The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10

by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)

  This is my first ride in two days of hitchhiking in eastern Czech Republic, the borderlands of Slovakia. I should be ecstatic, kissing Bogart’s wingtips in gratitude, but I am edgy. My fear is not of thumbing in a strange country or of my rapidly dwindling cash funds. Nor is it from having no second languages except the words I butcher from a pocket Euro phrasebook. I am not even bothered about hopping in the car with Slovakian Humphrey Bogart even if he does turn out to be the gun-running proprietor of a gambling den in Casablanca. These are accepted risks. But I am scared about the tent.

  Until a recent drought of rides, I had been traveling with my brother, Joe. We had hitched the length of six countries without too much trouble. (Admittedly Belgium is three hours border-to-border. We’d squandered a week there developing a taste for Belgian blondes.) We had little trouble getting rides in western Europe. As long as we had showered in the past seven days, someone would stop for us within an hour or so, and sometimes we didn’t even have to stick out our thumbs. Folks we rode with occasionally offered us a place to stay, an extra bed or a floor. But most nights, we hiked outside town to illegally pitch our bright yellow tent in woods by the highway, on farms, or in public parks. Our sworn mission was to travel without trains, buses, planes, hotels, hostels, or even campgrounds. Since Joe had just graduated college and I still had two years to go, we were content roughing it to save what little money we had. And we wanted the dirtbag cred, to stuff our greedy pockets with stories and taste the road in all its sun and filth, even if that meant eating Nutella sandwiches and canned sardines three times a day.

  Our destination was the northern mountains of Slovakia. An international hitchhiker’s gathering was being held in a town called Liptovský Mikuláš, and we planned to hitch every mile there from our start in Cork, Ireland. The troubles came east of Prague. We were quickly introduced to the Stoic Slavic Driver, a genotype of the eastern European races that involves but is not limited to a) scowling deeply while b) driving with the fierce concentration of a military general. The Stoic Slavic Driver wholly lacks the patience and the frivolous inclination to look at the foolish hitchhiker on the side of the road. Because surely that fool is either some halfwit tourist, a bottom-feeding cling-on, or a gypsy. Joe and I just happened to be two of the three. So perhaps we’d overdrawn on our celestial luck, and being stranded was exactly what we deserved. But just desserts don’t curb indignation. After the second full day of fruitless thumbing on a busy road populated by hopelessly Stoic Slavic Drivers, our nerves and patience were scarce. We decided it would be expedient to split up and meet in the next town over—Zilina. “Meet at the entrance of the highway E50,” we agreed, looking at a desperately wrinkled and stained map of Slovakia. This simplistic resolution was rash: neither Joe nor I had a cell phone. We each carried half of the tent so if we didn’t rendezvous by sunset we’d have either a bag of poles or the skin of a tent to sleep with. Also, neither of us really knew where Zilina was, let alone the entrance to the E50, or that Zilina is one of the biggest cities in Slovakia. However, if we were in the habit of considering complications, we wouldn’t have been stranded in Eastern Europe. So for the first time in months, we split up.

  The first ride is with Humphrey Bogart. He ushers me to the rear of his tiny maroon Vauxhall and opens the door with the grim ceremony of an English butler. In the rear are two young girls, probably Bogart’s daughters. One is sitting in a car seat, maybe two years old, and the other looks ten or eleven. The younger one looks up at me with off-angle pigtails, gives me the kind of delightful toothy smile possessed only by children, then goes immediately back to chewing the face off her Kermit the Frog doll. The older girl has fake red fingernails and offers me a coy smile. Bogart tells the older one to make room and I cram in, conscious for the first time in weeks that my b.o. is probably at mummifying-corpse levels. A woman in the front seat, by her looks the mother, turns around and smiles at me. “Ahoy,” I say, feeling like an idiot. Strange hello for a landlocked country. The mother says a few more words to me, but Bogart addresses her in Czech, probably something like, “He doesn’t know shit,” and the mother laughs and stops talking. We grind gears into first, and I wonder how long it will be before I see Joe again.

