Fault Lines - John Knoop

Tuva, August ‘90
No phones and no airplanes and no sign of another living soul for our first ten days on
this river. Unbroken forest on both sides of the water. Lots of mosquitoes and tiny ticks that
burrow into and barb your flesh so that you must dig them out with a needle or knifepoint. Then
the terrain opens up and we visit a family of shepherds living in yurts in a broad meadow above
the river. We buy some goat milk and a sheep, which they butcher for us while we drink tea in one
of the yurts. I film them herding their sheep and goats and separating milk to make cheese from
the cream.
Floating along later Anatoly says, ‘The only good thing
about the Chernobyl disaster was that it made people begin to
think about the threats from technology and development. Atomic
plants, hydroelectric stations. All that stuff destroys the
ecosystems. Nomadic people don’t need or even want electricity,
but the government comes along and builds dams and hydro plants anyway. Like the Katun River
in the Altai region. Then these people have to try to learn how to live in our culture when their
own is destroyed. It’s too crazy. We must find other ways to generate power.’
We pulled in for lunch on a log-strewn bank of the broadening river. There are tiny cacti
on the hillside above us, a southern exposure with rock outcroppings. The opposite bank is virgin
forest. I have 15 more rolls of Betacam tape and just enough battery power left to shoot them. It
rained all morning and we hovered under a tarp on the big pontoon raft. I took the camera out at
one point and shot the shrouds of mist on the mountainside and the river over Viktor’s back as he
manned the sweep. A thunder-clap echoed off the mountain walls.
We’ve reached the region of Orthodox fundamentalists known as Old Believers. We stop to
visit an old woman who has lived alone since her sister died, miles from her nearest neighbor,
raising sheep and cattle; fishing and gardening. Only
occasional help from the world of men. She shows us some
bronze icons that she says tarnished overnight when her
sister died. She recites from a huge book of religious texts
printed in old Russian, squinting through broken eyeglasses
and falling into a trancelike state as she reads. As we leave
she plaintively asks Lena, one of the teachers from Moscow,
if she would consider staying with her. Lena quietly and sweetly says that she can’t.
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