Perhaps it would have been fitting -- in some macabre way -- to have gone down with that Aeroflot helicopter in a land so replete with death, where the earth had been toughened by the bones and soaked with the blood of millions of gulag prisoners going back at least a hundred years, to first the tsars and later the Marxists headed by Stalin.

It was the summer of 1991 and I was a freelance reporter -- working for NPR and The Christian Science Monitor -- touring the Magadan and Chukotka oblasts of the Soviet Far East, a vast region of almost no roads and thick taiga, larch trees packed together so tightly as to make the forest impenetrable, even for the great communist machine.

 I was the first American woman to visit this area since the 1920s and in most parts since the beginning of time. It wasn't the kind of place most American women put on their list of top destinations. It was -- and still is -- poor, tough, rugged, remote and not especially beautiful.

Toward the end of the month-long trip, I found myself waiting in a small village for a helicopter to take me, a fellow American journalist and three Soviet scientists, to the town of Zyryanka to catch a small boat for a seven-day trip up the Kolyma River to the East Siberrean Sea.

Time was tight, and a forest fire, or taiga fire, was raging all around us. We were forced to wait, day after day, for the fire to let up, as the air thickened with smoke and our schedule was pushed back. I was starting to panic -- if we did not make it back to the city of Magadan for the last plane to the States, we could be stuck there throughout the winter, where temperatures were among the coldest on Earth.

We finally took off, helicopter blades whipping through the smoke, with every bolt and seam in that old chopper rattling and groaning, until we reached some altitude and turned north.

I rolled around in the helicopter's hold with my fellow passengers until the Russian pilot called me up to the cockpit, pointing to the seat beside him to share the view and keep him company.

That is  when I realized there was no view. The windshield showed nothing but thick white smoke, and I could see flames licking at treetops below. He admitted -- through an interpreter -- that we were flying through the mountains with no radar but took great pains to reassure me, with a gold-capped smile, that I had absolutely nothing to fear. He, Sasha, would get us there safely.

I braced myself for the life-ending impact I knew was waiting for us every single moment of the way. I just knew that beyond that wall of smoke loomed a mountain slope or even mountain top with our name on it. We would crash and the helicopter would smash into smithereens; our bodies, I knew, would be unrecognizable.

Sasha threw back his head and laughed when he saw the terror in my eyes. My knuckles were white as I dug my nails into my legs.  That was when I realized that was the last thing I needed to be doing at that moment -- distracting him with my obvious fears of imminent death. 

I kept imagining what my friends back home would say when I failed to return: "At least, she was doing what she loved to do. You know, take risks and put herself out there." No! I thought. That's only one part of me -- the rest prefers to stay home, eat popcorn and watch TV shows of other people taking risks and putting themselves out there.

Thirty eternally long minutes later, we emerged from the mountains and the flames and the smoke and the dread and landed with just a few minor bumps by the banks of the Kolyma, ready for the next leg of our trip, a soothing boat trip into the Arctic where the reindeer roam and the salmon and moose they do play.

I gladly shared a few toasts of vodka with my fellow passengers and, most especially Sasha, who stayed with us for just a few minutes before leaping back into the pilot seat and heading straight back into the fire. In a land that had known so much danger and so much suffering, I could see that a little smoke over the mountains was absolutely nothing to fear. Spasibo, Sasha. Thank you.