Storytellersunplugged

By Stan Ridgley

The urge to be a “travel writer” overcomes even the best of us at times — of this I am convinced.

Call it the urge to “travel write.”

I like to believe that I overcame the urge many years ago, purged of the urge, as it were. Purged of it by the recognition that the sights, sounds, smells, and exotica of a foreign land fall inevitably flat, given that such writing is invested with our own egos, which are often wrapped into the mix of sensory stimulation that translates so poorly onto the page.

I recall my own painful efforts in this regard–enamored of expatriate work of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the like.

Undergraduates, of whom I have written often, are most afflicted with the hubris endemic to “study abroad” programs. They return from their sojourns burdened with the obligation to share their perceived unique experiences.

I recall one young man in particular, an undergrad at Duke named Ed, who was possessed of a fired passion for the mundane, blandly expressed. And a proclivity to write only in the first person, except when he was writing about himself in the third.

I suppose it is a burden that each person must shed or outgrow on his own. I hope my own burden has been shed, but these next few minutes will determine that.

So, with my throat duly cleared and the readership duly caveated, let me share my own travel experience with you, even as I pen these words on a legal pad.

I wish that I could say that I am feverishly scribbling at a table in a smoke-filled cafe brimming with sultry women, hushed conversations among swarthy hulks, and the strains of minor-key music . . . but no.

Instead, I sit at a leisurely breakfast buffet, prepared to a menu that sits astride East and West — Russian pancakes, scambled eggs, fried mushrooms, sosinki, and such like.

For a brief spell, I chat with a businesswoman, a Russian married to a Dutchman and the owner of a juice distributorship in the Netherlands. Tatiana is here on a business trip and laments the fact to me that: “Perhaps the way Russians do business is exactly opposite to what you teach.”

“Hmmm. What do you mean?” I ask.

“I am trying to be polite,” she says. “I mean corruption. My company does not give bribes and that puts us at severe competitive disadvantage.”

With an invitation the company in Holland, she bids goodbye.

A pleasant interlude, given that my senior professor colleague and I are still reeling from the time difference and travel fatigue that goes with moving point-to-point in Russia, particularly in the provinces.

We arrived in Moscow via Delta Friday a week ago, then the next day continued our journey by train to the city of Izhevsk, 900 kilometers to the east. An 18-hour overnight train ride through Kristal’nii Gus, Nizhny Novgorod, and Kazan could sound exotic, I suppose, but I resist the urge to travel-write and say only that the restaurant car was warm and inviting and the Vodka smooth.

In Izhevsk, the nine-hour time difference began to take a terrible toll on two poor academics allergic to meetings and yet forced to meet repeatedly in a disciplined schedule doubtless designed by the re-employed directors of the Gulag Archipelago.

Meetings with faculty, with the Minister of Economics of the Udmurt Republic (a burly Russian, which is not necessarily an oxymoronic trope), with representatives of a heavy machinery and metallurgical trade show, and with some of the nicest, warmest people on the face of the earth, we concluded our time with a 2-hour return flight to Moscow in a Tupolev-134 and a 1-hour cab ride in a Peugot.

Today, we concluded meetings at Moscow State University and with the president of the Hayek Foundation.

This is a schedule to be envied, I know. Tomorrow, it’s the embassy. And the Chamber of Commerce.

And what is the point of all this?

Possibilities.

Opportunities.

Personal relationships.

I tell you, getting from one place to another is utterly exhausting. And one does not get full sense of the word until one is exhausted — “utterly.” Getting these words onto a computer and launching them to you has a grinding adventure in itself, one that I will disappoint you by not describing, I’m sure.

So, lest I disappoint further, I will briefly — only briefly — mention the leggy and booted blonde prostitutes populating the hotel lobby couches, cigarettes dangling from full, pouty lips. They of course hold interest only as they are participants in a niche pleasure market for tired businessmen, a sad commentary on the human condition. Transactions appear brusque, businesslike.

And quick.

Again, the point of it all? How does one communicate the alien character of a society that superficially resembles ours in so many ways, and yet, under a thin patina, is so radically different?

The pitfalls of Russia are many, especially as there is an ingrained proclivity to deceive Westerners in ways great and small. This tendency to deceive is embodied in the well-known phrase “Potempkin Village,” in which a facade is presented to the West… and is often accepted as reality by us.

I do not condemn Russians for this tendency. It is information, description, nothing more. Neither good, nor bad. I merely describe it as a reality that is well for a Westerner to know. For self-preservation, if nothing else.

Ah, Regina approaches.

Regina is a dark-skinned asiatic, her skin ruddy and beautiful, hair braided into long and thin strands. She worked in Canadian television for a while. She aspires to be a film director and next year, she begins a special program.

Reality or facade? Hmmm.

So, having violated my own introductory dictum with regard to travel-writing, I offer this excuse, that I am ensconced in Russia, I have an essay due today, and this is coupled with a highly cultivated sense of obligation to my fellow writers.

So, you see, I have turned my literary sin into virtue. I do it for you, not out of vanity or self-congratulation.

One learns lessons hard — but wisdom gained through experience is often the most highly-prized.

Obviously, I have not enough experience, and I have not learned the lesson of “travel-writing.”

And so I travel write: “Sosinki are delightful Russian comestibles, link sausages steeped in grease and whose spices hint at socialist revolution, proletarian sweat, and the raucous speeches of a Lenin outraged at the people’s suffering.”

Isn’t that great stuff?