Trains, part 8
My wife, Alice, and I went to Italy in 1999 to visit our son, Brody, who was living in Florence for the summer. We planned to spend a few days in Rome and then take the train north. Everyone suggested we take the bullet train; it was comfortable and quick, they said. But I wasn't in the mood for a bullet train.
Four years earlier, I spent five weeks in southern India with a Rotary exchange team, and I was delighted when I heard that we'd be traveling the breadth of the country by rail, from Mysore to Madras. But as it turned out, it was a high-speed train, equipped with seats in rows resembling a jetliner. The trip lasted all of three hours, and we saw almost nothing of the countryside - just a blur through windows caked with muddy dust.
So given a choice, I chose the slow train to Florence. It was June, and quite warm, so all the window in the car were open, and it was difficult to talk over the noise of the tracks. With remarkable regularity, we plunged into total darkness as the train entered long tunnels, and then the car was blasted by the blinding light of midday as we emerged on the other side. Gradually, Rome gave way to farmland and the rocky hills of Tuscany. Leaning my forehead against the vibrating window glass, I stared as this pastoral scene and, despite, the noise, began to nod off toward sleep when suddenly I was lifted from my seat by the concussion of a bullet train passing in the other direction. This happened several more times during the trip, and each time the shock wave (or perhaps just the noises of several thousand tons of steel passing a few feet from my open window at about 200 mph) rocketed me six inches off my cushion and set my heart to fluttering.
Damn those bullet trains!
3/30/2006
Trains, part 7
( W&J students Craig Brasington, Erin Paraska and Laurie Trautvetter keep warm on the train from Warsaw in 1994)
My first experience with trains in the former Soviet Union came in January 1994, traveling with a group of Washington & Jefferson College students and professors through Eastern Europe and Russia. We went by rail from Warsaw to Moscow, with a three-day stopover in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The rail car was similar in design to the one on which we traveled on in China, but it seemed more solid, cleaner, and there was an actual toilet at the end of the car. Unfortunately, the coal stove on top of the car malfunctioned, and smoke poured through the vents in our compartments all night long, forcing us to keep our windows open. But even those who could sleep with the noxious fumes and the frigid draft didn't sleep much. Four times the train screeched to a halt and border guards, looking like they'd been guarding the witch's castle in "The Wizard of Oz," stormed the car, pounded on the door of our compartments, yelling "Visa! Visa!" They ordered us out of our bunks to stand at attention and present our papers. The
Belarussians were the worst. One of the guards was a woman who giggled behind her woolen glove at the sight of me standing by my bunk in my underwear.
Leaving Vilnius, we were surrounded by drunks and thieves on the unlit station platform. We stood in a circle around our pile of suitcases like covered wagons ready for the assault.
The night passed, warm and smokeless. We woke to the sight of birch trees and deep snow, a landscape devoid of color. Little wooden houses appeared as we approached Moscow. And then we were there, in the capital's huge, gray-brown vastness, among the smokestacks pumping out new volumes of grayness.
"Gloomy, yet dirty," one student quipped. 3/28/2006
Trains, part 6
After the furious and sweaty rush to board the train in Xi'an, a shower would have been in order, but that was out of the question. Our group occupied a "first class" car, but the facilities were limited to a stall at the end of the car with a cold-water sink and a hole in the floor.
Actually, we didn't have it so bad. Our private, four-berth compartments were luxurious compared to the five "hard-cushion" cars ahead of us, where passengers slept on triple-deck planks with no privacy, or in the five cars behind us that had no bunks at all.
We anticipated wiling away our 36-hour journey reading books and writing letters, but the incredible spectacle of China rolling past was too much of a distraction. For most of the day, we sat staring through the open windows, the wind in our faces and the roar of the tracks in our ears.
When the train stopped in mountain villages, we jumped down from the car and jogged to stretch our legs, or leaned from the windows and bargained with the chattering vendors for bottles of beer and roasted ducks.
The dining-car cooks and waiters must have been told that we were important guests. They turned the tablecloths clean-side up for us and found flowers for the vases. They made sure we had plenty to eat: gruel, chicken soup, fried rice and boiled vegetables.
