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Where the sea used to be
By THOMAS FRENCH
Here are remnants of shoreline, where green waves once touched and a lighthouse guided sailors into the harbor. Shoulders hunched against the cold, cheeks pinched red, the kapitan trudges through a barren stretch of thistle bushes and windblown trash. One by one, he points toward the empty spaces where the buildings of the port once stood, where the ships loaded their cargoes, where this town and its thousands of inhabitants made a living. "It's gone," says Sergei Bakaushin, 67. "Long gone." Finally he leads the way into the place he most wants visitors to see: a graveyard of giant, rusting vessels left behind when the water vanished over the horizon. "This boat brought food to the fishermen who lived on the boats," he says, nodding toward a faded blue cargo vessel. "One hundred and fifty horsepower. A very fast boat." He looks toward a barge, leaning in the distance. "The Khabarovsk," he says. "Sixty tons." Then a tugboat, farther out. On its decrepit decks, children are running and playing. "The Yermak," he says. In all, more than 20 abandoned ships lie stranded in the sand around Moynaq. Bakaushin remembers the name and history of every one of them. "Of course," he says, jutting out his chest. "I was the captain of the port." For nine years, from 1977 to 1986, Bakaushin oversaw the port here in Moynaq, a once-thriving fishing town that sat on the southern shore of the Aral Sea. He supervised the shipments of sturgeon that moved in and out of the bay. He kept track of all the vessels and their crews. And as the sea gradually dried up -- the result of a mammoth blunder of Soviet engineering -- Bakaushin and the rest of the town fought in vain to protect the water and keep the ships afloat. "To the north, to the north," he says, remembering how the sea left them. "Every year, further and further away." Today the waves are no more. The Aral Sea, already less than one half of its original size, is on its way to disappearing completely. Its shore lies approximately 80 miles away from Moynaq. Left behind is a town without any reason for being. There is no more port. No more jobs. No more fish, other than a few swimming in one last tiny reservoir outside of town. Still, Bakaushin remembers. He walks along the old shoreline and looks out over the dried-up seabed and thinks about the water. "It was real," he says. "It was a real sea." * * * What has happened to the Aral Sea -- the dimension and scale of it -- is almost beyond comprehension. Yet for readers of this newspaper, who know what it's like to live and work alongside a great expanse of water, the loss might be easier to envision. Imagine what it would be like if Tampa Bay dried up and the Gulf of Mexico receded so far to the west that you could no longer see it, even off in the distance. Imagine the port of Tampa dead and useless, its tankers scattered in the sand. Imagine the fish, the beaches, the hotels along the beaches, gone forever. The deep blue of the water, the bright green of the trees, the reds and purples of flowers, all vanished as well, replaced by mile after mile of sand and dust. Imagine these things, and you begin to get a sense of the devastation here. Located in the heart of Central Asia, in the southern reaches of what used to be the Soviet Union, the Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest lake in the world. Tens of thousands of people worked its waters as fishermen; along its shores, resorts catered to tourists who longed for the sun and the water. Then, in the late 1950s, Soviet planners launched a massive agricultural initiative, deciding to take vast stretches of land around the sea and convert them into cotton fields. To make the fields grow, they needed water for irrigation; to get the water, they diverted huge amounts from the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the two great rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea. As the decades passed, the level of the rivers dropped lower and lower, and the sea began to die. The results were no secret. Within a few years of the plan's introduction, it was obvious to everyone who lived in the region that the sea was slowly drying up, taking the local economy with it. But the Soviets pushed ahead anyway. People were told that the disappearance of the sea would be good, because then more cotton fields could be planted on the seabed. Today, some 40 years later, the Soviet Union is gone, and much of the Aral Sea with it. The remaining portion of the water lies across the border between two former Soviet republics, Uzbekistan and Kazakstan. In recent months, the sea has been at the forefront of the news. There is an island in the middle of the water -- Vozrozhdeniye, or Renaissance, Island -- that the Soviets used for years as an open-air testing site for biological weapons. The Soviets ultimately abandoned the facility, but before they left, they deposited tons of anthrax in the soil. Today it remains the largest anthrax burial ground in the world. Fears about Vozrozhdeniye Island have increased in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. As the sea around it has receded, the island has grown. Soon its southern tip will join with the mainland, and it will no longer be an island at all, making it more accessible to terrorists who might want to collect lethal spores. A month and a half ago, in response to these issues, the United States and Uzbekistan announced a joint agreement to remove the anthrax and decontaminate the island. These concerns, however, are relatively simple compared to the larger catastrophe created by the shrinking of the Aral Sea. In the decades since the water began to recede, the area has become one of the worst