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.