I don't much like vacations.
My life is a perpetual vacation. I haven't worked for 25 years. We live in a very scenic neighborhood – rivers, lakes, forests and all – with nice neighbors. I like my own cooking better than most restaurants, and I hate the wasted time getting to restaurants and waiting for an order.
I like the predictability of taking the girls to kindergarten and having the day to myself. I should put it another way. I appreciate such predictability as there is, given that there are always impromptu disruptions to the schedule that keep us from boredom.
It was hard work for Oksana to get me to agree to go for a long weekend to Transcarpathia, 750 km from Kyiv, within spitting distance of both Hungary and Slovakia. Sasha and Victor, parents of Eddie's good friend Yarema, escaped Kyiv to Uzhgorod on account of the war. Oksana could not turn down the invitation to spend some time with them.
They were making a trip to Kyiv – an overnight journey both directions – for a one-day celebration of Sasha's father's 69th birthday. Oksana managed to get reservations in the same wagon on their return. Our five-member family was in a four berth compartment. I don't sleep well in the first place, and especially not on trains, so Marianna wedged into a lower berth together, side-by-side and foot to foot. She at least got a good rest.
Trains in Ukraine travel at a leisurely 45 or 50 miles an hour. It gives you time to appreciate the landscape. Those in Western Europe may be faster but they are much more expensive. Airplanes are supposedly faster, but given the way both airlines and governments abuse air travelers I much prefer staying on the ground. We got to our hotel shortly before noon, lunched on some delicious Hungarian and Ukrainian soups, then rested a while after which everybody else enjoyed the large hot spring-fed swimming pool. Not me – I like rivers, lakes and oceans for swimming. You don't get vertigo turning around every hundred feet.
Ukraine's border runs east-west at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. The Uzh (snake) river, about 100 yards wide, runs out of the mountains, fast flowing and shallow, connecting on the other side of the border with the Tisza River which flows a few hundred kilometers south through the great Hungarian plain to join the Danube. A similar river, Latorica, runs through the town of Mukachevo about 25 miles to the east.
Victor and Sasha showed us around Uzhgorod on Friday. Although this little corner of Europe has switched among the Hungarian, Austrian, Polish, Soviet and Ukrainian nationalities every few decades, local capitulations in recent wars having been quick, however, the devastation has been elsewhere.
The towns of Uzhgorod and Mukachevo radiate out from central castles dating back centuries. We walked along the riverbank, enjoying cherry blossoms, here also called sakura, reminiscent of those in Washington. Victor left us in the middle of the old town to find a restaurant. Young people are stylish, and the city has a light, relaxed feeling, much more like France or Germany than Russia.
Sasha drove us to the Uzhgorod castle on Friday. The major attraction was the cherry trees – Sasha snapped this photo of Oksana and me outside of a typical village house.
That night was a Ukrainian style barbecue. They barbecue with what is called a mangal - a metal cage on a handle. Filled with fish and marinated pork shashlik, you turn the mangal over open coals, burned down from oak, in a firebox. Eddie and the boys relished the opportunity to wield an axe. After dinner they burned three times more wood than had been needed for cooking just for the fun of chopping it.
Using a mangal is significantly different than cooking with the Weber grill. You need an early start, to reduce wood to coals. There isn't any way to control the airflow, so you regulate the temperature by fanning the flames and pushing glowing coals back-and-forth with an iron implement.
The true delight was watching six healthy, normal kids playing together. The boys squirreled around like boys do, and the girls squealed like girls do. None are vaccinated against Covid, and not much against anything else. None have any noticeable abnormalities.
I went on, as we old folks will, about the good old days when normalcy was totally normal. Sasha and Victor, less than half my age, are polite enough to listen. In this case it was my recounting the seachange that swept over America as I was in college. The Fourth Turning puts the year at 1965, four years after Syntex invented the birth control pill, pop music first started celebrating marijuana, and government began indoctrinating us that conventional wisdom with regard to race, reinforced by lifetime experience gathered through our own eyes, was not to be trusted. Ozzia and Harriet were out, Angel of the Morning was in.