environmental disasters in history. "All our problems are in some way related to the Aral Sea," says Tatyana Kulumbetova, a biologist with the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences. Late last month, during a visit to the remote region surrounding the sea, the St. Petersburg Times hired her as a guide. Kulumbetova was born in Karakalpakstan, a republic in the northwestern section of Uzbekistan, the area that includes the Aral Sea. As a child, she often visited relatives in Moynaq, spending her summers swimming in the sea. "It was wonderful," she remembers. "It was beautiful. It didn't look like any of the other seas." For the past 20 years -- most of her professional life as a scientist -- Kulumbetova has been studying the implications of the Aral Sea's shrinkage. The effects have been so sweeping, she says, that she had no choice. "It was impossible not to study the problem," she says. The catalog of deterioration is long and grim. To begin with, the portion of the Aral Sea that hasn't dried up yet is increasingly barren. Its salinity has reached such levels that only a few species of small fish survive inside its banks. As the water has receded, the environment of the entire area has been radically reshaped. Without the temporizing effects of the sea, the region's weather has grown more severe; the winters are longer and colder, the summers burn deeper. Vast amounts of salt, left on the surface of dried-up seabed, have been carried by the winds into fields hundreds of miles away. Plants have died; crops have suffered. With the destruction of so much vegetation, the soil in the area has eroded more quickly, leading to terrible dust and salt storms. The dust and salt, meanwhile, are mixed with the residue of pesticides and other chemicals, including DDT, that the Soviets and their successors have used for years in the fields. Much of the air, in other words, is toxic. By now, the health consequences of living in such a place are well-documented. In recent decades, the rates of allergies, liver and kidney diseases, tuberculosis and cancer have all been on the rise. Birth defects and infant mortality are also astoundingly high; 90 percent of the new mothers in the region reportedly suffer complications during their pregnancies or deliveries. Many species of fish, birds and other animals have slowly vanished. As the Amu Darya and Syr Darya have dried up, forests that once spread along their banks have died off as well, taking away the habitat of more species. Wild boars, jackals, pheasants, foxes, swans and pelicans used to roam here. As late as the 1970s, tigers hunted beside these rivers. Now the tigers, and most of the other animals, are gone. Most alarming of all is the expectation for the future. As Kulumbetova explains it, the Aral Sea is bordered by deserts. To the east lies the Kyzilkum, or Red Sands. To the south is the Karakum, or Black Sands. Now the sands are converging. When they meet, one vast desert will cover the area. In Karakalpakstan, they already have a name for the emerging wasteland. Kumlumbetova speaks this name softly, as though she is reluctant to give it power. "Aralkum," she says. The Aral Sands. * * * We wanted to see the place for ourselves. So a week and a half ago, several of us -- myself, St. Petersburg Times photographer James Borchuck, an Uzbek guide and a Russian translator -- made the long journey to Moynaq. First we flew from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, to Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan. There, we met Kulumbetova and rented a van that took us north. We set out on the road on Wednesday, Nov. 21, the day before Thanksgiving. We left shortly after sunrise; Moynaq was 130 miles away, and we knew it would require several hours to get there. Though it was a sunny day, the air was so cold that a white layer of frost still lay upon the ground, mixed with a sprinkling of salt particles. As the day grew warmer, the frost melted, but the salt remained. In the glow of early morning, we drove out of Nukus, which was bustling in the cold. Old women were selling laundry detergent on the corners; small children walked down the street with their backpacks, headed for school. Soon we were in the country, tearing along a bone-jarring road that ran parallel to the dwindling banks of the Amu Darya, through the area that was once the river's delta. Now the delta was gone, replaced by scrubland. "Does the Amu Darya still reach the Aral Sea at all?" I asked Kulumbetova. She shook her head. "Nyet." The road took us through cotton fields where farmers still eke out a living, despite the salt in the ground. We passed tiny villages where women were cooking on fires outside huts with thatched roofs. We passed children leading flocks of sheep, men with donkeys carrying bundles of kindling, even a few modern-day cowboys -- chaban, they're called here -- who were herding cattle from horseback. Once our van lurched to a stop for some camels crossing the road. A little while later, we slowed for two bulls settling a dispute with locked horns. The farther we went, the more bleak the land became. The fields grew more sparse; the salt drifted on the ground more thickly. At one point, perhaps two hours into our journey, the driver stopped again, pulling up to a metal box attached to a solitary pole beside the road. Our Uzbek guide got out, walked over to the box, then pushed some money into a slit in the side. "Donations for a mosque," he said, returning to the van. We drove away, continuing northward for another hour until we came to a sign at the side of the road, written in Karakalpak. Moynaq Qalasi The town of Moynaq. Above the words, someone had painted a sea gull. Below, a fish swam in water that no longer existed. A little