REGROUPING DAY IN PETROPAVLOSK: I GO TO MAIL ALL OF MY SERIAL
LETTERS
AND CARDS IN RECONSTRUCTED POST OFFICE, LUNCH IN RED FOX INN,
SEE ENVIRONS OF PETROPAVLOSK, GET BUREAUCRATIC CLEARANCE OF THE SHEEP
SKIN AND TROPHIES FROM APPARATCHIKS' OFFICES THEN SUFFER A TOTAL LOSS
AFTER A TWO-HOUR REPORT HOME FROM THE INTERNET CAFÉ THAT SIMPLY LOSES
THE FINISHED TRANSMISSION AT "SEND." WE GO FOR AZERBAIJANI SHISH KEBAB,
AND
TOUR THE THERMAL HOT SPRINGS OUTSIDE PETROPAVLOSK AT THE "BLUE LAGOON"
UNDER THE THREE TOWERING VOLCANIC CONES REGROUPING DAY IN PETROPAVLOSK
August 29, 2001
I did what I always do when I am in "destination re-entry" (preparing to depart for the return trip home) when I had arrived last night at 2:30 AM at Hotel Petropavlosk. I had sorted all the print and slide film into their respective mailers and got the PhotoWorks rolls ready to be mailed form the first US port, Anchorage. I then made a stack of the audiotapes, which will end with tape ten, and I would have to label the cassettes for the tapes and prepare to send them home. I then finished Serial Letter B-Four, and packaged all the mailings I had written out completely for the entire hunt, including the postcards, and prepared them for being sent from the post office here in PKC. I took all the soaked and dirty hunting clothes and packed them in a separate plastic bag and re-packed them in the duffel bag and started assembling all the materials that I had for the backpack.
This would mean I could scurry around Petropavlosk doing chores, perhaps even seeing some sights as a tourist in the two final days we had here before early takeoff on Friday morning, the first of two August 31's we will have upon our returning across the dateline. This process is designed to have me on my way "ship shape and Bristol fashion", meaning the decks are never so well cleared nor the sails better trimmed than on the way home. This is necessary in my case, because of the re-entry smersh that will occur upon arrival, when all of this organization should have been accomplished.
Alan and I met Victor at breakfast where he appeared in a flurry, with a number of "accompanying persons," and unfinished documents and other things to accomplish to clear us and our trophies, as well as to get our passports and visas to the Hotel desk and a series of documents related to the trophy. He needed final payment for the bear trophy, but it seems that the CITES permit is not going to be available in time, so that we will be traveling without the bear hide and skull which will have to follow behind us with the returning moose hunters. That is just as well, since it means one more thing I will not have to carry, and gives me time to see what should be done to the bear hide and by whom. I already know what I should like for the sheep-and that is the passionate subject of Marcus Zimmerman's interest.
THE MULTIPLE OTHER "URBAN INTERESTS"
OF THE RETURNED HUNTERS,
HOME FROM THE FIELD
It seemed to me that Victor was continuing to give us good service in looking after all the details of our hunt, but he was also quite "busy" in other affairs at the same time. There was not a single one of the waitresses in the bar where we had breakfast that did not know Victor in a rather personal sense of the term. He was scurrying to juggle "old" and "new" girlfriends on his list and had to field frequent calls to manage multiple schedules. One of these is a plan he has to move to Kiev in the Ukraine where his current number one girlfriend insists he come to live with her, as she works for an American metals company based there. Victor is a hunter and there is no hunting there for him so whether he is planning to commute across the vast Russian state is unclear. Meanwhile, he has an 20-year-old son studying ecology in St. Petersburg to whom he needs to wire money this morning from the post office where I also must be going, so we will see to that later.
