We wake about 8:30 and drive the last few miles to Minsk. The outskirts of the city are a sea of huge gray and blue apartment blocks, and there are more under construction. They look good from a distance but Mike says when you get up close you can see that the concrete is badly finished and usually flaking off. He's right.
And the people are poor. Mike's girl Riassa Jarkova doesn't work but another trucker's girl friend is a maternity nurse in a hospital, and she makes $35 per month. Riassa was a ballerina with the national theater, but the theater is shut down.
Riassa lost her hearing after a smallpox vaccination when she was young, and now she lives with two friends and their child in a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of a huge block. Mike tries to spot the block as we drive past on the highway, but they all look alike. The land between us and the apartments is a sea of mud. We can see the trails where jeeps and light cars have cut straight across, but Mike doesn't want to try it with this truck.
The interchange is about five miles down the highway and we drive back through the streets of the suburban development. This part of town looks like the worst of the planned housing that city planners in the States and Canada built back in the 60's. There are blocks and blocks of huge apartment buildings, and a few schools and clinics.
There are dozens of street-corner kiosks and a few commissary-type stores, but no stores you would want to shop in and no factories or offices. The tens of thousands of people who live around here obviously have to commute to work, shopping and entertainment. Mike says the buses are free but I don't see many of them, and I assume that most people commute in the rattle-trap jalopies I see parked everywhere. Later I find that if you don't have a car and can't afford a taxi, it's hard to get downtown.
We park on the street and walk through a parking lot to the block Riassa lives in. Six or eight doors are spaced along the front of the building and there are four pay phones, with a line at each one, in front of the door where Mike turns in.
The wooden door is broken but it opens easily to a dingy gray hall with concrete walls and shallow stairs. Up the first flight of stairs there is an elevator, with a manual door and a car just big enough for two people. It works, but later I find it's faster and easier to walk to the fifth floor. The steps are not as steep as European or American stairs.
From a landing on the fifth floor there are two doors with a cluster of electric bell buttons outside each. The bell buttons were installed after the building was built, and the wiring runs along the surface of the concrete wall. Because Riassa and her friends are deaf, their button lights a lamp in their apartment.
Mike rings. A man answers the outer door and waves us down the hall to where the apartment door is open. He doesn't speak but Mike tells me his name is Uri.
Riassa can't speak much but she can communicate well enough with me, and very well with Mike. Now pregnant she still moves like a ballet dancer and, with straight blonde hair and high cheekbones she is almost a stereotype of Slavic beauty.
The apartment is clean and well cared for, but tiny. Mike and Riassa introduce me to Uri and his wife Elena, and their three-year old daughter. A couple of suitcases stand in the front hall.
"Uri and Elena and the kid move out when I come," Mike explains. "They stay with friends upstairs."
That's one solution to two families in a one-bedroom apartment. We take our shoes off before we enter the inner rooms.
The living-bedroom has two couches that fold out to double beds and a big cupboard in one corner. The kitchen is tiny, with a small sink, stove and fridge and just barely room for a small table with three chairs.
The toilet has a small room to itself. The bathroom next to it has a small tub and a big sink, and a long swivel tap that can swing from one to the other.
The kettle is on and Riassa makes tea. Uri and Elena leave, and Mike goes in for a bath. We've been on the road a couple of days at this point, and truckers learn to take a bath when they can.
I take my book into the living/bedroom, and wait my turn in the tub.
After lunch Mike drops the trailer and the three of us head downtown in the tractor, looking for the British Consulate so Mike can get Riassa's papers straightened out. Without the trailer the tractor is still about twice the size of a big car, but to Mike it's a runabout.
Parts of the downtown are nice. The architecture looks like an old European city but this area was scorched earth in World War II and I think most of the buildings were built since then. The main streets are generally wider than they would be in either North America or Europe.
Mike has been trying to get Riassa's papers for a while and he knows where he's going. He parks on a wide street a block or so away, and he and Riassa walk to the consulate while I check out the neighborhood.
It looks like some kind of park beside us, but I can't get in because there's a high cast-iron fence. On the wide sidewalk outside the fence there's a row of kiosks selling liquor, cigarettes and chocolate -- the three commodities that you can get anywhere in Russia -- plus an assortment of candy, toiletries and what-not. American cigarettes cost 40,000 rubles, or about $4 American or a half week's salary for the average Russian, but I see one man carrying about 20 packs of them in his arms.
