share their view of the merits of scarcity. We come out of the dark, as frail and tender as the furry buds on an antler. Why turn your back on anything that will make life easier? Why spurn cities and machines, diesel, plastic, medicine?
It was a matter of faith with them. I suppose all settlers must be zealots first. Those first colonists who went to Roanoke or Plymouth, what did they think as night fell for the first time over their strange anchorage? Behind them were playhouses and libraries, stone churches, the wellkept graves of their ancestors. In front of them were the forests of their weird Canaan, birds and plants they couldn’t recognize, and the unwelcoming spears of their new neighbours. How did they know the land could even support life?
*
We had had to renounce our old countries as a condition of settling here.
At the time, this land was almost as empty as it is now. Even so, the settlers had to pay twice over for it: they handed over cash for the title to the land, and they gave up the rights they had as citizens of other nations. What’s more, they had no right to what lay under it – oil, diamonds, or gas. The government kept that for itself. We owned nothing below the thin topsoil.
My father kept his old navy-blue passport along with his birth and marriage certificate up in a tin box in the attic, but it was a worthless document, and all those like me who were born here were born stateless.
It was a high price, and many baulked at paying it. Some had pointed to the empty spaces of Canada and said we should settle there instead. But the land in Canada that suited them belonged to its native people, while on the other side of the straits the Tungus had no such claim.
It never seemed to matter too much at first. The most religious among us regarded nationhood as a fiction. But by coming here, we made ourselves into orphans.
The Russian government never looked upon us as real citizens. Eventually, they would grow to hate us, but first there were many years of official indifference. Once or twice, they sent bigwigs to see that all was in order, but soon those visits stopped. No one paid us much heed, tucked up in the empty north of this huge country. We were left to ourselvesht=p>
Seventy thousand people had come, all up, in three waves of settlement that lasted over ten years. Most of them were Quakers like my father and mother who had turned late to their faith. Others were believers of a different strain who held that we stood in the last days and the chosen would shortly be snatched up to heaven in the Rapture. A few had no fixed faith at all, but worshipped nature, or reason, or just believed that the old crowded cities they had grown up in were hopelessly out of whack with how life ought to be. The chief thing they had in common was the shared belief that the old world was going to hell in a handbasket. None was fleeing poverty; if anything, they were fleeing its opposites: money, greed, idolaters. Some left the old lives happily, and some left with a great sadness, feeling it was a defeat and an abandonment. But all of them believed that in the space and stillness of the Far North, they would recover the quiet music of life as it ought to be, austere, rugged, shaped by the seasons and the knowledge of hardship, and contact with others like them.
The settlers were hard-working folk. The cities thrived. The winters grew milder. There were hot springs to the north of our city which we piped to heat our glasshouses. We raised tomatoes in the arctic and talked about growing oranges.
Gradually, over time, it became clear that the settlers had less in common than they imagined. The absence from the world made their differences bigger. And try as you might to begin afresh, pretty soon people fall into old ways of doing things. A lot of life is habits. Start everyone off equal, some still wind up with more and want to protect it, some wind up with less and cry foul.
But I think in those first
It was a matter of faith with them. I suppose all settlers must be zealots first. Those first colonists who went to Roanoke or Plymouth, what did they think as night fell for the first time over their strange anchorage? Behind them were playhouses and libraries, stone churches, the wellkept graves of their ancestors. In front of them were the forests of their weird Canaan, birds and plants they couldn’t recognize, and the unwelcoming spears of their new neighbours. How did they know the land could even support life?
*
We had had to renounce our old countries as a condition of settling here.
At the time, this land was almost as empty as it is now. Even so, the settlers had to pay twice over for it: they handed over cash for the title to the land, and they gave up the rights they had as citizens of other nations. What’s more, they had no right to what lay under it – oil, diamonds, or gas. The government kept that for itself. We owned nothing below the thin topsoil.
My father kept his old navy-blue passport along with his birth and marriage certificate up in a tin box in the attic, but it was a worthless document, and all those like me who were born here were born stateless.
It was a high price, and many baulked at paying it. Some had pointed to the empty spaces of Canada and said we should settle there instead. But the land in Canada that suited them belonged to its native people, while on the other side of the straits the Tungus had no such claim.
It never seemed to matter too much at first. The most religious among us regarded nationhood as a fiction. But by coming here, we made ourselves into orphans.
The Russian government never looked upon us as real citizens. Eventually, they would grow to hate us, but first there were many years of official indifference. Once or twice, they sent bigwigs to see that all was in order, but soon those visits stopped. No one paid us much heed, tucked up in the empty north of this huge country. We were left to ourselvesht=p>
Seventy thousand people had come, all up, in three waves of settlement that lasted over ten years. Most of them were Quakers like my father and mother who had turned late to their faith. Others were believers of a different strain who held that we stood in the last days and the chosen would shortly be snatched up to heaven in the Rapture. A few had no fixed faith at all, but worshipped nature, or reason, or just believed that the old crowded cities they had grown up in were hopelessly out of whack with how life ought to be. The chief thing they had in common was the shared belief that the old world was going to hell in a handbasket. None was fleeing poverty; if anything, they were fleeing its opposites: money, greed, idolaters. Some left the old lives happily, and some left with a great sadness, feeling it was a defeat and an abandonment. But all of them believed that in the space and stillness of the Far North, they would recover the quiet music of life as it ought to be, austere, rugged, shaped by the seasons and the knowledge of hardship, and contact with others like them.
The settlers were hard-working folk. The cities thrived. The winters grew milder. There were hot springs to the north of our city which we piped to heat our glasshouses. We raised tomatoes in the arctic and talked about growing oranges.
Gradually, over time, it became clear that the settlers had less in common than they imagined. The absence from the world made their differences bigger. And try as you might to begin afresh, pretty soon people fall into old ways of doing things. A lot of life is habits. Start everyone off equal, some still wind up with more and want to protect it, some wind up with less and cry foul.
But I think in those first
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