A dramatic and audacious undertaking had drawn me into using this region as the setting for my novel. In medieval times, this vast uncharted area was regarded as the hinterlands, the gateway to Siberia. By the fifteenth century, its natural resources—furs, timber, salt, and mineral deposits-–had been mercilessly extracted and commercialized by men who became national legends.

My plan was to gather information on architecture and artifacts from the region’s centuries-old churches, homesteads, and fortresses, and investigate Perm’s current ethnographic and natural history museums, gathering details that would help me create an authentic setting and “feel” in my novel. Most important to me was the inspiration that would come from observing the people who currently lived in the area, observations that would add texture and nuance to my story.

Two weeks after I arrived, an undreamt-of opportunity arose. Galina called me to her office, where Evgenia, a young professor of Russian history, was waiting. I’d had private tutorials with Evgenia on the etymology of the Russian language and the cultural significance of Slavic fables. The course was entirely in Russian, which Evgenia kindly dumbed down to a level more suited to a preschooler and which I still struggled to comprehend.

As Evgenia spoke no English, Galina relayed her proposal. “Evegnia and her family would like to invite you to the Ivan Kupala festival—next weekend from Friday to Sunday.”

I’d learned about the Ivan Kupala festival from watching a Russian film about Andrei Rublev, a fifteenth-century iconographer, who was, coincidentally, the model for the main character in my novel. One scene, set in a forest glen alongside a river, depicts the culmination of the festival as a passionate flurry of sexual orgies.

I blushed at the thought. Galina, who must have noticed my discomfort, explained that the festival recreates the Slavic celebration of the summer solstice. Evgenia added that activities included historical reenactments, archery, dancing, and music, all of which she mimed in case the Russian verbs were unfamiliar to me.

“And there is even a bonfire.” Galina clapped her hands, “It is all perfectly designed for your research.”

My thoughts shifted to images of what I thought a Russian renaissance faire would look like. As visions of picnic food, country air, light-hearted reenactments of pre-Christian rituals and folklore were forming in my mind, I felt that this research trip would also be a welcome escape from industrial Perm’s building summer heat and humidity. Plus, I trusted Evgenia and was excited by the possibilities. The festival seemed like a perfect opportunity to interact with a vestige of medieval Russia. I nodded eagerly. “Yes, of course, I’d love to attend.”

Galina said that Evgenia would provide the tent and sleeping bag, and then hesitated, narrowing her eyes. “But I should warn you, the conditions will be primitive. Maybe not what you’re used to.”

I wanted to dispel her apparent opinion that I was a spoiled American.  “I’ve camped before,” I assured her. “I can sleep in a tent for a few nights.” What better way to experience the conditions my novel’s characters would have undergone?

The festival was also a convenient excuse to put off the daunting task of working on my novel, something Galina often inquired about, as if she expected a finished product before I left. I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t face another weekend wandering alone, popping into local museums, churches, and cafes. My college Russian was improving. I was forced to speak more and was understanding the general gist of what was said to me. But the constant effort of living within another language fatigued my brain, making it impossible to transition to creative writing. I was becoming lonesome and homesick.

A week later, after a two-hour, Friday-evening bus ride north into the countryside, passing through primitive, isolated villages, I was with Evgenia and her family as they thwacked the brush for a tent site in a meadow of waist-deep, stalky grass that I soon learned was an amorous breeding ground for bomber mosquitoes.

On Saturday morning I was alone, searching for Olga, to whom Evgenia had introduced me the night before, thinking Olga, an English teacher at Perm’s aviation academy, would like some experience with a native speaker. Olga and I had agreed to meet after breakfast.

I zig-zagged between the campers’ makeshift tables, where the remnants of breakfast—cheese, sausage, porridge—remained as an unintended offering to swarming flies. The acrid smell of kerosene starter still clung in the air from smoldering campfires. I was feeling both queasy and awkward wandering amid a cluster of sherbet-colored tents, pitched in the grassy field without any plan or order. Moving along, I encountered a pasty, pudgy man emerging from his tent. He was entirely naked, his arms outstretched in greeting to the new day.

“Dobroye utro.” He smiled at me as if we were old pals. I averted my gaze and pulled down the brim of my cap, too rattled by the Russian doughboy to utter a simple good morning in return.

Startled by a hand touching my shoulder, I was relieved to see it was Olga. “Ah, Lori, you are here.”