That was 1965. More was to come shortly with the Stonewall riots. I shared similar observations about fluoridation of the water supply, pesticides, the FDA's food pyramid, whole language and other phenomena I had witnessed in a long lifetime. In conclusion, I assured Victor and Sasha that war was a small price to pay for the experiences to which their children would not be subjected living in Ukraine.
Sunday we all went for a hike in the woods. The Carpathians commence with steep hills rising abruptly from the plain. The ten of us hiked a couple of miles up a steep hill and along the ridge past lovely wildflowers, then down through a dense wood to a shack designed for picnicking. At two and a half Marianna could not keep up the pace, so I carried her most of the way on my shoulders. After a snack – I know of no nationality that eats more often or more generously than Ukrainians – Victor and I and the three older boys set off for a nine mile trek over the first ridge of mountains, leaving Lucas, the youngest boy and the two girls with their mothers a couple of hours to navigate the 2 miles home. That too was an adventure - the older kids went ahead and got lost for half an hour as the women kept Marianna moving.
We followed a trail through a national forest, marked green blazes on squares of white paint on trees every few hundred yards. Concessionaires keep the forest thinned, harvesting oak trees which they drag out over the trails we used. This being Sunday we did not see any machinery, but there were deep imprints of tractor tires everywhere. In the low places we had to skirt the roads because the ruts were filled with water, some deep enough to support pollywogs and frogs.
The predominant oak and beech trees were very tall and straight, probably 100 feet high, with a sparse growth of alder and gooseberry underneath. We saw tracks of deer and wild pigs, and got a picture of a beautiful black and orange salamander.
At 4 o'clock we stopped for lunch. Had I been planning the outing that would've been a brief stop for sandwiches and a drink of water, but this is Ukraine, Victor shocked me by having the boys gather firewood to build an open fire right on the forest floor, covered with dry leaves. Smokey the Bear would have turned over in his grave. Victor cut up a delicious 3 foot long local sausage and whittled some sticks for cooking it over the fire. We wrapped the pieces in Middle Eastern bread – here called lavash - and enjoyed it immensely. When lunch was over Victor used his boots to scrape the dry leaves – which had not even gotten singed – away from the fire and kick some dirt up around the coals. It was smoldering as we walked away. And, no, there was no smoke on the horizon when our ride arrived a few miles to the north a couple of hours later.
We walked down the other side of the ridge and through some land that must have been farmed in the distant past but was now returned to nature except for a scattering of apple and cherry trees, now in bloom.
Arriving in the village of Yarok where Sasha would meet us, we saw cow pies in the road and then the cow herself, placidly returning home unattended, full of milk from wherever she pastured during the day. The village scene was completed by a flock of five geese, also unattended, in a marshy stretch of the dirt road.
On Monday, we visited the castle in Mukachevo. It was an absolutely perfect setting for a castle – a very steep basalt hill surrounded by flat land. The castle is a multitiered affair spread over the crown of the hill. We understand that digging through the basalt to create a well bringing water to the top was a multi-decade affair that cost many lives. Here's a photo of Marianna in one of the gun emplacements towards the top of the castle.
That's the story from Lake WeBeGone, a chronicle of memories for the children when they are grown, also a pleasure to share with you readers right now.
What a delightful post, Graham. Thankyou for sharing this glimpse of the other side of the world. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I graduated from high school in 1965 and went from a mixed fruit orchard in the mountains of British Columbia to the beautiful campus of the University of British Columbia and straight into the political and cultural maelstrom that you describe, although the issues were somewhat different in Canada. I was shocked by one of my fellow students being extremely rude to our philosophy professor, in a class held in a small classroom with only a few students even for first and second year philosophy classes. How things have changed! But 'never trust anyone over 30' was afoot and although I could never bring myself to be rude to an elder, the idiocy of such a statement did not occur to me for many years. Sexual liberation (?), the idea that communism held all the answers ( ?) female liberation.....all swirling around in our milieu but at only 17 I did not have the historical perspective or understanding to make sound judgments or sound choices. Still, it was an exciting time as well but the confusion lingered in me for a very long time and only now do I realise it was deliberately engendered by clever propagandists. A beautiful picture of the two of you among the cherry blossoms. I know what it is like to walk down a double row of cherry trees planted by my grandfather in the twenties. Very special. Thanks.
Lovely to hear about your trip. I so enjoy seeing your photos. Thank you.