Trans-Sib Part Dva: the land that goes by

There were so many places along this journey I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs: stop the train!  I want to explore!  We left the Moscow station at night, and sometime in the wee hours we passed Nizhny Novgorod, which is the capital city of the area I lived during my exchange - I didn't realize until I woke up at sunrise the next morning that we were farther east than I had ever been.  When we left, it still seemed like summer in Moscow - some of the leaves were changing, but the gardens around the Kremlin were still in full bloom, and everyone was out in short sleeves, eating ice cream and wearing sunglasses.  For the first day of our journey, it still seemed like we were just on the cusp of fall: the stands of tall birch had splotches of color here and there and the grasses were just beginning to change (including something that looked very much like fireweed, gone to tuft and beginning to turn red). 

There were fewer industrial cities than I expected, but tiny settlements up against the tracks here and there, old style wooden houses with garden plots and dirt roads.  At one point we passed two crumbling complexes that looked as though they were prisons or detainment camps - they had watchtowers set around the fenced perimeter and bunker-type buildings within.

We never stopped long enough at any of the stations to go beyond the platform.  I would see a solitary fellow walking along one of the village settlement roads, or someone riding a rusted bicycle along a path near the tracks, and wish that we had the chance to stop in these out of the way places.  On the second night we passed through the foothills of Ural Mountains and did not see the obelisk that marks the border of Europe and Asia.  The land became more open, with grassy stretches and fields where hay had been scythed and appeared to be gathered by hand into stacks - the kind of landscape you might see in a Van Gogh painting, which also made me think of the part in Anna Karenina when Lev goes out into the fields to work with the peasants.  We passed Omsk and Novosibirisk, the largest city in Siberia.

Dostoevsky was exiled to Omsk in 1849 - the Siberian exile system of the Tsars was rarely practiced by the beginning of the 20th century, but Stalin brought it back on a whole new level with the vast network of Gulags, the main administration centers for a variety of work camps, resettlement programs, and psychiatric hospitals.  It is easy to see why escape from the Gulag seemed unlikely - open bogs and wide rivers and forests that stretched to the horizon.  We seem to have passed into full-blown fall at this point- everything either dark red or burnt orange or yellow, another beautiful sunrise as I lay in my top berth and watched the colors all light up from the low angle of the sun across the flat Siberian plain.

On our third day we woke up to heavy skies, the dark and wet trunks of pine trees, and wet leaves on the ground everywhere.  We started twisting and turning through more hills and the landscape with dark evergreens and late fall color made me think of New Hamshire.  At one point in the morning, we started to see the first light layer of snow from the night before, and as we climbed a bit higher, we went through a village that looked like a remote Christmas card, leaves entirely gone and evergreens with a few inches of snow under low clouds.  We twisted back out to fall again, and through my favorite scenery of the trip, on the way to Krasnoyarsk.  It seemed like we passed by village after village, some with beautiful woodwork on the houses and rich black soil in their turned over gardens.  Cabbage, it seemed, was the major crop still in active harvest.  This did not seem like an isolated place at all, but part of a larger community.  We would climb a bit and the valleys and ridges of green and orange would suddenly open up on one side, while the houses seemed to fit perfectly with the landscape...

Krasnoyarsk is the jumping off point for taking a train south into the Republic of Tuva, part of the Russian Federation, but only just.  Ever since reading Richard Feinman's "Stamps from Tuva", I've thought of this place as sort of the ends of the earth, but the Trans-Sib edges fairly close to the border at this point - probably the closest I will ever get. 

By the afternoon, we had passed the halfway point  for the rail between Moscow and Beijing, and overnight we rolled through the middle of Siberia and crossed the Angara River in the early morning light into Irkutsk.