For me, America began about 25 years before my physical appearance in it – by living in an incredibly vivid parallel reality, in which this country appeared in the form of a multitude of dazzlingly bright, for some reason Gothic buildings stretching to the distant horizon. This image defined the sublime – then youthful – perception of a hopelessly distant, inaccessible and exorbitantly beautiful country.
Having ended up in the hands of an undoubtedly mysterious, skilled puppeteer director, my American reality happened when I was over 40 years old. To begin with, in 1990, an American colleague, Mel Podvysotsky, an employee of the US Geological Survey, appeared in my life. Together with Podvysotsky, we organized an enchanting Soviet-American conference on remote sensing of the Earth’s surface, with numerous participants from the United States and dozens of other countries from different continents. The conference took place in the very last period of the USSR’s life. That’s why I managed to grab a decent budget from the USSR Academy of Sciences, which allowed the participants (our and foreign) to travel to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tbilisi and the Kola Peninsula. Mel and I had a separate trip to Kamenets-Podolsky. There we found Mel’s distant sister.
There was no limit to the delight of the conference participants, which made them my close colleagues, scattered all over the world. And with the American Mel, we became, as they say, friends forever.
Less than a year after the conference, I got a job at South Africa’s largest gold mining company and moved to Johannesburg with my family. From there, all my further travels around the world took place over the next four years.
My arrival in the United States in the spring of 1995 was arranged by a mysterious puppeteer, who organized a conference at Kings College University in London, Ontario, two hours away from Toronto. After the conference, my friends drove me from Toronto to Niagara Falls, where two events took place that captured my spirit without a trace: first, Niagara itself, and secondly, the emotionally experienced crossing of the Canadian-American border.
Niagara Falls, or rather its largest, Canadian component called the Horseshoe, produces an invariably hypnotic effect on an everyday crowd of thousands of tourists, putting all these lucky people in a state similar to astral sleep with a wonderful dream. And this is not only due to the literally dizzying height and width of Niagara Falls. A person next to this miracle is filled with a blissful feeling. According to popular theory, it is associated with the phenomenon of water droplets rubbing against the air, which generates negatively charged ions, which cause brain activity in humans, which develops into a pleasant feeling.
My American life began with an eight-hour drive in a rented Toyota from Niagara to Reston, Virginia, near Washington. My friend Mel lived and worked there at the head office of the U.S. Geological Survey.
I checked into a hotel, and Mel and I went to a giant supermarket. In a huge store parking lot, I was lucky enough to begin to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible – the secrets of the character of ordinary Americans.
What were the minutes of our meeting with Mel spent on after five years of separation? I was following a friend who was enthusiastically rushing along the rows of cars and proudly demonstrating to me, a newcomer to the States, the newly introduced registration number registration rule. In addition to numbers, it was allowed to place pictures on license plates: birds, small animals, bugs, spiders and an infinite number of other images.
To complete the picture, in the description of my first day in the States, I should mention my purchase No. 1 at the mall. I became the proud owner of the coveted audio cassette “Vladimir Horowitz plays Mozart.” Music started playing in the car immediately after purchase.
In general, the first day in the States was a combination of completely different experiences.
Another element of American life manifested itself in connection with Mel’s neighbor, who lived in a typical (magnificent!) a house that demonstrates that the owner belongs to the upper middle class – the upper middle class. The neighbor was going to get a big job at the FBI. And so the space around this wonderful African–American woman was filled with representatives of the bureau, openly chatting with her immediate and distant surroundings – relatives, neighbors, staff and other people from the list of possible contacts. Mel was among the others. One day, he was called to the Geological Survey checkpoint by an unmistakably FBI agent with detailed questions about the candidate’s neighbor.
For example, the neighbors were expected to be aware of the correspondence between the official income and the real cost of living of the candidate. That is, the FBI reasonably believed that nothing would escape the all-seeing neighbor’s eye. In response to my perplexity, Mel reassuringly assured me that there are usually no errors in cost estimates.
A special story is our trip with Mel to the historic Washington bar and restaurant Old Ebbitt Grill in the government quarter on 15th Street, a stone’s throw from the White House. This is the oldest institution in the city, founded in 1856.
The exorbitantly popular place is widely known for the constant presence of famous politicians, actors, singers and other public figures in it. I had to wait for a table for an aperitif in a chic bar. We literally disappeared into the festive atmosphere, in which the restaurant’s customers behaved serenely and joyfully.
At that time, I was struck and embarrassed to the point of blushing by the manner of local girls and young women who were already tipsy, relaxing while waiting for a table by openly appraising the strangers present. At the same time, the ladies were usually joined by their companions after a few minutes.
During the two days of my first visit to Washington, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the National Museum of Natural History, run by the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Art Gallery floated before me like in a dream… Too much for such a short time! In the future, I will be given many days in Washington – without the tourist fuss.
I flew from Washington to New York. I was met at the airport by a married couple of Moscow friends. Vitya’s friend, being a nuclear physicist, worked in Russia at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. He became part of a wave of our world’s best nuclear scientists who signed a contract with Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. It housed particle accelerators and sophisticated experimental facilities based on these accelerators – the most sophisticated tools of modern physics. Working in the famous American laboratory for the guys from Dubna in the penniless 90s was a great success.
This wave of nuclear scientists settled near the laboratory and formed a very Russian-looking village. It looked like a country house, with green clapboard cottages, each for one family. The verandas of the buildings were decorated with identical clotheslines, as was customary for Russian people. We arrived at one of these wonders of local architecture, under the probing and curious gazes of Vitya’s neighbors, also Dubna nuclear engineers.
I had a couple of days left before returning to Johannesburg. I spent them with great pleasure in New York or walking in the pine forest surrounding the cottages.
On the day of departure, Vitya undertook to take me to the airport. “We’re going for a little drive,” my friend announced. And the slow movement began along the narrow asphalt road. We’re going and we’re going… And then it dawned on me that we were moving in a circle–this was the third time we had passed the same tree.
Vitya drove with great enthusiasm. When I asked if we were moving in a circle, Vitya answered almost shouting: “Of course we are moving in a circle! I’m showing you (he politely didn’t say “dumb”) how the accelerator works under the road!”
After enjoying the simulation of the motion of elementary particles in the accelerator, we finally left for the airport. n