OUR FINAL AND FAREWELL DAY IN PETROPAVLOSK
BEFORE LEAVING KAMCHATKA
EARLY ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING-
TO ARRIVE BY A SPECIAL MAGADAN AIR CHARTER IN ANCHORAGE
(ARE YOU READY TO BE CONFUSED?)
SIX HOURS LATER THAN TAKEOFF ON AUGUST 3OTH-
THE PREVIOUS DAY!
SEE A FEW MORE SIGHTS AND MUSEUMS
AND FAREWELL DINNER WITH OUR TEAM
August 30, 2001
The first part of this closing chapter of the saga of Kamchatka-'01 will deal with our final day in Petropavlosk and a story of the characters around us during the hunt and this final preparation of us and our trophies for return travel. The second part will deal with our takeoff on Magadan Air charter, along with an unlikely bunch of Golden Agers, on our first of two August 31sts (a date we returned to after our first August 30th,) became our second August 30th after the first August 31st popped back in the air over the International Date Line. Don't worry; it had me confused for a while also!
I tried to put the outline of events together while I was still hooked into the wall current (even if it is 220 V, stepped down through my converter, since it seems that my refurbished Dell laptop is still unable to operate on its batteries---a real bummer for long-haul air travel!) and get a preliminary report ready to email today in view of the complete bust yesterday through the Internet Café where all of my completed efforts vanished at the push of the "Send" button. We will try again today at a different place through a different server. I made some preliminary packing efforts, and then planned to go downstairs to the bar and purchase some bottled water, and Alan requested a Coke. I went down to the bar at around midnight, and made known my request to one of the barmaids. She came back out with the requested fluids, and I was asking the price when a voice behind me asked "Can I help you?" It was Victor, standing with our breakfast waitress, whom we had left much earlier who was on his way home (to which one, I am not sure) but had returned, not for any business we required, but to schmooze several of the barmaids and to hang out awaiting a new girl at the Hotel Petropavlosk. He is not getting any more sleep here in town than he did two nights ago when he was holding the tent frame down in a storm!
FURTHER PERSONAL STORIES OF OUR COMPANIONS
AS WE GATHER AT BREAKFAST WITH TWO OF THEM,
VICTOR AND ELENA,
PLANNING OUR DAY OF FINAL ERRANDS IN PETROPAVLOSK
Elena appeared at the breakfast bar, with Victor not far behind, and Sergei came to the hotel but did not join us, since he was still working on the trophies, packing them up in the special duffel bags I had brought for this purpose. They will turn out to be useful, especially as the bear skin and skull will have to be making the return trip tagged and flying as an "unaccompanied minor dependent", as the CITES permit has been paid for, obtained, but not officially stamped for it to be exported on this end and imported into Anchorage. This may happen with the return of the next hunters coming out, who will be hunting for big moose in another area of Kamchatka, and the returnees may include Bob Hobbs (who had been with me in the May 2000 spring brown bear hunt) and George Sevich, who reached us by the long distance phone from a family Labor Day beach holiday in the Outer Banks.
So much for our concluding hunt arrangements, with the sheep trophies to come by way of Sergei to the PKC airport in early morning as-can you believe? -"carry-on" hand baggage! What I then learned was probably even more interesting to those who have been following the members of our team. Let's start with Irena, our cook for the first part of our camping in the base on Mt. Tumrak, and whom we had not seen much since departure for our spike camp in bear country and not at all since arrival in Petropavlosk. Irena's story is that of two men, and these biographies probably tell as much as any vignettes about the rise and fall of the once Soviet Super-Power. It also explains why there are an excess of single women in Russia and how it has come to be that the Russian state, unique in the modern world, has had a substantially falling life expectancy, as much as five years less life expected than only a few decades previously, all of that within the male population.
Irena is an MD, remember, and her story may be an even greater tragic waste than that of the two principal men in her life. She is not allowed to practice, and has had a clandestine pharmacy job, but is principally living off a pension granted to her 13-year old daughter, who is qualified for the pittance of state support as an orphan of a military father. Most of what she is able to scrape together, however, goes to purchase vodka for another man-a real loser, for whom Irena is a pathologic enabler. Both men could be prototypic Russian male failure figures.
