Zematija and Lake Platelai

Highlight of Jen’s weekend: listening to the singing deep-bass voices of large Lithuanian men reverberate off the metal walls of a former-Soviet nuclear missile silo!

Let me back up a moment.

One thing I am beginning to discover about life in Klaipeda, and in teaching in general, is that there will always be more work to be done. There will always be another opportunity to go out with students, to have dinner with friends, or to make a lesson plan better. But, in order to do any of these things well, I need to take a mental break now and then! Saturday I was able to take a short road trip around “Lower Lithuania” with four other teachers from LCC (Jerilyn, Kate, Thor and Jared).

It was inexpressibly wonderful to get out and see the countryside of Lithuania, the little villages and churchyards (my fingers are resisting the urge to type the word, “quaint.” I’ll go with “lovely” instead). I have always felt that you can’t really know, or feel at home in, a country until you have walked in the woods and fields, over its little rivers with their foreign names.

Thor arranged to rent a car and he drove us to a number of places that can’t be gotten to by bus or train. The first was Orvydas Garden, one of the strangest, most mystical and wonderful places I have ever been. It is basically a rambling and ramshackle sculpture garden, with little pools and paths leading through plum trees and woods. Strewn around everywhere are statues, wood carvings, pieces of architecture, iron and wooden crosses, relics of the Soviet era and earlier pagan times. All these things were collected by a monk named Orvydas who was forced to leave his order during the Soviet occupation and took up wood-carving as an occupation. This garden represents his life’s work. The psychic effect of all these strange and unintelligible objects juxtaposed in one location gave me shivers. It is something like a physical representation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” when he says, “These fragments have I shored against my ruin.” It is like a collection of the wisdom and follies and beliefs of so many past centuries, all being slowly weathered into the ground. It is like watching the wisdom of the world dissolving before your eyes, as God’s creation preempts and covers over all that we humans think we understand. Walking around, you can’t help but feel a spiritual presence – especially in some of the stone carvings that mix passages from the Bible with astronomical charts, and poems to our Creator chiseled into shiny slabs of rock.

After the garden, we had time for lunch in a village (blyenai – potato pancakes – for me. Quite filling for only 4 lt) before heading into Zematija National Park to go boating on Lake Platelai. The boating was quite a hilarious excursion, four of us in one flat-bottomed rowboat, with the one guy, Thor, trying to row us straight into the wind! We eventually switched around, with Jerilyn and I rowing together. She is quite a bit more experienced (okay, and more fit) than I, so it was pretty hilarious as I had to row two stokes for every one of hers! After successfully navigating around one of the islands, we returned wet and exhausted (well, not all of us. I got booted from rowing duty pretty quickly!). Even though it was windy and cold, we took a quick swim at the beach and jumped off the diving tower, just to say we’d done it.

From the beach, we had time to go to the “Militarizmo Ekspozicija” - which is an abandoned Soviet missile base that housed nuclear warheads until 1978 (it was closed after the signing of the Helsinki Accords). It had been built this far west in Lithuania because this was a sparsely populated area and the woods surrounding the area made it easy to hide (not to mention that it made it easier for Russia to target places in Western Europe). Providentially, as we were walking up to the rusting domes and concrete walls that are all that’s left of the place, a Lithuanian tour guide arrived with a group and offered to let us tag along on the tour inside the base, for a very small fee. We took her up on the offer, and found ourselves being led down into the mine-like installation with a group of inquisitive Lithuanian tourists.

Most of the rooms were barren metal caves – stripped of their artifacts by the Soviet army when it left, but we got to see some of the old generators and operations rooms. Then the guide took us down a long hallway toward one of the four missile silos. At the end of the hallway, everyone had to climb up through a door into a bowl-shaped area. We crawled up and suddenly the entire group was circled around the missile shaft opening, staring more than 300 feet down into an abyss of air, the bottom of which has been slowly filling with water for the past 20 years. This was the point at which the Lithuanian guys started singing, their deep voices echoing in the hollow space. This made people laugh, and others started drumming on the rusty railing that surrounded the platform we stood on. It reminded some of us of the scene in “Lord of the Rings” with the characters in Moria, and the “drums in the deep” start thrumming, sending them all rushing away from the fiery Balrog demon!

As we stood peering over the edges of the barrier, I could not help but think what a mercy, what a miracle it is that this place – designed to bring about terror and death – was echoing with laughter (nervous, timid laughter, yes) and singing. It made me momentarily happy to think that in the time that I have been alive, even just this one evil has been undone, unmade.

In an abrupt change of tone, after our visit to the army base, we drove to Zemaiciu Kalvarija, which is a tiny village famous for its “Stations of the Cross” chapels that are scattered around the windy streets of the town. Unfortunately, most of the chapels were padlocked and closed, but we climbed a few hills, drank water out of a bucket from an old Lithuanian well, and took some pictures, so not all was lost! It was probably the fourth or fifth church we had stopped at that day, not to mention all the cemeteries we’d walked through. Probably the nicest thing about the entire afternoon was the freedom to just walk through the headstones and crosses and dirt paths and experience a consuming sense of peace. Walking in those places, I find my life taking on a sense of order and meaning. Because I have only so long before laying down in a churchyard somewhere, it makes me want to breathe more deeply now, to live with more conviction now, and to worry less about what others think or don’t think of me!

After Zemaiciu Kalvarija, dusk was starting to settle over everything and many of the farmers were driving out to milk their cows in the fields. In Lithuania, the dairy cows are staked out in the field and the farmer goes to them for milking. This way, the cow eats grass at different places each day and isn’t penned up in a dairy barn eating hay. Lithuanians are often touting the fact that their food is all-natural, organic – which I can testify as being true since my milk tends to go bad in two or three days! In a country this small (aprox. 4 mil), they are finding a way to hold onto some of the qualities that have been lost in American agriculture, it seems.

Dinner after our long and enjoyable day was a cooperatively constructed meal of pasta and vegetables at my apartment back in Klaipeda. I am always thrilled to have guests over, and we finally tired ourselves out with cooking, talking and a little wine. More important than even the fun of the day is that I actually feel energized to tackle the work of the upcoming week – and such energy is always a blessing!