Fellow Travelers

The Delta direct flight from New York to Moscow is a microcosm of Russian- American relations. Like all flights, it’s possible to get a good look at your fellow passengers and speculate a bit about their circumstances or reasons for travel. New Russians with fancy luggage filled with recent purchases, older Russians visiting family with tattered bags. But more significantly, the flight is just long and boring enough to make a chatty neighbor spill his guts.

The plane usually has at least a couple of groups traveling on it. And more often than not, they’re Christian missionaries. Missionaries are recognizable mainly by their matching oversized polo shirts embroidered with the name of their church and some corny hopeful saying about light or truth or seeds or sometimes all three. Missionaries, in my experience anyway, seem to have a look about them; something approximating peace and fear in equal measures. It can come across as creepy or calming.

I’ve learned to speak differently to these folks. At first, when I would say that I am in Russia on a Fellowship, they would perk up and ask what Church I was affiliated with. It wasn’t a definition of the word that I was familiar with – but to many people “fellowship” has an exclusively Christian organizational connotation. Now I just say that I work in Moscow.

There’s always an upper-middle aged guy on the plane with sort of a stunned look on his face. And he always ends up sharing with seat mates how he found a wonderful woman on the internet that he’s on his way to meet.

I sat next to Roy on the way back to Moscow and heard all about it. As I helped him fill out his “migration card” – which the Russian government in its wisdom decided to issue solely in Russian unlike previous multilingual versions – he gushed forth geyser-like with details of his trip. I have to say that they were pretty sketchy. He had already started taking her advice on financial matters for the trip to Russia.

When we got to the part of the form for writing down the details of the “inviting body” – I skipped over making a pun on that, though it was killing me to let such comedic fruit just rot on the tree – he admitted that he didn’t know his friend’s last name, let alone her address or phone number. I directed him to his visa and hotel information for the appropriate information.

There are always more than a few guys like Roy on that plane. Both in July on my first trip to Russia and on the way back to a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been able to compare similar stories with my traveling companions that we’ve heard from our respective seat mates.

Sometimes they’re success stories. Like the fellow who was going back to visit his new extended family in Russia after some dozen years of happy marriage. But in general, suffice it to say that you’d prefer to hear your seatmate’s story on the first leg of the trip – when’s he’s guaranteed to be hopeful and excited and a little apprehensive. Not the return trip, when there’s a chance that you’ll be listening to a disappointed, venting, jilted suitor.

Roy didn’t seem to have any sort of heavy coat with him on the plane, which was a bit of poor planning given the single-digit temperature in Moscow. He assured me that, as a native of Ohio, he wouldn’t have a problem with the wintry weather. I asked where he lived in Ohio. “Oh,” he said matter-of-factly, “I don’t live there anymore. I’ve lived in Southern California for the past 30 years.”

I love the optimism. He’s traveling to Russia to meet a woman with no address and only a first name. And he’s quite sure that childhood memories alone will sustain him physically regardless of how unprepared he is to weather such numbing cold. If you gave 100 guys like Roy a budget and some time, they might just change the world. Or die of hunger.

I last saw Roy at passport control in the airport in Moscow. He had stumbled his way into the “Russian Citizens Only” line, and it was too late and too far for me to help him out.

I wondered what became of him as I waited for my luggage.