Like many women at the festival, Olga wore a long peasant dress adorned with the traditional red and black embroidery. Her hair was braided and coiled around her head, accentuating her round face and owlish eyes.  She could have stepped out of a nineteenth-century painting. And that was the point—to embrace and revitalize the Russian soul. I’d heard many times during my visit that their past was what the Soviet era had unjustly denied the Russian people.

Olga pursed her mouth at my rumpled cotton trousers and baseball cap. “Come, Lori, we swim now. Cleansing in the river is Ivan Kupala tradition.”

I didn’t want to go swimming. But I also didn’t want to offend my only English-speaking acquaintance. By that time, I could understand Russian phrases, and even decipher the meaning of unfamiliar words embedded within a stream of conversation. Yet each time I opened my mouth expecting to deliver an intelligible thought in coherent but admittedly child-simple Russian, garbled nonsense sputtered out, causing embarrassed confusion. While my immersion in the Russian language was certainly increasing my communications skills, from time to time I did long to have a conversation in my native tongue. In fact, just then I felt that my sanity depended upon the opportunity to converse with Olga, in English.

Yet I was also worried about swimming. What about leeches and water-borne parasites? Or ingesting some lethal, foreign bacteria? Galina had advised me to buy bottled drinking water and never drink Perm’s tap water. By the smell and color of the municipal water supply I had concluded that it contained some concoction of heavy metals. I was not confident that the water in the river, where hundreds of festival-goers were bathing, was any safer for someone with my lack of Russian antibodies. If I admitted my suspicion that the river was not only weedy, slimy and mucky, but was also a cesspool of illness, I feared Olga would take offense or dismiss me as an American prig.

Olga frowned at my bare arms. “Lori, you must swim. The water will ooze–-no, what is correct word?” She bit her lip in thought. “Soothe. The water will soothe bug bites. You have many.”

I rubbed my hands over the itchy welts that had erupted overnight. It was only mid-morning, but it was already very hot and humid. Sweat dribbled down my spine. I lifted my arm to rearrange the cap stuck to my brow, got a whiff of my armpit, and realized that perhaps Olga was hinting at something. A Russian acquaintance had once told me that Americans emitted a peculiar, unpleasant milky smell. The river was the only bathing place, and my last shower had been three days before.

“I didn’t bring a swimsuit,” I hedged.

“Swim in what you wear. It is normal here,” Olga countered.

Normal? I glanced around. Small groups of bikini-clad women strolled by carrying towels and soap on their way to the river. These were not the brick-bodied, dour-faced farm workers that seemed prevalent during the Brezhnev era of the 1970s and ‘80s. They were slender and graceful, with silky braids falling over their shoulders—women fully embracing their femininity. How pathetic I, the little foreign capitalist, would appear emerging from the water, soaked trousers outlining my cellulite-dimpled bottom, my polyester top clinging to my torso, as I traipsed back to my army-green pup tent.

Stalling, I glanced around and spotted a young couple a few feet away. I particularly noticed the broad-shouldered man, who was straddling a bench.  His long brown hair was tied back with a leather cord. His beard, thick and wiry, covered his lower face and upper neck. An embroidered white linen tunic, belted at the waist, matched his free-flowing trousers—an outfit similar to the peasant costume Leo Tolstoy assumed in his later years, after renouncing his aristocratic privilege. Unlike Tolstoy, however, this young man was barefoot, blades of grass threading between his thick toes; better to connect to mother earth, I’d been told. I wondered what kind of man he was as he languidly drew a comb through the long tresses of the pretty woman who sat with her back to him, while other men, many in faux uniforms—snug black T-shirts tucked into camouflage military-fatigue trousers—gathered around the metal working and archery demonstrations.

Mr. Nouveau Tolstoy raised an eyebrow, his blue eyes suspiciously scanning me. “Hmmm…,” he said in a deep voice, “I don’t know about an American woman swimming in our Russian rivers.”

He began to say more, but Mrs. Tolstoy rapped his hand and scolded him. She glared at me as he turned back to combing her thick hair.

I was stunned. First, that he’d been listening to our conversation, and second, that he spoke quite good English. Then I realized the insult he’d casually thrown out—that I, as an American, was not worthy, or able to stand up to the challenge of swimming in one of Russia’s grand rivers— a body of water that, by Russian-river standards, was as placid as a swimming hole.

