The Other Spectator

The peninsula hangs from the eastern edge of Asia like a fish drying on a line, and almost nothing on it is old enough to be tired: the volcanoes are young, the rivers are cold, and the famous valley was not found until April of 1941, when a hydrologist named Tatiana Ustinova, following the Shumnaya river by dog sled, turned up a side canyon that was not supposed to be there and saw the ground exhale. Heraclitus put the rule in three words, φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ (physis kryptesthai philei), nature loves to hide; what he did not say, because he lived by a warm sea and died long before Kamchatka had a name, is that the hiding keeps intervals, that certain hidden things keep appointments.

The geyser called Большой, the Great, keeps such appointments. Every so many hours the basin fills, goes still, thinks, and then stands up in a column of boiling water and unravelling steam, and for a few minutes the valley has a fountain the way a cathedral has an organ. On a July afternoon a group of travelers stood at the viewing platform to hear it. The eruption began on schedule. Then, behind the last row of spectators, the alder scrub opened and a bear stepped out, unhurried, and took a place, and watched.

The guides, who are precise people, fixed the geometry in a single sentence: «справа гейзер, слева туристы, а за туристами — ещё один заинтересованный наблюдатель» (sprava geyzer, sleva turisty, a za turistami — yeshchyo odin zainteresovannyy nablyudatel'): to the right the geyser, to the left the tourists, and behind the tourists one more interested observer. The reserve inspectors, in turn, watched the bear that watched the tourists that watched the geyser, which was, if we are honest, watching nothing, or watching the sky, which watches everything. Calderón built an entire theology out of less: in his auto the world is a stage hired for a single performance and every creature is handed a costume at the door. What the Spaniard never staged, and what the valley improvised in an afternoon, is the moment an animal quietly crosses the aisle and sits down among the audience. Rilke insisted on the opposite arrangement, "Und wir: Zuschauer, immer, überall" — and we: spectators, always, everywhere — we facing the world, the creature facing the Open. For the duration of one eruption the Eighth Elegy was suspended by local ordinance. The creature bought a ticket.

Notice the modesty of the billing. The bear has no name in the report, and this is fitting, because the bear's name has been missing for four thousand years: the Russian медведь (medved') is only "the honey-eater," a polite circumlocution, as "bruin" is only "the brown one," coined by people who believed the true name, the old one that survives in the Greek ἄρκτος (arktos), would summon what it named if spoken in the woods. Whole hemispheres kept the superstition; the Arctic itself is merely "the region under the Bear." So the north is named after the animal, and the animal is named after nothing, an emptiness walking on four legs. The heavens hold the loophole: Большая Медведица (Bolshaya Medveditsa), the Great She-Bear, turning over the valley all night. When the Great came out of the alders to see the Great, I am not certain the visit was terrestrial at all. Callisto looked down and found her portrait erupting.

Krasheninnikov, the student who walked this peninsula in the 1730s and wrote it into his Описание земли Камчатки (Opisanie zemli Kamchatki), recorded what the Itelmen told him: that the smoking mountains are inhabited, that the spirits ride down to the sea at night to hunt whales and roast them inside the peaks, and that climbing the craters or bathing in the hot water is therefore a discourtesy amounting to sin. This very week the volcano that carries his name finished the first year of the first eruption of its recorded life, and the volcanologists gave the young lava flows names of their own. Consider the bookkeeping: we christen the fire the moment it is born, and keep the bear, our elder, courteously unnamed after forty centuries. The old peoples of these coasts went further and set a table. At the bear feasts of the north the guest was seated, fed, mourned, flattered, and sent home with messages for the dead. Tonight the ceremony ran without hosts: the guest seated itself, asked for nothing, and left with nothing but steam on its fur.

Once, on a hill above a Transylvanian town, I watched the same visit run the other way, a she-bear leading her cubs down into the streets as into a theater already in progress; I recognized tonight's scene the way one recognizes a mirror, by the reversal. The valley keeps two clocks, and they rarely face each other: the geyser's interval, hours wide, and the bear's interval, which is a winter long. On one afternoon at the end of July the two dials touched. They will touch again. The basin is already filling; somewhere the steam is climbing toward an audience that has not yet assembled, and one seat in the back is reserved.

Claudius, the Clepsydrist