According to Elena (who should know, as one of Victor's current girlfriend recruits into the hunting translating business,) there are quite a few "away games" going on as well. Elena herself has been recently divorced four months ago after a17 years of marriage, and has a 12 year old son living here in Petropavlosk where her husband is in the commercial fishing business. She reports that Victor has three "official" wives, still, and an uncounted assorted number of applicants for associate status. Sergei has a 15 year-old son living with his mother in Moscow (Slava, whom we know well from our camp where he has had the chance to visit during this school vacation) and another who lives here in Petropavlosk with his mother. Each one of us here has what would be considered a "colorful biography' with the exception of Alan Magee, who confesses that he has been married to the same woman for 35 years---which I said shows either a lot or, I kidded him, a profound lack of imagination. The others with us have even more melodramatic personal stories, which I will relate in turn. Peyton Place Petropavlosk was my first impression, from the activities around this hotel on my first visit in May of 2000. Now, Alan characterizes the current scene in our team of helpers on this, his first visit, as the fervor of high school when the hormones are high. There is a contest going on despite Victor's age 45 and Sergei's age 42, but Sergei does not appear to be flaunting it.
POST OFFICE POSTINGS OF SERIAL LETTERS
AND QUAFING A "Kwash" Russian Coca-Cola
The post office was open and reconstructed, which had been closed up and under demolition when I had tried upon arrival to get cards and stamps. All my literary effort in rain-bound tents went into six serial letters, B-1/2 through B-5, with a B-0 having been mailed form Kozurevsk, and all the rest sent out from here, along with the post cards. None of the postcards were bought in Petropavlosk that I had to scrounge from prior stocks as I wrote them, but I did purchase a group of them later-the only purchase I had made in Kamchatka-which may now come to you with the wintry Russian scenes as I am traveling about India and Nepal!
Along the street and at intersections especially, there are yellow tanker trailers with the Cyrillic word: Kwash: painted on them, and a young girl is usually employed to siphon out a foaming cup of amber liquid which is "Russian Coca-Cola" according to Victor. For only about four rubles one gets a pint of the flat bread-tasting fluid made from bread. We stood across the street from a nightclub called the Mill, which is near Victor's apartment, and Sergei drove up in a pickup truck. He has been hard at work at his home with the bear hides and the preparation of the sheep trophies. As we stood and he and Victor talked, I watched the people on the street and the girl selling them Kwash after I had finished mine. A few of them were on parade, and looked very beautiful, which is what they were doing on the street-parading for the admiration of passerby. Each of my guides-and I suppose I, also, looked different, having showered and shaved, and we looked less like the bears we had been pursuing.
The conversations were about the many changes in things like airline confirmations, since our scheduled Magadan Air flight left on Sunday the 1st of September, and we were booked on a charter that left on August 31 morning. Such information had to be obtained at the airport, rather than through phone calls. There would be further airport stops to clear the trophies through the veterinarian resident there. Sergei went on to get further taxidermy-ready work on the trophies, and I gave him my two unused duffel bags with my tags on them already, in which he might put the sheep in one and the bear hide in the other. Everywhere we looked in the town, which looked almost presentable if a little down in the heels, the beautiful backdrop was Mt Korialsky and its snowcone. I seemed to be the only person fascinated with it, and kept staring at it, finally saying, "Two days up, and one day down." That can be arranged for "next time."
We went to a restaurant known only to locals and hunters like Victor called the Fox Den Restaurant, decorated with a number of small wildlife taxidermy pieces. I have eaten the local seafood most often, since it seems like it should be better than whatever they would have to import form as far away as I have come. I learned a bit about the anthropology of the Paulana, an aboriginal group that has gone out of the peninsula on dance and other cultural affairs exchanges, often to Alaska. There are fewer aboriginal peoples here in Kamchatka than in Alaska, but their arts are much the same-totem pole carving, blanket toss, story telling, etc
A LONG WAIT IN THE VETERINARIAN'S OFFICE
We parked in the airport parking lot next to an old Lada with a Michigan State University sticker on it. Of course, we were going to visit the veterinarian! She was a harried bureaucrat, a leftover apparatchik, and had a parakeet loose in the room that was her pet. She had to sign and stamp forms as ornate as any I have received for graduating from degree programs. As in the airport, where the flurry of rubber stamps I somewhat a mystery, we watched many supplicants come to her for the sight different stamps and signature lines on forms that were filled in by hand and on layers of CARBON PAPER! It was almost nostalgic. We were allowed to wait in the office under a map of Kamchatka, and fortunately for me, I had stationery in my pocket, so I began filing out the last letter. Alan, not of such preoccupation, zoned out and sat staring for the hour and a half until Victor returned form getting some form-and whatever other assignations he was up to.
