Marcel Theroux - Far North

It was close to midsummer, light round the clock, and the insects and birds loud enough to drive you crazy.

I felt I couldn’t live in the town any longer, and I rode away into the mountains.

For two months of that summer, I lived in an abandoned cabin on a lake. There was an old skiff, and I set nets in the water for fish, but looking back, the rest of that time is lost to me.

All I know is that sometime in late August, when the long nightless summer days were drawing to a close, and the mosquitoes had died off, I ate my supper, pulled on my boots, and went outside to drown myself.

The boat sat on an outhaul because the lake was big enough to get choppy at times, and I didn’t want to risk her near the rocks. I pulled her in and then set off for the middle of the lake.

I loved the sounds of the moving water, the plop and drip of the oars, the gurgling from the stern, and the occasional slap of a small wave; and I loved the smell which rose off the warm larches like cinnamon off a baked bun.

In my mind, those moments between summer and the start of winter shared the sadness of my own middle age. I knew that in a few weeks, the first snow would fall and dust the horseshoe of mountains that ringed the valley. Then the mercury would plummet, down to where only an alcohol thermometer could gauge how cold it was: sixty and seventy below. The lake would be locked under six feet of ice. Soon there would be nothing to smell on the freezing air, and the lake, until it broke up with loud cracks the following May, would be silent.

About a hundred yards out, I shipped the oars and drifted. The sky above me was turning purple. When I got to the fishing nets, I hauled them in. The last time , I thought, and there was a sense of peace inside me that I hadn’t known for years.

A couple of grayling fell from the net with fat thunks onto the floor of the boat. I felt sorry for the poor creatures. I grabbed one. It bucked in my hand and then slipped over the rail of the boat. I threw the other one after it and there was a flash of silver as it vanished in the inky water.

Alone in the gathering darkness, I yanked off my boots, stood upright in the teetering boat, pinched my nostrils shut, and got ready to jump.

I’d thought about this moment so many times that I almost felt I’d done it before. As I went, I gave the boat a kick to send it far away from me. The shock of the cold water knocked the breath out of my body. Suddenly, I was fighting for my life. The thick padded sleeves of my summer jacket filled with water and dragged against me like lead wings, but my face kept on upwards, looking towards the sky. I shut my eyes and tried to force myself deeper ithe water, but my body was struggling against me. It felt like I wasn’t killing myself, but some poor, unwilling fellow who wanted nothing of it. It was as though his legs were keeping me up and his sharp, shallow breaths were putting air in my lungs.

Gradually, I figured, my legs would weaken, and the fight would go out of me. That idea kind of relaxed me. Water began trickling into my mouth and nostrils. I peed myself and a cloud of warmth spread out around me. I waited for a flood of final images to fill my brain as my whole sorry life folded up like a telescope into that moment. I could still hear the rasp of my breathing, but behind that now was a deeper note, like the deep bowed string of a contrabass, drawing me in towards it — the sound of my quietus.

I leaned back. The water bubbled and closed over my ears, muffling the noise. My body began to shake. It seemed like death was close. That throbbing bass sound grew louder. My eyelids flickered open to see what it was.

There was a tiny silhouette above me, banking steeply towards the farthest northern slope. An aeroplane.

I watched amazed as the silhouette dipped down below the top of the ridge. Then there was a faint pop , followed by louder cracks as trees broke under the weight of the plane. The noise echoed around the valley for a time. Then it all went quiet again.

My fingers were so numb and cold that it took me a while to unlatch the buttons of my jacket. I let it sink in the water and struck out for the boat. By the time I got to her, I was too weak to crawl in, so I just clung on to her stern, sicking up water, and flailing my legs to bring her in to shore.

*

It was midnight by the time I reached the wreck. It had been so long since I saw anything like it that it seemed like an apparition, and I half-thought that I was on the lake bottom already, dreaming these things.

She was a biplane, fitted with wheels for summer flying, in a red and white livery. The starboard wing had sheared off at impact. I ran my fingers over the jags in the metal.

Most of all what struck me was the smell in those woods — it seemed to belong to an old childhood dream. It came back to me in waves. I kept thinking of when pa put his auto on blocks for the last time and he gave me the job of draining the fuel tank with a length of hose into a can. I sucked so hard I took down a gulp of gasoline. I wanted to be sick, but couldn’t and my shit turned tarry and dark the next day.

Gasoline. That was the smell in those trees. It was so strong you felt you could have got drunk off it. It had that shimmering, sharp feeling you get when you put your nose over a glass of warm whiskey.

And then suddenly the whole wood was lit up for a second brighter than noontime, as though a flash of lightning had hit. The thunder followed a second later, and the boom knocked me back off my feet and down into the darkness I’d glimpsed at the lake bottom.

THE TUNGUS HAVE a story that, who knows how many years ago, when the first pilots were opening up the east, one named Sigizmund Levanevskii flew out to reconnoitre a Far Northern route.

In those early days, the craft they had were small and spindly with no fancy instruments, and they were forced to fly low, without stopping, hugging the earth, and getting all mixed up in the weather.

Two or three days out, Levanevskii and his crew ran into trouble. They lost power from their engines. They had no parachutes and the land below them was nothing but an ocean of trees.

Knowing that it was too late to save his aircraft, Levanevskii gambled that at least some of his men would survive the crash if he could bring the plane down in a lake. But the plane smacked into the water and sank in seconds, leaving an oily stain and a hiss of steam behind it.

The government of the time searched and searched for the wreck and the dead men, but couldn’t find them.

But the Tungus will tell you that someone did see that plane go down. The great-great-great-granddaddy of one of them was herding reindeer by the lake as that doomed thing came plummeting out of the sky.

This man, who was just a boy at the time, watched it slap into the water, break up, and sink almost immediately. Seconds later, the valley was silent again, but the face of the lake was all shaken up by the impact, and waves splashed over the boy’s boots.

Then the boy lit a fire so that when the men finally appeared he could welcome them with a cup of tea.

The herder who told me this story the first time found it so funny he almost wept with laughter as he recounted it. He put on a big performance, pretending he was kindling a fire while greasy bubbles rose to the lake top.

Imagine! The boy was so in awe of the white man’s fancy gizmos that he thought that was how a plane was supposed to land!

The story seems to making fun of the boy’s simpleness, but the real butt of the joke is Levanevskii and his broken plane.

The idea of looking up at that aircraft, that miracle, must have made the Tungus feel pretty small. They like to say their shamans know how to fly. But I’ve met some shamans and they could certainly drink, but not one of them could fly worth a damn.