Arriving

Muzeum Świat Iluzji / Museum World of Illusion in Warsaw

I once spent ten full days doing almost nothing except thinking about chocolate cake.

From the outside, it would have looked like I was attending a meditation retreat. However my actual days were fourteen hours of anticipating a tall slice of three-layer Chocolate Love at the Snowman Café in a nearby neighborhood of Kathmandu.

The intention of a ten-day introductory Vipassana meditation course like the one I was in is to develop tools of self-discipline. Practitioners begin by learning to narrow awareness down to the air entering and exiting the nose, observing all other sensations arising and falling away like gusts of wind. With practice and observation, they experience that all sensations are fleeting. Understanding this impermanence, they are no longer controlled by the universe’s whims, so goes the pedagogy. Choose to not scratch an itch and the itch will eventually just go away, and you’ll gain discipline by not having reacted to it, over and over again. The practice has been passed down in some form going back several millennia.

Ten days of voluntarily going without speaking, reading, writing, music, or leaving a small walled-in lawn stretches time. Try it (dhamma.org), I’ll house-sit for you while you’re gone. It’s not for everyone. I won’t say it was the best ten days I ever spent, but they were among the most valuable.

Sitting still for ten days remains the most physically difficult thing I have ever done. More than a twenty hour shift fighting forest fires, more than running a marathon, more than trekking across Poland in the depths of winter.

After a day or two of seated silence among the dozen other attendees, my focus consistently drifted from sattipathana and mettā to imagining each spongy pore, every peak of frosting, every towering crumb.

Overpass graffiti in Warsaw

It was a happenstance of timing that chocolate cake became the object of focus instead of something else. Another traveler had told me about the Snowman moments before I stepped into the retreat center.

“You gotta go, man,” said the bearded Aussie. “It’s been the same old guy behind the counter since like 1965 with the same family recipes. Hendrix hung out there, the Beatles, Morrison, you know. It’s like the lineage. Have a slice of the same cake. Gotta try the Chocolate Love.” (Note: research reveals the celebrity claims to be mostly imaginative tourist lore).

With that small seed planted, my mind filled days of empty space with cake anticipation.

By day three, I decided if I was going to make it the whole ten days I’d just accept that my focus will wander further afield than the breath at the tip of my nostrils. Cake was the main object of imagination, but many stranger thoughts also built palaces.

A young man with wisdom beyond his years and a deep scar across his forehead acted as our minder, shushing and keeping one eye open to see that we did not nod off or distract our cohort. When we spoke at the end of the retreat I learned that he’d been hit across the face with a metal pipe in a gang fight several years ago. Meditation was part of his healing journey.

In the hour-long faded VHS tapes screened each evening after a light meal, a wrinkled Burmese businessman named S.N. Goenka proffered basso-profundo encouragements like the greater the craving, the greater the aversion; the greater the aversion, the greater the suffering; anitya, anitya, anitya…

By the last day, chocolate cake was a meaningless abstraction. I knew it would be there, but even if it wasn’t, I didn’t need it. My mental inbox had processed all the junk mail.

Afterwards, I hiked to the Snowman across town. The cake did not disappoint. The cafe ambiance of cigarettes and sweaty teenagers did not deter. I stayed a half hour to appreciate the artistic graffiti and swishing ceiling fan, picturing the Fab Four with a hookah on the cushions in the corner.

The cake itself was fine, but the anticipation transformed it into something I remember vividly.

For most people, the lesson that anticipation is more compelling than completion might be obvious without needing ten days to think about cake in still silence. Maybe not everyone needs to physically experience an idea to understand it. Or to hike across a large country to understand family history. These kinds of things seem to be my habit though.

I haven’t attended any meditation retreats since then, but each time I decide on a new place or new idea to explore it’s like a new Chocolate Love on the horizon. I know I will find that state where I won’t need to scratch an itch.

***

So it was in late January when I saw the green road sign with Warszawa 152 (Warsaw 152 km or 95 miles), I knew that here, this sign, was the actual object of my travels, though the end of my journey still lay 152 kilometers ahead. From here, my anticipation could only level off. The cake was near.

