The landscapes came in all shades of white, from pure blinding light, through hazy blues to misty greys. Only at sunrise and sunset did the rest of the spectrum make an appearance when the peaks were splashed with amber and golden yellows and, for the briefest of moments, a spectacular array of fiery reds.
After the usual early morning ritual of warming the axles and wheel hubs with flaming torches, coaxing our frozen vehicles back to life after a night in the deep freeze, we wound our way up mountainsides to gaze over rivers that slept in their gorges and down again to creep across narrow wooden bridges so as not to disturb them. Whenever we stopped to stretch legs and relieve bladders I would walk far enough away from the vehicle’s engine to stand and marvel at the serenity of it all; not a breath of wind, not a twitter of a bird, just a majestic silence.
There’s a map of the world pinned to the wall of my study at home and I often sit there looking at it thinking what a pimply little afterthought Europe is on the western end of Asia. Asia is a really serious, man-sized continent and Siberia occupies almost a third of it. Though you can get a certain handle on the scale of things by looking at a map, it was only now that I’d been here for a couple of weeks that I was beginning to get a feel for Siberia’s size.
Even after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia emerged as by far the largest country in the world and three quarters of it is Siberia. Siberia is unimaginably vast. It could swallow up the largest countries in South America, Africa and Europe and still have more than a million square kilometres of elbow room. This ‘sleeping land’, as its name translates literally, possesses a million lakes, 53,000 rivers and a staggering wealth of natural resources. It spans eight time zones for God’s sake.
Down in a wide valley we stopped to pay our alcoholic respects to the spirit of a hot spring beside the road. It was immediately obvious in the snowscape thanks to its shroud of mist. Seeing hot running water seep from a land that was otherwise set in suspended animation, it was easy to understand the pagan origins of the ritual. All the trees around the spring were festooned with bits of rag tied by Nature’s parishioners. Other people had left messages, cigarettes and an empty vodka bottle.
Hot tea, sausage and bread were waiting for us in the back of the van after our toast and we ate greedily with the engine running to maintain the heater. Although thirsty after the alcohol, I stopped myself from drinking the tea straight away because I remembered something in one of the medical articles I’d read about how drinking hot liquids straight after coming in from very low temperatures raises the likelihood of shattering your teeth. So I let it go cool.
The sun had already vanished behind the mountains by 3 o’clock in the afternoon. We passed other patches of thick fog signifying open water and more hot springs as the last rays of sunshine splashed yellow beams on to the snow-clad peaks. At about 6 o’clock, a good hour after the sun had set, the moon came up at the end of the valley. But this was no ordinary moon. If I hadn’t just seen the sun disappear I’d have said that this was it, because the thing perched on the horizon was a huge, really bright, orange vitamin-C lozenge. It seemed to just sit there radiating an incredible light vertically upwards. Like a gigantic bonfire, orange flecks were being fired towards the heavens. The phenomenon lasted for perhaps ten minutes before we were left with just the tunnel of light from our headlights as we pushed on through the snowy scene.
I heard three theories on why Oymyakon, the coldest town on Earth, is situated where it is. One said that it was in a meadow on the Indigirka River because historically this was where nomadic reindeer herders would spend the summer in a sort of semi-permanent settlement. The second said that this was the spot where Stalin, when he introduced collectivization in the 1930s, told the nomads to settle down. The third was that the town was a regional administrative centre. The three ideas were not necessarily mutually incompatible.
I felt a rising sense of excitement on our final day of driving along the Road of Bones. The valley had widened and the mountains had given way to hills set back from the road, which looked more like piles of white sand or flour. From this distance, the spruce trees clustered around the base of the piles took on the appearance of black currants. We were scuttling through a Siberian giant’s kitchen as he prepared to knead a currant loaf.
Wildlife had begun to appear. A snow-white ptarmigan shot out almost from underneath our wheels, invisible but for the two black triangles on its tail feathers. It moved gently through the air like a kite until it hurtled across the grey ice of the road and became briefly visible as a bird flapping its wings before disappearing again over the snow.
