Into Thick Air (23 page)

The Volga, like the Colorado, is one of the most intensively plumbed rivers in the world, engineered into a staircase of hydroelectric dams and reservoirs. So it's a shock and a delight to see that the Russians—the same folk that murdered the Aral Sea by water diversions—have mostly preserved the Volga's wetlands by faking the spring flood each year, opening the penstocks at Volgograd's dam and inundating over a thousand square miles.

It's a miasmic land, a good place to hide. The Meadows have been part of Russia since Ivan the Terrible kicked out the Mongols in the late 1500s. But the tsars weren't so popular after it was declared, in 1649, that serfdom was hereditary—once a peasant, always a peasant. Serfs recognized a raw deal. Some ran away. Many were Cossacks, and the bands of rebel serfs hid from the sting of the tsar's whip in places like the Meadows. In the 1670s they stopped hiding, and around 20,000 of them went on the offense, led by Stenka Razin, who gained a romantic reputation as a sort of Robin Hood. It was the first serious anti-tsar civil war. The rebels took control of nearly the length of the Volga—until Razin was caught, brought to Moscow, and dismembered.

The Russians seem to prefer me whole, but sometimes I wonder. Leaving Volgograd, I was warned that Communist Party members of the Duma are stirring up anti-American sentiment by blaming Russia's problems on the dollar. When I stop in the Leninsk market to buy a pound of big purple grapes I'm suddenly Mr. Capitalism, in the flesh. A knot of vendors closes around me with aggressive shouts of
America dollar! Dollar up, ruble down!
I worry most about the growler with an earflap hat, a man with “1960” tattooed on his hand. His birth date, I figure. When he was young he surely learned how Russia was the first to launch a man in space. Now he's hawking a stack of Chinese pots labeled, in English, “Happy Lady.”

After some ruble waving the anger sputters out. A hungry cyclist must be a pitiful sight. Within a minute I'm gobbling grapes and accepting a gift of two tomatoes.

It's a ten-aspirin ride to Akhtubinsk, where I finally ride out from the under the lid of clouds. There's a big modern hotel, which means it's destined to collapse in the not-so-distant future. The bathroom bidet is connected to nothing, and the wall tiles are falling off, leaving a spectacular 3-D landscape of grout.

But there's a café. I order in my usual way, simply pointing to whatever someone else is eating and saying, One of those, please. This works beautifully, and tonight the other diners invite me to sit with them.

The four men with big mustaches and smiles are on their way to pick up sixteen tons of salt from a dry lake about sixty miles east, then haul it six hundred miles to their homeland in the Caucasus Mountains. Sounds like a lot of work, I say with a
Whew!
and an emphatic mopping of my brow. They shake their heads—
No problem. We're up at dawn. We don't drink. We're Muslims from Dagestan!

Dagestan is one of the twenty-one Russian republics that are something like reservations in the United States—the federal government gives autonomy and a hunk of money to those minorities swallowed by the empire. Ebadula, Omar, Magomed, and Koorban are very hospitable. They don't yell or cajole me to swallow vodka. They're impressed by the jottings I made in my notebook before leaving the United States, and they now believe that all Americans know that Dagestan's president is Magomedali Magomedov, and its capital is Makahchkala. It's a good thing they can't read English, because the rest of my notes read, “Dagestan is Russia's most politically violent republic. Fourteen politicians and businessmen murdered in the last two years. The mayor of the capital is in a wheelchair from a car bombing.”

Ebadula none-too-subtly points out Russians at another table and does a remarkable job of pantomiming his cultural perspective. A Russian drinks and gets crazy. A Dagestani is pure. A Russian man doesn't care if you borrow his wife for sex. A Dagestani man will cut your head off. Don't believe it? He invites me to see for myself, carefully printing his address
in my journal, dressing it up with a sketch of snow-capped mountains and soaring birds.

I'm impressed, but I needn't visit Dagestan for a taste of a country that would earn a high Scrabble score (if proper nouns were allowed). Today's ride along the desert rim of the Meadows passes within fifteen miles of the frontiers of the newly independent nation of Kazakhstan to the east, and the Russian republic of Kalmykia to the west. The influence of the tsars never extended much beyond the Volga and the Meadows, and with the fall of the communists the low stubble of desert grasslands to either side of the river is again the domain of Turkic-speaking herders. As I ride, it seems that nebulous sheep are always disappearing over a swale along with the sound of the herders on horseback, jangling their noisemakers and hooting.

