by Tom Fort
‘Why do I exist if I could have been without existence?’ he asked, but reached no conclusion. Pressed by an earnest disciple to explain his theories of Pure Form, he would yell ‘Après moi, le déluge’, or recite a Russian proverb roughly translated as: ‘I would be famous for heroism if it weren’t for my haemorrhoids.’ In the end the absurdity of the successive invasions of Poland by the Germans and the Russians proved too much even for the absurdist Witkacy. In September 1939 he took an overdose and slit his wrists. The fame he had longed for arrived posthumously; in 1988 the Polish Culture Ministry arranged for his body to be exhumed from his grave in Ukraine and reburied amid appropriate ceremony in Zakopane. Unfortunately a cursory examination of the remains revealed them to be those of an anonymous Ukrainian woman, and in the end Witkacy’s admirers had to settle for a commemorative tablet.
A morning of Zakopane was enough for me. Following the example of the artists, I decided to seek relief and inspiration in mountain scenery, so I took a minibus a few miles out of town to the Dolina Chochołowska, the valley of the Chochołowska stream. According to my Rough Guide, it and its neighbour, the Dolina Kościeliska, were acknowledged to be two of the loveliest valleys of the region. They must have been, once; and they might be again, if someone removed the toy train, the coach parks and hotels, the rows of gift shops, the grilled meat and beer kiosks, the gaggle of hawkers peddling rubbish, the turnstiles charging 5 złoty to get in, and at least four-fifths of the trippers swarming in all directions.
Do I sound grumpy? I was. The guidebook raised the prospect of ‘an immensely rewarding day’s hiking’ up the valley. I pondered this phrase as I headed up from the turnstiles. The toy train, its little coaches packed, passed me for the first time. Squads of cyclists overtook me, tyres hissing on the smooth tarmac road. To one side a flock of sheep nibbled photogenically. On the other families were getting a taste of the rustic life in a village of rustic chalets. Beyond the chalets, picnic tables and benches were arranged in phalanxes beside the stream.
Having passed or been overtaken by the toy train three or possibly four times, I took a path that led over the ridge separating the Dolina Chochołowska from its rival for the title of most beautiful valley in the Tatras. For an hour and a half or so I exchanged the rattle of train wheels and the tinkle of bicycle bells for the quiet of the woods and some fine views of forested hills stretching away to the border with Slovakia. Descending into the Dolina Kościeliska I surrendered myself once more to the tide of humanity, by now ebbing towards the car parks and coach parks and the road back to Zakopane.
I needed cheering up. Fortunately Marek Kot was waiting for me in a bar, ready to do the trick. Marek was the next link in my chain of Polish anglers. A mad-keen fisherman, he is employed by the Tatra National Park as a geomorphologist and as director of a programme to educate schoolchildren about the Tatras and the ecological threats to them. I felt at once that the mountains could not have recruited a more doughty or delightful champion. Short, broad and barrel-chested, with thick, tufty greying hair and a heavy moustache, Marek quivered with passion and hummed with energy.
He banged his fist on the table then smacked it into his hand as he enumerated the crimes against his mountain rivers. ‘Too many problems,’ he said furiously. Poachers. Bandits scooping up the stones and gravel with mechanical diggers for building. Abstraction. Pollution. Corrupt government officials. Corrupt angling club officials. He embarked upon a lengthy, fractured account of how he and others had campaigned to expose finagling by the president of the Zakopane Fishing Association.
I asked him about the building of the dam at Czorsztyn on the Dujanec, which had submerged a number of villages and left the stretch of brawling river that I had fished with Leszek lost beneath the flat waters of a reservoir. The fist came down again. ‘Katastrof,’ Marek bellowed. The best section on the whole river had been destroyed. And for what? To protect the holiday homes of a few officials and their friends from occasional flooding. He noticed my expression of surprise. ‘Is true,’ he exclaimed, fist descending. ‘Is how Poland works.’
Marek Kot
Sunday was his one day off. He suggested that we fish together on the Białka, which delighted me. Of the Polish streams I had got to know in 1990, it was the Białka that had stamped itself deepest into my memory.
