equipment; big, twisted nests of twelve-foot I beams and enormous shattered chunks of rebar and cement. It was as if the gargantuan Soviet industrial complex had been trying to use Siberia and kept getting it wrong and would then —Godzilla-like—crumple up its mistakes and throw them away. There were also lone graves along the tracks, neatly fenced and marked with handsome headstones. Maybe these are hero workers who died while getting it wrong. Or maybe these are Trans-Siberian bathroom tragedies—people who stood too close to the track when someone in a passing train was on the can. I would have asked my fellow passengers about the graves, but nobody spoke English. People were friendly, and they shrugged and smiled at me, but for four days I couldn’t actually say anything to anybody, and for a yammering mick like myself, this was as bad as AA. Our route took us along the Amur River plain, and the country opened into an empty paradise. It was land that seemed to have been made for a human habitation and enterprise that never came—ungrazed prairies, unfarmed bottom land, unfished trout streams, unhunted bird covers. In the marshes, acres of wild irises bloomed, fated never to join a bouquet. Plenty of wilderness has been spoiled by man. This had been spoiled by lack of him. However, beyond the Amur River and for the last 400 miles south to Vladivostok, the countryside has been domesticated. That is, I saw a person every fifteen or twenty minutes. Usually the person was a babushka, one of those Russian grandmothers who look like Boris Yeltsin in a dress. There were babushkas hanging laundry, babushkas chopping wood, babushkas in bikinis weeding their gardens, babushkas riding in motorcycle sidecars. It was Granny Nation. The men I saw were mostly piloting those motorcycles—motorcycles seemed to be the only form of transport. I didn’t even see tractors. Hay was still being cut by hand. There was one ancient bearded fellow, leaning on his scythe and watching the train, who looked too much like Father Time. Russia needs modernizing. I’d rather deal with Father Daylight Saving Time, who wears shorts and shades, and carries a weed whacker. The land was good. But like so many good things in Russia, nothing good had ever been done with it. And I didn’t see any young people around to bring in Toros and Lawn Boys to replace the grim reaper. I suppose the young people are off in the cities seeking their fortunes.
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