MAY 7, 2025 -Normally, Azerbaijan isn’t anywhere close to Falcon Heights, Minnesota, but this morning I encountered the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan (at one time part of Caucasian Albania[1]) at the geographic center of North America, a million miles from the southwestern shore of the Caspian Sea, where you’d ordinarily find the modern day Republic of Azerbaijan. It turned out to be a bizarre encounter—more, I’m sure, for the Azerbaijani couple in their mid-forties (I guessed) than for me.
It all started on my way to the Aldi grocery store about three-quarters of a mile from our house. The time was a bit after 8:30, and I was making a quick run to fetch a few food items before heading back up to the Red Cabin and Björnholm to resume my tree-planting operation over the next two days. As I moved into the left-turn lane at a traffic light on Larpenteur Avenue, I noticed a #61 bus (my old route) approaching from the opposite direction and bound for downtown Minneapolis. As I waited for other through traffic, I watched the bus pull up to the bus stop to take on a passenger.
Suddenly, a man dashed into my frame of view and toward the bus stop. He was a distinctive character—tall with a large frame, he wore jeans, and a tight-fitting, dark orange nylon shirt. His jet-black, closely cropped beard contrasted with his clean-shaven crown. A woman dressed in an abaya and hijab trailed him, running the best she could. I saw them cry out to the bus driver to stop—at this point no more than five feet from where he’d already stopped and was now rolling forward. For a reason we’ll never know, the driver wasn’t about to break his cadence for late-comers. Breathless but without any visible vexation, the couple accepted the driver’s decision. I saw them confer for a second or two, then start walking in the direction in which the bus would’ve taken them.
I was miffed at the driver for not having stopped. The racing couple weren’t half a block away; from my vantage point, the guy was close enough to have touched the bus door. I thought of three possibilities: 1. The driver honestly hadn’t seen the couple, though this scenario was improbable, given the couple’s proximity and shouts; 2. The driver had trained in Switzerland, where whoever snoozes loses; and 3. A combination of #2 and the driver not liking Muslims. I wanted to think that the driver—a rather beefy guy with a big beard—had his eyes trained on this left-side mirror after he’d picked up the other passenger and was focused on whatever traffic was speeding toward him from the rear as he attempted to proceed through the intersection.
Nevertheless, having re-enacted the Olympic 100m dash on numerous occasions back when I took the bus to and from work every day, I empathized with the couple and what their narrow miss now did to their schedule. After 8:45 a.m., I knew, the #61 bus runs less frequently—once every half hour. I suspected that the two would-be riders lived in some nearby apartments where a number of foreign graduate students live—a convenient location, given that the University of Minnesota School of Agriculture campus is less than a mile and a half west down Larpenteur. I thought perhaps I should offer them a ride.
Less than a minute later I raced through Aldi to grab the four items I needed. After squeezing the grocery bag onto the back floor of the car, I moved some of my gear around to open a spot on the back seat and cleared some loose items from the front passenger seat. In short order on my way back to the house (where I was dropping off a couple of things that Beth had wanted before I headed out of town), I saw the couple walking fast down the sidewalk west and on the south side of Larpenteur. Soon they’d be at the frightfully busy intersection of Larpenteur and Snelling, where they’d have to cross four lanes of through traffic plus turn lanes.
Since rush hour traffic had abated some, I was able to execute a wide U-turn through a break in the median on Larpenteur and pull up on the wide shoulder near the sidewalk just ahead of the couple. I turned on the flashers and lowered the passenger-side window.
“I saw you miss your bus!” I called out.
The couple immediately stepped over to the car and just as quickly established that between the two of them, they knew about three words of English: “very” and “thank you.” By sign-language and reducing my own English to that of a person who knows about nine words of it, I communicated that I’d seen them miss the bus and that I could give them a ride.
“Sank you, sank you, very sank you,” said the man. He and the woman, whom I presumed was his wife, were in such a hurry, they showed absolutely no hesitation in following my motions to get in the car.
As the man kept saying “Sank you, sank you,” I pointed west and said, “You go to University of Minnesota?”
“Yes, University of Minnesota!” he said.
“Good, good, good,” I said. “I’ll have you there in less than two minutes.”
“Sank you very much, sank you,” he said. I didn’t think he or his wife knew a word of what I’d said, but surely they knew that I was headed in the right direction, especially after I turned off Larpenteur and into the campus.