  The Kermit the Frog doll speaks Czech in his obligatory kazoo-like Wisconsin accent, but his batteries are low so his voice begins to deepen into what sounds to me like a Russian KGB officer. Mother lights a cigarette, props one foot onto the dashboard and begins painting her toenails, alternately green and blue. Some eastern European version of Raffi plays through buzzing speakers while Bogart and his wife talk. The language is guttural and staccato, beautiful. Pigtails sinks her teeth into KGB Kermit’s eyeball. The older girl with the red fingernails turns to me and asks, “How are you?” in heavily accented English. I smile broadly, grateful to hear English even if this is all she knows. “I’m great,” I say. “How are you?” She smiles and gives me a thumbs up. The girl’s broken English is amazingly good. She tells me her name is Sabina. She has taken two years of English in school. Her vocabulary is limited and she takes a long time forming sentences, but she knows enough to talk at length. Sabina tells me her mother is from Poland and her father is from Romania, but she and her little sister were born in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

  “So you know at least three languages, not including English?” I ask her. She nods. I had never been more ashamed to be a native-speaking English major. Then she asks the question I hoped she wouldn’t.

  “And what languages do you know?” I hang my head and hold up one finger. She is as astonished at my handicap as I am by this young polyglot. Bogart turns around and asks Sabina something. She turns to me. “My dad wants to know where you have been in the Czech Republic.”

  “Well,” I say, preparing to butcher all place names, “I was in Plzen, Velké Meziříčí, Brno, Olomouc, Prague—”

  “Aaaahhh” Bogart interrupts, shaking his head, “Prague shit.” The mother and I laugh. Pigtails laughs wildly, seeing her mother laugh.

  “Sorry,” Red Fingernails whispers, “the only English word he knows is ‘shit.’ He’s like a child.” Bogart consults Red Fingernails again. She sighs and turns to me, “Dad wants to know what kind of Czech beers you have had.”

  “Well,” I say, “I really loved Pilsner Urquell and Primus.” Bogart nods approval in the rearview mirror. “Ummm, I had Staropramen—”

  “Nooooooo!” Bogart breaks in. He smiles, pausing for dramatic effect, “Star-o-pra-men shit,” he exclaims, hitting the steering wheel with every syllable.

  I am dropped off in the empty lot of a sprawling industrial park outside Zilina. I thank the family with another of my few words of Czech, and they drive off waving. Miraculously, I find an entrance to the E50 by walking in a random direction through parking lots and abandoned strip malls. But no Joe. I know that I am probably on the outskirts of the city, that the E50 is nothing but a beltway with a dozen entrances. The gray city sprawls into the skyline ahead. I shake my head, beginning to grasp the stupidity of our plan. I sit for a moment and wait for the dread of uncertainty to creep over me like a cold sweat. But I feel nothing. If anything, I feel light, cool, even elated. This is my first time away from Joe in months, and I am giddy with aloneness.

  My shadow is long, and I chuckle at my options for the night’s accommodation: overgrown cement planters in front of an empty strip mall, under the raised highway belt, or possibly under a footbridge I passed on my way to the highway. To defer my night’s grim possibilities, I buy a greasy sandwich at a gas station and eat in the empty parking lot, watching the red sunset. The sandwich tastes like ketchup on stale bread but I eat quickly, my mind wandering to thoughts of my hometown in West Virginia: the odd meow of my cat, Pickney Benedict, the cherry tree’s branches reaching toward my bedroom window, the angle of Dad’s guitar resting on the wall, the broken whistle of the family teakettle, a blackened copper-bottom Paul Revere. I ball up the oily brown paper and stand to take a walk under the highway.r />
  Ornate and colorful graffiti tags plaster massive cement support beams: here is a sinister purple octopus eating a school girl in a plaid skirt, here a gray alien giving the peace sign, here a thirty-foot goldfish with fat Buddhas sparkling in its eyes. The deep thundering white-noise of the highway above resonates in my chest. Great mountains of trash shuffle and flap in the dusty wind. I spot a few clearings among dense Japanese Knotweed plants and consider sleeping among the forest of weeds. The piles of trash have been sorted into junkyard hangouts: bike jumps made of plywood and cinderblock, couches with springs sticking through mouldering fabric, wet sleeping bags and rotten pillows on cardboard. I hear voices nearby. Behind the next support pillar I walk through squatter’s village, constructed mostly of blue tarpaulins, dull corrugated iron sheets, and cinderblocks. There are maybe a dozen hovels and tents. Two dark-haired young women sit in front of a patchy abode. A Space Jam blanket hangs in a window behind them, swaying in the breeze. Both women are beautiful, with dark olive skin and black hair. They look like sisters. One holds a bundled baby on her chest, patting its back. They stop talking as I walk by and look at me with bewilderment on their faces. I know this is no place to sleep. Darkness descends as I backtrack out from under the highway, toward the footbridge.