Still 150 kilometres from Oymyakon we pulled off the road up a steep incline to a wooden house that commanded the best view of the valley. It was a lonely meteorological station, manned by a young man who lived in the middle of nowhere with his wife and two dogs. I wondered how he felt, being posted to this isolated spot in the heart of Siberia, so close to the world’s coldest town and yet not quite there. He took me to inspect his compound of instruments, a difficult operation when I ventured from his well-trodden path because the snow was thigh-deep in places. He put his foot on the step up to his Stevenson screen, opened the louvered door designed to protect a thermometer from direct solar radiation that would warm it up beyond the temperature of the air, and examined the instrument. ‘It’s 32,’ the young man told me. I peered over his shoulder. The liquid inside the instrument’s thin tube was at -32°C (-26°F). ‘You don’t say “minus” here?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘it’s obvious.’ There was no answer to that.
But it felt colder. A light wind was blowing, burning my face and slicing through my gloves to freeze my fingers. I was relieved when he invited us in to drink a cup of tea. The meteorological observer wore thick, bottle-bottom glasses, and like me he suffered from the tedious problem of their frosting up as soon as we entered his house in billows of what seemed like steam as the cold air mixed with the warm inside. It was a handicap that I’d learned to live with since my arrival in Siberia. The frosted lenses had to be warmed before I could see again and it was unwise to venture out a second time before they had, because the condensation would freeze, potentially ruining the spectacles. But this man introduced me to a clever solution. He removed his glasses and held them over the hot stove, evaporating the condensation in no time at all.
Several factors contribute to Oymyakon’s record low temperature. Siberia is cold in winter and eastern Siberia particularly so, because it has the highest degree of continentality on Earth, being far from the effect of the sea in dampening down extremes of temperature. This severe continental climate is dominated by cold air from the Arctic in winter when the region is under the influence of an area of high pressure. Winter means short days and little energy from the sun, but the cold is intensified by the dominant high pressure that produces clear skies. Clear weather promotes strong radiation from the snow surface during the long winter nights, hence what little heat is available during the day is lost rapidly after the sun sets. Winter in this part of the eastern Siberian taiga is typically severe and dry, with relatively little snow, few clouds and only light winds.
Eastern Siberia’s generally low winter temperatures are lower still at Oymyakon thanks to the local topography. Although the town lies at an altitude of 740 metres above sea level, it is situated in a valley 10 to 20 kilometres wide and below the general level of the Oymyakon Plateau, which in turn is enclosed on all sides by mountains at a height of 1,500 to 2,000 metres.
Just as hot air rises, cold air tends to sink, so cold air accumulates in the valley. In winter at Oymyakon there is hardly any wind to disturb this cold air and the air is effectively trapped in the valley by a more-or-less permanent ‘inversion’: typically, there is an increase in temperature with height in the air through the first 500 to 1,000 metres above the surface of Oymyakon’s valley floor (in most parts of the world, air temperature decreases with height). I tested the inversion theory for myself one day, managing to sc
ale one of the hills at the side of the valley carrying the portable meteorological station I’d brought for the purpose. To my delight, the temperature at the top of the hill was a whole 4ºC (7ºF) warmer than at the bottom. This inversion also means there is little wind to disturb the cold air sitting in the valley bottom and the coldest temperatures coincide with the calmest periods. The average January temperature at Oymyakon is -50.1ºC (-58.2ºF) and the lowest temperature recorded was -71.2ºC (-96.2ºF) during a Russian expedition to the then unknown mountains of Yakutia in the 1920s.
