July 18,1994
The Pit of Siberia
In the long twilight we came to the oil capital of Nadym (635k .mov), a hundred odd twenty-story apartment blocks rising abruptly from the flatland, a two-mile concrete runway with scores of enormous blue and orange Aeroflot choppers on the apron. Here there are no roads and the helicopter is the principal vehicle of local transportation, chopping in and out at all hours of the day. Amoco has offices in Nadym and we had learned from the Dartmouth group in Salekhard that they were providing Dr. William Fitzhugh's transport. After we booked rooms in the horrible airport hostel, four of us went into town to look for him, chartering a city bus off the street with two twenty dollar notes.Canyons of pastel high-rises rose from the high tundra, with seven story murals of hope, labor, and enlightenment; a nightmare city out of Brave New World or Soylent Green. We told the driver we were looking for our friend, an American, a professor. He took us straight to the Northern Guesthouse, and there was Fitzhugh. Though both he and Ron Davies both work for the Smithsonian, none of us had ever met him before--but we recognized him instantly. The tall graying athlete-scholar looked just like Indiana Jones. "Livingston, I presume," Davies said. "Now that we've encountered one another in this bizarre setting on the far side of the world, perhaps we'll cross the mall for lunch one day." We made a date for lunch in Nadym and returned to the hostel, where young Russian oil field workers with lemon vodka and Uzbeki weed and dozens of rap tapes made a long long late party (735k .mov) for us.
The Nadym airport authority charged us $1000 for overnight parking and didn't want to let us bring our gear on board. The American contingent was sidelined, our banker and principal interpreter Gleb Shestakov having suddenly, and without warning, bailed out on us to return to London. The four cases of vodka donated by Absolut to smooth such moments had been delivered to his flat there, where he had left them, as he explained, because of airline weight restrictions. There was a full hour of serious yelling, the loudest yet, between the Russian expedition members and the airport commandatura. Security louts in red armbands came out to menace. Somehow the argument resolved. We left the sci-fi nightmare of uniform high-rises on the high tundra and headed for Dudinka.
Next: They Will Be Shot For This
