Mushrooms After the Rain

Saturday, September 8, 2007
As many a time so far on this trip, it is raining. We are packed inside a marshrut, a mini-van like form of public transit, heading north of the city centre to the “kitayski rinok” (Chinese market). We’ve come in search of bulk rice, cheap produce and cheap products. We follow the river north for awhile, past the imposing, crisp-white-and-shiny Church-on-the-Blood, the newly constructed shrine to the Romanov family who were killed at this location by the Bolsheviks. Past the church, we turn to a less impressive part of the city, where drab Soviet apartment blocks stand diligently row-on-row, though they appear to be tiring after years of such stringent conformist obedience. These buildings seem not quite sure of how to keep up with the roads that flank their sides, the ballooning number of billboards that are sprouting on their shoulders, and, especially, with the changing goals and aspirations of the passengers of the ever-increasing number of cars that travel these roads every day.

We come to an abrupt stop and clamber out of one of these cars into the light rain. Defri directs us across the road, through a small fruit market and under the new highway underpass. The people here are visibly different—not necessarily Chinese as the name of the market implies, but not as white as those you find in the downtown. I notice especially a group of women in colourful dresses and head scarves crossing the road nearby. Their skin is the colour of coffee with a dollop of cream, though I cannot place where they are from. They remind me of gypsy characters in a Hollywood film, dark and mysterious and colourfully dressed, and I guess that they are probably of Central Asian descent, Tajik or perhaps Uzbek. But I do not to look too hard; I do not want to stare or gawk or gape, and I focus my gaze instead on the opened-air market unfolding ahead of us. Unless you have seen such a market, it is hard to imagine. The best I can do is to say that it is a zoo of people hassling you to make a sale (they especially seem to like calling out devushka or “young woman”), rows upon rows of merchandise—fur coats and hats, boots, shoes, pots and pans, sheets and towels, shoelaces and sweaters—followed by rows of food vendors and the glorious smell of smoked meat dampened by the rain, interspersed with strange mall-like buildings that are almost as zoo-like as their outdoor equivalent. We wander up and down the rows, past merchandise that seems to repeat itself fairly often, trying not to look too obviously foreign, Mark buys some towels and Guilerme and I find winter coats, and Defri leads us to a place to eat. We sit for a moment away from the chaos and then head back towards the bus stop. As we leave the market, we pass again the place of the people with the light chocolate coloured skin. It is still raining and cold enough that I’ve put on my new coat, but despite the damp cold, one of these women is sitting on the curb nursing a child. As I try not to stare, we are approached by another child. His body is the size of a 3 or 4 year old, though his face is older and his eyes are those of someone who has already seen too much. He is colourfully dressed like his mother, and he approaches us with an outstretched arm carrying a dilapidated tin cup. There is dirt under the fingernails that clutch this meager begging bowl, and snot or juice—I can’t decide which—caked between his upper lip and his nose. He is joined by a friend, or perhaps a younger brother. No one around us seems to take notice of them, and I force myself to do the same. We pass under the highway once again, leaving these children behind us, but it is too late: his dark brown eyes have already seared a hole in my heart, and I know that as long as I live I will never forget his face.

We return to the dormitory just in time for me to meet a Russian friend with whom I’ve kept in contact over the last two years. We decide to walk downtown to grab a coffee and catch up. He asks how I’m finding being back in Yekaterinburg. As we walk past construction site after construction site, I tell him that I sometimes barely recognize where I am and am amazed at the number of new buildings. He tells me that he too felt the same way after being gone for only a month in the summer. He tells me that Yekaterinburg will be host to the 2009 Asia-Pacific summit convention, and much of the construction is part of a project to make-over the city in time for this event. We reach the coffee shop, “Mamma’s Biscuit House” on Prospekt Lenina, and I debate between an over-priced “Kafe-Amerikana,” “Mega-Kapucino,” or “Mokka.” I wonder if Lenin, who still stands in the main cit square just outside the café, would still be smiling if he could see us here now. I order the “Mokka” and my friend the “Lattey.” As the rain continues outside, we enjoy our warm drinks and he tells me of his work, his school, his family. He is tired, he says, tired of the stress of his job and studies—he is, at age 23, halfway through his PhD, teaching 20 hours of lectures a week, and about to publish a textbook—and also tired of being here. Tired of being in a country where his sexuality is taboo, where he is not free to publicly love who he wants to love. On our walk back to the dorm, we fall back into our discussion of the construction that has overtaken the city. As we pass a new Silvercity-like cinema complex, he tells me that soon Yekaterinburg will be very beautiful. Yes, in 5 years, he says, it will be very beautiful. He tells me that in Russia they say that this construction boom is “like mushrooms after the rain.” After the rain, you know, the wild mushrooms grow unhindered across the fertile forest floor.

