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Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2012
From: Sergei Roy <SergeiRoy@yandex.ru>
Subject: Re: travel piece

Two for the Riverrun, or: Up Upper Vetluga!
By Sergei Roy [Former editor of Moscow News]

A funny season, summer. Passes much too quickly. In Russia, it simply scurries by. Twinkle an eye, and it's already July, while the itch in your bones gets stronger and stronger: Away from it all! To the pampas! Even at a pretty advanced age, even after recent open-heart surgery it's hard to get rid of that itch if all your life you sought to escape the boredom and hustle of the rat race and Thoreau's quiet desperation of humdrum existence. Escape ­ and head for the stillness of the wilderness and the society of birds, fishes and other God's creatures ­ minus one species.

adapted from image at
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Vetluga_river.jpgThis time my wife is dead set against letting me go on a solo hike. A heart attack will hit you, she says, you will conk out under some bush, she says, and where will we look for you? Who am I going to wail over?

Generally, I prefer to wander in the wilderness alone. That way, it's more like long drawn-out meditation. Whoever heard of meditating in company? The way I see it, the trick is to get submerged in one's own soul, not one's neighbor's, however decent they may be. Suum cuique. To each their own trance.

There are also more mundane reasons for this misanthropy. I explained them somewhere something like this: dragging a woman with you on a hike in the wilds is a bit like packing a pig-iron pan in your rucksack: it's heavy to lug around, but the pancakes are delicious to eat. The converse theorem also applies: pancakes are yummy, but a heavy pan in your backpack, that's a different story altogether.

I was merely trying to be witty there, of course. The real reasons are more cogent.

All sorts of things happen on a hike, even a not too tough one. Unpleasantness, difficulties, and sometimes even cataclysms. Your boat may get spiked on a sharp stone or bough, or it may plop keel up on the most piddling of rapids; or you may miscalculate your store of provisions and have to eat whatever Mother Nature provides, or just do without; or a bear will wander into your path unawares. All that sort of thing. And the weather? On a paddling trip down a Siberian river rain kept pouring on my head for a solid month, with minor breaks of an hour or so (characteristically, it stopped completely on the last day of the trip). On the Msta, in late May, snowstorms hit me in the face to blot out daylight, I mean literally blot out, with a thick layer of snowflakes on my specs, whereas the radio had promised sunny warmth and bird cherry in bloom along the banks. This litany can go on endlessly.

Now, when you are on your own you take these things in your stride. You wanted nature, didn't you? So there you have it, quite raw, you can gorge yourself on it, just mind you don't choke. Somehow or other things tend to sort themselves out in the end, and you emerge from the flames reborn or a bit singed, that's as the case may be. Your swear output may be double the usual, but who's there to censure you? No one, and that's the whole point.

It's totally different when all this beastliness befalls a delicate, unbruised creature absolutely alien and averse to men's idea of fun, like putting themselves through crash tests, to breaking point and beyond, and similar perversions. Result, your conscience pricks like mad, your heart bleeds for her, and an all-round spirit of depression pervades the atmosphere ­ very unhealthy for a heart with all those bypasses in it. Well, your heart is your own affair, but what about her feelings? In extreme cases divorce has not been unknown. I personally observed one such drama unfold, and even wrote it up (see my short story "Pursued by a Bear").

Nothing to be done this time, though. Two it is. I'll just have to choose a route on the more humane side, and closer to Moscow. The North, the Urals, both Siberias, the Far East and the inner seas are out, but definitely. I went over a dozen options and finally settled on the Upper Vetluga. Scenery, divine; difficulties, none ­ practically; population, sparse to nonexistent. Just the ticket. Getting to and from the river, perfectly acceptable. The railroad is close by, both at the start and at the finish. Close by, that is, by Russian standards, a matter of a few dozen kilometers. Starting point, fourteen hours by train north-east of Moscow. Nothing to it, really.

Measured on the map, the route is some 250 km long, but that's strictly by the map. Like all plains rivers, the Vetluga keeps twisting and turning sinuously, so in real terms 250 has to be multiplied by some digit, I only wish I knew which ­ 2? 1.5? My map of the Kostroma Region dates from the Soviet times and is thus hilariously inaccurate, but what of that? Much more fun flying by the seat of one's pants, as pilots used to say. We'll feel like trailblazers. Such a bore, knowing things in advance. Que sera, sera.

To choose a vessel, now. Not much choice, in fact. As there are two of us, the only suitable boat is my LE-3, an unmusical Russian acronym for "expedition-purpose inflatable raft for three." Quite a tight squeeze for three, but just about right for two. The tub is 25 years old, and very precious to me. Over the years she has known various mishaps in the shape of punctures and such, but she has six sturdy rubber compartments, so if one or two get torn, you can still safely paddle ashore. You hope.

I thought my companion would be cheered no end by my assurances of the boat's safety, but she seemed little impressed. A sort of cloud darkened her features, even. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the male and female views of apparently obvious things may differ in a totally unexpected, freakish way.

That's the prologue, for all it is worth. There follow excerpts from the diary - pardon me, ship's log. In the manner of such documents it was written in the third person singular. It features skipper Commodore (yours truly; I got stuck with the sobriquet way back in my rock-climbing days) and Cadette, a.k.a. deck-hand-cum-cook-cum-camera-operator with responsibility for all, including the weather. The log entries were usually dictated by Commodore (which task he combined with paddling ­ a welcome diversion from pulling all day like a galley slave). Occasionally Cadette would fluff the lines, so now the authorship of any particular passage is uncertain, not that it matters a rap. So,

24 July 2004, Saturday. Day One on the Orbit

Yesterday we boarded train 340, Moscow-Chita. The traveling companions were passable, a corpulent lady from Togliatti and a taciturn undergraduate from Kirov who kept munching continuously. Conversation, miscellaneous. One important topic was mushrooms. The lady let drop that they did not pick the kind that "grow in the grass." She thus favors the parasitic kind growing on trees, which placed her in the amoeba category of mushroom gatherers, especially compared to Cadette, who can hold her own against any learned mycologist. The lady got off at Galich at 23:00.

Observed from the window: lots of church buildings, singly and in clusters. The density of church domes per square kilometer, truly amazing. Monasteries encircled by fortress walls apparently used to double as fortresses. Clearly all this was once the original God-fearing, God-saved Old Russia. In other parts ­ the south, the north, the Urals, Siberia and further afield ­ the scenery is different. Just great empty spaces, not too many human dwellings, let alone churches.

Only recently these church buildings hereabouts were all St. Marys-on-Potatoes, used as vegetable storage facilities, warehouses, correction schools, and suchlike. Worse still, they were ruins crumbling away, empty and meticulously fouled up by anthropoids. Lots of church buildings are now being restored after seventy years of rabid atheism. This is certainly good and proper, but sets one wondering. Sure, the walls and the domes can be restored; faith is a different matter. People have lived too long without God, He was abolished, they had a mini-god of Georgian extraction instead of Him, later followed by caricatures of the mini-god. In lieu of paradise in heaven, they were promised communism on earth, but the project went phut; meantime faith got thrashed out of the minds and souls. All that's left in some is faith in ritual: make the sign of the cross at proper intervals, fast and go to confession now and then, and you're assured of a ticket to heaven. But are you? Other gods rule the roost these days, Mammon and Demon Drink. And whatsitsname ­ Glamor! Yapping day and night on the idiot box. You start musing on all this, your only wish is to get as fast as possible, as far away as possible from all this bestiality. If only for a while.

Ah well. The trip, now. During the night Commodore took a snooze, only much too short. After Buy (it's the name of a town, no invention of ours, and the station building there is part station, part church) something outrageous broke out outside: lightning flashed continuously, thunder rumbled ditto, and the rain came down in sheets. An impressive sight, of course ­ if admired from a warm room, that is, but we would have to make a soft drop right in the midst of it.

Commodore worried Cadette might get her feet wet and wanted to pull her wellies out; he wrenched the rucksack from under the berth and in the process sat down heavily on the undergraduate's head, the poor chap. His own rubber boots Commodore had left behind. This is a cast-iron law of travel: on each trip at least one major stupidity must be committed. As for minor ones ­ well, whoever's going to count them?

We spent some three hours in sickening anxiety, gazing at the nocturnal thunderstorm scene. A revolting sight, really. At about four we reached Shabalino (emphasis on the last syllable; for some reason the Vyatichi prefer French type stresses). No platform as such, just the storm and the downpour in full blast. In a few seconds the rucksacks were soaked through, and so was the lower half of Commodore's frame, though the station building was barely twenty yards away.

The tiny waiting lounge contained a couple of drunks in sleeveless jackets and a surly old man. We hired a car driven by an individual who either had a bad lisp or spoke with a broad Vyatka accent. Russia is great, and the number of dialects in it is even greater.

It took 400 rubles and about an hour to cover the 40 km to the bridge across the Vetluga by the village of Koneevo, or else Kuneevo, the spelling varies. Probably it used to be Kuneevo originally, from the Russian word for marten (kunitsa), but eventually the marten population was severely depleted while some koni (horses) were still left around; there is also the Turkic word kunem, but that's altogether unprintable, something like the French con, the two even sound alike. (That's Commodore showing off his linguistic skills.)

On the way we saw two hares and one fire. The fire was caused by lightning; our chauffeur informed us that two more houses and a sawmill had burnt down, all of them struck by lightning. The benefits of the lightning rod are still unknown here, though the device was invented back in the 18th century, if memory serves.

One of the hares Commodore saw very close, within a dozen paces or so, a big one (a rusak) and dark from the rain. It was sitting right on the road (taking a shower bath?), then languidly ambled over to the roadside ditch and squatted there. Commodore yelled, "Bet I'll hit him!" and grabbed for his pistol, but mostly to rile Cadette. Predictably, Cadette fiercely leaped to the hare's defense. She was sorry for the dear little thing, if you please. To cook hare stew, first catch your hare, but this logic is beyond cadettes' intelligence.

Later Commodore recalled how the poet Pushkin was riding in a sled from his village to St. Petersburg, where he would certainly have got himself involved in the ruckus started by his Decembrist pals, and would have been either hanged or exiled to Siberia in irons, only he turned back when a hare crossed his path and thus missed his chance of sharing the Decembrists' glory. Alas, we just can't afford that kind of superstition.

It was pouring solidly all the way, and as we reached the bridge the deluge was worse than ever. Climbing down a steep path under the bridge with the heavy rucksacks, Commodore slipped and landed smack on his ass in the clayey mud. Another bad omen, second worst after hares, nearly bad enough to make us turn back, but how?

We lingered under the bridge till about eight, waiting for the rain to subside, only it wouldn't. We breakfasted on some tomatoes, rusks and sweets, then prepared our craft for launching. Cadette looked a bit down in the mouth. As for Commodore, if he had a tail, it would be trembling with excitement and anticipation of wonderful things to come.

Thunder kept cannonading deafeningly all around. Once lightning struck quite close, Commodore even feared it might hit the metal bridge. Iron attracts electric discharges, doesn't it. He remembered his sister Lucy narrowly escaping with her life ten years before, when lightening had struck wet ground in her own garden in the South Urals; Commodore was then paddling down the Nugush in a tiny self-made catamaran, some 200 km away, fishing for grayling. In that area, too, a thunderstorm could rumble on for hours and hours, and he had had to wait it out in a dry tent, while we could not even find a dry spot to put up our tent on.

A curious combination, that ­ steady rain-cum-thunderstorm that seem capable of going on forever. A rara avis, truly.

At about eight we just could not wait any longer. The boat was pumped up, our stuff loaded in, and we pushed off. Whoopee! The joy of the first strokes with the paddle, and a fortnight of bliss ahead ­ fabulous! As reward for our daring, the rain first let up, then ceased completely.

The Vetluga is a typical river of the Russian plains, only there are more forests and fewer people here than elsewhere, and even fewer good camping sites. After several hours of paddling we disembarked at what seemed like a decent spot, only to step into a dense growth of waist-high and very wet grass, and no dry pine branches for the fire. Disgusting. Greenhorn Cadette tried to talk Commodore into stopping there, but he was adamant. A camping site like that is only good for hanging oneself; anything else would look absurd.

So on we paddled, admiring enchanting wooded scenery on the high banks either side ­ alas, worse than useless for camping purposes. We negotiated a couple of obstacles ­ a bottleneck and a spot where islands divided the river into several log-filled streams. There were sightings of the odd snipe, four stray motherless ducklings of obscure provenance, and one or two adult ducks with family. We commiserated with the orphans and cheered the family groups.

After three more hours or so of steady paddling Commodore's strength and resolve began to give out. He said the sensation felt familiar; just like at the barricades in August '91, severe lack of sleep beginning to tell. At about 13:00, an amazing bit of luck: a spot where quite a crowd must have camped before us. The grass, tall and thick as everywhere else, was here trampled flat by many feet. Just super. There were pine trees around, too, but of a curiously silly variety, even seemingly dry branches were dripping wet. So we had to rely on Commodore's woodcraft and make a fire of tiny, very dry fir twigs ­ these will burn when everything else won't even smolder. We cooked a species of gruel with buckwheat, vermicelli, soy shrimps, and a single slippery jack. In short, an Irish stew. Lacking in it was a dead rat contributed by Montmorency, but we did not have a Montmorency with us and decided it would have to do as it was. It did.

Time now, 19:00. The sun has been shining for hours and gives no sign of wishing to go down. Everything looks as if there had never been any rain around here. It's stifling inside the tent, and buzzing with insect life. Next task, fighting mosquitoes to the last drop of blood. Actually it's more like an auto da fe: Commodore lights a candle and fries the bloodsuckers till every single one is exterminated.

25 July 2004, Sunday. Day two.

12:00. Left Camp Fallen Pine-tree. A fine camp site it had been. We'd puttered around sleepily and lazily all morning, set out rather late and traveled in the worst of the heat. Commodore's phiz got burnt raw, as were the backs of his hands. Sitting on the stern compartment he plies his double-bladed kayak oar non-stop ­ the current is almost nonexistent, so if you don't paddle, you stay put. Cadette basked in the bows and actually refused to write in the ship's log out of insuperable sloth.

That day we kept going for some seven hours, in the course of which the following memorable events occurred:

Just like yesterday, saw four orphaned golden-eye ducklings. Someone (an otter?) must have got their mum, and they too are now doomed; they'll either make a meal for some predator (a pike?) or freeze to death at night ­ no warmth from mother duck's body.

A molting mallard drake shot up from a clump of grass just a few yards away. Commodore wasn't even chagrined that he had had no time to drop the oar, draw and shoot; a molting drake is just a bag of feathers and bones. Thus no family rumpus ensued.

We filled a bottle from a sulfur spring. Cadette cheekily alleged that the water was full of nasty germs. Commodore begged to take a few sips; the water tasted exactly like a mineral spring in Pyatigorsk, his hometown or what he likes to think of as hometown. No ill effects afterwards. Nature must be trusted.

After a few hours we were hailed from the right bank by a Ms. Blumkin (that wasn't the way she introduced herself, just what we dubbed her later). She was the first living soul we'd seen since the day before. This particular soul was starved for company and loath to see us go. She and her husband had vacationed on the Vetluga for 25 years, from July to early September. The husband fished, that day he had gone fishing on some lake in a one-seater inflatable raft. Hearing this, Commodore turned green with envy ­ we just can't afford to waste time fishing, must push on.

Ms. B. said the nearby village was deserted, just two old dears ­ brother and sister ­ left there. The rest had been moved to another village populated by 30 cows and as many alkies. The holidaymaking couple go there to buy milk and other stuff. She says folks from Nizhni Novgorod, Moscow and Vyatka kayak down the river, but, sadly for her, very, very rarely.

Re the weather: Ms. B. reports that it is 280 C in Moscow, and it will be the same here in a couple of days. The news comes from the two oldies' radio. All a load of rot. It was amazingly fine yesterday, and the weather will be as it will be.

We handed Ms. B. an old business card of Commodore's, mostly to impress her. Which she duly was. "Fancy!" she said. "What people one meets!" On this note we parted. The sparsely clad Ms. B. remained on the steps cut in the clayey bank, while we paddled on, quietly enjoying one beautiful view after another.

Tried to land, but no luck: tall, impenetrable grass on a high bank, like in most places. A few minutes later we were overtaken by two chaps from Nizhni Novgorod in a two-seater kayak. Like us they had set off on Saturday, only much later. About our age, and of the civil class, apparently. Conversation along the usual lines ­ who came from where. About the weir ahead, it should be safely under water with all that rain, they said, so we perked up quite a bit. A kayak goes about twice as fast as our raft, though Commodore found fault with their paddling technique ­ ungainly, but that's a pale translation of his colloquialism.

Shortly after that we came up against an obstacle ­ a fallen aspen that barred the whole waterway, bank to bank. We lifted the broken top of the aspen and squeezed through, hearts palpitating ­ an overkeel was a distinct possibility. Still, it's all experience.

