This is not what comes to mind for me when I hear the Russian word for tungsten, but this is apparently the rock that the horse "Volfram" was named after.  How could such a pretty word like Volfram translate to tungsten?  But it does.  I always thought it was just a pretty name for a horse.

Volfram was the draft pony in the stable where I worked for lessons when I lived in Novgorod, Russia.

He pulled the manure cart out to the manure dump, and looked very nice in harness, even given the non-pretty payload.  He was light sorrell in winter, and as big-fluffy-fuzzy as they come.  He had a kind face with a large eye.  He was an intact stallion, and was still being used as a stud.  He was leading a pretty active, full life, as manure-cart ponies go.  He had a great temperment, one of the best in the barn.

One weekend I was out at the stable and was carrying water or something past the end of the barn.  I stopped and caught my breath.  There was a horse hide stretched out on a frame to dry in the sun.  I just stared, as the realization dawned on me that I recognized that hide.

I went to Volfram's stall and it was empty.  I asked.  He had colicked.  They put him down.  This was what was left.  Nothing left to waste- a functional being in a functional place.

I think the kids that worked alongside me (ages from around 9 to 16) put on an extra tough face when they were at the stable, because the atmosphere was tough.  The trainer was a very serious man who kind of scared me.  The horses were big and fast.  We were show-jumping these animals in all weather without any safety equipment.  Just one sour old Afghan war veteran running this rag-tag crew of macha squinty-eyed pre-adolescent and adolescent girls (with two young men as the exceptions).  It was not a place you wanted to be seen crying.

So I didn't.  I stuffed it down. 

Then, just now, I was reading a proposal from a group working in the Altai mountains, and the author mentioned a "volfram" mining operation.  I translated. 

Multitran gave me "tungsten"  for Volfram.  Not a fair trade at all.  Not at all.

My first trip to Siberia was in July 2000, when I was celebrating my 27th birthday and Saturn Return by going on a horseback mountain trek through a new ecotourism company that needed to experiment with a foreigner (they have since become a successful business).  I went up the mountain alone with a local guide.

I just discovered some old photos from that trip that I scanned years ago.




The Road to Biisk, between Barnaul and Chemal.

Our crappy car fell apart at the rate of about a part per 20 km.  The usual drive of 6 hours turned into 13 hours.  But the company was good- students a little younger than me working for the ecotourism company for the summer.





The first day, rain.

I was photographing this part of the trip with a crappy disposable camera that I kept in a pouch in my windbreaker.  Not bad, for that.






My guide (what was his name?  Sasha?), raised in the wilds there, half Altai and half Russian, was especially gifted at starting campfires in 10 minutes or less no matter whether it was hailing, raining, or blowing and gusty.

This was our last campfire (and warm lunch of canned meat) before galloping back to the main camp.








Our first day out we just did a day trip for six hours and then slept back at main camp.  I think they all wanted to see if I was crazy or if I really could ride in those conditions.

The second day we went out and the two of us slept in tents at a crest.  In the morning I took this photo looking south towards China and Kazakhstan, and then Pakistan.



This photo was taken at the crest we made on the first day.  The horse was named Red:  "Ryzhii" - and the guide sang him a little song - "Ryzhka, Ryzhka maya."  (Little Red, My Little Red.)  He worked very hard for me.  An honest little guy. The horse, I mean.  The guide was a little strange.



I was so sad to leave the main camp.  You see Ryzhii relaxing there, still tacked up after our last ride.

It's amazing how the two horses and me and the guide had become a unit, a team, over three days.  I never expected or expect to see any of them again (even having been back in the area once since then), but it still felt like a heartbreak to be driven away from there.  Like I was leaving a real part of me behind.


Yeah.  The guy I asked to take the picture didn't know what he was doing.  But you can sort of see three of the folks I hung out with on the hellacious car ride to Chemal and then each night back at main camp the few nights I was there.  They helped me celebrate my birthday in fine style the night before, complete with drinking and song.  This photo was taken right before I got in the SUV that drove me back to Barnaul, the day of my birthday proper.

I LOVE the color I had my hair that summer.  It was called "fiery eggplant." 



On the way out we stopped at one of the tourist traps along the way: an artesian well that is a sacred site to the Altai people.  They - and Russian tourists - tie bits of cloth on the branches around the spring.  Each is a tiny prayer.  I guess it must be an offshoot of the practice of prayer flags in Tibet.  A lot of Tibetan Buddhist influence can be seen around there.

A line of little kiosks with gifties of all kinds lined the parking lot.  I remember the outhouse was particularly foul there.

But the beribboned trees around the spring, here framing the Katun River in the background, were pretty.


I'm so glad I found these old scanned photos!  I should scan more of them.  There are some lovely shots-- I keep the prints on my kitchen cupboards to remind me of this little adventure-- the wildest thing I've ever done, probably.

This is a photo that was taken in June 2004 in a woods outside of Novgorod, aka Velikii Novgorod, aka Novgorod the Great.

