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 where she had spent the night under a corner of the woman's beige cardigan. The light through the window was the soft grey of an early summer northern morning. The woman was already up and drinking tea from a glass with a metal holder.

"Birches," the woman said.

▶ Play this part

Polly looked. Outside the window, white-trunked trees were running past at sixty kilometres an hour. They were everywhere. They went on. They were not in groves. They were not in clearings. They were the entire landscape. The forest had become a continuous fact.

This was the western edge of the Russian birch belt. White birch, Betula pubescens. Some downy. Some silver. The species has the widest natural range of any deciduous tree on Earth. It can grow on land where almost nothing else will. It thrives in cold poor soils, in marshes, on the edges of forests where larger trees cannot get a foothold. It is the tree that says: there has been a fire here. Or: there will be a forest here, eventually, but I am here first.

The young man with the laptop, whose name turned out to be Pavel, looked up from his typing. "You are the parrot," he said in flat English. "I noticed." He went back to typing. The woman, whose name was Galina, poured a second glass of tea and offered it to Polly. It was the colour of strong amber. The lemon slice on top floated like a small yellow boat.

Polly drank a sip, carefully, off the edge of the glass. It was very hot and very sweet. The samovar at the end of the carriage had been running for twelve hours straight.

Polly hopped to the window. The birches kept going. Occasionally a thin black river. Occasionally a small village of grey wooden houses with carved window frames. Then more birches.

"The longest part of this trip," Galina said, "is the trees. 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. In the maps it is a green colour like any other green. In the train it is something else."

Polly tilted her red head.

▶ Play this part

The taiga begins, technically, somewhere past the Volga. The forest she was watching now was still mixed European forest. But the structure of it, the way it filled the window without any landmark to anchor it, was already what taiga becomes. Most of Russia is covered by forest like this. About forty percent of the country's land area is taiga. The country contains roughly twenty percent of all the world's standing forest. From the air, in winter, Russia is mostly snow on trees.

Polly drank a second sip. Pavel typed. Galina returned to her book. The train made its steady rhythm. Outside the window, four hundred kilometres slid past as if it were one continuous birch.