The sun was scorching, and the air inside the boat's tubular compartments noticeably expanded. Observing this, Cadette added yet another phobia to her rich collection. Terrified that the rubber tubes will burst, she keeps pouring water on them, for cooling. That is good, for Commodore remembered the guy whose whole afterdeck blew up on the Akhtuba precisely for this reason. Le mot juste: Things do happen.

26 July 2004, Monday. Day three

26 equals 13 times 2. Out in the wilds, superstitions mushroom, and rightly so. You've got to be extra careful with this parallel worlds stuff, any rock-climber or mariner will tell you that, and Commodore has had experience with both mountains and seas.

Yesterday we had to clear some Lebensraum for our tent and cooking-fire on a high bank where no man had trodden. Dense conifer thicket, real taiga. That's what we called our bivouac, Camp Taiga. And as for the grass... You need a Malayan cris to cut this grass, not Commodore's hunting knife: much too short. We'd dragged our raft up that steep bank right over some briar bushes. Stupid, of course, but what were we to do? Couldn't leave it moored down there, could we ­ suppose some bad guys pinched it? Ridiculous, we know, but better safe than sorry.

Our sleep was of the cat-nap variety. Commodore woke up at five, but then snored until eight. For breakfast, we finished off the last remaining shrimps boiled in salty water + buckwheat + delectable russulas. Lots of mushrooms there, but mostly of the wrong kind (bitter boletes, acrid lactariuses, and suchlike). So says Cadette, and her word ­ on this subject ­ is law.

10:45. Left Camp Taiga. Commodore says his duralumin oar has taken in lots of water, it's more like a crowbar now. His shoulders are creaking most painfully, especially the patched-up one. But he is used to the kayak-type paddle. With it, you sit in the boat facing front, and that's the only way when you are on your own - have to look sharp all the time if you know what's good for you.

Another tree-trunk right across the river, mostly submerged. Got over it by squiggling. Thank goodness the log was smooth, but the patch over an old puncture is giving us concern. Most of the squiggling occurred right round that bit. Thank God for the sluggish current, stronger current would have turned us broadside ­ better not think about that.

Lying flat on her tummy, Cadette acted as a lookout. Commodore expressed his complete satisfaction with her work. A proper hawk-eye she was, missing no obstacle in the stream, but mostly admiring the view, judging from the expression on her face.

The vistas were indeed as good as any picture in the Hermitage. The perspective was finely drawn, with great inspiration and in excellent taste: tall steep banks covered with forest as far as the eye could see ­ pines, firs, birches, aspens, others; fleece-like shrubs coming down the steep slope right to the water's edge, the river ahead wide and resplendent, with warm blue skies over it all dotted with chubby white clouds. Lovely.

The first few days you do little but feast your eyes on it, like in a trance, but eventually this wears off. Commodore says it's the same up in the mountains; at first the fierce beauty of the hills all but squashes you, you can't tear your enchanted eyes from the view, but then your attention is distracted by other things, you have to do what you need to, to stay alive ­ not much time for gazing. At times, though, you again wake up to the magic with a start and just stare with your mouth agape: how can things be so unutterably beautiful?

Now flocks of bright-blue damselflies, aptly named the Beautiful Demoiselles, dart about and often alight on the boat. They look a bit like butterflies. Commodore seems to be teachable, after all. The bit about blue damselflies did sink in, though most other inedible flora and fauna just gets forgotten the minute your back is turned.

The sky gradually exudes a pall of thick white clouds with strips of some nonsense in between. This looks pretty menacing, while we have carelessly packed away all our waterproofs. But we are in luck, not a drop of rain, after all. More reason to kick back and relax ­ for some. Commodore keeps slogging away, for the current is conspicuous by its absence. Where the river widens out enormously, one sometimes wonders whether one is still moving forward or has about-faced somewhere without noticing it and is now heading upriver.

13:05. Some creature, its fur looking ginger-colored ­ could be an otter or a squirrel ­ crossed the stream in front of us from the right bank to the left, and dashed into the bushes. An otter rather than a squirrel, on second thoughts. What would a squirrel want with the opposite bank? The landscape is the same for all.

Still no Paozer. Should be renamed the Kitezh-Paozer, like that town that sank in Lake Kitezh, never to be seen again. The overall situation is Commodore's pet hate: river widens out vastly with no current and a head wind. Yesterday there was some semblance of current at least, today a gust blows into your face and the boat stops dead: she sits high on the water surface, all of it, and acts like a sail. No kayak she. Sure it's bliss, lolling about on her soft bottom, only someone has to pay for it ­ and we know who that someone is.

13:30. Reached the estuary of the Paozer ­ at last. The Paozer is swift and carries masses of yellow foam. With a current like that and masses of fallen trees in the river we would have had no end of trouble, had we started the trip on the Paozer, as originally planned. Lucky we. The Vetluga now seems to be showing some temperament, too, flowing a bit faster, only this is unlikely to last. The river is wider now as well, and all the willows are standing knee-deep in water.

13:50. Have just had a bite: rusks, pretzels, nuts (our chief source of protein), some fruit jelly and a single prune apiece. After the snack, the view seems more beautiful than ever. The river has grown even murkier. So let it ­ with this current we're sitting pretty.

14:20. Sailed past a submerged wooden boat chained to a sawyer. Looks like there's a village nearby; deserted as like as not. The villagers went away somewhere; must be terribly busy drinking themselves to death.

The right bank is overgrown with dense bushes, and on the very top there's a band of pink-and-white dodder. A most pleasing sight.

The current continues fine. Commodore's face is gradually turning scarlet, ears transparent in the sun, even though he is wearing a Bedouin headgear. A Bedouin in a sailor's striped jersey, see? He got used to this style in clothing while traipsing all over Central Asian deserts. And his ears got burnt back on the Ak Deniz, the White Sea in Turkish, a.k.a. the Eastern Mediterranean.

14:50. The banks are turning sandy, grown over with burdock-like weeds and willows. Must be a popular camping site ­ footmarks in the sand, egg shells, tracks left by a fox or a smallish dog. The sand is hot, the water cold. Commodore took a dip in his birthday suit ­ his first plunge in a river in two years. Says he feels on top of the world. Cadette utters something not unlike a raspberry.

15:30. A solitary crow. So far we've mostly seen herons. A heron shits most copiously, ejecting a long silvery stream.

15:35. A partisan's dugout in a steep bank, with an antechamber of pine boughs. Tramps' abode, or else a shelter for mushroom/berry-pickers during the season. Earlier on, nesting holes of sand martins, chicks peeping from most. Commodore doesn't see them, simply cannot make them out, which upsets him no end. We aren't getting any younger, that's what it means. Can hardly hit a squirrel in the eye with a single pellet, like he used to.

17:00. Stopped at Camp Chanterelle (L), not far from the village of Lipovo. The bank is high, grown with a mixture of pines and firs. Pines, that's good, they fill the air with ozone and provide a supply of dry branches for the fire.

Footpaths on the bank, and they must lead somewhere. Cadette alleges that she can hear dogs yapping and human voices. A rotten net, a fish-trap, a disintegrating angler's bag, a pole with an iron tip ­ these are used to pound on the water and poke into holes to drive the fish out and into a net. A fine place for fishing, obviously. Commodore is quite downhearted ­ can't fish, feels too wobbly. Damn and blast old age! Time they learned to build hearts of metal. After all, a pump is just a pump, right?

Cooked a sort of soup with lentils and a handful of russulas picked underfoot. At 21:00 retired for the night. And why not? We'd spent the day in as talented a way as we could.

27 July 2004, Tuesday. Day four

Commodore woke up around six. Had a nightmare toward morning: in this dream he was asking his former boss at a magazine run by ex-KGB men to sign some paper. How on earth did that son-of-a-bitch sneak into Commodore's dream? Ah well. KGB rules. They never shed their spying skills or habits, do they.

First thing in the morning, went looking for mushrooms ­ on Commodore's timid suggestion. Our first find was a slippery jack, which Commodore had marked the previous evening. It was difficult to miss ­ sat smack in the middle of the path, yet it was a good specimen, perfectly sound. Later there were several russulas, found by hawk-eyed Cadette, who else. Then Hawk Eye struck on a whole clearing full of chanterelles. We took none but the cutest and firmest; filled a whole plastic bag.

Chanterelles were our chief delight at this camp. They made delicious soup with asparagus, but fried they were out of this world. Commodore demonstrated his technique of frying stuff in the lid of his mess kit; the lid is placed on hot coals from the fire and rotated as required by the simple expedient of a pair of miniature pliers that figure in the inventory under the heading VALUABLES. Unable to find fault with this procedure, Cadette fretted but soon consoled herself. Commodore admitted that he had not invented the method, he had merely added the pliers touch. He says chanterelles fried on a fire are the tastiest dish in the mushroom department, ever. Something in that.

Hawk-eyed Cadette snooped around till she filled a cup with bilberries and strawberries from a patch where Commodore could see nothing but dense weeds. Score, 1:1.

10:55. Left camp. 11:40. Shot past a wooden church by the village of Bystri. Didn't have time to take a picture of it. Very dark with age, but all the more beautiful for it. Towers over the vicinity.

12:00. Stand from under! Have just wormed our way over a ruined wooden bridge. Here, water rushes over the collapsed bridge and some tree trunks blocking the entire stream. Just a small gap by the right bank where water swirls over what's left of the bridge's handrails. We slowly approached the spot holding on to some bushes, then shot into the gap. If there had been some nails sticking out of those handrails we'd have been impaled on them. Thank God there weren't.

A couple of locals, man and woman, were crossing over in a boat there. They said kayakers usually carried their vessels over land here. Quite right, too. It's just Commodore showing off, taking risks that way. The woman in the boat yelled, "It's all right, folks, you can pass there on the right, the handrails are smooth enough." The guy furtively dropped a bottle of vodka into the boat as they were boarding. That must be their way of life, from bottle to bottle. On the subject of the weather the woman said this: "It'll keep hot and dry for another ten days, then the rains will start again."

After Bystri we faced a succession of lake-like, still-water stretches. Excruciating. Practically weeping with fury, Commodore paddles on so hard duralumin nearly gets bent at each stroke.

Better late than never. At long last we decided to baptize our LE-3 (a loathsome acronym). When the British queen smashes a champagne bottle against some stern, she intones this formula: "We name thee..." plus the name of the ship. Well then, we name thee Slowpoke, after Slowpoke the Magnificent, the centerboard of the Mewa class, the heroine of Commodore's Aral, Caspian, and countless other voyages. Slowpoke, that's because she crawls at exactly a snail's pace even when Commodore plies his paddle like a windmill.

With so much water around, Cadette did some washing ­ Commodore's socks and her own towel. Commodore's towel covers his head, in a parody of Yasser Arafat, to protect what's left of the skin on his face. Very little, actually.

13:25. Filled bottles with some more sulfurous water full of ferrous anions. The smell was there all right, but mild. Unlikely to be pig farm wastage, we thought. Commodore had once indeed partaken of some such liquid, by mistake. Too parched to pay much attention. Still, he survived, didn't he.

Photo of Commodore wearing wet white gloves.

The bank is a solid expanse of tansy. Very pretty, very pretty indeed. Has anyone ever tried to paint a landscape like that, we wonder. We both have rather unsophisticated esthetic taste ­ both fancy landscapes.

Commodore tried on the freshly washed socks and discovered there was plenty of sand in them. Not exactly a sandbag, but close. An unusual experience.

Basho-Roy:

How exquisite, to pull socks
on one's sun-singed feet.
Squash the bloody gadfly.

Oh the joy of hiding in the shade
One's sun-burnt face.
Dragonflies making love on the gunwale.

A black-and-white snipe
flies past on business.
The pines on the bank stand to attention.

An old birch tree leans low
to admire its reflection.
Current lays bare its roots.

Leaves rustle softly, softly.
A fieldfare rattles rudely.
Then, museum silence.

28 July 2004, Wednesday. Day five.

Stopover for one day near Luptug village.

We landed here at about 5 p.m. yesterday. Bank's terribly steep. At the top of it, a treasure trove of mushrooms. The moment Commodore stuck his head over the brink, his gaze hit on a bed of chanterelles. A small clearing, probably left by loggers. A footpath along the bank, leading from Luptug ­ where? Somewhere. Ashes of old cooking-fires here and there. Must be a favorite spot with fishermen. A tributary nearby. No current in it, so it can be an old riverbed, not a tributary. Who cares.

A solitary passerby stopped by, looking for a ford. Says there's no timber rafting on the river, no economic or any other kind of life; so, few people left in the villages; the weather is settling; Luptug, 4.5 km away; we are already in the Kostroma Region, not Kirov; all the fords are deep under water; 10 km to Zenkovka (Commodore translates: this can be between 5 and 25). He then said goodbye and went on his way.

He picked some of our chanterelles working in a crude, peasant way: he'd yank up a mushroom, then cut off the soil-smudged part of the shank. This way it's less tiring, you don't have to bend down so much. Commodore tried to do likewise, but nearly had his head bitten off by nature-loving Cadette. In fact, Commodore felt he was committing a sin against nature, himself. Mustn't destroy mushroom spawn ­ bend real low, cut the stem cleanly, and feel virtuous.

By 9 p.m. all the chores were done. We added to the soup the disgusting Czech (that is, beloved by the Czechs) mushrooms (incongruously called horns of plenty, in English), but the dish turned out quite tasty. Cadette issued a ban on frying mushrooms twice a day. Generally, Cadette keeps usurping Commodore's rights and privileges, quite forgetting that skipper on board his ship comes first after God, le premier après le dieu. Like, she alleges that Commodore makes flies nervous as we fight to shoo them out of the tent. Cadette has her own, Machiavellian tactic of coping with these spawn of hell.

Had a moderately quiet night, except for a "dry thunderstorm." Commodore leaped outside and stretched a plastic sheet over the tent, just in case, ignoring Cadette's taunts. Woke at 6 and went off mushroom picking. Commodore personally found one (1) slippery jack. Cooked quite a lot (chanterelles, slippery jacks, russulas) in a big frying pan ­ and wiped it clean.

Time to clean up and all that sort of thing. Commodore retreated into the woods for a minute and found a biggish patch of raspberry bushes. We filled a bottle and a couple of mugs with raspberries and another mug with bilberries, then ate them all and plopped down for a nap. Dolce far niente is our law, we decided. After this l'apres midi we felt that life was getting better, life was getting merrier (incidentally, it wasn't Stalin who coined the phrase but some academician's mama). Before that, we'd felt slack and slow. A bit pooped. After all, this is our fifth day out.

After the siesta, cooked our daily soup and prepared to do some fishing. Paddled a bit upstream, to a biggish pool, tied the boat to some overhanging bushes and were all set to cast the spoon-bait when the boat began to sink, air visibly escaping from the tube ripped open on the Osuga the year before. We hurriedly paddled toward the spot where the banks were slightly lower; found a low-hanging branch to which to tie our painter ­ Commodore had to climb over some tilting tree trunks like a monkey, to perform the trick. Dragged the boat to camp, turned her over and swore in unison: there were air bubbles all around a rubber patch covering the old tear. We tore off the vile piece of sticky tape bought at a Boats shop ­ it can hold bloody nothing, the sales talk had been just that, sales talk. For over an hour Commodore toiled away at the tear scraping off the old glue. Dusk fell. It started to drizzle gently. Just one of those days.

29 July 2004, Thursday. Day six

Thursday morning was spent on repairs. Set out at 12:05. At 14:25 saw the village of Zenkovka. View, the usual ­ not a soul around. For a while the current was decent, after that stretches of still water half a mile long and nearly as wide. Plus a head wind, the nose-bashing kind. In the end, a very strong nose-basher.

Landed at 17:00. Set up camp right in the middle of an old dirt road. Well, why not? The ground is flat, no need to fight thickets of tall grass. The track apparently leads from Zenkovka to Lyapino, as marked on the map. Has not been used for quite a while, maybe years.

As we were having supper a visitor arrived. The Tramp (that's what we dubbed him, though his social status could be different) prattled non-stop ­ must have been starved for company, like most folks here, it appears. Had a few roach in a mess kit. He said that before St. Peter's Day (July 18th) life was an endless torment hereabouts ­ gnats, mosquitoes, midgets ate you alive. Now there were no mosquitoes to speak of, he said. Indeed, there were practically none at that camp.

Other things he said: he lived in a village some 15 km away; earned his living by gathering mushrooms and berries, especially cranberries on the Pine Marsh; in the fall it attracted lots of people, some came from neighboring regions even. Procurers bought bilberries at 17 rubles a kilo, chanterelles, at 30 rubles, cranberries, at 20 rubles.

Not far from this spot some Muscovites bought five houses in an abandoned village. They were going to build a church, invite a priest, and live as a commune in pristine sinlessness. Something in the manner of Commodore's friend Sergei Sossinsky, who settled somewhere near here back in the 70s. Yes, it's a trend among Moscow's intelligentsia, God help them. Downshifting of sorts. In the past, Commodore himself felt a vague inclination to join the crowd, but never got round to doing anything about it. Staying put in one place over long periods of time is just not his cup of vodka.

