Russia (#23) p.s.: The long way home

     Cameras, luggage, and memories stowed away, we said goodbye to Moscow early the next morning.

    Our last moments in Moscow involved a lot of posing. In the days before selfies, of course, it was usually a matter of the person with the camera (John Woodard in this case) saying, "Stand with so and so, and try to look pleasant." Here my son Stefan and Dan Sorensen embrace the moment.

 

    In conversation at some point, our translator Andrew discovered I was a poet. As we were leaving Vladimir he gave me two books of Russian poetry in Russian, which I still have and still can't read. Sadly. He was earnest in giving me the books, so I remember thinking how can I refuse??

    When we got to Moscow, Andrew found several memorial statues of the poet Alexandr Pushkin that he thought I needed to stand beside for a photograph. This is the best of the lot, taken somewhere near the Bolshoi Theater.

 

 

 

   At the huge war memorial we visited before eating at the Mongolian restaurant, many of the boys posed with one of the WWII era canons.

 

 

 

 The trip home was uneventful, as one always hopes air flight will be, but for the slowly evolving panorama beneath us.

    Most of our team spent the hours of flight sleeping or watching the inflight movies, which were screened for everyone in those day. The movie on offer was Bruce Almighty. For my part, I spent my time looking out the window and trying to fill in my journal, thinking someday I might want to write an account of our journey and thinking, correctly as it happens, that I would need all the contemporaneous detail I could find. 

    When the clouds gave way beneath us as we approached Greenland, I watched as the seascape turned to landscape. I remember thinking what a marvelous thing this is to see such severe beauty. How will I ever remember?

    My notes say, "the deep blue of the sky and the deep blue of the ocean are separated only by a band of clouds on the horizon. Greenland gradually takes shape as we recognize rugged mountains with fjords cutting between them. The entire scene is blue and white, so absolutely gorgeous as to be other worldly: the mountains white with veins of blue and the ocean blue with white lines, breakers, paralleling the shore. I am in awe. God be praised."

    Then we were on the ground in Toronto scrambling for bags for the long anticipated ride back to Houghton. I loved that we had gone, I loved the Russians we had met, I loved the places we had visited so briefly, and I loved how my heart had been challenged and my world expanded. Now, more than anything, I wanted to return to my wife and the rest of my kids, the people I love most in the world.