further down the road, at a police station on the outskirts of town, a uniformed officer signaled for us to stop. Our Uzbek guide got out, went into the station for a few minutes, then emerged with two men in plain clothes. They were officers with the state security service; the Uzbek government's successors to the KGB. One of the officers got into a car to follow us. The other, a man in his 30s wearing a business suit, joined us in the van. His name, he said, was Farhad Shamambetov. He was a major with the security service. He was polite. He was cheerful. From the moment we met him, it was clear that he was there both to assist us and keep an eye on us. "What do you want to see?" he asked. The first place he took us was to a bluff, perhaps 40 or 50 feet high, that looked over the area where the water used to be. We stood there for a few minutes, gazing out at the sand and scrub bushes, rolling into the distance. "That's the Aral Sea," said the major. "There it is." Below, at the foot of the bluffs, children had used rocks to write their names in the dirt. Beyond, the graveyard of rusted ships began. Most of them were skeletons now, picked apart for scrap metal. There were more than a dozen in this section of the seabed: barges, tugboats, cargo ships, all of them cast randomly about the sand as though they had been dropped there. The major stood beside me, his hair blowing in the wind, and pointed up and down the old shoreline. "There used to be summer camps for kids, resorts along the shore," he said. "It's all gone. Everything has been ruined." We got back in the van and drove down a road that led into the seabed. Leaving the van, we walked among the rusted carcasses of the ships. Bushes grew inside them; bolts hung from them. Some of their hulls were marked with graffiti drawings of people having sex. On other parts of the metal, visitors from around the world -- come to see the devastation -- had scratched their names. David, Sue, Maxim Nottingham, England, 2001 Bottles, anchor chains, mateless shoes, bones of goats lie half-buried in the sand around the ships. Cowpaths, littered with cow patties, wound between the hills that rose and fell from the seabed. Over every rise, more ships waited. * * * When we left the graveyard, the major gave us a tour of his town, or what is left of it. Some have described Moynaq as a ghost town, but what we found was worse: dusty streets lined with fences made of tattered reeds, dusty houses where thin cows milled in the yards, an old movie house -- with a statue of a famous Uzbek poet out front -- that had been shut down for years. Once, some 20,000 people lived here. Now there are only 6,000, many of them unemployed and too poor to move anywhere else. The fishery is closed. The cannery is closed. The market is open, but its merchants have almost nothing to sell other than a few fish caught in the one small lake outside of town. There are no trees, no grass, only dirt yards littered with bits of trash. Hanging over all of it -- and over the people who still live here -- is the memory of the water. "When the sea was here, it was wonderful," a retired fisherman told us. "Now there is nothing." The sense of depletion was everywhere. On the streets, men stood idle, rubbing their arms against the cold. Children huddled in doorways, staring at us as we drove by. A starving dog, its ribs showing through the skin, slinked down an alley. On a light post, we found another sign, this one offering a slogan from Islam A. Karimov, Uzbekistan's president. The slogan said: You should work and live for the benefit of the people. As we turned from the sign, a handful of young boys pushing a cart passed by. Two of them, seeing us, grinned and saluted us with their middle fingers. The major said nothing. Either he did not see the boys, or he chose to ignore them. Together, we got back into the van. "Where next?" he asked. We told him we wanted to meet someone who knew the history of this town, someone who had lived here long enough to remember what it was like before everything went wrong. After thinking for a moment, he said he knew of a man who could answer our questions. The old kapitan of the port. The one who was in charge when the water went away. * * * "Mr. Bakaushin!" The major kept knocking at the gate, calling out over the fence. From inside the yard, a dog barked and chickens clucked. "Mr. Bakaushin!" Finally, a voice answered from the house, saying something in Russian. We walked into the yard. A woman immediately ran to a clothesline and pulled down several pairs of her underwear, removing them from the sight of her surprise guests. Maria Bakaushin turned to us and nodded. Her husband, Sergei, stood beside her, nodding along. The two of them led us inside, through the kitchen and into a room that served as their living quarters. In the center of the room, several wooden chairs were arranged around a table; two small beds were lined against the far wall. Above one of the beds hung a painting of Stalin, smiling benevolently as he hugged a little girl. Nearby, another painting showed the Virgin Mary, nursing the baby Jesus at her breast. While his wife hurried to the kitchen to make tea, Bakaushin invited us to sit around the table. As our Russian translator explained to him who we were and why we had come to see him, I studied our host. Like the rest of Moynaq, Bakaushin had seen better days. He was wearing an old sports jacket, a striped shirt and slacks. Under the left arm of the jacket, the material was ripped. His brown hair was thinning; a few long strands from the sides were combed across the bald patch on top. His face and hands were rough and weathered, as you would expect from someone who had spent so much of his life on the water. Before we could ask any