The main occupation here is logging, though not on the scale of the Soviet times, not by far. At our previous stopover we had seen masses of timber lying on the ground, all overgrown with tall grass. Apparently the time had come for Gaidar's brilliant reforms, all industries died as a result, and the timber was left to rot where it had been felled. This evoked our sincere disgust and an acute desire to string up all reformers. "Reformers a la lanterne!" ­ that's the spirit.

More quotes from the Tramp's narrative: saffron milk caps grow right at the end of his vegetable patch; it takes him just an hour to gather a bucketful of ceps (or penny buns, the coveted prize of all Russian mushroomers). His staples seem to be mushrooms and roach, but the diet clearly does him good ­ phiz very well filled out. Says meat is 20 rubles a kilo here. He has a kind of lean-to not far from our camp, complete with a small iron stove ­ an equivalent of mod cons hereabouts, apparently. Life will bloom anywhere.

Another thing he told us was in a somewhat sadder vein: once upon a time he and his wife had also gone boating, only he had broken his oar. Still, it was clearly a sweet memory. He told the story falteringly, and one could see why: it was all far in the past ­ a wife, a job, weekend outings. Nowadays, nothing but vodka, or whatever they drink here. Cleaning fluid, most likely.

30 July 2004, Friday. Day seven.

No fried mushrooms in the morning ­ our favorite Tramp had picked all the chanterelles around. But that's all right. Fried mushrooms every day, and without brandy to go with them, that's a bit too hard on the stomach.

9:40. Left Camp-by-the-pine-tree-marsh, or Camp Talkative Tramp. The sky looks overcast. The night was warm ­ likely to rain. Headwind as usual, pretty fresh yesterday, set the waves rolling, some with white crests. The boat rocks pleasantly, which reminds Commodore of sea voyages. Strangely, Cadette receives this comment somewhat huffily.

Today we set off earlier than usual, to avoid the strong head wind in the afternoon, but it blows right now, anyway. In an open space, where there's no forest close to the river, it must blow even fiercer. We have not yet reached such a space; just another reason to feel chirpy.

10:10. Passed a morose angler. Not a bite, apparently.

10:40. Looks like we've reached an open space, no solid forest on the banks. The right bank is high and steep, the left one, low with bushes half in water. No rain, the water level is going down, the bushes come out of the water's embrace, only what's that to us? Without rains the current is simply dying down. That's life for you: on the one hand... on the other hand...

Plenty of sand martins' nests in the cliff (R). A few cows wandering up there, and the sand martins feed off the fauna on the cows' backs. Something lying in a growth of burdocks. A bag? The shepherd? Who knows. Some sand martins fly very low, right above the water's surface, others high in the sky, so it's impossible to guess whether it will rain or not. No consensus among sand martins on this score, apparently. There are masses of them here, fussing and chirping. Some lightly strike the water with their beaks ­ drinking, or carrying a drop of water to their nestlings. Very caring parents, sand martins.

The banks are overgrown with ragwort, meadow sweet, tansy, and sneezewort. Tansy is good for mooring, its roots hold fast. When you moor sitting in the boat, these trifles do matter. In the cinema the characters leap into the water and drag the boat onto the beach. We just don't care for such heroisms. What we do, we tie both bow and stern to some friendly bush or something on the bank, then carefully disembark keeping Cadette's feet dry.

11:55. Our first sighting of gulls. Not a good sign, that. Gulls mean a lot of open water. The wind as contrary as ever, and stronger than the current.

12:30. There's a raft by the right bank, a contraption of poles and inner tubes. Next to that is a tiny, flimsy, triangular boat; in it, what looks like a small spade but is actually intended as a paddle, and a miniature gaff for landing pike. All strictly D.I.Y. The little boat is water-logged. No humans around, the impression is there's been no one here for months or years. Depopulation in full swing.

The current continues fairly decent, by the Vetluga standards. The sky is overcast, and it is a bit chilly. Commodore's bare feet are beginning to feel the cold. Never fear, they've known worse. Aboard a vessel, one is expected to walk about barefoot; old yachtsmen may stare at you if you don't.

All day long we keep shifting from bank to bank. By the steep banks pitted with sand martins' nests the current is more noticeable, and we try to catch it. Might as well try to catch the wind.

15:40. For a good half-hour Commodore kept casting the spoon-bait from a sandy bank. The bait got snagged once, no other result. Using a wobbler is no earthly good on this river. The fish just can't see it in the murky water. Commodore worked the river pantless, in his shirt only. "A pornographic show," comments Cadette . No fear of voyeurs here, though.

20:40. Camp Lady's Panties on a high bank (R). Someone left the panties in a growth of young birch-trees. As noted above, life blooms everywhere, sex life included.

A dirt road overgrown with weeds, just like yesterday. Ashes from old fires, empty cans and bottles. A table, built by some hikers before us. Commodore says all this was left by the same group of baidarka people whose traces we'd found at Camp Fallen Pine-tree. The same kind of forked stakes for the cooking-fire, the same size poles for the tents. And the panties are theirs, too. "How d'you know?" asks Cadette. "Intuition," replies Commodore. "Huh," says Cadette. End of dialogue.

Not so many mushrooms as before, yet there are some, including even a particularly nice orange birch bolete (red top, dark downside). Also chanterelles, russulas, oyster mushrooms. No fear of starving ­ it's summer time. In winter, we'd be done for in a single day. A good frost, and there we would be, toes up.

A rotten pine-tree log with some ants in it got thrown onto the fire. The ants heroically threw themselves into the fire trying to save the eggs, dragging them somewhere rather foolishly. Life is a complicated affair, no question about that.

Tasty Tuscany soup for supper. Commodore tried to scoop some soup with a tea mug. That's what tiredness does to you. In all, he had paddled for eight hours today, minus some time for fishing.

The sky is frowning again, says Cadette. We parody an old slogan, "Let there be no war!" with "Let there be no rain!" It's sinful to complain, though: the weather has been simply superb.

Taking stock of our provisions. We'd taken too much dried bread and dried fruit on this trip, Cadette says. Nonsense, bristles Commodore: there ain't no such thing as too much food on a trip. Only too little. Iron law.

31 July 2004, Saturday. Day eight.

No wind during the night. The river, smooth as glass. Cadette listened to the squeaking and groans of unknown night birds. A nice little birdy (light-gray downside, brown-speckled back, light stripes on the head) shat on our tent. During the night Commodore crawled out of the tent three times to see if our boat was still there, unpinched. For the first time we'd left it down by the water's side. The cliff is too high, steep and crumbly, no strength left to drag the boat up to camp.

10:53. Left Camp Lady's Panties. Commodore had incised an inscription on the bench there: S. Roy. Before us, someone had left a scratched "James" there. What James could it have been, how could a James turn up here... Mysteries everywhere.

Passing the mouth of the Vokhma (R). It's bigger than the Paozer, about as wide as the Vetluga itself. The current is weaker than in the Paozer. No traces of timber rafting, all that was left behind in the socialist past. After the Vokhma, the river is nearly twice as wide as before. Commodore much prefers narrow streams in the woods, more like green tunnels. Beautiful. Actually, he loves all kinds of streams, even tundra rivers.

11:45. A boat moored by the left bank. Of human beings, zilch.

The weather changes quite abruptly. A moment ago, it seems, the sun was scorching hot, Cadette washed Commodore's shirt, but right now a chilly little wind has sprung up, and the sky is completely overcast. Incidentally, nights have been starless and moonless here, which is a pity. It's somehow jollier with the moon up there. Come to think of it, it's good for us, this no moon business: it's sure to rain at the time of the new moon. But it will come as per schedule, no getting away from it.

More of Basho-Roy's stuff:

At the bend of the river
water licks the sand.
Three gulls overhead.

Not too bright, is it. Flat. Says what it says, no more. One has to admit it ­ fatigue affects brain tissue. It melts, or something.

Piles of stored logs rot away on the bank (R). Another sign of Gaidaronomics.

12:05. On the left bank a wench with a pigtail feeds a fire, chap nearby is busy doing something obscure. Look like locals. We wave to them. They stare.

12:10. Two young girls bathing by Maloe Ramenye (L). We asked their permission to take pictures. They struck up elegant attitudes; quite nice-looking just as they are.

12:20. Heaves into view: an automobile bridge with some traffic ­ motorcycles and a single car. Lots of small sheds and boats on the bank (L), and no human figures anywhere. Nests of house martins on the bridge.

Covered 104 km in a week ­ that is, if one goes by the map; the actual distance is anyone's guess, and what's it matter anyway.

12:35. A fir stump ablaze on the bank. What swine.

Power lines on the bank (L). Must be Kazhirovo. That's where a gent from Moscow has settled. Left the big city, tries to re-convert the local peasantry to Christianity. Built a little church with his own hands, only it's sheer waste of effort. Religion may be opium for some, but the locals are perfectly happy with their diet of self-made hooch and store-bought vodka. No one goes to pray there. This is truly dispiriting. What's to become of this country? Will it burn down in alcoholic fumes? Still, there are saintly individuals here and there, and a whole city can be spared for the sake of a single saint. Or so the Good Book says.

Direction has changed to south-west, but the head wind persists. That's another cast-iron law on river trips: no matter which way the river turns, the wind always blows in your face.

13:40. Landed on a long stretch of sandy beach. Visible ahead, the village of Markovo (L). Downstream, there's another Markovo marked on the map, bigger than this one. The more Markovos, the better, seems to be the local view. Meadow on the left bank; the right one sports a dense growth of shrubs. Sand martins fly about at low altitudes. By Markovo-1 the river narrows abruptly, with lots of bends and rifts. That's good. Brings back Commodore's memories of white-water rafting, but he'd better keep them to himself.

14:15. Passed by the spot where the Lekma flows into the Vetluga. Somehow this caused little excitement. So it flows in, so what. More exciting things happen in this world.

14:45. A brand-new dandy little church in Kazhirovo (L). Must have been built by that Muscovite chap interviewed by the Russian Orthodoxy journal we'd read. A hopeless undertaking that, trying to reawaken conscience in a thoroughly brutalized people. It'll take another generation, and what will it be like, that new generation? Drunks beget morons, that's a law of physiology.

Only just managed to avoid a collision with a motorboat with a burly human animal in it. He was heading straight at us. A faster vessel has to give way to a slower one, this is the law of the sea, but that animal was obviously pissed and couldn't care less about laws, maritime or any other. ?ommodore recalled a scene from a trip up north, where a similar pack of bipeds laughed merrily as they rammed a kayak with women and, if memory serves, a kid in it. Here, Commodore's rubber-bullet throwing "makarych" is no good, it's a job for a real "makarov" 9-mm pistol ­ make a hole in the thugs' boat, and let them plug it up with their pants, the bastards.

15:55. Cape Lonely Dog. The dog was running about the bank, apparently lost and looking for its master. Felt sorry for the poor thing, but could not take him onboard. No room, and precious little food left.

The clouds look menacing. The river splits in two. We take the left-hand stream. It splits in two in its turn. Again we choose the one on the left. The going is easy, no mishaps. That's truly gratifying. You sometimes choose a channel and at the end of it you come up against an impassable obstacle and have to pull the boat against the current, and the bank is not everywhere suitable for towing. Sheer torture. We're just a couple of lucky dogs, Commodore and Cadette, hip-hip and more or less hurray.

20:55. Camp Horrible.

After Kazhirovo we shot past some nice cozy pine woods where we could have camped in comfort. As we paddled on, the scene turned utterly disgusting ­ low marshy banks or else unscalable cliffs. Twice we tried to land only to hit on impassable briar thickets. Hasty retreat.

Finally we spotted a couple of aspens, and some birches, too, on a high bank. Landed at last, with great difficulty. The bank is sheer mud left by receding water level, but we sighted a tree trunk lying right by the water's side and moored there. Commodore crawled all over the place till he found a spot where someone had camped a long time ago. Three huge birch-tree logs set upright, for chairs, big forked stakes where the fire had been, rotten grass bedding where their tent had stood, old papers. All very nice, but all in a dark thicket on a cliff where you could cut mosquito clouds with a knife. What blockhead had chosen such a spot for camp... Must have been in spring, when mosquitoes were just a distant memory.

We cut some weeds to spread under our tent for softness, put up the tent, did all the evening chores, faster than usual. Still, while we were at it, the mosquitoes ate half Commodore's back, right through his shirt. Cadette suffered all over. Lucky dogs we? Oh sure...

1 August 2004, Sunday. Day nine

Slept long and deliciously, until seven. In the night a rat-sized mouse paid us a neighborly visit. Toward morning Cadette listened a long time to some bird clicking castanets. The night was still, the morning of the de luxe variety. Breakfast, like supper, mushroomless.

High up in the sky some big predatory bird is going round and round. Can be an eagle, hard to say. Plenty of birds of prey here ­ harriers, kites, also hawks and falcons a couple of times. That means there must be game here, too, but that does not concern us, not this trip. We have neither the time nor the weapons for shooting ­ Commodore's "makarych" can hit something with a rubber bullet at six paces, not more. Good for whacking a thug in the eye, only there aren't many thugs around. Yet another rationale for escape into the womb of nature, only ­ who needs any rationale for that? Not Commodore, that's for sure.

We took our breakfast in the tent, and did some "picture gazing" after. "Picture gazing" is a phrase from Commodore's heroic, mountain-climbing past. He had read somewhere that Academician Ivan Pavlov (of the Pavlovian reflex fame) used to rest half an hour in an armchair after breakfast, knees wrapped in a plaid rug, gazing at his modest collection of Old Masters. Commodore then introduced this custom among his bunch of rock-climbers. Back in camp after a tough climb mountaineers have little to do except eat a lot, get their strength back lolling on their sleeping bags and "gazing at paintings" ­ mentally. There are also outdoor games with young ladies, of course, but that's at night, after the dances.

10:10. Left Camp Horrible, a.k.a. Infernal and Hyper-mosquito-laden.

12:55. Fished, or rather tried to. Snagged the hook twice ­ once in a bush, then a log in water. And all the time large fish slapped their tails noisily and contemptuously by the opposite bank. Commodore just could not throw his wobbler that far, though he waded in nearly shoulder-deep. We ought to fish while in motion, but Cadette obnoxiously refuses to, and Commodore has his hands full paddling. Result, neither fish nor flesh, just plenty of exercise.

No sign of man in this Amazonia. Strong nose-basher of a wind, waves, too, pushing us back. Shades of Lake Baikal.

15:30. Passing Shaimensky settlement. Nothing of note. Many little houses with fretwork windows, a single haystack. Could we live in a place like this? Imagination baulks, completely.

16:45. Passing a log storage or some such establishment (R). Abomination of desolation. Martian landscape. A huge derrick and, as ever, not a soul within sight.

That day Commodore paddled for ten solid hours, minus an hour for angling.

2 August 2004, Monday. Day ten

12:45. Left camp. Right off, baffled by a curious sight: a tree trunk floating upstream, though we had not noticed any beaver presence here. Must be counter-current of sorts.

After the Shaima estuary, lots of bends in the river, no bank suitable for landing, much too steep everywhere. Landed at 20:00, where Commodore caught sight of some barely visible tracks on the steep slope. Signs of someone camping here long ago. Turned in by eleven.

The forest is empty, no bilberries, no mushrooms, nothing. Must have been worked over by gatherers. Well, people have to subsist somehow. Tcha. These woods may have been barren from the beginning of time, who knows. Absolutely anything may happen in this curious world of ours.

A half-day stopover. Slept till 08:30, then went looking for mushrooms. Commodore found an aged slippery jack and a couple of russulas. The rest, courtesy of Cadette. In all, enough for a sumptuous feast of fried mushrooms.

Yesterday the sun was truly scorching. Today, ditto. Yesterday Commodore's heart gave him just a teeny bit of trouble towards the end of day. Today, it behaves impeccably. Must be all that oxygen in the air. Like in an oxygen tent.

The map faithfully shows all the river bends. Commodore keeps track of these, God knows what for.

13:50. Pretty clouds over meandering river. Basho-Roy:

Oh, to savor the quiet.
That's what one came here for.
Instead, persistent buzzing in the ears.

Cadette: "Call that poetry? A complaint to an ear-nose-and-throat specialist, more like." Commodore: "Huh. I once came across this monostich, in the Poetry magazine: "You owe me $64."" Cadette: "But that's American poetry." That certainly shut Commodore up.

16:25. A vast stretch of still water. Current nil. Tough, coping with space manually. That bloody Dudno nowhere to be seen. Surely it must be somewhere? Or could it be that we ourselves have escaped into some parallel world? A perfectly sound explanation, given the facts.

3 August 2004, Tuesday. Day eleven

11:50. Spent a whole hour fishing off a sandy beach. The locals only fish off a steep bank, mostly in a sitting position, with very short rods. They cast the spoon bait with a jerk from behind the head to a distance of just a few yards. Incidentally, the method is not unique to this area; Commodore observed a similar technique at other rivers, too. Somehow it doesn't seem sporting enough to him. "They get results," Cadette points out, quite unnecessarily. Where's her spirit of camaraderie?