Irena's husband was a military man, the one way for an ambitious young man to get ahead in the Soviet heyday. (Sergei, for example, had nearly all of his education and prior experience in 14 years in submarines-a rather far cry from the "job retraining" of stalking Russian brown bears!) Irena was moved with her husband through multiple places as he went up the ranks in the army, and she took advantage of their posting to one interior town with a medical faculty to use the "tuition benefits" to become a GP MD-a rather prototypic Russian physician, a woman, state employee, a scratch above their "Feldsher" (PA) system. They moved to Ukraine and he was in the position poised for great things in the bloated "military-industrial complex" when the Soviet Union fell apart, the Super Power crumbled and the springboard of the army as a career ladder vanished from under him. He was distraught, since all the rules had changed under him, and he was very despondent, doing what most Russians do when they consider their lot in life and their predestined role to suffer for Mother Russia-he drank. It was not too long after his mustering out into a non-existent "private sector" from the military shrinkage that he did what may have been the only honorable thing I heard about him-he shot himself.
This event was four years ago. Irena, with a teenage daughter, which is her
source of the meager allowance on which she lives, finds "the one man she
does not want to live without"-and this loser makes the late husband look
like a pillar of strength. He was a former active top Party official, and with
the bust of the Soviet Empire, the diplomatic inflation had to contract in the
same way that the military had to so he is unemployed. He did what most good
Party members have done under similar circumstances (it is a good thing that
they did get separated from the Kremlin and their fingers were taken far away
from buttons or decisions relating to them); he drank himself into oblivion.
He is capable of staying stuperous for days at a stretch so long as Irena keeps
him supplied, and her resources are stretched so thin, that this is how an MD
has been moonlighting as our camp cook. Our munificent tip will be more income
than she has had in the past six months from whatever sources she was able to
find, but it will all almost certainly go toward the same end. Several times,
Irena's friends have tried to get her away from him, but she responds, of course,
that "he needs me;" true enough. Victor has gone to their very distant
hovel, on the far side of the Blue Lagoon we visited last night, and has carried
him away and put him on a train to go-anywhere at all just go-and the fellow
blithers "How can you do this to me, I am so sick!" But Irena shares
this sickness and takes him back in to allow him to again pickle his brains
with the last of her resources, saying she does not want to go on without him.
She might have a chance to test that hypothesis soon enough, since without her
he might go the way of her first husband, though without access to firearms
it may not be as successfully sudden, but just as messy.
So, Irena is dealing with an end-stage alcoholic, the wreckage of the once powerful
Party apparatchiks, Lenin's Legacy. She is supposed to gather herself together,
and join our party tonight-a very big deal, after all, since this is Pay Day,
in which they earn far more than their cut of the hunt fees and trophy fees
in the generous tips Alan and I pooled for each of them. When the time came
to pick her up, Victor drove all the way out past the Blue Lagoon to fetch her
to our Hotel where the party was to begin at eight o'clock. This expensive trip
by car is over an hour and a 100 km round trip, but it got to be longer for
Victor, since a morbid scene ensued when he arrived. When he realized she was
going to be leaving to come over to see us off, "her patient" would
not let her go, crying and blithering "Don't leave me!" and she would
not, despite the importance of this appearance on her part. The envelope with
her name on it and the US Benjamin inside, may or may not get to her, and probably
for her sake, it might be better if it did not.
Irena's story is, unfortunately, not that rare as a sample of the despair of the Russia in transition. The peasantry in the periphery probably never got a whiff of the glory that was wafted from the Tsar's court through the period of the great proletariat revolution, to the heady days of transient Super Power status on a world stage, where this poor, frozen, vast landlocked Mother Russia had a brief flurry of grandeur, first through Peter the Great's establishment of a Navy to make of Russia a Great Power, and by aping all things European to make the heads of state come to a land that could wow them by out-Versailling Versailles through the coerced labor of Russian late feudal serfs; then after the Revolution, party apparatchiks used the same means for a higher frontier in harnessing the threat of the atom, the ICBM and outer space as a platform from which to try to out-America the Americans, until it was apparent that there just were not enough repressed peasant hammer and sickle labor or smarts to keep up with the American Joneses. Reality is a rather harsh medicine, and the Russian lesson should be remembered by the Americans in this game who did not win it, but are lasting longer in it.
Now, for Sergei and his "wife." Elena tells me that I will meet Laura, who will identify herself as Sergei's wife and re-enforce that title many times over, mainly to convince herself of a reality that isn't. Sergei has a wife, or two, one in Moscow, and one in Petropavlosk, each with a son, about three years apart. I could identify with this since his sons have the same age spread as mine, and he really likes to see them-which it seems he can only do on trips. His older son joined the first hunt of the season just before ours, and I tried to encourage Slava, his second son on our trip, making his first major excursion having been flown here from Moscow with a little bit of a late return when school starts this week.