Abandoned German military bunker

There is a poetic fragment ready-made for the moment when pilgrims first catch a glimpse of their destination: “Mt. Joy;” or Monte Gozo. The horse can smell the hay in the barn. At home in Alaska, I’ve seen it closing in on a mountain peak, a first scent of woodsmoke from the stove after a long ski in the cold, in the glint of a distant car windshield at the end of a weeks long river float.

In my travels through Poland, Mt. Joy was this road sign somewhere west of Kutno among the snowdrifts and windbeaten barns. I let aloud a cheer into the wind for no one, for myself. After weeks, it was the first official sign of closing in on my goal. I had spent the previous several days traversing Hoth and banana-peeling on tractionless city bike tires across ice glazed asphalt. I would stop for the next available gas station hot dog to celebrate. (Orders of magnitude better than American gas station hot dogs, by the way).

Opposite the distance sign, a roadside catholic shrine (practically as common as road signs) featured a tall concrete color painted statue of a shirtless Christ. I’m freezing, but that guy looks even colder than me, I thought.

On my last morning camping only 35 km from Warsaw, I awoke to calf deep fresh snow. I navigated slushy mud or nonexistent road shoulders. The single-speed bike chain was also giving up the ghost, repeatedly falling off. I stopped to flip the bike upside down for repairs over and over. I attached the broken rack struts back into place with wet duct tape.

And then, there was another sign; simply Warszawa, no number behind it.

I had already experienced Mt. Joy, so what was this? There was no finish line, no cheering squad.

A labyrinth of busy city blocks brought me to the second-floor apartment of Malwina and Peter, my hosts for two nights in Warsaw. A fascinatingly cosmopolitan pair hailing originally from Poznań and Sydney (Australia), respectively, they took me in on a friends-of-friends endorsement from Kacper, a Polish academic from Couchsurfing.org I had hosted the previous spring back in Alaska. Clean sheets, a shower, home made zupy grzybowa (mushroom soup) and potato latkes, and my own box of Ptascie Mleko awaited me as if I were a royal sultan. Books in a half dozen different languages covered every wall of the apartment.

Malwina quizzed me on historical details that had inspired my travels. ”Why would liberated allied soldiers [like my grandfather] all the way over in western Poland have been told to rendezvous on the opposite side of the country?” she reasonably asked. “And how would that have been communicated?” Geographically, some closer hub like Berlin might have been more logical. Or why did someone not come to retrieve the prisoners once it was known that they had been freed? 

Malwina and Peter in Warsaw

 

I don’t have all the answers, but in my reading it seems that in spring 1945 the Soviet Union was insistent that western Allies not be allowed to travel for any reason through soon-to-be-Soviet-occupied Poland. Moreover, the Soviet military regarded all POWs as essentially traitors, best left to fend for themselves or prosecuted for their “crime.”

Bombed-out Warsaw was still a hub for train routes, and the powers that be at Yalta had settled on the Ukrainian city of Odessa as the port city where allied soldiers could catch a ship back home. A direct train route connected the two cities. This is the route that my grandfather took. Before Russia’s invasion in 2022 I had also considered traveling to Odessa as part of my trip, which in 2026 is still under regular air assault.

“I think it’s good to keep these family stories alive,” she said as we spoke over dinner. “The youth here grow up having some awareness of this history, but a few generations removed now, it can seem quite distant.”

She left for a moment to retrieve a long navy blue overcoat from the closet.

”This was my grandmother’s,” she said. “I don’t think she wore it much. It was too big for her. But it fits me.”

The coat was a post-war gift to her grandmother circa 1946 from a German family. Like many Polish families under occupation in the early 1940s, her grandmother’s family was force-conscripted into farm labor in Germany during the war years. After the war, the German farm family that had “hosted” Malwina’s grandmother apparently felt sheepish about the whole affair and made overtures to make nice. They visited Poland several times bearing gifts, including this overcoat.

She asked me about the eighty year old lump of sugar in my backpack. I had almost forgotten. I had stopped anticipating it weeks ago somewhere out in the windswept countryside.

