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If you missed the fences and the swath of open land in the woods that mark the border, you can’t help but notice that you’ve finally left Russia because the human presence beyond the windows of the train is no longer disheveled. Finland shares a long history of tension with its huge and powerful neighbor to the east, but I wonder if having to share such a long border with Russia galls the Finns most of all because everything in their country is so orderly, while everything in Russia is such a mess. The immediate difference crossing between these two countries may well be more stark than between any two others on the planet. We are out of Russia and into suddenly more familiar and comforting territory, and James and I are suddenly giddy and joking about everything— about how the damn Finns have a ridiculous word like Hei for hello instead of the far simpler Russian Zdravstvuite, about how the Finns must long for a life without lawn mowers, a social contract, and more than one color of paint, about how surprised we are that the Finns and the European Union allow Russian trains to use their filthy open toilets within their territory but have perhaps granted a special temporary exemption to trains originating in SDCs—shit-dumping countries. . . . Russia recedes beyond the Gulf of Finland, beyond the lovely decompression chamber of Helsinki, beyond the soothingly smooth and comfortable trains and beds of Western Europe and all its polite people who almost always seem to speak English, and with every passing hour and kilometer we are at once more relaxed and more glad to be rid of the place and more and more sorry that we are not still there. Russia grabs hold of you tight, and if it often feels as if it’s choking the life out of you and making you want to flee, its suffocating embrace is also powerfully seductive. If it often seems to be going to extraordinary lengths to make itself infuriating and impenetrable—almost challenging you just to give up on it and turn your attention elsewhere—it also makes it impossible for you to turn away, and ultimately makes the whole exhausting and exhilarating encounter worth it.

Zigzag to Russia

The Fukuoka train station feels nearly asleep as the clock heads toward 11:00 p.m. Perhaps the station in this small city on Japan’s western shore always feels nearly asleep, no matter where the clock is heading, but we hope not to have to find out. There’s a train leaving for Kyoto in a few minutes, and we hope to be on it. We had no idea when we left Korea whether there actually was an overnight train from Fukuoka to Kyoto, but the way I figured it, it’s Japan, the place that’s supposed to have the best train system in the world—there has to be. And now here we are in Fukuoka and we’ve found out that I’d guessed right, and we’ve caught the snappy little bus that was waiting outside the terminal to take us to the station, hauled our stuff off the bus, quickly tried to ascertain from the kaleidoscope of Japanese signs and strange symbols which way the ticket lobby might be, and turned to head in that direction. What we still have no idea about is whether we’ll be able to find out if there are any seats left on the train, get our rail passes validated, get tickets, and find our way to the platform before the train slips off into the warm September night in less than half an hour—especially since it quickly became apparent that few people out here in the Japanese hinterlands speak English. And now as we hitch up our backpacks and take our first steps toward the lobby, a voice comes from behind us, a female voice in heavily accented but well-practiced English, and it’s saying, “Can I help you?” We turn back and where not a moment ago there was nothing but still night air there is now a beautiful young woman and, I’m pretty sure, the fading swirls of a puff of smoke. Out of nowhere has materialized our own little Glinda the Good Witch, only Japanese, and without all the glitter and lace.

Bad Roads Are Good for Baikal

The Barguzin River flows out of the Barguzin Mountains, through the town of Barguzin and then the coastal community of Ust-Barguzin before it finally loses itself in a broad cove of Baikal known as Barguzin Bay. The only way across the river for miles upstream from the lake is a ramshackle little wooden ferry with a tiny, corrugated steel shed with a wood stove in it and room on its deck for about half a dozen cars. The ferry slips noiselessly away from the end of the road on the south bank, and looking west toward the lake, two ghostly, rusting timber loading cranes loom on the horizon while the river spills over into a grassy marsh on its north bank. Turning back to the east, there’s a small motorboat laboring to get upstream—laboring because it’s attached to a tow rope, which is attached to the ferry. The ferry, it turns out, is just a hapless little barge, at the mercy of the river without the guidance of the motorboat pilot on the other end of the towline. Our crossing takes less than five minutes, and connected to it by nothing but that single strand, the pilot directs the barge into place perfectly on the far side. But the deckhand fails to secure it, the ferry swings wide in the current, spins ninety degrees, and slams butt-end into the dock. The pilot scowls as he turns the motorboat around and uses its blunt bow, covered in a tractor tire, to push the barge back into place, where the deckhand finally lashes it to the dock. The Barguzin is Baikal’s third largest tributary, after the Selenga to the south of here and the Upper Angara to the north. It carries about six percent of the water flowing into the lake, along with migratory fish like omul and sturgeon, born in the shallow gravel beds upriver before wandering downstream to spend most of their lives in the lake. And even though it flows through only two towns between its headwaters and the lake, the Barguzin carries a significant pollution load into Baikal, as well, especially organic chemicals from timber operations.