Laura is a piece of work. She speaks English, working for an American/Canadian joint venture gold mining firm, which runs hot and cold depending on gold prices, seeking refuge from environmental regulation by digging in Kamchatka, where there is both "placer gold" (easy surface nuggets" that have made for the world's gold rushes in California, the Klondike in Alaska, the Shotover River in New Zealand, and a dozen other "Eureka!" bonanzas) but also the deeper hard rock industrial gold (with which I am familiar from the South African rand.) So, the company has diversified into strategic minerals as well. Equipped with the single "ticket to modernity"-the English language-Laura was propositioned by Victor to come along as the base camp hunt translator about four years ago. She did this but was not content to stay in camp but wanted to be out on the sleds being towed by the snow machines when spring bear hunting was opened to foreigners in Kamchatka, "so that she could tell the clients what was a good 2.8 meter bear, or ask if they wanted a smaller 2.6 meter bear." The idea of having a woman on the hunt (her heroine is Ayla, the "Woman Who Hunts" in the "Clan of the Cave Bear", the first book she read in English) put off a number of the Oriental hunters, and a few Russians as well, Victor apparently being one of them. She had moved to being Victor's live-in at the time, but there would never be only one of those, and, as he moved on, she spotted Sergei.
Sergei is lean, tough, hardy-and she said that the reason Russian men died is that their wives fed and pampered them, gave them all the richest buttery dinners and they sat in front of the tube and drank vodka. She planned to never feed him, "except in very small quantities of good not-rich foods, and he would exercise often, never watching TV, and stay-like you." This man was the love of her life. She thought that the hunt was a noble, even romantic profession, and it "brought him into contact with distinguished Americans-like you." She didn't even mind "that your bear hide is in my bathtub and your sheep skull is cooking on my stove," since he brings her back other things from the hunt which she likes-like furs, feathers,--like you.
She wants to learn to hunt, and is pestering to be allowed access to a shotgun, since she has selected the one trophy she wants to shoot which will be her diploma, and his, since she is going to come back from the hunt and give it to him to exercise his taxidermy skills to preserve---she wants to shoot a capricale. This is the coveted large black grouse (the "Grosschen" of the German jaegers, and especially coveted on the European edge of Russia-as the most prized of trophies on display in Konopiste [now Republic] are capricale displays) the size of an American wild turkey and stalked in much the same way. The male drums and calls in the spring, and with its head tucked back within its wings and fluffed out feathers during its mating display is the only time the hunter, guided by his jaeger, can move in on it. It is a big game bird, and I had almost tried to arrange a capricale hunt outside Moscow on my May 2000 visit but that it got too pricey. There are lots of forests with capricale near Petropavlosk, and she aims to make one of these noble birds her initiation into the hunt, to become Ayla. Sergei who hears, but understands none of the language we are using, looks pained and patient.
There is a source of friction in the three-way association of Sergei with Victor and each with Laura. She met Sergei because he was Victor's partner in the hunt, yet she resents and begrudges the time spent with Victor away from home. She has kids of her own form an undisclosed earlier liaison, and Sergei is a fellow who likes to sleep in when he is home, storing up calories and rest before getting out to the hunt. Nonetheless, she points out proudly, he would get up early and have only coffee and drive her to work so that she could be at her office a t 9:00 AM every day of the year, including those which are very snowy, the he goes back home and goes back to bed after her kids are cared for. He is a "househusband" she has come to count on, and therefore does not like it when Victor "finds work" that takes him away. She has not forgotten how she came into this triangle, but she is working one against the other to keep him home more, and resents that he is going away again next week as a guide on the moose hunt, being gone during the critical time period in the only season when the hunters can work, with this gold mine form heaven of Americans who are coming and layering tips larger than the best salaries, almost up at Mafioso's' ranges. So, the product of the hunt she appreciates, but she wants her hunter to stay home full time and keep the cave, so no Cave Bars threaten the artificial ersatz clan she has imagined. These arguments have never before been heard in history.
Elena herself has a "past" which she spoke of only briefly when we were on Mt. Tumrak, and she confessed that it is hard, divorced only four months after 17 years marriage to a commercial fisherman with a son in a stable position as secretary in a "stock trade company" which is how she came by her English, in a position only possible in the "new Russia"-and now here she is, using her brief vacation, "with my good friend Victor" for the first time in mountains she had never imagined despite having lived all her life in Kamchatka. "How you Americans enjoy life in all its potentials! But, I have two very hard-working parents who have good jobs and never have they made more than $45 in a month, and I see that even ordinary Americans are able to travel, some as far as over here!" Our tips to each of our guides would be well over a year's income to Elena's hard working parents, and she is wistfully repeating what Victor had told me a dozen times, conniving "I would like to come to America." He would miss the Kamchatka frontier spirit to which he has adopted so well in the new Russia, with no rules to worry about.
THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
OF PETROPAVLOSK AND KAMCHATKA
While Victor and Sergei sat outside trying to call George Sevich to connect him with me as a satisfied American client who was ready to go home, Alan and I went with Elena into a rather moth-eaten homely little museum overlooking the quaint port and its dry-dock ship refitting businesses and the smelly old fishing boats coming in to drop their loads into refrigeration, a service that I would imagine is not quite so necessary for about ten months of the year.
There were little old Babushka women in each of the chambers of the museum, all of them wearing about eight layers of wool and including leg wrappings and head coverings-I would believe that getting dressed every morning of the year should not acknowledge this brief aberration called summer. They followed us like hawks, not so much to make sure we did not touch the moth-eaten exhibits as a reflection that we were certainly their only visitors, at least so far, today. We were the mobile museum, brought in for their entertainment, and this one fellow seems to be interested enough in what we have here that he is actually taking notes! They were also on patrol to see if either of us pulled out our cameras to take a picture of anything, since there was an extra fee to be assessed for photography. But, I saw nothing, even if free, that I should take a picture of since there was a stuffed Ovis nivicola and a Ursos arctos horibilis, neither in as good a condition or nearly half the specimens that I already have abundant film evidence of wrapped up for development.
I remembered immediately a museum scene that was similar. When I had gone through the "Museum of the Siege of Leningrad", there were Babushkas in the corner of the rooms, trying not to look at me, and barely short of mummification themselves as survivors of childhood in this horror. Yet their curiosity was justified, since not only was I the only person in the museum who had actually paid to get in and tour it, but my signature in the guest book was the first in four days. Here, again, I was a bit of the outside world tossed up as flotsam on these distant mariner shores, with many of the exhibits depicting the early explorers showing how forlorn and far away this forbidding place was-and that is seems to resemble the same frontier now as then.
We saw some of the natural history exhibits that make this place economically viable-if it is. Giant "Kamchatka Crab" and the salmon life cycle are displayed. There are stuffed capricale, snow sheep, wolverines, wolves, walruses, lynx, and lots of sea birds like the fulmars, which nest by the millions on the islands and peninsula. I heard a story that there were a number of lynx that were harassing people very near the Blue Lagoon geothermal swimming pool where we had been last night, and that finally they had to call in hunters to patrol until they were reduced.
THE HAZARDS OF LIVING WITH WILDLIFE
But, then, came the chilling story and the newspaper account to go with it-and this was not in the museum cases, but in the newspaper of current events one of the babushkas had been reading when we came in. The place I have photographed each time I have flown over it is the "signature" of Petropavlosk called the "Three Brothers"-the rock seastacks just outside the harbor at a place called the Suneke Valley, after the Captain who had been an early describer of the rocks and the area when first discovered. Two young boys, one of them 17-years old had gone camping in the Valley right near the sea in sight of the Three Brothers. During the night a brown bear came to them while they were in their tent sleeping in their sleeping bags. There was no food in the tent, since the boys were from Kamchatka and knew they should hang their food in a tree. The brown bears, unlike the black bears, are too big to climb up into trees and take down the food stores thus deployed.
The one boy woke up, and in the confusion ran out of the tent. The 17 year-old never did. The bear killed him and when the other boy went away to get help that returned in the morning, they found that the 17 year-old had been eaten by the bear. The newspaper even printed pictures of what was left. This happened on Monday, when I was out "dancing with bears", the same species.
ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
The Koriac (on the other side of the Bering Sea, over which their common ancestors trekked when it was frozen in the prior ice age, the Alaskans of the same genes are "Kodiak) had a rather harsh life. How they coped with this environment and how they survived as hunter/gatherers was displayed in dioramas. They were the ones to exploit the fish and game with their primitive hunting methods and then, like the bears, huddled to over winter until the frenetic gathering of summer's provender set them up for another long winter. It is 55* remember, on all of my GPS marks, which puts it another 10* above northern Michigan, for example, not exactly a balmy resort in mid winter either.
The first European to sail into these waters was Vitus Bering, 1725-1729, who checked out both sides of "his" Sea, which is how Seward came to the folly of purchasing the claim for all of Alaska from Russia based in these four years of exploring the sub-Arctic here. Vitus Bering sailed into the Avache Bay to anchor in this Harbor in two ships: St. Peter and St. Paul-hence the name, Petropavlosk. There is a monument here in the town with models of these little caravels, emblematic of the city. We looked over al the early exploration exhibits and then an art gallery of a local artist who glorifies the rather minimal cultural arts of the Koriac, like the blanket toss and totem pole carving familiar to Alaskan visitors.