21:00. Camp on Sand (L). Arrived here at 15:15. It was all nice and ready for us ­ stakes for the fire, firewood, and a bedding of cut grass. We cut down some more grass, set up camp, and went to look for mushrooms. The woods are scraggly, completely flooded in spring. Lousy, in short. Mushrooms, disappointing ­ mostly fetid russulas, which we refuse to gather, for such are Cadette's principles. In all, a meager handful of proper russulas and oyster mushrooms (the latter found by Commodore).

Most of the day was spent ­ wasted ­ fishing. Commodore lost a wobbler ­ it just flew away somewhere. Then he lost two fair-sized fish, either pike or chub. The second time was especially vexing ­ Cadette already had the landing net ready. Commodore had not struck properly, or else the triple hook was too blunt. The sensation of a heaviness at the end of the line and the sight of a huge gaping maw will stay with us forever, it seems. Wide open jaws, that's the classic pike method of freeing itself from the hook. Cadette caught sight of a pale belly and a powerful tail. Commodore nearly burst into tears but made do with a salvo of juicy Russian.

Also, Cadette watched an under-age pike lying in ambush behind a rock ready to pounce on small fry, and in the end it did gulp down something really tiny. All strictly according to Darwin, so why can't we get a bit of the action? We too must eat. Other pike youngsters nibbled at Commodore's toes as he was washing his hair. Well, that's nothing. In Central Asian canals small fry do their best to wriggle right up your anus and nibble at your pubic hair.

Lots of prints on the sand; clearly identifiable are those of a heron, small snipe and also some small animals. The sandy beach is virtually free of mosquitoes, but it is going to be chilly at night. Discovered a boat in the bushes. There must be some locals around, not that we are too eager to see them. We are happier as we are ­ and we keep our pistol shells dry.

4 August 2004, Wednesday. Day twelve

10:30. Left Camp on Sand. The sun is blazing fiercely. The sky is dotted with tiny clouds. Fished for a couple of hours; only result ­ hook got snagged twice.

19:50. Made camp leaving the village of Mikh-something far behind. The day's events:

Caught a two-foot pike. Commodore invented a method of fishing from the boat: you just stick a spoon-bait at the end of a line straight into the mouth of a pike lying in ambush among the lilies and stuff growing by the bank. Cadette worked the rod, Commodore paddled very cautiously, not to scare off the fish. After about five minutes' trawling Cadette hooked a pike, an extremely violent one. The spoon-bait ended up far down the pike's gullet. We pulled the predator aboard and packed it in a plastic bag, to tame it. Should have hit it on the head with something heavy but ­ Cadtte's nerves... Better not.

We wanted to land and cook the pike, but at that moment the village came into view, with a pontoon bridge where it began. Commodore walked to the village and found out that no buses ran from this place to the railway station. Some locals said we could take a van selling bread to the villagers to a place called Pishchug and from there, a bus to the station, but this P. thing is way in the north, in the opposite direction from the railway, so to hell with it.

We decided to paddle on till we reached some bridge. There ought to be a bridge somewhere, preferably not a collapsed one.

For a long time the village refused to disappear from view. Saw some women bucolically washing linen in the river. Then Commodore raised his paddle saluting a fisherman. The guy offered to sell us some fish, but we proudly said we had everything we needed, fish included, thank you all the same. It's a shame we missed so many wonderful spots in which to fish Commodore-fashion, but Commodore's resources of strength are woefully limited. Better luck next time.

After the village, the banks were of the lousiest kind. Commodore disembarked and found the remains of a lean-to, or rather a sort of Indian screen: a fire on one side, a screen of fir-tree branches on the other, some grass bedding under the screen. But the place itself was awful: the ubiquitous curse of tall dense grass, shrubs, trees. Ideal for mosquitoes, not us weary travelers.

We paddled on for just a couple of minutes ­ and found a fabulous site for camping. It looks like we hit, for the third time, on a spot where those chaps from Nizhny Novgorod had made camp. The same way of building a cooking-fire, the same kind of bedding under their tent. Thus spake Commodore.

We cleaned and cut the pike into manageable pieces, put up the tent, and went to look for mushrooms. Didn't find any. Instead, we found somebody's clothes and things ­ trousers, a jacket, a bag, all hanging on tree branches. Stuff for at least two, and hanging there for a year or perhaps more. It's a bit of a mystery, and sets one wondering sadly. What happened to the fellows who once inhabited those trousers? Lost their way? Eaten by wolves or a bear? Or were they just too drunk to find their way back to the camp? But there were no traces of a proper camp there, just the rags hanging on trees. A propos of this Commodore recalled some stories of people getting lost in the forest and weighing about thirty kilos when they were found or got back to some village by accident. Who knows what the others weighed, the ones who never got back. Cadette turned pale and rudely advised Commodore to dry up.

It so happened that we too lost our way a bit as we turned back, just overshot the spot where our camp was. Seriously, it takes some skill to lose one's way near a river. We soon found our camp, lit a fire and cooked some fish soup with herbs and stuff. The soup turned out to be quite piquant, though pike meat tastes as flat as you please. With the seasoning of bearlike hunger, it was a gourmet experience to remember for years to come.

We crawled into our tent early today. When the wind dies down, mosquitoes go plain berserk.

And another thing. Today, Commodore performed a dangerous stunt just to show off, or so Cadette believes. On reaching the pontoon bridge we should have disembarked and carried all our stuff along the bank past the bridge, but that would have taken all day. Instead, Commodore ordered Cadette to pack our papers and valuables, go ashore and walk ahead, while he himself gathered speed and aimed the boat at a narrow opening between two pontoons. The current there was pretty fast, and if the boat had hit some sharp metal edge it might have been ripped wide open. The bridge was very low, Commodore was in danger of smashing his forehead against it but he flopped on his back just in time and the boat shot through, only the paddle hit something with a loud crack. An inveterate show-off, Commodore is. Real Soviet hikers do not behave in such a despicable manner.

5 August 2004, Thursday. Day thirteen

10:10. Left Camp Where We Ate Fish, a.k.a. Thank You Nice Guys from Nizhny. Did our best to finish the fish; even so, there was enough left for the birds to peck at. We dealt with the fish strictly according to mountaineers' law: better bust the foul belly than waste good food.

Cadette reported hearing some mysterious creature rustle and crackle in the bushes during the night. Big news. As if Commodore had not nervously clutched his puny pistol half the night. A lot of use it would have been against something big. We crawled from the tent and looked around. Lots of fresh tracks leading in all directions, but what our visitor had been there was no telling from the grass trampled by some heavy feet, no identifiable prints. Could be a bear, easy. They are generally quite good-natured in summer. That's our only hope: inside a zipped-up tent we are as blind and helpless as newborn babes.

Commodore is paddling lazily, stroke ­ pause, stroke ­ pause. No wind so far, nor any current either. The sun is blazing straight in Commodore's scorched face, as we are heading due south already, where the railway is, or should be. Oh for a drop of rain! Commodore can't recall ever wishing for rain on a hike, if you don't count deserts where wishes don't count anyway. Here, there was heavy dew in the night, the tent and the plastic sheet over it got soaking wet ­ a sure sign of rains to come, only where are they?

13:30. Talked to a very sun-tanned denizen in a boat with a small boy and a rod. Interestingly, he had a dinghy exactly like ours. The name of the village was Berezhok (Little Shore), motorway, six km away. Maybe it is, though one sometimes gets the impression that locals use the term kilometer more to amuse than to inform. Paddle on, Commodore, paddle on with a song in your heart. Yo-heave-ho...

15:40. A village hove into view. A chap in a boat said, Staroshanskoe. Now, where was the church with a golden dome we'd been promised? None in sight. Can't be seen from the river, and if so what's it for anyway? A church should tower over the place on a high bank, to have an esthetic significance. Now, people all along the Volga know that, and they built their churches properly. Commodore wrote about them somewhere.

18:30. Passed Petunino, made camp not far from it. We'll write up today's experience tomorrow, feeling too pooped and too lazy right now.

6 August 2004, Friday. Day fourteen

07:30. Camp Noisy, a.k.a. the Last One.

Yesterday's events, now. After Petunino we drifted a long time in the blessed shade of some trees, keeping very close to the bank. Got out our fishing tackle. Almost at once Cadette caught a juvenile pike, but that was all. No more grass at the water's edge, nowhere for pike to hide, not a bite in hours of futile trawling.

At Petunino we had seen a modest castle being built. Must be for some local or visiting oligarch. Wooden stairs leading to the water down the high, steep bank, for the castle owner's convenience. Who can afford a place like this, these days? Only a thief and a bloodsucker, that's who.

Not far from the village we ran into a couple of anglers, very literally. Their tiny boats were tied to the bank with lengths of twine, one of which we hit and had to back water in a hurry. The angler merely smirked as Commodore reprimanded him ­ quite sweetly, for an old mariner.

Then we decided to camp but could not. The usual nonsense: either the trees were behind a jungle of scrub, or the bank was too steep, muddy and slippery. Commodore did contrive to climb up a cliff to reconnoiter a couple of times, but returned in disgust: not a scrap of land suitable for camping. A third attempt yielded something almost decent ­ a smallish flat area after a passable climb. Time, going on 21:00. That day Commodore paddled non-stop for over ten hours and was plumb falling to pieces at the end.

Cooked some fish soup with oyster mushrooms found on the spot. The soup was of the add-more-salt-and-it'll-do kind. We kipped after eleven. All night endless rumbling came from beyond the river, a proper highway there. Mostly heavy trucks. Must be carrying stolen timber to sell abroad. The usual thing: some oligarch lining his pockets with what used to be the whole nation's asset.

10:00. Left Camp Noisy. Oddly, the noise ceased almost at once. A few minutes after we left camp, the left bank turned into a nice sandy beach, if a bit muddy from receding high water. Cadette had seen this yesterday, but had not bothered to inform Commodore being out of sorts, like. The reason for her moodiness cut Commodore to the quick. Our Slowpoke II was not comfortable enough for her, believe it or not! To Commodore this gallant vessel seemed as good as an easy chair ­ and here Cadette says she constantly feels somewhat nervous while on board. "Why, for heaven's sake? What's to feel nervous about?" Commodore spluttered. No answer. Commodore then muttered darkly that Cadette should be given a ride in the Lastochka, to get things in perspective. That little craft has the technique of a rodeo bull. Try taking a breath at the wrong moment, and she'll plop upside down in no time flat. Compared to her, the Slowpoke is as meek as a dove. Indeed, a woman's soul is a truly Freudian mystery. Unfathomable! As is a man's, come to that. Part paradise, part cesspool (Nero Wolfe?).

The sun is as scorching as ever. Commodore is quite happy, he's found the clothes pin he uses to keep his Arafatka in place. The pin sticks out from under his nose, giving him a Papuan aspect.

The scenery around never varies: worse than useless for landing, but obviously good for fishing and mushroom picking. None of this for us, though. We face other tasks today.

Commodore is gradually recovering from yesterday's spurt. He says, in future we'll travel with pomp, meaning with a pump. A pump is most useful for inflating the raft. So far Commodore has always pumped up the Slowpoke with his mouth, but we aren't getting any younger, it seems. Nowadays he doesn't do any parachute jumping even. Fear of broken legs.

***

At this point the log comes to an abrupt end; no time to make entries, and anyway not much to write about. We reached the bridge, climbed on the bank, swaying like proper sea dogs (after all, we'd spent two weeks riding the waves), washed, dried and packed the boat and all our stuff. With much difficulty and frequent stops Commodore (that is, me, or is it I, again) managed to haul our monstrously heavy rucksacks up the steep path to the motorway. We had to wait long but not too long for a vehicle going our way. Eventually we cadged a lift for a modest fee. The driver asked us what distance we had covered. Hearing the figure 250 km, he registered admiration/disbelief: "Well I never! Unbelievable." Then there was the railway station at Sharya (again stress on the last syllable), scenes from provincial life as we waited for the train, the train ride, and Moscow. Phew!

Now, to get back to normal life (why, oh why does noise, bustle, foul air, foul language in angry exchanges, etc. have to be the norm?). Soaking in the bath, healing cuts, bruises, insect bites, and suchlike. One of my injuries, a pretty painful one at that, is worth a laugh: with the appetite I'd developed I all but dislocated my lower jaw chewing. Sprained a muscle or something. Now I remember the trip each time I masticate, and even smiling is painful. "It'll pass," Cadette says, laughing heartlessly. (And indeed it has.)

We check out our measurements. My waist has shrunk from 88.5cm to 85cm, all my trousers now slide off me like soaped. Cadette keeps her achievements a secret. Small wonder; she did not have to paddle. True, she asked me once to let her try, but a few minutes of the exercise sufficed. "Thanks awfully, but that'll do for me." I too found the paddling harder than it had seemed from Moscow, but that's the way things always are. You just gotta be a philosopher.

What's most pleasant to remember is our amazing luck with the weather. Not a drop of rain in two weeks. A record in my experience. Well, fools and novices are proverbially lucky, and Cadette is still in that category (novices, I mean). The only time I had the same experience was in Central Asia, but there it never rains in summer anyway: rain drops evaporate while still in the air, or on hitting the sizzling hot ground.

The fierce sun has given me a "peasant" suntan: face, neck, hands and legs up to the knees burnt black. The Yasser Arafat attire was not much use. Cadette was clad more thoroughly, or else she is not susceptible to sun burns, even from double radiation, direct and reflected off the water. Some people have all the luck.

Another nice thing, we'd taken enough food to last us the whole trip ­ ate our last rusk at the railway station. The mushrooms and the fish helped, of course, though we did not fish as much as we would have liked to. No fault of ours, was it.

In all, counting in the price of food, train tickets, and the rest, the trip cost us some $50; $100 at the most, that's for sure. I remembered reading of ex-President Carter going fishing somewhere in Kamchatka; they refused to give out the figures, saying merely that an ordinary, not de luxe trip cost $1500 a day there. I can't imagine what they do with all that dough ­ stick some of it up the anus of each separate fish they catch? One thing is certain ­ we got about a million dollars' worth of fun for our fifty.

It is rather a wrench, going back to all this noise and commotion, curiously called normal life, after two weeks of a trancelike state. Watching TV, listening to the radio, and reading the papers all has a strange feel to it. The news is the same old news as before the trip, and it's hard to get rid of the suspicion that the people in them can't really be serious about the things they do and get so worked up over. So absurd, really. Not the main thing, if you get the point. Shakespeare has a nice phrase for it: "Stale, weary, and unprofitable."

Still, one cannot get by without it ­ without communication (some say intercourse) with other humans, however disgusting their ways. That's another thing you learn on a trip. As you get encapsulated within yourself, sensory deprivation sets in, and you start composing haiku, or something. Haikus, they also have addressees, and it's not just your companion. Haiku, hell. I addressed benevolent remarks to herons standing one-legged by the banks, or swore quite emotionally at the tea-kettle when it obstinately refused to boil, or talked persuasively to the pot of soup. And I had a real live companion, at that.

I looked through our ship's log. It seemed to describe everything like it was, and still there was something important missing. Then I realized what it was. The log covered the scant and often boring events of the trip, while the trip itself was about something quite different. It's about the beauty that constantly surrounds you and eclipses everything else. That's the focus of travel, the whole point of it ­ the scenery that keeps changing and fascinates you, your eyes feast on it while you keep paddling on fully certain that over there beyond that bend in the river the scene will be even more enchanting, and it often is. You grow greedy, that greed drives you on and on, to the highest point of the trance only it never comes, there's just this rapture you wish never ended...

Naturally, you just can't write about these things on each page, the ship's log is a different genre. We should have taken pictures, but there Cadette failed sadly: the film jammed and she snapped all those enchanting views on the same frame. A damn shame, really. Thank God, there's the Internet. A guy had kayaked down the same river a couple of years before us, and he posted some lovely pictures. No crime to pirate them, I guess.

Beauty is one theme, but there are others. At one's advanced age one tends to look for a justification of one's existence other than the need to eat, drink, sleep, and ­ pardon me ­ defecate. Reading helps, writing helps even more, but travel is surely the most powerful remedy for diminished zest for life. Here I am, just back from this trip, and already contemplating another, or at least dreaming of it. "Alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades," to quote Joyce. I first climbed Mount Elbrus in the mid-1950s, so I've had half a centenary of it. I hope to God I'll add a few more really worthwhile trips. I.I.a.a., of course. If I am alive (L.Tolstoy).

Upon return I took up Alan Watts's "The Way of Zen" where I'd left off before the trip, and I seem to be reading it with a pair of completely different eyes. It now seems rather comical to have to concentrate on a wall, a candle or that spot between your eyes while meditating. Why? Because you remember what you felt as you watched a harrier going round and round in the bright blue sky, soaring higher and higher; or the huge full moon as you crawled from your tent towards dawn; or the absolutely still, mist-filled, black-and-white river stretching under the cliff you stood on; or the sun peeping shyly from behind distant woods; or a thousand other such sights. I ask you, who needs Zen, when you have ­ all this?

In short, I am all for dissolving in nature whenever we get a chance. After all, we all of us eventually do that, but in a highly unpleasant fashion. Better avoid that as long as we can, or even longer...

