My 1990 travel story Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace, first published in House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad edited by Madelon Sprengnether, C.W. Truesdale, was picked up by Black Dog & Leventhal (Workman) in 2001. See my blogpost, Bill Truesdale for the backstory.
Writing the Rails: Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers edited by Edward C. Goodman. Alas, the book was remaindered soon after it was released, right before 9/11. I never did get to do an author reading or book signing at Barnes & Noble.
Here's a link to my 1991 post. I do not have an electronic facsimile of my story. Only way to get it is to scan pages, but I've no OCR software. I may scan pages direct. —MH, 2014 Well, it took me six years to get around to it, but the OCR of this text is now at the bottom of this post. It wasn't easy but I managed. I actually had to buy a copy of the book on eBay. Now to see if this text is the same as in House on Via Gombito. It should be as it's a direct reprint. Still missing is the original email that led to the first long draft, and various permutations before the annotated text settled into its present position. —MH 2020.
WRITING THE RAILS
Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers
Edited by Edward C. Goodman
Black Dog & Leventhal; WORKMAN Publ.
Rich and inviting, this collection of 101 train travel stories, both fact and fiction, by renowned writers from around the world and throughout history, is a feast for the armchair vagabond. The stories, essays, historic accounts, poetry, songs and other pieces that comprise this impressive anthology have been carefully selected from the widest range of sources to reflect the glories of travel by rail, from the Orient Express to the New York City subway. So many of the world's great writers have celebrated train travel, and here they are in one collection-Mary McCarthy on the Italian railways; Paul Theroux on the old Patagonia Express; Lewis Carroll from Through the Looking Glass; F. Scott Fitzgerald from Tender Is the Night; Ian Fleming, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Rudyard Kipling-by turns funny, exciting and moving, and a joy to read throughout. Whether your true love is travel, great literature or trains, you'll get lost in this eclectic and exotic compilation that extends to all parts of the globe and deep into the imaginations of our finest writers.
Note bene: I have never had so much trouble scanning an article. I had to buy a copy of the book online from eBay as I didn't have a copy. I don't have the original email draft, or even the revised text (which was MUCH longer) that eventually became this article. The OCR software scans fine, but it can't recognize the text. I am determined.... Let's just say there were several workarounds.
NIGHT TRAIN TO MOSCOW: WAGING PEACE
from The House on Via Gombito: Writing by American Women Abroad
Maureen Hurley
California writer, poet and photo-journalist Maureen Hurley has served as Director of Poetry Across Frontiers: Sonoma Heritage in Santa Rosa, a student poetry and art exchange program with the Ukranian town of Cherkassy, She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including seven California Arts Council grants.
"Though this land is not my own I will not forget it."
—Anna Akhmatova
We ride across the limitless snowbound Russian steppes by train in Car #17 to Moscow from Cherkassy. Once reserved for high-ranking Communist officials, the car with its russet wooden paneling reveals an earlier era. In fact, one still can't officially buy tickets for this well-appointed carriage at the train station. We get them through a friend. Connections mean everything in the USSR: in a country of perennial shortages, anything is available for a price. Out of the grimy window blanketed with coal soot, a monotonous landscape rhythmically repeats itself. My partner, Oleg Atbashian, says, "Siberia is like this; only it goes on forever."
We are leaving the Ukraine, where few villages have survived the many wars. Instead, industrial high-rises now punctuate the landscape, holding the low cloud ceiling aloft. Battered about for eighteen hours by train, we see that it could be any city—the curious sensation of déjà vu, and of arriving without ever having left. In frozen fields, haystacks hibernate like slumbering mastodons under a coat of snow. Poet Nazim Hikmet was right: No European hills or chateaux skirt the rivers here. There is nothing lovelier than birch trees in winter. Birch trees are as Russian as vodka. We eat small dark Ukrainian cherries steeped in liquor, and I hum "Moscow Nights," but not much is left in the way of onion domes to inspire me. Not much is left of the Oriental architecture of the Tartars, the Golden Hordes that once taxed the Slavs of the steppes into submission. In the morning, the dezhurnia brings us sweet amber tea in delicate lead crystal glasses confined in flowery brass holders.
I visited the USSR twice; during August 1989, and again the following December and January to set up a poetry and art exchange. I met with artists, writers, and publishers in Moscow, Leningrad, and Cherkassy, a Ukrainian town near Kiev. Armed with a crazy dream and a Macintosh computer, printer, and modem to revolutionize the cultural exchange with Cherkassy, the sister city of Santa Rosa, California, I met poets and artists everywhere: in cafes, video bars, and homes. Impromptu gatherings formed on street corners and trolleybus stops. We read poems, shared art, sang, made toasts, and talked of everything under the sun until late into the night. Sleep was often forsaken as we demystified the myths. Summer was sultry—lingering sunsets followed by incredibly long twilights, the white nights that lasted until dawn. Long walks along the Dnieper River, a wide expanse that moves without hurry through the drowned valley.
At home in California's wine country, people doubted my sanity when I made a return visit to the USSR in the dead of winter. Winter solstice. Then the dark that stretched past forever, a hungry tiger following us. Spectacular dawns and sunsets followed in rapid succession, and the long curtain of night beating against window panes announced its Arctic origins.To understand another culture, we must forsake fair-weather travel; we must see it even in winter. I came to the Soviet Union by accident, but I'm not an accidental tourist. As a writer, the world is my teacher, my inspiration. Stripping away acculturation, like so many layers of clothing, we discover we are alike in the flesh, after all.
"We Americans and Soviets are sentenced to understand one another," someone said. It was easy to begin. I was impressed with the openness and generosity of these people—most of whom had never met an American. I was part of a home-stay program, living with Soviet families in small crowded flats where I was treated like a long-lost relative—in a country where suspicion and distrust are inbred after generations of government terror, and repression is as common as the borsht we ate three times a day. It was not always easy. Misunderstandings arose—and required careful translation even from English to English. From this, I learned what "detente" really meant. Distrust sometimes went to funny extremes. At a birthday party, Oleg's grandmother thought I was a spy, but when—after politely parroting chut-chut too many times—I nearly slid under the table, she decided I was all right. Chut-chut is not a national toast as I first thought (since everyone was saying it)—it means "a little more!"
Glasnost, which literally means "open door," has done much to tear down the walls of misunderstanding on both sides of the American/Soviet power equation. Like many, I too was a product of the Period of Stagnation, raised in the ignorance and misinformation of our McCarthy era, and of the Stalin/Breshnev periods in the Soviet Union. Another reason I went to the USSR was to banish ghosts. When I was a child, my best friend's mother, a Russian translator for the United Nations, blacklisted during the Red purges, took a drink for solace, and died, branded by fire. Coming home from school, we were moths circling the blazing house. An accident, they said—blaming a crossed wire in the dryer. But our political climate killed her—surely as if they'd set the fire themselves. . . . Because of glasnost, I was able to move in relative freedom around the country and discover what Citizen Diplomacy, a natural grass-roots evolution based on personal contact, friendship, and sharing—is all about.When we shared the stories about our fears during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Bay of Pigs—the stories were identical, only our nationalities were different. The Russians have only one word, mir, for both world and peace.
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