I pulled into Siauliai after a brief panic attack on the train. It's harder to read the station names through the windows here, and they don't make announcements in English, and I thought I was where I needed to be before I actually was. Got up, grabbed my bags, went to the door. Door didn't open. Banged on the doors like a nut.
Ran back through the car to the door on the far end of the car in legit panic that the train would start moving again. From whence sprang this disquiet? Like, if you miss your stop, get off and catch the next train going the other way. No bad days.
But... I just didn't want to miss it. Some instinct was like, "Get out. Out out!"
I saw an old man in a bookstore parking lot once trying to get in through a locked side entrance. He tried the door, and it didn't open. He tugged again, nothing, and then he went fucking crazy, yanking at the handle, rattling the glass. He would not be denied.
He seemed like an animal to me, and I thought of him while I was pounding on the train walls. I became him.
When I got to the open door, the trainlady was like, "I know you, you're the guy who wants to go to Siauliai. Well, this ain't it."
The train started creeping along again and I was too ashamed to go back to my seat. I had just run, grimacing, past these people. I stood in the corridor with my bags and waited there.
A thing I love about Lithuania is that the bus and train stations have seed kiosks next to the magazine racks and coffee counters. Big colorful envelopes promising flowers and vegetables. It's just so sweet to think that planting and gardening are such a casual thing here that you would impulse-buy some not-yet-born baby carrots or morning glories.
And it's not instant gratification. Like, with a candy bar, or newspaper, or latte, you want it right then and consume it quickly. The seeds imply work and planning and delayed satisfaction, but it's such a part of the fabric of their lives, that's normal. Beyond the souvenirs and the monuments and the traditional food, this might be the symbol that gives me the most real insight into their national character.
And that was on my mind as we pulled into Siauliai for real this time. Patience. Calm. Seeds.
It's a small town, and you can walk everywhere. It's big enough to be pretty cool, though. Like, it had everything I needed. I stayed in a hotel here instead of an airbnb. Cheap, easy. Dropped off my bags, washed my face. Washed my hair. Mapped out the route to The Hill of Crosses.
That's why people come here. Story goes, it was a sacred place where people prayed and left crosses and when the Soviets took over, they were like, 'Hey, Imagine no religion -- it's easy if you try," and they turned the churches into discos and bulldozed this place.
But, people sneaked back and put more crosses there, and the Russians did a Jim Belushi-style doubletake and were like, "But.. how, I thought we...ok, fire up the bulldozer." And they trashed it again, but again people came back at night.
Again crosses sprang up. Rinse. Repeat. Until the Reds gave up. And now, it's just nuts with crosses all over the dingdong place. A symbol of both faith and resistance.
My hope was that it would be interesting and not another Zalipie, a place with a cool story but an underwhelming payoff.
On the way to the bus station, I passed the mighty Cockerel Clock! Back in Tarnow, gateway to Zalipie, the drivers rolled their eyes when you told them where you wanted to go. Here, though, they were like, "I don't speak that lazy-tongued hamburger nonsense you call language, but here is a mimeographed pamphlet with every possible minivan that goes to the Hill of Crosses."
Helpful. Cool. Found my little van, had to kill and hour, so I bought the ticket to Riga for the morning. It occurred to me that it was the last ticket I would buy on this trip. That was the final Unknown segment. Everything from Riga on was booked. So, that was a moment.
Got some coffee, read The Handmaid's Tale, got on the chopper.
Sat in the front for fear of missing the stop. It was another one of those, middle of nowhere places that you have to let the driver know you're stopping at. Plenty of people go there, but they usually take tours. I saw some hippie German hitch hikers.
If you do what I did, you're supposed to look for a little sign that reads Kryžių Kalna. When I saw it, I made gentle grunts and gave off enough nervous energy that the driver knew to stop.
It was a 2KM walk from the stop, which is about twenty minutes. So, more Zalipie flashbacks, but I could soon see it in the distance and it was very clearly what it was supposed to be.
Quiet walk through the sort of terrain I think later will define this trip for me. Quiet blue skies with enormous white clouds over fields of bright green grass dotted with yellow flowers. A child could easily draw The Baltics with just the small packet of crayons they give kids at restaurants.
Enormous bees on Spring Break got fucked up on nectar.
Nothing around, just the occasional solitary tree, and in the distance the bristling spears of the Christ Child.
When I got there, I had the place to myself but for the exception of the hitch hikers who had somehow beaten me there. Quiet, almost-eerie ramble around this strange place.
Because of personal and cultural corruption, I had the lyrics to Spill the Wine in my head. Instead of a religious epiphany or emotions about the defiant, brave souls who'd contributed to this place, I was humming 1970's #3 hit on the Billboard charts. I looked at the wild variety of crosses and sang "there were strong ones, tall ones, short ones, brown ones, black ones, round ones, big ones, crazy ones."
You can't help what's in your head. "I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie."
Many of the crosses were handmade and personal but many of them looked like they had come out of a crate marked "Crosses for The Hill - 50 Cents." I saw the same tin Christ hundreds of times. Very easy to picture him in an overflowing drawer of himself at Home Depot.
Christs for all purposes. Strong ones, tall ones, short ones..."
But, it was a very peaceful and interesting place. Some old pieces there, many encrusted with jewels or hand painted, a few very old with Jesus falling off, making a break for it.
I also saw a very sweet bird living in cross. I called him Christ-o-pher Robin.
Easy ride back. Happy thoughts. It felt good to walk the 2KM there and back to the stop.
Tooled around Siauliai proper, ate some bread and spinach pies. Rambled around by the lake and in a cemetery. Some very beautiful girls were playing cards on a tomb. The frames on their sunglasses were large and they wore pretty skirts. It came off as natural and not grim or ghoulish. Why not play cards in the cemetery?
Ate proper dinner at the hotel. There were six men in the hotel bar, each at their own table. On a large HD screen, Elton John croaked through bad cover versions of his own greatest hits. The bartender, hair in a high black bun, eyebrows in high black arcs served everyone slowly and with a reserved humor.
Oh, Nikita, you will never know anything about my home.
I drank local cranberry bitters and ate herring with beets. The other men drank vodka and ate French fries. They were Russian. Russians and Texans are the same, arrogant pot-bellied businessmen obsessed with the Motherland. Singing drinkers and drinking singers sure of their own worth. Jeans and rings. She must have been serving men like this all her life. She will continue to serve them for all of theirs.
And the New York Times says god is dead.
The sun was crazy red and round as it set. It looked like the world was red underneath the sky and someone had scraped away a circle to show the fierce undercoat. I slept early and long. In the morning - Riga.
Nothing like hits from the '70's to keep you grounded in exotic foreign lands. The pictures from the hill are amazing.
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