Far North (5 page)

About a hundred yards out, I shipped the oars and drifted. The sky above me was turning purple. When I got to the fishing nets, I hauled them in.
The last time
, I thought, and there was a sense of peace inside me that I hadn’t known for years.

A couple of grayling fell from the net with fat thunks onto the floor of the boat. I felt sorry for the poor creatures. I grabbed one. It bucked in my hand and then slipped over the rail of the boat. I threw the other one after it and there was a flash of silver as it vanished in the inky water.

Alone in the gathering darkness, I yanked off my boots, stood upright in the teetering boat, pinched my nostrils shut, and got ready to jump.

I’d thought about this moment so many times that I almost felt I’d done it before. As I went, I gave the boat a kick to send it far away from me. The shock of the cold water knocked the breath out of my body. Suddenly, I was fighting for my life. The thick padded sleeves of my summer jacket filled with water and dragged against me like lead wings, but my face kept on upwards, looking towards the sky. I shut my eyes and tried to force myself deeper ithe water, but my body was struggling against me. It felt like I wasn’t killing myself, but some poor, unwilling fellow who wanted nothing of it. It was as though his legs were keeping me up and his sharp, shallow breaths were putting air in my lungs.

Gradually, I figured, my legs would weaken, and the fight would go out of me. That idea kind of relaxed me. Water began trickling into my mouth and nostrils. I peed myself and a cloud of warmth spread out around me. I waited for a flood of final images to fill my brain as my whole sorry life folded up like a telescope into that moment. I could still hear the rasp of my breathing, but behind that now was a deeper note, like the deep bowed string of a contrabass, drawing me in towards it – the sound of my quietus.

I leaned back. The water bubbled and closed over my ears, muffling the noise. My body began to shake. It seemed like death was close. That throbbing bass sound grew louder. My eyelids flickered open to see what it was.

There was a tiny silhouette above me, banking steeply towards the farthest northern slope. An aeroplane.

I watched amazed as the silhouette dipped down below the top of the ridge. Then there was a faint
pop
, followed by louder cracks as trees broke under the weight of the plane. The noise echoed around the valley for a time. Then it all went quiet again.

My fingers were so numb and cold that it took me a while to unlatch the buttons of my jacket. I let it sink in the water and struck out for the boat. By the time I got to her, I was too weak to crawl in, so I just clung on to her stern, sicking up water, and flailing my legs to bring her in to shore.

 *

It was midnight by the time I reached the wreck. It had been so long since I saw anything like it that it seemed like an apparition, and I half-thought that I was on the lake bottom already, dreaming these things.

She was a biplane, fitted with wheels for summer flying, in a red and white livery. The starboard wing had sheared off at impact. I ran my fingers over the jags in the metal.

Most of all what struck me was the smell in those woods – it seemed to belong to an old childhood dream. It came back to me in waves. I kept thinking of when pa put his auto on blocks for the last time and he gave me the job of draining the fuel tank with a length of hose into a can. I sucked so hard I took down a gulp of gasoline. I wanted to be sick, but couldn’t and my shit turned tarry and dark the next day.

Gasoline. That was the smell in those trees. It was so strong you felt you could have got drunk off it. It had that shimmering, sharp feeling you get when you put your nose over a glass of warm whiskey.

And then suddenly the whole wood was lit up for a second brighter than noontime, as though a flash of lightning had hit. The thunder followed a second later, and the boom knocked me back off my feet and down into the darkness I’d glimpsed at the lake bottom.

7

T
HE
T
UNGUS
HAVE
a story that, who knows how many years ago, when the first pilots were opening up the east, one named Sigizmund Levanevskii flew out to reconnoitre a Far Northern route.

In those early days, the craft they had were small and spindly with no fancy instruments, and they were forced to fly low, without stopping, hugging the earth, and getting all mixed up in the weather.

Two or three days out, Levanevskii and his crew ran into trouble. They lost power from their engines. They had no parachutes and the land below them was nothing but an ocean of trees.

Knowing that it was too late to save his aircraft, Levanevskii gambled that at least some of his men would survive the crash if he could bring the plane down in a lake. But the plane smacked into the water and sank in seconds, leaving an oily stain and a hiss of steam behind it.

The government of the time searched and searched for the wreck and the dead men, but couldn’t find them.

But the Tungus will tell you that someone
did
see that plane go down. The great-great-great-granddaddy of one of them was herding reindeer by the lake as that doomed thing came plummeting out of the sky.

This man, who was just a boy at the time, watched it slap into the water, break up, and sink almost immediately. Seconds later, the valley was silent again, but the face of the lake was all shaken up by the impact, and waves splashed over the boy’s boots.

Then the boy lit a fire so that when the men finally appeared he could welcome them with a cup of tea.

The herder who told me this story the first time found it so funny he almost wept with laughter as he recounted it. He put on a big performance, pretending he was kindling a fire while greasy bubbles rose to the lake top.

Imagine! The boy was so in awe of the white man’s fancy gizmos that he thought that was how a plane was supposed to land!

The story seems to making fun of the boy’s simpleness, but the real butt of the joke is Levanevskii and his broken plane.

The idea of looking up at that aircraft, that miracle, must have made the Tungus feel pretty small. They like to say their shamans know how to fly. But I’ve met some shamans and they could certainly drink, but not one of them could fly worth a damn.

Levanevskii’s plane was like a boast from on high, it was the white people saying, look what we can do! And everyone likes to see a braggart humbled.

The story seemed to tell the Tungus what they knew from their own lives, and from dealing with people like me, the remnant of the other way of doing things: time has a way of evening things out, the simple ways endure, and the fancy pants with his smart new way falls by the roadside. The best way to tell how long a thing will last is ask how long it’s been around for. The newest things end soonest. And things that have been around for a good long while will last a while to come.

