Knee Deep

Here in KZ, I get my news on a two-week delay. We get Newsweek magazines every week, but as it takes a week for them to get to the PC office in Almaty, and then another to get to us northerners, I rarely read anything that would still be called “breaking news.” It seems fitting then, that I should put material up here two weeks after the described events took place. As you can see from the previous entry, sometimes it is worth the wait. Once my previous attempts to post the 11A rap video had failed, I had time to edit all three videos together and find a way to make them a manageable size for uploading with a slower internet connection. Unfortunately, the resolution goes down the drain. But hey, you’re watching videos taken on the other side of the world, and that’s pretty cool. But enough for introductions…

Two weeks ago I experienced the worst weather I’ve known in my twenty two years. The temperature was only -10 C (+14 F or so), but the wind and snow were nothing less than ridiculous. Walking home from a friend’s house, I turned a corner and was stood up by a wall of wind. I regained my balance, squinted to keep the snow out of my eyes, lowered my head and plowed on. With the snow coming in sideways – I wouldn’t doubt it if the snow that landed in Petro actually started falling in Russia – I had ideas of a cup of tea and a book to fill my day, getting up only for refills, moving only as far as from the bed to the chair to the couch and back. Fortunately, my comfortable, relaxing plans were shattered and I found myself on a bus heading out toward the edge of town for another picnic out on the frozen lake. Forrest and I didn’t have a ride, so we took the bus as far as we could and walked the rest. On the highway walking wasn’t too bad except for the wind in our faces. We found the car the others had abandoned on the side of the road and the footprints they had left leading off into the woods, and then our real adventure began. My first step off the highway shoulder landed me in a foot and a half of snow. I laughed and thought out loud, “This is gonna be fun.”

We got to the lakeside to find the fire already blazing and the university English club huddled around its warmth. We ate our fill of pelmini and then Mike, Forrest and I decided that the fire was too boring, too comfortable. We didn’t come out in a blizzard to sit by a fire. We trudged out of the woods and onto the lake where the wind whipped by us at incredible speeds, flinging stinging snow in our barely exposed faces. I wanted to do a front flip off of the bank into the drift of snow below that had to be five feet deep. “Go for it, but give me your camera first,” Forrest suggests, and I take the plunge. The landing was comfortable, but getting up and walking was a little more challenging. Each step sunk down past my knees, and I realized it was more productive to crawl, thereby spreading my weight out more evenly. There was a four foot deep hole in the snow ten yards from the bank where they had dug out some ice to boil our lunch, and we decided that was the best place to shield from the unrelenting wind. After twenty minutes of football, races, wrestling matches and sarcastic weather reports (all on video), we headed back to the warmth of the fire. After thawing and taking a few more videos, we called it a day and made our journey back to the bus stop, a twenty five minute walk away. At least on the return trip the wind was at our backs.

Pictures are up on flickr, videos are in the production stage.