Category: Eastbound, a Road Trip

Somewhere between Lodz and Warsaw I pass a farmer standing at his gate. Standing at a gate waiting for something to happen seems to be the national pastime of Polish people over the age of fifty five. I park a ways down the road and get out to ask him for his picture. He understands this as me telling him that my car has broken down and disappears into the house. A while later he returns with his daughter, who speaks a little English.

‘My car’s not broken,’ I say, ‘But thank you.’
‘Thank God, thank God’.

They show me their horses, their pond, and their foals, all the same shade of brown. Then they invite me inside for coffee and eggs. As I wait at the table, the farmer disappears and returns with a baby in his arms, his little granddaughter. He holds her out to me like a trophy. The moment she sees me, she begins to cry.

‘My father thinks you shouldn’t go to Warsaw, because it’s too dangerous,’ his daughter says, taking the baby. ‘Don’t listen to him. It’s not so bad. He’s just never left here.’

He speaks again in his soft, measured Polish.

‘My father likes your car,’ she translates. ‘He wants to know if you would trade it for his horse.’

I cross the Elbe on a little wooden bridge so narrow that before I drive across I get out to see if the car will fit. For all it’s historical significance, here the river resembles a regular old creek: brown and a little swollen from all the rain.

Something feels different on the other side of the Elbe. Grey geese pick through the mud next to abandoned factories. Many of the houses are made from dark log houses with white chinking. Roofs seem larger and droop farther towards the ground. Rather than apple trees, rowan trees line the narrow streets, and in the dusk they look like so many red matches.

I stay overnight at the Hotel Alpský in a bare yellow room. Cold air from the Carpathians blows in and I sleep well for the first time on the journey.

When I wake up, I notice a picture hanging over my head: a tiny well in the middle of what looks like a desert. Tiny print underneath the picture reads ‘Source of the Elbe’. When I look it up on a map, I discover it’s only a few kilometers away, and that there’s a road leading there directly from the Alpský which seems to continue on to the Polish border, which is where I intend to go.

Ten minutes into the drive I’ve almost run over some Czech tourists and realize that I’m driving on a hiking trail in a nature reserve. So I turn around and take the regular old pass to Poland and do not see the source of the Elbe.

Although I didn’t plan to stop in Prague, I did. And since it has World Heritage status and that’s, well, why I’m here on this road trip in the first place, I thought I’d go take a look at what the city had to offer. I found a place to park and set out in the direction of the Charles Bridge.

As I looked down at the broad Vlatava river, a sheet of rain hit my back so powerfully and at such a strange angle that I thought it was the Vlatava itself. I watched the streets empty of people, as if someone had pulled a drain.

It rained and rained. I couldn’t see a thing. As World Heritage goes, I have nothing to report. What I can tell you, however, is that there is a little restaurant on Na Bojišti street that serves roast duck with caraway seeds, bread dumplings and soft red cabbage that tastes wonderful when you’ve just come in from the rain. And down the street, there is a hotel, the Tivoli, which has seen better days but is nonetheless bright and warm. There you can sit in bed and watch Czech television until sleep finally comes.

My hosts in Elbančice, Marcel and Katarina, are mad about collecting mushrooms. Every spare inch of their stone house is filled with mushrooms laid out in various stages of cleaning or drying. The green of the billiard table is barely visible beneath all the mushrooms: chanterelles, oysters, porcini. Baking sheets are propped up precariously on the wood stove and the chairs, so that you have to tip toe everywhere. The cats are hissed at whenever they come too close to the mushrooms.

When I meet Katarina out in the forest in her red raincoat, she looks very guilty.
‘I promised I’d be quick today, she says. ‘Yesterday I was out in the forest for the whole day. Marcel was mad.’

She can’t help herself: even as we talk, her eyes move over the ground. She knows exactly where to look. Hřib Smrkový like the roots of silver birches, Liška Obecná prefer ditches. She gave up being secretive a long time ago, she tells me. There’s more than enough to go around. That’s what you come to realize as soon as you start to really look. She tells me about cars that she sees which are sagging under the weight of mushrooms, cars so full that their driver is no longer visible. She holds each mushroom to my nose so I can smell its delicate perfume.

When I wake up in the morning, the wood stove in the corner of my room has gone out, and sun shines into the room through the small window. Beyond the fields, red pines bow deeply with every gust of wind. The clouds move quickly. Rain falls for a few minutes at a time, then stops again. When I go downstairs, I find a bowl of mushrooms, eggs, tomatoes and butter on the table.

I make breakfast, drink a cup of coffee and walk down to the old Jewish cemetery. Many trees have grown into and around the graves. On the edges of the cemetery, near the low walls, wild strawberries grow. Between the graves, mushrooms.

I leave for my trip a few weeks later than planned, just as the weather takes a turn for the worse. Driving rain in Munich. As I head east, it clears but remains grey. Every car on the Autobahn overtakes me.

After Deggendorf the road takes a sharp turn and heads steeply up the mountain. I look for a place to park and take one last look down at Germany, but there’s too much fog to see anything, so I drive on.

Želená Ruda is the Czech border town. Hand painted signs advertise cigarettes. There are two gas stations and two casinos. There are four nail salons with pink, blinking signs, and a dozen columns of blue wood smoke rising from brown, low houses. To the left and right of the only street, shacks are propped up like theater backdrops. Ornaments, bird houses and woven baskets dangle from their beams. Owners sit outside, wrapped from head to toe against the damp cold.

I drive through Harmanice, past wet fields ringed with birches. The road follows the black, narrow Otava river through Střelské Hoštice, Předotice, Zvíkovské Podhradi. Towns pass by in an instant and are gone forever. Apple trees heavy with fruit line the roads. Apples roll into the street and under my tires.

I stop to eat in Jistebnice. By now it’s evening, and Jistebnice is tiny and all dark, except for the bluish light of a bank machine, and the small yellow windows of a restaurant. A group of teenagers lean against a wall near my car. We get to talking and they invite me to a rave. I’m flattered but politely decline.

The restaurant is one small, packed room with an unlit fireplace in the corner. People shout and laugh and play cards. Children prop themselves up on muscular little arms and swing between the tables, yawning. I order fried trout and beer. When I’m finished, I feel suddenly overcome with loneliness.

Voices and laughter follow me out into the street. The teenagers have left and the night is cold and quiet. I drive through the dark, and turn on the radio to keep from nodding off. The sky is as black as the Otava. No moon, no stars.