After our last meal, we asked to see the chef. The poor man stood trembling before us, clutching his apron, certain he was to be reprimanded. The staff stood behind him, eyes on their feet. Our praise for their efforts was translated, and they seemed to wilt with relief. We gave them a round of applause, and as is the custom in China, they applauded right along with us. 3/27/2006
Trains, part 5
It is October 1991. I am touring China with a group of journalists. We are supposed to go to Tibet, as well, but our Chinese hosts explain to us that this is impossible because "Tibet is closed." They make it sound as if Tibet is a store and we have arrived just a few minutes after the shopkeeper has left. Actually, Tibet is open - open to everyone except journalists, as it turns out.
We're taken around to what have now become the usual tourist cities - Shanghai, Beijing, Xi'an - by jetliners whose pilots seem to take delight in landing their planes at high speed. The flights are odd: the attendants come down the aisles holding trays and I reach up to take a hot towel or a cup of water and grab instead a keychain.
In Xi'an, we learn that our flight to Guilin has been canceled. We must take the train. It will be a slow, 1,400-mile, semicircular journey from Xi'an in the northwest, through Wuhan in the central east and on to Guilin in the south.
The train stops in Xi'an for just a few minutes, and we have a problem: we are 28 people with 38 heavy suitcases in a waiting room that is up a long flight of steps from the tracks. Some of the people are too old to carry their own bags, so the younger men must carry them as well. We end up throwing the last of the suitcases through the open windows of the car and hopping on as the train begins to pull from the station.
We begin our journey panting, drenched in sweat. It will get worse, but it will all be worth it. For 36 hours we will see parts of China closed to all foreigners - those vast areas between the open tourist cities. We will see poverty and plows pulled by people, duck farms and steam locomotives, a China its government would rather not have us see.
(Tomorrow: More on China) 3/24/2006
Trains, part 4
For three years in the 1960s, I was a student at Darrow School in upstate New York. Sometimes, coming home for Thanksgiving, Christmas or spring break, those of us living around New York City would take the train. We'd lug our suitcase down the mountain along a dirt road to the village of New Lebanon and wait there in front of the grocery store for the Trailways bus coming from Pittsfield, Mass. That would take us to Albany and the cavernous, dingy railway station.
The train ran through the Hudson River valley, immortalized in majestic landscapes by so many 19th century painters, yet we weren't interested in the scenery. We'd go immediately to the bar car, show our fake IDs, sip our gin and tonics, puff on our Pall Malls and Chesterfields and act as much like older, college students as we could.
These were the same tracks that ran just down the hill from our family's home in Scarborough, but the train did not stop at that station. I would have to get off a couple of miles up the river in Ossining, at a station in the shadow of the walls of what once was known as Sing Sing Prison. I'd disembark alone, leaving my schoolmates to continue their party all the way into Grand Central Station.
There's nothing quite so quiet as a railway station after the train has departed. I can recall waiting for my parents, sitting on my suitcase with the white-capped river to my back, no other soul around save the distant silhouette of a gun-toting guard posted in a tower at the corner of the prison wall. 3/23/2006
Trains, part 3
When my family moved to Bronxville, N.Y., in 1955, my father commuted by train to Manhattan. And when we moved to Scarborough - farther north and on the Hudson River - he commuted on another line of the New York Central Railroad.
The station was just a short walk down the hill from our house. In the early 1960s, almost all of the people gathering at the station in the morning were men, hundreds of them in suits and trench coats, carrying brief cases and umbrellas,most of them wearing hats - homburgs in the winter, staw boaters in the summer. In the evening, the sun setting beyond the hills and cliffs on the other side of the river, they streamed off the rail cars with newspapers tucked under their arms, dashing into waiting cars, kissing wives, loosening ties.
As a teenager, this was also my escape from our sleepy neighborhood to New York City. There were express trains, but I preferred to take the local, the train that stopped at every station along the way, places with names like Ludlow, Riverdale, Spuyten Duyvil, Marble Hill and Morris Heights - old Dutch settlements where George Washington and his ragtag army had fought and retreated from the British.
As a student at Washington & Jefferson College, I brought a girl from here home to meet my parents in 1969. On a rainy night, we took the train to the city for dinner. I borrowed my father's trench coat, and on the way home I lost it, left it on the train. It was still raining the next day, and my father needed the coat. The girl had to witness the parental lecture that ensued: "How can you be so irresponsible?" they yelled.