Several of the kiosks are closed, and the others don't seem to have much business.
The street is wide and reasonably busy. About a hundred yards down it spreads out into a traffic circle, surrounded by ornate curved buildings. One has a sign and I assume it's a store, but I don't know how long Mike and Riassa are going to be so I don't go far from the truck.
That turns out to be a good idea, because they come back in a few minutes. The consulate has moved since they were here last, and Mike and Riassa have directions to the new address on Karl Marx Street. Mike is a pro at following directions but the road signs are written in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, and it's hard to spot street names.
A half hour later we pull in to a side-street and park illegally. I will stay in the truck this time, to argue with any Russian cops who want to ticket us. Before Mike comes back a police car passes and the cops give me a hard look, but by this time I am in the driver's seat and pretending to be a driver who has stopped for a minute to check his paperwork. The cops drive on, and Mike comes back before they do.
No luck yet, he tells me as we drive home. The problem is that the Consulate seems to be afraid Riassa will go on welfare in England. They're worried because Mike is "only" a truck driver, and that's ironic.
In fact the average truck driver makes more than the average white collar worker, and a long-range international driver like Mike has more responsibility and makes more money than most consular officials.
This trip, for example, Ralph Davies trusts Mike to take about $250,000 worth of Davies' equipment and several million dollars worth of IBM computer from England to Uzbekistan. Mike has thousands of dollars of company cash to spend as he sees fit, and he is expected to deal with all the problems his truck, the road, the weather, bandits and the police, customs, immigration and highway trucking authorities of nine countries can throw at him. From the moment he leaves the company yard he is on his own, and for weeks at a time he is expected to plan his work and solve his problems with no supervision from the head office.
But in England Mike is classed as semi-skilled labor. If he didn't drive international, he says, he would be considered unskilled labor.
A couple of years ago I rode across England with Paul Hincheliffe, grandson of one of the founders of J & H Hinchliffe of Bury, near Manchester. The company has about 40 big trucks and a couple of warehouses, and Paul is one of the heirs apparent.
But when Paul told his high-school guidance teacher that he was going to drive truck for a living, the teacher tried to talk him out of it. Paul was too smart to be a truck driver, the teacher said. He could make something of himself -- perhaps even be a teacher!
In fact most of Hincheliffe's drivers make more money than most schoolteachers. As a truck driver Paul obviously has a good chance to wind up in a top management position in a family company worth quite a few million dollars, but the school teacher couldn't see that. All he knows is that a truck driver doesn't wear a white shirt to work.
If Paul or any other English boy wanted to be an airline pilot his teachers would applaud, because pilots are considered high class. That's because planes are more expensive than trucks, and because rich people ride in planes and some fly them for fun.
But in fact the average truck driver takes more responsibility, and has to apply more skill and diligence than the average pilot.
When he sets out on a long flight the airline pilot steps into a plane that has been completely serviced and inspected before he sees it. He performs his own inspection too, but that's just a formality. Mechanics who understand the machinery better than he does have already approved it.
The pilot also has a back-up pilot and possibly a navigator to help him in the air. Before he takes off he is given a complete weather briefing, and he will get weather reports by radio as he flies.
The airport is designed for only one purpose -- so airplanes can take off and land in safety. If a runway is a tight fit for a modern plane, it will be extended. If the weather is not good enough to fly, the airport will be closed and the pilot will be told to wait.
When a plane is ready to take off airport controllers tell the pilot which runway to use, and when to use it. When the plane is aloft air traffic control tells the pilot which direction and what altitude to fly, and will warn him if any other airplanes come near him.
A commercial pilot shares the high-altitude airways only with other trained pilots, and they all take orders from the same air traffic controllers. Radar and automatic systems tell each pilot where he is, where he is going and where other traffic is at all times. Most times an auto-pilot will take the plane to it's destination, and in the days before auto-pilots a well trimmed plane would pretty well fly itself anyway.
When the plane gets to its destination airport controllers tell the pilot when and where to land, and check his altitude and approach on the way in. If the airport is in a foreign country there is no language problem because all the signals are standardized, all airlines around the world work in English, and the airline will have people there to handle any paperwork.
