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A Night in Siberia
Michael W. Beaty, M.D.
"Go west until you're home again" was my cheeky mantra when I graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Direction absent destination. It doesn't matter where you go, just go. I knew full well the consequence of such action. A Magellanic voyage. My plan was to pack a few clothes and what little money I had earned delivering Domino’s pizzas, and take to the road. And so with my good friend, Ross, being of similar carefree attitude as myself, I left Ann Arbor. Over the course of my nearly year-long journey, I would travel east, north, and south, but always in the end, west.
 Well, that was my plan anyway. Several months into the trip Ross and I found ourselves seemingly inexplicably in the Far East, with a little less, uh, shall we say, virtue. In a Hong Kong back alley, we made a simple but important decision—to purchase black-market tickets for the Trans-Siberian train. To travel 9001 kilometers, Beijing to Moscow, for a mere combined 50 bucks seemed to us a steal. Of course this meant we Americans would be traveling through the great communist countries of the People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But in 1988, the Cold War was in a spring thaw, so we jumped at the opportunity.
Reservations for the train could only be made in Guangzhou (Canton), China, and as it turned out, the soonest available train was four months later. So, we bummed around China until we were granted the necessary visas to travel on the train through the Soviet Union. We were not going to be allowed to travel around the Soviet Union, but merely transit through to the west, so we were required to obtain dated visas from Poland, East Germany, West Germany, and France, demonstrating our intent to leave the country.
 But much fun was to be had in China before that. We were something of an oddity, as at that time tourists were rare in southern China. We had many free meals and lodgings from the locals who were warm, welcoming, and grateful for the opportunity to practice speaking English. At one point I got quite ill with a bout of what we supposed was pneumonia. I took the care of an ancient Chinese physician who administered a complex, vile regimen of herbal teas. Nasty. Fully recovered, Ross and I experienced a typhoon, countless Buddhist temples, shrines, monuments, the Forbidden City, and days hiking along the dilapidated Great Wall. We slowly made our way north to Beijing, the Mongolian line terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Once in Beijing, we were drawn to the University for many rowdy, "free" discussions of democracy and capitalism, participating in several student rallies. It seemed that was the only thing that the university students wanted to talk about. We had no way of knowing, and there was no outward sign then, that the government crackdown on the fledgling pro-democracy movement, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, was only a few months away.
We boarded the old 1940s-era coal-driven, ramshackle Soviet train the day before Thanksgiving. This was to take us to Moscow? Confidence was low. We had been well-advised by fellow departing backpackers to take food and drink with us, as the dining car was prohibitively expensive and extravagant, particularly for those of us traveling on a shoestring. Also, once boarded, we would not be allowed off the train until we reached Moscow, eight full days later. We loaded up on rice and cheap Chinese wine. Being the only Americans on the train, we celebrated Thanksgiving carousing with the other travelers, including the very friendly KGB officer who we all called Stalin…with all due respect, of course.
 The next day, through the post-celebration fog, we watched from our bunks the magnificent Mongolian desert speed by the window, slowly giving way to the mountains, forests, and lakes of Siberia. Describing Lake Baikal as spectacular would be a gross understatement. But Ross didn't seem to recover from the disagreeable physical aftereffects of the wine as I did. Certainly, the hitching, rocking train did little to help. Indeed, he grew sicker, and developed alarming chest pain and difficulty breathing. A curious rash broke out on his chest, which grew to encircle his entire thorax, and started to weep with blisters. His breathing became labored from the pain.
Several anxious days later, somewhere between Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk, a whistle screamed in the middle of the night. The train lurched to an unexpected stop, tossing us from our beds. There was loud shouting in the corridor, growing in frenzy as the commotion approached our cabin, then a brief moment of silence before our door burst open to a flourish of guards in fur coats and hats brandishing large rifles bristling with bayonets. They stormed into our berth yelling something unintelligibly Russian. Holy shit! Did something happen to chill US-Soviet relations? Had word had gotten through to officials about our participation in some of the Beijing rallies? Being out of news contact for several months, I could only speculate. We were going to be hauled off to some Siberian backcountry kangaroo court as political prisoners to be tried as spies. Tortured... OR worse. But we have so much further to go, I thought, still not precisely sure where. However, the Gulag was definitely not it. I hoped.
Suddenly the soldiers parted and made way for a severe looking old woman who stepped forward waving a stethoscope like a talisman. Ah, a doctor. Stalin, whose ritual was to get to know everyone's travel business by making daily "rounds" at all the berths, had made arrangements for the midnight stop and doctor’s call. Without uttering a word, she approached Ross, waving off the soldiers who fell back to the door. She began to manhandle him in some sort of physical examination. To say that her bedside manner was medieval is being charitable. Ross moaned in pain while she poked, prodded, pushed and pulled. So, there was to be torture after all. I glanced worriedly at the guards without making eye contact, and nodded to Stalin, who was peering furtively in through the doorway.