But the girl ended up marrying the irresponsible coat-loser. And she's managed to keep him from losing his clothes ever since. 3/21/2006
Trains, Part 2
In the late 19th century, New York's richest people, like the Astors and the Vanderbilts, liked to go to the mountains of western North Carolina to unwind. To make the trip easier, the built a rail line to Asheville, N.C., on which they could place their private cars.
The benefit of this largesse to normal people was that for many decades after that you could travel easily between New York City and Asheville on daily overnight trains. This was particulalry convenient for my family because my great-grandmother lived in Asheville, and I will never forget riding that train to visit her in 1958.
Grandmother Burroughs was in her 90s and bedridden. She lived in a big, Victorian house on a shady street. After spending time with her in her bedroom, she had her cook fix us lunch - lamb chops - served to us in the dining room as if we were visiting royalty. All the people we saw - the servants and the other people in our hotel and the shopkeepers - spoke and moved as slowly as people wakened in the middle of the night. But it was the train that I remember most.
We boarded at Penn Station and found our compartment - beds that folded down from the wall and a tiny bathroom with a miniature sink that seemed to be made especially for children. We ate our supper in the dining car at tables covered in white, starched tablecloths, with cloth napkins and heavy silverware. The waiters, big, black men in spotless white coats, so sure-footed in the rocking car, carried food to us under silver covers, thick fingers deftly brushing crumbs, pouring water. One big hand patted my shoulder as the other poured more coffee for my father. There is talk of Carolina weather, beaming smiles, chuckling gentle affirmations like "Sho 'nuf."
When the lights go off in our compartment, I pull the sheet up under my chin and listen to the rythym of the wheels clacking over joints in the tracks, see around the curtain and through the window a sliver of moon in the ebony sky. The rocking motion puts me to sleep, but I wake later and realize that we are stopped. I hear muffled voices on the platform of some unknown station is some unkown place, hear the conductor yell, "All aboard!" and then the hiss of brake steam. I feel the car jerk and sense motion, and then soon we are rolling again into the night.
I wake with the light of the rising sun in my eyes. I walk out of the compartment into the passageway and watch Carolina stream past the window: white clapboard shacks, barefoot children, abandoned cars covered in dew and patches of earth the color of paprika.
When we step down from the car, I start counting the hours until we can get back on it again.
Train journeys - a new series
If you happen to be a hopeless romantic, nothing beats traveling by train. And if you've never been rocked to slumber in a sleeping compartment and wakened by the sun rising over a strange and ever-changing landscape, you've missed the thrill of travel as it used to be.
For the next week or so, I'll be remembering the trains and the places they took me over a period of 55 years, beginning with one I was too young to recall. The above photo was taken in 1950 in Ciudad de Valles, Mexico. That's my mother and I leaning from the windows.
At the time, my parents and I were living on my grandfather's sugar cane ranch in Aguabuena. Getting to and from the ranch and Mexico City involved a long journey by train that included a narrow-guage railroad. I checked with my father about this photo. It was taken in Valles as we were leaving for San Luis Potosi, capital of that central Mexican state. It was about a four-hour trip to San Luis, and a much longer one from there to Mexico City.
I recall nothing about those trains, or our life on the ranch, or the language I first began to speak. All I have of those times is a scrapbook of black-and-white photos with serated edges. Yet, somehow I think that my love of train travel began then and there. 3/17/2006
Controversial photo
The Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal set off a firestorm of protest with a page-one photo it published a couple of weeks ago. A state trooper was slain in a gun battle with two bank robbers. Remarkably, the newspaper photographer must have arrived at the scene just as other police did and took a photo of the overall scene: troopers with guns drawn, hunkered down behind cruisers, and one of them in the background of the photo kneeling beside what appears to be the body of the slain trooper. Although the photo is shocking and disturbing, it is hardly gruesome; there is no blood, and the body appears as hardly more than a shadow.
Yet, the newspaper was flooded with letters damning it for printing this photo. It published many of these letters on its editorial page. "I am absolutely appalled at the picture... Obviously you people did not consider the feelings of the trooper's family and friends when showing his dead body for the world to see," was the typical response.
Does this reaction sound familiar? It does to us. We hear it every time we print a shocking news photo.
Journal managing editor Bruce Estes defended the selection of the photo in an editorial, and I like his response:
"As public budgets have eroded fire and police protection in our communities, it is important for citizens to see the potential consequences of those budgetary decisions. In our county and others, fewer sheriff's deputies protect us today than five years ago... Citizens are asking their protectors to do much more with less.
