Investment Biker Read online

  There are two major forces at work as the world moves into the twenty-first century, globalism and tribal control. How these opposing forces resolve their contradictions will be one of the new century’s great historical dramas.

  The truth is, people need the psychic glue of deeply held beliefs to bind them to others. That we all drink Coca-Cola and eat McDonald’s hamburgers is not good enough.

  We have a powerful need for a strong local identity, one we can comprehend and control, something close to home that we think we can reach out and touch. We resent its being destroyed by globalization and gigantism.

  We met our first political protestors, two hunger strikers, camping out in the main park in Irkutsk. They sat on a bench surrounded by posters that detailed their stories.

  One had lost her job at a drama institute. The other person was a dedicated human-rights advocate trying to obtain the release of an electrician jailed for accusing his boss of embezzlement. He had been in the park for six days.

  That both were being ignored by the authorities was a major step forward for the people. A year before they would have been arrested the first day they had shown up.

  …

  We approached the town of Zima on a dirt road made slippery by a slick coating of thin, watery mud. The rain was wearing us both down.

  Although we drove cautiously, I took a spill. I wasn’t hurt, but one of my saddlebags was ruined and much of my gear was spread behind me along the muddy road.

  I gathered up my mud-streaked maps, shirts, toothbrush, and socks. Muttering to myself, I spent a couple of hours scrubbing mud out of them in the bathroom of the sports complex where we were staying. Many cities in China and Siberia had one such center where all athletic contests were held. There were always locker rooms and guest rooms for visiting teams.

  We learned that Zima means “cold.” I couldn’t imagine what this town in the middle of Siberia called “cold” must be like in the winter.

  Here we met Ramis Yukus, a visiting Lithuanian about twenty-five years old, and his first cousin.

  Ramis’s uncle had been exiled to Siberia in 1948 by Stalin when he had refused to turn his farm into a cooperative. Three years after the uncle had arrived, while working as a woodcutter here in the Lithuanian community, a tree had fallen on him and killed him. He had been buried in a local cemetery for thirty-nine years.

  For a long time Ramis’s parents had talked about the tragedy of his uncle’s being buried so far from home. Ramis, finally, had been told by his mother, “Go to Zima and get my brother.”

  So, a little bewildered by the strangeness of Siberia, Ramis and his cousin had traveled thousands of miles with a small copper-covered, lead-lined locker to find his uncle’s grave and bring the bones back to Lithuania for his mother.

  They had found the grave in a cemetery near a settlement of Lithuanians, marked by his name, the single word Randis on a large traditional cross. The ancient grave-keeper said he had known the uncle and verified that this indeed was his grave.

  The youths’ initial excitement had turned to frustration on encountering the Soviet bureaucracy. No local official wanted to give them permission to remove the remains. Each had thrown up objections, handing them more forms to fill out, citing further permissions needed before his department would issue a permit.

  Ramis had visions of returning to Lithuania empty-handed, disappointing his mother. For more than a week the two had trudged from one government office to another in this small town, documenting who they were, who was buried in their uncle’s grave, that the body was indeed that of a relative, and that their uncle had not died of a disease too frightful to unearth.

  Finally, however, Ramis had everything he needed. The two young men were excited and apprehensive at the prospect of opening up a thirty-nine-year-old grave.

  As they dug, it began to rain. At the bottom of the grave the shovel struck old wood. The remnants of a pine box and a suit of clothes were brought into the light of this sodden day. They tossed the bones out one by one and put them in the lead-lined box for their uncle’s long ride home.

  Before they left, they used a rusty nail to scratch onto the huge, sagging cross in Lithuanian, “Gone home.”

  In most towns there was a gas station that sold the only two qualities of gas available in the Soviet Union, 74 and 93 octane. Most drivers, looking to save a few kopecks, changed the compression on their cars to burn 74, although over time this ruined their engines. Gasoline cost us the equivalent of six cents a liter, or twenty-five cents a gallon at the official ruble-dollar rate. Of course, at the black-market rate it was half that—twelve cents a gallon.

  In Siberia we always went to gas stations for gas. When they didn’t have 93 octane, we went to the police station and asked for it. They either had it on hand or could get it from the military.

  At one gas station, Olga, the lady attendant, said in broken English, “Look, I only can sell ninety-three to police or ambulance drivers.”

  “Yes, but we have to have ninety-three,” I said, pointing at the seventy-four sign and crossing my two index fingers. In Russia, this all-purpose gesture means nyet—“I can’t do it,” “No way,” or “Broken.” I went on to lay my usual rap on her in sign language and simple English, using the map of the world to show our journey. Hoping she could follow me, I said we had legitimate visas and that we had to have the right gas for these bikes or stay here forever.

  Olga was firm. “I tell you, it is law. I no give good gas to nobody but police and ambulance drivers.”

  “I know we’re an inconvenience,” I said, “but our bikes must have ninety-three octane. By the way, do you like Western cigarettes? We don’t need this carton of Marlboros.”

  Now Olga was adamant. “Don’t you listen?” she shouted, drawing herself up to her full formidable height. “Don’t you hear? I tell you two times already. I no give good gas to nobody except police, ambulance drivers, and American travelers driving motorcycles!”