Mushrooms after the rain… I can’t get the image out of my head for the rest of the day. It is an ironic image in a way that I cannot yet pinpoint. Mushroom collecting, like dachas, banyas and vegetable gardens, is a deeply entrenched and much loved Russian custom—part of the Russian psyche, or the illusive Russian soul. On a warm summer day, Russians love to head into the forest with their baskets and collect wild mushrooms. A section of my Russian textbook was even devoted to the identification of different types of mushrooms, to the result that I know the names of more types of mushrooms in Russian than I do in English. I immediately recognize this metaphor of mushrooms after the rain as a deeply Russian metaphor. And yet I am not sure exactly what these metaphorical mushrooms or this metaphorical rain really mean. Capitalism has hit Russia as a tropical storm, leaving little recognizable—save some deteriorating Soviet apartment blocks—in its wake. It has been a fertile rain for some, no doubt, and the city seems awash in new money, the buildings mushrooming from the ground testament to this wealth. Yet while it has been fertile for some, it has flooded others out; for those who don’t know how to swim, it has meant a return to make-shift houses on the side of an unpredictable, eroding riverbank. This is unbridled free-market capitalism at its best—or its worst. You can either jump in the rainy river and try to follow the rampant current to the top, or be thrown in and left to drown unless you learn quickly to swim, or at least to float with the current. And while this river has watered the mushrooms, it is hard as of yet to identify which ones are okay to eat, which will make good soup and which will send you to the back of a line at an overcrowded hospital, or to a street corner with a tin cup or a baby on your breast. And so perhaps the metaphor is not ironic after all, but perfect as a metaphor could be. Or perhaps it is perfect in its irony, in the strange tension and contradictions that it depicts. Russia has, I suppose, long been a country of contradictions, of extremes, of high highs and low lows. Why, then, should we expect this New Russia to be any different? Perhaps we will only find out when the rain slows and the sun manages to break through the clouds, casting new shadows across a new forest floor.

Очередь: n, turn, queue; Стоять в очереди: vi, to wait in line

Friday, September 7, 2007

Well, after 4 nights sleeping in my new bed in our residence in Yekaterinburg, this place is slowly beginning to feel like home again, and I am settling into the idea of making it that place. It has been difficult at times to be in this place again, as some things here are exactly the same, while others are completely different, and I’ve found myself longing for the good old days of 2005 while also knowing that this year cannot be like before. Nevertheless, w are almost through the worst of the bureaucratic hoops that we need to jump, we all have beds and roommates (and hopefully soon desks and keys and sheets and healthy digestive systems) and are in good spirits despite the chronic inefficiency and disorder (or at least to foreign eyes) that seems to be Russia. Let me tell you a bit about our first three days here…