When finally we arrived in the world’s coldest town I asked that we drive directly to the monument erected to commemorate that occasion. The memorial to ‘Oymyakon – Pole of Cold’ was in the middle of town, a stone’s throw from a small area of forest. Set in a stone base, surrounded by a low wire fence, it consisted of a mock thermometer recording the record low set next to a plaque honouring Sergei Vladimirovich Obruchev (1891–1965), journalist, geographer, traveller and writer, who holds the honour of having recorded the lowest temperature of -71.2ºC during the expedition of 1926–29. Andrei translated the inscription for me, ‘For his glory already nothing is needed. He is needed for our glory.’
Above the plaque, set on stakes, was a metal snowflake and wind vane, and above them the hammer and sickle. As a geographer, I suspected that Obruchev would have been disappointed with the circular metal globe that accompanied these symbols because North America was woefully thinner than it should have been, no doubt to give added prominence to the USSR, picked out in red.
After leaving the ghost town of Nezhdaninskoye we had passed several other sad and depleted settlements along the Road of Bones. Their outskirts were marked by derelict houses abandoned as the towns had contracted following the closure of a state-run enterprise or industry, leaving a core of survivors in the centre of a withered community. But Oymyakon was not like that. Spread out across the plain of the Indigirka River, it had many hallmarks of a thriving hamlet. Each neat wooden house was hemmed in by paddocks enclosing haystacks and grazing horses or cows, the school was well attended, the shop well stocked and a new sports hall had only recently been built. During my stay there I learned that the town was not without its problems but people were coping well enough because virtually every family was basically self-sufficient thanks to their animals.
The head of the family I boarded with (there was no hotel) worked at the town’s electricity generating plant that ran on diesel. He worked 12 hours on, 24 hours off, and was glad of the extra income I brought because he hadn’t received his salary from the power plant for more than a year. ‘I do get advances on my wages,’ he told me, ‘but it is not unusual to go for three months with nothing.’
This was a story I was to hear repeated numerous times during my stay in the world’s coldest inhabited place. The electricity generating plant was important, but its sister plant, the town’s boiler house, was simply essential to life. Much of Oymyakon’s housing consisted of farmhouses spread out across the plain, loosely linked by a network of rough tracks, but the central part of town was more tightly organized in a few conventional streets of housing, the kindergarten, the school, shop and bakery. While the farmhouses had their own wood-burning stoves, the centre of town relied on the boiler house for heat. The hot water was pumped across the permafrost through pipes enclosed in a wooden casing that looked like very short fences running along the sides of the roads.
The boiler house ran on coal, but the state did not have enough trucks to distribute it from the Yakutsk coalfields in the south. Of the 1,300 tonnes they needed in a year usually only about 900 arrived. Nikolai, the manager, shrugged when he told me this while we stood outside his small plant with its two pencil-like chimneys billowing smoke into the crisp air. Behind us, two grimy figures were shovelling black nuggets from an undersized pile into an iron wheelbarrow that looked as if it remembered the great October Revolution and had come out of it badly.
‘So we burn whatever else we can,’ Nikolai said. ‘I have a team who chop wood in the forest and we dismantle abandoned houses to feed the boilers.’ And if the boiler house stopped working, I asked him, what then? ‘It would be a crisis,’ he said simply, almost as if the thought had never occurred to him. ‘There would be no bread, the schools would have to shut and a lot of houses would have no heat.’ The situation had happened in other Siberian towns that winter. Some had had to be evacuated when the fuel ran out, the heating ground to a halt and houses rapidly sank below freezing point. A roof over your head is a bare essential in the icy wastes of winter, but a house without heat is like no house at all.
‘That would be the first problem, but worst of all the hot water pipes would freeze and fracture. They would have to be replaced. It would take many months to get new ones.’
Nikolai didn’t tell me he hadn’t been paid for ten months. Andrei informed me as we were leaving the plant after looking inside. Three huge brick furnaces gobbled coal and splintered doorframes to heat the boilers. Tangles of antiquated pipes and valves were encrusted in black coal dust. It was Dante’s Inferno incarnate. I offered to contribute some shovelfuls of coal to the furnaces’ fiery bellies and within minutes was almost overcome by the dust that penetrated to the depths of my lungs.
