I Am the Walrus
2011That's morzh in Russian, Amerikanets. And to join this brotherhood of cold-water swimmers, you have to take a dip in a lake. North of the Arctic Circle. In January. Twice. Peter Savodnik mans up
I am underwater. I have been here for three seconds. They have been very protracted seconds, like chapters or decades, whole life spans. I try to keep moving. I flail. There is an immense pressure building around my head, and there are miniature icebergs pawing at my back and shoulders, and when I resurface I can hear the lunatics on the ice, in their camouflage and bearskin hats, smoking their cigarette stumps, shouting, hurrahing. I pull myself out of Lake Semenovskoye onto an iced-over dock, and now the ice and frost are forming around my toes, along the backs of my legs and the arc of my back, and I can feel my soles starting to adhere to the dock, and the cold is not simply cold, it’s metaphysical, like a newly emergent state of being. Vitaly Poborchiy, my tutor and spiritual guide in the art of ice swimming, is shouting—“Into the banya! Into the banya!”—and I scurry across the snow toward the log cabin, the banya, which sits next to the lake. As I tear through the front door, the other men throw a towel around me, and Poborchiy says, “You made it!”
Now the ecstasy is rising through me, yeast-like, and I suspect that I’m on the verge of being inducted into some holy fraternity, and Poborchiy, noting my sense of triumph, puts a hand on my shoulder and says, “Listen, tovarish”—comrade—“now it is time to go again.” I laugh. “Listen, tovarish,” I say, “I think I’ve had enough.” To which he replies, “No one except for some of the very, very old babushkas would ever go just once. Everyone goes twice. Then you will be a real walrus!”
A walrus, or morzh, is a Russian who swims in very cold bodies of water. The morzhi are the equivalent of what Americans call “polar bears,” except that in America polar bear plungers are regarded as strange and masochistic eccentrics, and in Russia morzhi are descendants of a noble 1,000-year-old tradition. Ice swimming hangs over you the way a challenge to one’s integrity or sexual prowess does. I’ve come to the Russian Arctic to prove my mettle. Morzhi are everywhere: in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Siberia, the far east, and the very far north, including in Murmansk—which abuts the Barents Sea and is the largest city north of the Arctic Circle—where the local temperature for my baptismal dunk, in Lake Semenovskoye, was nine. When you say “morzh” around Russians, and especially older Russians, they often nod and smile and say things like, “This is a great thing for your organism.”
Now my organism is in a state of transformation, and the cold is no longer the alien force it was a few minutes ago. The blood just beneath the surface of my skin moves quickly, with a hitherto unknown energy. My heart beats, not pounds, with a newly honed momentum. My digits, numbed into submission, have been vaccinated against the cold. My skin feels as if it has been stretched, vacuum-like, around my shoulders.
The banya is the very best part of swimming in an icy lake 124 miles north of the Arctic Circle. This is not simply because of the absence of cold. It is because there, the afterglow of the polar swim blossoms into a deeply kneaded warmth, a loosening up of all the muscles and connective tissues, a disentangling of every last knot and tension. “In the banya, after your swim, you feel a power you have never known,” says Poborchiy, the head of the Murmansk chapter of morzhi (currently 350 strong) and a former captain, second class, in the Soviet, and then Russian, navy. “This is a power to do battle with anything—for example life, which is full of many tragedies, or your archenemy, or a difficult wife.”
The traditional banya, in which one alternates between a very hot steam room and a very cold bath, is but a Russian offshoot of a long history of water-related treatments, including Roman baths, Turkish baths, Scandinavian saunas, and the (supposedly) curative waters of the Caucasus and the Alps. But the ice swimmer’s banya—the Dom Morzhi, or House of Walruses—is not so much a traditional banya, where people surrender themselves to birch-scented vapors and an invigorating dip in the pool. It is stripped down, ragged—a poorly insulated 12-by-12 box festooned with yellowed photographs of mostly naked championi jumping rope and flexing muscles, illuminated by the flickering white-yellow glow of two bulbs screwed into the ceiling. There is no furnace or bubbling samovar. There is only the “fake heat,” as my comrades call it, that comes from leaving the very cold exterior and entering the not terribly cold interior. It feels spiritual, not in the way that spas or mineral baths are meant to cleanse our souls or simulate a super-chic womb, but in a serious way, in a way that makes you feel that a confrontation is taking place, with the water, the cold, yourself, God. It is here that you are returned to yourself before the Fall. But it is not simply a purification. This is a distinctly Russian moment, so it is necessarily infused with struggle, and the outcome is unclear. Reason, argument, fact, the linear progression of premises and conclusions that is the cornerstone of the Western mind—none of this obtains in the Dom Morzhi. Here, there is only the holy showdown between the swimmer and his fate.
