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