By 1997, Sobolonye had become a profoundly unhealthy place to be:
morale in the village plummeted and alcoholism, already a kind of
cultural norm, became rampant. Things began to break and burn, and
people began to die—in all kinds of ways. Today, three of the huntress
Baba Liuda’s five children lie in the village graveyard. “I can’t call it life
anymore,” she said. “It’s just an existence.”
Under these circumstances, time, as most of us know it, begins to blur
into irrelevance. Replacing it in Sobolonye was a far more approximate
chronology that could be called subsistence time: when you’re broke and
disconnected and living in the woods, the steady pronouncements of
clocks and calendars no longer carry the same weight. Maybe, if you’re
lucky, the arrival of a meager pension check will give some structure to
the month, but if some or all of this money is invested in vodka, it will
only serve to blur time further. As a result, subsistence time includes
periods of suspended animation combined with seasonal opportunities
determined by the natural cycles of fish, game, bees, and pinecones.
These, in turn, may be punctuated by potato planting and the occasional
stint on a logging or road building crew. It’s a kind of ancient schedule
that is all but unrecognizable to many of us, despite the fact that millions
of people live this way all over the world.
Markov did his best to dodge the depression and inertia that stalked so
many of his neighbors, and one way he did this was by spending more and
more time in the taiga. “He was a good man,” recalled his neighbor Irina
Peshkova. “He knew everything in the forest—everything. He could find
any root. He even saved some bear cubs once.”
“He was always running around doing something,” said Denis
Burukhin. “One cannot afford to be lazy in the forest: you need firewood;
you need water. You have to be checking your traps and your nets,
hunting for meat—you have to be hustling all the time.”
Perhaps recognizing the need for some kind of objective order and
discipline, Markov kept an alarm clock in his cabin. But the longer one
spends in the elemental and self-directed world of the taiga, the harder it
can be to put up with the demands of a domestic routine. By the time
Trush ran into him and confiscated his gun, Markov’s preference had
ron
(Ron)
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