My trivia team Thursday night at "Ginnery Gin"

***

After two days of museums, starry-eyed wandering, and a handful of fancy coffee shops around Warsaw, I took the train to visit Kacper in the northern coastal city of Gdańsk.

What does it look like to actually dedicate resources to peace? And how do you know if you’re achieving it?

This seemed to be the premise of Kacper’s new job. After a few post-docs around the world, including a research trip to Alaska where we’d met last year to study the legacy of early Russian colonies, he’d moved back home to Gdańsk. He’s the only person I know who can pepper in phrases like “memory politics” with authority in casual conversation.

Kacper with a tiny scale model of a synagogue at its former site

Now in his new job with a public policy think tank, he was tasked with helping decide how to quantitatively measure European progress towards goals of peace, civility, and prosperity.

He’d been involved with this kind of research already for many years, including in nearby Belarus and Ukraine. He described seeing the slide of those regions back under Russia’s sway (Belarus) or attack (Ukraine) had been exhausting and disappointing.

He was a friend of Malwina’s from college. I recalled her retelling a few days ago of being evacuated from a government ministry assignment in Kharkiv (eastern Ukraine) in spring 2022, following months of daily not-to-be-believed headlines in the theme of Your City Must Be Evacuated by Tomorrow.

“Sometimes I wonder what it all amounts to,” he mused as we zoomed in his small Toyota on the way back from a Friday-night horse-drawn sleigh ride out in the country with his family. Did all this academic labor amount to actual improvements in people’s lives?

“Maybe sometimes victory is just minimizing a loss,” I offered. “We can’t always score a goal, we can’t always be the striker. It’s just as important to be the defense. Maybe putting good ideas out there in the world makes less space for bad ones to flourish.”

“Right,” he said. “We can be like the sweeper. Like Paulo Maldivian of AC Milan. He was so masterful, so powerful, he lead the team for decades …” I was lost in several minutes of enthusiastic football fandom after this point.

”Thanks, that’s pretty good, actually. Sometimes we are the sweeper,” he eventually said. “I’ll use that.”

***

Back home in Alaska, a friend asked me, “Do you think you got to know your grandfather any better as part of this trip?”

I think back to the WWII museum in Gdańsk from just a few days earlier. In a room dedicated to POW experiences of all nationalities, under a glass case I spotted several of the exact items I had found in my dad’s blue suitcase of memorabilia spread out across the kitchen table back home. There was a Purple Heart medal, there was an oxidized zinc snap-tag necklace etched with the name of a prison camp, there were the wrinkled black and white kodaks of family kept tucked in pockets. There were photos of officers that seemed to be putting on some sort of theatrical drag revue.

American WWII POW memorabilia at the WWII museum in Gdańsk

Everett’s military records were destroyed in a warehouse fire in the 1970’s, so almost no official government account exists of the historical events I’ve described in these posts. Seeing other copies of these military paraphernalia in the museum was somehow the closest confirmation I’ve had that they were real.

At the WWII museum in Gdańsk

I doubt that the six weeks or so that my grandfather spent MIA in Poland were even the most memorable part of his tour of duty in Europe. He had ended up there after an extended push south from Normandy through the French countryside in which a substantial portion of the infantry were lost in battle. Following that trail may be a journey for some other time.

If there is any realization from reaching back in history, it is this: no one undertakes this kind of trip that we took, especially on foot, at any time in history, unless they absolutely must. To flee from danger or to seek safety and stability far from home is to leave the known behind. To do it as a quirky tourist is a lark, to do it out of necessity is unimaginable. In spring 1945, millions of refugees and soldiers of all backgrounds were traversing the continent or fleeing it, looking for home, new or old, wherever it may be found.

Today, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide is estimated at 117 million.

In the specific case of the thousands of allied WWII prisoners abruptly liberated in spring 1945, survivors are indebted to the people of rural Poland who provided food, shelter, and care along the way.

I met no Poles who did not have an intense tale of how their ancestors survived this time. I imagine the thoughts of a Polish farmer back then seeing through the farmhouse window a gaggle of starving GIs approaching in the dark of winter, to know that their visit might mean weeks less of scarce food reserves, and I say aloud, today, eighty years later, Thank You.

