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Once, in the town of Visokogorsk, a woman went out into the forest to pick mushrooms. 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"). 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."
 

Irina Leonidovna told me this story, and she swears it's true. I thought of it often, in my loneliest moments, when I could almost feel a camera zooming out until the dot that was me was lost in that vast, vast country.
 

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, "Where you're going is a long way from Europe, and it will be different enough."