It gave me reason to think about the phrase ‘to eat like a horse’. I don’t know where it came from since all horses eat is grass. A better phrase would be ‘to eat like a Siberian’. These guys ate vast quantities of meat and anything else they could lay their hands on (mostly bread and milk products like ice cream). They really threw it down their throats. And I did too because I was always hungry in Siberia. I ate what seemed to me vast quantities but never felt full. My body was like the boiler-house furnaces that needed constant stoking.
If I had consumed as much at home I would have had permanent indigestion, but not in Siberia. Nevertheless, devouring horsemeat morning, noon and night was something my intestines took a bit of time to get used to. Three or four days into my stay at Oymyakon my stomach began to make constant groaning noises, as if there was a whole horse inside there trying to get out. I knew what the problem was but just the thought of resolving it made me weary. I had left the land of flushing toilets far behind. I remembered the last one, in a truckers’ stop on the Road of Bones. The converted apartment only had hot water, no cold, including in the loo. It had been a very peculiar, rather pleasant feeling to sit on the bowl and have my bottom warmed from beneath.
But there were no such luxuries in Oymyakon. The apparatus in question was located outside in a little wooden hut raised up above the ground at some distance from the house. Number ones were no problem, a fast and efficient operation, swiftly completed. But the prospect of squatting down over a hole in the floorboards, straining to evacuate the unprocessed remnants of an entire stallion at -45ºC (-49ºF) was daunting. I left it for another day, hoping against hope that we were due for a warm spell. Doing it at -30ºC (-22ºF) would make a great deal of difference, I felt. The next day I could wait no longer, because I was becoming seriously disturbed by the thought of my belly splitting. I checked my portable meteorological station but its electronics had frozen solid. My backup conventional thermometer said it was -52ºC (-62ºF). It served me right. The only consolation lay in the lavish supply of toilet paper. It was a book to tear up; a 1983 Soviet volume entitled New World.
My encounter with Siberian toilets was just one in a series of everyday activities that took on quite different dimensions in the cold. The unfortunate incident involving my glasses just prior to the walrus dip had been followed by a series of similar breakages of the plastic straps on my boots, brought from England, which had been advertised by a well-known Danish footwear specialist as suitable for temperatures down to -50°C (-58ºF). It was -38°C (-36ºF) when the plastic snapped. I had expected the ink to freeze in my pens (which it did) so I’d brought a Dictaphone to make notes on, being very strict about keeping it deep inside a pocket next to my body so that the batteries wouldn’t conk out. The machine worked after a fashion but when I listened back to my tapes in the evenings they came with ghostly silent patches that were inexplicable other than as some sort of reaction to the cold.
For my personal safety, investigation of the medical literature had been supplemented by advice from several people at home on the sorts of dangers I could expect in Siberia in winter. Some also suggested how I might avoid them. Worried (unnecessarily as it turned out) about vicious Siberian dogs, I went to see a nurse who gave me a rabies jab. She went all goggle eyed when I told her the temperature might sink as low as -50°C. ‘Your eyeballs will freeze,’ she said with complete authority. What was the best precaution I could take to prevent this type of injury, I enquired. ‘Don’t go,’ she replied.
My sister Margot came up with a more useful source of advice, a friend of hers who had trained Special Forces in Arctic survival. He warned of the dangers of frostbite and recommended I buy some silk underwear to keep me warm. Cotton is no good in the cold apparently because it absorbs your sweat and rapidly loses heat when wet. He also told me I should get kitted out in whatever local people wore, which would probably be animal skins.
His opinion had been echoed by the words of Nikolai, the hunter-cum-forest ranger from Lake Baikal, and the dead animals that I’d chosen had served their purpose very effectively. Apart from significant discomfort and the temporary loss of feeling in the extremities, including a couple of occasions when Andrei had startled me by reaching out to hold my nose (‘It is white,’ he would say with customary understatement, ‘this is not a good sign.’), I had survived my trip to date medically undamaged. The only drawback of my animal furs was the weight of my sheepskin coat, a significant cause, I suspected, of my voracious appetite. I had to eat a pound of meat a day just to keep up the strength to walk while wearing it.