Its source is a small oligotrophic lake called Morskie Oko, the Eye of the Sea, which is held in a bowl overlooked by the High Tatras. Unfortunately for this famously lovely place, the way to it from the direction of Zakopane is smooth and easy. Everyone who comes to Zakopane visits the Dolina Chochołowska and the Dolina Kościeliska, and everyone visits the Eye of the Sea. In the holiday season 20,000 a day squeeze into the car parks and around the shores. Their first question, according to Marek Kot, is: Where is the toilet? Then, Where can I get a beer? Finally, Where is the nature?
The pressure on the lake is extreme, but typical of this area as a whole. The Tatras are shared with Slovakia, but the Polish sector is much the smaller, and much more intensively developed for tourism. Skiing is big business, and hikers swarm along the trails when the snow has melted. Everywhere the fragile ecology is squeezed and compromised.
Somehow the Białka had escaped, like a fugitive on the run. The name means ‘white river’ and it fits. The stream bed is composed of granite stones and boulders worn and rubbed over the aeons to the pallor of bleached bone. It flows due north from the mountains through a belt of thick coniferous woodland, with no more than the occasional farming village beside it. The valley it has made for itself is wide, and the glacial water wanders hither and thither across it, dividing into braids that flow between islands of willow bushes and unstable bars of stones and gravel, tumbling over shallows into green-tinged pools. If you lift any stone in the pools, you will find it studded with the cases of caddises, like tiny broken twigs, and the nymphs of stoneflies and smaller insects. For a mountain river the feeding is rich, and the Białka teems with trout and grayling. They are mostly small, but make up for it by being eager takers of a fly.
Marek calls it the Holy River; it is where his father taught him to fish. We went first to a stretch downstream of the bridge at a village called Brzegi. This kind of fishing – wading fast water, hopping between boulders, flicking your flies into tiny resting places as you go – takes getting used to if you haven’t done it for a while – in my case, a long while. I floundered and struggled and caught nothing, until a great string of kayaks suddenly came through, paddles flying, and Marek suggested moving somewhere else. On the way back to the car we stopped to fish a couple of pools on a sidestream below a ramshackle but still active sawmill. Marek pointed out a well-tended vegetable patch as an item of interest. Otherwise the ground was largely uncultivated. No one bothers with growing anything any more, he said sadly. Tourism pays better. Even the sheep are only there for the tourists.
Four or five miles downstream, the Białka was just as I remembered. It had split into a multiplicity of channels, threading their way through the wide bed created by the floods of a thousand ages. It was easy to tack from one stream to the next, searching out the pools; so that in the course of an afternoon I must have covered two or three miles of water, yet at the end of it I had no more than half a mile to walk back along the path through the woods to get back to where I had started. After a time I lost count of how many fish I’d caught and let go. When I came upon Marek, he’d caught even more. He was grinning from ear to ear, the shaggy moustache tightened at either end, and I was grinning too.
As a finale we went to the Dunajec a little way upstream from the reservoir that had engulfed its junction with the Bialka. It was sad to see it. From studying the map I knew that I had fished here before, but this wasn’t the same river. I remembered it as big and sparkling and full of urgency as it pressed its way between high, tree-covered banks down a succession of long, foaming runs and surging pools full of the promise of trout and grayling. Now the water was sluggish, greyish, almost soapy, and carried w
ith it an insistent smell of old socks. It swarmed with little roach and chub and shoals of enormously fat minnows. I wandered upstream for some distance from the bridge, hoping to find a spot that would recapture something of the old Dunajec, and failing.
Back at the bridge Marek had filled a bag with the corpses of minnows and other little fish. They were for his cat, he said. Her name was Pussy. She weighed more than 15 kilos, and would have nothing to do with tinned cat food. She insisted, Marek said with immense pride, on the best fresh fish and meat.
