"Siberia begins somewhere further"

I was born in Kazakhstan and never thought that I would spend part of my life in Siberia. The plans after school were to go to St. Petersburg on the oceanographic. But the herd feeling won, and I went to Tomsk with two comrades. The father of one of them joked as a parting words - earlier to Siberia was exiled, and you are voluntarily there.

I fell in love with Tomsk from the first sigh, from the first step from the train car. It was a strong contrast with Temirtau - a kind of Paris by my standards of a provincial Kazakh boy. The ancient buildings of the Polytechnic, huge poplars, the artist store and youth, all youth around. And when winter came, I wandered around the streets for hours and inhaled the snow - I have never seen such white and light snow!

I did not meet the root Siberian soon. In the hostel where I lived, they were not there. My neighbors in the room were “Uzbeks” and “Kazakhs”. In the bustle of student life, I did not particularly think who the Siberians are, and even those Tomsk citizens who studied in the same stream did not differ much from us, newcomers. It always seemed to me that Siberia begins somewhere further, and Tomsk was just a student city.

The first Siberian, whom I really met, was my father-in-law. On weekdays, Leonid Nikolaevich regularly spent 40 hours in the office, and went to the forest for the weekend.

I fell in love with winter skiing and did not notice how the questions "Where are you from?" He began to answer - from Siberia (he always said that from Kazakhstan)

A day or two before leaving for the taiga, he stretched in a 2-room apartment (in which five people lived!) Fishing nets, hemded and repaired, on the kitchen table, cartridges were refueled, wide skis, knocked out by fur. It smelled very well with ski ointment and something “wild”, a huge hunting backpack occupied half the hallway. The father-in-law was returning by the evening on Sunday-in the entire canvas, in a badger hat with tails, brought with him to the 6th floor of the gift of taiga. In the bathroom, he freshened hares - their white skins stoop nearby, the game gutted into the pelvis, the fish hid in the opening of the windows, throwing her farewell look at the lively civilization of the Frunze Avenue.

Once my attention was attracted by the scarlet-painted rubber ducks, which hunters are luring real game. Scarecrows are launched into the pond and under the whistle Mank and wait for real ducks to respond to the call of the brothers in Peru. I volunteered to paint a new batch of foam blades as close to the original as possible. Two weeks later, a couple, painted by me, pseudo -trapped left with Leonid Nikolayevich in the taiga. The business artist’s business collapsed as soon as the father-in-law lay in the grass by the lake and began to “grunt”. The shooting rose, the hunters took my stuffed animals and for real ducks and broke them to fluff.

In the fall, I was happy to go with a father -in -law to the forest for mushrooms, berries, nuts. These were long trips. It always seemed to me that we were walking around the forest where my eyes looked, but I soon realized that Leonid Nikolaevich was moving among the bushes and trees like me around the city, and all these paths and copses for him - like the streets and alleys of Tomsk for me. Here he puts loops on hares, and then the fox drove his nose all winter, and the license disappeared, did not please his wife with a collar. If we take into account that he travels in different seasons to different places, it turns out that he was familiar with the whole forest outside the city - it was impressed. Here he is a native Siberian! The village in the Kolpashevsky district, in which he was born, wore, by the way, his last name ... I began to look at the taiga with different eyes. I learned to bite cedar nuts and not pay attention to mosquitoes. I fell in love with winter skiing and did not notice how the questions "Where are you from?" He began to answer - from Siberia (he always said that from Kazakhstan).

My wife and I have been left Tomsk and even Russia for more than 20 years, a couple of years ago we decided to live in work/travel around the world. We do not like megacities and noisy cities, we rent housing somewhere near the park or a large forest, sea, ocean, deserts-in a word, next to nature-the country does not matter. Every morning I start with a walk. And I owe to my current lifestyle in some way to my father-in-law-Leonid Nikolayevich Smakotin, a real Siberian. It was he who infected me with his love for Siberia and the Siberian nature, and it was with this that my journey around the world began.

Nikolai Fedyaev - artist, citizen of the world

The "Opinion" expressed in the heading of the point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial office