Investment Biker Read online

  Another day and another night.

  We were told there was something of a road near Chernyschevsk, so at last we asked to be put off, having been on our personal flatcar for a little more than two days.

  In this part of Siberia we often passed mobile missile launchers on the highways, Scuds, I suppose, and we saw hundreds of tanks. The launchers were fifty, sixty feet high, often broken down. This was due north of Beijing, so if war with the Chinese started, here was where there would be action.

  At a big tank-training base a young soldier, to cement international Soviet-American relations, gave us a reproduction of a sketch, drawn in the heroic mode, of a youthful Brezhnev as a stalwart tank commander. The soldier had won it in a bicycle race. He didn’t think much of it as a prize, but I was glad to have it. It now hangs over my pool table.

  All those gigantic numbers about Soviet military hardware that the CIA and the Pentagon pumped out to justify their own spending—and here we passed missiles, launchers, and military equipment rusting by the side of the road and being fiddled with by half-assed mechanics. Much of these had been stripped for spare parts. A glance told you a lot of them wouldn’t work.

  Having seen both armies, the Chinese and the Soviet, I had the impression that neither side had very much, and that what it did have wasn’t very useful. Granted, I hadn’t seen as much on the Chinese side.

  On every bridge out here—this was a war zone, remember—stood a guardhouse and a couple of armed soldiers. What the Chinese did have was all the soldiers in the world. In a war the Chinese would first take out the Trans-Siberian Railroad, cutting the vast Soviet Union into any number of helpless parts.

  That afternoon we were on the road to Chita, a big city, where we hoped to stop and rest after the jolts of the flatcar.

  A police car stopped to ask who the hell we were and what we were doing out here, just as the Alabama patrolmen might stop and check out strangers. After we showed them our papers, they pointed to the sky and said in pidgin English that we’d better find “skelter” because there was going to be a “sturm.”

  I thanked them and they left.

  “What’s a ‘sturm’?” Tabitha asked.

  “I guess a storm.”

  “Maybe we should pull over,” said Tabitha. “Wait it out.”

  Although it had rained here for six days, today it was dry.

  “I’ve seen storms before,” I said. “We were on that flatcar too long. I want to spend the night in Chita, where we have the chance of a decent hotel room, not another night in a drafty barn.”

  At five o’clock we drove through a picturesque village where we saw no one, not a soul. It was so unusual and so eerie that the hairs on the back of my neck rose.

  Outside the village it became ominously black and still. We kept moving. I thought about stopping, but I figured a little unpleasantness from a storm would be more than made up for by getting to Chita and some form of civilization. If you stopped in Siberia every time it rained, you’d never make it across.

  Then a gust of wind hit the side of the bikes, and I thought it would knock me over.

  The wind got wild quickly, rushing at us from all sides. No sooner had I figured out how to tack into it than it changed direction, whipping my bike around. In front of me Tabitha was having trouble, too.

  It started to rain, buckets of lashing water, which turned into hail. Ice stones the size of mothballs and golf balls racketed against our helmets, face shields, and fenders. The protection of leather jackets, heavy sweaters, and shirts wasn’t enough. Our backs were pummeled as painfully as if buckets of stones were being hurled from the sky. We were in a maelstrom of wind, rain, and ice stones.

  Within minutes the slippery road became a river of white hail and water, making the bikes even more difficult to keep upright. Fields ran up to the road on both sides; there was no shelter.

  The wind rose and howled as if it wanted to sweep us up and blow us away. We clung to our handlebars and fought to hold the five-hundred-pound bikes upright. We passed twenty white-and-tan cows in the middle of the road—and yet the sky was so black and the hail so thick we could scarcely see them. Our wheels slid about, and only our boots kept us upright. We were creeping along at four or five miles an hour when a cow, blinded by the storm, walked into me. My bike was knocked over and I was sprawled across the road.

  Tabitha put her kickstand down and ran back to help, slipping and sliding on the mud and white balls underfoot. She helped me right my bike.

