Into the Lake—Shallow

The air smells of rain and autumn decay and sends cold, sharp fingers poking through our clothes as the Lonesome Boatman steers our little craft along the shore of the Holy Nose. Beyond the gunwales of the boat, spears of orange and emerald march up the steep hillside—the ubiquitous larch and birch, cedar and fir, muted under the thick sky. And behind this abrupt shoreline rises a dark mountain chain that extends fifty kilometers southwest along the length of the peninsula, mirroring the ridges of the Barguzin chain across the bay to the east and the unseen peaks of the Primorsky, Baikal, and Khamar Daban ranges hugging the lake’s western and southern shores. This is the vertiginous lay of the land around nearly all of Baikal’s shoreline. It’s not just the clear and deep water that can make one’s head spin. On all sides, mountains rear up five, six, and seven thousand feet above the lake, and then plunge past the surface and on toward the depths with barely a pause to acknowledge the change from air to water. Bobbing in a boat on its surface, you get the peculiar feeling that Baikal is itself contained by some larger vessel. One English word that I’ve heard used to describe the lake basin, in keeping with the notion of Baikal being a “sacred sea,” is “chalice,” like some kind of holy vessel cradling these mystical waters. You get the peculiar feeling, as well, that the world begins and ends here. There are no landmarks that are not part of the Baikal ecosystem, not a spot of earth on which a drop of falling rain doesn’t flow into Baikal. And despite the lake’s magnitude, it’s actually a very small world, at least the part that humans can occupy. Around most of the lake there’s almost no “shore” to speak of, just a narrow margin at the base of the mountains here and there where humans can get a toehold at the edge of the abyss.