Those herders took it in the neck for years from people who claimed to be better, know more. From the little I know of history, I understand that their holy men got killed, and their villages broken up, and their ways of doing things beaten out of them, all in the name of progress. So if they came across a trifle smug in telling their story, you can understand it.

But whenever I hearhat story I felt something different. I thought: what a piece of work man is! What can’t we do when we have a mind to? I feel a kind of awe at my ancestors, living surrounded by more kinds of knowledge than will fit inside any one man’s head. You can say, as the herders do, that they overcomplicated their lives and that made them weak. Or you can just marvel at their ingenuity and hope that what they did once can be done once more.

When I came to, the woods were burning, and my eyebrows and a good part of my hair had been singed off. My collar bone was broken, and I could hardly hear on account of going deaf from the boom.

I lay on my back in a pile of brush watching a plume of black smoke coil into the sky, masking the stars as it went up, and I thought: glory, hallelujah, we’ve come again. 

 *

The woods burned for three days, and it was almost a week before I was able to get anywhere near the wreck. By then there wasn’t much at all to see: a skeleton of blackened metal, propellors, a few charred boxes that had been tossed into the air from the blast and damn nearly taken my head off.

The heat had been so fierce it was hard to say how many people the plane had been carrying, but I guessed five or six. I buried what I could find at the approach to the woods so animals wouldn’t get at the bones, and marked the place with a simple cross that I pounded into the ground with a rock.

When I reflected on it, it seemed to me that the best monument to those people was the plane they had died in. I knew I had never seen anything so beautiful, in all my years, as that plane arcing through the sky over the valley.

I’m not superstitious, but I took it as a kind of sign, from god, or the gods, or the ancestors, or whoever is up there, not to abandon myself to my despair. It does seem strange to take comfort from death and disaster, but the appearance of the plane in the sky told me I was no longer alone. The people who flew in her had died, but I knew she must have been built somewhere, that someone had fuelled her, prepared her for her journey through the air. Of course, I still mourned Ping and the child, but whereas I’d thought that the three of us were the last of the old world I’d cared about, it seemed now that there was more than a remnant of that world out there, working as it ought to, as it had in the past, performing its miracles, putting men and who knew what else in the air, and I set my heart on finding it.

8

S
INCE
THE
PLANE
was flying roughly west when it went down, my first thought was that it had been sent out of one of the cities between here and the Bering Sea. Five had been built during the waves of settlement that had brought my parents from Chicago: Plymouth, New Providence, Homerton, Esperanza, and Evangeline – the first to be settled and the farthest west by some two hundred miles.

I felt certain that one of them had scraped up fuel and a plane and gone to scout out the others. In that position, I’d have done the same. There was me, so there might well be more than me: Makepeaces all over, still scratchin out a solitary life, longing for contact, but afraid to move, like a person lost in a wood, in case they miss the search party when it comes.

There’d been no word between the towns for years. Even at the best of times, the links between us were slender. The settlers were inward-looking on principle. They didn’t come here to be social, or to recreate the bustling trade and business of the world they’d left behind. But even so, there was a sense of cousinhood with the other cities. They were the closest we had to a nation.

 *

My father used to say he decided to leave America when he noticed that the poor had all begun to look alike.

He didn’t mean their faces, and he didn’t mean only the poor of the United States. He meant poor people everywhere.

It stands to reason that the poor of each country should differ more from each other than other men do. Their roots are in the soil. What they eat, how they dress, their homes, their customs – all grow out of the ground. Thatch, palm, or caribou skin. Rice, wheat, or manioc. Fur, cotton, or worsted. Their whole lives are fixed by the character and habits of the land.

He said it hit him travelling one time in the year or so before he met my mother. Whatever country of the world it was – Persia, Siam, or the Indies, Europe or the South Seas, or Mesopotamia – the poor were starting to look alike, live alike, eat alike, and dress alike in the same kind of clothes all made in the same part of China.

To him, it was a sign that the people had got severed from the land. I can’t say if he was right or wrong. By the time I was old enough to take an interest in his world, it was already passing away.

He liked to say that ever since we slid out of the primeval mud on our bellies, we had been shaped by scarcity. Whatever you took: cheese, churches, good manners, thrift, beer, soap, patience, families, murder, fences – it had all come about because there was never enough, sometimes not quite enough, and sometimes not nearly enough, to go round. The story of the mass of humanity was the story of people struggling and failing to get the wherewithal for life.

The pain of that struggle taught people forbearance.

And yet my father said he was born into a world of abundance. It was a world upside down, in which the rich were skinny and the poor were fat. In one single day of his youth, there were more people alive on earth, than had lived on it in all the years since Noah parked his boat on Ararat.

You don’t need to be any more than normally superstitious or even a Bible reader to guess that lean years will follow fat ones. Milliards of people who want feeding will make a rumble that shakes the planet. But my father’s concerns weren’t practical ones. He believed that one way or another, these people would be fed, but that the price of this abundance was an impoverished spirit. He wanted to turn his back on a world that he felt was debased and graceless.

It must have been strange for the Tungus to think anyone looked at their difficult lives with envy. But men and women like my father dreamed of quitting their cities, putting fresh roots in the soil and growing up again in the patched, handmade world of their ancestors. They chose that instead of – instead of w I don’t know – whatever dreams of speed, and glass, and luxury drive men who know they will never go hungry.

In centuries before, they would have obtained a warrant from a king and set sail to found a colony in some emptier place. But the earth was full. There was no place to start again. Even the moon had a flag on it in those days.

I believe Siberia was suggested to them as a joke. People thought of the place as a land of ice, a desert of rocks and snow, with the wind blasting it ten months a year from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean. Lucky for us they did.