Episode 8: Planes, Trains, Automobiles
The first car I ever drove was a Datsun station wagon that belonged to my mother. My parents had just purchased it, used but in great condition, and they were reluctant to let me drive it, but had relented and allowed me to drive it when it wasn’t needed by either of them. It only took a couple of weeks for me to wreck that station wagon by running a Stop sign three blocks from our house. I was speeding a bit, doing maybe 35 mph in our 25mph residential neighborhood. The Impala driving the cross street was speeding quite a bit and hit me broadside as I drove into the intersection, shattering the driver’s side window and putting a huge dent in the back driver’s side door.
I had been on my way to pick up a friend to go to a bar in Stateline, Idaho for an evening of drinking and dancing. We were both sixteen. Hear me out. The drinking age in Washington, where we lived at the time, was twenty one, but in Idaho it was nineteen, so we high school juniors and seniors often drove the 30 miles to the little town of Stateline perched right on the border of Washington and Idaho, where all the bars that didn’t bother carding high school students were clumped together in a little cluster. This all made perfect sense to us at the time, because we were, you know, sixteen. When on the rare occasion we were asked for ID, our fake ones did the trick. I was the proud owner of an old driver’s license that proclaimed me to be Marcella Brown, aged 23. The picture looked nothing like me, but that never seemed to matter. If I didn’t have my fake ID on me, I could always resort to putting on a Russian accent and claiming to be an exchange student attending one of the colleges in the area. The fact that we were in the middle of the Cold War with Russia, so there could be no such exchange programs never came up.
In any case, the collision with the Impala put an end to my driving for a while. I had not been wearing a seatbelt (no laws about that at the time), and the impact of the crash spun the Datsun around and smashed me against the inside of the driver’s side door, which opened, and I ended up thrown from the driver’s seat onto the lawn of the house on the opposite side of the street. Somehow, the only injuries I sustained were some bruises along the left side of my body, and a small piece of glass from the shattered window embedded in my forehead. The paramedic who examined me at the scene picked it out with a pair of tweezers. I still have the tiny scar left by that piece of glass. I didn’t make it to the bar for drinking or dancing, and I pretty much refused t drive again for the next six months or so. Not that there was anything to drive. Mom’s Datsun was destroyed, and she stopped driving at that point, too, allowing her driver’s license to expire for good.
The first car I owned was a Chevy Nova. It was dark red, made of steel, practically indestructible, loud, and all mine. I bought it in 1985 and drove it for about a year before its untimely death in 1986. It was murdered by a semi that decided to take up two lanes at the same time, smooshing the right side of my car with its wheels and ripping a nasty gash in its body with the spikes attached to the hubcaps. The poor old girl could not survive those injuries, and in truth I didn’t exactly mourn her passing, since I pretty much hated that car.
From the unloved and unmourned Nova, I moved on to a brand new, shiny, black, 1986 Ford Tempo. Now this was a car to love, with its actual new-car smell and a rear that stuck up higher than other cars, making it easy to find in any parking lot! Unfortunately, my poor Tempo was also doomed to an ugly death, stopping one day in 1988 in the middle of an intersection, its engine block cracked, green stuff oozing out. If only I had known about the need for oil changes back then! Writing this, I’m realizing that I was a bit of a menace on cars when I was young.
I have owned many cars since those days (yes, I learned about oil changes, and the need for maintenance, and wearing a seat belt, and obeying traffic signs), from a red Cadillac that my husband bought at a police car auction (don’t ask), to a huge conversion van that could have doubled as our first house (it didn’t, but it could have), to a string of basic sedans and an SUV. In short, I have participated in that great American love affair with cars my entire adult life. But as a child, riding in a car wasn’t a part of my experience.
In the Soviet Union of the 1970s, in my home city of Leningrad, we got around on public transportation. There were buses and trolleys that ran on overhead electric lines.
We took either busses or trolleys wherever we needed to go, as Leningrad was absolutely crisscrossed with routes that could take passengers to just about anywhere within the city limits. They were slow, crowded, and smelly, but we were all used to these things. The bus took us to visit family, go grocery shopping, see a doctor at a health clinic, or visit a museum. Men gave their seats to women, and the younger gave their seats to the elderly. When there were no seats, you stood. My mother somehow would manage to hold onto me, my brother, her purse, and our groceries, as we made our way through the city, getting on and off public transportation, until we reached home, after at least an hour of travel, exhausted but in one piece. When she had gone into labor with my younger brother, with my father working and unable to get to her in time, she had taken the bus to the hospital to give birth.
My favorite way to get around Leningrad, though, was the Metro. Similar to the subways of many cities worldwide, The Metro of Leningrad is a webbed network of underground tunnels of train rails, connected by a large number of stations. Unlike many such systems, the Leningrad Metro was rather grand and beautiful. Station walls were lined with marble or ceramic tiles, their ceilings were held up with imposing columns, their floors were made of gorgeous stone or marble, and ceilings were hung with chandeliers. Decorative statues, crests, moldings, and art made these stations things of beauty. And each station was unique.
There is an entire history and propaganda machine behind the Metro. In a nutshell, Metro stations, used on a daily basis by ordinary Russian citizens, were built to mimic the grandeur of the palaces and theaters previously accessible only to the royalty and nobility of Russia. Never mind that these same ordinary people often lived in assigned, communal apartments. Never mind that stores rarely had enough meat, milk, fruit, or vegetables. Never mind that exhausted parents stood in line for hours, hoping for a couple rolls of toilet paper or bars of soap. But I digress.
Living my childhood in Leningrad, I rode the trains, busses, and trolleys without giving any of it a second thought. Occasionally, I would notice the few cars that shared the road with us. I mostly remember seeing the larger Volgas and the smaller Ladas.
Volgas were almost always black or dark grey sedans about the size of an American mid-size sedan. Ordinary people didn’t drive these. If you saw one on the road, there was likely to be a government or KGB official in the back seat, though sometimes it might be a visiting dignitary of some sort.
Regular people who were, by some miracle or through a major bribe, able to obtain a car, typically drove a Lada. These little cars were about the size of a breadbox, and were meant to hold a family of four. To buy a car, you had to put your name on a list, or a queue, and wait until a car was available. There is a famous joke about this that goes something like this:
Man: I would like to buy a car.
Official: Put your name on this list. We will call you in approximately ten years.
Man: Morning or afternoon?
Official: What difference does it make?
Man: The plumber is coming in the morning.
The rich and the KGB had cars. Nobody I knew had a car.
The plane that brought us to the U.S. landed at JFK airport in the evening. The plane that would take us to Louisville, our final U.S. destination, would take off in the morning, so we had to get a room at one of the airport hotels. After our few suitcases came off the carousel, we trooped through the terminal and out to the parking lot to get to the hotel. The lot was crammed full with parked cars, and I stopped dead in my tracks. These cars were huge! They were bigger than any Volga I had ever seen.
All my reading came back to me, then. The skyscrapers and smokestacks, the huddled poor, and the ruthless millionaires. How was this possible, I thought. Maybe the stories were wrong. Were all Americans millionaires! But it was late, the parking lot was dark, and I was sleepy. We made our way to the hotel, and the next morning, we were on our way to Louisville. But those cars, and the awe I felt that first night in America, have stayed with me.
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