Travels In Siberia - Part II

The best part of Part II begins, “One morning during that January I went on an expedition to Peterhof, the grand palace built by Peter the Great twenty-five miles west of the city on the Gulf of Finland.” On this expedition, Frazier gets on the wrong train and ends up in a village called Little Verevo. I like his description of the village: “eight or ten houses, with no lights showing, and snow draping roofs and fences as if it had been laid on in multiple coats every day since fall." In Little Verevo, he encounters two women (“Both had weathered, wrinkled-shoe faces, multiple worts, and lively pale-blue eyes”) who tell him the right train to take to Peterof. When Frazier finally gets to Peterof, he visits the Cottage Palace. His description of the Morskoi Cabinet on the top floor is very fine, particularly his mention of “a long brass telescope and a speaking trumpet” that he sees on a table. At one point, Frazier uses “crowbar” as a verb. He says, “To me St. Petersburg seems more like a hole in the corner of a sealed-tight packing crate that Peter crowbarred open violently from inside. Once the breach was made, the light flowed in, and it continues to flow.” I recall Frazier saying something similar in his New Yorker article “Invented City” (July 28, 2003): “Oceanic light continues to pour through this opening he crowbarred into the corner of Russia just as he intended.” I think Frazier’s use of “crowbarred” is inspired. Part II contains one other highlight – a flight to Little Diomede in the Bering Strait, which occasions this memorable description of sea ice: “In places where linen-white ice expanses met, the lines of crunched-up ice pieces were the exact same blue as Comet Cleanser.” In Little Diomede, Frazier does exactly what I would’ve done: he walks around looking at stuff, e.g., “a frozen seal on the floor of the vestibule of the tribal health building,” “a polar bear skin hanging on a wooden frame,” and most interestingly, “a walrus-skin boat on a rack near a launching ramp at the bottom of town,” which Frazier says, was a "museum-quality object.” These details alone made Part II worth reading. I ate them up. I also liked Frazier’s drawing of a jumble of sheds that illustrates the beginning of Part II. I’m looking forward to Part III, in which Frazier finally launches his nine-thousand-mile road trip across Siberia.