Into the Lake—Deep

Dress warmly, hold your breath, and take a dive . . . You pierce the surface of Baikal at a soft angle and slip like the low rays of the high-latitude sun into a prism of liquid glass. The water molecules release their bonds with each other to embrace you. Sunlight follows you, wiggles, and scatters; the photons themselves become liquid. Sound becomes a liquid, too, thick and syrupy. Gravity loses its bearings and presses at you from all around. Normal reference points fall away— up and down, left and right—your sense of where you are comes only from subtle changes in light, temperature, and pressure. This will take some getting used to. But not to worry, here in the world’s oldest lake, still in its youth at twenty-five million years, you’ve got nothing but time. And if you put on your special magnifying goggles, you’ll see that you’ve got plenty of company, as well. You’re surrounded by a haze of tiny creatures, each no longer than a millimeter and a half. They’re Epischura baicalensis, those elfin shrimp that float through the lake, sucking massive Baikal through their little digestive tracts, feeding on algae and bacteria, pulling out impurities, and helping to keep the lake clean and clear. Epischura baicalensis are members of a group of organisms known as zooplankton—tiny animals and larva that drift and swim through the water, buffeted about by waves and currents. The miniscule creatures that make up zooplankton live everywhere, in just about every body of water on earth, and like Epischura baicalensis, many of them are little shrimp, or copepods. But Epischura baicalensis live nowhere else, and apparently can’t live anywhere else. It’s said that they can’t live even in a glass of Baikal water removed from the lake. Perhaps they die of homesickness. The water surrounding you as you float in Baikal is about as close as you can get in nature to pure H2O. It’s what aquatic scientists call “oligotrophic”— there’s very little in the way of nutrients and minerals running off into it from the surrounding landscape, and so a very limited supply of some of the basic building blocks of life.

Songs and Whispers

Acrumpled and broken strand of asphalt rises at the northern edge of Ulan-Ude, wanders through the dark woods of the Khamar-Daban Mountains, and finally settles into a band of fertile bottom land in a narrow stretch of coastal plain approaching the eastern shore of Lake Baikal. A rattly old Toyota van skitters along the road, passing lonely farms and tiny villages that gather up out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly, domed churches that seem miles from any worshipers, and an occasional solitary babushka by the side of the road selling whatever she’s been able to squeeze from the earth or gather in the woods. There are seven of us riding this highway on this raw morning in October of 2000, crammed into the van and bobbing like buoys to its irregular rhythms—James and me from Boston, our guide Andrei Suknev, his colleague Igor and our driver Kim, all from the city of Ulan-Ude, and two young women who have also signed on with Andrei for a few days—Elisa, from France, and Chanda, from Canada. We’re all eating pine nuts that we bought from one of those women at a wide spot in the road—they’re called orekhi here—and washing them down with lemon soda from a huge plastic bottle. Andrei is showing us how to crack open the nuts’ hard shells with our front teeth and excavate their soft and pungent meat with our tongues. At an austere restaurant in a tiny village that Andrei tells us is called “Noisy Place,” we eat a lunch of rice and some sort of meat, dry bread, and a peculiar variation on borshch, and we pee in an outhouse across the road. We get back in the van and rumble on. We’re heading for a remote national park on Baikal’s eastern shore, but at the moment I’m not quite sure where we’re going. I’d asked Andrei to take us hiking and camping on the lakeshore, to introduce us to local residents, communities, and culture. He’s promised to do that, but he hasn’t provided much beyond the barest details, and none of us has been asking for more.