After this display of archaic bureaucracy, we went to an Internet Café, where a computer could successfully accomplish what we had seen take hours in just minutes-it erased everything I had done on a letter summarizing the hunts for both of us that I was going to send for both Alan and me. I asked the gurus who record the time each computer is used how such a message should be saved before I punched the "Send" button, and each said "Don't bother, it always works!" and then none of the Tsars' horses and none of these same men could retrieve save or do anything but kiss off all the typing effort I had put in in 1 ½ hours on the machine. No one anywhere got any message from me, and I resolved on not having that same fiasco as has happened on each of my Internet Café visits in such places as Dharamsala, Lei, Manila, and Delhi happen again, so I carry addresses and message on disc-no luck. So, I can carry this futility into the microchips of distant places as well as those closer by.
Victor went back to his apartment to pick up his swimming trunks, since he was keen on taking us swimming. Alan, a Tucson resident, said he had absolutely no interest in swimming, and did not do so when he went to Hawaii for several weeks each year, and would not be likely to do it here. We went anyway to the places that one can swim in Kamchatka-the thermal pools. We drove a long way to get to two of them, each called "Blue Lagoon" and constructed and run by a group of people here form Iceland. They have contracts to construct geothermal generator power plants and a fish processing plant, but have made these swimming pools over hot vents of volcanic that steam heats the rocks and water. I watched the kids splashing at sunset, with the cold sky reflected in the already steaming pool in a month still called August.
We the went to an outdoor (rather chilly) Azerbaijani Shish-kebab place where Korean vegetables are served up first while skewers are grilled of pork and other menu items definitely NOT on the American Heart Associations "go-to" list. "It is commonly known that you must drink Georgian Red Wine when you eat this shish kebab-which meant me, since Alan is a non-drinker, and Victor is driving. Several military officers had got there rather early in the day, it would appear, and were having trouble negotiating the distance from their picnic table to ours, but felt obliged to try to stagger over to offer to drink with the fellow whom they did not recognize as a regular. If someone is incoherent in Russian, the only language they know, it would be a rather brief exchange of pleasantries in any case, but I was saved by their inability to walk-so, of course, they drove off.
We crossed the Avache River (a very common name around here because of the dominance of the landmark volcano) and watched people lined up with home made fishing tackle to try to catch sea trout. There are few of the aboriginal peoples left in Kamchatka, although the ghost of the language overhangs things here, since all the volcanoes are named in their language, but there are small groups of foreigners. There are Koreans, Chechneyans, Jews, Chinese, Icelanders, and all the rest Slavs. I saw one black face here-and that was on a billboard advertising Kamchatka beer with an American football player as the one doing the drinking. The name Kouriac is used to describe many things (like a sub-species of ovis nivicola) which is the same word as Kodiak in Alaska. I still cannot tear my eyes away from the majestic volcanic peaks, so I looked up the three in a row around Petropavlosk, 3,458 meter Korialtsky, the dominant one for the skyline, 2,731 meter is its neighbor, which I can neither pronounce nor spell, and 2,189 meter Najakabul is the third. Some day, if I am back in PKC, I will have to be looking down from the top of one or more of these!
LAST FULL DAY IN PETROPAVLOSK,
AND A SUCCESSFUL EMAIL TRANSMISSION
BEFORE A CELEBRATOIN PARTY FOR THE SUCCESSFUL
CONCLUSION OF THE HUNT