MAY 9, 2022 – As previously noted, for nine of my 14 days aboard the 18-carriage Trans-Siberian train, I was the sole Westerner aboard, which fact conferred upon me celebrity status, especially given that I was from the leading nation of the West. My unique position allowed me to optimize my time and interactions with Russians.
But equally rewarding was the time I spent with a dozen fellow Westerners during the first five days of journey . As I wrote in my letter home, “My encounters with this ‘delightful dozen’ reminded me of my days back in NZ and Australia. Down there I’d met many travelers with months of hard-core experience (mostly in India and SE Asia). I really admired and respected them, hoping that I too could gain the same sort of experience. Now I was on the other end of the seesaw: these people [aboard the train] were just starting out (no one had been away more than two weeks) while I’d been ‘on the road’ for nearly eight months. I tried to supply a few helpful answers to their many intelligent questions. It was an opportunity to ‘take inventory’ of some of my lessons.
One of ‘the delightful dozen’ aboard the train—Lisa, from France—was having second thoughts about her odyssey. As I wrote in my letter home, “Lisa, Françoise’s friend, had difficulty with English and lacked the self-confidence displayed by Françoise, but though she was very quiet, she had a great deal to offer. At any rate, while Doug [the Texan], Françoise, and Reinhold [the German] were discussing their respective travel plans, I noticed that Lisa, sitting beside me, was crying. I asked what the problem was.
“‘Nothing,’ she said, through tear-flooded eyes.
“‘But I know something’s bothering you,’ I answered, ‘and I’d like to help.’
“‘It’s so hard,’ she finally opened. ‘All the problems of traveling. I don’t think I’m strong enough for it.’ (She and François had left France only 10 days before and planned to be away for a year (SE Asia and India)). With that I dived into the troubled waters and pulled Lisa to an island of encouragement, positive thinking and humor. I drew heavily from my own experiences, good and bad, and assured Lisa that with the proper attitude, she could conquer all.”
What the letter didn’t disclose was how Lisa’s emotional state had triggered memories of my own abject fear. I imagined her fighting for her life aboard a leaky lifeboat adrift upon wind-whipped seas of the unknown. Seared in my memory were the words of that flight attendant on the crowded 747 from Perth to London with the intermediate stop in Bombay (Mumbai), who, in response to my question as the plane sat on the Indian tarmac, “When are we getting off the plane?” answered, “Oh, are you the one getting off here?” Also etched into my brain was the scene outside the Bombay terminal where I was besieged by a pack of impoverished children, their aggressive hands violating my pockets in search of loose rupees; and later, my reaction upon learning that I couldn’t catch a flight out of India for weeks to come. Those shocks and others during my first two days in India had led me to fear that I’d never see home again; that I’d made a horribly naïve, life-threatening decision to gallivant around the world. And then there was the time on Svolvær in the Lofoten Islands of Norway, when hiking in the rain, I found myself “rim-rocked”(unable to ascend or descend) on a twisting, skinny, and slippery trail along the edge of an abyss just centimeters away from the sides of my boots. In holy terror I nearly puked when I realized that the tiniest misstep would hurl me into the giant maw of eternity. Amid the romance and wonderful excitement of travel were the risks of the unknown and unknowable.
If the other travelers kept their fears to themselves, there was Lisa, a fellow explorer who confessed openly her “rational anxiety.” I wanted nothing more than for her to know that I understood “rational anxiety” and that if I could overcome it, so could she.
My other interactions with the “delightful dozen” were wonderful. Those people were joyful, savvy, and intelligent company.
But there occurred a highly unusual and conspicuous incident involving two of us, along with an interloper—one “Karl,” a member of a British-American tour group aboard the train from Moscow to Irkutsk; an incident that in retrospect, was as much a harbinger of America’s current polarization as it was in the moment, a giant embarrassment. Stay tuned. (Cont.)
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
