Day 23: Ice, decay, and sad news

We arrived back to the lake late on Wednesday evening, on dark icy roads from Riga (Latvia), and felt this odd melancholic happiness of revisiting a place we had left a few months earlier. It's not exaggerated to say that we start feeling at home here, after all the visits, after all the time spent, after all the talks and chats and after all the experiences and impressions gathered. Arriving back to Aarde Villa late in the evening, only to find our same old guest house rooms, and the chimney room downstairs, felt like a return to a place that has indeed gone a step closer to being a home for us. And our mobile computers remember the Wireless Internet's network ID.

Today in the morning we woke up and stood still for a while outside the house, freezing and looking over the endless emptiness of the frozen Lake Peipus. As always when you come somewhere late in the evening when it's already dark, your real arrival is delayed until the following morning, and you spend the evening in a sort of limbo, having left one place but not yet properly arrived to your destination. As we breathe the ice-cold air coming from the lake, listen carefully to the total silence over the lake, compare the view with our previous views of the lake from the same place, and as we simply remain still for a few minutes in this early morning, we arrive one more time, this time for real.

After breakfast, our first journey of course leads us to visit some of the men fishing on the frozen lake. The ice cover on the lake is about half a metre thick at this time of the year. The silence is breathtaking. The further from the shore you go, the more silent it becomes. Occasional cracking sounds under your feet are worrying at first, but then you understand that the ice is indeed more than thick enough to carry a man, or many men, and also their vehicles. We talk with some of the fishermen, who show us how they drill the holes through the ice, and explain that during the day, they leave the smaller fish they catch on the ice, so the foxes would come out at night and eat them. The give and take of a life that has retained at least some connection with nature.

We went on to Varnja to visit Mother Zoya, who is renovating her house. The village feels empty. Zoya tells us that some people have died since our last visit, some have moved away. We wrote in this blog repeatedly how different the area feels in summer, when families come to visit and children crowd the streets and beaches, and there's the sound of laughter and play everywhere. Already in autumn, the place felt entirely different. And in winter, the contrast becomes even bigger. In fact, in winter, it becomes obvious how many of the houses in the villages are empty - you can see it from the snow. Entrances to many houses are covered with half a metre blankets of snow, leaving the houses inaccessible, and nobody cleans that snow. That's the case for a surprising amount of houses. Our happiness to return makes room for a certain sadness and melancholy. One more time we realize that we might actually be witnessing a disappearing culture.

As we go a little north and meet Timofey in Kasepää, we receive more bad news. Timofey's wife has brain cancer, and was just recently sent home from the hospital, the doctors saying that they could not help her anymore. Timofey is taking care of his dying wife at home now, and says it's a matter of days, maybe weeks.

It's winter.