Keywords: Russia, Environment - Russian News - Russia

 

Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2012
From: Sergei Roy <SergeiRoy@yandex.ru>
Subject: Re: travel piece

Two for the Riverrun, or: Up Upper Vetluga!
By Sergei Roy [Former editor of Moscow News]

A funny season, summer. Passes much too quickly. In Russia, it simply scurries by. Twinkle an eye, and it's already July, while the itch in your bones gets stronger and stronger: Away from it all! To the pampas! Even at a pretty advanced age, even after recent open-heart surgery it's hard to get rid of that itch if all your life you sought to escape the boredom and hustle of the rat race and Thoreau's quiet desperation of humdrum existence. Escape ­ and head for the stillness of the wilderness and the society of birds, fishes and other God's creatures ­ minus one species.

file photoThis time my wife is dead set against letting me go on a solo hike. A heart attack will hit you, she says, you will conk out under some bush, she says, and where will we look for you? Who am I going to wail over?

Generally, I prefer to wander in the wilderness alone. That way, it's more like long drawn-out meditation. Whoever heard of meditating in company? The way I see it, the trick is to get submerged in one's own soul, not one's neighbor's, however decent they may be. Suum cuique. To each their own trance.

There are also more mundane reasons for this misanthropy. I explained them somewhere something like this: dragging a woman with you on a hike in the wilds is a bit like packing a pig-iron pan in your rucksack: it's heavy to lug around, but the pancakes are delicious to eat. The converse theorem also applies: pancakes are yummy, but a heavy pan in your backpack, that's a different story altogether.

I was merely trying to be witty there, of course. The real reasons are more cogent.

All sorts of things happen on a hike, even a not too tough one. Unpleasantness, difficulties, and sometimes even cataclysms. Your boat may get spiked on a sharp stone or bough, or it may plop keel up on the most piddling of rapids; or you may miscalculate your store of provisions and have to eat whatever Mother Nature provides, or just do without; or a bear will wander into your path unawares. All that sort of thing. And the weather? On a paddling trip down a Siberian river rain kept pouring on my head for a solid month, with minor breaks of an hour or so (characteristically, it stopped completely on the last day of the trip). On the Msta, in late May, snowstorms hit me in the face to blot out daylight, I mean literally blot out, with a thick layer of snowflakes on my specs, whereas the radio had promised sunny warmth and bird cherry in bloom along the banks. This litany can go on endlessly.

Now, when you are on your own you take these things in your stride. You wanted nature, didn't you? So there you have it, quite raw, you can gorge yourself on it, just mind you don't choke. Somehow or other things tend to sort themselves out in the end, and you emerge from the flames reborn or a bit singed, that's as the case may be. Your swear output may be double the usual, but who's there to censure you? No one, and that's the whole point.

It's totally different when all this beastliness befalls a delicate, unbruised creature absolutely alien and averse to men's idea of fun, like putting themselves through crash tests, to breaking point and beyond, and similar perversions. Result, your conscience pricks like mad, your heart bleeds for her, and an all-round spirit of depression pervades the atmosphere ­ very unhealthy for a heart with all those bypasses in it. Well, your heart is your own affair, but what about her feelings? In extreme cases divorce has not been unknown. I personally observed one such drama unfold, and even wrote it up (see my short story "Pursued by a Bear").

Nothing to be done this time, though. Two it is. I'll just have to choose a route on the more humane side, and closer to Moscow. The North, the Urals, both Siberias, the Far East and the inner seas are out, but definitely. I went over a dozen options and finally settled on the Upper Vetluga. Scenery, divine; difficulties, none ­ practically; population, sparse to nonexistent. Just the ticket. Getting to and from the river, perfectly acceptable. The railroad is close by, both at the start and at the finish. Close by, that is, by Russian standards, a matter of a few dozen kilometers. Starting point, fourteen hours by train north-east of Moscow. Nothing to it, really.

Measured on the map, the route is some 250 km long, but that's strictly by the map. Like all plains rivers, the Vetluga keeps twisting and turning sinuously, so in real terms 250 has to be multiplied by some digit, I only wish I knew which ­ 2? 1.5? My map of the Kostroma Region dates from the Soviet times and is thus hilariously inaccurate, but what of that? Much more fun flying by the seat of one's pants, as pilots used to say. We'll feel like trailblazers. Such a bore, knowing things in advance. Que sera, sera.

To choose a vessel, now. Not much choice, in fact. As there are two of us, the only suitable boat is my LE-3, an unmusical Russian acronym for "expedition-purpose inflatable raft for three." Quite a tight squeeze for three, but just about right for two. The tub is 25 years old, and very precious to me. Over the years she has known various mishaps in the shape of punctures and such, but she has six sturdy rubber compartments, so if one or two get torn, you can still safely paddle ashore. You hope.

I thought my companion would be cheered no end by my assurances of the boat's safety, but she seemed little impressed. A sort of cloud darkened her features, even. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the male and female views of apparently obvious things may differ in a totally unexpected, freakish way.

That's the prologue, for all it is worth. There follow excerpts from the diary - pardon me, ship's log. In the manner of such documents it was written in the third person singular. It features skipper Commodore (yours truly; I got stuck with the sobriquet way back in my rock-climbing days) and Cadette, a.k.a. deck-hand-cum-cook-cum-camera-operator with responsibility for all, including the weather. The log entries were usually dictated by Commodore (which task he combined with paddling ­ a welcome diversion from pulling all day like a galley slave). Occasionally Cadette would fluff the lines, so now the authorship of any particular passage is uncertain, not that it matters a rap. So,

24 July 2004, Saturday. Day One on the Orbit

Yesterday we boarded train 340, Moscow-Chita. The traveling companions were passable, a corpulent lady from Togliatti and a taciturn undergraduate from Kirov who kept munching continuously. Conversation, miscellaneous. One important topic was mushrooms. The lady let drop that they did not pick the kind that "grow in the grass." She thus favors the parasitic kind growing on trees, which placed her in the amoeba category of mushroom gatherers, especially compared to Cadette, who can hold her own against any learned mycologist. The lady got off at Galich at 23:00.

Observed from the window: lots of church buildings, singly and in clusters. The density of church domes per square kilometer, truly amazing. Monasteries encircled by fortress walls apparently used to double as fortresses. Clearly all this was once the original God-fearing, God-saved Old Russia. In other parts ­ the south, the north, the Urals, Siberia and further afield ­ the scenery is different. Just great empty spaces, not too many human dwellings, let alone churches.

Only recently these church buildings hereabouts were all St. Marys-on-Potatoes, used as vegetable storage facilities, warehouses, correction schools, and suchlike. Worse still, they were ruins crumbling away, empty and meticulously fouled up by anthropoids. Lots of church buildings are now being restored after seventy years of rabid atheism. This is certainly good and proper, but sets one wondering. Sure, the walls and the domes can be restored; faith is a different matter. People have lived too long without God, He was abolished, they had a mini-god of Georgian extraction instead of Him, later followed by caricatures of the mini-god. In lieu of paradise in heaven, they were promised communism on earth, but the project went phut; meantime faith got thrashed out of the minds and souls. All that's left in some is faith in ritual: make the sign of the cross at proper intervals, fast and go to confession now and then, and you're assured of a ticket to heaven. But are you? Other gods rule the roost these days, Mammon and Demon Drink. And whatsitsname ­ Glamor! Yapping day and night on the idiot box. You start musing on all this, your only wish is to get as fast as possible, as far away as possible from all this bestiality. If only for a while.

Ah well. The trip, now. During the night Commodore took a snooze, only much too short. After Buy (it's the name of a town, no invention of ours, and the station building there is part station, part church) something outrageous broke out outside: lightning flashed continuously, thunder rumbled ditto, and the rain came down in sheets. An impressive sight, of course ­ if admired from a warm room, that is, but we would have to make a soft drop right in the midst of it.

Commodore worried Cadette might get her feet wet and wanted to pull her wellies out; he wrenched the rucksack from under the berth and in the process sat down heavily on the undergraduate's head, the poor chap. His own rubber boots Commodore had left behind. This is a cast-iron law of travel: on each trip at least one major stupidity must be committed. As for minor ones ­ well, whoever's going to count them?

We spent some three hours in sickening anxiety, gazing at the nocturnal thunderstorm scene. A revolting sight, really. At about four we reached Shabalino (emphasis on the last syllable; for some reason the Vyatichi prefer French type stresses). No platform as such, just the storm and the downpour in full blast. In a few seconds the rucksacks were soaked through, and so was the lower half of Commodore's frame, though the station building was barely twenty yards away.

The tiny waiting lounge contained a couple of drunks in sleeveless jackets and a surly old man. We hired a car driven by an individual who either had a bad lisp or spoke with a broad Vyatka accent. Russia is great, and the number of dialects in it is even greater.

It took 400 rubles and about an hour to cover the 40 km to the bridge across the Vetluga by the village of Koneevo, or else Kuneevo, the spelling varies. Probably it used to be Kuneevo originally, from the Russian word for marten (kunitsa), but eventually the marten population was severely depleted while some koni (horses) were still left around; there is also the Turkic word kunem, but that's altogether unprintable, something like the French con, the two even sound alike. (That's Commodore showing off his linguistic skills.)

On the way we saw two hares and one fire. The fire was caused by lightning; our chauffeur informed us that two more houses and a sawmill had burnt down, all of them struck by lightning. The benefits of the lightning rod are still unknown here, though the device was invented back in the 18th century, if memory serves.

One of the hares Commodore saw very close, within a dozen paces or so, a big one (a rusak) and dark from the rain. It was sitting right on the road (taking a shower bath?), then languidly ambled over to the roadside ditch and squatted there. Commodore yelled, "Bet I'll hit him!" and grabbed for his pistol, but mostly to rile Cadette. Predictably, Cadette fiercely leaped to the hare's defense. She was sorry for the dear little thing, if you please. To cook hare stew, first catch your hare, but this logic is beyond cadettes' intelligence.

Later Commodore recalled how the poet Pushkin was riding in a sled from his village to St. Petersburg, where he would certainly have got himself involved in the ruckus started by his Decembrist pals, and would have been either hanged or exiled to Siberia in irons, only he turned back when a hare crossed his path and thus missed his chance of sharing the Decembrists' glory. Alas, we just can't afford that kind of superstition.

It was pouring solidly all the way, and as we reached the bridge the deluge was worse than ever. Climbing down a steep path under the bridge with the heavy rucksacks, Commodore slipped and landed smack on his ass in the clayey mud. Another bad omen, second worst after hares, nearly bad enough to make us turn back, but how?

We lingered under the bridge till about eight, waiting for the rain to subside, only it wouldn't. We breakfasted on some tomatoes, rusks and sweets, then prepared our craft for launching. Cadette looked a bit down in the mouth. As for Commodore, if he had a tail, it would be trembling with excitement and anticipation of wonderful things to come.

Thunder kept cannonading deafeningly all around. Once lightning struck quite close, Commodore even feared it might hit the metal bridge. Iron attracts electric discharges, doesn't it. He remembered his sister Lucy narrowly escaping with her life ten years before, when lightening had struck wet ground in her own garden in the South Urals; Commodore was then paddling down the Nugush in a tiny self-made catamaran, some 200 km away, fishing for grayling. In that area, too, a thunderstorm could rumble on for hours and hours, and he had had to wait it out in a dry tent, while we could not even find a dry spot to put up our tent on.

A curious combination, that ­ steady rain-cum-thunderstorm that seem capable of going on forever. A rara avis, truly.

At about eight we just could not wait any longer. The boat was pumped up, our stuff loaded in, and we pushed off. Whoopee! The joy of the first strokes with the paddle, and a fortnight of bliss ahead ­ fabulous! As reward for our daring, the rain first let up, then ceased completely.

The Vetluga is a typical river of the Russian plains, only there are more forests and fewer people here than elsewhere, and even fewer good camping sites. After several hours of paddling we disembarked at what seemed like a decent spot, only to step into a dense growth of waist-high and very wet grass, and no dry pine branches for the fire. Disgusting. Greenhorn Cadette tried to talk Commodore into stopping there, but he was adamant. A camping site like that is only good for hanging oneself; anything else would look absurd.

So on we paddled, admiring enchanting wooded scenery on the high banks either side ­ alas, worse than useless for camping purposes. We negotiated a couple of obstacles ­ a bottleneck and a spot where islands divided the river into several log-filled streams. There were sightings of the odd snipe, four stray motherless ducklings of obscure provenance, and one or two adult ducks with family. We commiserated with the orphans and cheered the family groups.

After three more hours or so of steady paddling Commodore's strength and resolve began to give out. He said the sensation felt familiar; just like at the barricades in August '91, severe lack of sleep beginning to tell. At about 13:00, an amazing bit of luck: a spot where quite a crowd must have camped before us. The grass, tall and thick as everywhere else, was here trampled flat by many feet. Just super. There were pine trees around, too, but of a curiously silly variety, even seemingly dry branches were dripping wet. So we had to rely on Commodore's woodcraft and make a fire of tiny, very dry fir twigs ­ these will burn when everything else won't even smolder. We cooked a species of gruel with buckwheat, vermicelli, soy shrimps, and a single slippery jack. In short, an Irish stew. Lacking in it was a dead rat contributed by Montmorency, but we did not have a Montmorency with us and decided it would have to do as it was. It did.

Time now, 19:00. The sun has been shining for hours and gives no sign of wishing to go down. Everything looks as if there had never been any rain around here. It's stifling inside the tent, and buzzing with insect life. Next task, fighting mosquitoes to the last drop of blood. Actually it's more like an auto da fe: Commodore lights a candle and fries the bloodsuckers till every single one is exterminated.

25 July 2004, Sunday. Day two.

12:00. Left Camp Fallen Pine-tree. A fine camp site it had been. We'd puttered around sleepily and lazily all morning, set out rather late and traveled in the worst of the heat. Commodore's phiz got burnt raw, as were the backs of his hands. Sitting on the stern compartment he plies his double-bladed kayak oar non-stop ­ the current is almost nonexistent, so if you don't paddle, you stay put. Cadette basked in the bows and actually refused to write in the ship's log out of insuperable sloth.

That day we kept going for some seven hours, in the course of which the following memorable events occurred:

Just like yesterday, saw four orphaned golden-eye ducklings. Someone (an otter?) must have got their mum, and they too are now doomed; they'll either make a meal for some predator (a pike?) or freeze to death at night ­ no warmth from mother duck's body.

A molting mallard drake shot up from a clump of grass just a few yards away. Commodore wasn't even chagrined that he had had no time to drop the oar, draw and shoot; a molting drake is just a bag of feathers and bones. Thus no family rumpus ensued.

We filled a bottle from a sulfur spring. Cadette cheekily alleged that the water was full of nasty germs. Commodore begged to take a few sips; the water tasted exactly like a mineral spring in Pyatigorsk, his hometown or what he likes to think of as hometown. No ill effects afterwards. Nature must be trusted.

After a few hours we were hailed from the right bank by a Ms. Blumkin (that wasn't the way she introduced herself, just what we dubbed her later). She was the first living soul we'd seen since the day before. This particular soul was starved for company and loath to see us go. She and her husband had vacationed on the Vetluga for 25 years, from July to early September. The husband fished, that day he had gone fishing on some lake in a one-seater inflatable raft. Hearing this, Commodore turned green with envy ­ we just can't afford to waste time fishing, must push on.

Ms. B. said the nearby village was deserted, just two old dears ­ brother and sister ­ left there. The rest had been moved to another village populated by 30 cows and as many alkies. The holidaymaking couple go there to buy milk and other stuff. She says folks from Nizhni Novgorod, Moscow and Vyatka kayak down the river, but, sadly for her, very, very rarely.

Re the weather: Ms. B. reports that it is 280 C in Moscow, and it will be the same here in a couple of days. The news comes from the two oldies' radio. All a load of rot. It was amazingly fine yesterday, and the weather will be as it will be.

We handed Ms. B. an old business card of Commodore's, mostly to impress her. Which she duly was. "Fancy!" she said. "What people one meets!" On this note we parted. The sparsely clad Ms. B. remained on the steps cut in the clayey bank, while we paddled on, quietly enjoying one beautiful view after another.

Tried to land, but no luck: tall, impenetrable grass on a high bank, like in most places. A few minutes later we were overtaken by two chaps from Nizhni Novgorod in a two-seater kayak. Like us they had set off on Saturday, only much later. About our age, and of the civil class, apparently. Conversation along the usual lines ­ who came from where. About the weir ahead, it should be safely under water with all that rain, they said, so we perked up quite a bit. A kayak goes about twice as fast as our raft, though Commodore found fault with their paddling technique ­ ungainly, but that's a pale translation of his colloquialism.

Shortly after that we came up against an obstacle ­ a fallen aspen that barred the whole waterway, bank to bank. We lifted the broken top of the aspen and squeezed through, hearts palpitating ­ an overkeel was a distinct possibility. Still, it's all experience.

