By John
Sweeney Encounters a Russian Adventurer in the Avon
Valley
Sweeney had to do
his shopping at Northam Coles.
There was a lot of
kerfuffle in the town and more
than a few foreign
voices. He was surprised
to find the
foreigners were not being attacked
by locals. On his
asking why, a teenager stacking shelves
told him, It’s
because they’ll only be here for a while.
What was going on?
Sweeney took to the airwaves.
Birds of a
feather, we might interpolate. Just outside town
he came across a
vast balloon being spread out and filled with night.
He swooped down
and found a man who looked like
a heavily bearded
Dennis Hopper. He caught the name
of this wild man
whom he recognised as a holy obsessive.
Almost like me, he
said. A Russian. There were many voices
speaking Russian.
I know Russian, said Sweeney — I get pictures
wired to my
headspace from a poet in his country dacha
every winter,
every summer. It’s cold here in winter,
but not as cold as
it gets in Russia. That’s the definition of cold
in overheated times.
The balloon was filling and the zeal
of the adventurer
was palpable. All of this just for him.
His name was Fedor
Konyukhov. He was aiming to loop
the earth from
sunrise. To smash a record. The media, cloying and clinging,
were saying he
sees the world as a place to conquer: mountains,
oceans,
everything. Sweeney could see vast swathes of mangroves
dying in the far
side of the country but in his gondola Fedor Konyukhov
would fly nowhere
near them. Sweeney watched the balloon rise
with the sun, hung
around and did a couple of interviews, then flew back
to Coles to finish
his shopping. I feel like the stork delivering my own birth,
he said, adding a few more cans to
his stash.
John Kinsella
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