to salt, traitors to whack, and now he vied for Viktor’s forbearance of this cardinal sin. When we rendezvoused with Misha back at the GTT, he was singing the same tune of camaraderie, but in a different key.

  Which brings everything back to this lagoon behind the Mafiya’s northernmost outpost, where I stood that morning after my night out on the tundra with Rinat, not caring so much about how the treachery of the stolen caviar might somehow come crashing down on us when we reunited with Misha and Viktor at low tide, but instead far more concerned with my new belief that I was destined never to have a solid day of good fishing here in the angler’s paradise of Kamchatka.

  When Misha had dropped us here the previous afternoon, we’d spent a moment discussing the nature of things, fishwise. His men had gawked at me, the sportfisherman. Not a one had ever brought in a fish unless he had gaffed, gigged, netted, snagged, or somehow scooped it out of the water like a bear. When Misha finally understood the style of fishing I was intent on doing, he frowned.

  “Nyet, nyet, nyet,” he said. “Don’t bring that here. We don’t want catch-and-release here.” We argued: If he kept harvesting the roe at such a pace, where would the fish be for his children, his grandchildren? “Robert,” Misha smiled, “you and I alone are not going to solve this problem.”

  And then, too quick, always too quick, it was time to go. Back in Misha’s orbit, the criminals actually were in high spirits. It had been a good season so far, the silvers were starti
ng to arrive, and the interior of the GTT was packed solid with wooden casks of precious caviar.

  “I don’t like to catch fish,” Misha said breezily. “I like to catch money.”

  Kamchatka’s exploitation was both an old and a new story, but so was the campaign to preserve its wealth of resources. In 1996 Russia bequeathed more than one-fourth of Kamchatkan territory to the UN Development Programme. A stunning gift to mankind—a World Heritage site that includes the Kronotsky State Biosphere Nature Preserve, 2.5 million acres of some of the most spectacular landscape on earth. The Kronotsky Preserve contains a geyser field that is second only to Yellowstone’s, and the Uzon Caldera, filled with steam vents, smoking lakes, mud cauldrons, and dozens of hot springs. It also is home to three times as many grizzlies as in the entire Yellowstone ecosystem, plus the greatest known populations of Pacific and white-tailed eagles. The park has twenty-two volcanoes, including the Fuji-like Klyuchevskaya, 15,584 feet of elegant cone, the tallest active volcano in Asia and Europe.

  Many Kamchatkans fear that, as the economy plummets and the country opens itself to the unchecked appetites of the free market, the peninsula’s natural resources will be raided and areas like Kronotsky overrun by tourists. When I spoke with Boris Sinchenko, vice governor of the Kamchatka region administration and one of the men at the helm of Kamchatka’s future, he told me, “In five to ten years, we expect to host five to ten million tourists annually and to have built the infrastructure to accommodate them. The territory is so large, we can easily lose ten million people in its vastness.”

  Many Kamchatkans also harbor a corollary fear. The peninsula’s total population is less than five hundred thousand, three-quarters of which lives in or around P-K. An environmental scientist told me with a shrug, “When there’s no electricity, the people say, ‘We don’t care about nature, give us heat!’” One day, Rinat had slapped an orange sticker on the front of my notebook, given to him by his ex-wife, who worked for a Canadian gold-mining conglomerate: HUNGRY, HOMELESS, NEED A JOB? CALL THE SIERRA CLUB, ASK ABOUT THEIR NO GROWTH POLICY. Only the most arrogant conservationist would demand that Kamchatkans remain impoverished in order to preserve their wonderland for a future less hopeless and bleak than the present. Talking with Sinchenko, however, I sensed there was something a bit cynical about signing over a quarter of the peninsula to the enviros at the UN, as if now that it had proved its enlightenment, the state had earned carte blanche to do what it pleased with the rest of its resources.

  There were precedents for such cynicism. Twice, in the ’60s and the ’80s, the Soviets began to erect power plants on swift-flowing rivers inside or near the reserve, destroying spawning grounds and wasting millions of rubles. Nevertheless, a large hydroelectric project is under construction on the Tolmachevo River, and the gorgeous, fish-rich Bystraya River flowing through the village of Esso was stuck with a dam and power station. Sitting below the areas around Esso are some of the richest unmined gold deposits in the world. When I spoke with Boris Kopylov of the State Environmental Protection Committee, he mentioned that his agency had been successful in stopping exploratory drilling on west coast oil deposits and halting placer mining for gold near the mouth of the Kamchatka River, but it was clear that sooner or later the oil was going to be drilled and the Esso gold deposits were going to be extracted, ultimately endangering spawning grounds in central Kamchatka. “In previous years all the [environmental] agencies were completely against all exploration for gas, oil, and gold,” said Kopylov. “Now our position is to change a little.”

  In the salmon fishery, the magnitude of greed, multiplied in many instances by a struggle for survival, was mind-boggling. “Illegal fishing out of Kamchatka yields $2 billion a year,” David La Roche, a consultant for the UN’s environmental mission to Kamchatka, told me over beers in a P-K café as we talked about the local flowchart for corruption. “The legal fisheries are yielding not as much.”