The sun was scorching, and the air inside the boat's tubular compartments noticeably expanded. Observing this, Cadette added yet another phobia to her rich collection. Terrified that the rubber tubes will burst, she keeps pouring water on them, for cooling. That is good, for Commodore remembered the guy whose whole afterdeck blew up on the Akhtuba precisely for this reason. Le mot juste: Things do happen.

26 July 2004, Monday. Day three

26 equals 13 times 2. Out in the wilds, superstitions mushroom, and rightly so. You've got to be extra careful with this parallel worlds stuff, any rock-climber or mariner will tell you that, and Commodore has had experience with both mountains and seas.

Yesterday we had to clear some Lebensraum for our tent and cooking-fire on a high bank where no man had trodden. Dense conifer thicket, real taiga. That's what we called our bivouac, Camp Taiga. And as for the grass... You need a Malayan cris to cut this grass, not Commodore's hunting knife: much too short. We'd dragged our raft up that steep bank right over some briar bushes. Stupid, of course, but what were we to do? Couldn't leave it moored down there, could we ­ suppose some bad guys pinched it? Ridiculous, we know, but better safe than sorry.

Our sleep was of the cat-nap variety. Commodore woke up at five, but then snored until eight. For breakfast, we finished off the last remaining shrimps boiled in salty water + buckwheat + delectable russulas. Lots of mushrooms there, but mostly of the wrong kind (bitter boletes, acrid lactariuses, and suchlike). So says Cadette, and her word ­ on this subject ­ is law.

10:45. Left Camp Taiga. Commodore says his duralumin oar has taken in lots of water, it's more like a crowbar now. His shoulders are creaking most painfully, especially the patched-up one. But he is used to the kayak-type paddle. With it, you sit in the boat facing front, and that's the only way when you are on your own - have to look sharp all the time if you know what's good for you.

Another tree-trunk right across the river, mostly submerged. Got over it by squiggling. Thank goodness the log was smooth, but the patch over an old puncture is giving us concern. Most of the squiggling occurred right round that bit. Thank God for the sluggish current, stronger current would have turned us broadside ­ better not think about that.

Lying flat on her tummy, Cadette acted as a lookout. Commodore expressed his complete satisfaction with her work. A proper hawk-eye she was, missing no obstacle in the stream, but mostly admiring the view, judging from the expression on her face.

The vistas were indeed as good as any picture in the Hermitage. The perspective was finely drawn, with great inspiration and in excellent taste: tall steep banks covered with forest as far as the eye could see ­ pines, firs, birches, aspens, others; fleece-like shrubs coming down the steep slope right to the water's edge, the river ahead wide and resplendent, with warm blue skies over it all dotted with chubby white clouds. Lovely.

The first few days you do little but feast your eyes on it, like in a trance, but eventually this wears off. Commodore says it's the same up in the mountains; at first the fierce beauty of the hills all but squashes you, you can't tear your enchanted eyes from the view, but then your attention is distracted by other things, you have to do what you need to, to stay alive ­ not much time for gazing. At times, though, you again wake up to the magic with a start and just stare with your mouth agape: how can things be so unutterably beautiful?

Now flocks of bright-blue damselflies, aptly named the Beautiful Demoiselles, dart about and often alight on the boat. They look a bit like butterflies. Commodore seems to be teachable, after all. The bit about blue damselflies did sink in, though most other inedible flora and fauna just gets forgotten the minute your back is turned.

The sky gradually exudes a pall of thick white clouds with strips of some nonsense in between. This looks pretty menacing, while we have carelessly packed away all our waterproofs. But we are in luck, not a drop of rain, after all. More reason to kick back and relax ­ for some. Commodore keeps slogging away, for the current is conspicuous by its absence. Where the river widens out enormously, one sometimes wonders whether one is still moving forward or has about-faced somewhere without noticing it and is now heading upriver.

13:05. Some creature, its fur looking ginger-colored ­ could be an otter or a squirrel ­ crossed the stream in front of us from the right bank to the left, and dashed into the bushes. An otter rather than a squirrel, on second thoughts. What would a squirrel want with the opposite bank? The landscape is the same for all.

Still no Paozer. Should be renamed the Kitezh-Paozer, like that town that sank in Lake Kitezh, never to be seen again. The overall situation is Commodore's pet hate: river widens out vastly with no current and a head wind. Yesterday there was some semblance of current at least, today a gust blows into your face and the boat stops dead: she sits high on the water surface, all of it, and acts like a sail. No kayak she. Sure it's bliss, lolling about on her soft bottom, only someone has to pay for it ­ and we know who that someone is.

13:30. Reached the estuary of the Paozer ­ at last. The Paozer is swift and carries masses of yellow foam. With a current like that and masses of fallen trees in the river we would have had no end of trouble, had we started the trip on the Paozer, as originally planned. Lucky we. The Vetluga now seems to be showing some temperament, too, flowing a bit faster, only this is unlikely to last. The river is wider now as well, and all the willows are standing knee-deep in water.

13:50. Have just had a bite: rusks, pretzels, nuts (our chief source of protein), some fruit jelly and a single prune apiece. After the snack, the view seems more beautiful than ever. The river has grown even murkier. So let it ­ with this current we're sitting pretty.

14:20. Sailed past a submerged wooden boat chained to a sawyer. Looks like there's a village nearby; deserted as like as not. The villagers went away somewhere; must be terribly busy drinking themselves to death.

The right bank is overgrown with dense bushes, and on the very top there's a band of pink-and-white dodder. A most pleasing sight.

The current continues fine. Commodore's face is gradually turning scarlet, ears transparent in the sun, even though he is wearing a Bedouin headgear. A Bedouin in a sailor's striped jersey, see? He got used to this style in clothing while traipsing all over Central Asian deserts. And his ears got burnt back on the Ak Deniz, the White Sea in Turkish, a.k.a. the Eastern Mediterranean.

14:50. The banks are turning sandy, grown over with burdock-like weeds and willows. Must be a popular camping site ­ footmarks in the sand, egg shells, tracks left by a fox or a smallish dog. The sand is hot, the water cold. Commodore took a dip in his birthday suit ­ his first plunge in a river in two years. Says he feels on top of the world. Cadette utters something not unlike a raspberry.

15:30. A solitary crow. So far we've mostly seen herons. A heron shits most copiously, ejecting a long silvery stream.

15:35. A partisan's dugout in a steep bank, with an antechamber of pine boughs. Tramps' abode, or else a shelter for mushroom/berry-pickers during the season. Earlier on, nesting holes of sand martins, chicks peeping from most. Commodore doesn't see them, simply cannot make them out, which upsets him no end. We aren't getting any younger, that's what it means. Can hardly hit a squirrel in the eye with a single pellet, like he used to.

17:00. Stopped at Camp Chanterelle (L), not far from the village of Lipovo. The bank is high, grown with a mixture of pines and firs. Pines, that's good, they fill the air with ozone and provide a supply of dry branches for the fire.

Footpaths on the bank, and they must lead somewhere. Cadette alleges that she can hear dogs yapping and human voices. A rotten net, a fish-trap, a disintegrating angler's bag, a pole with an iron tip ­ these are used to pound on the water and poke into holes to drive the fish out and into a net. A fine place for fishing, obviously. Commodore is quite downhearted ­ can't fish, feels too wobbly. Damn and blast old age! Time they learned to build hearts of metal. After all, a pump is just a pump, right?

Cooked a sort of soup with lentils and a handful of russulas picked underfoot. At 21:00 retired for the night. And why not? We'd spent the day in as talented a way as we could.

27 July 2004, Tuesday. Day four

Commodore woke up around six. Had a nightmare toward morning: in this dream he was asking his former boss at a magazine run by ex-KGB men to sign some paper. How on earth did that son-of-a-bitch sneak into Commodore's dream? Ah well. KGB rules. They never shed their spying skills or habits, do they.

First thing in the morning, went looking for mushrooms ­ on Commodore's timid suggestion. Our first find was a slippery jack, which Commodore had marked the previous evening. It was difficult to miss ­ sat smack in the middle of the path, yet it was a good specimen, perfectly sound. Later there were several russulas, found by hawk-eyed Cadette, who else. Then Hawk Eye struck on a whole clearing full of chanterelles. We took none but the cutest and firmest; filled a whole plastic bag.

Chanterelles were our chief delight at this camp. They made delicious soup with asparagus, but fried they were out of this world. Commodore demonstrated his technique of frying stuff in the lid of his mess kit; the lid is placed on hot coals from the fire and rotated as required by the simple expedient of a pair of miniature pliers that figure in the inventory under the heading VALUABLES. Unable to find fault with this procedure, Cadette fretted but soon consoled herself. Commodore admitted that he had not invented the method, he had merely added the pliers touch. He says chanterelles fried on a fire are the tastiest dish in the mushroom department, ever. Something in that.

Hawk-eyed Cadette snooped around till she filled a cup with bilberries and strawberries from a patch where Commodore could see nothing but dense weeds. Score, 1:1.

10:55. Left camp. 11:40. Shot past a wooden church by the village of Bystri. Didn't have time to take a picture of it. Very dark with age, but all the more beautiful for it. Towers over the vicinity.

12:00. Stand from under! Have just wormed our way over a ruined wooden bridge. Here, water rushes over the collapsed bridge and some tree trunks blocking the entire stream. Just a small gap by the right bank where water swirls over what's left of the bridge's handrails. We slowly approached the spot holding on to some bushes, then shot into the gap. If there had been some nails sticking out of those handrails we'd have been impaled on them. Thank God there weren't.

A couple of locals, man and woman, were crossing over in a boat there. They said kayakers usually carried their vessels over land here. Quite right, too. It's just Commodore showing off, taking risks that way. The woman in the boat yelled, "It's all right, folks, you can pass there on the right, the handrails are smooth enough." The guy furtively dropped a bottle of vodka into the boat as they were boarding. That must be their way of life, from bottle to bottle. On the subject of the weather the woman said this: "It'll keep hot and dry for another ten days, then the rains will start again."

After Bystri we faced a succession of lake-like, still-water stretches. Excruciating. Practically weeping with fury, Commodore paddles on so hard duralumin nearly gets bent at each stroke.

Better late than never. At long last we decided to baptize our LE-3 (a loathsome acronym). When the British queen smashes a champagne bottle against some stern, she intones this formula: "We name thee..." plus the name of the ship. Well then, we name thee Slowpoke, after Slowpoke the Magnificent, the centerboard of the Mewa class, the heroine of Commodore's Aral, Caspian, and countless other voyages. Slowpoke, that's because she crawls at exactly a snail's pace even when Commodore plies his paddle like a windmill.

With so much water around, Cadette did some washing ­ Commodore's socks and her own towel. Commodore's towel covers his head, in a parody of Yasser Arafat, to protect what's left of the skin on his face. Very little, actually.

13:25. Filled bottles with some more sulfurous water full of ferrous anions. The smell was there all right, but mild. Unlikely to be pig farm wastage, we thought. Commodore had once indeed partaken of some such liquid, by mistake. Too parched to pay much attention. Still, he survived, didn't he.

Photo of Commodore wearing wet white gloves.

The bank is a solid expanse of tansy. Very pretty, very pretty indeed. Has anyone ever tried to paint a landscape like that, we wonder. We both have rather unsophisticated esthetic taste ­ both fancy landscapes.

Commodore tried on the freshly washed socks and discovered there was plenty of sand in them. Not exactly a sandbag, but close. An unusual experience.

Basho-Roy:

How exquisite, to pull socks
on one's sun-singed feet.
Squash the bloody gadfly.

Oh the joy of hiding in the shade
One's sun-burnt face.
Dragonflies making love on the gunwale.

A black-and-white snipe
flies past on business.
The pines on the bank stand to attention.

An old birch tree leans low
to admire its reflection.
Current lays bare its roots.

Leaves rustle softly, softly.
A fieldfare rattles rudely.
Then, museum silence.

28 July 2004, Wednesday. Day five.

Stopover for one day near Luptug village.

We landed here at about 5 p.m. yesterday. Bank's terribly steep. At the top of it, a treasure trove of mushrooms. The moment Commodore stuck his head over the brink, his gaze hit on a bed of chanterelles. A small clearing, probably left by loggers. A footpath along the bank, leading from Luptug ­ where? Somewhere. Ashes of old cooking-fires here and there. Must be a favorite spot with fishermen. A tributary nearby. No current in it, so it can be an old riverbed, not a tributary. Who cares.

A solitary passerby stopped by, looking for a ford. Says there's no timber rafting on the river, no economic or any other kind of life; so, few people left in the villages; the weather is settling; Luptug, 4.5 km away; we are already in the Kostroma Region, not Kirov; all the fords are deep under water; 10 km to Zenkovka (Commodore translates: this can be between 5 and 25). He then said goodbye and went on his way.

He picked some of our chanterelles working in a crude, peasant way: he'd yank up a mushroom, then cut off the soil-smudged part of the shank. This way it's less tiring, you don't have to bend down so much. Commodore tried to do likewise, but nearly had his head bitten off by nature-loving Cadette. In fact, Commodore felt he was committing a sin against nature, himself. Mustn't destroy mushroom spawn ­ bend real low, cut the stem cleanly, and feel virtuous.

By 9 p.m. all the chores were done. We added to the soup the disgusting Czech (that is, beloved by the Czechs) mushrooms (incongruously called horns of plenty, in English), but the dish turned out quite tasty. Cadette issued a ban on frying mushrooms twice a day. Generally, Cadette keeps usurping Commodore's rights and privileges, quite forgetting that skipper on board his ship comes first after God, le premier après le dieu. Like, she alleges that Commodore makes flies nervous as we fight to shoo them out of the tent. Cadette has her own, Machiavellian tactic of coping with these spawn of hell.

Had a moderately quiet night, except for a "dry thunderstorm." Commodore leaped outside and stretched a plastic sheet over the tent, just in case, ignoring Cadette's taunts. Woke at 6 and went off mushroom picking. Commodore personally found one (1) slippery jack. Cooked quite a lot (chanterelles, slippery jacks, russulas) in a big frying pan ­ and wiped it clean.

Time to clean up and all that sort of thing. Commodore retreated into the woods for a minute and found a biggish patch of raspberry bushes. We filled a bottle and a couple of mugs with raspberries and another mug with bilberries, then ate them all and plopped down for a nap. Dolce far niente is our law, we decided. After this l'apres midi we felt that life was getting better, life was getting merrier (incidentally, it wasn't Stalin who coined the phrase but some academician's mama). Before that, we'd felt slack and slow. A bit pooped. After all, this is our fifth day out.

After the siesta, cooked our daily soup and prepared to do some fishing. Paddled a bit upstream, to a biggish pool, tied the boat to some overhanging bushes and were all set to cast the spoon-bait when the boat began to sink, air visibly escaping from the tube ripped open on the Osuga the year before. We hurriedly paddled toward the spot where the banks were slightly lower; found a low-hanging branch to which to tie our painter ­ Commodore had to climb over some tilting tree trunks like a monkey, to perform the trick. Dragged the boat to camp, turned her over and swore in unison: there were air bubbles all around a rubber patch covering the old tear. We tore off the vile piece of sticky tape bought at a Boats shop ­ it can hold bloody nothing, the sales talk had been just that, sales talk. For over an hour Commodore toiled away at the tear scraping off the old glue. Dusk fell. It started to drizzle gently. Just one of those days.

29 July 2004, Thursday. Day six

Thursday morning was spent on repairs. Set out at 12:05. At 14:25 saw the village of Zenkovka. View, the usual ­ not a soul around. For a while the current was decent, after that stretches of still water half a mile long and nearly as wide. Plus a head wind, the nose-bashing kind. In the end, a very strong nose-basher.

Landed at 17:00. Set up camp right in the middle of an old dirt road. Well, why not? The ground is flat, no need to fight thickets of tall grass. The track apparently leads from Zenkovka to Lyapino, as marked on the map. Has not been used for quite a while, maybe years.

As we were having supper a visitor arrived. The Tramp (that's what we dubbed him, though his social status could be different) prattled non-stop ­ must have been starved for company, like most folks here, it appears. Had a few roach in a mess kit. He said that before St. Peter's Day (July 18th) life was an endless torment hereabouts ­ gnats, mosquitoes, midgets ate you alive. Now there were no mosquitoes to speak of, he said. Indeed, there were practically none at that camp.

Other things he said: he lived in a village some 15 km away; earned his living by gathering mushrooms and berries, especially cranberries on the Pine Marsh; in the fall it attracted lots of people, some came from neighboring regions even. Procurers bought bilberries at 17 rubles a kilo, chanterelles, at 30 rubles, cranberries, at 20 rubles.

Not far from this spot some Muscovites bought five houses in an abandoned village. They were going to build a church, invite a priest, and live as a commune in pristine sinlessness. Something in the manner of Commodore's friend Sergei Sossinsky, who settled somewhere near here back in the 70s. Yes, it's a trend among Moscow's intelligentsia, God help them. Downshifting of sorts. In the past, Commodore himself felt a vague inclination to join the crowd, but never got round to doing anything about it. Staying put in one place over long periods of time is just not his cup of vodka.

