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Growin' Our Own (page 5)

Roll Another One .... Comrade

By: Skot Free

(This story started as a part of a correspondence to a Russian gentleman who was kind enough to respond to one of my outbursts I started issuing after my bust for private possession, some of the details of which are included in summarizing my experiences in an international economic perspective.)

On a cramped and dusty bus from Cheleyabensk, through the vast steppes and rolling hills south west of the Ural mountains. Endless glowing fields of sunflowers, wheat and wild grass, lazy cowboys on horseback and cattle drift past, silhouetted by the low slanting rays of the evening sun, the sky a vast smear of dark gray, light blue, pink and orange. Passing a dilapidated gas station I'm struck by an imagery far more mid-western than anything I've ever seen in the west. Getting off the bus at the dirt crossroads of Champinious, marked only by a minimalist sign on a steel pole and a few red iron fence posts, in the dusky blue twilight I inspect a fat virulent stalk of cannabis flowering from a road side ditch and collect a small sample. Cannabis is growing in the streets , vacant lots ,farm fields, and forest meadows from Vladivostock to St.Petersburg and on the plains south of the Urals I collected its sappy fruits, and resin rubbings, some of them turned out to be quite potent.

We hitched a ride with a huge diesel dumptruck reluctantly stopping for a group of indifferent cows on the outskirts of darkening Champinious, one of the innumerable victory villages typically named after idyllic European towns remembered by the soviet soldiers who returned to settle them after WW War II. Vova, a guitarist for the Rainbow Army Band (featuring Rastaman) and Mark Scheider Kunst of Club Tam Tam (a burned out police station turned over to the civic youth organization to restore for their own facility, and now a world famous invitational live house in ST. Petersburg) remembers the way to his aunt's house to the driver.

Dogs bark at us through the gate while Vov yells his lineage to Totia. An ancient yet quite substantial woman opens the gate. We follow her back through the yard to the house while she yells at the dogs to shut up. Off with the boots and coats in an anteroom, meeting up again in the kitchen where ancient uncle, his face eroded with age, is smoking a papparose and beaming. With the phone out at the Matushkin home we must relay and finally get through by the neighbors while Vova's aunt lays on a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and sour cream with home baked bread and tea with fresh cream, in the ancient plastered timber cabin with the traditional Siberian central brick stove or Petchka filling one sixth of the main room from floor to ceiling complete with oven wood, drying rack and an upper ledge for sleeping. Vova's father arrives driven by a neighbor, after genuflections and introductions we assemble out into the waiting Lada. On the dark road to Perva Uzjney (1st Southern), an ex-military strip mine turned farming village about 50 km. south west of Magnetagorsk in the semi-autonomous zone of Baschkyria. Vova and his father Victor assess the current situation, too much rain ruined all this year's wheat and potatoes. Wide prairies telephone poles and power line towers, a solitary street lamp like mid-west America lost. We're constantly force fed fresh bread, vegetables, potatoes and cream by Vova's mother. The next morning Granny Matushkin next door reminisces Vova with lineage, deaths and marriages, I photograph them by her spinning wheel.

Roaming through the village in the daylight I'm confounded by the situation of two or three blocks of two story "Stalin's Modern" apartment houses originally built to accommodate the now ex-workers and technicians for the nearby "secret military quartz strip mine," finally closed for good the year before and all the heavy equipment sold to pay off the local population. These people, left stranded, have seriously taken up agriculture and husbandry explaining the surrounding potato fields, fenced garden plots and rambling medieval looking shanty town of improvised barns and out buildings on the shores of a man made lake. Once a recreational site, now draining and over fished, one of the older residents remembering to us the huge fish it once yielded; "(Once) there was (a) time (but ),now there is only the moment." The strip mine, a grand canyon of devastation, with equally immense deposits beside it like the bases of three great pyramids. Evidently 30 years in the making, the pit is now filled with stagnant water and teeming with mosquitoes. Over the mounds and through a wonderland of wild grasses and herbs, brilliant purple thistles crawling with bumble bees, and multicolored wild flowers spring from the gray brown distance into lush green surroundings supplanted with constellations of thick aromatic stalks of hemp. Though rain washed off most of its external potency we collected select flowers like wild berries. Some were surprisingly potent though ever so subtle in inclination, contrasting with the rush of paradox I'd become accustomed to with city "shit" and grass, walking back towards Uzjney through the sunset steppes I almost imperceptibly penetrated the velvet tapestry of the deepening blue night sky as it descended on the high plains.