But the danger that had loomed largest in my mind ever since I had set out on my journey to Oymyakon had come from my reading of the medical literature. Simply breathing at extremely low temperatures can kill you. Very cold air brought too rapidly into the lungs can damage bronchial tissue and cause potentially fatal internal haemorrhaging. When I read this it sounded to me like a good reason for smoking in Siberia: warm the air before it goes into your lungs to avert the mortal dangers of breathing.
Hence there was additional cause for concern the night I ventured forth to the small wooden cabin in -52°C (-62ºF) to ‘see a man about a horse’ as they say so aptly in Mongolia. The temperature was a new personal best, but I was too busy concentrating on staying alive to celebrate. When I finally left the cabin, joyous after my success both at avoiding internal haemorrhaging and in finally embracing the opportunity to dispatch a few more pages of New World to the frozen stalagmite of history, I was met by another curious quirk of life in the deep freeze. As I walked down the snow path back towards the house with my torch I became aware of a slight rustling sound. It was barely audible, but was in the region of the very faintest rustle of leaves in a breeze, or of sand sliding down a dune face.
I stopped, held my breath and pricked up my ears to listen. Nothing. Not even the rumour of a noise. Then I let out my breath and heard it again, a magical sound like grain being poured in some distant elevator, the smallest amount of noise as if in respect for Siberia’s primeval silence. It was the noise produced by the freezing of water vapour in my breath. I looked up at the perfectly clear night sky and was met by a spectacular array of stars. As I stood spellbound by the marvellous heavenscape, I realized that I could now hear the rustling continuing between my breaths. It was a phenomenon only perceptible on especially clear and cold nights, a weak, continuous strange rustling which the Yakuts call the ‘whisper of the stars’. It is the sound caused by the settling of tiny ice particles produced by sublimation – when water vapour, a gas, freezes directly to become solid ice – at these very low temperatures. Even the soft voices of the stars seemed happy at my success.
F I V E
I had come to Oymyakon with preconceptions, half expecting to find a miserable place full of hopeless people trapped in a post-Soviet nightmare of slough and despondency. I had arrived in Siberia with visions of the world’s coldest town as a gulag leftover, or a dilapidated mining settlement, populated by forgotten souls, desperate to get away but with nowhere else to go. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Whenever I asked anyone how they coped in such a God-forbidding climate they would look at me as if this was a curious question, one that had not crossed their minds before. ‘This is our home. This is where we live,’ they would say, and that would be the end of the matter. The outsized poster of ripe watermelons and juicy peaches adorning the wall in the kitchen of my hosts was not a cry for a transfer to another world, just a nice colourful picture of fruit that might become available when winter passed.
No one was champing at the bit to get out of Oymyakon. They all seemed rather happy with their lot, in spite of the delayed salaries and the wintry weather. Not once did I hear a bad word about Moscow or the Soviet Union, despite the rigours of the past. Just the opposite in fact. Wages were paid on time during the Soviet period. If anything, times had been better then. But no matter what the complexion of the government more than 9,000 kilometres away, people here just got on with
things. In many cases this seemed to mean reverting to subsistence level, but there was nothing wrong in that.
Self-sufficient the people of Oymyakon were, in terms of food, but water was provided by a municipal truck that drew it from a warm spring in the nearby river and delivered it to your door. Every time I walked or drove through the town, admittedly much more often the latter than the former, I saw a parade of red flags hung on poles outside houses signifying that the residents were in need of water from the truck. After a few days, however, it became clear that the flags were never taken down. Each day they became a little more encrusted with frost until in some cases it was difficult to tell what colour they were.
I asked Andrei what was going on. ‘The truck is not delivering,’ he told me. ‘Why not?’ I wondered. ‘It has broken down.’ I paused, disappointed because I had rather hoped to be able to join the water delivery man on his rounds. ‘Also, the driver is drunk,’ Andrei added, rather disapprovingly.
