17 May 2007. Wispy sun, cool breeze off the bay. Single helicopter, tiny, traversing shelf of gray-white cloud, at an angle above worn mansard shingles of the 7-eleven. Someone's good idea, ages back--make the place appealing. And then, banks of insistent fluorescents, big brew sign in red-orange and green--the attention-getters, a universe of commerce, evenly applied, spread over every available surface. As opposed to the Ainu, on Sakhalin. A robe of fish skin--delicate-seaming, color of winter sand, the round hearth, tundra twigs for a fire. They worshipped the bear. Spirits of land and water--fish, whale, seal. Island itself in the shape of a spirit--long and narrow, running hundreds of miles into the north. Prigodne, Yuzhnaya Okha, Polovinka...Muz'ma, Pomyt, Rybnovsk...
The Sea of Okhotsk...
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