Taking Pictures of Lithuania From The Car

Ingrida was driving through Lithuania, in a new Swedish Saab this time. We borrowed it from our brother-in-law who had just flown from Riga to Berlin for a small vacation. Despite making the road literally less bumpy, I think she missed the simplicity of the broken down Ladas. It took her long past the outskirts of Riga and the Stat Oil gas station to learn that she needed to pull up the little ring that encompassed the shift knob to find reverse. Me, I offered what comfort I could and graciously pointed out that we would almost always be going forward. Needless to say the queen of drivers ignored me even though I offered her her favorite Latvian cinnamon buns, that I had bought in the tiny white kiosk at the tip of our sweet street that Grandfather had pointed out.

In the early morning rain, now hours ago, we had driven in great traffic down Lacplesa iela, a street named after a medieval hero, and across the “Stone Bridge” of Riga to take the unmarked narrow turn that would bring us out circling and put us on the Central Lithuanian road.

I had brought a small Nikon digital camera to document amber and folk art. Ingrida suggested that I take pictures of the interesting things that we pass, kind of a Robert Frank view of Lietuva. In my naiveté I said, ‘yes, why not,’ still trying to compensate for the evil new car’s strange gear shifts and the fact that I was almost useless.

Where I pointed my camera, every single scene I fell in love with: a farmer with his horse and wagon returning from market, the carved old trees that bordered homesteads, the Mountain Ashes planted in twos before the main entryways to the old Lithuanian buildings, and the covered crosses at the cross roads, but my documentation never seemed to work out. The worst was the storks.

We had spent the summer with storks finding them everywhere we went. Traditionally they are a great good luck symbol. But in the last years they have become something more; perhaps a symbol of balance and union with nature, and of one still being within culture and knowing the old ways, the ways of the People.

“You certainly have to have some pictures of storks,” Ingrida, The Driver said. My ill fated stork pictures and their pursuit would take a tragic novel to describe. It was at the very end of our journey going through central northern Lietuva back towards Riga that I realized the storks were playing with me. I saw a field with at least 50 storks all walking their old man like walk, bobbing and bending, and when I had actually seen them through the lens of my little camera and taken the picture, not one showed up on the LCD screen.

Ingrida asked in her sweet way, now long and long after the shift knob, “Did you get it?” I said “Yes.” A picture in my mind forever, of these wonderful birds, the dark tilled soil, the wet rich tall grass heavy with seed on the side, and the hayed land encircling.

Kaunas

I find a great peace and comfort in this Lithuanian city. Here, Ingrida and I work all day long in the amber trade among darting minds and gracious beaders. Exhausted at night, we throw ourselves into the harmony of the city and the setting sun as its last lights illuminate the pedestrian avenue. We always stay in the same old giant Soviet hotel, only partially remade, that sits on the walk way.

The amber work of the day, the selection and size of beads, the many discussions, and the paper and pencil of design, always exhausts us. At the end of work we are tired and emptied out. Tired and empty we walk down the long tree lined avenue facing into the sun and quietly, among the gracious others that surround us, friends walking arm in arm, lovers around small tables, women in linen going home, we renew our strength and relax into a simple celebration of life.

The hotel is a certain smell that stays with one through the long odd passages that lead to painted doors and narrow dark wooden beds, two in our room that by their size won’t allow us to sleep together. White sheets, comforters even in summer, are piled on the darkness of the mattresses. The bathrooms are always odd and not quite working. But the rooms are always reasonable and familiar, whole in their own way, leading one outward to the sweetness of the Lithuanian streets.

Out of my last 3 birthdays, I have spent two here, and I count myself lucky. Extremely lucky. For here is a gracious civility built upon simple human interaction with a high regard for a depth of intellectual thought. Here lovers should come, to be lovers in the whole. Here thinkers should come to be thinkers in the whole. Here mystics would find that they are mystics in the whole. For each is embraced and offered that wonderful right of way that marks a city that is confident of itself, small enough to be known, and complete.

More on Lithuania:

Thank you for the response to the entries about Lithuania. As some have asked for more writing on this gem in the Baltics, tomorrow's piece will be be about a particular city I love, Kaunas. Until then, here is a pictoral clue of my inspiration today, the tree lined streets of that city you will soon read about...

Lithuania

I fell in love with Lithuania in 1988. Somehow Ingrida and I were able to cross the boarder without being turned back, separated, held, or made to pay a bribe larger than what we could afford. We had come to Lithuania to talk with folk artists and amber masters, to get amber crosses for the priests graduating from the seminary in Minnesota as per Grandmother’s wish, and to place our own family crosses at Krustu Kalns, Cross Hill, the Hill of Sorrow and Hope.