  A quick black stream runs under the bridge, and the air is cool and damp. The red brick platform by the water should be comfortable to sleep on even without a tent. As I step onto the platform an acrid stench pierces my nose. I switch on my headlamp. Neat piles of shit lay everywhere on the brick, evidently a latrine for the homeless. My shoes are caked in it. My optimism hits the fan like a shit cocktail. Weary of my enormous backpack, I begin hiking to the nearest gas station, uncertain why I’m going there or what I will do next.

  A weird logic fuels to this severe brand of travel, an attraction to feeling lost, unable to communicate, even unable to find a place to sleep. The unease creates a pendulum of emotion in extremes, like a chosen form of bipolar disorder. The normal cycles of fortune and misery are concentrated. The typical rotation of good and bad days or years shifts into cycles of hunger and plenty, night and day, weariness and rest. The common platforms of normalcy are dissolved: a day is divorced from schedule, home, school, work, family and is replaced by a tangible absence of time, a forced union and trust in strangers, and the complete abnegation of a “normal” sense of control.

  Yet this traveling lifestyle has a rare brand of control: the dirtbagger can choose to go someplace, to trust in chaotic forces: in probability, in the belief that random strangers will share that goal and help him find wherever he’s going. This willful vulnerability is a trust that shifts the default view of “strangers” from suspicion, anonymity, even paranoia, to a necessary openness. After a time the openness becomes natural; strangers seem more like unmet friends than threats. The kindness I received from so many people in strange lands wore down a cynicism I’d unknowingly internalized from common and simplistic platitudes like, “Don’t talk to strangers.” I don’t advocate unconditional, blind trust, but the world is mostly strangers. Everyone forms their own balance between overly insular caution and foolishly vulnerable trust. It is worth considering where one lies on this spectrum and whether giving more trust might give back a friend or a story.

  I walk to the gas station with a bounce. I have direction. At the station I meet a German hitchhiker who knows no English but has Google Translate on his phone. We have a conversation by passing it back and forth, though some translations come through the program a little Yoda-like, “Jim my name is. Meet you it is nice to.” Jim allows me to map directions to the Zilina train station on his phone, and I write them on my arm in blue Sharpie. It’s a ten-kilometer walk, but with street names like “Ulica Vojtecha Spanyola,” and “Nanestie L’udovíta Stúra” my arm is quickly covered with directions, wrist to elbow. I decide to break the sacred pact against non-hitching transportation, to take a train to Liptovský Mikuláš, where Joe will surely end up for the international hitchhiker’s gathering. Something about the shit under the bridge pinched a nerve, and I wanted to get the hell out of Zilina.

  The walk is strange and dim, a dreamy daze of narrow winding streets and buzzing yellow lamps. I am comforted to have a direction, to be moving. I smile to the murky road ahead. Bats flit and dip overhead, hunting the swarms of insects gathered around purring street lamps. Once a bat catches a bug, it crookedly careens back to its colony, a circling cloud above the hangar of a car repair yard. It’s around midnight, no signs of people anywhere. I walk down the middle of a well-lit road and not a single car passes. No muffled music plays from apartment windows, no children cry or dogs bark or sirens whine. Even the windows are dark in apartment buildings and houses. Like curfew hour in Pinochet Chile, surreal, portentous. I feel that I am walking in a painting of a strange empty cityscape, the lonely subject of a Hopper piece. It feels more like an elaborate stage set than a city.

