Ukraine Day!

We’re gonna call this Freeform Monday. Happy Ukraine Independence Day!!! Today is the day my home regained its freedom, or at least ratified it by issuing our own Declaration of Independence. It didn’t use to be that special; most Ukrainians didn’t even celebrate. A few members of my own family believed that the real holiday was December 1st, when the vote passed that ensured our independence, but to me that’s pedantic. What matters is that we are now free and will continue that way into the future. In honor of the sacrifices of my family and all families of Ukraine, let me tell you a story about the real Ukraine, a story about the provinces that you never really get to hear.

Even other Ukrainians who grew up in Kyiv or Sumy or Lviv will ask me, “What are the provinces like?” I usually respond with some off-the-cuff response about it being “Soviet” or “poor” or “mafioso,” but it’s honestly pretty different from that. My friend told me once, “If I want to fly an F-16 in Ukraine, I can find a guy and fly a fucking F-16.” My grandmother also used to say, “Japanese can build the best cars, but can they take three Gorkys and stitch ’em together into something that runs?” That’s the provinces, that’s the beauty of it, that’s my home.

I lived there every summer for 18 years. I’d go back with my dad to our family farm outside Korosten (a small provincial city near the border with Belarus). My family has had that farm for probably two or three hundred years in different forms. The small region that we live in actually resisted collectivization and had some autonomy. The farm never left our family, even in the Soviet era; it’s mostly because it’s a damn swamp. If you’ve seen the Chernobyl show, you know the region. The farm is probably an hour- or two-hour drive from the edge of the exclusion zone, down a bunch of old dirt roads that are tracts of mud and moss.

To the story!

I was probably 8 or 9, so about 2004 or 2005. I was born in 1997, but I don’t remember what year this takes place. Let’s just say early 2000s. There were still some military depots in the region, but the army was so unfunded they operated with only a few men at most; sometimes they had no guards at all. They were full of stockpiles of old munitions, tanks, etc., and you could more or less walk in and do what you wanted. A lot of the heavier stuff had been moved, sold, or poached, but you could still find some small-caliber bullets. Sometimes the soldiers were so poorly paid they’d take goods off the base and sell them to people in the nearby towns and villages to supplement their income.

My cousin and I had the bright idea to go scrounge and see if we could find some stuff of our own. We hoped for some light grenades, maybe a pistol, or at least some high-caliber bullets. We got small-arms munitions and half a tank of gas we bought off a guy named Dmitry for about 12 bucks USD I’d brought from back home. I took our loot back to the farm, and my cousin went off to town to buy us some kvas and some pancakes.

When I got back to the farm, I put a blanket down in the pasture in between a couple of sheep who stared at me like I had the plague. I pulled apart the cartridges and dumped the powder out on the cigar papers my uncle used to roll. The powder in the bullets was damp from the swamp air, and I wasted half a box of matches trying to get a pinch to light to test out the explosiveness. When my cousin, Roman, came back with our treats, our minds collaborated and came up with the idea to use the egg warmers to dry out the powder enough to hold a spark. That worked, and we got a tiny bit to crack from a couple of feet away by throwing matches at the pinch until one hit.

Now, we never tried out the power of the gas. That was a huge mistake. Roman wanted to see how big of a bomb we could make with our new toys, and me, being impressionable and a couple of years younger, was totally on board. We poured the gasoline into an old pail and took it to the furthest side of the pasture, about half an acre away from any of the animals and buildings, maybe further. I don’t really remember. We at least had enough sense not to light shit near the buildings, but not enough to save any of our gas for later. When we got out there, we wrapped all the gunpowder into a couple of cigar wrappers and threw it into an old kvas bottle, then made a makeshift fuse with a long piece of rope we had from the shed. We put some wax on the rope to make sure it would keep the fire going long enough to hit the gunpowder. We were set for experimentation.

We ran probably a baseball field’s length back. Roman lit the fuse, chucked it towards the pail, and then we waited for what seemed like an eternity.

BOOOOMMMMMM!

I don’t remember the actual explosion, probably ’cause I got knocked flat on my ass and my ears rang like I’d gotten punched by Usyk ten times. My vision was totally white, and I thought I’d gone blind. When it finally cleared, my uncle was over me with cold water in a bucket and threw it onto both of us. The best thing was, when I sat up, I remember all that was left of our bomb was what seemed like a four-foot-wide and three-foot-deep crater, some smoking pieces of fence, and a burning tree. It was fucking awesome!

We burned off our eyebrows, and I had a nasty sunburn for a month. Mucking stalls and pig pens was the punishment. Damn, that was fun. I wouldn’t do it any differently.

That’s the real provincial Ukraine, and it’s goddamn awesome.

Cheers and Слава Україні!