Day 1: At 6:30am we pulled in to the Sverdlovsk train station, expecting Jenny to meet us on the platform. I had told her our car number, so expected to find her quickly, but she was no where to be found. We walked the length of the train with no success, and decided to head into the main station. We rounded the corner to go down the stairs leading under the tracks at just the same time that Defri, an Indonesian student we spent some time with last time I was here, happened to be climbing the stairs. I was surprised to see him, to say the least, and even more surprised to hear why he was there—Jenny had called him in a panic at about 5am after she had been mugged walking to the train station (mom, disregard this last line, we will be safe, don’t worry). So we hopped on the subway and then the tram to make our way to the residence. Defri informed us that Mark would be living with him in Tugrul’s old room, and I would be living in the room beside Jenny, possibly with a yet-to-be-determined roommate. Mark and Defri immediately went to sleep, while unpacked and tried to sleep, though something was not agreeing very well with my stomach. Jenny came by, and I had my first encounter with the commandant—the boss of the residence—and got my pass that I must show every time I enter the building. By the time Defri and Mark woke up mid-afternoon to go to the university, I was finally ready to sleep. When they returned we did a little grocery shopping and Mark prepared dinner. While they were at the university, Defri had also been informed that they may be getting another roommate, and just as Mark was finishing making our dinner, he—Guilherme from Brazil—arrived. Guilherme had actually arrived at the airport quite a bit earlier in the day, but no one had come to pick him up. Luckily his Russian is good enough that he somehow found his own way to the residence. Guilherme is a jovial young man, with curly brown hair and a passion for languages and Brazilian dancing, and we over dinner we commiserated about our lack of knowledge about what we were supposed to be doing here. We went to bed with our stomachs full, and, although Guilherme had to sleep on the floor for lack of enough beds in the room, spirits high.

Day 2: We woke up bright and early Wednesday morning to beat the lines at the hospital where we had to be tested for tuberculosis by means of chest x-ray. This test is a mandatory annual test for everyone—Russians and foreigners—who live in Russia (or at least in housing somehow supported by the government). I’d been through this ordeal before, so at least kind of knew what to expect, though the experience of waiting in line for an extended period of time, stripping down in front of a stranger (still not sure why this is necessary), and pressing yourself up against a cold metal x-ray machine is never something one looks forward too. We made it through here in about 2.5 hours, and then headed towards the lice check place. We managed to beat the crowd here, so were in and out very quickly. Next came the university. Here we were introduced to some of teachers, the dean for the faculty of Russian for foreigners, and given a brief run-down on the types of classes we would need to take. We handed over our passports for registration, and somehow Jenny talked them into not making us pay until we get our passports back—not that we would have been able to before, as we must pay in cash and can only withdraw 10 000 rubles a day. After the university we went and had some photographs taken—we need 4 for the residence and 2 for the university—and then I did a terrible thing: bought a cell phone. I’ve never owned a cell phone before, but land lines don’t really exist here and I thus have really no other way to communicate with anyone. Alas, when in Rome… Mark and I wandered the rainy streets for awhile, then headed home to a meal prepared by Guilherme. After dinner Defri’s (Russian) girlfriend came over, and wanted us to tell her Canadian folk stories, so Mark, in his very poor Russian, told some crazy story about voyageurs giving their souls to the devil for a night with their wives. Guilherme then gave us all Brazilian dancing lessons, though I spent most of the time doubled over laughing at the site of Guilherme dancing with Mark, who loves to dance but who doesn’t have a lot of grace or the greatest rhythmic sensibilities. When we first arrived I had some trouble being in this room, room 820, Obshshezhitiye No. 6, because some of the happiest memories of my life were made in this room, but none of the people who were part of those memories are currently here. I am slowly warming to the idea, however, that it will be a place of many new adventures and happy times.

Day 3: Thursday we let ourselves sleep in a little bit, before heading again to the hospital to pick up our results. Before we left, however, Defri received a call from another Indonesian student who’d arrived at the airport and was coming to the dorm, but had no idea where she would be staying. She and her Tatarian fiancé joined us in room 820, and after some tea we headed to the hospital. After being sent from one room to another and then finally to the back of the same line we’d been in the day before, we decided to walk around for a bit and come back later. We walked towards downtown and went into the shopping centre where we did all of our grocery shopping two years ago. Since then, a movie theatre, 2 or 3 dozen clothing stores, and a bus stop with a free shuttle to the newly constructed Ikea have been added to the centre…this city seems to be drowning in new money in its transition to the world of unbridled capitalism, yet the new billboards and stiletto-bearing professional class and fancy commercial districts don’t seem to quite know how to exist beside the crumbling soviet apartment blocks, the polluted Iset River that runs through the city, nor the head-covering babushkas who beg for money in the parks—this is a country of contradictions. By the time we returned to the hospital, it was only a short 35 or 40 minute wait to pick up our results. From here, we then returned to the dorm to wait another 40 minutes or so to give the results to our beloved komandant.

