Bridge thinking

Bridges are more than roads. They not only take you to somewhere, but they do it by taking you above somewhere else, somewhere else where the going is rougher.

About ten years ago I spent the Christmas season in Krasnoyarsk, an industrial city located just about dead-center Siberia. Siberian winters are just what you think they are, colder'n hell. But I had a long, thick woolen coat, a good Russian fur hat, a scarf and gloves, and high, grotesquely ugly rubber boots that chafed.

One night my colleague Yevgeny invited me and a group of other Russian colleagues to travel with him to his dacha and experience a real Siberian banya. The banya is a combination of things - an incredibly hot room, birch switches that one beats one's friends with, and instant access from the hot room to the great outdoors, all million square miles of it, sixty feet deep in snow, the temperature conveniently at around minus 40. I call that convenient because minus 40 is minus 40 if you're using Farenheit as I was or Celcius as Russian colleagues were. Minus 40 needs no translation.

Among my shortcomings is a refusal to say "no" when presented with really bad ideas like Siberian banyas. So I said yes. And when other Russian colleagues muttered in angry Russian to Yevgeny, "Nyet-nyet-nyet," and one of them, Yvan, said to me, "No, no, Mark... eet ees too far... theesss eesss not goot idea..." I paid them no attention, insisting that they all come along for the fun.

We piled into a small Russian car of dubious provenenance. At five o'clock when we set out the night was already pitch black and a passing blizzard was making exploratory jabs in our direction. I remember being really, really surprised by how long we drove, me jammed into a small rusty car with four big Russian guys, three of whom didn't want to be there and talked about feeling that way a lot. The blizzard closed in around us and soon even the driver could see nothing. He sped on like a madman, steering by instict and encouraged by his huge, boisterous faith that nothing bad could happen when a foreign guest was in his car.

We stopped at about 7:00. We were at the huge Krasnoyarsk Hydroelecric dam on the Yenisey River, a dam two kilometers in width, a bright red portait of Lenin on it to inspire one to greater efforts and coincidentally to use up five hundred gallons of left-over red paint. Krasnoyark is downstream from the dam and Yevgeny's dacha is upstream.This picture shows it in summer, and Yevgeney's dacha is above the dam on the right hand side of the river. The expanse of water is known locally as the Sea of Kransoyarsk, and even though the picture makes it look really really small, there's a lot of water back there. Those distances are vast even by Siberian standards.

The car stopped in the inky blackness just the other side of the dam. No more road. Ahead of us - jack squat that I could see. The Sea of Krasnoyark was frozen and snow covered, there was no light, nobody had a flashlight. Russian colleagues muttered "Nyet-nyet-nyet." Yvan's glasses slowly glazed over with thickly inscribed frost crystals. Yevegeny gestured into the vastness of the Siberian blizzard and proclaimed, "Ees chust over there... Come Mark. Come. Soon you will bee enchoying goot Russian banya, goot Seebeereean banya." He pounded himself on the chest, inhaled deeply through the nose, exhaled through the mouth and then the lunatic set off on foot across the Sea of Krasnoyarsk. Cursing myself I followed, three murderous Russians cursing along behind me.

Across a frozen sea, in a blizzard, in the Siberian night. I began to reflect on my decision-making. My most immediate problem lay in the fact that the sea, while frozen, was covered in about three feet of loose snow, so we weren't strolling along humming skating walzes. We were struggling through the snow, in the darkness, minus forty degrees in both languages. My incredibly stupid bloody rubber boots filled up with snow in no time until each seemed to weigh fifty pounds. Twenty-something kilograms, in the spirit of cultural bloody sharing.

Imagine my surprise when, about 20 minutes into our death-march, I began to feel very, very hot. Under my thick, long woolen coat I was sweating. A lot. Sweat oozed from under my fine Russian fur hat. The snow in my rubber boots began to melt and to slosh around. I loosened my scarf. Ten minutes later I opened a couple of buttons on my coat. Yvan shook his head sadly and I heard a quiet chorus of "nyet-nyet-nyet's"as if from geese off in the distance.