  I should have listened to that policeman, and I should have stopped in that village. Here my impatience, my drive to move along, had put us in danger. Anything could happen out here—the road could wash out, a flash flood could overwhelm us, a blind truck could run over us.

  She was terrified, in tears and in pain. “The hail—it hurts! I can’t see anything!”

  “What do you want to do?” I shouted. “Where do you want to stop?”

  She didn’t know. She shouted that she was worried about her bike—didn’t hail destroy cars? I shouted that we had to keep moving to get out of this. There wasn’t any sense standing here and letting the storm beat up on us.

  I’ve never been one to stand still. If we left our bikes there in the middle of the road and walked somewhere, who knew what would happen to them or to us? We cranked the bikes up, put them into the lowest gear, and, still blinded by hail, hugged the edge of the road and pushed them along.

  Even that was hard, because we had to peer through the gloom and the hail to make sure we were still on the road. It was hard to keep our footing with hailstones underfoot. We pushed the bikes for a long while.

  Finally the storm lifted and the sky turned light again. Under the summer heat, the hail melted.

  We had never had a chance to put on our rain suits. We were soaked, and so were our saddlebags and almost everything in them. In the middle of the road Tabitha stripped down to her underwear and put on her rain suit, the only dry clothes she could find. On every side the landscape was windswept and beaten down. Tons of water rushed down the sides of the hills and roads. Stones the size of footballs and grapefruit had been blown out onto the unpaved road. Branches, leaves, and trees were strewn across the road. In places the roadbed was washed away.

  “Maybe sturm means ‘tornado’ in Russian,” said Tabitha.

  “Something might have been lost in translation,” I said.

  “The next time the police announce a sturm, we’re stopping.”

  “Right” was all I could answer.

  In a small town, parts of which were under a foot of water, we tried to get gas, but the electricity was out, which meant the pumps wouldn’t work.

  One of the locals sold us gas from his spare jerry can. Now the sky looked fine, so we again set out for Chita, this time with some of the local fellows in cars as companions, because we were always exciting to the Russians who stumbled across us.

  They led us out of town. One dashed ahead and came back with the news that the storm had washed out the bridge. We figured this now was the end of the day.

  “No, no,” they said, “we’ll show you something else.”

  We went back to the fork in the road with them and took the other way. After a couple of miles, we came upon a paved road. Unbelievable. Glorious asphalt. Not a road sign, not a car, not a manmade object, only flat paved road.

  We roared out. Our new friends rode along, waving and shouting like teenage boys. Well, I was happy. It was late in the day, we were driving straight into the sun, I was wet from the “sturm,” but we were making great time. I had on my electric vest and my heated handle grips, trying to dry myself out. My stereo was blasting, first Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” and then Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” We ran into another fabulous Siberian light show, lattice works of lightning flashes to the left and sunset colors the like of which I’d never seen to the right. I couldn’t think of any place in the world I’d rather be, or anything else I’d rather be doing.
>
  I was having a wonderful time, but I kept asking myself, What’s this road doing out here? Why isn’t it on any of the maps?

  Finally the Russians wanted to go back. They explained that this was a secret military road, one used for the transportation of missiles. Of course it was flat and fast. Of course it wasn’t on the maps! We said good-bye. With some trepidation, we moved on toward Chita.

  The entire way there we encountered no one. We arrived in Chita near midnight, found a decent room, and collapsed into bed. At first Tabitha was too wound up, tired, and sore to sleep, but finally she dropped off. We had the best night’s sleep we’d had in days.

  The Hotel Siberia in Petrovsk Zabaykalskiy—yet another hotel in yet another town where nothing worked.

  The light fixtures didn’t work, nor did the elevators. We considered ourselves lucky to get a bathroom that worked, as out here lots didn’t. As usual, the tub and the sink were fed from a single faucet that swung between them, an economic installation. There were long dark corridors, unpainted, run-down, and seedy.

