Picking Mushrooms — and Bombs
BOSS OF THE FIRING RANGE
Mykhailo Shvorak, known in Cheremoshne as the Head of the Firing Range, sat for half an hour on the bench by the forestry office, a very unusual occurrence, as everyone knew that he could never be found at home. And when he boarded the first bus out to do some shopping at the Kovel bazaar, he would return on the last one. And then he vanished, as usual. When asked about him, people would shrug and say he’s at the firing range, where else.
He earned the byname not because Cheremoshne was close to the former powerful military facility, but because of his inborn enterprising spirit, an ability to make the best of the military neighborhood.
“This one cuts a colorful figure,” says Krychevychi Village Council Chairman Hryhory Rudiuk pensively. “He’s worn army underwear, tunic, breeches, and garrison cap as long as I can remember. When it got cold he’d put on a pair of combat boots he’d get from servicemen in exchange for something. And he’d wear bast shoes when it got warm.”
From what I could gather the man was an eccentric who would hang around the local bazaar, acting like a vendor, his merchandise thrown across an arm and a note hanging from his neck, reading “Fresh Flypaper.” And one that never drank vodka — something incredible in the Ukrainian countryside — but collected empty bottles all over the neighborhood, along with old jugs, woven brooms, bast shoes for sale, and used twisted wire he found on the firing range.
What does he need that wire for? People wondered, but he declined comment, saying if I tell you, you’ll want to do the same.
Formally, Mykhailo Shvorak was in the local collective farm’s employ, yet collecting and selling scrap was his key revenue, both under the Soviets and during independence (in the latter case he did all the required paperwork).
The firing range near Cheremoshne existed even when the area was part of Poland. After World War II it was used as a training ground for military aircraft from all Warsaw Pact countries, shelling and bombing targets, including real tanks and armored personnel carriers.
“They’d bring trainloads of equipment. After bombing they’d strip the combat vehicles of batteries... When the range was closed (after the Soviet Union disintegrated), local enterprising people took apart or away every single vehicle,” says Hryhory Rudiuk.
And the number of bombs that never exploded after hitting the ground and are still somewhere in the marshland. This means the Head of the Firing Range and other “prospectors” have no alternative but to collect and dig up what is left of the bombs that did explode.
The people is used to living under and surrounded by bombs. On more than one occasion military pilots bombed the village by mistake. Vasyl Bilinets, an old-timer, says he sometimes had to get to the forestry, his place of work, by running and ducking bomb blasts. And warplanes also crashed into the firing range. There is still a grave, now an overgrown hillock...
Old men sitting on the bench by the forestry sigh, remembering the past: “There are senior officers in that grave. The wife of one of them, a major or a lieutenant colonel, would come from Lutsk to pay homage. And then she stopped visiting...”
FIREWOOD FOR AMERICA?
If one studies a map of Volyn oblast, one will see that Krychevychi and the neighborhood are in the heart of it. The terrain consists of age-old forest, estuaries of the river Stokhod. In a word, a spot of almost virgin nature. Oleksandr Vyndiuk, Deputy Forest Ranger, says he spotted a black crane yesterday. Wildlife thrives: badger, fox, marten, wild boar, elk, goat. About a decade ago people saw a lynx... Now there is an influx of beavers (entered in the Red Book along with the black crane).
“I was walking down Liubarka [a natural boundary — Author] and saw some twenty sotkas of trees on the ground, as after a felling shift. Beavers did it,” says Oleksandr, explaining to us neophytes that the cute furry thing can bite through a tree you won’t be able to embrace, and then put the trunk down in the right direction (you could not even with a chainsaw), and that it builds a cabin five meters in diameter and up to two and a half meters high. There were cases when beavers blocked roads cut through the woods. When asked if maybe the beaver family caused too much damage, Vyndiuk shook he head resolutely:
“No way. Nature keeps its own balance, and it’s not for us people to decide what it needs and doesn’t.”
When the firing range was organized in the scenic locality after World War II, Cheremoshne and a dozen other villages were evacuated to Bessarabia. Liubarka, Smoliary, Tserkovka (names that sound like song lyrics) vanished from the face of the earth and from all maps, for their residents never returned. Those of Cheremoshne lived in dugouts, under howling and exploding bombs. They took the risk because they wanted to stay on their native land.
“You stop a man with a cartload of firewood, and he says that its his forest, not yours,” Forest Ranger Ruslan Hulovsky explains the local mentality.
The Village Council Chairman adds that such self-styled lumberjacks in the villages of the neighboring Kamin-Kashyrsky district, on the opposite side of the Povorsky Firing Range, pay fifty hryvnias a day for others to take their turn to herd the cattle so that they can take care of their business.
“They’re stealing timber on a far larger scale; once or twice they were officially allowed to do it, and now it’s hard to stop them. Here the most one can is chop down a cartload, but we keep an eye on the woods and stop it whenever we spot it. With our neighbors it’s a vicious circle. People steal timber, are fined large sums, so they borrow money and then have to steal more to pay their debts...”
Local employment agencies send a couple of dozen of unemployed to the forestry almost every day.
“They all ask for a certificate saying we have no jobs for them. But there are plenty!” The forest ranger sounds outraged. “One can easily earn twenty hryvnias a day in the woods. But they don’t want to... We can’t even find anyone to man the fire brigade’s watchtower. That’s a laughable job, you sit and watch, and earn 150 hryvnias a month.”
The forestry of Cheremoshne is a young enterprise started on the basis of the former firing range, hoping to prosper procuring reeds and firewood and supplying them outside, as they say. The thing is that a warehouse meter of firewood costs five hryvnias here, but outside it is eighteen euros... Perhaps then the populace will be willing to work in the woods. At present, people in Cheremoshne and Lomachanka prefer to earn money picking mushrooms and berries. Quite a few families make five or six thousand hryvnias a season.
SINGLE MEN IN EVERY HOME
This locality is rich not only in mushrooms and bombs, but also in young men. When the local authorities held a convention of soldiers’ mothers recently, 55 women came from three villages under the Krychevychi Village Council, each with three sons in the army. Twenty had four sons each, and four with more than five boys on active duty.
Svitlana Kravchuk, Secretary of the Village Council, says that such statistics cannot be found anywhere else in this district. She claims to know every family tree in three villages (that’s my job), and says that Krychevychi, Lomachanka, and Cheremoshne are the wealthiest villages in Kovel district with plenty of everything, including woods (with the best characteristics in the district), land (people till up to five hectares per family, growing and selling potatoes and carrots, and each farmstead has 10-15 sotkas of such crops), and children (four babies have been born on the same day, and other village councils register one baby a year)...
The streets of Krychevychi, Lomachanka, and Cheremoshne look surprisingly narrow, with the homes crowding each other so that there seems no space between them. This is a local tradition, explained by the age- old problem of the land, rather its shortage, as every acre had to be fought for by seizing it from the forest. And the residents are mostly autochthonous, with a spattering of settlers, so the son would often build a home next to his father’s. There are yards with five homes inside. And people live side by side without developing any enmity.
“There are 600 farmsteads (540 homes, with two masters of the house in some) and almost 800 head of cattle, as many pigs (no one keeps one or two, always more), and some 600 cows.” Both the Village Council Chairman and his Secretary look proud.
There is only one setback: single men in every home.
“If only we could have a factory with just women on the payroll,” muses Svitlana Kravchuk, “I mean women under forty, some forty of them, just enough for our prospective bridegrooms...”
