Cedar Pine Nuts
December 15, 2025
Today I am thinking about my friend Pehuen. In Russian there is a word that babushkas (grandmothers) use affectionately when speaking about a child or a person. They say “золотой”, zolotoy, “golden”.
It is this word, this adjective, that comes to my mind when I think of Pehuen: “zolotoy Pehuen.”
It has nothing to do with the value of money, but with human value — character, and the energy of presence.
Pehuen and I went together to the Far North twice. The first time for one month in the Finnish taiga in December 2018 (if my memory is correct). The second time for three months in Siberia last summer (2025).
For several months we shared our daily lives during these demanding expeditions. We shared our thoughts, our emotions, our difficulties, our fears, our wonder…
Yes, our deep intimacy. We opened our core, our souls, to each other.
Pehuen is an adventurer. The camera he uses to film and photograph is a tool for presence in the moment — in the end more a pretext than a goal in itself.
I saw in his eyes the deep joy when he looked at the beauty of vast wild spaces: the sky, the sun and the moon, the river, the scales of fish in his hands…
An adventurer watches, observes, keeps alert constantly like a fox.
For him it is not a question of modifying what surrounds him, nor what he lives through. He keeps the position of a visitor, a guest, who marvels at the beautiful and the ugly without any judgment.
This attitude of deep respect for “what is” resembles the relationship to the world of hunter-fisher-gatherers, in contrast to that of farmers, who must contain and control in order to survive.
While writing I remember a day when we had already been for three weeks in the vast wilderness of the pre-polar Urals.
Exhausted by the effort of a difficult march, having eaten nothing for several days, we crossed wide plateaus without trees, without rivers, lakes, berries or mushrooms…
Finally we reached forests of birch and great cedar trees. At their feet lay pine nuts from the previous year. Most were empty, but some still contained seeds.
So we sat down — almost collapsing — without even removing our backpacks, and we carefully ate every pine nut we could find, after the passing of winter, squirrels and bears.
Not a word came from our mouths, perhaps to preserve the smallest drop of energy.
And I remember the silence and the deep peace of that moment, so beautiful that we lived it together.
Today I write for him, so that he remembers that his friend Tashunka was fully with him in those moments of strength and weakness, in the powerful contrasts of adventurous life.
And the word of the babushkas echoes in me:
zolotoy Pehuen.
