Peat Bogs of Balakhna

 13.04.11

Decadence Geometry

How long do our footprints on Earth outlast us? To find the answer, I undertook a journey to the bogs of the Middle Volga, where a huge energy project started 90 years ago and disappeared 60 years later.

In every planet's region, tourists are presented with some archeological findings, the miraculously survived witnesses of old ages. In opposition to it, ecotourists love the sight of how the omnivorous nature swallows products of human being, brakes them down, adopts the most resistant and fits them into a landscape in its own elegant manner.

Middle Volga is one of the most developed and heavily populated areas in Russia. A ground traveler would remember it as a country of ubiquitous human presence - big and small towns, villages and processed fields. Seems that there's no place for mystery here, but this is a deceptive impression. The roads carefully avoid large pieces of practically impassable marshland.

Crusade For Energy

Once the civilization had a go at conquering the bogs, tempted by their peat. Flying over the Volga region, you probably will see a huge net of strange rectangle ponds, the witness of the fuel excavating for what was once the world-biggest peat-fueled power station of the town of Balakhna. Built in 1925, the 200 MW station supplied electricity to several nearby towns. In the following decades an infrastructure of numerous settlements and a narrow gauge railway - the longest in the USSR - was developed in the woods and swamps. Peat reserves had reached their end in the late seventies, and the station was converted to natural gas fueling.

My Silent Guide

I follow a railway embankment to pass through the bogs (the rails were dismantled about ten years ago). If I loose it, my GPS gadget will be of little help. Swamp is swamp: out of the embankment, one can progress only at an absurdly slow pace.

Two tracks beaten by hunter's SUVs and legs of the local folks - former peat workers - witness that the road is still in use, but not everywhere. Old wooden bridges that were joining banks of numerous brooks go to ruin quickly. At present, they are already in a very bad condition, and I wonder at traces of some desperate drivers who still venture to cross them. By this reason, long sections of the road are impassable, covered with young but already thick trees. Sometimes I even have to leave the embankment and squeeze through the thorny raspberry and blackberry bushes.

'Eternal' Things

Surprisingly, the railroad itself disappeared practically without a trace. I was looking for some part of the track that had escaped destruction, but nothing remained intact. The rails were everywhere ... less the road: they substituted poles in the fences of the nearby allotments, or served as hand-made auxiliary devices in the yards of the former railway workers. Sometimes a sleeper or a fastener emerged out of the dirt. I measured one sleeper, it was a little bigger than 26 inch wheel of my bike. Can you imagine how tiny the train must had been?

The steel turned out to be a bad guardian of history, so did the stone. Most ex-railway buildings looked as if they had been deserted centuries ago: wooden roofs and ceilings fell down and crashed brick walls. I was certain that flora would swallow them entirely in just some years.

In contrast to the rail track, a power line wasn't dismantled. Wooden poles rotted and fell down, but growing trees raised up the iron wires again. The haywire hanged amidst the pines, furs, and birches, and would still for some time amuse accidental travelers, unfamiliar with the history of these lands. When the embankment is totally overgrown with trees, the wires would be the only guide for those who'd try to repeat my journey.

While 'indestructible' steel and concrete railroad items disappeared almost completely, the rectangle ponds, named 'peat lakes' in the saying of the local folks, had remained unchanged year after year. They are the real treasure of the region, worth the attention of many tourists, with their peculiar regular forms and enormous charm in the woodland's windless calmness. Channels, endless and straight as an arrow, lakes, and brooks are filled with deep-brown water - it makes an illusion of sweetness (but it isn't so). You can't guess how deep a lake is - the shoreline is steep and its bottom is always hidden. Narrow stripes of land, covered with pines, alders, and moss, are funny to walk without haste: the landscape leaves the traveler with a peculiar sensation. There's a narrow path along each one; mushrooms and cowberries grow in profusion here. The lakes lack fish - only Amphibia, reptiles, and birds live here. Nowadays, the area attracts thousands of ducks for nesting.

Demolition With Style

Who might think that this decadence happens in the middle of the Europe in the XXI century? Scientists reckoned recently that if our civilization disappeares today, all its signs will vanish in the following 20 000 years. Even in preserving conditions of a desert or the arctic ice. Again, swamp is swamp, it swallows remains much faster, and I watched its destroying power.

Wandering around the peat lakes, I had a slight inner feeling of an apocalypse movie hero. I soaked the warmth from a tender weak August sun, and reveled in complete quietness for the first time in months: the wind in tops of pines and birds' voices were the only sounds. And I thought - I have nothing against this kind of end. Even if this is our end.