When the full story was revealed it transpired that the driver, a man with the improbable name of Guy, had gone on a binge after failing to fix his truck. I imagined Guy lying face down on his back somewhere in a pile of straw, having drowned his sorrows. ‘Perhaps he’ll sober up tomorrow,’ I ventured. ‘I don’t think so,’ Andrei replied, ‘he started drinking two weeks ago.’
So while they dutifully kept their red flags flying, awaiting the return of Guy from his trip to oblivion, the residents of Oymyakon were obliged to be self-sufficient in collecting water too. This meant harnessing a bullock or a couple of horses to a sledge and driving it down to the river. No one had the wherewithal to pipe water from the spring, and besides there was a danger that the sledge would get stuck, so they visited frozen parts of the watercourse and hacked great chunks of river ice to take back home. Consequently, every house had a pile of ice lumps outside next to the neat pile of chopped firewood.
Another aspect of life in the permafrost zone that fascinated me was the challenge presented to gravediggers by deeply frozen ground. The issue had caught my interest many years ago, as a student, when I read a book about economic development in Siberia. Death caused its own unique problems in the coldest place in the world. Simply digging a hole in the iron-hard ground of winter is difficult enough, but the most macabre aspect of the business comes much later. Although permanently frozen to a depth of 100 metres or more, the surface layers of permafrost often thaw during the summer and freeze again seasonally. This cyclical nature of freeze-thaw has the effect of forcing large buried objects to rise towards the surface. In old cemeteries, the book stated, bodies buried in coffins are pushed to the surface where they thaw.
I sought advice from Andrei on the accuracy of the story. He confirmed that it was correct, adding that putting the dead in the ground was a settlers’ custom brought from European Russia. ‘Traditionally, the local tribes in these parts, the Evens and Evenks, bury their dead in trees.’ The thankless task of re-interring the returning dead was a grisly symbol of the fact that the north does not easily tolerate the lifestyle of newcomers.
Andrei was not keen to discuss the matter further. He told me it was not a polite topic of conversation, so I didn’t pursue it. I had wandered through Oymyakon’s graveyard where the snow was deeper than elsewhere, reaching my thighs in places. I saw no exposed coffins, just a surprising number of deceased drivers, their headstones marked by a steering wheel, often with their photograph set in the middle. The potential foolishness of my enquiries into the ways of the dead was brought home to me towards the end of my stay in the world’s coldest town. The week before I’d arrived a little girl had contracted pneumonia and had been flown to Moscow for treatment. She died during my stay and her body was flown back to Oymyakon for burial.
The little girl’s father and brothers had to thaw the permafrost with a bonfire, enabling them to dig down about a foot before building another bonfire in the shallow hole, to warm up the frozen ground again and dig further. It took them two days to dig a hole deep enough to bury her coffin.
Much of my last day before leaving was spent in the town of Tomtor, Oymyakon’s nearest neighbour. Oymyakon was set back some 30 kilometres from the Road of Bones, but Tomtor was situated right on the region’s major highway. It was for this reason that the mayor of Tomtor had erected a second monument to the Pole of Cold, a towering column topped by a globe that could be seen a kilometre or two before reaching the town. It was dramatically larger than the memorial in Oymyakon, and it soon became clear to me that there was a certain rivalry between the two settlements for the title of coldest town on Earth. Standing in the snow outside Tomtor’s museum were another two monuments to the record minimum temperature.
A small, wooden memorial that resembled a truncated telegraph pole had apparently been brought to Tomtor from its original position somewhere in the forest between Tomtor and Oymyakon. Behind the wooden monument was another in stone engraved with the magic -71.2°C (-96.2°F) and a further figure of 109.2°C (228.6ºF) which is the difference between Tomtor’s lowest and highest recorded temperatures, also claimed as a world record. In summer, temperatures here could reach as high as 30°C (86ºF).
At least part of the confusion over the exact location of the Pole of Cold lay in the fact that Oymyakon no longer had a meteorologist to record its daily temperature. When I found my way to the Tomtor meteorological station I was told that records had not been kept at Oymyakon since 1996 when a man named Ipatiy Atlasov, who had taken the temperature readings for the previous 17 years, had become so dissatisfied at not receiving his salary for a whole year that he simply stopped. Apparently, he gave the thermometer to the local school and burned all his notes.
