The Birch Forests

On the second morning, the train was already four hundred kilometres east of Moscow. Polly woke up on the small folding table. The light through the window was the soft grey of a northern summer morning. Galina, the older woman, was already drinking tea from a glass in a metal holder.

"Birches," she said.

Polly looked. Outside, white-trunked trees were running past at sixty kilometres an hour. They were everywhere. They went on. They were not in groves or clearings. They were the entire landscape.

This was the western edge of the Russian birch belt. White birch has the widest natural range of any deciduous tree on Earth. It grows where almost nothing else will. It is the tree that says: there has been a fire here, or, there will be a forest here, but I am here first.

The young man with the laptop, whose name turned out to be Pavel, looked up. "You are the parrot," he said in flat English. "I noticed." He went back to typing.

Galina poured a second glass of tea and offered it to Polly. It was the colour of amber. A thin slice of lemon floated on top. The samovar at the end of the carriage had been running for twelve hours straight.

Polly drank a sip carefully off the edge of the glass. It was very hot and very sweet.

"The longest part of this trip is the trees," Galina said. "People do not understand this until they ride it. You sit in a train for six days and you look out at trees. There is no end to them."

The taiga begins past the Volga. About forty percent of Russia's land area is taiga. The country contains roughly twenty percent of all the world's standing forest.

Polly drank a second sip. Pavel typed. Galina returned to her book. Outside, four hundred kilometres slid past as if it were one continuous birch.