With the sun low and the indolent smoke from fallow fields hanging in the poplars, I drop into the riverside town of Kharabali and see that the sheepherders live here, with the Russian farmers. They die here, too, and rest under tumbleweeds in graves marked by the crescent moon of Islam.

Two worlds, Jesus and Mohammed, wet and dry. In the Water Meadows the cows plod with tails that look like heavy clubs but are actually masses of cockleburs. Just beyond the reach of the river the land is clean grit and prickles of rigid brown grass. I only wish I'd been here a month earlier. When I duck into the comfort of a truck-stop café in Syeleetrenoy and hear the wind beating the building, I don't want to go back out there.

But I'm very close to the Caspian. So close that three Kazaks and a Russian drop in and throw down on a table a three-foot-long sturgeon and invite me over for a closer look. I've never seen one, except on the label of a jar of caviar. I tap on its head; it's an armored fish. There's no dorsal fin but instead a long row of finned plates like a stegosaurus. Sterlatka, they call it. One fisherman whips out a long knife and slices off a piece of pink flesh with yellow fat. It dangles from the knife as he lifts it to my face and says,
Eat
.

It's remarkable how very quickly the eye and the brain put together a list of Things Worth Noting. That's a terribly sharp knife. No obvious skin infections or lip ulcers on the fisherman. The fish appears very fresh.

So I eat and manage a look that says, “Wow, that's tasty.” They slap me on the back and send me on my way to the last city on my route, Astrakhan.

 

ADVANCE BILLING CAN make a skeptic out of any traveler, particularly if you've visited the region of Iowa that likes to promote itself as “Little Switzerland.” The city of Astrakhan is called the “Star of the Desert” or the “Gateway to the Orient,” but I don't believe it until I see it.

Forty miles north of Astrakhan, I see it: oil derricks and gas flares rising above sand dunes and double-humped Bactrian camels. I stop for a camel photo, but this is no tourist beast, and it lets loose a tremendous honk that rocks me back on my heels. It's hobbled, thank God, so I'm not afraid to camp nearby. I can prime my stove without attracting attention—it looks like just another gas flare from the refineries on the horizon. It's the warmest night in a week, and I'm glad to have eked out a lead on the Russian winter.

Unfortunately, it's only a eight-hour lead, and I wake in the morning to a cold tickle of rain on my eyelids. I pack in a flash and split for the city as the distant smokestacks of a refinery fade in the mist. It's a bleak ride. Crows with gray shoulders like epaulets jauntily pick at the ribs of a roadkilled horse. The Volga wetlands are laced with power lines under a hydrocarbon sky, but I can still make out the colors of the land. The higher ground is home to silky hummocks of grass, the bottomlands blush pink with ripe seedheads, and the channels are lined with tasseled reeds.

The French novelist Alexandre Dumas came this way in 1858. Dumas was excitable (his
Adventures in Czarist Russia
is jumping with exclamation marks) and sometimes gullible—he swallowed the accounts of sheep with tails so fat that they were trailed by a little wagon to carry the tail. But it's true that he passed a “Chinese pagoda” just above Astrakhan. It was actually a Buddhist shrine built by the Kalmyks, who still live west of the Volga.

All the Soviet Union suffered during Stalin's reign, but the south was hit the hardest. The Kalmyks, descendants of the galloping Mongolians, say they fought with gusto against the dirty Nazis in 1942. Stalin claimed the Kalmyks welcomed the fascists with tea and butter. Both sides agree that
in December of 1943 trains began arriving in Kalmykia. Jostling lightly on their couplings behind the engines were an extraordinary number of cattle cars. They arrived empty and left full, destined for Siberia. Within months the entire population of 170,000 Kalmyks was gone.

Stalin died in 1953, after three decades of rule. In 1957, 6,000 Kalmyk survivors were allowed to return. The rest vanished, hollow-eyed, into Soviet history, as did the Ukrainians who resisted Stalin's drive to bring all farms into the fold of state collectives. Stalin seized their harvest and let them starve. Around 14.5 million died. Stalin himself believed the figure to be around 8 or 9 million, but as he once said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

I don't expect to find much of the old ways of life during my storm-driven sprint into Astrakhan. With snapping mongrels at my heels and a superb wind on my tail, I whiz past the plywood slums and concrete apartment blocks into the city center. The oldest buildings have ornate wrought-iron balconies reminiscent of another delta city, New Orleans. But the buildings are vacant, the balconies collapsing. The cathedral hasn't fared much better—the communists turned it into a bus station.

