Hello, dear Ekaterina Sergeevna. How’s your little corner of the world doing? Slowly but surely, I hope?
Your Dimas Kalabas has been rowing for the third day on a river somewhere on the other side of the Earth and is writing this letter to you in his head.
Here, in the center of South America, the landscapes are very typical of our homeland — green fields and forests, river expanses, hills. Every now and then it seems to me that somewhere in a meadow, among grazing cows, there will be young ladies in kokoshniks and sarafans drinking tea from a samovar. All that would remain would be to walk out onto a cliff above the river and recite Yesenin by heart. I have already seen all sorts of things here: pines, unseen trees, llamas, armadillos, capybaras, and people in hats carrying mate thermoses. I wonder what the chances are in these lands of finding a samovar and meeting girls in kokoshniks? Whenever I think about it, I laugh at myself — whether it is nostalgia for the homeland speaking in me, or whether the brown waves have hypnotized me and all sorts of strange thoughts begin to appear.
They say you can look at water forever. Well, dear Ekaterina Sergeevna — it is true. At first it pulls you into endless thoughts. About the past, about the future, about the gold hidden beneath this chocolate-colored water. After a day nothing remains in your head except routine: stroke, stroke, stroke, a sip of water, and onward row.
That is how I have been rowing against the wind across the expanses of this distant continent for three years now. At first I thought — in a month I’ll go back. But once I set my course for Patagonia, time simply flew by. As they say, I came to my senses, and a whole year had already passed.
You probably will not believe it, but I remember that I promised someday to return and visit you in our village. Please forgive me, I beg you, but whenever I think that these days, to get to our village, one has to make an around-the-world journey lasting 80 hours, immediately both my years, and my laziness, and that very awl below my back that we call the spirit of adventure begin speaking inside me.
And that very awl keeps telling me that I still have not traveled through even half the countries in this part of the world, and as for how many countries there are in Central America — I still cannot even learn all their names! And no matter how you look at it, it seems to me that the probability of meeting a capybara or a crocodile in our Siberian village is much lower than discovering kokoshniks around a samovar in the middle of Latin America. And I am still not tired enough of palm trees and capybaras to exchange them back for my native expanses. So I keep rowing, driven by that same spirit of adventure in search of adventures. Or perhaps in search of a place where that spirit will loosen its grip a little and stop causing me side effects like sciatica?
But I still have time to think about that. Until the other shore.