  More bad stretches of road—little pavement, of course, mostly loose gravel, deep ruts, and potholes. We started off fresh each day, thrilling to the scenery and life in the remote villages through which we passed, but by the end of an eight- or ten-hour day our shoulders ached, our legs were cramped, and we longed for a hot shower. No, our butts weren’t sore, a question I’ve been asked a thousand times. That may happen on horses, but rarely on a motorcycle, no matter how long the trip or rough the road’s surface.

  It was a constant struggle to stay focused, although mercifully here the weather was dry. We counted every mile on the speedometer and hoped the end of the bad road was near. When we got to good patches—dry packed dirt—it was a joy to speed up to thirty miles an hour. Each mile gave us a sense of accomplishment, although it also reminded us of how long it had been since the last one had ticked over, how slowly we were going.

  Despite the hardships, there was no other place that summer I wanted to be. While we pushed ourselves on travel days to make all the time we could, in between we’d rest and absorb our new surroundings, spending days poking around, visiting, and exploring. This was travel the way it was done in the centuries before the car, the airplane, and the steamship. I loved the leisurely pace and the sense of personal mobility, as if we were ambling around the world on a horse, seeing, hearing, and smelling everything firsthand.

  I reveled in the wind in my face and the unobstructed view of fields, mountains, and streams, the beauty of which was often staggering. The honeyed perfume of flowers would be followed by the excited buzz of bees. When we stopped we heard the warm wind sigh through the trees. It was fun to be out where no one from back home had ever been, meeting villagers who had never before met foreigners and were delighted to see us. I loved their rough faces, harsh like the Siberian weather, but also untainted by too much civilization.

  We never knew who and what adventure lay right over the hill. It was a thrill to get a close view of what the world was like, to see for myself what was going on globally.
To my mind, we were like Europeans meeting the natives of North America hundreds of years ago. As happened to the Americas, Siberia would become open, would be explored and tamed. We were the precursors of many more like ourselves who would one day arrive.

  Wherever we stopped in the wilderness, in the much vaunted tayga, we were attacked by trillions of black flies. For some reason they didn’t bother us as we drove, but once we stopped, they made that rest stop a torment. Where they came from I never could figure out. What did they do all day when we weren’t there? All year?

  In the towns, restaurants were often covered with flies. Once we saw a manager doing her accounts, oblivious to the dozens of flies on her dress and her books. No Siberian had ever seen a fly swatter. Some entrepreneur could make millions producing them.

  One morning, we pulled over for a break. While I dodged flies, Tabitha explored the lush green field near the road. She called out excitedly, holding up a tangle of green. I went to her.

  She was standing in a field of green peas that back in the South we called sweet peas. Well, Tabitha loved raw peas, so we pulled up a bunch and sat by the road. We swatted black flies and shelled and ate a mess of them.

  I was worried about our eating so many raw, green vegetables, that we’d get sick the way you can after eating green apples, but the peas were delicious and went down well. In other parts of the world, China, for example, neither we nor the Chinese would dare eat anything straight from the field because they used human excrement as fertilizer. Nobody in China, not even the Chinese, would drink untreated water. But in Siberia there were so few people that there was little pollution of vegetables or the water.

  Afterward, despite the flies, we were so contentedly full that we took a nap. The field of peas was out in the middle of nowhere, far between towns, a field gone wild. We filled a plastic bag and took several bunches.

  Part of our excitement in finding the peas stemmed from our experience of the Russian diet, which appalled us. For breakfast they ate every artery-clogging, cholesterol-filled food they could find: a hard-boiled egg or two, a piece of bread covered by a layer of butter as thick as the slice itself, and a glass of smitanya, maybe twelve ounces of the stuff, sour cream with the consistency of yogurt. Their other meals were as bad—fatty meat, more bread and butter, fried potatoes, and few vegetables, followed by sweets and cakes.

  This diet, the general lack of exercise, smoking, and rampant alcoholism combined to shorten lives. The life span of Russian men averaged only sixty-four years. In the United States the average was seventy-two years, and in Japan, an even more impressive seventy-five years.

  We found more green peas along the road and continued to eat our fill, along with the vegetables and fruit we had bought in town markets.

  Coming into Kansk at about ten-thirty we saw a light show of lightning on one side of the road and a glorious sunset on the other, pinks and yellows like I’d never seen. Then the first end-to-end double rainbow of my life appeared, and I kept staring at it in disbelief.

  The road here was another disaster, dry but with lots of loose gravel. It took us ten hours to drive 130 miles. Both of us fell several times. We were going so slowly that these falls weren’t dangerous, just frustrating. I tried to take the spills in stride—after all, I’d never expected anybody to pave our way around the world—but Tabitha was disheartened by the endless bad roads. We had been in Siberia several weeks and had covered three thousand miles, yet we had another three thousand or four thousand miles of doubtless the same bad roads to go. We were discovering the hard way how large indeed was the world’s largest country.

  We approached Krasnoyarsk, a large industrial city closed to foreigners.

