Hi, I'm Lee. I'm currently walking from Madrid, Spain to Kiev, Ukraine on foot. Click here to learn why.
Subject: Ich aß ein berliner. Last week I had, for one evening, a travel partner. I met Cho Kuy Sam on the road to Potsdam. He passed me on his bike, the South Korean flag and the German one flying from the back. He stopped and chatted, probably as wanting for conversation as I was. Sam had enough English to tell me his story. He'd left his family and his job in South Korea two months ago, came to Europe with his bicycle with the intention of riding around the world for a couple of years. Like me, he sleeps in a tent in a field or, unlike me, sometimes begs a room at a local church. Like me, he has little money and relies on a lot of kindness to get by. "My family think I'm bad man," he said. "Running away, going around, drinking the beer." He gave a slight laugh. "Only kidding," he said. I'm not sure he was. Sam knew less German than I did, and his grasp of Western Culture was, let's say, precarious. When we ducked into a gas station for a coffee, for example, Sam didn't understand that when you push the "Espresso" button on the machine you're only supposed to get a little shot. He kept pushing the button until the cup was full, and was surprised when the clerk charged him triple the price. I paid the difference. Sam and I agreed to find a field together that night. We found a good one in the back of a house, and rang the bell to ask the owners for permission. Mario Keller and Katja had no problem with us using the ground, chatted with us a bit that night and the next morning. (Mario even looked at my website the next day and became a Fellow Traveler.)
I watched as Sam cooked himself some rice on his gas stove. "Lonely travel is the best travel," he said. "I have my freedom." He finished and went into his tent, and I into mine. I left earlier than he the next morning. He should have passed me again on his bike, but I probably missed him while having breakfast in a little cafe. I never saw him again.
So I'm in Berlin now. The gracious Valentina Heck has hosted me and shown me around this unique city, its gates and walls, remainders and reminders of a heavy history. The first night I was here, I met the man who was responsible for bringing down the Berlin Wall. Or so he told me. He was also sitting on the sidewalk singing opera at the top of his lungs and wearing a clown nose and barking like a dog, so I'm not sure who to believe.
Of couse, the World Cup is still going on here, and the German team can't be stopped, so there's a party-like atmosphere around the city. This means that my camera mic gets screamed into at point-blank rage about five times an hour. I'm having fun. But my unease at the bandwagon nationalism hasn't abated. It's not just because I heard some guys singing "Deutschland Uber Alles" after a goal, or even because two shirtless guys came up to my camera and screamed "Deutschland! White Power!" (They were quick to add, at my questioning, "We are good white boys but we also like people of other countries.") The tipping point for me was before Berlin, when I came face to face with three genuine Neo-Nazis. I met one of them in a bar and he offered me a place in his garden to sleep. The dude seemed like your average twelfth-grader, and it was only after we made a detour to a poorly-lit garage to meet his friends that things took a turn for the insidious.
"We're gonna put on this music," he told me. "Do you know it?" I didn't. The harsh scream-sung tunes were from a band called Landser. "What's this song about?" I asked. "This is about the Aryan Children of Deutschland," the guys told me. "It's about how the singer loves them and feels they must protect Germany." I made the faux pas of pointing out that if Aryan means blonde-haired and blue-eyed then I was the only Aryan in the room. There was a moment of silence. The kid showed me some novelites: a Hitler ringtone on his phone, and some wallpaper images of SS logos and sieg-heiling cartoon characters. "We are not like Hitler," the blokes told me. "We are only against criminals, those who deal drugs and rape children." In their cosmology, however, "criminals" was somewhat-synonymous with "immigrants", who use their Doner Kebab shops as fronts to push heroin and deal in stolen automobiles. "Drugs destroy the brain, they destroy our nation," the presumable leader told me while sipping a beer and dragging from a cigarrette. "I want to kill these drug dealers, and this is what I will do when I am older and have my own flat." This went on for hours. I wanted to excuse myself and find somewhere else to sleep, but you may understand my hesitation, dear reader, at offending the honor of three young men who've already expressed an ambition to homicide. So we talked some more. I asked questions, and made my gentle counterarguments. I thought I was getting somewhere with the most vocal guy, whom I actually believe to be a smart and sensitive kid at core who'd had some terrible influences. I told him that if he really cared about the problems of his country he should try to fix them peacefully: learn more, become a writer or a politician. "I've thought about your ideas," he said to me after some time. "And I don't believe in them. Nothing works without violence. You try to reason with people, but they do not listen. But when you hit a human, he wakes up."
