Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

I was becoming numb to scenery. My stock of landscape adjectives was running low. On the road paralleling the Ingoda, the panoramas just kept  coming at us as if they were being brought to the windshield by a conveyor belt somebody had forgotten to turn off. The road was gravel and dusty, the sky blank and bright. From it a hawk flared suddenly right in front of us, its belly feathers white, and then was gone. In every direction the land rolled on--unfenced, untenanted, unvaried, still apparently unused. The idea of "scenery" implies a margin, a frame. What we were seeing had neither, and I couldn't exactly situate it in my mind.

Siberia is a big place. It contains almost 8% of the earth's land. Everyone knows two things about it: it's cold, and it's remote. That remoteness has a special importance: "Siberia" is the place in the restaurant, or classroom, that is farthest from the action, or perhaps closest to the bathroom. It's where the Tsars, and later, the Soviets, sent exiles. It's where no one wants to be. And yet despite that--or perhaps because of it--it has a certain allure. It is untouched, unknowable, and vast. It's these qualities that attract travel writer Ian Frazier, whose book Travels in Siberia covers a half dozen excursions into the Russian outback, some large and some small. On these excursions, Frazier sees firsthand the qualities that make Siberia so daunting, but also so attractive.

Frazier's dalliance with Siberia begins in western Russia, Moscow and St. Petersburg, where Frazier becomes enamored with Russia, and even begins to take courses in the nation's difficult language between excursions. It's from St. Petersburg, the "Window to the West," where he first begins to think about crossing into Siberia, turning his back on Europe and looking the other direction. His first trips to Siberia, however, are actually from the other direction: he enters western Russia from Alaska, hopping over to coastal outpost towns like Providenskaya, and even stopping to look at Russia from land on the tiny island of Little Diomede, a few short miles from Russia's Big Diomede. But it's not until he decides that he must cross Siberia by car that the journey really begins.

The crossing of the Siberian road, or Trakt, is the heart of the book: a seven-week journey over rough roads and difficult conditions. Frazier is ferried by a pair of guides, Sergei and Volodya, who are by turns ingenious and careless, affable and irascible, and as you might expect of strangers thrust together under such stress for nearly two months without ceasing, they begin to hate each other. The van, provided by Sergei, is a piece of junk that breaks down every couple of days, but the guide manages to hold it together, quite literally with wire and tape. They are bedeviled by thick clouds of mosquitoes, and everywhere in Russia seems to be littered with trash. But among the rewards are Siberia's beautiful yet remote cities, like Tobolsk and Irkutsk, and the wonder of Lake Baikal.

One of the nice things about Travels in Siberia is that it's a history book as well: Frazier devotes long sections to the conquest of the Mongols and the Golden Horde, to Russian exploration of the Far East, and to the fate of the unlucky Decembrists, a group of dashing sophisticates who, if they were not put to death, were exiled to Siberia after being foiled in their attempts to assassinate the Tsar. These sections elevate the book above a mere travelogue, and allow us to see, as Frazier does, history unfolding along the Trakt, memorialized in small dusty museums and grand statues all out of proportion with the towns they gaze down on. Siberia, as Frazier sees it, is beautiful and ugly, a testament to human daring and human cruelty. Sergei bristles at Frazier's constant desire to hunt down Soviet-era prisons, and a tense photo stop at an operating prison makes it clear that such places have not completely disappeared. The prisons, and the many bribes needed for safe passage, make Siberia out to be a place of danger. In an unexpected, and ironic, twist, Frazier and his guides arrive at their final stop in Vladivostok on September 11, 2001--real danger, it seems, having struck at home.

A few years later, Frazier makes a final journey to Siberia because he wants to see it in winter. In this final section of the book he visits the Siberian city of Yakutsk, the only major city in the world built on permafrost, and the coldest. He drives on the ice the entire length of frozen Lake Baikal; he visits a traditional village of Even natives. (How many Americans understand that Russia, like North America, has its own indigenous groups? Or that, like the ones here, they have managed to establish long communities in conditions most of us would find absurd?) Frazier feels he hasn't really seen Siberia until he's seen it in the cold, and it's hard not to agree: this final trip, which trades mosquitoes and trash for snow and sable martens, has the bulk of the book's charm.

I enjoyed Frazier's style, which is knowledgeable but loose. He seemed of a type, to me, with Paul Theroux, both aging white guys who come off a little befuddled and out of place on their grand excursions, but not so much that you find yourself wondering, Who let this doofus travel the world and not me? I could do without the constant rib-jabs about how beautiful Siberia's women are, but the contentious relationship between Frazier and his guides provide a humor that makes the book feel human and--especially important, for a book about such a cold place--warm.