A Moment of Silence

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by Haden Webster Ware

This piece was written as the admission's

Essay for the Berkeley Application- 2/93

Our plane landed in Leningrad six hours after we had departed from Boston. I remember feeling as if we had crossed over or gone through some sort of zone to be here. This place was not in my world; it was black and white with shades of gray. The inhabitants were Russians more than they were humans. I had arrived onto a movie set where the actors were stereotypes and prejudged characters that I had

created in my mind before we even arrived. I had read the books and see the movies of the land I was in: a land with white tights but dark hopes. Back in the states I had sen the long lies for food and the poverty-stricken society on the television, as proof that communism was wrong. This was all I knew of this place, yet I thought I knew it all. I would soon find that no book or movie could describe this nation I was in.

We had come over as a crew team to race the Soviet Junior national team, and were to stay with their rowers while we were there. I was the only one on the tam who spoke any Russian at all, and I was quickly elected as our interpreter. After a couple of attempts to figure out our competitor’s names, I soon found that two years of Russian was not going to take me far, but by the second day we had had some success in talking to two rowers named Sasha and Peter. They enjoyed trading shirts and listening to American music. I began to look at these two as two kids rather than two products of a communist society. No book or television program ever captured the individuals of the USSR; it was always a Communist nation made up of Communist people. Sasha and Peter were not communists, they were kids; they could care less what governmental system they lived their lives under.

One night my roommate and I were awakened and dragged out of bed by our two friends, Sasha and Peter. The night, I remember, had hit its climax, and it was as dark as it got at this time of year which was a kind of hazy smoke-like gray.

The river had a dark, motionless look to it as if it were asleep, and as Sasha placed his four man kayak into it, the water gave a shiver of life, and a nice breeze picked up. We had never kayaked before and weren’t too thrilled at two in the morning about the idea of learning. Sasha and Peter showed us how to get in and we soon found ourselves sitting in a wooden four-man kayak in the middle of a river with two Russians. I was in the back, and as we began to move, it was rather poetic how we moved together following the man in front. And in this quiet mist, this silent movement of unison our language barrier dropped.

We no longer had to speak to each other to communicate; we were just four kids, two Russians, and two Americans working as one to glide along the sleeping river. I don’t believe that feeling will ever be matched, nor will I feel as close to two people as I did on that river.