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 ..."