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Homestead.org in the Former Soviet Union continued, page 5

The trail we were following was only cow-path wide, but it soon joined a wider one where four-wheeled vehicles had worn a pair of tracks through the clover.  This road bypassed the village and went through a section where the government had harvested a particular sort of yellow pea that I was unfamiliar with before O. started feeding them to me mashed as a low-carb substitute for potatoes.

Shortly after we crested what you might want to call a hill, we saw a four-wheel box-trailer sitting out in the field.  This, I was told, was full of bee-hives owned by the People’s Republic of Belarus.  I gather that they simply pull this trailer to different locations following the bloom of the different crops.  I don’t know if we do anything like this in America or not.  I believe the standard practice is to load individual beehives onto trucks and take them where they belong.  Whether this trailer had individual hives inside or not, I can’t say, but it had a few dozen openings with landing boards where bees were coming and going.

About a hundred feet beyond the trailer, there was a small white pup-tent partly covered with brush.  Outside on the ground were various items that you might use in camping as well as a little garbage and two sticks holding up a line of string on which mushrooms were hanging to dry.  O. told me that this was where the guard for the beehive trailer stayed.

“All the time, you mean?” 

“Yes, all the time.” 

“You mean that’s all he does all day long, all year long?” 

“Yes.  Well… maybe not in the winter.” 

 I’d thought the old lady tending the cow had a boring job, but this just seemed incredible to me. 

As we came closer, there was indeed a pretty awful-looking individual sitting in the opening of the tent looking like he’d worn the same clothes for approximately the last six months.  He was sort of the human version of the cows, because we all walked within about three feet of his grimy legs and nobody said a word.

This struck me as kinda odd, because I’d expected a pause in the walk and a minute or so of tedious small talk or at the very least a passing “Dobry dien!”, so I walked up close to O. and asked her under my breath why nobody spoke.

“Nobody knows him.”

As I mentioned earlier eastern European social customs are not so cheerily pseudo-polite as in the west, or as in the states, at least.

We continued on to the one side of the field where the cleared land became a dense pine forest that appeared to have been planted there, all the trees being the same height and in fairly uniform rows, and we followed the trail which skirted this forest down to an area where we saw several shacks and crude fences that marked this group of dachas.

All the dachas appeared to be about a half-acre of ground, roughly square.

Most of them were planted fence-to-fence with vegetables, fruits, and flowers. “Dom” is the Russian word for house and that’s what Tolya and Tanya called the building, although it was really just a moderately well-built shack of maybe ten by sixteen, so I could see why Tolya wouldn’t be overly worried about the fact that he hadn’t paid the taxes for five or ten years. 

Still, I’ve seen would-be homesteading city-folks try to go through an Ozark winter in little more. 

It had a main room whose ceiling barely cleared the top of my head, with a table beside a glass-less window and blanket-covered benches on either side, with a sort of tool-porch/foyer on the back, or north, side.  Additionally, there was a grape arbor on one side of the building that made a nice place to sit out of the sun for lunch.

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