Лед

I usually hate it when Irkutsk-ites (Irkutskians? Irkutskers?) act like Baikal is the same as the ocean. Because it’s not. It doesn’t have the same feeling of endlessness at all, where you are seeing the same body of water in Maine and in Florida and for that matter in Africa, should one be there. And it doesn’t smell like salt. But maybe it is more like the ocean than I indignantly internally protest, or I think of it as like the ocean more than I think I do. Because my shock at it being turned into a huge expanse of ice was sort of close to what I imagine it would be like to go out the door of one’s Outer Banks beach rental and find that the ocean had totally frozen. And if people were driving large motor vehicles on top of it. And if you could just go walk around on top of it, and if people who had never seen the Atlantic didn’t quite believe you that the big snow-covered plain they were looking at was not just land. Man, it was so crazy.

Abby and I were at Olkhon a few days ago. You faithful readers may remember that I was there in the fall. At that point it was surrounded by a liquid lake, and there were sandy beaches with waves breaking on them, and there were yellow larch forests. Not so now.

I would subject you all to rapturous accounts of the surrounding beauty, but I think I’ll just wait till I can post pictures. But I won’t be posting the pictures taken of me on the first afternoon on the island, as I bear a disturbing resemblance to an escaped inmate of a psychiatric prison. The chief factors in the creation of this resemblance are 1) the feathers flying out of the sleeve of my sleeping-bag-like coat, torn open by a crazy dog named Foox; 2) The frozen blood on my coat and face, from a bloody nose caused by the extreme cold and having resisted the hasty scarf-clean-up-efforts of myself and Abby; 3) the general look of frantic concern of my face and the hunted haunch of my shoulders, left over from the frantic efforts of the past ten minutes to hide my blood-covered self from the fast-approaching hip young Muscovite professionals, the owners of Foox, who were staying with us in our hotel. Plus my hands were very freezing from being covered in frozen blood. And I had the unsettling knowledge of my blood-covered scarf hidden within my coat. Man, this paragraph is gross. But it was very hilarious at the time. If you pay me $10 I’ll show you a picture sometime.

We could hear the ice forming, sometimes. It was sometimes like sound-effects in arcade games. And sometimes like we were just hearing the upper register of some deep, slow, mournful complaint voiced far below the earth. One night, especially, we stood on big blocks of ice by a previously-sandy beach and listened to the ice forming almost beneath us. It was sort of scary.

The next morning I went for a walk by myself. I climbed as far as I could on the Shaman Rocks (one of the five global energy points for the Buryats, which, as Ivan said the first time we were there, isn’t saying that much considering the rather limited geographical range of that particular ethnic group, but they attract a lot of shamanistic/new-age religious activity anyway), saw a fox run out from a nook in the rocks below, watched the morning light coming over the island and making it to the western shore, where I was. The light hit the sandy beach of the night before very attractively, and I decided to walk there over the ice, saving a lot of trouble from the fault-and-rock-covered shoreline. Far out from the shore, the ice was as smooth as a mirror, and I could see far down into the thickness of it, which was cool. But, as it was after all Baikal, I could see farther than that, all the way down to the bottom of the lake. And that was very, very far down. At that point I got really scared, but I couldn’t get back on shore for a long time, as the banks were just the tall red cliffs that seemed so pretty when I was on top of them rather than beneath them.