Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier Read Free Book Online Page A

motorized boarding ladderemerged and drove slowly to the plane, its door finally opened, and the passengers disembarked. With pointing arm fully extended, an airline employee indicated a group of tiny buildings just barely within sight. These were the terminal. In a mass with some stragglers, the passengers began to walk in that direction. Katya and I found each other and joined the trek.

Chapter 3
    What I have to say next concerns the Omsk airport men’s room. I regret this. I’ve noticed that in books by Siberian travelers of the past they don’t talk about bathrooms, and that’s probably good. I reluctantly break with this tradition for two reasons. First, I am an American, and Americans pay attention to and care about bathrooms. The habit may show childishness and weak-mindedness, but there it is. Second, if the world really is going to become a global community, then some of our trading partners (I’m talking to you, too, China) need to know how far apart we are on the subject of bathrooms.
    The men’s room at the Omsk airport was unbelievably disgusting. Stepping through the door, or even near the door, was like receiving a blow to the face from the flat of a hand. No surface inside the men’s room, including the ceiling, was clean. There were troughs and stools, but no partitions, stalls, or doors. Everything done was done in full view. The floor was strewn with filth of a wide and eye-catching variety. At the urinal raised cement footprints offered the possibility of keeping your feet out of the flooding mire, but as the footprints themselves were hardly filth-free, the intention failed. Certain of this place’s images that I won’t describe remain inexpugnable from my mind. I got out of there as fast as was practical and reeled away into the terminal’s dim lobby.
    Soon Katya appeared, also reeling, from her trip to the ladies’. The force of revulsion propelled us clear out of the terminal and into itscracked and weed-surrounded parking lot, where we finally risked taking deep breaths again. First we washed with packaged detergent hand wipes. Then on our hands and the soles of our shoes we poured rubbing alcohol that Katya had brought along. Readers may think us squeamish. (And, in fairness to the Omsk airport, later we did discover the public bathrooms reserved for foreigners, which were upstairs in the terminal, and not as bad; also, for all I know, in the new Russian economy the Omsk airport has upgraded its facilities by now.)
    But as I would find out, though the Omsk men’s room was especially awful, that kind of bathroom experience is more the rule than not in Siberia. Winter temperatures there often fall so low that in the outhouses, liquids freeze very quickly, and over the months a sort of stalagmite effect is created, growing up through the hole in the floor. As for the holes themselves, only in the nicer outhouses are they made with a jigsaw that cuts them into the conventional oval shape; more generally they are hacked with an ax into fractured parallelograms. In indoor bathrooms within the permafrost zone, the fragility of the plumbing means that toilet paper cannot be flushed away, and so it is disposed of separately, usually in its own plastic bucket beside the john . . . Again, I apologize.
    Now that I’ve brought up a few of these details, however, and gotten the subject out of the way, I won’t have to refer to it again. In future descriptions of Siberian sanitary arrangements, a more than occasional bathroom along the lines of the Omsk airport men’s room may be inferred.
    After a couple of hours and a second collection of tickets, the passengers bound for Ulan-Ude set out on another group hike across the runway, this time to a new plane. The day had become sunny and breezy, and I enjoyed the stroll. Seeing the plane parked by itself off in the distance and watching it grow in size as we approached it restored some of its miraculousness, a quality ordinary air travel takes away.