Lyubov Orlova and the Rats

It really has turned out to be the Trip that Keeps on Entertaining. About 3 and a half years ago my sister, brother,sister-in-law and I went to the Arctic and traveled aboard an old Russian ship, the MV Lyubov Orlova. (“An ice-strengthened Maria Yermolova-class cruise ship”.) The ship was named for Lyobov Petrovna Orlova, a Stalinist era Soviet film star. (You may recall her classics, Circus and Volga-Volga). The saloon was decorated with vintage movie posters. We had a marvelous time. We played 435 games of Bananagrams surrounded by Soviet-kitsch posters. We saw the Aurora Borealis and polar bears: we rode Zodiacs around icebergs the size of three Trader Joes; we dined on raw seal blubber, also fermented seal blubber, the real delicacy.
Immediately following our debarkation, the Orlova headed to St John’s, Newfoundland. There she was impounded by the Canadian authorities for unpaid wages. She ended up staying there for two years. The Russian crew aboard had not been paid and in most cases had not enough money to get back to Russia. We, the last passengers aboard, took up a collection and sent money to the Russian crew, many of whom we had grown quite fond of, despite the language gap, or perhaps abetted by the language gap. Meanwhile, the ship lingered while her owners ignored her. Finally, the Canadians started towing the Orlova down to the Dominican Republic, where she was to be sold for scrap metal. But the Lyubov Orlova never made it to the Sargasso Sea. The towline broke…and to make a short story even longer, the Lyubov Orlova was adrift in the ocean with no one aboard but the rats. That is the end of the real story.
But every so often, when things are otherwise slow in the sensationalist news department. the British press will print some horror story about cannibalistic rats aboard the ghost ship. I still wonder what has happened to those great posters of the lovely Orlova's films.

I AM NOT SPEAKING OF YOUR LANGUAGE

In a day that did not include a Zodiac landing on Beechey Island to see the graves of the first members of the Franklin Expedition to die, and the only ones to have graves, and then sighting one’s first live polar bear (not counting the Central Park Zoo), the Lyobov Orlova’s lifeboat drill would have been the highlight.
First we gathered in the lounge (the forward lounge where the curtains are always pulled closed and the movement of the ship is magnified and very sick-making and all forms of stomach distress are exacerbated) and heard from the Russian Security Officer. (Have I mentioned that the entire crew of 52 is Russian? The young women are blonde and wear toothpaste-tight jeans. The young men are swarthy, but mostly unseen by us. They all smoke healthy Russian cigarettes somewhere in the bowels of the ship.)
“Good evening ladies gentlemen. I am safety officer on this ship. Unfortunately I am not speaking of your language. I speak only Russian.” Then he launched into his speech – in Russian - that presumably referenced life vests and muster stations and life boats, but could just as well have been his favorite poem by Pushkin, or a dithyramb to his wife's sexual allure.
Then Jason, our Inuit expedition leader, translated. Or we assumed he did.
Five minutes later the bell blasted throughout the ship, and as instructed, we put on our warmest clothes and rubber boats and gathered any life-saving medications we might need on the open seas, and carried our life vests up to our muster station at the stern.
There, Dmitri, Russian Safety Officer, gave another speech in Russian. Jason translated. The sun was shining and icebergs benignly floated and sparkled in the surrounding sea.
Later, my sister, showing off her linguistic talents, said, "Kamillarlutit."
Trying to one-up her, I replied, "Itsavautaup ataaniippallaijuq." Which means, "It's probably under the chair.

BACK FROM THE ARCTIC

I did not eat my boots, but I did eat muktuk (seal or whale blubber), and you will not be surprised to learn that there is a local Inuit rhyme to be chanted by all initiates into the delicacy of muktuk, making use of every possible rhyme with the final syllable of MUKTUK.
Because there is more than I can say in one breath about the Arctic and because I could not blog from the Arctic, I plan to spend the next few days blogging AS IF from the Arctic. Even though I am sitting here in the temperate zone comfort of home, back with beloved CSB, dogs who would strenuously object to pulling a dog sled across the frozen ice, lazy chickens and recalcitrant bees, the conceit is that I am aboard the Lyubov Orlova, a Soviet era Russian icebreaker named for a Russian film star. She was best known – and beloved – for her roles in such Stalinist classics as Volga Volga; Engineer Kochin’s Error, and The Circus, in which an American circus performer (Lyubov Orlova) gives birth to a black baby and is shunned by the racist Americans, so she decamps to the USSR where she and her black son are embraced by the Soviets. The movie climaxes with a rousing lullaby medley sung by all the happy ethnic groups of the Soviet Union.

Parenthetically, here at home, the chickens have started laying. This is very exciting. However there is some concern there they are not very bright chickens since they (or maybe just one she) are laying on the straw covered floor of the coop, rather than in their roomy and stylish roosting boxes built by CSB himself. So far, she is not falling for the golf ball ruse.