I began this post a few days ago, and since then we have waited in a number of new lines, but I think you get the idea by now. My favourite line so far, however, has been our meal preparation line—in true Russian style, we’ve fallen into the routine of taking turns cooking the evening meal. And when you put 3 men from 3 different continents in a 1.5m x 2m kitchen, the results are never boring. And it is for such an eclectic dinner that I now depart.

A Very Rigid Search/The Kindness of Strangers Parts II & III

Sunday, September 2- Monday, September 3, 2007

Either Mark and I are good at looking like lost and confused foreigners and garnering sympathy from those around us, or traveling really is one of the best ways to renew one’s faith in humanity, for, once again Len’s adage has been proved true—we would not be on this train now save for the kindness of strangers. After an early start yesterday morning we made our way to the Hamburg airport and found ourselves flying to Moscow. United by our common lack of understanding of German, we began talking to the woman sitting next to us on the plane. She was a Muskovite who’d been visiting a boyfriend in Germany, and was now heading home. We landed in Moscow in the middle of the afternoon, took the little shuttle bus typical of Moscow airports to the main terminal, and then walked into a room of about 400 people waiting in line for passport control. Welcome to Russia, our mild-mannered Muskovite friend offered. We continued to talk with her while we waited the hour to get to the front of the line, during which time she managed to phone a friend and find out what train station we should go to in order to buy tickets for Yekaterinburg. She again waited for us in the baggage claim area, and came with us to catch a bus to the metro line, where she got off to show us which subway to take to get to the train station. We bid her farewell, feeling warmly welcomed to a country that is perhaps unfairly not known for warm welcomes.

We proceeded on the subway to Komolskaya station, where the Kazanski, Leningradski and Yaraslovksi train stations are all located. We went inside and were given direction to the ticket booth. Before asking about tickets, however, we decided we better find a place to get some cash. Unfortunately the ATM in the station was broken, so I left Mark with the luggage and set off to found another machine. The last time I was here, I never had the least bit of trouble accessing money, so I did not expect this search to last very long. I set out into the main square, a square from which I could see the main building of Moscow State University silhouetted in the evening sky. I found a dozen or so machines that accepted local bank cards, and 1 or two broken machines that would normally have accepted Interac. I returned rather tired and disgruntled to where Mark was sitting with our luggage. Mark offered to go search, but I decided however that rather than having Mark search all the places I’d already been, I might as well keep looking. And so I set out again. By this time the sun had already set and the novelty of the search worn off. I found a machine that seemed to be working until I put in the amount and it told me my transaction could not be processed. I then figured out that the machine dispensed nothing more than 500ruble bills, but I couldn’t even get this to work. I tried to ask a nearby security guard if there was another machine nearby, and when I finally managed to communicate what I was looking for he gave me a disparaging gaze and replied “zdes nyeto” (here there are none…). And so I continued the search, by this time definitely not in the best of moods, having slept only 2 hours the night before nor eaten since 6am. Not wanting to return empty handed, I went back to a department store across the street where I’d found one of the broken machines before, and followed some more signs to the third floor. I walked in what seemed like circles for awhile (I don’t know how to begin to describe a Russian department store), until finally I turned a corner to a dimly lit staircase, and at the end of the corridor stood an ATM machine. As I eagerly approached it and say the “cirrus” symbol and no “ne rabotayet” (not working) signs, I nearly wanted to cry and felt a bit as if I was in a cartoon, the treasure at the end of a long search being illuminated by a light from heaven. I again wanted to cry when the machine actually dispensed money. I was so happy (and hungry) on my return to the train station that I bought two ice cream cones, a treat I was introduced to by Len who was rather addicted to these strange little cones that come in plastic wrapping and don’t ever seem to melt. I returned triumphantly to where Mark was sitting and offered him this typical Russian dessert.

