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Once in the town of Visokogorsk, a woman went out into the forest to pick mushrooms. ^[1] She grew up in this country of dense taiga, and knew the subtle distinctions between types of mushrooms, and how to choose the best of everything that grows in the forest. But the taiga was so thick and pathless, that no matter how many years she had been coming to these same spots, she couldn't hold a set of landmarks in her mind, couldn't remember the individual dips and rises of the land in these rolling hills. The only way she could keep her sense of direction was to listen for the sound of the road.
 

There is only one road that runs through these hills, coming up from the south past the town of Kavalerovo (which means "cavalierville"), past the village of Visokogorsk ("tall mountain") with its empty husk of a tin mine, winding its way north to the small city of Dal'negorsk ("far mountain"). ^[2] Every few minutes or so a car or bus or maybe a tanker truck carrying precious fuel oil would rumble past the village and the woman would hear it and know that she was still in charted territory. And so she wove her way between the trees, up the slopes and down into the valleys, keeping her eyes on the ground and her ears trained to the distant sounds of motors. At one point, a strange thing happened. She was in a shallow valley, and the sound that was her lifeline suddenly shifted disorientingly. Maybe she realized it soon, maybe it was hours before she understood what had happened, but she had moved to a place where the sound of the road didn't carry to her in a straight line. What she heard was an echo, reflected off one of the many steep slopes surrounding her. The road she heard was just an aural mirage of a road, but she followed it for long enough that she lost the real one, long enough that she lost her way entirely.
 

It's lucky that she knew how to survive in the woods. She knew what to eat, how to stay warm. She had grown up knowing this, so she could survive for a long time while she plodded on, searching, because she had to find the road again some time, didn't she? I wonder if she despaired at night, if she caught glimpses of herself in cosmic perspective, a tiny speck of a woman in the midst of millions of trees who probably wouldn't have been seen from above even if her friends and family had been able to convince someone that it was worth the fuel to fly over and look. And I wonder how many times she doubled back without knowing it or whether she found a stream to follow or whether she followed the sun before she finally found the road again six days later. When she stepped, bone-weary, onto the highway, she could see signs that there was a settlement nearby. She stopped the first passing car to ask where she was. "Krasnoreshensk," the driver told her. Some sixty kilometers north and west of where she had started. "Get in," said the driver, "I'll take you home. I'm going that way anyway." ^[3]
 

Russia is a vast country. The village of Visokogorsk, in Primorsky Krai, isn't on any train line, but an 11 hour bus ride southwest along that one highway will take you to the city of Vladivostok, a major port on the sea of Japan. Vladivostok is the capital of Primorsky Krai and the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. From Vladivostok to Moscow is seven days by train.
 

When the Peace Corps offered me a position teaching English in secondary school in Russia, my first reaction was "I've been to Europe. I was hoping for something different."
 

"Don't worry," a woman in the Washington office told me, "It's a long way from Europe, and it will be different enough." She told me that the Russian Far East is to western Russia what the wild wild west was to the east coast of America a hundred years ago.
 

I lived the last two years, from the summer of 1999 to the summer of 2001, in the small town of Kavalerovo and worked there and in the even smaller village of Visokogorsk. While I would love to tell the story from the shaky start to the exhilarating end, it is a project too monumental to take on, so instead I'll take you through one week. I'll set this week approximately in late November of my second year. This is a week that could have happened. It follows my typical daily and weekly routine, and the particular events and conversations that take place are a composite of some individual memorable moments from the two years, and some situations that happened repeatedly during the two years. This is what I saw when I walked down the street every day, and these are the people that inhabit these two small towns east of Siberia.
 

egail: Wow. When will you post the next chapter? I'm hooked already, which makes me suspect you've done a good job on this intro...I have read a bit of Russian folklore, and I like the way you've started in a folkloric tone. I also hope/think that you've used this story in particular for its allegorical opportunities, and I'm interested to see how you work this angle. samira: Lisa, what kind of comments are you looking for? I have a variety of ideas and such, but I don't really know how you see this project taking shape or what purpose you want this intro to serve. Do you want general or specific comments? samira: Okay, more on the second half of this: What are you trying to do? Are you trying to create fictional autobiography? Fictional because you plan to smoosh time around a bit to give us just a week and are presumably going to pull some of your choicest stories, from different points in your trip, or are you going to give almost a field report, a la your training as an anthropologist? Becasue if you are doing the former, I do not know that you need to lay the project our for us from the start. I think that it will simply unfold and there is no need to write a game plan (though it might be very helpful for your planning to have written it.) Just let us get caught up in your story. When you have written it, if you feel it necessary to provide a context, then do so accoring to what you have written and anythign you might want to say. But if this is for "popular reading" you don't need an abstract. If it is anthropological narrative, then you know better than I... alecia: On Emily's comment: I like the idea of folktale-as-allegory. How are you like the woman lost in the woods? How was traveling to Russia somewhat familiar (in that you were dealing with people, that there are some common features of teaching and human nature anywhere you go), but also so far away from familiarity / home (from what you've told me of the culture, this is more obvious)? Perhaps playing with the allegory aspect of this piece would add a link between you and folktale, while preserving the break (between sections)... also, it might give you a way to explain your intention and plans (in the second section) without switching into the completely academic tone. lisa: This is a good thought. I definitely intended the allegory aspect. That's why I included details like seeing herself in cosmic perspective. Sometimes while I was there and feeling especially lonely, I could almost feel a camera zooming out to show me as a tiny speck in that vast, vast country. Add comment