questions, Bakaushin gave a speech of welcome. "It's very good that America and Russia are having good relations, now that the Cold War is over," he said. "Hopefully the Afghanistan situation will be settled, and there will be peace throughout the world." Even though he was born not far from Moynaq, in a village along the Amu Darya, Bakaushin made it clear to us that he thinks of himself as Russian and not as a Karakalpak. During his years of overseeing the port, he was a member of the local Communist Party. Now he spoke respectfully of his former bosses. He said that things were better under the Soviets, that officials listened, that problems were resolved instead of ignored. I wondered why he was so loyal. Had it never occurred to him that the Soviets were the ones who had drained the Aral Sea, thereby destroying everything around him? I kept these thoughts to myself. It would have been beyond impertinent for me to tell him whom to blame for the devastation of his town. For an hour or so, Bakaushin sat there with us, telling about his life. He described growing up on the Amu Darya; back then, before the irrigation projects made it run dry, the river flooded periodically. Once, he said, it surged so high through his village that he and his family were forced to spend a week living on the roof of their house. "Before, we were fleeing from the water," he said, remembering. "Now it's the opposite." When he was a young man, he and his wife had been joined in an arranged marriage. He remembered it like this: "My parents said, "There's this nice girl, Maria. Take her for a wife.' And I said, "Okay, if you say so.' " "No one even asked if we consented or not," said his wife, sitting down at the table for a moment. "No one asked us." That was 44 years ago. Now the two of them have three daughters, all grown, and five grandchildren. When I told them how impressed I was by the success of their marriage, Bakaushin smiled. "People sometimes divorce, even at such an age," he said. "How well do you two get along?" I asked him and his wife. Both laughed. "Nyet," they said in tandem. "Not very good." The room around us was filled with pictures of their daughters and grandchildren, as well as photos of Bakaushin as a young fishing captain and as a sailor in the Soviet navy. A member of the Old Believers, a sect that branched off from the Russian Orthodox church, he also keeps a framed icon of St. Nikolai, the patron of sailors. Bakaushin told us that he had worked on the sea all of his life, serving in the navy for a few years in the 1950s and then working on fishing ships here in Moynaq. Eventually he became the captain of several cargo vessels, and then he was appointed the captain of the port. By then, the edge of the sea was moving away from Moynaq, receding to the north. "It hit us hard," said Bakaushin. "The water was falling, and we started chasing after the water." For years, the people of the town held on as best they could. They dammed off several bays, trying to keep some of the water from leaving and to save enough fish to earn a living. They dredged a channel between the bays, so the ships could move between them. For awhile, they even loaded the ships onto railway cars and took them to a lake in neighboring Turkmenistan. None of it worked. The lake in Turkmenistan grew too salty and polluted. The water they'd tried to protect around Moynaq slowly disappeared, just like the sea itself. By 1986, when Bakaushin left his post as port captain, there was no more port at Moynaq. Then, several years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the town's fortunes sank even further. Today, there is no water, no port, nothing left of Moynaq's spirit. "People have changed for the worse," Bakaushin said. "There's no respect for each other." He remains proud of his service and of what he made of his life. While we sat with him, he went to a closet and pulled out his captain's white cap and jacket. As he posed for the camera, the medals on his jacket glinted in the sun. Bakaushin acknowledged that his life is only a shadow of what it was before. He and his wife have no savings, but they have his pension and enough to eat. Still, there is hardly any water for drinking or washing; they can only bathe, he said, once a week. Worst of all, there is nothing to do. "I keep sitting here in the house," he said, "and I get sick and tired of it." He reads, tries to find something on TV, works in what's left of his garden. During our visit, he took us into the yard and showed us the small corner of soil where he tries to grow cabbage, tomatoes, sweet carrots. It's not much use, though. Like everything else, the garden is slowly dwindling. "Where there is no water," Bakaushin said, "there is no life." * * * He spent all afternoon with us. He took us to the dried-up shore and pointed toward where the lighthouse used to stand before it was torn down. He told us about the history of all the ships stuck in the sand behind his house. As the day wore on, we kept hearing massive booms exploding somewhere in the distance. "What is that?" I asked. Bakaushin explained that surveyors were searching with dynamite for underground reserves of natural gas. So far, he said, they haven't been able to find any. But if they do, he thought it might bring some money back to Moynaq. Maybe it would help. "That's the only thing we hope for," he said. Again and again, he placed his hand over his chest and mourned the loss of the sea. He said it hurt his heart. He said he believed it was a judgment, delivered against those who fear water. "It's a punishment," he said. I asked him what will become of what's left of the Aral Sea. He turned and looked past the ships' graveyard, toward the endless sand.
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