The boats are not at sea. They have not been at sea for fifty years. They sit in sand forty miles from the shore, and the shore itself has retired another twenty miles since then, and what remains of the Aral Sea is a thin brackish membrane in the far north, still contracting.
The boats have names. This is the thing that stays with you. Lev Berg, named for the ichthyologist who catalogued the sea’s fish, all of which are gone now. Ulybka — Smile. They were fishing boats, built to rock and list, to take water over the bow, to be cold and wet and heavy with their catch. Now they hold sand the way a hand holds nothing.
Moynaq was a port city. It had a cannery that processed the sturgeon. It had a harbor, which presupposes water. When the Soviets decided to divert the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya for cotton fields, no one in Moscow imagined the sea would actually disappear — they imagined it would diminish, they imagined this was an acceptable trade. By the 1970s the fish had died. By the 1980s the shore had retreated beyond sight. By the 1990s there was a ship graveyard and a shrinking population and an excess of respiratory disease from the salt and the pesticides that wind lifted from the dry bed and carried into lungs.
The old fishermen — there are some still living — remember the color of the water. There are gradations of blue they have never stopped knowing: the particular shade of afternoon in August, the way the light went when a storm came from the north. Memory is very specific about color. It doesn’t abstract.
There is a map from 1960. On it, the Aral Sea is enormous, a blue interior wilderness, the fourth largest lake in the world. It contained muksun and pike-perch and roach. It contained the entire lives of the people who lived beside it. When you set that map next to a satellite image from 2000 — when you put them side by side — the shape of the loss becomes visible the way an x-ray makes visible what’s happening inside something you cannot otherwise see.
What the ships hold now is light. Morning light, afternoon light, the white dissolving light of the Karakalpakstan desert, which is what the bottom of the Aral Sea has become. The rust has made the hulls the color of the sand. In another century they will be incorporated into it. They will become topography. The desert will receive them the way the sea never will again.