Sergey walked up the mountain steadily and quickly. There was strength and elegance in his quiet walk. Sergey had been in the Soviet Army, had lived for a long time in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. He knew much about walking.

Sergey had picked us up at the train and took us to Listvyanka on Lake Baikal. I liked Sergey right off. He had gone to school to become an English teacher after his army life had ended. He taught for many years, but one day an opportunity to be a guide around Lake Baikal had come. He had loved his students, but he loved the forest and the lake more. He had grown up on Lake Baikal. He had walked in the woods with his father who chopped down trees for necessity and had always planted a new tree in a nearby place.

Each day we walked around Baikal with Sergey for hours. We walked for the length of a morning on the ice… the three of us slipping and sliding and all of us occasionally falling. The lake had finally frozen. The ice was so clear, we could see to the bottom. I looked for fish, but couldn’t see any. There were ice caves made of huge ice sickles… ice fat that had washed up to the shore… a blue, blue, sunny sky. The air was clean and held so much oxygen that I felt drunk and swaying.

Sergey told us about Lake Baikal at night… how the fresh water seal was disappearing, how Vladimir Putin was trying to get rid of the filthy paper mill on the other side of the lake, how the Chinese had bought timber interests in Siberia and were cutting trees down at an alarming rate… never planting anything to replace what was cut. I had, in fact, watched train loads of huge logs… old, old trees… head south as we went north. He talked about the two lungs of the world… the rain forest in South America and the forests of Siberia. The one lung, South America, had almost been completely destroyed… and now the other one was under attack. Much like Olga, he was not embittered, but under his cool exterior, he was conscious that serious changes were moving forward.

It was always later at night, though, that Sergey was transformed as he created magical conversation… wove stories of intricacy and connectedness in Galya’s softly lit, warm kitchen as the clock ticked us into the deeper spaces of the night. Sergey had visited villages of the Old Believers. The Old Believers had broken off from the Eastern Orthodox Church in the time of Catherine the Great in what was to be known as the “Raskol,” a liturgical schism of unresolved bitterness caused by Patriarch Nikon whose perceived power was greater than a tsar. Catherine had exiled the Old Believers to Poland. Later, she brought them back to Siberia to grow wheat. No foolish woman Catherine… she could make them financially productive and keep them in exile. The Old Believers came. Siberia was the kind of place that they flourished in. They had stands of birch and the larch of the taiga… thick, deep woods holding secrets about the nature of God. They were far away from the new church as an organized cultural institution… corrupt and bureaucratic. Even though the life was hard in Siberia, they had had much of what they wanted. Siberia became their church in an understanding that could only become deeper in such natural surroundings.

I imagined Sergey’s travels to the villages of the Old Believers. I imagined the conversations… the secrets he must have heard… the stories of the prison camps on Lake Baikal. I wondered if they were still there, the prison camps, and if there were prisoners. I did not want to think that there were, but knowing that, if they are not on Lake Baikal, they could surely be somewhere deep in cold Siberia, a common place of exile.

Our conversations sometimes took a turn to Russian literature. I had not read any current Soviet literature beyond Solzhenitsyn and Yevtushenko… ancient history now. It had seemed, though, that after the revolution, someone put a marker in the book of Russian history… quietly laid it on a shelf. The Russian people took the book down from the dusty shelf after the Soviet Union dissolved, cleaned it off, opened it at the marker and began reading in the same place. Sergey had agreed. I noticed that, even the women were dressing in pre-revolutionary dress… long fitted coats, huge fur hats, elegant boots, pretty faces… that return to a pre-revolutionary kind of “Frenchness” that had a Russian style and carriage all its own.

On the ice of Lake Baikal the next day, with the smell of wood fires smoking the fresh omul, Sergey sang a song for us in the style of the Old Believers… songs sung in unison, one note to one word unlike the polyphonic singing of the Eastern Orthodox Church that had been supported by Patriarch Nikon. The unity of monodic singing had been one of the things that had gotten the Old Believers exiled. Sergey’s baritone was clear and fervent… song that had survived the eventual deposing of Patriarch Nikon who would become a mere monk and live in exile himself. Sergey sang a song of a prisoner who had escaped in a barrel floating across the cold waters of Lake Baikal. The song went over the ice. I wondered if anyone heard it on the other side of the lake. Imagination would allow it to be heard back over the years for all those who had suffered… all who were now gone. Sergey had given us a gift.

It is now summer. The ice of Baikal is gone. People are on the lake fishing. Tourists come and go. Sergey is probably very busy. Perhaps Sergey has built a little more of his house on the shore of the lake. He builds it little by little, a very expensive proposition for him. Perhaps he and his wife and daughter camp there at night pounding and sawing the logs that will one day be their home.

I am certain that he wanders through the woods… so much a part of the woods and Siberia is he. I imagine the travel up an old path. His continuous walking stops. He reaches in his pocket. He takes out a ribbon and hangs it on a shaman tree… a silent acknowledgement and, then, continues on his way listening for the spirits living in the woods… a man at peace in his environment… a man who does no harm… a man who cares for the world for all of us.

One day, when Sergey is gone, his spirit will live in a tall, strong pine tree that looks over Lake Baikal. Deep in the night, no one will hear his song in the wind, but the lake. The lake will stretch and open one eye, its waves like arms touching the shore. The lake will smile at the song and just as quietly return to its sleep.