Here in Washington DC and the пригороды (“suburbs”) surrounding it, канун Дня поминования (“the day before Memorial Day”) becomes the occasion for a really big event — a privately organized парад байкеров (“biker parade”), entirely на мотоциклах (“on motorcycles”)! In English, it’s called “Rolling Thunder”; in Russian, it’s been translated as Раскат грома (“A resounding peal of thunder”) or Гром на колёсах (“Thunder on wheels”).

First organized by veterans of the Vietnam War, Rolling Thunder has become a ежегодная вашингтонская традиция (“annual DC tradition”) that honors not only American военнослужащие (“military personnel”) которые погибли в бою (“who perished in battle”), but has a special focus on those who whose fate remains officially unknown — those designated as пропавшие без вести (lit., “lost without a trace”, i.e., “MIA”) and also военнопленные (“prisoners of war; POWs”).

Even if, like me, you’re not generally a devoted поклонник мотоциклов (“fan of motorcycles”), it’s difficult not to be thrilled by the spectacle of Rolling Thunder — it’s such a colorful mix of искренняя торжественность (“sincere solemnity”), and весёлая вульгарность (“cheerful vulgarity”), and above all, it’s HUGE.

A Look at Verbs of Motion

Before we continue with “Rolling Thunder,” давайте сделаем крюк (“let’s take a detour”) for a little refresher on so-called “Verbs Of Motion” (VOMs).

If you want to say “to ride a motorcycle,” two Verbs Of Motion (or more precisely, two VOM pairs) are commonly used. The first pair you may already know because it’s one of the most important VOMs and tends to be introduced in Russian courses early on: ездить/ехать (“to travel by vehicular means or on horseback”).

The second is кататься/катиться (“to ride/glide/roll [on something]”) — a VOM that’s heard particularly often when you’re talking about certain means of conveyance that some people ride just for the fun of it, from мотоциклы to коньки (“ice skates”) to сёрфборды (take a guess!). The derived noun катание (“riding”) can be used (with на + prep.) to name such sports: E.g., катание на лодке (“boating” as a pastime).

Keep in mind that all four of these infinitives — ездить and ехать, кататься and катиться) are imperfective.

Because the key distinction between a mere “motion-related verb” and an actual Verb Of Motion™ is that a “true VOM” has not one but two imperfectives: one “indeterminate,” the other “determinate.”

Indeterminate VOMs

Ездить and кататься are both “indeterminate” imperfectives, also known as “multidirectional.” Generally speaking, indeterminate VOMs are used to express:

• Moving about without a destination:
  Они катались на роликах по парку. (“They were rollerskating in/around the park.”)

 

• One-time round trips:
  Вчера мальчик ездил на велосипеде в школу. (“Yesterday the boy rode his bicycle to school [and back home again]”)

 

• Habitually recurring round trips:
  Каждую субботу моя мама ездит в город на добровольную работу. (“Every Saturday my mom drives to the city for volunteer work [and comes home again].”)

 

• General ability to perform the action:
  Ты ездишь [ = Ты умеешь ездить] на мотоцикле? (“Do you [know how to] ride a motorcycle?”)
  Нашей внучке лишь восемь лет, но она уже хорошо катается на лыжах! (“Our granddaughter is only eight, but she already skis well!”)

Determinate VOMs

On the other hand, ехать and катиться are “determinate” or “unidirectional” imperfectives, and these express one-way motion:

• Often (but not mandatorily) with a specified destination:
  Сейчас мы едем в музей. (“We’re going to the museum right now.”)

 

• With something else occurring en route (especially in the past tense):
  Пока я ехал на велосипеде в библиотеку, я остановился купить мороженое. (“While I was riding my bike to the library, I stopped to buy ice-cream.”)

At this point, the astute reader may ask: “Aha, what if you make one-way trips, but on a habitual basis?” Well, you can do that, too — with the determinate forms accompanied by some sort of time expression that shows the repetition of the action:

По утрам он едет автобусом на работу, и по вечерам он идёт пешком домой. (“In the mornings he goes to work by bus, and in the evenings he walks home on foot.”)

But if the guy employed the same means of travel туда и обратно (“there and back”), you’d use the indeterminate of the appropriate VOM:

Раньше он ездил на работу и домой на автобусе, а теперь на роликах. (“He used to ride the bus to work and back home, but now he rides on roller-skates [both ways].”)

All this barely scratches the surface of VOMs, and we’ll return to them in future posts, but one more general point. When you put a prefix on VOMs, the prefixed indeterminate stays imperfective (and behaves more or less like a “normal” imperfective), while the prefixed determinate becomes perfective.

And in nearly all cases, a prefixed VOM follows the same conjugation as its unprefixed form, but ездить is the notable exception:

я езжу, ты ездишь … они ездят. (“I go [by vehicle], you go … they go.”)

BUT:

я приезжаю, ты приезжаешь … они приезжают. (“I arrive [by vehicle], you arrive … they arrive.”)

VOMs Rolling Thunderously

As I said, Раскат грома is huge — every year, десятки тысяч мотоциклистов принимают участие в этом событии (“motorcyclists participate in this event by the tens of thousands”), and in a few peak years, the number of riders has possibly reached 250,000!

With such a large crowd, many participants stay in motels outside of DC proper. So, very early on Sunday morning, байкеры приезжают (“the bikers arrive”) at designated meet-up points in the suburbs.

One such suburban meeting point — the largest, in fact — is less than 10 minutes пешком (“on foot”) from where I live in Fairfax (west of DC). Nearly a two-kilometer stretch of the eastbound highway turns into a temporary parking lot as thousands of bikes line up колесо к колесу, в четыре-пять ряда (“wheel-to-wheel, four or five abreast”).

At 9 A.M. sharp, моторы ревут (“the engines roar”) and the парад к Вашингтону начинается (“the procession towards DC begins”) — although it takes more than 30 minutes пока все мотоциклы не поехали (“until all the motorcycles have departed”) from Fairfax.

But the маршрут (“route”) doesn’t go directly to the city — first, all of the tens of thousands of riders съезжаются на стоянку у Пентагона (“converge on the Pentagon parking lot”). From there, колонны байкеров проезжают мимо арлингтонское кладбище (“columns of bikers ride past Arlington cemetery”), and only then do they переезжают через мост (“cross the bridge”) over the Potomac river and into DC.