“Nice hats,” I said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “Mink,” he said.
“Very expensive. Thirty rubles in Moscow. But in Siberia, very cheap.”
“I want one.” This is crazy. Why do I care about some mink fur hat?
“No. I am sorry. You can’t have one. They are only for the people of the State of the Soviet Union,” he answered. “Three hundred rubles,” I auctioned.
He grinned, glad for the temporary levity. He shook his head. “Americans. Always buying.”
After some time, the babushka dropped some pill packets on the bunk. In halting English, she told Ross, "Keep clean. Don't scratch. Take pill every six hours." She turned and left as suddenly as she had arrived, the soldiers accompanying her. No diagnosis given. Within minutes, another whistle pierced the night, and the train was underway. We sat in stunned silence. I grabbed a packet to read. The instructions were Cyrillic, but near the bottom, in tiny print: "Salicylic acid." Aspirin.
We watched the stunning Russian landscape go by for a few more days before debarking in Moscow. I sold a pair of jeans for two fistfuls of rubles, and we headed for some real medical help at the American Embassy, only to be turned away at the gate. It seems that sick American tourists were not allowed into the American Embassy. Right. On the way to a local hospital, the taxi we had piled into swerved, heading in the opposite direction. The cab driver revealed himself to be a secret service police officer instructed to deliver us back to the train station. We were placed on the first train out of the country. Seems sick Americans were not allowed into the Soviet Union, either. Ultimately, we finally were able to recuperate in a West Berlin hostel. I vowed that I would learn more about this mysterious, painful, and, at the time, extremely frightening illness.
Back home in Ann Arbor months later, following further adventures in Eastern and Western Europe, I learned that Ross had been stricken by shingles, varicella zoster virus. The chickenpox virus. A classic dermatomal outbreak brought on by emotional stress following that inebriated night in Mongolia, combined with motion sickness from the unrelenting rocking of the train. Strange, but very cool. This was fascinating to me. I read all I could get my hands on regarding the subject. Soon I was working in medical research on the herpes virus. Medical school seemed the logical next course and destination.
A dawning realization grew that sometimes I needed more than just a direction absent destination. A paradigm shift had occurred in my thinking. Perhaps I would, at least on occasion, no longer cast my fate to the wind, but allow it to carry me whither it would blow, to some where. My circuitous path in the subsequent twenty years has led to many new places of discovery: pathology residency, fellowship training in hematopathology, an unbelievably exciting and loving marriage, father to three smart-ass teenagers (for sale: Cheap! 30 rubles each.), teaching at Wake Forest, brew master, and much more. Some unanticipated, unplanned…others not. But all, happily arrived at.
It is said, rather tritely, that the journey is more important than the destination. Perhaps? When I left Ann Arbor as a fresh-faced college grad, the trek was all that mattered to me. Indiana newspaper writer John Soule's 1851 advice to "Go West, young man" must have called out to me on some unknown level like a ghost from the past: Manifest destiny. While I do not consider myself to be the most philosophical person or even to have much insight, my personal experiences have influenced me to believe that the journey and the destination are both essential. They are intertwined. They are both important and they gain their importance from the fact that there is the other. The arrival can have its own immense joy and satisfaction of accomplishment, while along the way we experience, learn, grow, change, discover, lose, gather, give. We become not just different, but more—more insightful, enlightened, knowledgeable, wise. So I will relish the finding, but have as much fun as I can during the seeking. My odyssey continues. Who can say which way?
M.W. Beaty 1 June 2008
P.S. I may need to get back to Siberia at some point, though. There’s a hat I’d liked to get…
Photo Captions
Visa picture and Trans-Siberian Train Ticket: My visa passport photo taken at the Russian Embassy in Beijing, China. This was tricky business, requiring the leaving of my passport in Soviet hands for several weeks. Cash was also spent at various stages of the paperwork, including for some officials demanding, uh, a little graft.
The Trans-Siberian Train ticket. Beijing to Moscow was eight days, during which, apart from some midnight madness, Ross and I played a LOT of cribbage. Oh, and the borscht in the dining carriage was delicious. This after five days of having nothing but plain Chinese noodles and rice, of course.
The Great Wall of China: The Great Wall of China. A crazy and spectacularly unsuccessful idea to keep the Mongol Hordes from invading China. Overall, the wall extends about 1500 miles (2400 kilometers). Most of the wall is now in ruin, but originally the wall was up to 25 feet high, 30 feet wide at the base, and 12 feet wide at the top (wide enough for marching troops or wagons), with watch towers at regular intervals. And built in locations almost vertically up and down the mountainous terrain. Unbelievable.
Moonrise over Mongolia: This place Time has virtually forgotten. At the Mongolia-Siberia border, i.e. Nowhere, there was a lengthy delay (10-12 hours) as the train was literally hoisted car by car to change the wheels and axles, in order to accommodate the Russian rails which were wider than the Mongolian ones. |