Falling Off the Map

PSKOV, Russia – I take my seat on the express bus to Moscow and already I'm nervous. My pre-assigned seat is next to a middle-aged man with several boils on his cheek (suspicious) who is wearing a long, gray overcoat despite already having taken his seat. From my high school days in the aftermath of the Columbine school shooting, I associate long coats with terrorists, and considering I'm about to enter Vladimir Putin's Russia alone, I don't need any suspicious seat mates.

The bus takes a circuitous route out of Vilnius, the prosperous capital of Lithuania: one last chance to admire the comfortable surrounds I am leaving. Here I made friends easily, and slept first in a comfortable country estate and then a cozy urban hostel. Now I must embark on the most uncertain part of my journey. Russia dwarfs the Eastern European countries where my journey to China begins. It sprawls around a globe, refusing to be taken in by just one glance, as if the territory of a much smaller country leaked out of the sides to the far eastern and western periphery of the globe. One man can't be found in all that space.

As the bus reaches the outskirts of the developed world, I know that if something goes wrong on this trip, there isn't a familiar face for eight thousand miles. I don't have a cell phone or the address of the American embassy. And I can't be comforted by the fact that I'm traveling somewhere particularly safe. Russia's international reputation is plunging, with plutonium assassinations and fuel lines shut-off at the slightest criticism of the Kremlin. Gangsters and oligarchs run amok and public services are extremely corrupt. I'm not sure if these things are true, but this is the Russia I have heard about in America, from friends and acquaintances, from people I ran into over the past few days in Eastern Europe, and from newspapers and magazines. This is all I have.

Tickets and passports are checked as we near the Latvian border. The vast majority of people on the bus are Russian, a few are Lithuanian, and there is exactly one non-Slav – me. When we arrive, my passport is passed around for special examination among the half-dozen assembled police and security forces outside the bus, I don't believe for security reasons. Rather it seems the young guards want a glimpse at a Chinese visa and the gold lettering Americans use on the front of their passports. Each time the small book is passed to another eager set of hands I imagine it slipping into their owner's pockets, never coming out. Somehow it makes it back to me, and I stuff it deep into my jeans.

We stop again sometime after dark. The men get out and smoke cigarettes. I urinate on the concrete wall of a shuttered convenience store. Just before the rest area I saw a sign for the border: 60 kilometers. Under an hour. There won't be another chance to leave. My iPod is on the bus, so is my passport. My bladder is empty. I retake my seat next to the man with the long overcoat.

I miss the signs that announce our exit from the European Union: they are obscured by the trucks. The line of trucks starts five miles before we exit Latvia. Commercial traffic must only be allowed to cross at certain hours, so these carriers of plastics and cheeses and consumer goods wait on the right side of the road for a few hours, with sleeping drivers, waiting for the checkpoint to open in the morning. The Latvian border guard stamps directly underneath my Latvian entry stamp; he must be used to foreign tourists using his country as a shortcut on the way to somewhere else. He is neat in his stamping.

The frontier is a disappointment. I am expecting rows and rows of razor wire, or perhaps high fences alternating with moats filled with acid. Instead it is just more "Latvia" – a field. Parked on the side of the road are a military truck or two, but these wouldn't stop the adjacent village from invading, let alone the forces of the European Union.

My nerves kick in again as I see the outpost come into view. It's a full-on Soviet establishment: bright fluorescent lights, slabs of concrete and depressing Modernist flourishes thrown together at the worst possible angles. Imagine the Jetsons as designed by a fax machine working in the mail room of a middling 1968 Detroit paper company. I don't know what that means: it looked ugly and imposing in the way Russian things built in the last half-century do. Across the top, in large, evenly spaced letters reads, "Russian Federation." That would be intimidating, but it actually says something much worse:

Росси́йская Федера́ция

The Cyrillic alphabet is a strange and frightening beast.

Now if I could separate into halves, the person experiencing this event a complete neutral, rational observer - the Vulcan - would point out that procedures at this border checkpoint are nearly identical to those at the Canadian checkpoint between Albany and Montreal, which I used to cross while riding on Greyhound Buses when I was in high school, going to visit friends at McGill University. We filed off the bus– in silence – and into the station. We passed through two queues. At each my passport was examined and at the second, it was also stamped. No one asked me any questions; in fact, no one said anything. I kept waiting for something to happen to break the tension, but nothing did.

Through immigration, I converted $50 into rubles and went back on the bus. By now it was almost midnight and there had been no dinner stop, so we pulled into a small store a few hundred meters into Russian space. The parking lot was filled with trucks waiting for morning and Latvia. I could see why we didn't stop before: gas and food is much cheaper in Russia. The store was overly lit and hours of being on edge left me with a headache and feeling drained, so I wandered the narrow aisles of the store in a dazed shuffle. I crossed the threshold, I went over the horizon.

After a few minutes inside the store, I settled on a pack of Skittles, a piece of sausage and a Gin and Tonic in a can. Two months ago in a Washington bar, I spoke with an English woman about her trip through Russia. She and her girlfriends just drank these mixers as they cruised around Moscow. As my coach headed deeper into the Russian night, I tried to think such comforting thoughts. But instead I could only nervously sip my slightly alcoholic beverage, which brought me toward restless dreams of me as a tiny green blip, fading from a view on a gigantic radar screen.