train hopping
If you’ve ever watched the movie Stand by Me from 1986, directed by Rob Reiner and co-written by Stephen King, then you are essentially about to experience a Russian re-make of the movie captured in un-edited, raw, analogue photos.
Like Gordie, I am here to tell you a story about the Summer of 2021:
There’s three of us: me, Oleg, and Zhenya. We are in a freight container on a train rolling through the south west of Russia. The sun has come up and it’s beginning to burn us; the container becoming a greenhouse while we’re still huddled in our sleeping bags since the night had frozen our bones. Through blurry eyes, all we see are the four walls of the container. It’s hard to wake up because we had spent the night trying to catch trains. But we know we have to move because of the changing temperatures and the heating metal, so we move to the shadow. Once again, we’re asleep. The next time we wake up, it’s because we hear voices saying “don’t move, stay in the train, police is coming.”
Great, two security guards— we’ve been caught.
By now, we are in the Volgograd region [you may know it as Stalingrad]. The security guards are instructing us to collect our things and to wait by the train, preparing ourselves for the police’s arrival. As we wait, they — the two security guards — begin to talk to us about what we did wrong and why we got caught. They are telling us how to train hop better. “You should always leave when the train stops,” says one of them. “We only catch prisoners and homeless people,” the other goes. ‘What the hell is going on?’ I’m thinking.
Eventually, the police arrive— except it’s Sunday morning. No one is on official duty, and the car is just some random five-seater that the policeman probably had to ask his wife or friend to borrow because he couldn’t make it over to the police station in-time to get a real police car. Anyway, what choice do we have? The security guards already made it clear we weren’t good train hoppers, we needed to face the consequences of not being better students. So, all three of us are now in this car being brought to the station; and, at least, it is a real police station— there’s a sign and all.
Now that we are here, they are searching us and our bags. They’re looking for something special to pin on us to make the early morning wake up call worth it. They don’t find anything, and now one is looking at the other: ‘great, what do we do we these guys?’ They’re probably thinking, and so they find something for us to do: write a statement. We need to declare and state why we are train hopping. The requirement? One-two sentences, that’s all, “whatever you want, just write it, write whatever,” the policeman tells us, and they would let us go with a small fine. And so, we begin, each one of us on a piece of paper writing the same thing, answering why we are train hopping?
Our answer: to see and experience the beauty of our country.