WE GO TO (A SCARCE) CHURCH,
TO SEE THAT RELIGION IS ALIV E,
IF NOT WELL, IN KAMCHATKA
There was only one church visible in Petropavlosk, and we had planned to go
to a church to see what was now legally allowed again even under the shadow
of Lenin's statue. To show me that there was more than one, we drove a long
distance, beyond the Blue Lagoon, to visit a small village with a name that
I will let you try to pronounce along with the name of this church: Hram Svjataj
Givouachaenoj Troica. It had gold burnished domes, and was next to a bustling
market, but the most imposing feature was that this church, like everything
else in this valley, was backgrounded by the stunning beauty of the Korialstky
Volcano. On an ideal day-such as the day we visited, the churches spires point
in unison with the conical peaks behind it. We went inside where a number of
parishioners were saying their prayers and genuflecting in front of the various
icons and paintings, which filled the walls of the otherwise empty church. There
were no pews, but an occasional parishioner would go to the relatively young
but gray-bearded patriarch and seize his hand whereupon he blessed them. Victor
said to me first that I should take my hands out of my pockets, since the people
were still suspicious, since not too long has transpired since the time when
Yeltsin allowed the use of this church again. How these two statements figured
in the same sentence were not explained. The second thing Victor said after
checking with the prelate is that I could take a picture as long as I remembered
to give some small gift to the church for the abundant poor they had to minister
to-so I did. Victor then seized the hand of the priest and, in the same way
that a prior young man had done, asked to confess. I said to no one around me,
"Well we may have to look for something else to do, since they could really
take some serious time!"
Alan had promised to buy his wife some small icon, and there was a group of smaller triptychs in the foyer along with a number of other items-mainly candles-for sale. Elena, also, went forward to seek the priest, and I watched the progression of other folk into the church, about half older women, and most of them looking around nervously, particularly toward the stranger in the corner with a camera---cautious habits die hard. I remembered my tour of the much more abundant, and much larger churches of St. Petersburg, now being refurbished and cleaned out of what they had been transformed into during the long dark night of communist party decree-one a granary, one a swimming pool, and even the grander cathedrals such as the towering Stick's Cathedral of Peter the Great, into "Museums of Atheism."
We went out into the market adjoining the church. There, we could see the stalls with fishermen selling nets, the women selling their garden produce, such as freshly picked red raspberries, which we bought. We looked around the goods, now abundant, which people can now market freely. Some of the commodities are responding to the world price, such as the salmon, at 25 R/kg, we saw on lots of stalls, with women whisking flies away from them. And smoked salmon which we bought for our later party celebration tonight---we could afford the smoked salmon, and, as Elena pointed out, the Russians who came by bought the fish heads.
BACK TO "CAFÉ INTERNATIONAL'
FOR AZERBAIJANI SHISH KEBAB
We figured that too much of a good thing-to quote Mae West-is wonderful. We therefore went back to the same carnivore's orgy of the pork rib barbecue grille with the Korean vegetables at this outdoor "Under the trees" restaurant with the name that I tried to figure out in translating it form Cyrillic. The reason we are here, of course, is that Victor knows the owner, and also has a few girl friends that hang out here, so we are back. Now, about that name, which I finally realize is "Café International;" how many International Cafes do you know that have a one-holer outhouse as their only "facility," with a bar of soap and a pitcher of water stuck to a tree as their "wash room?" There are also collections of very well fed dogs that hang out around the picnic tables under the trees who get the fatty goodies tossed to them during the diners overstuffing.
Victor's father was the one who taught him to hunt, and now in the age when "retirement" would be considered somewhere else in the world where a real social security system exists, he would not have to be working as he is now, having taken up the business that was formerly a hobby-bee keeping. It was Victor's father who had told him the rule that is inviolable---when you eat greasy grilled pork ribs in this "Argentine Asado" equivalent, you have to drink Georgian red wine. That is all there is to it. Anything else would be improper, and that rather puts a crimp in Alan's beverage of choice, which is Coca Cola. He made an exception for the first visit here, but could not repeat, so I had to do my part to eat more of the ribs and drink most of the wine.
A SUCCESSFUL EMAIL TRANSMISSION
AT A NEW "TELEFON" OFFICE WITH A DIFFERENT SERVER
We stopped at a different office where we used Alan's server remotely accessed to have his wife call the Alaska US F & W officers to say we are coming through, and he is trying to push his return flight up to tomorrow night, so that she should be expecting him. I then tried sending a message by cutting and pasting the address list, but that was too much to be hoped. The best I could do was to attach the outline of the Aug-C-Series, which could also serve as a summary of the events of this successful hunt in the remote Kamchatka wilderness. I got only about four of the twelve pages I had prepped for this event transmitted, but at least this system did not crash and destroy everything I have tried to do to tell you about what has transpired.