After sat briefly to enjoy our ice cream and garner enough courage to face our next challenge: the ticket counter. And so we set out again, down to the ticket counter. This would be a test of my Russian proficiency, and also determine where we would be sleeping tonight. I approached the window trying to seem confident and told the woman we wanted to go to Sverdlovsk (in train lingo Yekaterinburg is still known by its Soviet name), tonight if possible, third class. She told me there was no room third class tonight or tomorrow, only second class. I asked how much it cost, though couldn’t understand her response through the garbled microphone that mediates all such interaction in Russia (as the person behind the ticket booth is always encased in glass). I asked her if she could write down the prices for me, and after muttering some not very happy words about tourists she shoved a piece of paper under the glass. The prices were quite a lot more than we’d been hoping to pay (as we had wanted to travel third class), and also more money than I had been allowed to take out of the ATM in one withdrawal, and so after a moment of standing stupefied in front of a not very friendly ticket officer we moved away from the window to come up with an alternate plan. We considered going to another station to see if they had anything third class (Mark also thought maybe we’d find a nicer sales officer, but I had my doubts), but in the end decided we might as well just fork out the money so we wouldn’t have to sleep in the train station. And so I set out once again to find an ATM. Once outside, I decided I might as well at least check at Kazanski station, so I ran down the road to cross the street, then walked around in circles in the train station for awhile before realizing that I had to go out onto the train platforms and around the outside of the building to get to the ticket office. The woman at this counter was surprisingly a little friendly, finding my mediocre Russian somewhat amusing. She told me they had third class tickets, but as you need a passport to buy a ticket, I couldn’t purchase tickets for both Mark and I. She also kept telling me to go back to Yaraslovki station, and so I left empty-handed. Luckily I found a working ATM machine at the entrance of this station, and then ran back to the other station to report these new developments to Mark. We were a bit confused by this conflicting ticket sales, and in the end decided to stay where we were. We went back to the ticket office, intentially choosing a different window, and again I said we wanted to go to Sverdlovsk tonight. She, too, said they had no third class tickets. I asked if there were any third class tickets leaving from Kazanski station and she said no to this as well, and then quoted us a second class ticket. I can’t remember why, now, but for some reason we stopped to talk about this again, someone went in front of us in line, and then the ticket window closed, so we got into another line and finally decided to just fork over the money for a second class ticket and be on our way. Moral of the story: there is a reason that normal people buy tickets through travel agencies.

Thoroughly exhausted, we found the platform from which our train was debarking and were happy to see that it was already there, and, to my great excitement, the car we were in was closest to the train station! (It can be a 15 minute walk from one end of a Russian train to the other if your, and if your car happens to be at the other end and you aren’t there very early, this can lead to frantic races down the train platform.) We boarded the train and found our kupe, and by this time I was quite happy that we had the extra space and privacy that second class tickets afford you—and we lucked out and are sharing the kupe with one other person. This person is Yuri, a dentistry student about the same age as us, who is heading back to university in Perm for the year. And Yuri, like Masha on the plane, has given us the warmest of welcomes (and an awful lot of food). He speaks a few words in English, English that he has learned mostly from American hip hop and rap artists, but he has been very talkative and patient with our Russian and so our practice has begun. About 20 minutes after the train left, he started taking some food out of one of his bags, a bag that I’ve since discovered contains only food and a few presents for his university friends. He’s asked me to write down the names of the foods we are eating, a list that looks something like this: potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, tomatoes, sausage, chicken, cheese, noodle soup, cake, cookies, orange juice, bread, peanut butter, black tea. Yuri tells us that he is a boxer (and he definitely has the biceps to prove it), and he tells us that he must eat a lot. He also has two grandmothers who like to spoil him with vegetables from their gardens. There is far more food here than 3 people could eat in 2 days, let alone 1, and so we have accepted his generous gifts to the contentment of our stomachs.

