Across Russia on "kopek": As I understood myself, the country and relations
BEFORE THE MACHINE RUNS THE HARE, AND FOR IT SOMETHING IS LONG. We already see almost nothing - the battery died in the morning, so there are no headlights, no wipers, no David Bowie, and there is not even a gas meter: we are blindly driving in every sense. It is just about to stop for the night, because almost no one sees us on the road either — people or animals — even though we are a big red bus.
In my childhood there were so many cars that a little bit more and I would become a car mechanic
When it became completely dark, we caught up with the "valley of death": "No, well, you have to get there in order to spend the night in Monchegorsk!" This polar city is famous for two things: a sculpture of an elk and how in the late twentieth century it turned the neighborhood into a man-made wasteland. Emissions from the Severonikel plant burned trees and rocks, scared quails and foxes - the landscape is still a bit like Mars. We park the bus on the hill, from where on one side there is a view of the pipes of the Kola MMC, and on the other - of the lake, gloomy, as in Twin Peaks. Brew tea with spruce cones, wild apples and tundra lingonberries, fold a deer sandwich, put pots of thyme and juniper on the roof and go to bed. From the cars passing by, the bus shakes, so we fall asleep quickly, but before bedtime I have time to think that this is another perfect day on the road.
In my childhood there were so many cars that a little bit more and I would become a car mechanic. Grandpa Radiy put me behind the wheel before I could clearly pronounce the name of the brand of his car - said "Moshkvich". In the meantime, my fleet of models occupied all the window sills in the house, I often disappeared in the garage with my dad - laundered our “Volga” to the color of milk. Details of the car device I was not interested. The cars had other advantages: they are beautiful and they are the perfect pastime. When it came time to learn to drive, I chose the Debut women's driving school - we were explained the rules of the traffic rules on the Winnie-the-Pooh hitrukovsky. In the classroom with a copy of the engine, next to my grandmother’s contemporaries and my age mates, for the first time I felt something like girl power — all these beautiful women were eager to drive.
With the first car is not set. A used olive-colored nine stood in the parking lot in front of the house for several months. During this time, the bums spent the night in it, they robbed her a couple of times and even stuck a syringe into the wheel, leaving him hanging around. I patched everything, made a couple of attempts to get somewhere. But then I just took the car next door to mine and exploded - then I decided that I was not ready for such a busy life at the time, and I sold Oliviero (as I called it). Most importantly, I realized that I don’t need a car without a like-minded person.
"Rocket" appeared together with Bolshakov - we just started dating and in order to diversify our meetings, we took from a friend to ride the not very necessary "penny" - "Zhiguli" of 1979. Need I say that we still haven't returned it? Vanya was not right then, so I always drove. Recently, a psychologist asked me when I feel calm in my life, and I was surprised to find myself driving. At first, however, we were on nerves - until I caught myself not shouting "Lord, why does a person go on the road to meet me ?!" or "brake, in the fog hedgehog!". Instead, we go and argue with Vanya about something that does not concern driving at all. It was so great - to realize that once driving, I can now sort things out, then I drive confidently. We began to discuss in the car everything. And since on the road I want to talk only about something important, the “Rocket” has brought us very close together, and we have fallen in love with it, including for this.
At first, the trips looked like this: we went out of the city, when the whole Moscow began to have the most revelry, on the night from Friday to Saturday — for something that someone finds on a rave, someone on Facebook, someone abroad or away - we found it in the forests and villages. The route was laid most often by toponyms that attracted us. For example: "Let's go to Empty Christmas!" or "Well, the Old Bolsheviks?". Sometimes they traveled specially to strange objects, such as an experimental railway ring, of which there are quite a few near Moscow. Sometimes friends gave us the keys to their cottages. Where to go was not so important: the car itself became the reason for the journey for us, and not the way to get from point A to point B.
We drove hay rolls with the help of the "Rocket", drove friends around the field to greyhounds, danced on the roof, took pictures of the car in ridiculous situations. One day they even got into a small accident: a driver crashed into us from behind, who was staring at a dry cowling sticking up a couple of meters from the window above our car — we were carrying it as a birthday bouquet. But even without plants, many showed us the "class", they signaled, they began to chat with us and were surprised that I was driving. For many in Moscow, a girl and a Soviet car are complex-compatible concepts if it is not on the passenger. But far from the city, I saw a lot of women dissecting the "gazelles" and "Zaporozhtsy".
We brought "Rocket" a separate account on instagram, which soon had an amazing effect. We were interviewed as artists, “Rocket” itself took part in the exhibition of the Nuts & Bolts moto-custom culture, they began to contact us with proposals to test new cars and as experts in the Moscow Region and the region, which we really partly became.
From such trips you learn a lot about the life outside the Moscow Ring Road. First, you begin to really, and not by forcing to love birch and all that nature, which is called "Russian." Suddenly it turned out that for a hundred kilometers from Moscow begin moss, pine forests, hills; that the mist over the river might please more than a whole week in Vienna. Sometimes we sharply slowed down at some reservoir at three or four in the morning and watched the dawn for a long time. It was strange and new, because we always loved the city. I discovered bird sanctuaries, pontoon bridges and Muscovites who moved out of town. We fell in love with zaanensky goats, Vietnamese pigs, and kittens like fluffy chickens. A car is a new level of freedom. She can take you to where she can’t even get a helicopter - for example, in a thick forest. And given that our "penny" was in the villages for their own, almost all the doors were open to us. So we moved from aimless trips to exploring territories.