I left him at his house in Zakopane, without – to my regret – making Pussy’s acquaintance. He said that the following day he was taking a class of schoolchildren into the mountains. ‘It is only by educating the young that we can protect the mountains and the rivers,’ he said, crushing my hand in his clasp. I wished him luck. I knew that he would never give up.
Chapter 7
Hungarian train
ON THE DISTINCTLY old-fashioned train from Kraków to Budapest, I shared an old-fashioned compartment with bench seats and sliding doors with two employees of Scottish Railways. They were holidaying together, spending a week on the tracks from Warsaw to Istanbul via Kraków, Budapest and Belgrade. For the elder it was the first time, but the younger was a veteran of European train networks. I asked him which was the worst journey he’d had: 16 hours overnight, Thessalonika to Belgrade, arriving nine hours late. He shook his head in horror at the memory.
Their conversation was intermittent and mainly about trains and train-related matters. They took evident enjoyment in analysing the shortcomings of the Polish system and stock, pointing out to each other where sections of worn track had been turned around and connected by dodgy joints, causing a loud, insistent clackety-clack that I rather enjoyed. The condition of the overhead lines was not good, they said, possibly even unsafe. The camber was another cause for concern. To pass from Poland into Slovakia, we followed the valley of the River Poprad where it has cut a north–south pass through a comparatively low-lying section of the Carpathians, the line taking innumerable bends, ascents and descents that often reduced our speed to a strenuous, creaking canter.
Part of the fun for the Scotsmen clearly lay in comparing and contrasting the advanced Caledonian system with the primitive Slavic one. But we all agreed that the more backward model had its plus-points. For instance, the leisurely pace made it possible to appreciate fully the beauty of the passing scenery – not so easy between, say, Carlisle and Edinburgh or Glasgow and Fort William. The river kept us company all the way to the Slovak border, racing along between thick stands of willow and alder which gave way at intervals to steep meadows and fields. Every now and then we slowed to jogging speed to pass by a sleepy village, or through a station with faded ochre buildings and sidings where retired wagons-lits quietly mouldered away.
The occasional polite intrusion of the ticket inspector, in cap and uniform and bearing an old-fashioned ticket machine of the type with a handle at the side, reinforced the impression that we had all retreated into an earlier, more sedate, age of rail. The corridor outside our compartment encouraged an occasional promenade to relieve buttocks tenderised by the unyielding seats, where one could stand by an open window, breathing in the keen fresh air. We liked the old-fashioned restaurant car which we all visited for dinner, though not at the same time (being British, we had to observe limits to our intimacy). It was presided over, not by an on-train catering services team, but by an elderly, immaculately uniformed head-waiter of lugubrious appearance who resembled his fellow countryman Béla Lugosi, and spoke idiosyncratic English in a suitably theatrical manner. Instead of a damp, microwaved bacon-and-tomato roll in a polystyrene box, we were served spicy gulyás with rice on a warmed china plate set upon a table with a laundered white cloth.
I cannot speak for my Scottish friends but I also applauded the train company’s policy of discretion regarding announcements. There were no matey greetings from the man in charge of the microwave, no pally commentary from the on-board customer services manager, no annoying exhortations to ‘take a few moments of your time’ to look at a safety leaflet, also available in braille on request. Generally in eastern Europe, announcements on trains were restricted to identifying the approaching station, or else non-existent. Journeys passed slowly, sometimes very slowly, but peacefully: the peace of authentic train noises, rattling wheels, the whoosh of tunnels, the screech of brakes, an occasional tooting whistle; a peace long ago banished from British railways by personal music systems, mobile phones, laptops and busybody witterings from train staff.
The lavatory on the Kraków–Budapest service was as period as the rest of it, but clean and in sound working order. On the wall was a complex diagram showing how the flushing mechanism worked. It was an indication of the antiquity of the Polish rail system, and its cautious approach to change, that the accompanying text should have been in Polish, Russian, German and French, but not English, now the global language of urination and evacuation as of everything else.