"In the picture of Andrew Speer killed in the line of duty, I saw the sacrifice others make for our safety. The sacrifice that Speer, 33, made for us deserves to be remembered vividly and completely, even if it makes us uncomfortable. The stakes of not having a community remember that sacrifice would dishonor a man who paid a huge price for our safety." 3/16/2006
Creative process, revisited
The late John Cheever's technique in writing - composition almost entirely in the head, rather than on paper - is just one of many writing methods. Some writers prefer to put their thoughts down on paper - or more likely on a computer screen - as quickly as possible, and then go over and over the text, weeding, grafting, elaborating and revising.
The creative process in writing is not all that different than painting. Cheever's style is like a Marc Chagall drawing - an idea developed in the mind, then quickly executed. The other method is a deliberate process more like the way Edward Hopper painted: laying down the rough stucture of the work with a little paint mixed with turpentine, then gradually using more oil and pigment to develop depth and detail.
The results are remarkably different; different not just in how they are made and how they appear, but in how we perceive them and how they make us feel. 3/14/2006
Traveling in style
Ever wonder how former presidents of the United States travel around the country? Well, they don't fly on Air Force Three, Four or Five, because there are no such planes. They actually fly on the same jets with us commoners.
I witnessed George H.W. Bush hopping aboard a Continental flight Monday morning. Here's how it all went down:
I was sitting through a long flight delay at Fort Lauderdale International airport, starring out the window at the tarmac. A couple of uniformed security guards walked out of the terminal and were joined by a couple of suits. They stood around for about 10 minutes, scanning the tarmac and talking into their walkie-talkies. Then an armored truck slowly circled the area and stopped about 50 yards from the gate. Then a convoy of vehicles arrived. There were two identical, black Chevrolet Suburbans, led and followed by two black sedans, and surrounded by five police cars, lights flashing.
Secret Service types popped out and did their usual assessment, then unloaded luggage. Finally, Mr. Bush the Elder energed from the first Suburban and walked up the steps and into the plane. There was no one for him to wave to, except his Secret Service detail. Other than a few other people like me standing by the window, no one else even knew he was there.
My guess is that Mr. Bush did not have to sit in Economy, back by the toilets, in a middle seat. 3/9/2006
How writers write
As a student in elementary school, I was a troubling disappointment to my parents. It didn't get any better in high school, but I did develop an interest in writing that would help carry me through those years and through college.
I was, however, beset by the typical frustrations that writers experience. My method was to write something down on paper, read it, crumple it into a ball and start over. I began to wonder how writers could afford to buy so much paper. While at home on winter break one year, I asked my friend, Ben, what method his father - the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Cheever - used to write. What Ben told me would have a profound effect, not just on me but in the academic lives of my children, to whom I passed down this secret.
John Cheever, who died in 1982, did not spend a lot of time at his typewriter, Ben told me. He composed everything in his head. While he was puttering around the house, or running errands, or going out to lunch with people or drinking gin, he was constructing and reconstructing sentences and combining them into paragraphs. At some point, he would be satisfied with a particular paragraph and simply sit down and type it out.
Over the years, I applied this creative process for fiction writing to journalism. Writing is a thought process, and clear writing is a direct result of clear thinking. I keep telling myself and anyone else who will listen: Don't start writing until you have thoroughly contemplated the subject and have decided what it is you want to express and how you are going to do it.
When my children sat down to write theme papers for school (at the last minute, usually) and begged me for help, this was the advice I gave them. I refused to write their papers for them, but I would coach them through the thinking process.
Unlike their father, my children were good students, from kindergarten through graduate school. Probably, their mother's genes had much to do with that, but I like to think that the advice I learned from Ben Cheever helped them along.
(Note: Ben Cheever is an accomplished writer himself. Click HERE to read an exerpt from his book, "Selling Ben Cheever.") 3/8/2006
May I have your attention...
A writer who commented on yesterday's chapter was highly critical of my attitude toward ADD and wrote that this was, something I obviously knew nothing about. The rebuttal was eloquent, and the writer made some very good points, although I have to take issue with a couple of them.
It's definitely true that many artists, composers and writers have "medicated themselves" with alcohol and drugs and have still created great art. But it is my understanding, from the creators I have studied and those I have known personally, that their art was created for the most part with clear heads and that their alcohol and drug use fell into the category of diversion. There have been many great novelists who were drunks, but they did not write their novels while drunk.