I have done a challenging thing simply to know that I can do it. Is this not the definition of contrivance? Yet this is my best attempt to imagine a trip with as little contrivance as possible. No travel guides, no itinerary, no landmark tours. It is my best effort to experience history as a physical, living, struggling thing.

We don’t all need to traverse several hundred miles of rural countryside to keep family histories alive. Maybe your grandparent left an old overcoat in the back of your closet — see if it fits. Maybe there is a small town in a far away place that shares your surname, waiting for you to show up to a family reunion.

I learned, somehow, some small piece of how I arrived to where I am today.

What brought you to where you are today?

On the morning I left Warsaw, I left the bike out on the street with this note. "January 31, 2026. FREE BIKE. Hello, I am a free bicycle. A traveler from Alaska found me rusting in a ditch in the countryside near Poznan and rode me from there to here ..."

Almost There

Cathedral at Stary Rynek, with a gigantic fake Christmas tree (I checked)

Łowicz, Poland

In Orson Scott Card’s short story The Elephants of Poznań, a post-apocalyptic narrator begins by describing the city of Poznań’s central square. The “faded graciousness” of colorfully painted buildings catches the eye, and the square is a thriving bustle of book stores, coffee shops, and art galleries. Or at least it was that way, before the plague.

In the way that surrealist science fiction does, the story turns to darker matter. After a mysterious disease wipes out most of humanity, herds of elephants migrate into the town square to claim their place as the earth’s new ruling mammal. The story wanders to far darker places, and I don’t know how to interpret it. That might be part of the point of this kind of fiction, to leave the reader pondering imponderables.

I arrived at the Poznań of today’s Stary Rynek (old market square) with images of elephantine man-beasts on my mind, and wondering: why did Card set a story like that here, of all places? Why this particular European metropolis, and not Novi Sad or Prague or Lisbon? Did he once stay in a hotel above this square, and over morning coffee on the balcony, envision elephants filling the space? Did he draft the story from one of the very balconies I can see here? How does one even get in the frame of mind to dream up a story like that? If Card is dreaming up elephants, what kind of stories could I imagine in my own travels? And, are there science fiction stories published that I’ve never heard of set in Anchorage, Alaska, written in Chinese?

The square today is a bustle of locals and tourists. I had arrived too late to see the famed “fighting goats” of Poznań, wherein a five hundred year old cuckoo-clock like contraption built into the square’s Catholic cathedral puts on a show of two tiny wooden goats butting heads twelve times to mark twelve o’clock noon. They have done so every day for the last five hundred years. 

Petting the goats

“It’s so boring,” summed up my guide to downtown and Couchsurfing host, Gregorsz. “You didn’t miss anything,” he said as we strolled past shops hawking fighting goat t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, statuettes, and a mall’s automatic glass doors with glass etchings of fighting goats, the images ramming into each other all day long as the doors open and close. Personally, I think any kind of mechanical wooden contraption kept in motion for five hundred years is remarkable.

Nieropoznani (“Unrecognized”), steel sculpture by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Park Cytadela

We were headed to Piwna Stopa (Beer Foot), the first of several destinations on our Wednesday evening pub crawl. It was cold outside, and genuinely cozy inside. A couch in front of a real crackling wood fire, warm lighting, many dozens of local brews on tap. “Na zdrowie,” (“cheers), I managed to pronounce confidently after much patient coaching. A shelf of ceramic steins adorn the walls, each depicting quaint scenes of bucolic country life. I could have easily spent the rest of my time abroad right there by the fire.

“Na zdrowie” at Piwna Stopa

On the way out the door nearby, we passed a large domed structure. “There’s the old synagogue,” explained Gregorsz. “One of the few pieces of Jewish architecture that survived World War II. The Germans decided to turn it into a swimming pool in 1940, and it stayed that way until around 2010. It’s an abandoned building now. Can you even imagine?”