We finally crept into Budapest’s Keleti station at ten o’clock on a hot June night, with rain threatening. We were an hour late, but there was no obsequious, meaningless apology for ‘the inconvenience we know this will cause you’. By then I was thoroughly soothed and comforted by the rhythm of the journey. In a way I didn’t want to leave the train, ever; it was a wrench to wish the Scotsmen well and embark upon the long plod down the platform and out into the city.
Chapter 8
A programme
ONE NIGHT AT the end of January 2000 an earth and stone dam near the mining town of Baia Mare in north-western Romania collapsed. It had been constructed to contain a lagoon which was used to dump toxic waste from a gold extraction process operated by a joint Romanian–Australian venture called Aurul. In the darkness the contents of the lagoon – including 100 tons of cyanide as well as large quantities of zinc and lead – emptied into the nearest stream. By the time the alarm was raised, the spill was on its way down the River Someş, travelling west. Late in the afternoon of 1 February, 42 hours after the accident, it crossed the border into eastern Hungary, where the Someş becomes the Szamos. Early the next day it reached the Tisza, Hungary’s greatest river (if you discount the Danube as belonging to no single nation).
Travelling at four kilometres an hour, it took the 20-kilometre-long contaminated plume 12 days to pass through Hungary. In that time the spillage became an international story. Newspapers and television bulletins carried pictures of dead and dying fish floating on the surface of the river and clogging its margins. The Romanian and Hungarian authorities wrung their hands and avoided saying anything, while journalists, ecologists and environmental campaigners roamed the river talking of catastrophe. The people most directly affected – anglers, fishing guides, birdwatchers, hunters, boat owners, the operators of the many marinas, campsites and holiday resorts – gathered at access points and on the bridges. No one could do anything but watch and wait and weep.
At the time the Tisza was described as finished, destroyed. After decades of reckless pollution from industrial, agricultural and human sources, this was the final, fatal blow. Along the Szamos and the upper Tisza the entire community of planktons, the microscopic organisms at the bottom of the river food chain, was reported to have been eliminated by the cyanide. The insects, molluscs, crustacea and the rest of the host of uncharismatic bottom feeders seemed also to have been wiped out. Altogether, 1,200 tons of fish were killed, and it is likely that two already endangered species – the sturgeon and the Danube salmon – were lost for good.
But even as the corpses were being gathered up, the river’s self-healing system was at work. Within three weeks, testing in the upper catchment showed that plankton abundance was already recovering. Floods and warm weather that spring aided the cleansing. Populations of invertebrates returned to normal within two years. Emblematically, the large mayfly unique to the Tisza system – known as the Tisza Flower – was hatching in its usual vast numbers three years later
. Although the dynamics of fish populations were certainly changed, there was no evidence of a major impact on overall abundance.
It was a different story for the human population dependent on the river. Tourism, the lifeblood of the Tisza basin since the decline of heavy industry and collapse of intensive agriculture, was beaten to its knees. The journalists who had recorded the death of the river had long since departed. No one paid attention to the biologists and their encouraging findings. Even places untouched by the cyanide – principally Lake Tisza, a reservoir that had been developed as a major holiday destination – were tainted by association. No one wanted to come to a poisoned river. Holiday bookings plummeted, businesses folded, many were forced to seek work elsewhere. Most of those affected by the disaster received no compensation of any kind.
Among those who watched and wept were Gábor and Márta Hegedüs. They had sunk everything they had, and every loan they could raise, into setting up a marina at Tiszafüred, a town on the eastern side of Lake Tisza. To them it seemed that all their hopes and dreams had been washed away and drowned by the slick of poison flowing silently between the endless lines of willows.
When I first met Gábor Hegedüs, in June 1990, he was an employee – albeit a highly disaffected one – of the Hungarian Anglers’ Federation. This organisation seemed to have survived the crash of the political system that had created it in surprisingly sprightly shape. Its powers – including direct control of every river, stream, lake, pond, reservoir and canal in Hungary – were intact. It boasted a weighty secretariat based in a spacious suite of offices in down-town Budapest. My first appointment on reaching Hungary was with the secretary himself, Mr Béla Csákó.