“Turn here, yes?” I said.
“Sank you, sank you.”
“Where are you from?” I asked. Clearly the woman’s attire revealed that they came from a Muslim country, but that didn’t narrow things down much. I knew by their features that they weren’t East Asian or African, but they didn’t look Arabic or Persian, either. I was puzzled.
They understood me, though. “Azerbaijan,” the man and the woman said simultaneously.
“Azerbaijan!” I said. “On the Caspian Sea!” I was eager to show that while they were far from home, they didn’t have to be strangers.
“Da, da. Yes, yes,” the man said with a laugh. “Caspian Sea!” He sounded genuinely pleased that I knew where his country of origin was located.
“Vy govorite po-russki?” I said for what I’d learned over 40 years ago meant, ‘Do you speak Russian?’
“Ha! Da, Russki!” The man was overjoyed to discover that his random driver knew his native tongue, but I soon disappointed him by revealing my entire Russian vocabulary of five elementary words. He then said he spoke Turkish, but if he’d understood English or I, much Russian, I could’ve guaranteed him that I didn’t know a lick of Turkish.
I was struck, however, by the coincidence that sitting beside me was a man from the Caucuses. Just this morning I’d been reading about the diplomatic machinations preceding the Paris conference of 1856 after the bloody Crimean War and how the British, French, Austrians and representatives of the Porte (the Turks) grappled with security issues (and other interests) around the Black Sea—including the (ungovernable) peoples of the Caucuses.
As it turned out, however, the Azerbaijanis in my car were not headed for the University of Minnesota. A bit late in the game, the man showed me his phone screen. It was replete with place names . . . in Cyrillic. To read them, however, I had to pull over next to a large new building. Holding the phone, I made out the couple’s intended destination: “International Institute of Minnesota.” I’d heard of it and knew that it was somewhere in the vicinity but not on the University campus and just outside the State Fairgrounds, which are adjacent to the campus. I saw a gentleman approaching the building and from the car, shouted, “Excuse me!”
A professor or grad student—it was hard to tell—but he was eager to assist us; a perfect emissary for the “good side” of our country. “You’re close,” he said with a smile. “Just wind your way through the fairgrounds. It’s on Como Avenue just opposite the Miracle of Life building, if you know where that is.”
I did. I thanked him for helping us, and so did the Azerbaijanis. “Sank you, sank you very sank you!” they said.
Two minutes later we pulled up to the main entrance of the International Institute. I realized that the couple’s probable purpose there was an English class. During the ride, the man had mentioned “green card.” I don’t know if he had one or if a green card was strictly aspirational. For that matter, given the current rage of xenophobia that is ascendant in America, I wasn’t sure if obtaining a green card was even possible anymore.
Other cars were pulling into the parking lot of the Institute too, and I observed hurrying toward the entrance, several people in attire common in other lands. I was grateful to have helped—in however small a way—people from a far off world become part of the genius of America; part of the diverse fabric of an extraordinary society—if it survives the current introverted setback.
If I had been correct—that the Azerbaijanis were headed for an English class and the start time was 9:00—they’d made it just in time. They showered me with more “Sank yous” before rushing off and disappearing into the building.
As I drove away, I savored this brief, haphazard encounter. It reminded me of the many such contacts I’d enjoyed during my Grand Odyssey in 1981. In every country I visited, people had been extraordinarily generous in their kindness toward me and in their assistance in helping me along, whether it was finding the train station, ordering a meal, interpreting a sign, telling their stories or simply gaining insight into an unfamiliar culture. I knew that in the vast majority of cases, I’d never have a chance to repay people’s kindness and generosity. I vowed, however, that whenever I encountered a stranger visiting my country; anyone who was lost or searching for a particular place or in need of assistance in “making it to the station in time,” I would be sure to step out of my lane, my routine, my work at hand and extend the same good will that so very many people had shown me and with no expectation of recompense. At the age of 26, I realized that that was what made the world a better place; not money, not things, not stuff, but simply kind and generous treatment of people, and that the least I could do was practice a bit of spontaneous outreach whenever the opportunity to do so presented itself.
As much as the Azerbaijanis said “Sank you,” this morning, it was I who was just as touched and enriched by their kindness and generosity of spirit.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1]Having nothing to do with the Balkan Albania.