I also have to take issue with the claim that I know absolutely nothing about attention deficit. In the 1950s, long before anyone had dreamed of ADD, I was a classic case, a child so inattentive in school that my teachers described me as nearly comatose. Those teachers had no patience for this behavior; I received failing grades, was left back. To this day, I must struggle to concentrate on what people tell me, even in brief, one-on-one conversations. If I drive to the market to buy milk and bread, I must have a list with me on which is written "milk, bread," or I will return with roasted peppers and lag bolts. I can't speak to groups without notes. When I do, I forget what I've said, what I'm going to say, and even why I am there.
I have no intention to take medication to help me focus better, however. It's true that I often live in my own world, but that is the place where my ideas are made, and the last thing I want to do is to shut it down. 3/7/2006
The creative process
There are a few things I know something about, and very many things about which I know absolutely nothing. But there's one thing I think I know quite a bit about, and that's the creative process. Being a writer in a professional capacity for the past 34 years, being the manager of newspaper writers, photographers and graphic artists, and being the husband and father of artists, creativity is something with which I deal on a daily basis.
As it has become a part of my daily routine, I don't often give the creative process much thought. But last week I was exploring an Internet site that explains how to create video presentations online and watched a sample production - "Adult ADHD" by Adam Cole - that got me to thinking.
Cole explains in his film that he is prone to distraction, begins projects and then abandons them, and worries that he suffers from Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. He decides to undergo tests to see if he has this disability. The tests indicate he does. The doctor recommends medication, which she and he hope will help him focus better. He indicates in the end of his video that he is taking it and it helped him finish the video.
I find this depressing. I wonder if Cole or his doctor have ever though much about the creative process and all that it involves. I wonder if they think that people, with the proper medication, can simply sit down and create art at a convenient time and place. Perhaps people can be drugged to the point where they are focused enough to create something, to finish projects. But is this art?
In his video, Cole shows himself sitting in front of his computer terminal reading a book, playing with his cat, doing just about anything but working at his computer. Apparently, he thinks this is abnormal, that he should simply be able to go to work at a certain time and be creative, and the only solution to this lack of productivity is drugs.
Inspiration is precious and fleeting. Sometimes, days go by before it appears, and then after a euphoric burst of activity, it's gone again. The creative process works in fits and starts; it's not something that can easily be turned on and off. Thoughts need to be cooked in the brain for awhile before they're ready to be expressed. Inactivity, procrastination, distraction and diversion are therefore as much a part of the creative process as the actual creation. Take them away, and what you're left with are uncooked ideas.
Adam Cole may be able to create more films while medicated, but I'm pretty sure they're not going to be worth watching. 3/6/2006
Brrrrrrr!
Edvard and Nadejda Schmals are in their mid-50s and are exceedingly fit and healthy. They claim to never be ill and attribute this fortune to their lifestyle. You can't avoid being physically fit when you have to haul all the water you use in buckets from the well, and chop the wood you use for heat, cooking and bathing.
There's an enormous stove in the center of the Schmals' kitchen, which is in the center of their house. It's made of brick and stone and covered in mortar and plaster, and it provides all the heat for their house. Stoking this stove is a task that never ends.
Every morning, 365 days a year, Edvard and Nadejda put on their bathing suits and walk the few yards from their house to the river. There they submerge themselves, in winter breaking the ice to do so. They call this the secet to their health.
Four years ago, W&J professor John Mark Scott and I were staying with the Schmals, and they invited us to join them for their morning dip. Much to their amusement, Scott yelped his way into the pool, managing to get in waist-deep before retreating. I could get in no farther than to my knees; my bones ached too badly from the icy water. Later, we put a thermometer in the water and found that it was 42 degrees F.
Unlike most Russians, the Schmals do not smoke. They enjoy beer and the occasional vodka but drink in moderation. Their diet is probably high in fat (whole milk, vream and butter from their cow) and carbohydrates but provides them with the fuel they need for their rigorous routine of living. Their garden is not a hobby but a necessity and nurtured accordingly. 3/3/2006
The old ways
The village of Chemal sits along the Katun River at the foot of the Altay Mountains, which stretch from southern Russia into Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia. The environment there is pristine, the scenery breathtaking, but almost no people live in this corner of the earth, because there is no industry and no jobs and no money, and because the winters are brutally long and cold and because forest fires, pushed by stong winds from the south, sweep throug the valleys at incredible speed.