I could see nothing much and so was terribly alarmed when I very nearly stepped through a hole in the ice. There was a hole in the ice! A bloody great hole for me to step through, vanish under the ice forever, leaving Yevgeny to wonder if I had changed my mind or something, Yvan to say, "I knew we were going to lose him... he had started stripping by then..." What the bloody hell was a bloody great hole doing in the ice in the middle of the Sea of Kransnoyark in the middle of the Siberian winter, minus forty for god's sake? I eased around it, trying to feel for ice cracking beneath me. I couldn't feel anything, only gallons of stinky water sloshing around in my boots.

With effort I caught up to Yevgeny and panted out "You know, Yevgeny, I couldn't, help but, notice just, back there, there was a hole, a hole through the ice..."

"Ah yess!" He beamed at me, proud of me perhaps? No, more like proud of being Siberian and having me discover Siberian things like bloody holes in the ice in the middle of bloody winter. "Ice fishermen," he explained, and made a gesture with his arms to show me how Siberian ice fishermen lift their poles up when they catch a fish. It was a very cultural bloody moment. "Don' fall een," he laughed, and set off again.

That's when I first began to think about bridges, and how they aren't just roads. They take you above places where the going is tough, and I wished I had a bridge.

After about ninety minutes of this, I was all but carrying my coat in my arms to stay cool, we reached the shore. Ahead dim yellow pools of light gave away the fact that there were little cottages here, including Yevgeny's. In fact it wasn't Yevgeny's but his father-in-law's. His was somewhat bigger than the others, with a sloping roof covered in snow piled at least five feet high.

We tumbled into the dacha - there were two women there, but they stayed well out of sight. Yevgeny's father-in-law greeted us and shepherded us out to the banya building itself. We stripped down to our bare bums, and then entered hell.

The banya per se was a small wooden room with a blast furnace going at full blast in the corner. The heat was like a wall you had to get through in order to sit on a wooden bench and wish you were somewhere else. The thermometer measured somewhere north of 100 degrees. Celcius.

Yevgeney, a demonic figure in my mind by now, grinned an unnerving grin and asked, "Eessss every-bodee ready?" He poured a big ladleful of water onto the blast furnace. The water hit the coals and howled bloody murder, leapt back into the room and seared us all to death. Almost. Instinctively I looked at the thermometer to see if it was north of two hundred yet, but of course it hadn't changed. The water didn't raise the temperature. It just used the temperature to boil me alive. I couldn't breathe. I thought I would surely to god pass out, the sooner the better.

Being beaten with birch branches was exactly as much fun as I had expected it to be.

Once we were all well beaten, completely awash in rivers of our own sweat (which felt like blood), dying for god's sake, Yevgeney threw open the door. The five of us scampered (in a manly way) across the pathway and leaped into the deep snow on the field out back. I dove face first into it.

Jesus.

The snow burned just like the steam burned. I lay stunned for a moment asking myself harsh questions with bad words in them. I tried to push myself upwards, but my arms only sank deeper into Siberian snow. I rolled over onto my back and tried to sit up. The snow gave way, my bum sank deeper. I vaguely remember wondering what my testicles thought of all this and noticing that they were nowhere to be seen. Finally I log-rolled to the cleared path and struggled to my feet. Then I lurched for the blast furnace room again wanting more than anything else to be near that wonderful little blast furnace and the banshee blasts of killer steam.

We repeated the whole exercise.

And then we repeated it again, and again.

As we did so, the experience began to change. I began to change.

My fatigue faded, melted away. The periods with the blast furnace became recharging times, powering up times, the birch switches an unlikely but real part of that process. The dives into the snow were the payoff, the reward, exultant moments of absurdity and energy and laughter. And pride, I confess. Look at me! Look what I can do! Energy became enthusiasm, became exhilaration, became exaultation. It was the most wonderful experience I had ever had. And to top it all off, at the zenith moment Yvan paused beneath the roof line... and just over a ton of snow slid down onto him with a soft "whoomph!" leaving only his eyebrows and glasses showing. I thought life was just about perfect at that moment.

Afterwards we ate great greasy slabs of duck or chicken or pork or something, I have no idea what, that Yevgeny's father barbecued, Russian shashlik style, hot and smoky and dripping with fat, washed down with cold Russian beer, there is no better beer on the planet. Pickled vegetables, cheese, caviar, vodka, it was amazing. I was so very, very alive in the moment at that moment, in a blizzard in the middle of a Siberian winter night, a million miles from everywhere with no bridge in sight.