***

The next morning Gregorsz headed back out to his rounds of visiting hair salons, and I bundled up in an extra layer to face directly into the east winds on a bicycle. Heading through the suburbs I stopped several times to put on more layers of clothing until I was wearing everything I owned. I had inflated the tires, lubed the chain, and adjusted a few spokes on my new-found bike, ready to ride as far as it’s creaking joints would take me. 

Follow the signs

Rolling east, I only wished I had planned for something like this earlier. Bikes are transformative. Poland seems to know this, too: bicycle infrastructure, even in small towns, is everywhere. Signs, trails, and safe buffer spaces to separate bikes from traffic. Vehicles slam on the brakes if your body language even suggests you might use a pedestrian crossing. Here, bikes are traffic, just as vehicles are. A similar mindset back home would get me quickly squashed. 

It is a different journey on wheels than on foot. Not easier, not harder, but faster. Before, it was becoming obvious my walking pace would not have brought me all the way to Warsaw in the time I had before flying home on February 2. I had been pondering how best to use the time I had. Push on as far as I can and return to finish the route  some day? Choose a mid-point destination and use my remaining time to bounce around between museums? A transition to bicycle has been the right compromise of my intention to experience every millimeter of landscape between start and finish, and the desire for momentum.

A friendly local

I chose not to bring headphones on this trip, so I am left to hum every single half-remembered song I’ve ever heard, and to continue asking myself: why am I doing this?

If anyone even tries to tell me “the journey is the destination,” I will drop a tall stack of new-age self help hardcovers on their toe.

I think I first got this kind of thing into my head when Karl Bushby rolled into town one fall day of my freshman year at University of Alaska Fairbanks. Bushby, a British ex-paratrooper, had just spent the last five years on foot coming from Ushuaia. I skipped an evening chemistry lecture to see his jaw dropping slideshow in a campus auditorium. His mission was to become the first person to proceed without transportation assistance of any kind in the longest theoretically possible path around the globe: from the bottom of South America, across the Bering Strait, and eventually back home, to Hull, England, across the British Channel.

Today, twenty-seven years after he set out, Bushby has made it as far as Hungary, and plans to be home next fall. A Byzantine web of visa restrictions, political turmoil, and financial upheaval has made the journey anything but straightforward. But amazingly, he has pushed on. Not without sacrifice though, it seems.

Ruiny Zamku, near Kościelec

More recently, author and long-walk enthusiast Craig Mod spelled it out more explicitly in his new memoir Things Become Other Things. Those of us compelled to undertake these kinds of solo missions, to traverse alone between point A and point B for vague secular reasons - there must be something at least a little bit wrong with us. Something that needs to be processed. Is it healthy to spend that much time alone? Maybe, for a while at least. Results may vary. 

“Pilgrimage” is the word I’ve been resisting. Every year, pilgrims around the world undertake great journeys to Hajj, to Rome, to Bethlehem, to Kumbh Mela, to Disneyworld. Neither religious destinations or Disneyworld pique my personal tastes, so maybe I had to invent my own. Even that would suggest that there was some grand landmark to see at either the beginning or the end of my trip. At the beginning, there was a small empty fenced-in area in the forest with an interpretive sign. At the end will be a busy metropolis. Neither of those are really what I came to see, so what did I come to see? I guess the journey is the destination, and there’s my toenail bruise.

High speed train near Konin 

If I am indeed devolving into new-age speak, I’ll go on. In these travels I’ve learned that when you’re in the middle of something challenging, just keep going and you’ll get through it eventually. And travel light; carry nothing you don’t absolutely need, you’ll go further that way. 

The thought I am left with, at the end of a long day, is: the thousands POWs who were left to wander the countryside after their liberation by the Soviets in 1945; I sure hope they did some hitch-hiking to help themselves get home, along with all the walking. I know that my grandfather did, it’s unclear how much exactly.

Just to know that I am capable of drawing a continuous line across a map is enough, for now, I think. And to give myself space to imagine my own version of post-apocalyptic elephants.

I am planning to arrive in Warsaw in two more days, weather cooperating. Hopefully someone there will want an old bike.