The people who do live in Chemal make a little money from tourists, who come to test themselves against the rivers's rapids or to live life the old way, without conveniences, for a week or two.
For about $15 a night, you can stay at the home of Edvard and Nadejda Schmals, for instance. For that price you get a comfortable bed, three hearty meals and the services of Nadejda as your personal tour and hiking guide. However, you'll have to put up with living in the 19th century, for the most part.
Like almost everyone else in Chemal, the Schmals do not have indoor plumbing. You'll have to pump a bucket of water from the well, then pour it into another bucket above the sink, then push on the stopper at the bottom of that bucket to get handfuls of water to wash your face and brush your teeth. Feel like a hot shower? Sorry. Edvard will fire up the banya for you on Saturday so that you can sweat off the dirt and cool yourself down with dippers of icy stream water. There is an outhouse beyond the garden. It's a long walk from the house, so I don't know what they do in winter when it gets to 50 below zero.
The Schmals' cow needs to be milked regularly, and you'll be asked to do it, if you like. They also have a few chickens, as most everyone does. The garden, cow and chickens provide the Schmals with most of what they need to eat; they trade for much of the rest. Their daughter, Leda (in photo), and her husband, Oleg, help in the garden and around the house and share the harvest. Unlike most young people, they have decided to stay in Chemal, rather than move to the city. It's not so hard to understand that - all you need to do is to see this landscape illuminated by starlight or to lower your lips to the stream for a cool drink. 3/2/2006
Life in Chemal
(Form left: Nadejda, son-in-law Oleg, Park Burroughs, Rita Stachovich and Edvard Schmals, in Chemal in May 1999)
After hearing about the disaster in Chemal, I messaged another friend, journalist Tanya Turina, and asked her what she knew. Tanya has also spent much time in Chemal at the home of Edvard and Nadejda Schmals.
Tanya hadn't heard about it but got busy calling friends. Eventually, she was able to determine that the flood had occurred about a month ago after an accident at a hyrdoelectric plant. She believed it was far from the Schmals' house and there was probably nothing to be concerned about. I remember that there was a lake and a dam just a short walk downstream from the Schmals' house. I viewed satellite photo of the area on Google and could see no other impoundments farther upstream, so I suspect the dam I remember must have given way, sending water from the lake into the Katun River and flooding homes along the Katun on the north end of Chemal.
Tanya is still trying to get more information, which I'll pass along. In the meantime, I should tell you a little about the Schmals and their simple way of life. Some time ago, I wrote in this Catfish Creek about the barter economy of Chemal, and how the Schmals and everyone else in the village manage to survive without much money. Edvard works as a sort of road supervisor for the state government, and Nadejda works at the local museum. The first time I visited there, in 1999, neither of them had seen a paycheck in 11 months. Things were a little better four years ago during my last visit, but their pay was miniscule and sporadic.
Nevertheless, they manage to live a good life through hard work and a healthy lifestyle. More aboout that next time. 3/1/2006
Trouble in Chemal
I received a disturbing message last week from a friend in Novokuznetsk, Russia - Julia Machlina. She said that the village of Chemal, which is in the Altay mountains close to the Chinese border, had been struck by disaster.
The name Chemal may ring a bell. I have visited this place twice and written about it, both in the newspaper and on this blog. Several years ago, this newspaper sponsored the Chemal Relief Effort, which resulted in us sending 3.5 tons of donated books, school supplies and furniture to the village school, recently rebuilt after a devastating fire.
According to Julia, there was a sudden flood of a tributary of the Katun River, followed by a quick freeze, resulting in numerous homes under water - and then ice - up to the roof level.
I scoured the Internet for news of this, but there was nothing. I'm not surprised. Chemal is in a remote, almost unpopulated area of Siberia. There are few telephones in the village. Communications to and from there are exceedingly slow and difficult.
There is only one tributary that flows into the Katun at Chemal, and it flows right past the home of Edvard and Nadejda Schmals, in whose house I had stayed during two visits. I took this photo of the stream just a few feet from their front door. Naturally, I feared for them.
I've received a little more information since then, which I'll share with you tomorrow.