It is now mid-afternoon on Monday, we have just passed through Kirov, the halfway point of our journey. The sun is shining once again, and although Russia remains grey in much of my memory, this is perhaps the first time we have had two consecutive days of sun. And after three weeks of travel like this—3 planes, 10 buses, 7 buses, and an assortment of other land and sea modes of local transit (yes, I had fun adding those up)-- it feels now as if we are heading home. The birch trees and intermittent track-side villages whirring by outside the window are a mark of familiarity, a place I have known before. This is a new home for Mark, and for me as well, yet also a place that has always remained home in my memories, a place where I left, as Len predicted (it seems this man knows Russia well), a little piece of my heart.

A Rainy Swiss Adventure

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

I am sitting in the passenger seat of an aging blue Renault journeying down the narrowest paved road I’ve ever seen, somewhere just inside the Swiss border. We’ve set out for a tour of the mountains, but the weather is not cooperating. There was a light drizzle when we left the farm, but it has since turned into a steady rain, and the higher we climb, the less we can see, until at the top of the mountains we can barely see 10m in front of us through the fog. We slow to almost a standstill at each road sign as I try and navigate the route Céphas’ brother has mapped out for us—a scenic route through the mountains that he’s done on bike. Our spirits (and the ground beneath us) are understandable dampened by the rain, there is a tension in the car, caused by the disappointment that our views of the Swiss countryside have been obscured by what Céphas tells us is very unusual weather. We decide to take a shorter route home, grâce à our visibility problems. We back up to a road that descends the mountain towards a town called St. Ursul. And although it is raining, today is one of those days where, inside of resigning oneself over to feelings of disappointment, I feel as if something unplanned will happen to save the day from complete failure.

We arrive in St. Ursul after a short drive, the breaks squeal as we descend the winding hill, a detail Céphas tells me not to mention to my mother. We decide to find a parking spot and walk around the town. Just as we get out of the car, the steady rain turns into a downpour. Céphas pulls out two umbrellas from the trunk, and we start to explore the downtown. As I walk between Céphas and Mark, the umbrellas serve more as an eaves trough directing water towards me than as a shield against the rain. In a few minutes I am completely drenched and give up using the umbrellas altogether. I think to myself that were we on a canoe trip, this would be the point of a stormy day where we’d resign ourselves to soggy feet (and legs and bums, etc.) and just start singing, the act of singing ridiculous songs together somehow making the time pass more enjoyably.

We enter the cobblestone downtown and decide to follow a sign towards a hermitage . We ascend some stone stairs and end up in what seem to be a dead end. An elderly man with sparse white hair comes out of a little garden shack and tells us that we can can’t pass through the gate behind him, but we can follow the stairs up the mountain to “la croix.” We begin our journey upwards on a very slippery and narrow mountain path that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. We find a few small shrines in the forest, but decide to come back down. I take a slightly different route than on the way up, and come across a hobbit-like wooden door set inside a stone wall. I push it open gently to reveal another, better maintained walkway. I call Céphas and Mark over, and we follow the path to a set of stairs that leads up to the original hermitage we were seeking—a small chapel on the top of the hill overlooking the city, flanked by a tiny cave and a shrine set back inside the rocks. We sit here for awhile, enjoying the view, then decide to continue on. We head back towards the door, and a sign that directs us towards “le chemin des statues.” We decide to see where this leads, I full of a childlike sense of adventure and Céphas and Mark at least willing to tolerate a little more exploration on this wet, green, treed mountain side. We come to a fork in the road, I take the higher road. We come to another fork in the road, I begin up the higher road, but then we decide to turn back to the lower. We walk along here for awhile until we see through the trees a turret and a wall—the lookout of an ancient fortified city, that we had seen from the road below when we drove into town. Céphas pushes on the door. It is open. We peak inside and find some camping supplies. Céphas remarks that the Swiss are a very trusting people. We venture up the narrow staircase, one storey and then two, stopping to look at the city below through the key-hole-like slotted windows. We are on top of the city, and, here, sheltered briefly from the rain, it feels as if it could be the top of the world.