The main occupation here is logging, though not on the scale of the Soviet times, not by far. At our previous stopover we had seen masses of timber lying on the ground, all overgrown with tall grass. Apparently the time had come for Gaidar's brilliant reforms, all industries died as a result, and the timber was left to rot where it had been felled. This evoked our sincere disgust and an acute desire to string up all reformers. "Reformers a la lanterne!" ­ that's the spirit.

More quotes from the Tramp's narrative: saffron milk caps grow right at the end of his vegetable patch; it takes him just an hour to gather a bucketful of ceps (or penny buns, the coveted prize of all Russian mushroomers). His staples seem to be mushrooms and roach, but the diet clearly does him good ­ phiz very well filled out. Says meat is 20 rubles a kilo here. He has a kind of lean-to not far from our camp, complete with a small iron stove ­ an equivalent of mod cons hereabouts, apparently. Life will bloom anywhere.

Another thing he told us was in a somewhat sadder vein: once upon a time he and his wife had also gone boating, only he had broken his oar. Still, it was clearly a sweet memory. He told the story falteringly, and one could see why: it was all far in the past ­ a wife, a job, weekend outings. Nowadays, nothing but vodka, or whatever they drink here. Cleaning fluid, most likely.

30 July 2004, Friday. Day seven.

No fried mushrooms in the morning ­ our favorite Tramp had picked all the chanterelles around. But that's all right. Fried mushrooms every day, and without brandy to go with them, that's a bit too hard on the stomach.

9:40. Left Camp-by-the-pine-tree-marsh, or Camp Talkative Tramp. The sky looks overcast. The night was warm ­ likely to rain. Headwind as usual, pretty fresh yesterday, set the waves rolling, some with white crests. The boat rocks pleasantly, which reminds Commodore of sea voyages. Strangely, Cadette receives this comment somewhat huffily.

Today we set off earlier than usual, to avoid the strong head wind in the afternoon, but it blows right now, anyway. In an open space, where there's no forest close to the river, it must blow even fiercer. We have not yet reached such a space; just another reason to feel chirpy.

10:10. Passed a morose angler. Not a bite, apparently.

10:40. Looks like we've reached an open space, no solid forest on the banks. The right bank is high and steep, the left one, low with bushes half in water. No rain, the water level is going down, the bushes come out of the water's embrace, only what's that to us? Without rains the current is simply dying down. That's life for you: on the one hand... on the other hand...

Plenty of sand martins' nests in the cliff (R). A few cows wandering up there, and the sand martins feed off the fauna on the cows' backs. Something lying in a growth of burdocks. A bag? The shepherd? Who knows. Some sand martins fly very low, right above the water's surface, others high in the sky, so it's impossible to guess whether it will rain or not. No consensus among sand martins on this score, apparently. There are masses of them here, fussing and chirping. Some lightly strike the water with their beaks ­ drinking, or carrying a drop of water to their nestlings. Very caring parents, sand martins.

The banks are overgrown with ragwort, meadow sweet, tansy, and sneezewort. Tansy is good for mooring, its roots hold fast. When you moor sitting in the boat, these trifles do matter. In the cinema the characters leap into the water and drag the boat onto the beach. We just don't care for such heroisms. What we do, we tie both bow and stern to some friendly bush or something on the bank, then carefully disembark keeping Cadette's feet dry.

11:55. Our first sighting of gulls. Not a good sign, that. Gulls mean a lot of open water. The wind as contrary as ever, and stronger than the current.

12:30. There's a raft by the right bank, a contraption of poles and inner tubes. Next to that is a tiny, flimsy, triangular boat; in it, what looks like a small spade but is actually intended as a paddle, and a miniature gaff for landing pike. All strictly D.I.Y. The little boat is water-logged. No humans around, the impression is there's been no one here for months or years. Depopulation in full swing.

The current continues fairly decent, by the Vetluga standards. The sky is overcast, and it is a bit chilly. Commodore's bare feet are beginning to feel the cold. Never fear, they've known worse. Aboard a vessel, one is expected to walk about barefoot; old yachtsmen may stare at you if you don't.

All day long we keep shifting from bank to bank. By the steep banks pitted with sand martins' nests the current is more noticeable, and we try to catch it. Might as well try to catch the wind.

15:40. For a good half-hour Commodore kept casting the spoon-bait from a sandy bank. The bait got snagged once, no other result. Using a wobbler is no earthly good on this river. The fish just can't see it in the murky water. Commodore worked the river pantless, in his shirt only. "A pornographic show," comments Cadette . No fear of voyeurs here, though.

20:40. Camp Lady's Panties on a high bank (R). Someone left the panties in a growth of young birch-trees. As noted above, life blooms everywhere, sex life included.

A dirt road overgrown with weeds, just like yesterday. Ashes from old fires, empty cans and bottles. A table, built by some hikers before us. Commodore says all this was left by the same group of baidarka people whose traces we'd found at Camp Fallen Pine-tree. The same kind of forked stakes for the cooking-fire, the same size poles for the tents. And the panties are theirs, too. "How d'you know?" asks Cadette. "Intuition," replies Commodore. "Huh," says Cadette. End of dialogue.

Not so many mushrooms as before, yet there are some, including even a particularly nice orange birch bolete (red top, dark downside). Also chanterelles, russulas, oyster mushrooms. No fear of starving ­ it's summer time. In winter, we'd be done for in a single day. A good frost, and there we would be, toes up.

A rotten pine-tree log with some ants in it got thrown onto the fire. The ants heroically threw themselves into the fire trying to save the eggs, dragging them somewhere rather foolishly. Life is a complicated affair, no question about that.

Tasty Tuscany soup for supper. Commodore tried to scoop some soup with a tea mug. That's what tiredness does to you. In all, he had paddled for eight hours today, minus some time for fishing.

The sky is frowning again, says Cadette. We parody an old slogan, "Let there be no war!" with "Let there be no rain!" It's sinful to complain, though: the weather has been simply superb.

Taking stock of our provisions. We'd taken too much dried bread and dried fruit on this trip, Cadette says. Nonsense, bristles Commodore: there ain't no such thing as too much food on a trip. Only too little. Iron law.

31 July 2004, Saturday. Day eight.

No wind during the night. The river, smooth as glass. Cadette listened to the squeaking and groans of unknown night birds. A nice little birdy (light-gray downside, brown-speckled back, light stripes on the head) shat on our tent. During the night Commodore crawled out of the tent three times to see if our boat was still there, unpinched. For the first time we'd left it down by the water's side. The cliff is too high, steep and crumbly, no strength left to drag the boat up to camp.

10:53. Left Camp Lady's Panties. Commodore had incised an inscription on the bench there: S. Roy. Before us, someone had left a scratched "James" there. What James could it have been, how could a James turn up here... Mysteries everywhere.

Passing the mouth of the Vokhma (R). It's bigger than the Paozer, about as wide as the Vetluga itself. The current is weaker than in the Paozer. No traces of timber rafting, all that was left behind in the socialist past. After the Vokhma, the river is nearly twice as wide as before. Commodore much prefers narrow streams in the woods, more like green tunnels. Beautiful. Actually, he loves all kinds of streams, even tundra rivers.

11:45. A boat moored by the left bank. Of human beings, zilch.

The weather changes quite abruptly. A moment ago, it seems, the sun was scorching hot, Cadette washed Commodore's shirt, but right now a chilly little wind has sprung up, and the sky is completely overcast. Incidentally, nights have been starless and moonless here, which is a pity. It's somehow jollier with the moon up there. Come to think of it, it's good for us, this no moon business: it's sure to rain at the time of the new moon. But it will come as per schedule, no getting away from it.

More of Basho-Roy's stuff:

At the bend of the river
water licks the sand.
Three gulls overhead.

Not too bright, is it. Flat. Says what it says, no more. One has to admit it ­ fatigue affects brain tissue. It melts, or something.

Piles of stored logs rot away on the bank (R). Another sign of Gaidaronomics.

12:05. On the left bank a wench with a pigtail feeds a fire, chap nearby is busy doing something obscure. Look like locals. We wave to them. They stare.

12:10. Two young girls bathing by Maloe Ramenye (L). We asked their permission to take pictures. They struck up elegant attitudes; quite nice-looking just as they are.

12:20. Heaves into view: an automobile bridge with some traffic ­ motorcycles and a single car. Lots of small sheds and boats on the bank (L), and no human figures anywhere. Nests of house martins on the bridge.

Covered 104 km in a week ­ that is, if one goes by the map; the actual distance is anyone's guess, and what's it matter anyway.

12:35. A fir stump ablaze on the bank. What swine.

Power lines on the bank (L). Must be Kazhirovo. That's where a gent from Moscow has settled. Left the big city, tries to re-convert the local peasantry to Christianity. Built a little church with his own hands, only it's sheer waste of effort. Religion may be opium for some, but the locals are perfectly happy with their diet of self-made hooch and store-bought vodka. No one goes to pray there. This is truly dispiriting. What's to become of this country? Will it burn down in alcoholic fumes? Still, there are saintly individuals here and there, and a whole city can be spared for the sake of a single saint. Or so the Good Book says.

Direction has changed to south-west, but the head wind persists. That's another cast-iron law on river trips: no matter which way the river turns, the wind always blows in your face.

13:40. Landed on a long stretch of sandy beach. Visible ahead, the village of Markovo (L). Downstream, there's another Markovo marked on the map, bigger than this one. The more Markovos, the better, seems to be the local view. Meadow on the left bank; the right one sports a dense growth of shrubs. Sand martins fly about at low altitudes. By Markovo-1 the river narrows abruptly, with lots of bends and rifts. That's good. Brings back Commodore's memories of white-water rafting, but he'd better keep them to himself.

14:15. Passed by the spot where the Lekma flows into the Vetluga. Somehow this caused little excitement. So it flows in, so what. More exciting things happen in this world.

14:45. A brand-new dandy little church in Kazhirovo (L). Must have been built by that Muscovite chap interviewed by the Russian Orthodoxy journal we'd read. A hopeless undertaking that, trying to reawaken conscience in a thoroughly brutalized people. It'll take another generation, and what will it be like, that new generation? Drunks beget morons, that's a law of physiology.

Only just managed to avoid a collision with a motorboat with a burly human animal in it. He was heading straight at us. A faster vessel has to give way to a slower one, this is the law of the sea, but that animal was obviously pissed and couldn't care less about laws, maritime or any other. ?ommodore recalled a scene from a trip up north, where a similar pack of bipeds laughed merrily as they rammed a kayak with women and, if memory serves, a kid in it. Here, Commodore's rubber-bullet throwing "makarych" is no good, it's a job for a real "makarov" 9-mm pistol ­ make a hole in the thugs' boat, and let them plug it up with their pants, the bastards.

15:55. Cape Lonely Dog. The dog was running about the bank, apparently lost and looking for its master. Felt sorry for the poor thing, but could not take him onboard. No room, and precious little food left.

The clouds look menacing. The river splits in two. We take the left-hand stream. It splits in two in its turn. Again we choose the one on the left. The going is easy, no mishaps. That's truly gratifying. You sometimes choose a channel and at the end of it you come up against an impassable obstacle and have to pull the boat against the current, and the bank is not everywhere suitable for towing. Sheer torture. We're just a couple of lucky dogs, Commodore and Cadette, hip-hip and more or less hurray.

20:55. Camp Horrible.

After Kazhirovo we shot past some nice cozy pine woods where we could have camped in comfort. As we paddled on, the scene turned utterly disgusting ­ low marshy banks or else unscalable cliffs. Twice we tried to land only to hit on impassable briar thickets. Hasty retreat.

Finally we spotted a couple of aspens, and some birches, too, on a high bank. Landed at last, with great difficulty. The bank is sheer mud left by receding water level, but we sighted a tree trunk lying right by the water's side and moored there. Commodore crawled all over the place till he found a spot where someone had camped a long time ago. Three huge birch-tree logs set upright, for chairs, big forked stakes where the fire had been, rotten grass bedding where their tent had stood, old papers. All very nice, but all in a dark thicket on a cliff where you could cut mosquito clouds with a knife. What blockhead had chosen such a spot for camp... Must have been in spring, when mosquitoes were just a distant memory.

We cut some weeds to spread under our tent for softness, put up the tent, did all the evening chores, faster than usual. Still, while we were at it, the mosquitoes ate half Commodore's back, right through his shirt. Cadette suffered all over. Lucky dogs we? Oh sure...

1 August 2004, Sunday. Day nine

Slept long and deliciously, until seven. In the night a rat-sized mouse paid us a neighborly visit. Toward morning Cadette listened a long time to some bird clicking castanets. The night was still, the morning of the de luxe variety. Breakfast, like supper, mushroomless.

High up in the sky some big predatory bird is going round and round. Can be an eagle, hard to say. Plenty of birds of prey here ­ harriers, kites, also hawks and falcons a couple of times. That means there must be game here, too, but that does not concern us, not this trip. We have neither the time nor the weapons for shooting ­ Commodore's "makarych" can hit something with a rubber bullet at six paces, not more. Good for whacking a thug in the eye, only there aren't many thugs around. Yet another rationale for escape into the womb of nature, only ­ who needs any rationale for that? Not Commodore, that's for sure.

We took our breakfast in the tent, and did some "picture gazing" after. "Picture gazing" is a phrase from Commodore's heroic, mountain-climbing past. He had read somewhere that Academician Ivan Pavlov (of the Pavlovian reflex fame) used to rest half an hour in an armchair after breakfast, knees wrapped in a plaid rug, gazing at his modest collection of Old Masters. Commodore then introduced this custom among his bunch of rock-climbers. Back in camp after a tough climb mountaineers have little to do except eat a lot, get their strength back lolling on their sleeping bags and "gazing at paintings" ­ mentally. There are also outdoor games with young ladies, of course, but that's at night, after the dances.

10:10. Left Camp Horrible, a.k.a. Infernal and Hyper-mosquito-laden.

12:55. Fished, or rather tried to. Snagged the hook twice ­ once in a bush, then a log in water. And all the time large fish slapped their tails noisily and contemptuously by the opposite bank. Commodore just could not throw his wobbler that far, though he waded in nearly shoulder-deep. We ought to fish while in motion, but Cadette obnoxiously refuses to, and Commodore has his hands full paddling. Result, neither fish nor flesh, just plenty of exercise.

No sign of man in this Amazonia. Strong nose-basher of a wind, waves, too, pushing us back. Shades of Lake Baikal.

15:30. Passing Shaimensky settlement. Nothing of note. Many little houses with fretwork windows, a single haystack. Could we live in a place like this? Imagination baulks, completely.

16:45. Passing a log storage or some such establishment (R). Abomination of desolation. Martian landscape. A huge derrick and, as ever, not a soul within sight.

That day Commodore paddled for ten solid hours, minus an hour for angling.

2 August 2004, Monday. Day ten

12:45. Left camp. Right off, baffled by a curious sight: a tree trunk floating upstream, though we had not noticed any beaver presence here. Must be counter-current of sorts.

After the Shaima estuary, lots of bends in the river, no bank suitable for landing, much too steep everywhere. Landed at 20:00, where Commodore caught sight of some barely visible tracks on the steep slope. Signs of someone camping here long ago. Turned in by eleven.

The forest is empty, no bilberries, no mushrooms, nothing. Must have been worked over by gatherers. Well, people have to subsist somehow. Tcha. These woods may have been barren from the beginning of time, who knows. Absolutely anything may happen in this curious world of ours.

A half-day stopover. Slept till 08:30, then went looking for mushrooms. Commodore found an aged slippery jack and a couple of russulas. The rest, courtesy of Cadette. In all, enough for a sumptuous feast of fried mushrooms.

Yesterday the sun was truly scorching. Today, ditto. Yesterday Commodore's heart gave him just a teeny bit of trouble towards the end of day. Today, it behaves impeccably. Must be all that oxygen in the air. Like in an oxygen tent.

The map faithfully shows all the river bends. Commodore keeps track of these, God knows what for.

13:50. Pretty clouds over meandering river. Basho-Roy:

Oh, to savor the quiet.
That's what one came here for.
Instead, persistent buzzing in the ears.

Cadette: "Call that poetry? A complaint to an ear-nose-and-throat specialist, more like." Commodore: "Huh. I once came across this monostich, in the Poetry magazine: "You owe me $64."" Cadette: "But that's American poetry." That certainly shut Commodore up.

16:25. A vast stretch of still water. Current nil. Tough, coping with space manually. That bloody Dudno nowhere to be seen. Surely it must be somewhere? Or could it be that we ourselves have escaped into some parallel world? A perfectly sound explanation, given the facts.

3 August 2004, Tuesday. Day eleven

11:50. Spent a whole hour fishing off a sandy beach. The locals only fish off a steep bank, mostly in a sitting position, with very short rods. They cast the spoon bait with a jerk from behind the head to a distance of just a few yards. Incidentally, the method is not unique to this area; Commodore observed a similar technique at other rivers, too. Somehow it doesn't seem sporting enough to him. "They get results," Cadette points out, quite unnecessarily. Where's her spirit of camaraderie?