Alan and I got dropped back at the Hotel Petropavlosk where we did some further packing, and then he and I pooled some very generous tips for our team. Because of their extra services they deserved them, but it is also apparent that we are supplying them with tips that trump annual salaries by putting them on a US standard while they are living in Russian standards of living. I especially hope that Irena's wreck of a dependent patient she has decided to devote herself to caring for until he has drunk himself to oblivion does not commandeer all her windfall so that she and her daughter go begging. It is apparent that the others of the group know what is forthcoming on this farewell celebration as payday, since they are rousting out all their finest and coming to the Hotle where we will gather in the restaurant transformed for this night into a special night club cabaret.
PART TIME
And so it was. With repeated rounds of toasts and special complimentary goodies sent our way-the smoked salmon from the market, a special round of bottles from Victor's friends in the management, my waitress Svetlana, who tries to keep a business-like eye on our table while all around are carousing, we dined from the large to the small hours. Alan and I were the centerpieces of this celebration in one sense, and in the other, we were the excuse to hold a hunter-gatherer feast, since this is one of the rare good times in an otherwise hard life. It was a little hard to follow the Russian, but there were two singers who kept dedicating songs I honor of the successful hunters, etc, etc. The man who is the nightclub crooner is a Jewish heavy weight business tycoon and only does the nightclub gig as a hobby -a show eh cannot be excluded from since he owns it. He runs the biggest fish processing plant and fishing fleet in Petropavlosk, and comes to "relax" all night, as apparently our fellow celebrants also intended. Alan was growing a bit weary of the extensions of our dinner, with the several rounds of aperitifs that came to our table in new bottles we would have to finish, so several times he, or I, would make a little summing up speech, prepatory to excusing ourselves. After all we only had to go upstairs, whereas our hosts/guests would have to be going home, right? Not necessarily. The whole crew stayed until past dawn, Victor zeroed in on a new conquest, each of them had to leave only to fetch up our trophies, shower and change clothes to accompany us to the airport with our unusual carry-on luggage. Alan and I are the travelers being seen off, but the whole group had a bigger, grander, and certainly longer and more libation-filled send-off party than did the sendees!
D-DAY
DEPARTURE FROM "PKC" ON THE FIRST AUGUST 31ST BEFORE FALLING
BACK TO OUR SECOND AUGUST 30TH AT THE DATELINE, AND THEN PUSHING
OFF FROM ANC TO FLY HOME ON OUR SECOND AUGUST 31ST ARRIVALWE
LEAVE ON A CHARTERED MAGADAN AIR FLIGHT WITH A VERY UNUSUAL
GROUP OF FELLOW PASSENGERS---"GOLDEN AGERS,"
WHO HAVE BEEN ON THE CLIPPER LINE CRUISE---BIRDING!
At 5:30 AM we were up and packed down to the lobby, where we had withdrawn the rifles from the checked baggage, and all our duffel was ready to go. Victor, Sergei and Elena each made their bleary-eyed appearances and we shuffled off to the international section of the PKC airport and were already standing in the queue waiting for our inspection by the customs and export officers (old buddies of Victor's) when we were engulfed by a flood of unusual folk who were our unusual traveling companions on this charter flight. There were elderly people, many wearing recognizable hats such as "Michigan Wolverines" and carrying plastic bags in hand filled with exposed film. Several were Parkinsonian, two women had had strokes and were helped to the front of the line with walkers to have on of the two seats in the waiting area. This is encouraging--after all, they are still traveling! They were hard of hearing and somewhat frightened of their surroundings.
Now what kind of folk are going to be spending their later years and early mornings in a non-user-friendly place like PKC airport? This was a traveling cruise group made up of three groups: would you believe? -University of Michigan Alumni Tours! for one, MIT Alumni group, and the ABA. Now lest you think that this means the American Bar Association, it turns out to be the "American Birders Association" including its president. They were just off the Clipper Cruise ship made in Japan that was custom designed with a 7-person Philippine crew that had left Alaska and had floated along the Pribiloffs and across the Bering Sea and were coming down to the Kamchatka Peninsula to sea the thousands of unique birds along this coast. This is the area for the puffins, the fulmars , the eiders and the Stellar's Sea Eagle. On a cruise ship, the special needs for even the crippled elderly could be accommodated, but now they were to fly back to Anchorage for one more overnight in a hotel where they could have their farewell celebration and exchange notes and bird lists and compare "life lists."