Well, I got out of there without a scratch. And in Berlin, last night, I met those at the opposite end of the spectrum: some left-wing anarchists who believe that Germany doesn't even have the right to exist after its crimes in the Twentieth Century. Their reaction to the Cup amused me: they have a contest to see who can steal the most German flags that fly from car windows. Winner gets some t-shirts, and everybody gets to watch as they burn a huge pile of these flags.
Still, the better part of my time here was spent at a safe remove from politics, left or right. Walking alone in a crowd, regarding the lovely street art, browsing bookshops, sitting by the river. My thanks to the new Fellow Travelers: Barbara Mooney, Jonathan Moskow, Tommy Roberts, Bill Hardy, further support from Anne Robertz, and, as mentioned above, Mario Keller. Poland is next.
Subject: Americanski. I crossed into Poland at the border town of Frankfurt am der Oder. But first I spent some time there, wrote some postcards and met some students at the university there. The oddity of being in a border town hit home when the students ran out of beer and said, "Let's go get some in Poland. It's cheaper there." Cheap beer and cigarettes seem to be the only attraction for most Frankfurters to cross into Slubice, the small Polish city just over the river. But it also seems to be what drives Slubice's entire economy. As I walked through it I managed to resist the ads for buck-fifty packs of Marlboros, but I did buy a cheap pocket dictionary and a lady's fake-snakeskin belt to hold up my pants.
My last days in Germany were good. The German was shut out of the World Cup, so football mania had considerably cooled. There was, however, some unrelated festival going on in Frankfurt when I showed up, which provided the opportunity to hear bad, folksy covers of Beach Boys tunes played live. I also met Rolf Becker, a colorfully-kitted fellow who described himself as a "local hero". I asked him what made him a hero. "I am the German answer to Crocodile Dundee," he said. (For those counting at home, that marks the second reference to the Paul Hogan character on this web journal.) "During Communist times, I was persecuted by the East German police," Rolf told me. "So I figured what I must do is become internationally famous. I looked in the Guiness Book of World Records and found that the record for playing the hurdy-gurdy continuously was 44 hours. So I played it for 48 hours and got my name in the book. The police could not touch me then!" "I am now in the book twelve times," he said. "For example, I created the largest stamp in the world. And the largest bottle-opener. It takes twelve people to operate that bottle-opener." Rolf cranked up his hurdy-gurdy, went into showman-mode and belted out a version of Brecht and Weill's "Mack the Knife". I could only make out a few words of what I assumed were the original German lyrics. "Do you know the English version?" I asked Rolf. "That was the English version," he told me.
It would seem that every Polish town of a respectable size is required to employ four or five men to sit outside the general store, to just sit and gab and smoke cigarettes and stare, to now and then send one man into the store for a bottle of booze, which he brings out and shares with the other men in plastic cups. They laugh, and they demonstrate the multiple uses of a word that I guess is spelled kurdwa. When one of them tries to sit up and falls over, the others help him up. And when a stranger comes and sits down and pulls out a camera, he's made to feel a bit menaced, and is encouraged to move on. Here, I feel more alien than anywhere else. It's not that the villagers of France or Germany are accustomed to the sight of a guy with a big rucksack and a little camera walking through their town. But I guess they flatter themselves into thinking this should be a perfectly ordinary sight. They don't do that in these little Polish villages, and they make no secret of gathering to stare at me as I walk past. Sometimes I wave hello and offer a greeting in the few words of Polish I know. I can't tell whether they're amused or frightened. Except with this woman, whose expression as I filmed her told me I should get very lost:
The other day I met with some rather competitive hospitality. Stopped in a bar and got to talking to some gentlemen there, told them where I'm from and what I'm doing. I paraphrase what I could glean from there conversation, held in a mixture of Polish and German: "You can put your tent in my yard," one man told me. "My house is just there." "No!" said another man, "He can stay at my house. I'll give him a bed and some food. A shower, too." "But your house is three kilometers away," the other said. "Mine is only 200 meters away." "Yes, but it's three kilometers in the direction he's going anyway. He stays at my place." This argument carried on like this for a surprisingly long time. Eventually I ended it by picking which of the two seemed more entertaining. Jarek's house was indeed three kilometers away, and we walked there while Jarek tried unsuccessfully to flag down every passing car for a ride. The man was drunk. He kept calling me "Michael", although I told him my name is Lee about fifteen times. I took care to make sure he didn't stumble into a semi as it rumbled past. We sang some songs together, Paul Simon and the Beatles. (I handled the actual lyrics while Jarek did a kind of sha-na-na backup that loosely fit the melody of each song.) "I love America, Michael!" Jarek yelled out. "Poland is nice, too!" I yelled back.