Post-Soviet Russia has newly embraced, even officially sanctioned, God. And the ice swim is associated with Orthodox traditions. The ritual of the Epiphany, which takes place every January 19 and imitates Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan, has become something of an event, like an art opening. It is common to see lines of ordinary people—girls in skinny jeans, traffic cops, men in suits and ties—shivering on iced-over lakes, waiting to jump in a tiny patch of nearly frozen water. They do this once a year because that is what people do now, believe in God and get baptized and all that.
But to Poborchiy, 51, and his coterie—Vladimir Petrov, 46, who buys and sells salmon and trout; the pensioners Sergei Koromislov, 58, Glazko Tolya, 70, and Viktor Martinov, 74; and Yuri Ivanov, 47, a captain, first rank, on a nuclear submarine—those dilettante swimmers are “not very real walruses,” as Martinov puts it. They are mostly from Moscow or St. Petersburg, and they prefer to wear Italian swimming trunks and bikinis and pose for the camera with bearded Orthodox priests, all the while laughing, bouncing through the snow, jumping in the water (“just once, never twice,” Ivanov notes), having fun. “When you are in the water, it is not about having a good time,” says Ivanov. “It is about staying in and getting out.” Poborchiy agrees. “To achieve this empowerment,” he says, “you must know how to endure.”
Only by swimming in very cold water on a regular basis can one purge the viruses and bacteria that reside in bodies accustomed to warmer climes, according to Poborchiy. This may be true, to an extent. Adherents of cryotherapy contend, not entirely unreasonably, that limited exposure to the bitter cold reduces the incidence of everything from the common cold to manic depression. When Poborchiy is training—the Murmansk morzhi host regular competitions, races that draw swimmers from across Russia, Finland, Norway, and Israel, home of many ex-Soviets—he goes to the lake twice daily, meaning he jumps in the water four times every day. “Each time, it is like a great shock rushing through the whole body, like you are freezing, dying, like you have been electrocuted,” Poborchiy says. “Not everyone should do this.”
It is Poborchiy’s dream to host a summit in Murmansk, featuring the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and President Barack Obama. “Our president is a great lover of ice swimming,” he says. “My hope is that Medvedev and Obama will go swimming here, and that when they are together in the banya, they will be able to talk like men about the things that need to be talked about.” He mentions Afghanistan, oil, the Chinese, the economy, and of course, in good Soviet fashion, “friendship among the peoples.” Petrov, who is looking to break into the American fish market, seems to think this is a good idea.
After ten minutes, I step outside the Dom Morzhi and trundle down to the dock for my second plunge. A sprawling plain of frozen lake, blanketed in two to three feet of snow, envelops the tiny swimming hole. Beyond Lake Semenovskoye is a gray-faced apartment block, the Church of the Savior on the Water, and a 100-foot-tall statue in honor of all the sailors who died defending the motherland. Two middle-aged women, Rima and Olga, wearing bathing suits with the Russian tricolor emblazoned on their stomachs, are staring at the hole in the ice. Two men stand next to them, both in their seventies, grizzled, red-faced, and with rusting instruments that resemble very large pliers, extracting chunks of ice from the water, which encompasses an area roughly six by eight feet. One of the older men drags out a mini iceberg, and everyone applauds. A band of cross-country skiers in the middle of the lake whistle at the swimmers. Rima removes her thick-soled flip-flops and descends the ladder. She paddles around, keeping her head above the water, pushing the blocks of ice out of her way. Everyone stares. After a minute or two, Rima says, “It feels a little colder today than yesterday.” Poborchiy whispers to me, “Rima is not a beautiful woman, but she is an amazing walrus.”
As Rima emerges, one of the older men, glaring at me, says, “Davai,” which means “Let’s go” (and in this case includes a dollop of “imperialist coward”), and everyone chants—“Amerikanets! Amerikanets!” I descend the staircase into the water, and the shouts and bleats of my fellow idiot swimmers are suddenly muffled by the violet black.