21:00. Camp on Sand (L). Arrived here at 15:15. It was all nice and ready for us ­ stakes for the fire, firewood, and a bedding of cut grass. We cut down some more grass, set up camp, and went to look for mushrooms. The woods are scraggly, completely flooded in spring. Lousy, in short. Mushrooms, disappointing ­ mostly fetid russulas, which we refuse to gather, for such are Cadette's principles. In all, a meager handful of proper russulas and oyster mushrooms (the latter found by Commodore).

Most of the day was spent ­ wasted ­ fishing. Commodore lost a wobbler ­ it just flew away somewhere. Then he lost two fair-sized fish, either pike or chub. The second time was especially vexing ­ Cadette already had the landing net ready. Commodore had not struck properly, or else the triple hook was too blunt. The sensation of a heaviness at the end of the line and the sight of a huge gaping maw will stay with us forever, it seems. Wide open jaws, that's the classic pike method of freeing itself from the hook. Cadette caught sight of a pale belly and a powerful tail. Commodore nearly burst into tears but made do with a salvo of juicy Russian.

Also, Cadette watched an under-age pike lying in ambush behind a rock ready to pounce on small fry, and in the end it did gulp down something really tiny. All strictly according to Darwin, so why can't we get a bit of the action? We too must eat. Other pike youngsters nibbled at Commodore's toes as he was washing his hair. Well, that's nothing. In Central Asian canals small fry do their best to wriggle right up your anus and nibble at your pubic hair.

Lots of prints on the sand; clearly identifiable are those of a heron, small snipe and also some small animals. The sandy beach is virtually free of mosquitoes, but it is going to be chilly at night. Discovered a boat in the bushes. There must be some locals around, not that we are too eager to see them. We are happier as we are ­ and we keep our pistol shells dry.

4 August 2004, Wednesday. Day twelve

10:30. Left Camp on Sand. The sun is blazing fiercely. The sky is dotted with tiny clouds. Fished for a couple of hours; only result ­ hook got snagged twice.

19:50. Made camp leaving the village of Mikh-something far behind. The day's events:

Caught a two-foot pike. Commodore invented a method of fishing from the boat: you just stick a spoon-bait at the end of a line straight into the mouth of a pike lying in ambush among the lilies and stuff growing by the bank. Cadette worked the rod, Commodore paddled very cautiously, not to scare off the fish. After about five minutes' trawling Cadette hooked a pike, an extremely violent one. The spoon-bait ended up far down the pike's gullet. We pulled the predator aboard and packed it in a plastic bag, to tame it. Should have hit it on the head with something heavy but ­ Cadtte's nerves... Better not.

We wanted to land and cook the pike, but at that moment the village came into view, with a pontoon bridge where it began. Commodore walked to the village and found out that no buses ran from this place to the railway station. Some locals said we could take a van selling bread to the villagers to a place called Pishchug and from there, a bus to the station, but this P. thing is way in the north, in the opposite direction from the railway, so to hell with it.

We decided to paddle on till we reached some bridge. There ought to be a bridge somewhere, preferably not a collapsed one.

For a long time the village refused to disappear from view. Saw some women bucolically washing linen in the river. Then Commodore raised his paddle saluting a fisherman. The guy offered to sell us some fish, but we proudly said we had everything we needed, fish included, thank you all the same. It's a shame we missed so many wonderful spots in which to fish Commodore-fashion, but Commodore's resources of strength are woefully limited. Better luck next time.

After the village, the banks were of the lousiest kind. Commodore disembarked and found the remains of a lean-to, or rather a sort of Indian screen: a fire on one side, a screen of fir-tree branches on the other, some grass bedding under the screen. But the place itself was awful: the ubiquitous curse of tall dense grass, shrubs, trees. Ideal for mosquitoes, not us weary travelers.

We paddled on for just a couple of minutes ­ and found a fabulous site for camping. It looks like we hit, for the third time, on a spot where those chaps from Nizhny Novgorod had made camp. The same way of building a cooking-fire, the same kind of bedding under their tent. Thus spake Commodore.

We cleaned and cut the pike into manageable pieces, put up the tent, and went to look for mushrooms. Didn't find any. Instead, we found somebody's clothes and things ­ trousers, a jacket, a bag, all hanging on tree branches. Stuff for at least two, and hanging there for a year or perhaps more. It's a bit of a mystery, and sets one wondering sadly. What happened to the fellows who once inhabited those trousers? Lost their way? Eaten by wolves or a bear? Or were they just too drunk to find their way back to the camp? But there were no traces of a proper camp there, just the rags hanging on trees. A propos of this Commodore recalled some stories of people getting lost in the forest and weighing about thirty kilos when they were found or got back to some village by accident. Who knows what the others weighed, the ones who never got back. Cadette turned pale and rudely advised Commodore to dry up.

It so happened that we too lost our way a bit as we turned back, just overshot the spot where our camp was. Seriously, it takes some skill to lose one's way near a river. We soon found our camp, lit a fire and cooked some fish soup with herbs and stuff. The soup turned out to be quite piquant, though pike meat tastes as flat as you please. With the seasoning of bearlike hunger, it was a gourmet experience to remember for years to come.

We crawled into our tent early today. When the wind dies down, mosquitoes go plain berserk.

And another thing. Today, Commodore performed a dangerous stunt just to show off, or so Cadette believes. On reaching the pontoon bridge we should have disembarked and carried all our stuff along the bank past the bridge, but that would have taken all day. Instead, Commodore ordered Cadette to pack our papers and valuables, go ashore and walk ahead, while he himself gathered speed and aimed the boat at a narrow opening between two pontoons. The current there was pretty fast, and if the boat had hit some sharp metal edge it might have been ripped wide open. The bridge was very low, Commodore was in danger of smashing his forehead against it but he flopped on his back just in time and the boat shot through, only the paddle hit something with a loud crack. An inveterate show-off, Commodore is. Real Soviet hikers do not behave in such a despicable manner.

5 August 2004, Thursday. Day thirteen

10:10. Left Camp Where We Ate Fish, a.k.a. Thank You Nice Guys from Nizhny. Did our best to finish the fish; even so, there was enough left for the birds to peck at. We dealt with the fish strictly according to mountaineers' law: better bust the foul belly than waste good food.

Cadette reported hearing some mysterious creature rustle and crackle in the bushes during the night. Big news. As if Commodore had not nervously clutched his puny pistol half the night. A lot of use it would have been against something big. We crawled from the tent and looked around. Lots of fresh tracks leading in all directions, but what our visitor had been there was no telling from the grass trampled by some heavy feet, no identifiable prints. Could be a bear, easy. They are generally quite good-natured in summer. That's our only hope: inside a zipped-up tent we are as blind and helpless as newborn babes.

Commodore is paddling lazily, stroke ­ pause, stroke ­ pause. No wind so far, nor any current either. The sun is blazing straight in Commodore's scorched face, as we are heading due south already, where the railway is, or should be. Oh for a drop of rain! Commodore can't recall ever wishing for rain on a hike, if you don't count deserts where wishes don't count anyway. Here, there was heavy dew in the night, the tent and the plastic sheet over it got soaking wet ­ a sure sign of rains to come, only where are they?

13:30. Talked to a very sun-tanned denizen in a boat with a small boy and a rod. Interestingly, he had a dinghy exactly like ours. The name of the village was Berezhok (Little Shore), motorway, six km away. Maybe it is, though one sometimes gets the impression that locals use the term kilometer more to amuse than to inform. Paddle on, Commodore, paddle on with a song in your heart. Yo-heave-ho...

15:40. A village hove into view. A chap in a boat said, Staroshanskoe. Now, where was the church with a golden dome we'd been promised? None in sight. Can't be seen from the river, and if so what's it for anyway? A church should tower over the place on a high bank, to have an esthetic significance. Now, people all along the Volga know that, and they built their churches properly. Commodore wrote about them somewhere.

18:30. Passed Petunino, made camp not far from it. We'll write up today's experience tomorrow, feeling too pooped and too lazy right now.

6 August 2004, Friday. Day fourteen

07:30. Camp Noisy, a.k.a. the Last One.

Yesterday's events, now. After Petunino we drifted a long time in the blessed shade of some trees, keeping very close to the bank. Got out our fishing tackle. Almost at once Cadette caught a juvenile pike, but that was all. No more grass at the water's edge, nowhere for pike to hide, not a bite in hours of futile trawling.

At Petunino we had seen a modest castle being built. Must be for some local or visiting oligarch. Wooden stairs leading to the water down the high, steep bank, for the castle owner's convenience. Who can afford a place like this, these days? Only a thief and a bloodsucker, that's who.

Not far from the village we ran into a couple of anglers, very literally. Their tiny boats were tied to the bank with lengths of twine, one of which we hit and had to back water in a hurry. The angler merely smirked as Commodore reprimanded him ­ quite sweetly, for an old mariner.

Then we decided to camp but could not. The usual nonsense: either the trees were behind a jungle of scrub, or the bank was too steep, muddy and slippery. Commodore did contrive to climb up a cliff to reconnoiter a couple of times, but returned in disgust: not a scrap of land suitable for camping. A third attempt yielded something almost decent ­ a smallish flat area after a passable climb. Time, going on 21:00. That day Commodore paddled non-stop for over ten hours and was plumb falling to pieces at the end.

Cooked some fish soup with oyster mushrooms found on the spot. The soup was of the add-more-salt-and-it'll-do kind. We kipped after eleven. All night endless rumbling came from beyond the river, a proper highway there. Mostly heavy trucks. Must be carrying stolen timber to sell abroad. The usual thing: some oligarch lining his pockets with what used to be the whole nation's asset.

10:00. Left Camp Noisy. Oddly, the noise ceased almost at once. A few minutes after we left camp, the left bank turned into a nice sandy beach, if a bit muddy from receding high water. Cadette had seen this yesterday, but had not bothered to inform Commodore being out of sorts, like. The reason for her moodiness cut Commodore to the quick. Our Slowpoke II was not comfortable enough for her, believe it or not! To Commodore this gallant vessel seemed as good as an easy chair ­ and here Cadette says she constantly feels somewhat nervous while on board. "Why, for heaven's sake? What's to feel nervous about?" Commodore spluttered. No answer. Commodore then muttered darkly that Cadette should be given a ride in the Lastochka, to get things in perspective. That little craft has the technique of a rodeo bull. Try taking a breath at the wrong moment, and she'll plop upside down in no time flat. Compared to her, the Slowpoke is as meek as a dove. Indeed, a woman's soul is a truly Freudian mystery. Unfathomable! As is a man's, come to that. Part paradise, part cesspool (Nero Wolfe?).

The sun is as scorching as ever. Commodore is quite happy, he's found the clothes pin he uses to keep his Arafatka in place. The pin sticks out from under his nose, giving him a Papuan aspect.

The scenery around never varies: worse than useless for landing, but obviously good for fishing and mushroom picking. None of this for us, though. We face other tasks today.

Commodore is gradually recovering from yesterday's spurt. He says, in future we'll travel with pomp, meaning with a pump. A pump is most useful for inflating the raft. So far Commodore has always pumped up the Slowpoke with his mouth, but we aren't getting any younger, it seems. Nowadays he doesn't do any parachute jumping even. Fear of broken legs.

***

At this point the log comes to an abrupt end; no time to make entries, and anyway not much to write about. We reached the bridge, climbed on the bank, swaying like proper sea dogs (after all, we'd spent two weeks riding the waves), washed, dried and packed the boat and all our stuff. With much difficulty and frequent stops Commodore (that is, me, or is it I, again) managed to haul our monstrously heavy rucksacks up the steep path to the motorway. We had to wait long but not too long for a vehicle going our way. Eventually we cadged a lift for a modest fee. The driver asked us what distance we had covered. Hearing the figure 250 km, he registered admiration/disbelief: "Well I never! Unbelievable." Then there was the railway station at Sharya (again stress on the last syllable), scenes from provincial life as we waited for the train, the train ride, and Moscow. Phew!

Now, to get back to normal life (why, oh why does noise, bustle, foul air, foul language in angry exchanges, etc. have to be the norm?). Soaking in the bath, healing cuts, bruises, insect bites, and suchlike. One of my injuries, a pretty painful one at that, is worth a laugh: with the appetite I'd developed I all but dislocated my lower jaw chewing. Sprained a muscle or something. Now I remember the trip each time I masticate, and even smiling is painful. "It'll pass," Cadette says, laughing heartlessly. (And indeed it has.)

We check out our measurements. My waist has shrunk from 88.5cm to 85cm, all my trousers now slide off me like soaped. Cadette keeps her achievements a secret. Small wonder; she did not have to paddle. True, she asked me once to let her try, but a few minutes of the exercise sufficed. "Thanks awfully, but that'll do for me." I too found the paddling harder than it had seemed from Moscow, but that's the way things always are. You just gotta be a philosopher.

What's most pleasant to remember is our amazing luck with the weather. Not a drop of rain in two weeks. A record in my experience. Well, fools and novices are proverbially lucky, and Cadette is still in that category (novices, I mean). The only time I had the same experience was in Central Asia, but there it never rains in summer anyway: rain drops evaporate while still in the air, or on hitting the sizzling hot ground.

The fierce sun has given me a "peasant" suntan: face, neck, hands and legs up to the knees burnt black. The Yasser Arafat attire was not much use. Cadette was clad more thoroughly, or else she is not susceptible to sun burns, even from double radiation, direct and reflected off the water. Some people have all the luck.

Another nice thing, we'd taken enough food to last us the whole trip ­ ate our last rusk at the railway station. The mushrooms and the fish helped, of course, though we did not fish as much as we would have liked to. No fault of ours, was it.

In all, counting in the price of food, train tickets, and the rest, the trip cost us some $50; $100 at the most, that's for sure. I remembered reading of ex-President Carter going fishing somewhere in Kamchatka; they refused to give out the figures, saying merely that an ordinary, not de luxe trip cost $1500 a day there. I can't imagine what they do with all that dough ­ stick some of it up the anus of each separate fish they catch? One thing is certain ­ we got about a million dollars' worth of fun for our fifty.

It is rather a wrench, going back to all this noise and commotion, curiously called normal life, after two weeks of a trancelike state. Watching TV, listening to the radio, and reading the papers all has a strange feel to it. The news is the same old news as before the trip, and it's hard to get rid of the suspicion that the people in them can't really be serious about the things they do and get so worked up over. So absurd, really. Not the main thing, if you get the point. Shakespeare has a nice phrase for it: "Stale, weary, and unprofitable."

Still, one cannot get by without it ­ without communication (some say intercourse) with other humans, however disgusting their ways. That's another thing you learn on a trip. As you get encapsulated within yourself, sensory deprivation sets in, and you start composing haiku, or something. Haikus, they also have addressees, and it's not just your companion. Haiku, hell. I addressed benevolent remarks to herons standing one-legged by the banks, or swore quite emotionally at the tea-kettle when it obstinately refused to boil, or talked persuasively to the pot of soup. And I had a real live companion, at that.

I looked through our ship's log. It seemed to describe everything like it was, and still there was something important missing. Then I realized what it was. The log covered the scant and often boring events of the trip, while the trip itself was about something quite different. It's about the beauty that constantly surrounds you and eclipses everything else. That's the focus of travel, the whole point of it ­ the scenery that keeps changing and fascinates you, your eyes feast on it while you keep paddling on fully certain that over there beyond that bend in the river the scene will be even more enchanting, and it often is. You grow greedy, that greed drives you on and on, to the highest point of the trance only it never comes, there's just this rapture you wish never ended...

Naturally, you just can't write about these things on each page, the ship's log is a different genre. We should have taken pictures, but there Cadette failed sadly: the film jammed and she snapped all those enchanting views on the same frame. A damn shame, really. Thank God, there's the Internet. A guy had kayaked down the same river a couple of years before us, and he posted some lovely pictures. No crime to pirate them, I guess.

Beauty is one theme, but there are others. At one's advanced age one tends to look for a justification of one's existence other than the need to eat, drink, sleep, and ­ pardon me ­ defecate. Reading helps, writing helps even more, but travel is surely the most powerful remedy for diminished zest for life. Here I am, just back from this trip, and already contemplating another, or at least dreaming of it. "Alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades," to quote Joyce. I first climbed Mount Elbrus in the mid-1950s, so I've had half a centenary of it. I hope to God I'll add a few more really worthwhile trips. I.I.a.a., of course. If I am alive (L.Tolstoy).

Upon return I took up Alan Watts's "The Way of Zen" where I'd left off before the trip, and I seem to be reading it with a pair of completely different eyes. It now seems rather comical to have to concentrate on a wall, a candle or that spot between your eyes while meditating. Why? Because you remember what you felt as you watched a harrier going round and round in the bright blue sky, soaring higher and higher; or the huge full moon as you crawled from your tent towards dawn; or the absolutely still, mist-filled, black-and-white river stretching under the cliff you stood on; or the sun peeping shyly from behind distant woods; or a thousand other such sights. I ask you, who needs Zen, when you have ­ all this?

In short, I am all for dissolving in nature whenever we get a chance. After all, we all of us eventually do that, but in a highly unpleasant fashion. Better avoid that as long as we can, or even longer...

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