In consequence, Tomtor was the nearest operational meteorological station to the world’s coldest inhabited place, and thus its authorities felt a certain justification in claiming the record for themselves. But there was no doubt in the mind of Tomtor’s chief meteorologist that Oymyakon was the real Pole of Cold.
The meteorologist’s assistant, a young woman called Natasha, took me to see their compound of instruments. Natasha was straight out of university in Moscow and looked far too glamorous to be a meteorological observer. She was blonde and beautiful, dressed in an ankle-length fur coat, and totally disinterested in my questions about life stuck out in Tomtor. Talking to her was like taking a time warp back to the Soviet days when the only comments a Westerner could extract from a Russian were either ‘niet’ or ‘da’, and at least two ‘niets’ to every ‘da’.
‘Do you like living in Tomtor?’ I asked her, in an effort to break the ice. ‘Da’ she replied. Pause.
‘Don’t you find it rather cold here compared to Moscow?’ ‘Niet’, she explained.
I decided to change tack and ask her more specific questions about her work. Stations in these cold climates use ethyl alcohol thermometers rather than standard mercury ones because mercury freezes at -38.8ºC (-37.8ºF) whereas ethyl alcohol freezes at -115ºC (-175ºF). But the man with the bottle-bottom glasses at the station on the ridge where we’d stopped on our journey to Oymyakon had told me he had to use both, since his dogs broke the spirit-filled instruments to drink the alcohol inside.
‘Another meteorological observer told me that he has trouble with his dogs breaking the ground thermometers,’ I said to Natasha. ‘Do you have similar problems here?’ Natasha looked at me with piercing eyes that could have melted my soul. She began to giggle. I knew what was coming. ‘Niet’ she said.
I had avoided kind invitations to spend long periods outside during my stay in Oymyakon partly through cowardice and partly because I had managed to arrange to spend my last week in Siberia with some reindeer herders who were still more-or-less nomadic. I had seen the world’s coldest town. Now I wanted to get away from the ‘comforts of civilization’ (the toilets notwithstanding) to taste a life that was as close as you can get to this inhospitable climate.
When the time came I drove with my new translator, Olga, past Tomtor and back alon
g the Road of Bones for 100 kilometres or so before turning off just after a large wooden bridge. On the journey to Oymyakon I had secretly cursed the Road of Bones for its lumps and bumps that had us lurching and reeling all over the vehicle as we drove. I had thought that although the Soviet Union had produced some notable achievements, that road was not one of them, quite apart from the million-odd people who had died in its construction. Now that we were proceeding in a south-westerly direction towards the valley where the reindeer herders had arranged to meet us, I thought differently. The Road of Bones was like a snooker table compared to the track we followed.
We drove straight towards the sun, which was more brilliantly blinding than at any time during my stay in Siberia, through another stretch of winter wonderland populated by trees wearing their snowy winter coats, before following the welcome flat of a frozen river. After too brief a time on its sweeping meanders we ploughed off again overland at no more than 10 kilometres an hour, penetrating deeper into a landscape of quite incredible beauty, the virgin snow only touched by the tracks of deer or rabbit, the trees now looking as if they had been decorated with big blobs of cotton wool.
Tucked away on one side of the valley, hard up against a steep wooded slope, was the reindeer herders’ camp, a simple affair consisting of two canvas tents and a couple of wooden huts. Surrounded by piles of firewood, chunks of drinking water ice and wooden sledges, it was fronted by three large wooden posts, which bore a slight resemblance to totem poles, used for tying up reindeer. We were met by the head of the family, Petya, a wiry old man with a shock of grey hair, a leather face and a droopy moustache, and his wife, Shura, a woman whose main distinguishing feature was her bulbous red cheeks. The vehicle left me after I had made an arrangement with the driver to return after my week in the wilderness.
Going to Extremes Page 6