We wind our way back down the stairs, then back down the mountain, and somehow find ourselves on the opposite side of the gate that our gardener friend told us we could not pass before. We find ourselves in someone’s backyard, but eventually make our way back to the street. We walk down this picturesque streets a little farther. Céphas tells us that Switzerland has the best preserved ancient buildings of this part of Europe, being the only country to escape air bombardment. We wander into a grocery store to buy some chocolate—who can leave Switzerland without Swiss chocolate? The rain has slowed and we enjoy the chocolate as we search the streets for a public toilet. Satisfied, we decide to head towards home. The rain picks up again and we walk quickly towards the car, where we eat the lunch we’d packed and brought along and wait out the heavy rain. As we drive home, the fog seems to be lifting, or at least from this lower altitude we can see green hills extending upwards that promise to be mountains, though their peaks remain cloaked in thick rain clouds. We take a different route home so that Céphas can show us the village of Florimont, the closest village to their farm, that is just inside the French border. We hold our breath as we drive past the border, this is a road that Céphas, who has Swiss and French citizenship, travels, but not a road that travelers such as we should be on. We are relieved that no one is there, at this, the only real border left in Europe. We wind our way through Florimont and back to the farm. We enter the house and Priscille, Céphas’ younger sister, asks us how our trip was. Céphas tells her the rain was terrible (he also tells me it is French custom to complain about everything), and I say that although we didn’t see much, we still had fun, we went on an adventure, and it is these adventures that make the best stories—and, of course, the best memories.

A Return to Roots

Monday August 27-Thursday August 30, 2007

I awoke Tuesday morning feeling more rested than any other morning since we left, albeit a bit disoriented—upon opening my eyes I couldn’t remember where I was and spent a few moments searching my memory to recall where I’d closed my eyes the night before. But as it slowly came back to me and I settled into my surroundings, I couldn’t help but let the corners of my mouth turn upwards. And I lay for awhile in the strange knowledge that I was awaking in a house and in a land in which my Amish ancestors also awoke until the middle of the 19^th century. When I had gathered enough motivation to get up, I wandered down the stairs and into the older half of the farmhouse—dating to 1824—and into the old farm kitchen. Here I was greeted by Henri, Céphas’ uncle who lives with the family, a man best described as jolly and kind-spirited, with wispy white hair and an unforgettable laugh. Henri offers me some coffee, which he warms in the microwave, and then summons us to the kitchen table for a breakfast of fresh bread, fresh milk (as fresh as it gets, the cows have just been milked), home-grown honey and elderberry jam. He speaks quickly and jovially in the French of someone who grew up speaking Low German—Henri and Céphas’ father Andre came to this are on the border of Alsace and Franche-Compté in the 1950s, an area that was, at the time, populated almost solely by Mennonite farmers. Today they are one of the few Mennonite farms left in the area, and the land around has been put to other uses. Céphas tells us that the forest across from the lane entry nearly escaped being developed as plot for chalets, and also explains that the seemingly out of place fence in the field nearest the house was put there 3 years ago when the back half of the field was dug up to install a gas line with Russian origins. In the valley between the Voges and the Jura mountains, he tells us that their back field was the only option, and while they were compensated for three years of lost crops, they had little say in the operation. Nevertheless, this farm—“La Ferme de la Petite Taille”—remains a refuge of sorts, a rural retreat in an increasingly urban country and urban world.

We spend three days at this retreat, and both Mark and I are quick to say upon our departure that the nights on the bus and the multiple trains and layovers were worth the trip. For the first time in awhile, at the farm we find space—both physical and mental—and are able to relax and to begin to digest some of the experiences we’ve had. We are surrounded by people—Céphas, his younger sister, brother and sister-in-law and their 3-week old daughter Cami, Henri, and Céphas’ parents—who have been more than kind and accommodating, tolerating our broken French, offering us coffee, bread, and a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, and genuine welcome. We are surrounded by a beautiful countryside—there is a sizeable lake in the middle of the property, on a clear day we can see the Jura mountains, there are an abundance of fruit trees, most notably an apple tree bearing the juiciest fruit I have ever tasted, and the rolling hills typical of this corner of France. We are afforded the opportunity to reflect on the distance we have traveled, and the nearing reality of the year ahead.