On the Trail with Pod Boy and Monkey Mind

We are stretched out along the Holy Nose trail, the five of us, clinging to the steep hillside above Chivyrkuysky Gulf. The trail has narrowed even further, and it struggles to get around big trees and through thick brush. Andrei is ahead, as usual, but not as far as before and at a more relaxed pace. Elisa and Chanda walk together, talking. James and I walk separately, not talking. Not not talking as in pissed off at each other not talking, just not talking as in keeping our thoughts to ourselves and being alone here not talking, which we both do a lot. Baikal inspires many things in many people, but it has not yet inspired in either of us the gift of gab. Halfway around the world, cut loose from everything and everyone we’ve ever known, we’re still the same old us—both reserved, contemplative, a little anxious, and more than a little self-conscious. We both have a hard time letting loose and opening up. We are eighteen years apart, we’re only half-brothers, but we’re very much alike, in ways that I’m only now beginning to recognize. In the early part of the trip, James played around with the recording equipment I’d brought, and when I listened back to his recordings later I was stunned to find that sometimes I couldn’t tell who was talking—him or me. And I’m a radio journalist, a guy who listens to his own voice for a living. I should know who’s me and who isn’t. It was more than weird. James and I had different mothers and separate childhoods, but listening to these recordings, I realized that our voices have the same tone and cadence, that we use the same peculiar idioms and even stop and start our conversations in the same way. That we don’t just talk alike but that in some basic ways we clearly even think alike. I still can’t figure out how this happened, but it’s probably why this joint venture is working so well. I would not have done this trip alone, and I don’t think I could have done it with anyone other than James.

Into the Lake—Shallow

The air smells of rain and autumn decay and sends cold, sharp fingers poking through our clothes as the Lonesome Boatman steers our little craft along the shore of the Holy Nose. Beyond the gunwales of the boat, spears of orange and emerald march up the steep hillside—the ubiquitous larch and birch, cedar and fir, muted under the thick sky. And behind this abrupt shoreline rises a dark mountain chain that extends fifty kilometers southwest along the length of the peninsula, mirroring the ridges of the Barguzin chain across the bay to the east and the unseen peaks of the Primorsky, Baikal, and Khamar Daban ranges hugging the lake’s western and southern shores. This is the vertiginous lay of the land around nearly all of Baikal’s shoreline. It’s not just the clear and deep water that can make one’s head spin. On all sides, mountains rear up five, six, and seven thousand feet above the lake, and then plunge past the surface and on toward the depths with barely a pause to acknowledge the change from air to water. Bobbing in a boat on its surface, you get the peculiar feeling that Baikal is itself contained by some larger vessel. One English word that I’ve heard used to describe the lake basin, in keeping with the notion of Baikal being a “sacred sea,” is “chalice,” like some kind of holy vessel cradling these mystical waters. You get the peculiar feeling, as well, that the world begins and ends here. There are no landmarks that are not part of the Baikal ecosystem, not a spot of earth on which a drop of falling rain doesn’t flow into Baikal. And despite the lake’s magnitude, it’s actually a very small world, at least the part that humans can occupy. Around most of the lake there’s almost no “shore” to speak of, just a narrow margin at the base of the mountains here and there where humans can get a toehold at the edge of the abyss.

A Flash of Blue Light

Some places are just a place. Some places are a journey. Three days out of Vladivostok, the westbound Number One train lumbers across the Siberian outback like a team of driven oxen. The train’s nineteen hulking, crimson and blue cars creak and groan as they throw themselves forward at speeds not much different than when this track was hacked through half a continent of nearly impenetrable forest and bog in the days of the last tsars a hundred years ago. Three days aboard this beast-machine has gotten us deep into Russia, beyond a hundred ragged towns with names like Obluche, Zilovo, Spassk-Dalny, and Shimanovskaia, nearly every one of which, it seems, was established as a gateway to the mines and prisons of the tsars’ exile system or of the Soviet Gulag, and which generations later still seem more outposts than towns. Clusters of log homes and cabbage patches line the tracks, ashen concrete apartment blocks rise beyond, and doleful bands of kerchiefed women at each station peddle pirozhki and salted fish, unshelled pine nuts in newspaper cones, and hard-boiled eggs cradled in baby carriages. All are thinly tethered to Mother Russia by the lace curtains and flowers in every window, the stubbornly proud train stations, and these two thin steel rails. We’re three days deep into Siberia and, it seems, no place at all. Brown fields spread from the outskirts of the settlements, blotted at random intervals by abandoned and half-collapsed factories, and through the emptiness between passes an almost unchanging plain coursed by wandering rivers and deep thickets of dark pine and fir, wispy white birches, and larches glowing a brazen yellow. Dawn this morning revealed the regional capital of Ulan-Ude, the latest in a string of sullen cities of cinder blocks and smokestacks. This afternoon will bring us to the tarnished old imperial city of Irkutsk, first settled in the seventeenth century and later the destination of some of the luckier of the tsars’ exiles. We’re 3,700 kilometers west of the Pacific, 5,500 kilometers east of Moscow, 250 kilometers north of Mongolia, and south of nowhere.