We were having a picnic and roasting shashlyki when these local kids came through on nicely turned out horses, with saddle pads decorated with the shield of the city and other fashionable accoutrements.  I went for a spin (for a small fistful of roubles) and Sveta, in the hat, fulfilled a dream of riding for the first time.  She gave me this photo when I was visiting her and her new husband and new baby in September. 

Her husband Yura is a very kind and thoughtful man.  He made a point of telling me how much it means that I come back and visit my old friends in Novgorod, to remind them that "there is something out there, that we are connected to the world."  I know it means a lot to me to remain connected to that sleepy ancient city where I first learned to live in a city, and the amazing teaching I received at the institute.

I studied in the Russian Department, not a department where people go to study in order to become a jet setter, businessman, or politician.  I studied with genuine lovers of Russian language and literature, the future unemployed or underemployed poetry geeks of Russia.  The new economy of Russia is slowly stamping out their kind.  The Russian Department is a tenth of the size it was when I went there for a year 13 years ago.  There are only 7 Russian Majors, and they are all specializing in journalism, the only employment opportunity available for writers anymore.

The poets, lovers, dreamers... they are struggling in Russia just as they are struggling in the US right now.  In some ways it's a comfort to me-- despite cultural barriers and language barriers, they feel like my people.

I'm about four people folded into one, according to a friend of mine.  I have far-ranging interests and I have tended to have about 12 projects cooking at the same time since I was about ten years old.  Horses, language, dance, poetry... these are my loves.  The Russian-oriented part of me isn't far from the poetry-oriented part.  I studied the Silver Age of Russian Poetry in my last year of formal Russian studies, and I fell in love with Anna Akhmatova's "Requiem."  She memorized that series of poems, putting nothing in print, meeting different friends on different bridges, disclosing parts of the poems and repeating the lines into the memory of each friend, only collecting the scraps from the collective memory after the Stalin purges ended, and she felt safe enough to put the poetry into print.

During that time, when she was composing "Requiem" in that beautiful city on the Gulf of Finland, Leningrad (now Petersburg), she wrote this:

Dante

Il mio bel San Giovanni,
Inferno, Dante

He didn't go back even after he was dead
To that ancient Florence of his.
Leaving, he looked straight ahead:
It's for him I am singing this.
Night.  A torch.  A final kiss.
Outside, the sound of fate-- a kind
Of howl.  From hell he sent her a curse.
In paradise, she was still on his mind.
He didn't go barefoot, late at night,
Penitentially attired,
Through Florence-- treacherous, full of spite,
Whom he so faithfully desired.

(translation - Lyn Coffin)

I know her imprisonment in that beautiful city was a real imprisonment, but this mix of desire for a place at the same time you are imprisoned there is a sentiment with which I strongly identify.  I grew up on a terribly remote, wind-buffeted shore of Eastern Lake Ontario.  I often feel like I will never feel at home anywhere else, at the same time as it was a place where I nearly ended my life out of sheer despair and loneliness.

It is a great mystery in my life, why I feel so at home in Russia.  I can't explain it, but one probable explanation is that many people in Russia feel this deep loyalty and love for their home at the same time they are aware that it imprisons them (from reaching their full potential, from living in full health, from living with freedom of religion and expression, etc. etc.).

The landscape of North Western New York also greatly resembles - in topography and climate - North Western Russia.

Windblown, buggy, snowy or muddy, a big flat swamp.  Birches, pine, aged cemeteries, abandoned villlages.  Horses.


Nathan Altman. Portrait of the Poetess Anna Andreevna Akhmatova. 1914.
The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Привет!  Hi, dear reader.  Welcome to my experiment in documenting my life as a Russian-speaking Amerikanka working in the Russian-speaking diaspora, and in Russian and Former Soviet lands!  I have been at this work for 13 years now, and I have many many stories to share.

My work has me traveling irregularly to Russia, and working daily on projects concerning the wellbeing of my second Rodina, my second motherland.  Akh, Rodina.  "Let them say you're a monster-- we like you,"  (to paraphrase the rock band DDT).

The Bad Beginning

My journey began when I was 15, seeking a way to avoid a summer trip to the boring German city of Emden (am Nordsee - that's about all anyone has to say about Emden), and hoping to provoke controversy in my own boring hometown.  A chance to go to the Soviet Union came up through my school's art club (it's a long story I'll tell another time).  Anyway, my head was turned, and at that tender age I pledged to learn Russian and go to Russia to live.  I did all that, and now I'm living a life that in one way or another seems to pivot on that country and its people.

I have no Russian ancestry.  I have no Russian relatives.  My father, a language nerd, learned some Russian in high school, and can make his way through simple texts with a dictionary.  I never heard it spoken when I was growing up.  I speak with an accent, but everyone thinks I'm second generation Russian.  Sometimes it takes some doing to explain that I just liked the language and so I learned it.  When they ask me "why?"  I say, "that's what you speak in Russia.  If you spoke Spanish in Russia, I'd have learned Spanish."