Camping on Kamchatka, and Other Tales

Today it was Gi.'s, Ge.'s, and J.'s last day of school before the Easter holidays, and when they came home they were in a correspondingly good mood. Gi. and Ge. had written a German exam, partly or wholly about Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, which neither had read all the way through; but both were considerably optimistic, or at least cheerful.

Yesterday evening I finished Science in the Kitchen. It turns out that the author was a proponent of vegetarianism; she described meat as a coarse substance that is not necessary to nutrition but is saturated with nasty body wastes, and fish in particular as flesh teeming with parasites. Also, she finds cucumbers barely nutritious and barely digestible unless cooked. On the other hand, she seems inordinately fond of carbohydrates; I barely exaggerate when I say that there is some sort of boiled grain in every recipe. I was wondering about the temperance movement as I read. If one makes an enormous moral issue out of even one glass of wine ("beware the social glass!", as I read in another book), doesn't it make alcoholics defensive, making them more likely to become aggressive and drink more, and doesn't it discourage those who truly make an effort to stop but sometimes relapse? The present-day practice of treating alcoholism (real alcoholism, not just having a glass with meals) as an illness and not as a sin is, in my view, far more reasonable and helpful. Besides, when morality is no longer directed against actions that concretely cause harm, it only discredits all other morality, in my view.

It's funny, I think, how the wheel of public opinion turns. For example, drinking a glass of red wine per day, once denounced as the gateway to inferior regions, is now extolled for its supposed health benefits. Personally, I find the constant changes of views on nutrition highly irritating. First saturated fats are bad, then hydrogenated fats, then trans-fats. First the anti-oxidants in fruits are good, then they are bad if one consumes too much of them. Sports drinks are good, then they erode the teeth. Then there was the Atkins diet and the corresponding preference for meat over grains, followed by its furtive disappearance. And so on and so forth. I wish that everything written on the subject were supported by clear-cut scientific evidence, so that the public isn't like a herd of sheep ignominiously driven to and fro by the barking of the press. I like healthy debate, but I don't like when much of that debate consists of a pack of untruths.

Anyway, now I'm reading Tent Life in Siberia by George Kennan (not that George Kennan, but his explorer forebear). First published in 1870, it is the account of a surveying expedition sent out to Siberia in 1865 by the Russian-American Telegraph Company (for the Western Union Telegraph Company) to prepare for a possible trans-pacific undersea cable. The first trans-atlantic cable had just failed, and before the second trans-atlantic cable was laid there was a window of opportunity for the Western Union, of which it thus attempted to take advantage (unsuccessfully, as it turned out). The trans-pacific sea journey, which took nearly seven weeks, was anything but enjoyable. Mr. Kennan had expected the ocean to correspond to the poetic ideal, sublimely grand, whereas it inspired him only with intense sea-sickness. Then he landed in Petropavlovsk(-Kamchatsky), a village of some two or three hundred inhabitants, some of them xenoi from America and Germany. This village was also an important Russian fortress during the Crimean War. Its surroundings are not Siberian wasteland, as one would expect, but quite green and lovely. To Mr. Kennan, who arrived on shore desperate for land in any size, shape or form, it was nearly like Paradise.

I did an internet search on the Crimean War, which directed me to the Wikipedia article. One article led to the other, and I had an amusingly eclectic read about Florence Nightingale (whose Notes on Nursing I also read on Project Gutenberg), The Little Rascals, the Mexican-American War, the Texas Revolution, the Charge of the Light Brigade, Benjamin Jowett and other friends of Florence Nightingale, and even Petropavlovsk. The humble Russian village now is a city of over 100,000 inhabitants. There were even photos of it in the article about it, with Avacha Bay in the foreground, the buildings clustered on the shore, and the two neighbouring volcanoes in the background.

Here is a funny quatrain from the article on Benjamin Jowett, who was the Master of Balliol College at Oxford:

First come I. My name is Jowett.
There's no knowledge but I know it.
I am the Master of this College,
What I don't know isn't knowledge.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Jowett)

To end on a gluttonous note, for dinner we had a grand pot roast made by Papa with beef, potatoes, leeks, carrots, onions, white wine, etc.. We had baguettes on the side, and for dessert there was Quark -- by which I don't mean the tiny particle that composes the atom, but the food that resembles sour cream -- with cherries.