And here they were, being helped around the rifle cases and the two large bags just delivered to us by Sergei as carry-on luggage, stepping over the products of hunter-gatherers while they had been out with optics every bit as good as ours, and looking very suspiciously in our direction. They were all seated first on the plane, and then Victor's friend waved us through without even asking to look at the rifles-a ritual that is always such a time-consumer. NO one asked to see my pre-paid Magadan special firearms carriage permit. W e staggered forward to the passport control, and Sergei came forward to hug me warmly, as Victor and Elena said how much they want to see us next year-translation-I believe we have set a newer and higher curve in tips for their help.
A HUNTER AMONG (FELLOW) BIRDERS
I boarded the Tupelev 154 and pushed my way down the narrow aisle to the tilt forward seats while swinging the very large camo bag and my running bag packed with all my carry-on stuff for the six-hour flight in which I had hoped to pull out the charged- up computer and type enroute. One of the blue haired little old ladies in tennis shoes asked me "Pardon me, but I cannot help but ask, 'What do you have in that large bag?'"
I replied, I do not know what your group paid to join this charter flight, but for me it was $1,580, and since that was very expensive for a good friend of mine, I have stuffed him into this sack and will be carrying him this way to Anchorage." I did eventually tell her, a bird watcher, hoping to catch a sighting of a rare species of avifauna, that I was packing back one of the exotic endemic wild mountain sheep of the world, and probably number 12 in the world at that!
I started plotting how I might consolidate some of my gear once I reached the US, since I would be leaving the sheep's hide and horns there, and had carried a roll of duck tape to lock my rifle case onto the duffel bag and then duck tape them together as a unit to avoid another extra bag charge-which is what I did when I reached Alaska, the rifle case affording me a better handle on the duffel as a bonus. I have one additional new duffel bag with a name tag attached that will be in Sergei's home along with the bear's hide and skull, which could not come with us since the CITES permit had been issued in Moscow, a direction we had not come out, and it would have to await someone hand carrying it to Petropavlosk, which will happen when a couple of the moose hunters travel from the west to get to PKC next week. It will probably then be carried forward to Anchorage to Russell Knight taxidermist who had forwarded my Dall sheep last year to Zimmerman, the world's expert on sheep. Since he knows bears well, Knight might be the one to convert my hide into a bearskin rug, since he would be cheaper than the sheep specialist Zimmerman in Martinsburg Pennsylvania on Spring Farm Road in Amish Farm Country.
Having resolved the separate travels of my late traveling companions, I wanted to type. My laptop allowed me to get started, and then refused to save, froze up and crashed-a very ill omen for the six weeks of solid round-the-world travel dependent upon this machine starting next week. I began talking with one of my seatmates as we flew over the spectacular volcanic peaks of Kamchatka. The older man, behind me, incongruously staring out with tightly drawn skin and a Parkinsonian stare under the bill of a Michigan Wolverines cap, was trying to take a picture. I tried to help him, but he was hard of hearing, and his annoying daughter would loudly give him instructions and in the same volume spoke to me also ( was that because I was approaching his decades or because I also am a 'Wolverine?') and disapproved of everything I was doing. "Stay away from that exit row window; keep your seat from reclining back into my space; and move that unsightly bag out of here." I finally smiled sweetly at the old man, showed him my UM maize and blue flag, and said in the same sotto voce: "It is too bad you had to bring your daughter along, since we really could have had some fun!" It may have got no reaction out of him, but I did not hear from her again.
The fellow sitting next to me was retired from an oil machinery parts business in Fairbanks, and quit after the Alyeska pipeline boom, now spending winters in Palm Springs. He told me that they had a charter with Reese Air to fly them back from the Clipper Line docking in Petropavlosk, but Reese Air had gone belly up during their cruise. He was interested in my having been in Antarctica, upon spotting my jacket, and said many people on this cruise, as improbable as it might seem from their appearances, had been to Antarctica and many other exotic places on earth, as people hardly fit to walk to the bathroom, yet perpetually traveling the world and its most out-of-the-way places in an effort to "bag" just one more species. I told him I was a reasonably serious birder myself, but a determined "non-lister" and that I was also something more as a naturalist that might not go down well with the other people on this rickety cramped Russian Tupelev 154, made by Ilyooshin to resemble the now-obsoleting 727-I was a hunter. I told him that in the bag was a Kamchatka trophy Snow Sheep Ram. He lowered his voice and said "I have a rather good Dall Ram myself!" and shook my hand. We talked about Alaska hunting and compared Dall hunting experiences.
He had rather enjoyed the Clipper Cruise they had just been on, since it had done some serious whale watching also. He had once in a while wanted to get away from the group, (although he enjoyed the two shipboard lectures each day, like my Antarctic experience),not because of the passengers (he and I lowered the average age by two decades) but the annoying prattle of the jolly fat blonde young woman who just then wanted to take over the PA and give out her mindlessly cheerful little jokes interspersed with "what we would be doing along the way and answering any questions any of you might have." She did not know the answers to any of the questions, but she wanted to be the one who gave them the answers when it was found out.
