Dead Mountain: The True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Eichar Donnie

Author:Eichar, Donnie [Eichar, Donnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2013-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

17

2012

WHEN WE ARRIVED AT THE TRAIN STATION, IT WAS STILL dark. Kuntsevich’s martial discipline had us at the station at eight thirty in the morning, with over an hour to spare. I had been up for three hours, yet was still trying to shake myself out of my medicated daze after having taken a Valium the night before. I was not in the habit of taking pills in order to sleep—the Valium prescription was for my vertigo, a condition I’d been dealing with on and off for the previous seven years. But I had been so wired the previous night that without some help, I wouldn’t have slept at all. Even so, I’d slept only a few hours and was now struggling to stay alert on this first day of our trip.

I left my companions for a moment to explore the station. Fifty-three winters ago, the Dyatlov hikers had nearly missed their evening train leaving from Sverdlovsk. I could almost see them hurrying past me toward the platform, breathless, ten pairs of boots squeaking across the marble floors. I thought of Lyuda’s younger brother, Igor, walking here months later, after having returned from his studies in Uzbekistan. When I’d interviewed him on my last trip, he told me how he’d left Sverdlovsk in the winter of 1959, but because he hadn’t exchanged letters with his family, he had no idea that his sister was missing until he returned that April. He had only to step off the train and see his parents standing there on the platform to know that something was wrong. Though Lyuda’s body had not yet been found, her fate was written on their faces.

I wanted to imagine that I was occupying the same space as these people I had come to know, but the truth was that this building had been rebuilt and renovated over the years, and must have looked very different in 1959. There was an even older station to the west, a candy-colored artifact of imperial Russia that predated the hikers, which was now a railway museum. This particular station was most recently refurbished in 2003, with many of the old murals having been restored and a few new ones added.

In the vaulted waiting room, I studied the murals on the walls and ceilings, which made plain just how much had changed over the decades. There was a mural of the Romanov family’s celestial ascent, the Red and White armies positioned on either side. I would learn later that this image—featuring the seven Romanovs being pulled skyward, as if by tractor beam—reflected the family’s canonization by the Russian Orthodox Church in the year 2000. What would Yudin, who was still sentimental about Communist Russia, make of it? Even stranger was a mural reminiscent of a Depression-era WPA project. Similar in composition to the Romanov image, it featured two sets of Soviets—scientists on the left and military men on the right. Front and center were the smoking pieces of a plane falling from a blue sky, an American flag visible on a torn wing.

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