  The economic pressures that confront the ordinary Kamchatkan were made viscerally clear to me in July when I met Vladimir Anisimov, the headman of Apacha, a sprawling collective farm about ninety-three miles due west of P-K. A prosperous dairy farm until Gorbachev presided over the nation’s demise, Apacha’s ability to survive had seriously corroded, its herds whittled away by the state from four thousand to four hundred head, its buildings in sad disrepair. In desperation, the Apacha villagers had signed an experimental one-year contract with the Japanese to collect mushrooms, herbs, and fiddlehead ferns from the surrounding forest. And then, like almost every other collective in Kamchatka, Apacha had gone into the fishing business.

  Everyone was waiting, waiting, for the fish to start their run, but when I returned to Apacha in September, I learned that, as in much of Alaska this summer, it never happened—the July run of salmon never really came in from the sea. Nobody in the village had been paid a wage in recent memory. Vladimir was at a loss; the collective hadn’t netted half its quota of twelve hundred tons when, if truth be told, it had counted on netting its legal quota and then doubling it with another thousand tons off the books, as is the common practice. Apacha was rotting on the hoof, the central government gnawing away at the resources that the people had struggled fifty years to create. Since the middle of August, the ruble had lost two-thirds of its value, and the last day I saw Vladimir, shops were empty of basic foodstuffs and Apacha was without electricity because there wasn’t any fuel to run its generator. Even in such dire straits, the kindness and generosity that all Kamchatkans had shown me did not abandon Vladimir, and he embarrassed me by siphoning gas out of his own vehicle so that I could go fishing.

  Sergei, heretofore simply along for the ride, suddenly awoke to the idea that it was time to take control of our half-baked expedition, now that we had parted with the Mafiya and exhausted every option in our one and only plan to head north to that never-fished river. Pointing for Rinat to take a turnoff up ahead on the east-west road, Sergei allowed that if all I truly wanted to do was fish, then he had an idea that might finally relieve me of my obsession.

  Sergei disappeared down a path. I sat in Rinat’s diesel truck, praying that something good might come of this. Rinat wouldn’t look at me, and I could hardly blame him. His country was falling apart around him, and he was stuck chauffeuring a sport-crazed American, one of the nominal victors in an ugly game we had all been forced to play. All he could do was resign himself to an even uglier truth—foreigners equal money equals hope: Drive on.

  Sergei reemerged from the trees, beaming. He had a pal, the local tayozhnik, who owned a skiff and was caretaker of a hunting cabin about a half hour’s cruise downriver at the base of the mountains, at the mouth of a tributary as thick with char and mikisha (rainbows) as the main river itself was obscenely packed with the season’s final run of pink salmon. The tayozhnik would be willing to take us there.

  “But there’s a problem,” said Sergei, wincing. “No gasoline for the outboard motor.”

  Okay, that was a problem—there was only one gas station within sixty miles, and it was closed. We drove to a shack atop the bluff above an invisible river and picked up the tayozhnik, an unshaven backwoods gnome we might have roused from an Appalachian hollow, and together we traveled a half hour to Apacha, where Vladimir, the destitute headman of his destitute people, came to our rescue with the siphoned gas. Two hours later, back on the bluff, while I repacked my gear for the boat, Sergei and the woodsman suddenly took off to run unspecified errands.

  Rinat and I broke out the medicine and resigned ourselves to further delay. Then began the cirque surreal. First to wander across the clearing was a lugubrious old man who stood gaping at me with wet eyes, as if I were the Statue of Liberty. I passed him the bottle of vodka so that he might cheer up. Then a group of hooligans from Apacha screamed up in their battered sedan, disco blasting, apparently convinced we had come to the river to party. Obligingly, I passed around another bottle. Another hour ticked off the clock.

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sp; Sergei and the tayozhnik returned, followed in short order by a carload of RIVOD inspectors, blue lights flashing, replaced only a few minutes later by the militia, who sprang from their car patting their sidearms. Again, we passed the bottle.

  Night was quickly falling. Just as I bent to hoist my duffel bag, a van rolled into the clearing and out flew a not unattractive woman in a tracksuit and designer eyeglasses. “I heard there was an American here!” she shouted breathlessly and, zeroing in, almost tackled me in her excitement. She dragged me back to the van and shoved me inside, where her three companions rolled their eyes with chagrin, handed me a plastic cup, and apologetically filled it with vodka. My abductor—Marguerite—knelt in front of me, her hands on my knees, babbling flirtatiously.

  “What gives?” I said, utterly bewildered. She slipped a business card into my shirt pocket and pleaded that I allow her to represent me, refusing to hear my explanation that there was nothing to “represent.” Okay, she said, let’s do joint venture.

  “Robert?” I heard Sergei calling me. They were ready to go, no more endless dicking around.

  I tried to get up, but Marguerite pushed me back in my seat. I grabbed her hands, looked her in the eyes, and firmly declared, “I have to go fishing.”

  I lurched for the door, but she had me wrapped up. This couldn’t be more bizarre, I told myself—until Marguerite began stuffing six-ounce cans of caviar into the pockets of my slicker. Okay, I said, if you want to come, fine, but I’m going fishing now. Marguerite relaxed just long enough for me to bolt out of the van, but there she was again, welded to my arm, attached to me in some frightening, unknowable way.