  Its population of nearly a million people made it one of Siberia’s largest cities and the capital of the huge region that stretched from central Siberia to the Arctic coast. I understood that it was a center of the Soviet defense industry, and that it produced plutonium. It was here in 1989 that the Soviet government had admitted it had a missile-tracking radar station, in violation of the ABM (antiballistic missile) treaty and which it promised to dismantle. Rumor had it that the Russians were building the world’s largest underground nuclear-waste dump near the city, with part of it to reach under the important Yenisey River. This seemed stupid to me, but I didn’t put it past a government that had destroyed the Aral Sea.

  All this military activity, according to a policeman we asked about the roads, meant we had to go around Krasnoyarsk. Our map showed that the road in and out of the city was good, whereas the northern route around the city was, as usual, unmarked, which meant impossible roads—and an extra two days and three hundred miles at that.

  I wondered who would stop us if we disobeyed our permits. So far the soldiers with guns on every bridge only stared in disbelief as we passed. We had been stopped only once in three thousand miles.

  “Well, we certainly can’t stay in a hotel there,” said Tabitha.

  I agreed. At night, when we would park our bikes at the police station, we only sometimes had to show our visas, but we always had to show them to the suspicious hotel management.

  “We’ll just drive through,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, perking up at the idea of bypassing all the bad roads. “We’ll stay at a room on the other side. For a good road, I’ll even camp out.”

  I nodded. “No accidents. I don’t want the KGB down on us because we’re not where we’re supposed to be.”

  “No accidents,” she echoed with a knowing smile.

  So we set off on a beautiful paved road toward the closed city of Krasnoyarsk. Shortly, we approached a bridge that was heavily guarded by Russian soldiers. They made me nervous, but I stared straight across my handlebars and pretended I belonged here. Both of us kept our speed steady. To our relief they only watched us go by.

  A second bridge came up, again guarded by a patrol of gun-toting soldiers. Again we stared straight ahead and didn’t slacken our speed. I felt their eyes raking us.

  We drew abreast of them. No one shouted. We passed them. No shots were fired in the air. I didn’t dare look back. We’d made it!

  A few minutes later we were in downtown Krasnoyarsk: grim broad streets, seedy modern buildings, and scores of people fishing below the big main bridge.

  Then it hit me. The KGB was in Moscow telling them what to do in Krasnoyarsk, but out here nobody was listening! This country was disintegrating around us.

  At Kemerovo, where the coal miners had gone on strike in 1989, we met the head of the union and some miners.

  This was the union that had stunned the USSR with its first strike in decades. Militant, they told us they supported Yeltsin and that they wanted to change the government. They knew they would have to strike to do it. Then we went to see Oleg Glazunova, the head of a new independent newspaper, which was being threatened with closure. An employee translated our conversation.

  While we were there, in walked an army major, quickly followed by Colonel Solovyov, both from Novosibirsk and intent on getting the paper to be less antimilitary. Colonel Solovyov’s message to Oleg was that if the paper didn’t stop saying rude things about the army, next week there was likely to be a severe paper shortage.

  Over a picture of tanks coming back from Hungary, the newspaper had asked, “Why are the military sending tanks here, a town that doesn’t have room for them? We think it’s to suppress the coal miners. We think they’re building up the army for the time they can crack down on us.”

  Oleg pointed out the caption to the colonel, who replied, “No, no, that’s not the reason. We learned that lesson in Tbilisi. In the future the army will stay neutral. We’re bringing in troops and tanks because we’ve been thrown out of Europe and this is the only place they can put us.”

  I was amazed that their discussion was this rational and that we were allowed to hear it. That it was being held at all was progress, because not too many months before, the KGB would have come over and said, “Close the damn paper,”
or they would have shot Oleg.

  However, the miners supported its publication. If the army got too heavy-handed the miners would go on strike. The Soviet Union was one of the world’s largest coal-producing countries. All their steel mills, generators, and trains ran on coal. The apartment buildings of the party members in Moscow, not to speak of everybody else, were heated with Siberian coal. Despite the nation’s gigantic oil production, coal was what kept Soviet heavy industry going. All hell would pay if the army blundered into shutting down the Siberian coal mines.

  I wondered if the Soviet workers had wised up about their masters. It seemed such a good deal for the workers that no price ever changed. What worker wanted prices to go up?

  The Communists had a sweet racket.

  To begin with, they had the world’s largest country, 8,650,000 square miles, a sixth of the world’s land area and almost as large as the entire North American continent. While difficult to exploit—Siberia hadn’t yet been properly surveyed—Russia was also the world’s richest country in energy resources and minerals. The Soviets probably had at least a quarter of the world’s oil deposits, 40 percent of its iron ore, and a third of its phosphates. Even today no one knows the full extent of the nation’s wealth. Pushing hard, the Soviets had come to produce more steel than Japan, more fertilizers than the United States, and more oil than Saudi Arabia. This fervid lunge for producing more and more, however, meant that quality, environmental concerns, and efficient production had been ignored.

  If Russia produced a lot, the theory went, and kept the price of bread and rent and cigarettes and vodka low, then it would never have to raise wages. The theory was interesting: If the price of gas for the tractors never went up, surely, then, the price of wheat and thus bread never had to go up.