muus baran bütte...

Two weeks ago, the ice on the Lena River finally broke up. The ledokhod (in Russian), or muus baryta (in Sakha) was a little early this year, & we were all eagerly paying attention to weather reports... The ice jammed about 300km south of Yakutsk, but suddenly began to flow again two days later, so off we went to Tabaga, to stand on the cape and watch the drifting of the ice.

It seemed to be the place to gather, the best spot to watch the break-up. People had parked everywhere along the twisting roadside, and had begun to scramble about along the banksides high above the water.

Located 40km south of Yakutsk, the villages of Tabaga and Staraya Tabaga stand on the left bank of the river, at a place where the Lena narrows a little, and tall cliffs stand above good summer fishing spots. This is the site of a major powerline, and the first road-rail bridge across the Lena, soon to materialize (and displace the inhabitants of Staraya Tabaga, as well...)

I'm sort of disappointed in some of these photos, not simply because it was a wee bit cloudy and late in the day, but because I really haven't captured the vastness of this river. How the sky and the river mirror each other in blueness, in clusters vapor and ice, how you can't tell which is more expansive sometimes. Of how the changing ice flow breathes and stretches, filling the Tuimaada plains, how the city, in the distance, looks just like a washed-up pile of debris, haphazard rocks dashed upon the shore.

& the ice, kümüs-white, surges and slows, herd of bergs like snowy horses, then a sparse soaring of terms. How easily you understand this river to be yes, Ebe Ölüöne*, Grandmother Great River, this great artery feeding the land, how she has such strong blood.

*(Sakha, in the presence of the river, never call her Ölüöne, or Lena; she is simply ebe, grandmother... all bodies of water are addressed as such)

This year ebe was more merciful than last year; she did not flood the villages where I do fieldwork as she did last year, drowning houses and herds. She meandered calmly and swiftly, so so swiftly, bringing with her strong winds and a little spring snow from the south.

And as the ice melted, so did the ground, and the prairie crocuses blossomed, the river soothing their roots. Like daffodils in Britain, the Sakha Republic is carpeted by buttery nyurguhun (their Sakha name) blossoms every spring, wearing their fuzzy coats and turning the river cliffs and meadows yellow, violet or white with their flocked petals.

It's a flower of many evocative names: pasqueflower (for Easter appearances in warmer climes), windflower (vetrenitsa in Russian), son-trava (dream-grass), podsnezhnik (under-the-snow). As buttercup relatives, they are highly toxic, but small doses of their essences have been used traditionally for a variety of purposes (sedatives, abortifacients, cough suppressants).

When they wither, their little soft grey-ish whiskers will turn the fields into clouds of prairie smoke.
I couldn't bear to pick any; picking flowers in the wild seems a bit cruel to me, even when the blossoms are abundant, for some reason (years of growing up in National Parks, perhaps?) but I did find one that someone had plucked and then abandoned, and I pressed it in my journal.

Scrambling along the cape-side, I also came across fresh sprigs of sage (Russian: polyn', Sakha: sytygan erbehin). Rolling them between my fingers, I thought about the clay cliffs along the Yukon River, and how fragrant these hillsides would be in a month's time, under the June sun.

Amongst the sage, overlooking the water, an offering had been made to ebe; a circle of alaadjy (traditional Sakha pancakes, fried up much like bannock), and singed tufts of white horse hair. In another place I found biscuits sprinkled with kümüs.

Atop the cape, three weathered serge also watched the river flow; I couldn't read what the ones on the side commemorated but the middle one was dedicated to the completion of a water canal...
And above the river flew clusters of darting dark-headed gulls and terns, racing the floes downstream... Watching the ice I felt both calmed and spurred on; it seemed time was passing very quickly even as the moments stretched with the river's timelessness, as the icebergs moved so quickly and disappeared from sight. Now, just six weeks and I will be leaving, and I felt so scattered, opened, spread out all over the earth.

Before we departed we offered things to the river, out of respect for such nourishment, and to assure safe future crossings: coins, mostly, though someone left the dregs of beer (Siberian Crown) and a small arrangement of wilting petals and wind.