We were driving a Soviet red Lada car that had screw drivers stuck in the windows to hold them fully rolled up and to keeping them from falling outward or inward. The car had been broken into in Rezekne by young street kids who had simply pushed the windows in. The car of course was borrowed and Ingrida was the driver as she has always been, being better at jiggling the shift and hoping that it actually got into 1st, 2nd, 3rd and with God’s help, reverse. Sweet Ingrida had bought a motorcycle when she was old enough to drive one, a little Italian-made Harley Davidson dirt bike. When she was old enough not to break Grandfather and Grandmother’s heart, she pointed it outward and had been driving since.

Ingrida drove and we talked as we covered most of central Lithuania, going down its middle and turning east towards Vilnius. Everywhere was delight. I remember how organized the Lithuanian fields were, for the kolhozas in Latvia were sketchy on their care. If one walked them, it was ripe and waste. The waste was not created with ignorance for the land but rather it came from a tired, almost exhausted uncaring about the whole.

Here in Lietuva, was care, small measures of love made visible. Trees gently pruned. A hedge tended and cleaned of parasites. Rows of roses laid down for no reason at all but that they were beautiful. Even the ditch grasses were clean and ready to be cut for fodder.

I was moved by it. So it was most fitting that as we tried to not attract attention to ourselves I was given a five foot verba, a great Palm Sunday creation of broken flax, field crop, and grasses, that showed the Lithuanian “Tree of Life.”

No one that we passed by in crowded Vilnius did not stop to look. We were like a wave that created humor and sweet concern all about us, for Easter was a world away, and we were carrying an ancient national symbol through the streets of a difficult time… a western fool and the thin Latvian woman.

It was because I was Irish, not Lithuanian, an American who probably didn’t know anything about anything that it took us just 3 hours to cross over again at the boarder. The guards could have cared less about Limewood masks of Devils, flax constructs of wise horses and spiritual birds, or the gentle womens woven belts that blessed the basic ability of a Lithuanian woman to bear Lithuanian children. They passed us through with the 12 white amber crosses tied about my neck on a rough band of leather.

The verba, The Palm Sunday weaving that the Lithuanian’s make to commemorate Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, takes the place of split palm fronds which no common person in Eastern or Northern Europe had ever had. The one I carried then is still among the very small set of things that adorn my gentle apartment in Riga. Perhaps it is the greatest thing for it is the eldest in our history, Ingrida’s and mine, that has survived in a vagary of apartments and places to stay.

Looking at it, as the summer rains slash against our ancient wood windows, I am renewed with wonder about the heart that made it so purely. Here is love and an ancient faith that forms the common into beauty and tells again the story of a People. Thinking about my being then in Lietuva, to carry such a thing through the streets of Vilnius among the police and the soldiers, in a time of struggle, then I say that I could not think of a better thing to carry. For it was not a gun which the movies prefer, nor a slogan which is only politics, but a simple form of a profound spiritual belief about an eternal return, “cut the tree down and it will grow again.” Made through the will of an artist, it gives reverence for something that is “more” in the dark nights of the soul.

The Baltic Road

In 1987 Grandfather, Grandmother, Ingrida and I, with our daughters, then little children, were finally unofficially allowed to travel through Latvia to visit the family graves in the east, in the little village of Feimani, Latgale. As we were driven by a distant relative with Party connections along the great river Daugava, grandfather and grandmother told their stories that had to do with the road from Riga to Rezekne, through the history of their life, to the crowded car. To this day I remember the brightness of their faces and the sense of rapture that wrapped the shiny black official car in the moment and made it something more.

The world that opened up then with our ability to travel the Baltic roads as a family has changed my response to those roads even as I travel them now, for the road became stories and the stories opened fresh with every vista and view. The gracious little stories, sad, funny, or quietly terrible, told by Grandfather, by Grandmother, by Great Aunt Elza, by a multiplicity of people, unfolded their simple words into a multiplicity of levels that slid easily from personal history into folklore and the mythic.

The road that we traveled together in those years also produced its own stories: driving from Tallinn to Riga when there was no official gas and everyone looked for the Lithuanians along the coast highway who were selling gasoline in smuggled buckets and tins; of Grandmother Anna’s pilgrimage to Krustu Kalns, the Hill of Sorrow and Hope, in an oddly painted green cargo van packed with praying old women who were going to say the rosary from Riga to beyond Bersai, and the calmness of my two little daughters who were allowed to accompany them dressed in thin raincoats and holding bags of sandwiches. Stories that were left after all the break downs here and there, along every main road that ran through the three countries. Family stories of Grandfather, Sean, the improvised water bucket and the huge farmyard dog, that makes us laugh even now.

Not being able to travel outside of a certain area in Riga for so many years made the road when it did open for us into a precious thing. Every field, forest, tree, stork, village, city, became memorable. The clouds, the smell of the land, the type of crop in a field and its condition, even how the stones were dressed on the battered walls that had been left standing seemed to tell us something about each of these distinct lands and their people.

We were taught that summer, Ingrida and I, to listen with our hearts, the seat of the soul, as it enfolded what it heard in the changing moment into that rare state of timelessness and union. To our daughters, it was but part of their inheritance; the gold of the dainas and the living Latvian oral tradition.