Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

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Celebrate May Day

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Like a lot of traditions, the idea of the May Day celebration became one thing, then another and then fell into disfavor because of a different idea all together.

May Day grew from Celtic tradition of Beltane and the Germanic Walpurgis Night. These festivals celebrate the coming of Spring. As Christianity took hold throughout Europe it became less of a pagan holiday and more of a secular one; people simply took the opportunity to get outside and celebrate.

The earliest settlers to America brought the tradition with them, although the Puritans did their best to stamp it out. One of the most notorious instances came when Thomas Morton formed a breakaway colony called Merrymount. His free-thinking colony was eventually stamped out by Governor William Bradford and Captain Miles Standish. Morton wrote:

“The inhabitants of Merrymount … did devise amongst themselves to have … Revels, and merriment after the old English custom … & therefore brewed a barrell of excellent beer, & provided a case of bottles to be spent, with other good cheer, for all comers of that day. And upon Mayday they brought the Maypole to the place appointed, with drums, guns, pistols, and other fitting instruments, for that purpose; and there erected it with the help of Savages, that came thither of purpose to see the manner of our Revels…”

In the mid-20th Century, we stopped celebrating May Day as it became associated with the Soviet Union’s International Workers Day. No one wanted anything to do with the taint of Communism. The first time I remember celebrating May Day was ironically in Russia. In 1995, I was on my fourth trip to Russia as a freelance journalist. A friend invited me to visit the Caucuses in southern Russia.

We flew to the airport in Mineralnye Vody (Mineral Water) and then traveled up to Mount Elbrus—the highest peak in Europe. Communism was over, but they didn’t want to lose the holiday. We had a picnic in the forest with fresh shashlik (shish-ka-bobs) and plenty of toasting, music and dancing. Did I mention the toasting?Wow.

Anyway, I think we are missing out by not celebrating May Day. We don’t need another “official’ holiday. That tends to take some of the fun out of holidays anyway, when they become “recognized”. I think we need to make May Day like St. Patrick’s Day…an excuse for some revelry and enjoyment. The people of Merrymount had it right and the people I met in the Caucuses did too.

I think it is time to take May Day back. Go out and get some merriment today!

Introduction to Russia: The New Age

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The following is the introduction to the ebook Russia: The New Age. The book is a collection of articles and observations based on more than six months spent in Russia. It is not intended to be the definitive work on Russian history. Rather, it is intended as a glimpse into the lives and thoughts of Russians as they lived through one of the most turbulent periods in their history—from 1993 to present.

Visit the book’s Amazon page to download a copy. And you’ll get to see nearly 100 images spanning 1993 to 2010 from Russia as well.

You can also read other blog posts about the book here and here and see a few selected images here.

Introduction


“Before 1993 I could predict the future, not now. We live all the time like we are on the top of the volcano.” Nikolay, 2008.