Back at the house Vova plays mandolinand talks with babushka, while Victor (dad) contemplates the future based on the price of hay seed. I see in him a Midwestern farmer of National Geographic proportions complete with 50s wardrobe, but I'm almost out of film and batteries and lack the nerve to use the flash at such rude range. Fresh tvorog, jam, fried dough rings for breakfast. Later helping Victor collect potatoes after he digs them. He drives us out there on a fascistsky (motorcycle and sidecar, a common form of transport locally). Meaningless excavations dominate the housing complex and a rusting mobile excavator and drill grave yard at the edge of a hay field being worked by a combine. The perfect prototypes of Russian workers plod around working in the field opposite us. In his family's garden plot Vova calls to me to show me some dried poppies where they stand, urging me to try getting some seeds, when suddenly we're chased out by shouted curses, unknown to Vova the plot was sold to a neighbor recently .The scene started a rumor that we were "narcomen." There were the cases of innocent babushkas (grandmothers) getting prosecuted for having contaminated yards and garden plots (more often for opium poppies) to "make examples" but the enforcers are far too occupied with organized crime to bother with petty use. The latter being a system that I some times consider a far more sensitive and responsible alternative to government regulation, at least it's honest. In the Allon River, cutting through the plains from the Ural mountains, swampy banks of reeds, cat tails and herbs widening into bitter tannic brown pools rustling with ducks, crows and buzzing with dragon flies, we wash our hands and share a Kazbeck cigarette refilled with our favorite sample. I feel afloat on the rolling quality of the land like wide swells on the high seas, and feel myself pitching forward and sinking in a forlorn paranoia about the sovietification of my own country. We wander back through the moonscape of strip mine debris where horses graze at new growth on their edges. The next day we pick potatoes on the shores of the lake, while a lunar rover and crew weld and bury a gas line from the nearby village of Severney (Northern). The strip mine created this colony of technicians and engineers and suddenly abandoned them in the middle of nowhere - ultimately for no other cause than the industrial absurdity now corroding in the fields, looking like the failed glory of the extra terrestrial colonies envisioned by industrialist propagandists. I can't help thinking that a legitimate hemp industry would do wonders for communities like this one, being almost totally abandoned by the infrastructure could be an advantage after all.

Later, wandering with Andre Nagaiboksky (boshkirian for tartar), I'm consistently awed by the surrounding vastness and the audacity of this industrial oasis, the awkward and surreal perversity of this artificial culture superimposed on and dwarfed by the swelling plains. Off the dirt lane, through an antechamber into hallway of Andre's home, typically Russian, complete with full mirror and a chest of drawers offering combs, brushes, shoe brushes and shoe cream. Well stoned on our choice selection for the occasion, suddenly thrust into caricatured veneer of the flat and feeling Andre's insecurity coming to a head, everyone is unexpectedly spooked by the scene. Thinking we'd have the place to ourselves, we can't deal with trying to conceal our intoxication from his dad, but I'm nonetheless fascinated by the exotica of the scene. While we hesitantly remove boots and file into the living room where pop, just out of the hospital though seemingly round and healthy for his age, a white shock of hair curled over into a rockabilly pomp, reclines sideways on the divan next to a vintage simulated natural wood artificial fireplace space heater. Two horses drag a man to pieces on the TV as I genuflect and take a seat the scene changes to decaying bodies nailed to crosses, eyes plucked out (by birds?), as the shot pans to an unoccupied cross dad exclaims; 'mesty svabodney' (space available), his attitude puts me at ease.