I had one change of clothing in my backpack, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. “Wait,” I told Olga. “I’ll change.”

Why had I been so hesitant to take a simple swim, and why did it take a provocation from wanna-be Tolstoy for me to accept Olga’s invitation?

It wouldn’t be my first time in risky, mucky waters. I grew up in northern Wisconsin, in a place where my friends and I regularly rode our horses about town. A favorite ride went past the oil refinery, through the storage-tank field, to a tree-lined trail heading toward a small cemetery beside the Nemadji River. At the river bank, we’d tie our horses to a tree and step into the water. Swimming in the river was treacherous. The water was the color of rusty sheet metal, a result of the dense red clay that made up the river bed. I’d work my feet out of the thick muck cloying around my ankles like curing cement, and let myself drift. The more my friends warned me about the dangerous currents capable of sweeping me into the shipping harbor a mile upstream, the more I’d paddle away, defiant and determined. In the decades since, I’d come to my senses. Yet I was disappointed that I’d receded into such a meek version of my old self. And this Russian river was a gentle challenge compared to those I’d faced over the previous weeks.

By the time I returned to Olga, she had changed into her swimsuit. She nodded her approval at my shorts, hooked my arm under hers, and led me to the river. Olga swam out to the middle while I tested the spongy, weedy land near the river bank.

“Swim out to me,” Olga urged.

I grimaced at the river’s musky scent as Olga eyed my progress. My clothes swirled around me like a sack of rags as I glided into the water. I tried to ignore the other women as they swam, bathed, and relaxed on the river’s grassy bank, just as they seemed to be ignoring the obvious foreigner among them.

“Lori, you must be more brave,” Olga chided.

More brave?

Perhaps it was true that I had evolved from a daring and heedless teenager to a more cautious middle-aged woman. But hadn’t I traveled alone by train, twenty-two hours northeast from Moscow to Perm, a city of one million, where convicts had once begun their walk to the gulags? Hadn’t I had taken classes in which the other international students were mostly smart young women from China a third of my age? Hadn’t I rented my own apartment, navigated the city bus, and lost eight pounds as I floundered around in grocery stores and cafeterias, all while attempting to communicate in a language I was struggling to learn?

I’d once imagined that after my children left home I’d be on a European river cruise, lounging on a deck chair, sipping Bordeaux, spreading tangy blue cheese on a crusty baguette—not shivering in a flimsy children’s sleeping bag on permafrost earth, perched on a cracked plank in a grody campsite, eating oil-drenched, bony herring from a can, and using a recently dug hole in the ground as a latrine.

Was I not brave enough already?

I swam out to Olga, paused and caught my breath when I reached her, then pushed on to the other side of the river, where I stood, wobbling a bit until I gained purchase. I imagined a millennium of life on the shifting riverbed beneath me: the dust and detritus of the explorers and conquerors, the exploiters and the visionaries, who came to mine precious minerals, thin out the forests, and trap mink and fox, now compressed into the strata of the earth.

Like confetti, agitated flecks of silt twirled around my ankles as my feet imprinted into the ancient sediment. I curled my toes, squeezing and caressing the land.

I waved to Olga.

“Bravo, Lori,” Olga cheered.

Bravo, indeed.

My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love

by Leah Fisher

What if you could have a different marriage without having to get a different spouse? At age sixty, marital therapist, Leah Fisher, does just that. She wants to explore the world; he wants to focus on his career. After much discussion, the couple agrees to be apart for a year, each pursuing their own dream while arranging for periodic reunions and nurturing a committed relationship. Leah’s solo journey leads her to a shaman in the Amazon, a Colombian drug runner, a massive earthquake, volunteer projects, loving families, and lots of swimming in warm oceans. The couple’s relationship changes…for the better. Unknowingly, they’ve been reconfiguring their idea of a good marriage, shaping one that better suits their needs in the second half of life. This wise and often humorous book combines an intimate view of a long-term marriage, guidance in couple negotiation, healing adventures, and an inspiring example of individual expression and relational growth in later life. “A bold audacious experiment... described with breathtaking honesty.” — Judith Viorst “An inspiring travel remembrance... a practical guidebook to marital satisfaction. “ — Kirkus “As she and Charley continually alter their relationship, they model lived feminism and compromise. The result is wanderlust-inducing—the stuff of dreams and daring.” — NEW PAGES.COM Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore

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