Let me paint one final pictures. It is Thursday morning, and I’ve awoken in the same bed as Tuesday, though this time more accustomed to my surroundings. I wander to the same kitchen as before for coffee and bread and fresh milk and honey. Mark and I decide to wander to the end of the lane, across the road to the forest that has just narrowly escaped development. After a misty rainy foggy day driving through Switzerland, we enjoy the sun and clear sky and view of the horizon that the sunny weather affords us. We are guided back to the house by smells of a wonderful meal in progress. Céphas gives me two heads of lettuce and two tomatoes that he has just picked from the garden and I go into the other room to prepare a salad, the kitchen too full of people for me to work in there. I set the table for 9 people, and after about an hour everyone has wandered in from various parts of the farm. We begin with soup, then move to a course of potatoes, veal, cabbage, beets, cucumber salad, lettuce salad. Andre offers us fudge that he has brought back with him from his trip to Birmingham to visit his oldest son. We drink juice made from a syrup boiled out of a flower that Céphas grows in the garden. For dessert we have an apple custard that Céphas has prepared with apples from one of their trees. We enjoy coffee and fresh cream with our pie. People leave the table in stages, off to various jobs around the property—cows to be milked, babies to be cared for, dishes to be washed. Céphas comes down with me to the lake as I make use of the few hours we have left there and the nice weather to swim in the lake. We swim and then pack quickly, taking as many apples as we can carry for the trek back to Bremen. Céphas drives us through the winding narrow roads of southern Alsace back to Mulhouse and we run to catch the train. We stand on the platform to briefly catch our breath, glad that our train has been delayed. We say goodbye to a friend and board the train, waving through the window as the train pulls away like in the movies. As we watch the mountains through the train window on our way back through Strasbourg I am sad for the first time to be leaving a place, a place that felt strangely like home. I am content to do nothing but watch the mountains pass by, and think about a time that I may be able to return again to this country, to this land of hills and farms and roots—tree roots, crop roots and family roots—to this place of comfort and subtle yet ineffable beauty

.

From Baltic Shores

Sunday, August 26, 2007

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon and I find myself somewhere I definitely did not expect to be on a voyage to Siberia—or even knew existed: a beautiful sandy beach, just north of the most heavily trafficked canal in the world, where the Kiel fiord meets the Baltic Sea. The fiord in front of us is populated with more sailboats, ocean liners and cruise ships than I’ve seen in one place, save perhaps the Bosphorus, there’s a persistent breeze carrying the faintest hint of salt, periodically whipping of sand around my shoulders and creating a paradise for kite-flyers, wind-surfers, sailing enthusiasts and wind turbines. And, the sun is at least intermittedly gracing us with her presence.

I’ve just been visited by a young blonde-haired 2-year old who crawled up from behind me to where I am sitting in the sand. I smiled at her and she smiled back. I laughed and she sheepishly laughed as well. I started pushing sand around with my hands, and she did the same. Eventually we sat together in the sand, and I tried to get her to smile by burying my feet in the sand and then poking my toes through the sand, until she began to do the same. She named various objects in German—a rock, a plane overhead, our feet—and we continued to bury each other’s feet until her mother came and they continued on down the shore.

After a week of not understanding linguistically what is going on around me, I found encouragement in this short encounter as I was reminded by the simple language of this child and my obstinate use of words in our interaction what we all pass through a stage when communication is not based in words, but in gestures, mimicked actions, imitation, observation, smiles. And though this blonde-haired babe was entering into the world of German, fortunately, if we are willing to use and recognize and at least attribute significance to it, our ability to communicate without words never leaves us. This is a language that I’ve (re)learned in many foreign encounters—most notably perhaps with the Turkish students we befriended the last time I was in Russia, and then again in Turkey last summer. It is a language of necessity, perhaps—a language that teaches us humility as we return to more infantile forms of communication. But it is also a language with a certain transcendent quality, for it is a language that we all speak and understand if only we are willing to at times to be silent and return to an earlier, more primary way of ingesting our surroundings and making meaning in relationships.