Righteousness, Uncertainty, and the Point of No Return

Life in Russia is littered with small humiliations and labyrinthine obstacles to everyday tasks, and seems to have always been. And when you notice this, which is pretty much right away, you begin to understand the fatalism and stoicism that permeates this country. To get to the offices of the Baikal Environmental Wave, you have to squeeze into a cramped and rattletrap city bus, which hurtles along a dusty avenue through Irkutsk’s drab Akademgorodok, or university district, on the western bank of the Angara. Above the kerchiefs and caps bobbing around you, you might notice a color-coded route map, and you might initially be surprised at this little flash of consideration for the rider—we don’t even have route maps on the buses in Boston. But as the crowd shifts and you move closer, you discover that this speck of civility is merely an illusion. Instead of Russian, the names on the map are in German, and instead of Irkutsk, the bus system depicted is that of Potsdam. The bus is second hand, a castoff from Russia’s former satellite state of East Germany, no less, and local officials didn’t even bother to try to disguise the fact. Getting off the bus, you spot your destination—a new building that’s not yet finished but already looks old, sprouting up amid a scattering of other older structures that look as if they were never completed. You’ve been told that the office you’re looking for is toward the front of the building, right next to the street, but to get to it you have to take a circuitous path up the side and around the back, through the courtyards of neighboring buildings, under a darkened archway and through a construction site to an unmarked side door. You feel like little Billy Whatshisname from that insipid Sunday comic strip The Family Circus, forever taking the most roundabout route home through whatever trouble and mess he can get into, except that here you’re certainly not looking to get into trouble, but there is no short, straight line to your destination, and you’re pretty sure there never will be.

One of the Best Enterprises in Russia

The Angara River races out of Lake Baikal like a daughter fleeing her angry father for the arms of her lover. So goes the legend of the powerful river that is Baikal’s only outlet. Until the 1950s, you could see a huge rock near the mouth of the river that was said to prove the legend—the rock hurled by father Baikal toward his recalcitrant offspring, hoping to block her way as she ran off to join her beloved Yenisei, the great river to the west. Today, only a tiny tip of what’s known as Shaman Rock is still visible. Powerful Baikal could not block his daughter’s way and tame her energies, but humans could. They captured daughter Angara behind a series of hydroelectric dams and put her to work for the good of the Soviet people. One of the dams raised the level of Baikal by a meter and submerged most of the great rock in the river. Isolated in the middle of sparsely populated Siberia, its colossal depths and unique ecosystem enclosed behind its barrier of mountains, it would be easy to imagine that Baikal remains a world unto itself. But today that would be just an act of imagination. The lake may have stood apart for millions of years, but in the last 100 years, humans have speeded up time and collapsed space, and Baikal can no longer blithely follow its own, idiosyncratic course. Some changes were already evident early in the twentieth century. The Barguzin sable, source of so much wealth over more than 200 years, was on the verge of extinction, its long decline punctuated by Nicholas II’s belated decision to protect it with the Barguzinsky Nature Reserve. The limits of the limitless lake itself were starting to be tested, too—Baikal’s populations of omul and sturgeon were crashing as human populations rose, spawning habitat was disrupted, and new fishing technology was introduced. And along its southern shores, workers were clearing, blasting, flattening, and filling in, laying the path for the needle that would truly puncture Baikal’s bubble of isolation, 250 years after the arrival of the first Russians.