Twenty years ago, I visited Russia for the first time. That trip, and the place, changed my life and redirected my career in ways I never expected.
In the summer of 1992, I was working as a reporter in the Charleston (WV) Gazette-Mail Metro Department and Dr. Virginia Simmons invited me to report on the West Virginia Governor’s Honors Academy being held at (what was then) West Virginia State College. The academy was a summer program for top students from around state. That particular year they were fortunate to have a Russian teacher joining the faculty along with two young Russian students as part of an international exchange program. Following that visit, the West Virginia Department of Education was asked to bring a group of educators to Russia, specifically to Kaliningrad, Russia, to help the city government rebuild its education system. Their text books were useless and their instructional system was outdated.
Remember, the Soviet Union only officially ended on December 25, 1991. The Russian people were struggling to recover from the dissolution of a system that had controlled every aspect of their lives for more than 70 years. I recall hearing many Russian friends say “We were told for 70 years that we had the best of everything. Now we find out we were lied to.”
Dr. Simmons asked me if I wanted to go along on that first trip to Russia. I thought about it for about half a second before taking out a loan against my car and signing up for the trip. My boss at the time, Diane Lytle (now Wallace) at the Metro Staff was kind enough to allow me to go. They weren’t going to pay for the trip, but she kept me on the payroll with the understanding that I would publish stories when I got home. That was exactly what I wanted to do so it worked out perfectly. I was the only journalist on the trip. I had a couple cameras, a rag tag collection of film (slide film and black and white negative film) and a lot of wide-eyed innocence. At the time, I’d never been out of the United States and had never been on an airplane.
The trip affected everyone tremendously. When we got home, we all ran into the problem that our friends didn’t want to hear about Russia nearly as much as we wanted to talk about it. We ended up having a couple parties to get together and share pictures and memories. Probably the most significant result of that first trip was the creation of a nonprofit foundation, called the Russia and West Virginia Foundation, with four areas of focus: education, culture, business and community. Dr. Simmons was the president.
That April we pulled off something that we shouldn’t have been able to do. The foundation hosted a visit from the Russian Presidential Orchestra around West Virginia with a final concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. It was the first time the orchestra had ever been outside of a Communist country. Consider the logistics of getting 70 plus musicians to concert sites all over the state, along with feeding them, housing them and promoting a series of concerts with just a couple months to put it all together. In hindsight, we were crazy. But, we pulled it off and got it done, largely thanks to Dr. Simmons and her attitude of not accepting “no” as an answer from anyone. West Virginia University and Dr. Phil Faini (Dean of the College of Creative Arts) were instrumental in this effort, with their knowledge of moving large groups of musicians around.
The Russia and West Virginia Foundation has organized more than 400 exchanges since 1993 for everyone from teachers to students, doctors, artists, pharmacists, cosmetologists and architects. A Russian sculptor worked with a sculptor from West Virginia and they erected a statue at Haddad River Front Park in Charleston. Several Russian folk music groups have toured in the United States and the music group The Esquires toured Russia, even ending up on Russian national television. There have been dance exchanges both ways alongside humanitarian efforts including arranging for a young Russian girl to have brain surgery to remove a tumor. It literally saved her life.  Russians have opened businesses in American and Americans have opened businesses in Russia.
True to its core, the Foundation has coordinated efforts between universities to write and publish books, public school teachers to publish a comparison of standards for the first through third grades, and nearly 100 exchanges with Russian and American students, with upwards of 25 students at a time visiting the opposite country for as much as month, staying with host families and studying language and culture. Other students have lived in Russia for up to a year while several Russian students have attended university in the United States beginning with Dmitri Saveliev. There are even 4-H programs in Korolev because of the Foundation.
Through Kaliningrad/Korolev’s connection to the Russian Space Program, Fairmont State University created a special Space Scholar program where students worked at various space-related sites and projects in the summer. Several groups of students attend the NASA Space Camp on United States Information Agency (USIA) grants.
I returned to Russia in March of 1994, this time with Dr. Simmons and Dr. Ted Calisto. They were doing more lecturing on educational processes and I was photographing everything I could and conducting interviews. In August of 1994, I did two things on the same day. 1. I quit my job at the newspaper 2. I opened an exhibit of my Russian photographs from those first two trips.
Just a few days after leaving my job, I left for Russia for the third time. This time I planned to stay for three months. I had my own apartment and a few days a week I went to School 11 and talked to English classes to let them practice. That trip was followed by another month-long trip in May of 1995. I took one more trip to Russia in April 1997 and then my career took off in other directions and I didn’t go back until 2008.
Flash forward 11 years and I was able to work out an opportunity to go to Russia and re-photograph many of the same people and places I had visited in the 1990s. Fortunately, through the foundation, we had stayed in contact with many of those people. On my return, after talking to dozens of people and exploring a number of different opportunities, and again with the assistance of Dr. Simmons and the Russia and West Virginia Foundation, I was able to put together a photo exhibit of my work that ended up being displayed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 2009.
My work was part of a larger exhibit of art designed to bring people together organized by a nonprofit group in Myrtle Beach called the Global Awareness Project. One really interesting side benefit that came from that was the group decided to recognize the Russia and West Virginia Foundation in its annual calendar. They commissioned an artist to paint a picture that would represent all of the work done by the Foundation. The artist used two of my images as inspiration for the painting. It was featured for the month of July in the 2010 calendar.
After the success of the exhibit in South Carolina, we were able to take the exhibit to Moscow, Russia; Charleston, West Virginia and Bordeaux, France and back in Myrtle Beach in 2010.  You will find the 30 images, along with the Russian and English captions from the exhibit, at the end of this book.
Dr. Simmons, Ginny to everyone who knows her, was responsible for most of my opportunities relating to Russia and has had a profound influence on my career and my life. She opened doors for me I really never expected to see opened. Case in point, the opportunity to exhibit my work in Russia and France came about because Ginny met some Russian film producers on a trip to Russia in 2009 (immediately after the Global Awareness Project exhibit). She told them about my work and they invited me to exhibit my photographs at two film festivals.
What follows is a collection of stories, notes, blogs and photographs I made while traveling in Russia and working at home. I hope you find the stories and events included in here as interesting as I did when I was living through them. I remember saying in the 90s that it would take Russia 25 years to catch up to the West. They did it in less than 15.
For the record, the Russia I am talking about is not the Russia of government, policy and diplomacy. I am talking about the Russia of the people.

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Taking a cruise

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Just before leaving on my honeymoon a few weeks ago (read it here), I wrote a blog about the trepidations I had for going on a cruise. As it turned out, a couple of my fears were realized and a couple turned out to be totally wrong. In spite of the parts that annoyed me though, we had a great time.