‘Nothing at all?’ I asked Andrei. ‘No, he gets no advance on his wages, but the bakery allows him to buy bread on credit. He lives with his mother and he says her state pension is paid regularly. He has his own animals too.’
I thought of my own life at home in England. What chance would there be of me continuing to write or teach if no one paid me for ten months? But Nikolai still turned up for work each day to organize his small workforce, to keep the heart of Oymyakon pumping because he knew that if he didn’t there would be little of his community left.
‘He is a true hero,’ Andrei said as we made our way up the main street past the school where children played in their break time in the snow, ‘a hero without reward.’
About the only compensation of a job in Oymyakon’s Dickensian boiler house was the fact that the workplace was warm. The following day Andrei suggested I might like to see what life was like working at the other end of the spectrum, so we drove to the outskirts of town to join up with a man named Alexei as he rounded up his horses.
Yakut horses are hardy beasts, left to forage for themselves through the harshest months. They have short legs and heavy compact bodies that mean the ratio of their surface area to their volume is low, helping them to preserve heat. Their stature mirrored that of all the people I had come across in Yakutia: small and compact. So much so that I kept banging my head on low doorways, even though at five foot nine I am hardly a giant myself. There was no doubt in my mind that the distinct lack of tall thin people among these northern inhabitants was evidence of a physical adaptation to the cold.
I had already seen some of the horses from the Road of Bones, standing in small groups scraping at the snow with their front hooves to uncover tussocks of dry grass below. But although well adapted for life in the freezer the horses still rely in part on human help. Every couple of months in the winter, Alexei rode out to round up his herd, to brush them down with heavy metal combs and scrapers. Snow collected on their backs, he told me, and turned to ice, both a heavy burden for the animals and an icy threat to their health.
Alexei would typically spend eight or nine hours a day outside while finding his horses and rounding them up. He was well dressed for the operation, wreathed in a thick sheepskin coat and huge fur hat like my own. The only difficulty he encountered was plain to see on his face. His prominent cheeks were red and raw where frostbite had taken a grip. But it wasn’t painful, he said, and would heal come springtime. Nevertheless, for me the prospect of spending all day outside was still a disturbing one. It was clear that Oymyakon’s residents were made of sterner stuff. Indeed, they were well prepared for this kind of life from an early age. In the school, naughty children are not made to stay behind after class for detention but simpl
y locked out in the cold after lessons have begun. This punishment is not practised in all weathers, however. Classes are suspended and the youngest children sent home when the thermometer sinks to -52°C (-62ºF). The middle classes hold out to -54°C (-65ºF) and for the oldest children classes continue until the temperature reaches -56°C (-69ºF).
Other than a few cattle, horses made up the core of most people’s livestock holdings. They are an excellent source of meat and the mares produce milk throughout the spring and summer period. Although the family I stayed with occasionally served reindeer, horsemeat was the mainstay of their diet, as it was for most of Oymyakon’s inhabitants. It was usually boiled and dished up in large hunks for each person to attack with a knife on their own personal chopping board. By the end of a week, I longed for someone to roast the meat, but the oven in the family cooker had clearly never been used for anything other than storing bread.
Vegetables were conspicuous by their absence – unsurprisingly given the impossibility of growing anything in the permafrost – with the exception of raw onion and garlic bulbs. The latter were particularly loved by Andrei who popped one or two at breakfast each morning telling me how good raw garlic was for preventing colds. Otherwise, the lack of fresh produce from the ground took some getting used to; especially since I had to sit down to eat each day beneath a huge poster of fresh fruit on the wall in the kitchen. But everyone I consulted on the matter in Oymyakon informed me that fruit and vegetables were a waste of time. They provided little energy, I was told, since they burned up too quickly. Vegetable matter was what their livestock ate. A high-protein, meat diet was what people needed in winter.
Going to Extremes Page 5