New candy bar coming soon to a Three Bears near you

Art at a rural bus stop

Recent “bóbr” activity near a castle moat

Mural at a tiny distillery in Poznań that made only “Gruszkówka,” a traditional pear liquor

Arrived to Poznań

Abandoned rails near Kwilcz

There are some surfaces of the earth, built either by man or nature, that are best left untrodden by human feet. Freshly spilled lava, the ruins of Chernobyl, pits of writhing jungle snakes … to this list I will add the peripheries of busy interstate roads. The shoulder-less asphalt margins of the world conveying rivers of semi trucks and commuters were not designed for self-powered transportation. Maybe even more like a sneering gasp at the idea. At best, a long-distance bicyclist or pedestrian on these corridors is at constant risk of catalyzing an accident.

And so it was that I set myself a 50 km (31 mile) course east from Pniewy on Interstate 92. In the spirit of my trip to proceed eastwards towards Warsaw under power of my own wit, this was the best routing option I had, for a while at least. I had just come out of another few cold, lovely nights in the woods, but the landscape was changing.

Warta River at sunset near Międzychód

Snowy campsite near Mierzyn

Avoiding walking on the actual road itself, I crossed over the steep ditch to the frozen hayfields, which serve as decent concrete in this frozen time of year. Not a single other soul to be found outside apart from occasional blips of small villages.

Roadside gas stations are true oases for the self-powered traveler, much more so than for the motorized ones. The fuel bill for my camp stove amounts to to about $1.00 per week, but a good gas station feels like a true luxury after a day out in the wind. My highest compliments to the staff at the Orlan station near Sękowo. Everything fantastically spotless, warm, free phone chargers, nine kinds of kielbasa ready on the hot rollers, booths and tables to sit at. 

My bicycle near Bytyn

It was at this moment, after a long morning of whoosh and rumble and tripping over dirt clods, that I noticed the rumpled white frame of a bicycle in a ditch. I went down to inspect - it was overgrown, rusted, but still partially functional. I can only imagine its story - borrowed from a city, left at a bus station, joyridden by teenagers? I decided it deserved a better fate. 

I pondered some moments if it was in the spirit of this journey to all of a sudden transition to bicycle. It was, and is. I would also accept a ride in a limousine or on a hovercraft if it was freely offered. If a wandering POW eighty years ago found an abandoned bicycle in the country, would they take it? Of course. Did kids growing up in 1920s rural Kansas even learn to ride bicycles? I don’t know.

And so it as that I all of a sudden had a magic carpet. I exited the interstate immediately and plotted a course following somewhat longer, but safe, winding back roads and agricultural paths. The city bicycle creaked and complained and groaned and strained, but cooperated. I covered two days walking distance in a few hours.

Forest lichens near Kwilcz

Wind turbines near Pniewy

The lights of Poznań approached rapidly as the kilometers sped by. I had a place to stay lined up again through Couchsurfing.org, so I messaged to say I’d be arriving early. I stopped somewhere in the dark on the outskirts to take in the unmistakable waft of roasting cocoa beans, and sure enough passed an enormous chocolate factory a minute later.

Gregorsz and a traditional Polish breakfast at his home in Poznań

I’ve hosted 80+ guests myself over the years through Couchsurfing, but it would be difficult to compete with this Gregorsz’s hospitality. Before I even had my shoes off, there was action in the works to boil handmade pirogues, get my clothes in the washing machine, offer several varieties of liquor, and all the other offerings of a four-star resort experience here in his 500 sq ft (45 sq meter) apartment. A man who works as a busy traveling hair products sales representative, who happens to be without hair, he began hosting guests a few years ago to help keep his English skills intact.

I’m about to head out to see if I can find a bicycle helmet and a few other accessories. Hopefully also see some of the famed local midevil architecture downtown here. I’m meeting my host at a famed local city watering hole to try “real” beer this evening. I feel I’m in good hands.

We’ll see how long I can stick with the bicycle. It is a fairly dilapidated beast, and my knee no longer handles long distance bicycling very well. If I end up leaving it by the side of the road again somewhere, I can only hope it will find some other adventure.