Cherry vodka and a trip to the ISS

The two men who shared a single bunk enact a Buster Keaton routine as they wake. The first, swinging his legs out of the bed and sitting there in his underwear, reaches for a cigarette and lights up before even putting weight on his feet. A few minutes later the other stirs, shoos the other off the edge of the bed, and repeats the selfsame performance.

Breakfast is simple: bread, tomato, a little cheese. We taste the fresh, hot cheese that Lilit is busy coagulating over the stove¹, and I make the nearly fatal mistake of comparing it to mozzarella. I want to take a photo of her in her work but she is shy, so Arpine gamely stands in for her, after which the cheese is hung up on a line like sweaty socks, something to do with whey I gather :)

Samvel tries to get a head-start on the days water-fight by flicking water at me from a cup, I toss a little water back at him for his trouble but Lilit gets caught in the crossfire and Eleftheria — his grandma, four-and-a-half feet of pure matriarch — clips us both round the ear. I feel part of the family. We’re invited to stay for the water war that is to come, but from experience I know that it won’t kick off until well into the afternoon and there are days and miles ahead.

Only a handful of kilometres away from Arpine’s, we encounter what I come to think of as The Vodka Committee. They come lurching along the track in a UAZ and a Lada Niva, and stop in the shade of a tree where Jonny has just tested his bear spray for the first time (and not been too impressed with its performance). Men pour out of the Lada like it’s a clown car, and vodka pours out of plastic bottles like it’s a party (again, I drink Jonny’s share). Before long we’re back on our way, me with a little stagger in my step and a coke bottle of home-made cherry vodka in my pack. As best as we can tell, the party is heading to Arpine’s.

Jonny arrived in Armenia with pain in his feet already from Plantar fasciitis brought on by basketball, but his squishy metropolitan feet soon adopt the blister as their preferred discomfort after we hit the mountains, and the fasciitis seems to wander off. We stop semi-regularly to admire (and attempt to avert, with tape) the determined disintegration of Jonny’s feet, but he rides it out gamely regardless.

Our conversation meanders like the trail, winding through philosophical valleys and over spiritual ridges. Love, commitment, and acceptance are the themes of the day. I talk about realising that perfect comes after we’ve accepted good enough; Jonny reflects on accepting a person, wholly and without caveat, because anything less isn’t acceptance. I’m reminded of something I heard once about forgiveness:

If we are to forgive, then of course it must be our enemies—for who else is there to forgive?

Likewise, it means nothing to say we would accept a perfect person, because that wouldn’t take any acceptance. We talk about how acceptance isn’t passive – it’s an active choice, renewed constantly. How it’s different from resignation or tolerance. How it requires seeing someone clearly, flaws and all, and choosing to stay present with them anyway.

A trailer, a Soviet relic, abandoned and rusting, lies in a natural saddle between two mountains. Just beyond it lies another trailer that the elements have much more rapidly reclaimed, the earth heaving up through the floor, swallowing what has been forgotten. The first, the better of the two, looks grimy, mournful, and perfect.

Plainly nobody lives here, and hasn’t for a long time, but their echoes linger: two plastic disposable plastic cups on the counter, a discarded tissue, and a single old boot whose sole has escaped its body. The trailer’s only residents now are the dozens of twin-striped skinks that scatter at our every step, and two mice that can occasionally be heard chewing fresh tunnels through the polystyrene insulation in the walls, but who are shy in their work, falling silent just as soon as we actively listen for them. Not long after we move in one of them ventures out through an electrical conduit, quickly thinks better of it at the sight of the trailers new, larger residents and vanishes back down another hole.

Thanks to its cupola-esque windows we nickname our shelter the ISS, but we’re not astronauts. Journeying across a former Soviet satellite, adrift in the endless unknown of this planet, hanging in that larger infinity of the cosmic canvas, we can make-believe our refuge is a module of the Mir space station, and we are kosmonavts.

This world-order (kosmos), the same for all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.

The stars put on a good show for Jonny, he keeps sticking his head out the door to check on them, to check they’re all still there, and each time more have appeared and he comes back smiling anew.

This is the most stars I’ve seen, for sure.

Until he steps out without his glasses on and can’t see a thing, then he’s in mourning for his once clear vision.

We stand outside for a while after the true darkness descends, once those pinpricks in the black velvet curtain are most clear. Jonny spots Mars; we watch satellites and the odd shooting star respectively slide and slice across the canvas; talk about the sci-fi tingle of seeing Starlink satellites skate overhead like a string of pearls tossed into orbit, knowing that they’re only clumped up for a few days after a launch, like newborn tadpoles, before they boost themselves off to their own orbit, never to see each other again.

As I write this up, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is this:

I’ll not pretend our window onto the cosmos was as swish as ol’ mate Hubble’s, but it was good enough for us as we shuffled some boards around to make another three-plank bunk for me so Jonny could sprawl out on the floor.