A huge, glimmering white castle towers over the flat, open plains on the eastern outskirts of Enid, Oklahoma. As a youth growing up in the country to the east of town, I often stood amidst the endless wheat fields and viewed the monumental Union Equity grain elevators that, in my innocent vision of the world, rivaled the castles of Europe in magnificence and splendor.
At that time in 1982, my father worked as a charter pilot for a small outfit at Enid’s Woodring Air Field. One evening he came home from work and told the family that he’d flown some Russians from the Oklahoma City airport to Enid because they were buying grain from Union Equity. As a naïve thirteen-year-old, the prospect of my father flying Russian government officials alone in a small plane both terrified and thrilled me.
Wow, Russians! I thought. Real live communists in the flesh! When I pondered the magnitude of the situation, I realized that Enid must be pretty important if the Russians flew all the way over here to buy grain. My father then explained that Enid had "the largest grain-storage-capacity elevators in the world.” All that meant to me was that we had the most grain in the world, and the Russians had to come over here to get it.
The Russians scared me. I began to think that maybe they were really here to take over Enid and make us a communist state in the middle of America. I had never seen a real Russian before, except in photos and on TV. I wondered what they looked like in person... Did they have blood-red eyes? Fanged teeth? Or did they look just like normal people? When I thought about it for a while, I realized that Dad probably wasn’t afraid to be in the plane alone with them. After all, Dad had spent three tours in ‘Nam and was one of the first green berets, and my pop could kick anybody’s ass, even a Russian’s.
After I had allowed my imagination to hijack my sensibility, I finally asked Dad some questions. “Hey, Dad,” I began nonchalantly. “What were those Russian people like? Were they scary? Did they even speak English? I mean, what were they like?”
He rolled his eyes and chuckled, calmly replying, “Yes, they spoke English, and from what I could tell, they were good folks.”
A bit disappointed by my father’s anti-climactic response, yet feeling foolish for having considered such absurdities, I walked out into the open summer evening and was embraced by the warm dusty wind, which in Enid, never seems to stop blowing. As I watched the fuchsia sun melt into the horizon near the grain elevators, I admired the ripples made by its multitude of tall, vertical columns. Slowly, after the last light of sun disappeared from the evening sky, it occurred to me that tonight, somewhere in the Soviet Union, the Russians had eaten the same bread for dinner that I had.