Back at his house, I felt a little awkward around his son and wife and mother and father, who cast me looks that wondered what the hell I was doing there. "Is there a problem, Jarek?" "No problem, Michael," he said. He looked at his son. "Bartek, is there a problem?" Bartek mumbled No. "You see, Michael, there is no problem. Have more kielbasa, Michael. Eat."
The American dollar goes further here, the better to stretch the newest Fellow Traveler donations from Katie Duff, Daniela de Paulis, Joanie Tallon, and another from Richard Morasci. And special thanks to Sarah Wolff and Theresa Becherer for their hospitality in Frankfurt.
Subject: As yet untitled. I called that cat "Kotek", which is just the Polish word for "Kitty." He was a little stray, thin as thin gets and so hungry it tried to catch the flies and moths it saw buzzing along the roadside. I didn't really want the company, at first. But the cat wouldn't leave me alone, kept following a few feet behind me. I had bad visions of the little guy getting creamed by a car, so I picked him up and carried him for a few hours. He was docile and purred a lot. That night Kotek slept in the tent with me. He laid on my chest, over my sleeping bag, like my old cat used to do when I was a kid. I felt a lot less lonely that night. And so I decided to take Kotek to Kiev with me. I imagined carrying him in a bag slung over my shoulder when I walked on the dangerous roads. I'd put him on a leash and let him do his own walking on the safe roads. When I went into a bar or a restaurant, I imagined, I'd ask the owner if my cat could come in. If not, I'd tie his leash to a pole outside and let him wait for me. I imagined sharing my food and water rations with him, and having someone other than myself to talk to, even if it was an animal. Well, real life didn't accord with my imagination. By the next day Kotek had tired of me. I made a shoulder-slung bag to carry him in and he kept clawing his way out. "You don't want to do that," I told him. "It's a harsh world out there. Nobody else is going to feed you while you're tied to a pole by your leash." Nothing doing. He wanted his freedom. I can't say I blamed him. Last I saw of him, he was rooting around someone's front yard, looking for flies and moths.
My silences are getting longer as the journey goes on. This isn't strictly intentional. Computer access is now the scarcest it's yet been. And even when I can get online, for instance last week in the town of Ostrow Wielkopolski, the computers are sometimes too slow and outdated to handle even the simple task of updating my site. Somehow, though, I feel this is appropriate. I'm living a mostly non-verbal life here in Poland. Almost nobody here speaks English. I hardly know enough Polish to order food in restaurants. My thoughts have nowhere to go. My mind eats no new words. And so the footage I'm getting out here has this bizarre Koyaanisqatsi quality to it. Guys come up to my camera and talk at me. I, understanding hardly a word, mutter "tak" or "nie" at the right times to get them to go on, or just smile and nod. Men fix their hair in the reflection of my camera lens and sing the praises of certain brands of beer. Women stand in gardens, mutter and break down and cry. I feel like I'm living inside Fata Morgana, my favorite Herzog film. Given all this, I feel it fitting that I introduce some images without caption:
I've been having weird dreams. In them, I decide not to stop at Kiev, but rather to keep walking into Siberia, down into southeast Asia, sweep back across into India, cross the deserts of the Middle East and into Africa, to keep walking for the rest of my life. I wake up and wonder whether it's a good idea after all. Desptie the isolation and the heat, which by now is punishing me for a lifetime of sins, I've grown used to this lifestyle. And I'm afraid of it ending. And my friend Adam Adler sends me this quotation by email: "I thought how utterly we have forsaken the earth. . . There are but a few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. his gardens, orchards, and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless." -- Wallace Stevens Today's entry was brought to you by the newest Fellow Travelers: Julia Stanton, Marge Harrison, Michael Trackan, Bradley Mosher, Bob Bleskan, Clyde and Diane Richardson of Axes Music, and further help from Pamela Swierczewski and Mike DiMaggio. Also, if you find yourself in Kostoszyn, Poland and are in need of a tan, please visit the local solarium, the wonderfully-named "Black Power":
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walking journal:
Dec. '05 - Jan. '06.
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
November 2006
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writing, photographs and video all rights reserved, etc. etc.
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