When you and Meg left for Canada in 2006, what did you imagine your life there would be like?
ELENA: We didn’t exactly “leave” for Canada. Meg and I were trying to get away from my life and be together. I didn’t think about Canada. We were too busy with what was happening at the time. Us doing that sailing-across-the-world thing.
SIMONE: When you arrived in Canada, did you intend to settle there, or was it simply another stop along the way?
ELENA: We never intended to settle in Canada. Not anywhere else, as it turns out. The world, the way it works, forces us to, however.
SIMONE: What happened in Canada that made you stay longer than you’d intended?
ELENA: Paperwork. Canada was giving me all those papers that I supposedly needed. And they took away my passport. So I was not a complete person, really.
SIMONE: Who took your passport, and what reason did they give you?
ELENA: The government, of course. They have all those clusters, I don’t remember their names. I think then it was CIC and IRB. They took my passport to make me a non-person. To pin me down.
SIMONE: So you arrived in Canada without intending to stay, and then found yourself unable to leave. Did you and Meg try to find a way to continue your travels?
ELENA: We did five years later. When Canada finally pronounced me a refugee and a permanent resident.
SIMONE: Were you actually free to leave Canada and travel wherever you wanted?
ELENA: Yes. But we could go only to places we didn’t want to go. And to the US, for which I had a visa in my refugee travel document.
SIMONE: Why couldn’t you go to the places you actually wanted to visit?
ELENA: I’d need a visa for all of them. That was impossible once we took off. It has to be done from WITHIN the country where you are a resident. But I was a resident only on paper. We didn’t actually live in Canada. See? It’s Catch-22. This is exactly how it is designed. You have the right to move only if you are pinned down and can be found.
SIMONE: So when you finally left Canada, where did you and Meg go?
ELENA: Mexico. Then back to the US. Then Mexico again. Then the US. Then Panama and the US Atlantic coast. Then Canada to renew the bloody refugee travel document. Yeah. It’s been a lot.
SIMONE: Through all those years of moving between countries, did you ever manage to spend time somewhere simply because you wanted to be there?
ELENA: I’d say the US was the only place that we enjoyed seeing, when we had our road trips.
SIMONE: At what point did you and Meg realize that the life you were trying to live was going to be so difficult to sustain?
ELENA: I have always wondered how we would be able to pull it off with me being a bloody refugee and traveling with a refugee travel document. Actually living with, not traveling.
SIMONE: Did you eventually find a way around those restrictions, or are you still dealing with them today?
ELENA: I am traveling with a Russian passport today. After Canada kept refusing to issue me that TD, we aren’t doing that again. Basically, I am a Russian national. With the war going on in Ukraine, how easy do you think travel is for me? It isn’t. I can only go to a few ‘stans, Serbia and Turkey. Plus the islands and continents I am not interested in and that have nothing in commong with me. The “developing” countries.
SIMONE: When Canada refused to renew your travel document, what did you and Meg do next?
ELENA: We got the local press involved. This is how I got it renewed.
SIMONE: You went to the press? Did you approach a journalist yourselves?
ELENA: Yes, a journalist. He called CIC or whatever name they had then. They issued the document the next day. We left Nova Scotia in November. I wrote about it all nicely in my Clinging to North America part.
SIMONE: After everything you and Meg have been through, do you still have places in the world you’d like to visit, if the passport restrictions weren’t in the way?
ELENA: I don’t know. I don’t look at the world as a person who can move. I don’t expect myself to travel. Haven’t for years. I just go where this boat goes.
SIMONE: Who decides where it goes these days?
ELENA: My passport.
SIMONE: Has anyone ever asked you why you don’t simply settle somewhere?
ELENA: No. We have nobody in our life.
SIMONE: Has that always been the case since you and Meg began travelling, or did you gradually lose contact with people along the way?
ELENA: We had never had people in our lives who cared about us. Especially wanted us to be together.
SIMONE: So when you and Meg began your life together, was there anyone at all who helped you make it possible?
ELENA: No. Not a single person.
SIMONE: When you and Meg were trying to find somewhere you could live together, did you ever approach an organization or authority for help?
ELENA: We actually never thought about living anywhere. We started moving and never found a place we’d want to stay.
SIMONE: Was that because of what you found in those places, or because you and Meg simply preferred to keep moving?
ELENA: Because of the places. There wasn’t much to love about the kind of moving we were doing. It was jus open ocean, lots of waves. Borders. Uncertainty. Isolation.
SIMONE: What was it about these different places that made living there unappealing?
ELENA: I’d say most of it. It is all about showing off. Your status, your life, your wealth, your success, your relationships/family. All of it wrapped in consumerism. There is just nothing else. People are no longer people, they are consumer units.
SIMONE: Were there places where people lived differently?
ELENA: They lived differently in Panama or Mexico. Because they didn’t have the money for it.
SIMONE: And in Panama or Mexico, did you find their everyday relationships with one another different too?
ELENA: They were different. But so much of what we take for granted is also missing. Like common hygiene, any infrastructure, medical care, respect for living creatures. They still take and destroy, just on a smaller scale.
SIMONE: Was there ever a particular place where you and Meg seriously considered staying, even for a while?
ELENA: No. Meg keeps dreaming about it. I don’t. I am no longer delusional. Whatever places I think might fit me, I am not allowed to be.