This trip was actually a family vacation paid for by my new father-in-law (thank you, Ben!). It wasn’t really a honeymoon, even though we turned it into one. We had a whole crew along with us. That was never a problem though as there were plenty of activities on board that we could all go our separate ways and just meet up for dinner. And it was kind of nice to have more people to have fun with. It was also a great chance to get to know my new family more.

The only real complaint I have about the whole trip was the other passengers. Some of them just seemed to have lost their minds. They would push and shove and elbow on the way to dinner or when fighting for deck chairs. There were times I wanted to escape to get some peace and quiet and that was pretty hard to come by. At times it was even difficult in my room when some function was happening on the promenade.

El Morro Fortress in San Juan, PR

One concern I had before we left was not being able to spend enough time in any port to really learn anything about it. And while the time was short, it ended up being ok. I just thought about the time in port as a “sampler.” It gave me chance to visit a couple places I have never been and think about where I want to visit for an extended stay.

This was a nine-day cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Explorer of the Sea. We had four different ports of call: Bermuda, St. Maarten, San Juan, Puerto Rico and the cruise line’s private beach Labadee, Haiti. I really enjoyed St. Maarten the most and plan to go back there to dive. The history we saw on a walking tour of Old San Juan was really cool and it made me want to learn more.

The best parts of the cruise for me were when I made personal connections. I always make it a point to the people serving me. I want to treat them as humans rather than servants…something a few of my fellow passengers forgot. We ended up growing very fond of Michelle, our server at dinner and Elena, the bartender in the dining room. Both of them were Filipino and always pleasant and happy, even though they worked extremely long hours. Stephen was a waiter in the lounge where we hung out to listen to music after dinner. He was from St. Vincent and a lot of fun to talk to. He made me want to visit his island as well.

As I’ve already said, I really enjoyed St. Maarten and plan to go back there. It was especially good for three reasons. We went snorkeling with a very small group and had a great time with the crew drinking a large amount of rum punch once we got out of the water. The second reason the day was so cool, was I got to share the ocean with my (bonus) daughter Kaitlin. I think maybe she’ll be interested in becoming a diver some time soon. The third reason why the day was so much fun is I was on a 60-foot catamaran with fewer than 20 people and was within touching distance of the ocean. I could feel it with every wave and enjoy the salt air in my face. I realized that was what I had been missing. Time close to the water. Afterward, on the cruise, I tried to get away from the pool area and closer to the ocean’s surface so I could smell it and hear it.

Predictably, I also found some inspiration on board for a new novel. I think this is going to end up being a really cool story if a bit of a new direction for me from my other novels. It’ll be about six months before it is ready, but stay tuned.

Time to get writing!.

Traveling a different way

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Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to travel quite a bit, both inside the United States and internationally. Quite a lot of that travel has been while I was working in one capacity or another. Aside from the work aspect, what that meant was that I usually spent time with locals. They showed me around, told me stories and helped me to understand the culture of my destination. That sort of travel isn’t exactly glamorous, but it is certainly enlightening. And it can be a lot of fun.

But here in a couple days, I’m leaving on an entirely different type of travel. I’m taking a cruise. Yep, on one of those big, behemoth cruise ships that holds thousands of people. We’ll be stopping along the way in four destinations, but literally we’ll only be in each one for a few hours at a time. (Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but the longest stop is about eight hours.)

I have to admit to some mixed feelings about this trip. I’m sure it will be a blast and we will laugh and joke and have lots of fun. There will also be plenty of time for introspective staring at the blue Caribbean; time for lying in the sun and playing in the warm water. That part I totally understand, and all indications to the contrary, I do know how to relax and kick back. I don’t have to be in constant motion.

It is also extremely likely that I will get some writing done. And hold on, before you say “But, that’s work. You’re supposed to be on vacation,” as a writer, writing is a lot like reading, except I get to tell the characters what happens. Writing is certainly work, and it can be difficult, but when the words are flowing it is a whole lot of fun.

The part where my mixed feelings come in is the time visiting the ports-of-call. It’s going to kill me to tour around a place for a few hours and then have to get back on board the cruise ship and head off to the next destination. I’m going to want to talk to people and hang out and watch the sunset, have a beer with the locals and hear what they have to say.

I’m sure I’ll make the best of it…yes, I am joking. I KNOW it will be great. But even this falls into the category of new life adventures for me. I’ll probably have to spend some time exploring the behind-the-scenes parts of the cruise ship though to make myself feel less guilty about not actually “working” while I’m on board. Hey, maybe I’ll get enough ideas that I can set a future story on board a cruise ship bouncing around the Caribbean. Yeah, that should help assuage my guilt….

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