Transcarpathia is a jumble of wooded valleys running beneath bare mountains. DEC Camp is based in a former Soviet youth lodge on the hillside at the tail end of a dishevelled old road that leads down into a village that's name nobody seemed to know. The camp was modern, well lit and, in the frigid Carpathian winter, wonderfully, wonderfully warm. A pipe channelling hot water ran beside my bed on the fourth floor which was often so warm that I had to leave my window open. The views through that window where predictably fantastic, particularly when the sunrise broke in an orange glow above the hills. I shared my room with Nick and a Ukrainian Vitalic and we shared the camp with teachers, counsellors, psychiatrists, doctors, a small horde of adolescents and an army of hard-as-nails babushkas who kept the place clean and served us food of an almost unbelievably low calibre. My favourite thing about DEC Camp was the secret hut down an icy pathway beyond the prying eyes of children that contained a wooden panelled sauna and a tiled pool exposed to the freezing winter air; it was a place where shit went down.
In my spare time I would take walks down to the village or out in the forest. The village was the sort of place that's either gorgeously rustic or desperately poor depending on your perspective. Unlike elsewhere in Ukraine, the USSR's grip had always been weak in these hills and the ugly high rises that scarred towns out on the steppe had never been built here. Instead, ramshackle cottages and hoarded stocks of timber roofed with pine beams or aluminium clung to an icy stream that wound its way between two high ridges. From time to time I would walk past some sign of the modern world like a rusty old generator - collapsed but still just about functional - or a tractor half buried in snow. Some people travelled around the village in beaten down Skodas, relics from the 1980s. Most though rode tobogans or carriages pulled by horses whose breath hung white in the chilly air. On the hillside bales of hay, made by hand like they do in Romania, stood beneath powdery shawls of snow. It was poverty, but it was so, so pretty.
The people who lived there in the lawless western most extremity of the former Soviet Union are called the Hutsuls and, unlike the city slicking Russian speakers that I met in Kyiv, they are fiercely proud of their Ukrainian language. Often, they considering Russian the language of a foreign oppressor; I never made anyone so angry as the waitress who I thanked with Spasiba rather than the Ukrainian Diakuju. Historically a Habsburg dominion, many people here still set their clocks to +1 time, rather than the Kyivite +2, in accordance with the old Austro-Hungarian empire.
Past the village and our camp, the road roughened and then faded into snow beneath thick pine trees. The air out in the forest was nearly always still and hardly anything moved. I'd hoped to see a bear or some wolves but I never found any animals. I liked the atmosphere out there though; it was peaceful. I passed streams and I wondered where they led. The Danube? The Dnipro? The Dnister? If I followed this one would it lead down through Moldova, past the breakaway Republic of Transdnister where the USSR has never fallen, down into the Black Sea?