The consistent statistic Ifound throughout the country was that more than half of all high school and college age persons had either tried it and or were users. Of course, most of the young men having to join the military were introduced there. Vova once told me how he was taken on a field trip in kindergarten for an introduction to botany and was taught how to collect cannabis seeds for food. In Uzbekistan I enjoyed a candy bar similar to sesame brittle made of them. On my earlier visit I had the privilege of working as a proof reader on the academic journal with the aspiring director of the archeology dept. of the Hermitage Museum, Vadim Zuyeve, who, specializing in Scythian culture and recognizing my orientation, presented me with a sample of cannabis seeds collected from a burial mound believed to be at least 2700 years old. Because of their apparent importance in the burial sites they are believed to have held a sacred place in the social and religious ritual throughout the region. Evidence also indicates that the smoke of burning cannabis leaves and flowers were inhaled to induce a spiritual trance in a ceremony similar to that of the Native American's sweat lodge.

Prohibitionist hysteria may have been the case in the Soviet days, but in my experience the police there are too lacking in resources and incentive to worry about personal use, although there was considerable paranoia about trafficking. We often smoked Kazbek cigarettes refilled with Anasha, Gashcish or Shit (hash often collected by hand on rubbing expeditions in the fall and or beating naturally freeze dried flowers over a fine mesh in early winter) or if nothing else was available, Hempka, a crude acetone based schwagg concoction, in the connecting concourses of crowded passenger trains, in the court yards, and stair wells and on the balconies and roof tops of huge apartment complexes, Universities, and Museums, not to mention the lawns, parks, mountain sides and in the forests. Every one knew what it was and what we were doing and most were even sympathetic. The only eradication and prosecution campaigns I heard about were in and around central Asian and far eastern regions such as Turusky Dalynia. In Kyrgyzstan, a huge tract of the Tian Shan mountains that the soviet army tried to burn out repeatedly, only encouraging it to grow back thicker and so remained heavily guarded until the soviet collapse. Where the precious "Charse Masla (hashish) is collected by the nude bodies of Kyrgyze maidens running through the thick forests of rich fragrant oozing hemp," and along the greater length of the southern border (gladly, apparently impossible). By coincidence, these places were also the home of the repressed native cultures and economies of the "autonomous republics," and Afghanistan.

Japan, where I live now, is somewhere in between, being basically an old world (feudal) system under pressure from the more psychologically embedded west to "look democratic" and with a culture so adept at the art of the mask, this only exaggerates the contradictions between the concepts of "civil rights" and "economic development" (when dissident demonstrations threatened the image of a visit by Eisenhower in the 60s, the security service simply gave uniforms and armbands to the soldiers of the right wing yakuza, for one example). Somehow understanding this doesn't make me feel any better, I was jailed for 2 months BEFORE INDICTMENT, and in contrast to such strict adherence to the "code of Justice" (certainly incomprehensible to me) 4 months later I'm still not free from the illegal harassment by the same "officials" whose only difference from mafia thugs is their dress code, lower wages, and subsequent intelligence. I've been silent long enough, and look where that got me, "they" only view that as a weakness. "Divide and Rule," Unite and School (I say). My Russian friends are scattered all over the world and the "Evil Empire" rages on. If Russia is analogous to the Greek Empire (Cyrillic) and America to Rome (Roman) then, given the current accelerated rate of development and resource depletion, how long now until Vandals kick in, and we can kick back and get mellow all the long, dark night of "civilization" long? Back at the house remembering how the plant we got this from seemed to be sobbing I happily meditate on collecting the rest, as Vova declines a hit from the long cigarette holder and blows bubbles into his tea.