IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT—ATHENS

I have to back up in my story six hours or so. I found an entry I had written something in my small moleskin notebook—one more thing—about the Ilyushin 76 being a home to the five Ukrainian crew.

Somehow, probably the incredibly loud high-pitched scream of the engines, changed pitch—a decibel lower or something. I checked my wristwatch; it was almost exactly 24:00 UTC, Universal Time Code, what used to be called GMT, Greenwich Mean Time; otherwise known as "the middle of the night."

My back feels fine now. I haven’t spoken about this but I took this trip with a fairly excruciating pain in my lower back—it’s something I’ve dealt with before but it is aggravated each time I lift my heavy camera pack. So the couple of hours of lying perfectly flat on the foam mattress feels like pure heaven. It only hurts when I get up to check things out up in Sergei’s house. We’re over Greece—about to land at the airport in Athens. As I wrote earlier, I experienced my first landing in the bombardier’s window—the airport lights whizzing by just below my perch—very cool!

But now I climb sleepily, so very carefully down the small ladder into the soft midnight air of Greece. It’s a brand new shiny airport with all new trucks and equipment. Anatoly immediately must make a decision whether or not to unpack the huge tow bar, which is kept in the cargo hold, or rent one from the airport. After a quick negotiation he chooses to rent.

Meanwhile Fyodor has hooked up fuel hose to a pump in the belly of the aircraft. In order to pump, he must start up the plane’s own generator which operates a compressor which pumps the fuel. It’s that Russian-built oddity again—but the noise, like the noise of the engines, is twice as loud as any normal generator and compressor. Fyodor, however, obviously used to it—it occurs to me now that he might be mostly deaf—sets up a folding nylon lawn chair under the plane, an arm’s length from the fuel gauges.

After breathing in as much of the smell of Jet Fuel as I want to, I climb back up the ladder where I find Anatoly heating up a cup of tea in the microwave just across from the doorway. He makes one for me as well—which is interesting, as many things seem to be on this trip, because from the heat of the tea, the cup begins to expand in the middle. It instantly reminds me of a pregnant woman only the cup becomes pregnant at an alarmingly fast rate. Of course it makes me wonder if it is going to stop at some point. And, magically, it does—the liquid cooling off just enough, I suppose, just in the nick of time! Anatoly offers me a cookie from an open box on the counter.

The last paragraph I wrote that night was this: "It’s funny, I think, how when you’re on a trip like this, hot tea, even with no milk or sugar, drunk out of a melting cup, tastes better, feels better, than a perfectly brewed cup of Fortum and Mason served on a silver tray in a fancy tea parlor. I am happiest, by far, in these sorts of situations. With men who are real, who have real, useful skills and work at real jobs. I am tired of meeting people with sissy jobs, who work at desks, staring into computer screens, who have lost touch with reality. So many of the people around me at home are chasing the almighty dollar. They are living the lives of cliches obsessed only by greed."

When I get up on my soapbox, it’s usually when I’m tired. But every thought, on some level, deserves to be recorded—at least that’s MY theory—not that, in the light of day, some of them amount to a hill of beans.