  If there hadn’t been somebody at the desk, I’d have thought this dump was an abandoned slum, the hotel from the graveyard, yet it had been built only eleven years before we’d arrived. I couldn’t figure out how the Russians did it, but we constantly ran into public buildings like this, almost new and transformed into an instant slum.

  After four or five drunks accosted us in the streets, we realized people all over town were drunk.

  The officer at the police station where we stored the bikes explained. “Two weeks ago the town ran out of vodka. Our boxcar came in today with our shipment, so everybody bought all he could and got drunk.”

  Back at the hotel, a ruddy-faced, jovial Russian in his seventies introduced himself as Nikolai. Normally he shut down the hotel’s boilers at ten o’clock, he said, but tonight he would leave them on till eleven so we could bathe. He drew us aside.

  “I was stationed with your army in the Great Patriotic War,” Nikolai said in a conspiratorial whisper. In contrast to the usual fractured English we encountered, his was fluent. “In Belgium. You know Hershey bars? Fords?” Clutching my hand, he glanced around furtively. “I’ve never told any of them. Keep it quiet. They’ll put me in a camp if I say good things about Americans.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said. “All that’s changed.”

  His face darkened and he put a finger to his lips. “It’s changed before.”

  With tears in his eyes, Nikolai told us stories of his wartime adventures with American troops, for whom he was filled with admiration. For forty years he had treasured these memories, but fearful of the concentration camps that might follow his saying that Americans were good, he had shared none of them with his countrymen.

  The next morning we asked if we could take his picture, but he refused, saying they might take it from us and use it against him in court.

  Banned by the Communists for decades, town markets had sprung up in many of the villages through which we passed.

  However, in Siberia there were still no roadside restaurants, no Howard Johnsons, Dairy Queens, or McDonald’s to stop in for a snack. Travelers carried their own food or did without. We bought bread from the bakeries, and in these emerging markets stocked up on vegetables and fruit. Often we found potatoes, onions, tomatoes, scallions, cucumbers, yogurt, raspberries, and a delicious fermented blueberry preserve.

  In contrast to the decrepit public buildings, we rode through villages that looked as if they’d stepped out of picture books. Every house was brightly painted and decorated with Victorian gingerbread, and each had its own well. Carved shutters and intricately designed latticework around the roofs showed how much their owners cared. Flowerbeds glowed in front, and huge vegetable gardens lay out back, many with greenhouses. Each house was unique and cheerful, and each strove to outshine its neighbors.

  Nearly all the houses had blue-and-white or green-and-white shutters with picturesque designs, as did the gates to the yards and cemeteries. Reflecting layers of Russian history, some graves were marked with a double cross, its top bar aslant, the symbol of the older religion; some were marked by the cross that stood for the later Russian Orthodox faith; others had the red star, emblem of Communism and atheism.

  Seeing these self-sufficient villages, I realized the Siberians were never going to starve. Russians might starve in Moscow, they might starve in Leningrad, but not here. These people had lived this way for hundreds of years without the Communists bringing them any food. After all, in none of these villages was there a single store. Except for the aid of an occasional telegraph office and train station, the villagers were completely self-sufficient.

  We stopped in a couple of villages to find out who these people were and what this was all about, because their houses were in such contrast to the grim cities, where everybody lived in big apartment buildings that were allowed to fall apart.

  The villagers always pressed vegetables on us. Occasionally they gave us meat, too, which always turned out to be as tough as a ten-year-old cow, which it probably was.

  Inside, these houses were clean, whitewashed, and neat. Not much furniture, but they all had a TV. There wasn’t much programming—I noticed Mexican soap operas and the news—but I wondered how they got a signal at all. Then I remembered that Russians were good with military satellite technology. Here was a country in which little except the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the telegraph system worked—and television! It suited their propaganda purposes, I supposed, to keep the people of one mind about whatever their bosses wanted them to be of one mind about.

