That long-ago football game was a chance for me to enjoy a sport I loved, and to feel closer to home. I had just started reading Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again and was afraid it might turn out that way for me. And I was about to go farther away from home than I had ever been, in more ways than one. At the end of the first week of December, during our long winter break, I began a forty-day trip that would take me from Amsterdam through the Scandinavian countries to Russia, then back to Oxford through Prague and Munich. It was, and remains, the longest trip of my life. I went to Amsterdam with my artist friend Aimée Gautier. The streets were covered with Christmas lights and lined with charming shops. The famous red-light district featured perfectly legal prostitutes sitting on display in their windows. Aimée jokingly asked if I wanted to go into one of the places, but I declined.
We toured the main churches, saw the Van Goghs at the Municipal Museum and the Vermeers and Rembrandts at the Rijksmuseum. At closing time, we were asked to leave the wonderful old place. I went to the cloakroom to pick up our coats. There was only one other person left in line to pick up his. When he turned around, I found myself facing Rudolf Nureyev. We exchanged a few words and he asked me if I wanted to go get a cup of tea. I knew Aimée would love it, but just outside the front door, a handsome, frowning young man was anxiously pacing, obviously waiting for Nureyev, so I took a pass. Years later, when I was governor, I found myself in the same hotel with Nureyev in Taipei, Taiwan. We finally got our cup of tea late one night after we had fulfilled our respective obligations. Obviously he didn’t recall our first meeting.
In Amsterdam, I said good-bye to Aimée, who was going home, and left on the train to Copenhagen, Oslo, and Stockholm. At the border between Norway and Sweden, I was almost put out in the middle of nowhere.
At a tiny railroad station, the guards searched the luggage of all the young people, looking for drugs. In my bag they found a lot of Contac pills, which I was taking to a friend in Moscow. Contac was relatively new and for some reason wasn’t yet on the Swedish government’s list of approved drugs. I tried to explain that the pills were just for colds, widely available in American drugstores and without any addictive qualities. The guard confiscated the Contac pills, but at least I wasn’t thrown out into the snowy desolation for drug trafficking, where I might have become an interesting piece of ice sculpture, perfectly preserved until the spring thaw.
After a couple of days in Stockholm, I took an overnight ferry to Helsinki. Late in the night, as I was sitting by myself at a table in the dining area reading a book and drinking coffee, a fight broke out at the bar. Two very drunk men were fighting over the only girl there. Both men were too inebriated to defend themselves but managed to land blows on each other. Before long they were both gushing blood. One of them was a member of the crew, with two or three of his mates just standing there watching. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I got up and walked over to stop the fight before they did themselves serious damage. When I got about ten feet from them, one of the other crewmen blocked my way and said, “You can’t stop the fight. If you try, they’ll both turn on you. And we’ll help them.” When I asked why, he just smiled and replied, “We’re Finns.” I shrugged, turned away, picked up my book, and went to bed, having absorbed another lesson about different cultures. I bet neither one of them got the girl. I checked into a small hotel and began touring the city with Georgetown classmate Richard Shullaw, whose father was deputy chief of mission in the American embassy there. On Christmas Day, the first I’d ever spent away from home, I walked out onto Helsinki Bay. The ice was thick, and there was enough snow on it to give some traction. Amid all the natural beauty I saw a small wooden house a few yards from the shore, and a small round hole in the ice a few yards out. The house was a sauna, and soon a man came out in a skimpy swimsuit. He marched straight out onto the ice and lowered himself into the hole and its frigid water. After a couple of minutes, he got out, went back into the sauna, and repeated the ritual. I thought he was crazier than the two guys in the bar. In time I came to enjoy the hot steam of the sauna, but despite my growing love for Finland during several trips since, I could never get into the ice water.
On New Year’s Eve, I boarded the train to Moscow with an interim stop in Leningrad’s Finland Station. It was the same route Lenin had taken in 1917 when he returned to Russia to take over the revolution. It was on my mind because I had read Edmund Wilson’s marvelous book To the Finland Station. When we came to the Russian border, another isolated outpost, I met my first real live Communist, a pudgy, cherubic-looking guard. When he eyed my bags suspiciously, I expected him to check for drugs. Instead, he asked in his heavily accented English, “Dirty books? Dirty books? Got any dirty books?” I laughed and opened my book bag, pouring out Penguin paperback novels by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. He was so disappointed. I guess he longed for contraband that would enliven those long, lonely nights on the frigid frontier.
The Soviet train was filled with spacious compartments. Each car had a giant samovar full of hot tea that was served along with black bread by an elderly woman. I shared my berth with an interesting man who had been the coach of the Estonian boxing team in the 1936 Olympics, three years before the Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states. We both spoke enough German to communicate a little. He was a lively fellow who told me with absolute confidence that one day Estonia would be free again. In 2002, when I traveled to Tallinn, Estonia’s beautiful old capital, I told this story to the audience I addressed. My friend, former president Lennart Meri, was at the speech and did some quick research for me. The man’s name was Peter Matsov. He died in 1980. I think often of him and our New Year’s Eve train ride. I wish he had lived another decade to see his dream come true.
It was nearly midnight and the dawn of a new decade when we pulled into Leningrad. I got out and walked for a few minutes, but all I saw were policemen dragging inebriated celebrants off the streets in a driving snowstorm. It would be nearly thirty years before I got to see the splendor of the city. By then the Communists were gone and its original name, St. Petersburg, had been restored. On New Year’s morning 1970, I began an amazing five days. I had prepared for the trip to Moscow by getting a guidebook and a good street map in English since I couldn’t read the Russian Cyrillic script. I checked into the National Hotel, just off Red Square. It had a huge high-ceiling lobby, comfortable rooms, and a nice restaurant and bar.