The pilot takes nominal responsibility for the lives of several hundred people in his plane but he shares that responsibility with dozens of other people and, except in an emergency, the pilot requires very little actual skill or knowledge.
When a truck driver starts out he must inspect his own vehicle, and if he finds a problem he may be expected to repair it himself.
Most modern roads are designed for trucks but some were designed for horse and carriage. I watched Paul Hincheliffe ease his truck though streets that I would consider crowded for a car, and he showed me the route into one plant where his truck actually touches buildings on both sides of a zig-zag lane that leads to a loading dock.
Another professional truck driver hitched a lift with us on that run, because he had seen the laneway and found it hard to believe that anyone could take a truck through it.
Some places a trucker may have to maneuver through roadways laid out by the company president's wife, who has a sense of artistic landscaping. When he finally backs up to the loading door he may have to maneuver around other trucks, or parked cars, to get there.
Other men load a truck but they may not know or care how much it can carry or how the weight should be distributed. The driver takes responsibility for the total weight and the balance and he has to make sure it's tied down safety. In most cases he does not have scales to check weight and balance of his load but government inspectors may stop, inspect and weigh his truck any time, and fine him for any violations.
On the road a truck driver may have to find his way through the quirky traffic and strange streets of an unfamiliar town and, at the same time, pay constant attention to his own driving and to the often-unpredictable driving of thousands of amateurs. He's not likely to kill as many people as an airline pilot might, but almost any time in his eight or ten hour day a few seconds of inattention could kill a half-dozen people.
If we consider all the people he meets on the road, a truck driver takes responsibility for the lives of thousands of people every day.
And if he makes a mistake, the chances are that he will be blamed for it. Even if someone else makes a mistake, irresponsible journalists are liable to blame the truck driver for it.
A good truck driver may have more skill, knowledge and responsibility than the average company manager, and English truckers hold England's economic future in their hands.
Three hundred years ago sailors gave England the biggest empire in world history. After the Navigation Acts of 1651 English ships roamed the world, competing with the Dutch for control of Europe's trade and building a commercial empire. It's more than co-incidence that Dutch and English trucks are now leading contenders in the race to handle freight to and from Eastern Europe. While English trucks carry most of the freight, English factories can compete to supply high-tech goods to the East.
Mike and truckers like him are highly skilled and responsible adventurers but to civil servants who can't understand what they do, let alone do it themselves, they are semi-skilled labor.
From the consulate we drive back to the apartment to pick up Uri, and then head downtown to go shopping. This time we stop at a major hotel, where I can change $100 American into Rubles.
At 11,470 rubles to the dollar I get 1.14 million rubles in 20,000 ruble notes, counted by machine. I plan to use the money to take Mike and Riassa to dinner but as it happens I pay by credit card, and I still have that wad of rubles when I get back to England more than a month later.
Then we go to a "foreign" shopping center where Riassa and Uri load up on groceries and Mike pays $8 American for a kilogram of cheese and a small package of salami. That's expensive but Mike says they can't buy good food in the local stores, and he wants Riassa to eat well. He used to send her money in the mail but most of it didn't get through. Mike thinks someone in the post office found out about it, and kept an eye on her mail.
As we walk through the downtown I stop a public toilet. I don't know that I need to buy toilet paper before I go in, but Uri buys some and passes it to me in the stall. On the way home Mike and Riassa stop off at a clinic near the apartment, and I drive Uri home in the tractor. Uri says he never learned to drive. In the apartment Uri and I drink Russian champagne and watch a dubbed version of Rescue 911 on TV.
That night I take the five of them -- Mike and Riassa and Uri and Elena and their daughter -- to dinner downtown. The "Rincon Espanol" is one of the trendy spots in town, and most of the patrons are foreign. Prices on the menu are in American dollars and the bill for five of us comes to about $250. Not bad by world standards, but five months' pay for the average Russian.
We take a taxi home from the restaurant. The driver has a beer in his cup holder.
Mike and Riassa expect me to sleep in the apartment but I'd just as soon stay in the truck. It's parked right outside the apartment but, about 11 o'clock, Uri offers to walk down with me. He doesn't think it's a good idea for me to walk outside the apartment building at night. I think about that as I sleep. I'm glad I don't live in this town.