From the captain, who, with the attendants spoke nearly no English-a surprise in international travel and a mark of Russia's earlier isolation-we learned that at 2:50 PM we would be overflying Analap Island, at 3:20 PM Fragevenia Island, at 3:26 PM Providence Island (a name and legacy of Captain James Cook), at 3:40 PM the Russian/USA border, and at 4:50 PM landing in Anchorage, Alaska, USA, as we were traveling 450 mph ground speed at 33,000 feet, with the islands below an atypically balmy 62*F with 50*F arrival temperature in Anchorage. Now all that is true if you assume that we took off on time rather than an hour late, and remember that the clock changes even faster than the landmarks beneath us, and even the calendar changes back to the previous day, although six hours later than takeoff, meaning that in a six hour flight, we would be one full day back and a half day forward. Got it?
CLEARANCE THROUGH ANCHORAGE
We had a surprisingly smooth sailing through Anchorage, and its Customs, Agriculture and US Fish and Wildlife, probably due to two factors. One is that we had called in advance to alert them to our arrival and we had most all of the paperwork filled out for the sheep. Second, after our arrival, Alan stayed at baggage claim while I ran forward to the US Fish and Wildlife Office with both sheep and all of the papers, so that they had an early start on the process. I had schmoozed with each of the people in their small office, and eventually got around to asking if it were possible, rather than having the sheep trophies left in Anchorage to be "dipped" (and damaged) by their designated sheep dipper, who charged a large fee for each, but made his profit by only putting together one batch of the cheap caustic, and then waiting until the end of the season and batching all of them and doing them all at once-no matter that there has never been any hoof and mouth disease in the US or Russia, and the last place to suspect it starting would be among remote wild sheep, who would only contact it if we first brought it out there to the volcano peak. It turns out there is a way to avoid leaving it, if it is to be shipped in bond to a registered taxidermist on their big book, who is certified able to do that at the destination. I immediately got out the big book and went through Arizona and Pennsylvania, and, sure enough, Zimmerman is the registered agent in Martinsburg PA and Alan's taxidermist is the one in Tucson certified to do the honors. Immediately, I made arrangements for both of the sheep to be shipped direct in bond to each, mine in the camo bag which went into the freezer for Delta air lines transshipment around the Labor Day holiday to arrive on Tuesday, and Alan's by American Air Freight.
The bags took a long time in coming, so by that time I knew each of the Customs Agents and we were exchanging tips on big game bullets and calibers. The one, a very big guy, was a gun nut, and was going out the next week to hunt black bear, stating with envy that he was sure he could never go up and after sheep (and that was obvious) but if he could he thought that my 190 grain boat tail Silvertip bullet would be just the thing. I just happened to have it, and the mushroomed bullet retrieved from the opposite side of the sheep's hide at 315 meters was passed around through each of the agents with admiring comments. Anywhere other than among hunters in the entrepot Alaska this conversation would be absurd. But by the time it came to collect the bags and push them through the Customs, the agents helped us with the bags and waved us off when we pulled out the rifle registrations and the keys to unlock the cases. "Good luck on your next hunts, and congratulations on magnificent trophies!" were their official parting words. Try that sampler out in JFK in New York!
One more bit of luck for each of us: we had cleared in time for Alan to catch his earlier flight through DFW-even getting a first class upgrade. I scrambled to U/A and found a flight leaving through ORD at 8:00 PM to IAD and checked in my rifle case wrapped into my duffle along with my backpack and I was on my way. There was time enough for only one quick stop at TCBY where Alan and I said farewell with the possibility of getting together at Tucson or the SCI convention in Las Vegas in mid March. He gave me his rubles, which I will give to George Service when I see him next week with the pictures and I gave him the Photo Works pictures to mail in from ANC. I boarded the long lonely dark flight to ORD with only the movies, "Someone Like You" and "Crocodile Dundee" (Nth edition) to keep company since my time zones were set exactly twelve hours out of EDT.
My film is all packaged for immediate processing, the Serial Letters are all in the Russian post, the audiotapes are packaged to send forward to Michigan, I have the backpack and duffel bags to repack for takeoff next week on a six week, six-venue world tour, and I am booked to run a long training run with Joe in preparation for our marathon run immediately on my return from the next trip.
KAMCHATKA-'01
NOW COMPLETE!
As I had said at the outset of this 64-page "summary"-This has been a phenomenal wild wilderness adventure trip through pristine sub-Arctic Russian volcanic mountain and glacial river ecosystems!
Bon chasse!