I am underwater again. It feels cool but not exactly cold, and even though the icebergs keep scraping against my shoulders and chin, they seem less obtrusive than last time. Tolya, who used to catch cod from a trawler off the coast of the Kolya Peninsula, told me before I went in the first time that I didn’t need to go all the way under, that not everyone does that and that it can upset your system, the temperature of your blood, your equilibrium. That made me want to see what it was like down there, and once I’d lowered myself in, I had dunked my head in for a few seconds. But I was a novice then; I lacked technique and couldn’t think about anything except the cold.
Now the sting subsides. There’s a very intense chill, an almost pleasing numbness that wraps around my torso, neck, nose, temples, but it doesn’t hurt or jar. When you stop thinking about the temperature and contemplate the coldness the way you might approach a mathematical conundrum—What is the color of the water? What is its shape?—it feels less painful than lifeless, as if you have entered a place that has been sapped of its biology. This is not where everyone goes, as Tolya notes. This is where the morzh goes, and it’s lonely. Beneath the violet-black surface of the swimming hole at the lake, on the northernmost fringe of civilization, you feel that you are in a beautiful nether land that binds together the people who come here, and that, at the same time, you are all alone.
Later, in the banya, I ask Poborchiy why he comes here every day, then Ivanov, Rima, Olga, and finally the old men with the very large pliers and the camouflage coats and the bearskin hats. Everyone says this is an impossible question. Poborchiy, who has logged more than 2,000 dips at the lake, says the water makes you more virile, more fit to conquer (countries, women, whatever destiny might have in store). Martinov, one of the pensioners, says they swim because this is what they have always done, “and you cannot stop doing what you have always done.” I ask him why not, and he says, “Because then something very terrible would happen. This much is known.”
I am pulling myself out of the swimming hole for the second time today, and the sensation is much more profound because I know what’s next. I am running for the Dom Morzhi. A great shock is rushing through my whole body, like I am freezing, dying, like I have been electrocuted. This is the moment, the crystallizing juncture, when it occurs to me that this is crazy, that other people who do not belong to this special, demented club would never do this because this is called suffering.
It’s not the water. It’s what happens when you get out of the water, and the temperature plummets 25 degrees, and you have 60 seconds to scramble from the lake to the log cabin before you topple over. This is the critical window during which you are either catapulted to walrus status or something very bad happens. Tolya had told me about this post-swim denouement before I went in—“It will catch you without you knowing it!”—but I hadn’t paid attention because that was a half-hour ago, when I was standing on the dock and fixated on the lake, the icebergs, the plunge ahead. Now I am remembering his words: “You think you will die, but probably that won’t happen.” I laughed when he said this. “Why can’t we be sure of anything?” I asked. He laughed back, reproachfully. During the 30 or 40 or maybe 50 seconds during which you are running from the lake to the banya, he explained, you can see, maybe for the first time in your life, the outline of your own demise if things go badly. During these moments, you don’t necessarily expect to die, but you are aware of your vulnerability to larger forces, and you are scared.
The front door of the Dom Morzhi nears. Poborchiy, who is a tall man with a powerful baritone, is shouting: “Molodyets! Molodyets!”—“Outstanding! Outstanding!” I imagine my fingers falling off. I imagine leaving a toe or two behind—in the snow, stuck to the ice. The door swings open. A wave of fake heat embraces me. Ivanov, in his black naval uniform, is pouring a round of Ukrainian vodka for all assembled, and I grab a towel. I am about to express my gratitude for being admitted to the brotherhood when I notice that Ivanov is speaking in soft and measured tones. He is giving a speech. “Yakovlevich,” he is saying, “was not just a swimmer, although he was a great swimmer. He was a friend, which, as you know, is very hard to find these days, which are not like the days we used to know.”
Poborchiy hands me a glass, and Ivanov fills it with vodka. We drink together. Poborchiy points to a picture on the wall of Anatoly Yakovlevich, who was 81 and was buried a few days ago. In the photograph, he is mostly bald and well built and smiling, and he has just emerged from the same patch of water that I have just emerged from. Poborchiy says the photograph was taken shortly after the Dom Morzhi was built, in 1977. Ivanov, portly, with a mustache and meaty wrists and hands, leans close. He says that everyone has to keep drinking and pours another round. I ask him who will defend Murmansk from the Americans if the captain of the submarine is drunk. “This is why I keep saying that your president and my president must go swimming together,” Poborchiy says.
“But can your president swim?” Tolya asks me. “Can your president swim?” Ivanov repeats the question. Then he pours my third or possibly fourth round, and suddenly it is truly warm inside the little box filled with a flickering, white-yellow light and the photographs of dead walruses. We drink again, and again.