  The theme and variation of every building is a red-brick shoebox with small uniform windows, right angles, and a bland stoic facade. The neighborhoods are tight and angular; their effect is neat, moralizing, and utterly dismal. No doubt the architecture is a vestige of Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia. After an hour of walking, I pass an urban graveyard, a city of towering stone monuments. A great stone mausoleum stands in the center of the grounds, decked with ornate buttresses, chiseled portals, and Arabesque stained glass. Burning candles in red glass vases rest at the bases of many of the stones. Some candles are tall and wide, others are small tea lights. Some are only flickering puddles, but the effect is striking: a city of dim blinking ghosts. I stroll through the aisles of Dobrovodskýs, Chrobáks, and Polievkas. Their sleepy red spirits cast my shadow in a hundred shifting angles. I sit on a wooden bench. All is quiet. A weary peace washes over me. The deep gravity of sleep loosens my limbs, and I droop like a slack marionette. The moon is a half crescent, piercingly bright in this flickering graveyard. I squint at its bruised profile, then look down at my long moon shadow. I wonder whether this moon is growing or disappearing. The scrawls on my arm tell me I’m halfway to the train station.

  When I finally arrive at the station I feel raw, burned, like a crushed cigarette. The lobby of the sad white building is bright with buzzing orange fluorescent lights. I blink and squint. It’s around two A.M., but one ticket counter remains open. Miraculously, the slow-blinking woman behind the glass knows some English. “Four euros to Liptovský Mikuláš,” she says, yawning deeply. Overjoyed at meeting a fellow English-speaker, I begin to tell her why I am buying a ticket, “And-so-I’m-traveling-without-my-brother-and-we-are-hitchhiking—and . . .” The woman looks at me with furrowed eyebrows, a mix of genuine concern and fright. I shut up and hand her the money. She probably has no idea what I’m saying. The train is scheduled to leave an hour and a half later, so I walk around, looking for a place to sleep.

  In one corner sits an old woman, perched on a heap of possessions, her face a field of wrinkles. Shouts and drunken protests echo through the cathedral ceiling as two fat policemen escort a scruffy old man from the station. An arm under each of his, the police drag the drunken man two steps for every lazy stride he takes. His matted head hangs forward, bobbing and spitting curses. As they pass, I catch a whiff of the fresh stain down the crotch of his pants. I sit on the floor, back to the wall, and hug my backpack. An old Asian man stands by a row of coin lockers with what looks like his life’s belongings. His eyes are deep-set, as if trying to hide in his head. His face is leather-dark and wrinkled. When the police walk through the station, the Asian man pretends to put his things into the storage locker. He stops immediately when they leave. All night, I think, all night this man must perform this desperate act to keep from being thrown out into the street.

  The lights in the station are too bright to sleep, so I move to a bench outside by the tracks. Nearby the fat policemen take a smoke break. The blue smoke lifts into a fluorescent lamp, turning orange and twisting like flames before wandering off. Fa
r away a train whistles. The half-moon passes behind a cool wall of cloud. I drift to thin sleep, lying on a small bench.

  I feel a light tap on my shoulder from some far-off place. I hurtle back to my body like a baseball to a glove and snap upright. A man is standing above me in a cheap black business suit. He is tall and thin, gaunt, with a dark complexion and a long nose. Thin lips smile straight white teeth at me. The man offers his hand formally to shake, as if I am a politician or a businessman. I scowl, dubious, still curled on the bench. He speaks Slovakian as he crouches and opens a black attaché case. Inside are rows of sparkling chrome wristwatches, knives, lighters, and Woolworth-type jewelry spangled in plastic rhinestones. The man talks rapidly, pointing out the features on a wristwatch with a massive bejeweled face. I shake my head, unable to fathom why a suited man is selling his gaudy wares to a filthy traveler sleeping on a bench. “No,” I croak, “no.” I laugh a little at the absurdity before laying back down. The suited man closes the case and walks on. What the hell? I drift back to a strange, dreamless sleep.

  I wake to a hand resting on my arm. I jolt up. Two women are standing in front of me. The one with her hand on my arm takes two steps back as I sit up. The women are pleasant-looking, dark-skinned, maybe Indian. One is thin with black hair tucked behind large ears. The other is very fat and stands farther back. Neither of them look older than twenty. The smaller woman begins to speak to me. I shake my head, “I am sorry. I cannot understand.” The thin woman thinks for a moment then repeats herself slowly, carefully enunciating each word. “No, no,” I chuckle, rubbing my eyes, “I don’t understand slow or fast Slovakian.” She purses her lips, then rubs her thumb and forefinger together in the sign for money.