But there was a nuance - we both worked in offices and could go somewhere else only on weekends. In contrast to how happy we were on trips, our publishing houses somehow did not bring much joy. And in the end we decided to do with the work the same thing that we did with the machine - to move together in an unknown direction. Now we can say that this was the right decision. Soon we were offered to head up a magazine about citizens who moved to the village, - so the trip was partially monetized.
Suddenly it turned out that for a hundred kilometers from Moscow begin moss, pine forests, hills; that the mist over the river may please more than a week in Vienna
I wondered what benefit anybody could have from us: which example could we set and could we do? And I decided that the best continuation of our trips would be if some of our friends would no longer save money on expensive cars and reanimate the cars of their grand relatives. Or they would buy used Soviet cars and start driving too, getting the incredible pleasure that we received. One could even arrange joint trips. But the idea did not take root among friends, and we ourselves rolled those who wanted something new. Sometimes there was not enough room for everyone, sometimes I wanted to go further than a hundred kilometers from Moscow. We began to think about the development of history and about ourselves in general as a project.
Somehow Bolshakov brought a thick book from Berlin "Off the road: explorers, vans, and life off the beaten track". She scattered stories of people who travel around the world in minivans: here the girl works on freelancing and travels around the states, here the old man with a bushy beard has set off around the globe, so a couple of Americans went to Russia. Someone promotes responsible travel, someone austerity, someone hedonism - built in the car king bed. All these wildly beautiful pictures opened up new worlds. And we realized that we also need a minivan and a big idea related to it.
We found the perfect car on Avito - a 1992 red Mercedes-Benz bus that looked like a cow, a vacuum cleaner, and a sample of Scandinavian design at the same time. And he had curtains! After a week of negotiations, we agreed on a price. One problem - the car was parked in front of his master's house in Arkhangelsk. So, together with our first joint property, we got a trip, during which we even visited the beautiful island of Yagry. On the way to it you can see how submarines stick out of the water, and near the sandy sea beach - Soviet strangely designed high-rise buildings. I don't know what else would lead me there.
We called the car "Comet", returned to Moscow and began to think. We decided to associate our road trip with food after the past at gatroskamp in Nikola-Lenivets and now they understood: you need to go and cook right on the road from what we find in the wild and in the villages. So at the end of the summer we filled our red bus with dishes, put three girlfriends into it and went north to the Barents Sea and back. It turned out so cool that I want to do it again a hundred - correcting flaws, in the company of vegans and butchers, bakers and chefs, complicating the route, and with the broadcast - preferably television.
The journey stretched for 14 days and 4500 kilometers. All the way we were worn with the car as anxious parents: it creaks a little, then it falls off - and we stood, embracing, at night in some workshop on the outskirts of Vytegra, looking at the suspended "Comet". Then I realized that Vanya, who by that time had become the second driver, was developing something like a complex on the basis of what he did not understand in the glands, which means “not a man.” The same stupid gender stereotype, as well as the fact that all women on the road - a disaster. Together we began to understand what our car is packed with: in the alternator belt, in the hub bearing, and even how to find an automaster at any time. And we made sure that if you really need it, then everything is possible. At night, get something that, as everyone says, cannot be found before dawn, wash the car from firefighters when all car washes are closed, or get local fish in the village where they haven’t caught anything for a long time.
In the north of Russia, there were not only Icelandic landscapes, a host of berries, the ridiculous Saami capital of the reindeer herders Lovozero and the darkness of the natural spa. There we met very sympathetic people - they say it is a cold that teaches northerners to unite. Somehow we were already almost at night in a deaf village and could not find a suitable place for an overnight stay. Noticing the house where the light was still burning, we were asked to set up camp in the courtyard. The owner looked down on us - four girls and one guy from Moscow - and allowed us to stay. We cooked pike soup right on the spot, and in the morning the owner of the house also inspected our car for breakdowns while we were talking with his centenarian mother Anisia. The woman did not see well, but she almost did not have gray hair. She joked and told about everything - about her youth, about the village - and she was very interested to hear about us. I realized how much I miss the grandmothers and the stories from the life of women of the last generation - thanks to them, you always understand better what is happening today. We bought their whole family ice cream and went on.
What's next? The more you drove, the more you can drive: the driving muscles are trained in the same way as the muscles of the body - the whole world starts to seem very small, because you yourself can go round it. I want to drive more. I hope to connect the villagers to the project, sometimes turning into a rural food truck and treating them with food from the local products they are used to, but in a new form. I think to learn more about myself, about relationships and about the world. As it was written in one of the workshops where we stopped by: "Our experience is the most expensive, but the best teacher." For example, I will never forget two pots with plants on the roof of our bus.
Photo: personal archive, Ivan Bolshakov