Yet the central market thrives. Overflows, actually, into the streets, where perfume and pomegranates are sold from stands barely twelve inches from the steel whir of the passing trams. Inside, Kazaks with faces round and flat as coins are spooning out carrot salad and skewering lamb on shish kebabs. Ladies under headscarves are yelling “Chipsies,” which I mistake for
gypsies
until I spot the sacks of Lay's potato chips. Like a teen drawn to a horror movie, I aim for the meat market. As hoped and feared, the Russians are dismembering cows with huge and horrible axes atop tables made of tree trunks, big ones, bound with iron hoops.

Zesty markets are not uncommon, but Astrakhan's is the first I've seen since Turpan, China, that is well below sea level. This fact I recall after I get a room on the third floor of the Hotel Lotus and open both a Delta Beer and the wonderfully detailed map I bought in Volgograd.

The Caspian Depression is a flatland without peer. The Volga drops only three feet during its fifty-mile run from Astrakhan to the Caspian, a slope of precisely 0.72 inch per mile. That's ridiculously flat. If you tossed
a paper airplane off the top of the Empire State Building and it dropped in elevation at the same rate as the lower Volga, it would fly 20,000 miles before touching down.

The map intrigues me and disturbs me. The northern coast of the Caspian isn't a coast at all. Like the Water Meadows, it's neither land nor sea. It's a hundred-mile-wide swamp. There will be no seashore or any alternatives. To the east of the delta is Kazakhstan, where the Caspian sea lions had just that summer chomped on forty unwary beach lovers. Luckily, I have no visa. To the west is the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, whose president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, claimed to have been abducted by space aliens. “We flew to some kind of star. They put a space suit on me, told me many things and showed me around.”

I wouldn't mind warming up on a nearby star, but Kalmykia borders Chechnya. That settles it: always the prudent chicken, I will stay in Russia. Besides, there's one place on the map that's caught my eye, a place both low and high.

 

IT'S A FRIGID MORNING—and I'm still in my hotel room. It's warmer in the seventh-floor café, but the place is packed, and I must share a table with a young shark in a deluxe suit. He's silent until he tells me that he doesn't like the look of my handlebar bag on the table. Move it. Sure, I say—if you'll move that ugly cell phone. He puts it in his pocket and shortly exits. I finish my lemon tea and zip out of town on high hopes and a joyous tailwind.

Just beyond Astrakhan's surprising little suburbs of neat two-story brick homes is the water world of the delta. I pass an occasional roadside memorial to drivers who made it no farther, but there are hardly any cars today. For company I have canals and fallow rice fields and unmoving cows. Perhaps they're frozen. The sun is blinding but impotent.

It's farmland all the way, irrigated by the Volga but shunted by earthworks in so many directions it's not clear what's river and what's canal. The single village I pass, Syemiboogri, is built on a subtle rise reached by a floating pontoon bridge overlain with a slapdash collection of sheet metal. That's not as frightening as the attack geese that rush out from
under a cottonwood but fail to reach me before I park the bike and trot into the town store. Inside, a half-dozen men are talking about the recent cold snap. The clerk reaches into a freezer and gives me a bottle of frozen water. Russian joke.

The town is ready for the winter. Watermelons are stacked in sheds. The haystacks are as big as the houses, which still manage to put on a pretty face with fancy windows—although it's usually just one pretty face, facing the dirt street. The other three sides look as beat as I feel.

But I've only twenty miles to Tishkova. The pavement quits, and I bump along on gravel as a little bus with classic dingle-ball windshield trim passes. Its placard says Tishkova-Astrakhan. Good—I'll be on that bus tomorrow, heading back to Astrakhan, then home.

When the sun is low the big reeds cast a long shadow, and in search of warmth I ride on the wrong side of the road, in a thin strip of sunlight. Then I see what I've been hoping for, what my map showed as the only hill of any significance, three hundred feet long and fifty feet high and as close to the Caspian as possible without swimming. Its slumping sides appear, despite the cold, as if they're melting. It's a regular mountain in these parts, and it's the end of the line for me.