WRITING HISTORIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

May 1985
Viliui River, Siberia

Ivan Ivanov saw the foal fall in.

He had been standing near the edge of the river when the noise reached him –– first the single yelp, then the braying of the mare. Turning, he caught the white of the eye, the tongue an awful dusky pink, the small body slipping down the side of the icy riverbank, and before it reached the water he was already running.

Nearing them, he saw the dark shape of the foal bobbing in the water, its hair all plastered down and its head kicking up trying to breathe. Instantly he knew it would not save itself. The mare was bellowing, pacing the riverbank, running down nearly to the water and then scrambling back to safety, mad with fear; she would die trying to save her foal and she knew it, she was trying to decide, and in the trying she had made her decision.

Ivan Ivanov glanced at the foal, foundering helplessly, its motions weaker and weaker by the moment. He swore once, quietly. And the river surged up to take him.

The water was so cold it hardly even registered; it was as if he had been plunged into another dimension. Here gravity flowed in ripples and eddies, here there was nothing but the line where body became not. Ivan Ivanov held his breath and groped blindly in the blackness, kicked, came up and seized a mouthful of air, felt the sharp sting of cold against his chin. He could not find the foal. On the riverbank he could see, through a film of swirling water, the looming shape of the mare. She was standing still, or maybe they both were moving. Regardless it was dead; he knew, and so did she; it was dead.

Through the rushing of the water he heard a sharp and incomprehensible cry, and saw a rope, flung out in front of him. He seized it in the crook of an elbow –– his fingers were so numb they would not curl –– and let himself be hauled out.
           
A week later, Ivan Ivanov woke, and could not move.

Its onset, the doctor told his wife (and his insensate body), was rapid. At the time of presentation to the hospital all patients –– Ivan Ivanov included –– were generally comatose, feverish, intensely disoriented, twitching with chills, suffering from headache and intense pain, and moving stiffly, if at all. Following the initial acute stage, the doctor continued, in dulcet and sympathetic tones, the patient’s state would typically deteriorate rapidly, physically and cognitively: they would lose interest in life, becoming apathetic, shuffling creatures; their muscles would stiffen until they were unable even to walk or feed themselves; at some point, usually shortly before death, they would become mute and incontinent, stiff and spasmodic, a body in a bed.

Ivan Ivanov understood precisely, or at least he would have understood, had his brain, baked by high fever and marred by tiny holes, been able to grasp it. This was the stuff of all cautionary tales about the river in the village. Bokhoror: “the stiffness.” Appended: don’t fall in.

Bokhoror is better known in the broader medical community as Viliuisk encephalomyelitis, or VE. It is one in the small and nightmarish category of diseases described by medicine as “always fatal,” in the esteemed company of prion neurodegenerative diseases and the bubonic plague. Despite this it has received surprisingly little international attention. One suspects this may be because it exclusively affects the impoverished people of an almost entirely unpopulated area of Siberia; regardless, its etiology –– where it comes from and how it spreads –– remains almost completely unknown.

VE has apparently been around for centuries, popping up every so often among the Sakha herders and hunters of Yakutia, in northern Siberia. After a small outbreak in the 1920s, an epidemic began in earnest in the 1950s, and it wasn’t long before Moscow’s great head swung around and the neurologists flooded in. They found: nothing. A surprising amount of nothing, actually, considering how well-characterized other types of encephalomyelitis are, and how much time and money were poured into their efforts. Which really should make one wonder if there might be something else at play.

* * *

An old Siberian myth: just after the world came into being, the god of creation flew, quick and bright as an arrow, across the enormous expanse of new land. Suddenly he came across a cold so bitter that his hands froze, and in an almighty accident he dropped all his divine treasures in one place; and that place became Yakutia. This enormous and isolated region, the largest of Russia’s 21 republics, is blessed with a bounty of precious metals and minerals. Most importantly, it is Russia’s (and therefore the world’s) greatest producer of diamonds.

The world’s largest diamond mining company is a Russian state-controlled company, АЛРОСА (Alrosa), which is headquartered in Yakutia. An Alrosa mine is a marvelous thing to behold from above, a beast of contradictions: the brain recalls its vast proportions, the eye insists on seeing a child’s sandpit. From a satellite view it is difficult to tell whether it protrudes out from the earth or recedes into it. It looks like a bisected onion, or a tumor. Its unevenly concentric oval rings are flecked with speckles of grey; a slight zooming-in reveals that these tiny dots are actually trucks, supersize hulking monstrosities capable of hauling up to 136 tonnes of kimberlite ore. The Alrosa mine at Nyurbinskiy is a massive undertaking of human ingenuity and Soviet brute-force engineering, and every day it dumps tens of thousands of tons of waste rock into the barren tundra.

It is well-established that such a practice leads to heavy metals leaching into the surrounding waterways. And it is equally well-established that heavy metals trigger other kinds of encephalomyelitis, as well as other neurodegenerative diseases symptomatically similar to VE. Not to mention that the bokhoror epidemics began only once the Alrosa diamond mines opened in the 1950s; that Alrosa is mostly owned by the state; that diamonds, as one of Russia’s top ten non-energy exports, are of substantial economic importance; that almost all the neurologists sent to investigate were from state-controlled institutions and universities; that the closest any scientist seems to have come to writing about this effect is a weak reference to possible “mineral imbalances” in the region’s lakes; that it is commonly believed among the locals of Yakutia that the disease is spread by the river (and thus VE is named for the river Viliui, the Siberian Lethe where Ivan Ivanov lost his mind).

Of course, it’s impossible to say for certain whether these separate phenomena are or aren’t related to each other; there simply isn’t any evidence.