  For seventy years the Communists had banned the Buriat Mongols’ annual festival, the great gathering of the clans that had been a glorious rite for centuries.

  These were the descendants of Genghis Khan, proud mountain people who reveled in this religious and nationalistic festival. This year they didn’t ask Moscow if they could put it on, they just did it. More and more Tabitha and I kept noting examples of the Communists losing their grip over their subjects.

  The opening ceremonies in Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Buriat Autonomous Republic, were held on a Saturday night. Four bonfires were lit at the corners of a huge field symbolizing the four corners of the earth and the four directions from which the clans had come. As a large crowd of Mongols watched, a trumpet was blown and another bonfire was lit at the field’s center.

  Drums banging, the clans from the traditional homelands marched in—clans from the east, west, north, and south, including the nation-state of Mongolia, each displaying its characteristic red, gold, green, and purple dress. Girls from the west skipped in and danced, then those from the south. Drums beat, flutes piped, dancers swirled in tights and tunics—none in Communist Party gray. Lit by bonfires, this went on till midnight, an hour past sunset.

  On Sunday came exhibitions and contests in archery, hammer throwing, wrestling, and weight lifting, as well as horse and trotter races, enough events to take up the entire day.

  A lottery was held for consumer goods such as refrigerators and washing machines. The climax of the festival was a thousand-ruble prize, or $160, for anyone who could ride an unbroken horse around a track. The officials cleared the field of spectators, grimly forcing the crowd behind fences. The first Mongol broncobuster stripped off his shirt and danced around the wild horse. The police drew their guns, for this beast might do anything to the rider or the crowd.

  This killer horse had been tied to a stake all day. He had become tangled in his ropes, but nobody dared untangle him, afraid of being kicked to death. Yet, the Mongol horse was in no mood to cooperate. Instead of giving us fireworks, the exhausted animal walked the shirtless rider around the track. The crowd sank back in disappointment, cheated out of a display of Mongol daring.

  Outside Ulan-Ude we toured a beautiful Buddhist temple and monastery, built in 1975 to replace one that had burned. In all the Soviet Union, this was the only surviving Buddhist temple.

  With its
exotic prayer wheels and drums, it made what was happening in the Soviet Union sink in yet deeper. The revival of Judaism in Birobidzhan, the blossoming of Islam in the Central Asian Republics, and the resurgence of Christianity everywhere along our path made it clear how far Communism as a faith had failed. Across the entire Soviet Union people were spiritually bereft and grasping for something to believe in, a faith to clasp. Desperate for a collective identity—something we all need—this was frequently either their religion or their ethnic group, and often the two fused together.

  Had the Communist Party developed a successful economic theory, one that produced true wealth, these drives back to ethnic roots would not exist. Create a true boom and everybody wants to join you.

  Back in the twenties, thirties, and forties, those who had immigrated to the States wanted to be Americans above all else. They insisted that their children learn English, the faster the better. It is no accident that by the nineties our immigrants are clinging to their roots and that the demand for bilingual education has exploded. Multiculturalism is a force in America as in the Soviet Union because our immigrants no longer feel it’s as easy to rise to the top. The decline in our currency and the stagnation of real wages is making being an American less alluring.

  A reverse example is Poznan, once the summer home of the Prussian kings but given to Poland after both World Wars. Under Communist rule no one in the city had claimed to be or admitted to being German. Now, however, to take advantage of the rise of German prosperity, 40 percent of these Poles can prove that they are Germans, we were told, and thus must be allowed into Germany.

  I began to believe that the concept of the giant nation-state, the great melting pot, as economically sound was diminishing across the world. The British Empire had collapsed, the Chinese were ignoring their central command, and the Russian empire was falling down around me. I wondered if the American republic, overburdened by the heavy machinery of its federal government and spiraling debt problems, was destined to lose some of its parts, too. As a single example that could be multiplied by the thousands, since 1932 the number of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats per American farmer has multiplied by sixteen times.