SIMONE: When you and Meg decided to live differently, did you anticipate how much your choices would put you at odds with the way the world is organized?
ELENA: Never. I never, in fact, thought this was us leaving society behind. The current globalized, status- and self-obsessed version of it. I thought we were doing what we needed for ourselves. And we were.
SIMONE: When did you first realize that the way you and Meg lived was so different from how most people live?
ELENA: Probably just now, in the Balkans. We came as close to what we thought was our home as we could and that turned out to be the lowest blow yet. I feel like I am done with the world. I just want to crawl under a rock, as Meg says. I can’t stand what I see around me or in the media. And I don’t see a way out. For me. For Meg and me.
SIMONE: What makes it so difficuilt for you where you are now?
ELENA: All of it. All of what I see people do with their lives, with others and with the environment. There is nothing left of people anymore but the show they put on. There is no dignity, no grace, no care for living creatures, no culture. It is all buying and being perceived through what it is you are buying. Long nails, enlarged lips, hideous makeup, reproducing so that children become your trophies. I have never been as disheartened as I am here. Meg and I want to run. But run where? Back to sea? And then what? Where to next?
SIMONE: You and Meg have spent twenty years moving on in a search of a place that would be right for you. But now it is as though moving on is no longer an answer.
ELENA: There is no answer in moving on. The world is f*cked. I know that. Meg still believes in some haven somewhere. I don’t argue anymore. I let her figure things out for herself.
SIMONE: Looking back over these twenty years, do you think it is the world that has changed, or that you’ve come to see it differently through your experiences?
ELENA: Both.
SIMONE: Can you remember something about everyday life twenty years ago that you rarely see anymore?
ELENA: Mostly people have changed. What they care about. Also, keep in mind when you talk about my experience with people, it is not like I have spent these twenty years in one place. I only see the people we encounter while moving. I don’t have a neat progression. I only know that there is nowhere in the world I want to be.
SIMONE: When you say people’s priorities have changed, are you comparing them with the people you remember from your earlier life in Russia?
ELENA: Yes. Of course. But Meg says her life in Canada was also different. She used to WALK to school. They were reusing milk and beer bottles too. It’s all gone. Nowadays you just have to have a car and keep tossing yet another glass bottle into the landfill. That’s our humanity. This is what we are supposed to value and relish. If you don’t, you are a bad person. And should be excommunicated. I am surprised refusing to be a consumer unit isn’t outlawed yet.
SIMONE: Has it become harder for you and Meg to live the way you do as the world around you has changed?
ELENA: Of course. It became difficult because the people changed beyond the point of return. New generations now grow up knowing nothing but consumerism and the self culture.
SIMONE: How have those changes made everyday life harder for you and Meg?
ELENA: We go outside as little as possible. Only when we need to get food. This says it all.
SIMONE: Is there anything you still enjoy about being out?
ELENA: I enjoy an occasional bird. I don’t look at cats anymore because they are all sick, brutalized, poisoned or dead. And trips away from people by rail. When I walk as far away as I can so that I don’t see the locals, garbage and abused animals.
SIMONE: Has living aboard the boat made it easier to keep some distance from things you don’t want to participate in or see?
ELENA: Yes. Being in a marina keeps us further away from the locals, their rituals. From the cars.
SIMONE: Have you and Meg ever encountered people, even briefly, who you wanted to be with?
ELENA: Just very few people. Two couples, to be exact. One was in Los Angeles, in Marina del Rey. They are what they’d call travelers and weirdos. They kept moving around the world too to find a place for themselves. The other couple we met in Costa Rica. They have a lodge in the jungle for paying guests. They too got away from their own society as far as they could. These are the only people, really, that I felt comfortable with.
SIMONE: Did you and Meg stay in touch with either couple?
ELENA: I am in touch mostly with the lodge people. We have more shared values somehow. And we don’t pretend that we love people or that it’s all okay in the world.
SIMONE: After twenty years of going from one country to another, is there anything you still want from the world, or have you stopped expecting anything from it?
ELENA: I’d say I largely stopped expecting anything from it. I live from one day to the next. Meg and I tell ourselves that we feel that way because of where we are now. But I wonder. I am not allowed to be in the precious West, that’s true. But is it worth wanting to be in, I wonder. It has history that is part of me. It has people who care about the same things I do, I am sure. But what will it take for Meg and me to get there? At which point is the cost too great? We are not immortal either. I am 47. I was 27 when we started our life together. I am thinking I should stop dreaming of the grass on the other side. It may not be for me. Or it may not even be there. I am just tired, mostly. I barely have the emotional strength for one given day. So no, I don’t dream. But I go on.
SIMONE: What keeps you going?
ELENA: What makes me go on is that I still have my life. And that means whatever number of days I have left. I have Meg. I have this computer and I know English 😉. I still discover things about humanity that move me. I see signs that there are people like me out there, it’s just that we are disconnected. We can’t see each other and we believe that we are all alone in it. I keep telling myself I am not alone, that I just haven’t found people like me yet.
So, it is basically me, Meg and our life together. This is what makes me go on. And a weak hope that maybe, in the time I have left, I’ll have people in my life who would make me want to get up in the morning and look forward to the day. To sharing that day with them.