The pattern I’m seeing, after eight months on the road, is a split between places I stay for less than a week and places I stay for more than a week. Less than a week and I barely have time to do the touristy stuff before I’m moving on. More than a week, and I’m living someplace, albeit briefly. I can relax, and catch my breath for a bit.

Around a week, and I kind of split the difference. It’s long enough that I don’t have to see everything in a single weekend, but short enough that I can’t just kill four days in my room without missing out on things I wanted to see. I think I see fewer sights if I’m staying someplace for a week than for a weekend; it’s often such a relief to not have to worry about moving on for a bit that I’m thrilled to just relax or wander aimlessly around looking for a place for dinner.

And that all gets back to the question of what the point of travel is. Is it to do amazing things? To experience a way of living you haven’t? Or is it just to try and escape to someplace far away from where you were before, even if it’s just for a few days? I’m trying to do “all of the above.” But there’s a tension between all these things. They’re not quite mutually exclusive. Sadly, though, focusing on one means focusing less on another.

So I find myself trading off. Some days I walk for hours, without a goal or a purpose or even a plan, looking at the shops or the people or the parks. Some days I visit three museums over a long afternoon. And some days I hide in my room and don’t even see the sunlight.

There has been a shocking amount of sunlight in Lithuania this week. I took advantage by wandering around the Old Town as much as I could. I spent a couple afternoons just people-watching over lunch, and visited a couple of the churches and sculpture gardens. But the thing that’s going to stick with me, sadly, is the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights.

That awkwardly named museum¹ is housed in the former KGB headquarters in Vilnius. It’s dedicated to those who fought and died defending Lithuania against the Russians and the Germans.² The upper floors have a number of displays talking about the history of the occupations, the armed resistance movements which fought against the Soviets for about a decade, the way the KGB was organized and operated up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

And then there’s the basement. The building housed a prison for dissidents in the basement. It’s such a feeling of foreboding walking down those cement stairs. And that dread just keeps growing as you move through, as you walk past the guard post, past the concrete cell not much bigger than a van where they’d keep 20 prisoners without furniture, past the reinforced metal doors with only a single sliding window not much bigger than a dinner plate. And eventually you find yourself out past the yard, heading down another flight of stairs, and moving into the execution chamber, where they’d escort the prisoners into a nondescript room and put a bullet in their head. They killed more than a thousand people there.

The worst part of all this, the part that starts to really wear on you, is the recognition of how mundane the tortures were. There are the small unheated rooms they’d fill with a couple inches of water in winter and place prisoners in barefoot. Or the similarly unheated rooms filled with a couple feet of water and a small platform prisoners could be forced to balance on.³ You’ve got the isolation rooms, the padded cells where prisoners could be subjected to beatings or left to scream without bothering the rest of the prison, the filthy squat toilets and shower facilities.

Most of these could easily be used — or even were used — at Guantanamo Bay.⁴ I just read a book on escapees from a WWI prison camp,⁵ and it’s the same thing — starvation, humiliation, isolation, temperature extremes, and when that all gets boring just straightforward beatings. Even in the US prison system most of these techniques, while not expressly permitted, are rather depressingly commonplace.⁶

You can take comfort in the fact what passes for acceptable or tolerated is changing; chain gangs, for example, have been phased out in the United States.⁷ But there’s something unremarkable and evil woven somewhere in human psychology. Create a certain kind of system with an extreme power differential, and the same abuses start creeping up, over and over again. That doesn’t scare me; there are lots of ways to tweak the system to prevent it from happening. What does scare me is the sheer number of people who don’t care — those for whom the abuses are a feature, not a bug.

I had decided (and after the KGB museum, I really needed) to spend a day out on the Curonian Spit. The Curonian Spit is a long, thin strip of sand dunes cutting off the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. Half of it is in Russia.⁸ It’s a region of unparalleled beauty and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And it’s about a five hour drive from Vilnius.

The first question was how to get there. There are a lot of companies offering tour packages where they’d pick you up in the morning, drive you out there, shuttle you around for the day, then drive you back that night. Those sounded great. But they’re all group tours; the cost for one person would be $500 and the cost for six would be $550.

So I did it myself, booking a bus ride out Sunday afternoon, making a hotel reservation for the night just outside the spit in Klaipėda,⁹ and booking a bus ride back Monday afternoon from Nida on the spit proper. And when the day came, I grabbed my computer bag and hopped the bus, not even bothering with a change of clothes. And I found the hotel, checked in, had dinner at a brewpub open on Easter Sunday. And then I woke up in the morning with my back wracked with spasms.

I’m sure I’ve discussed this before — I’ve had back pain since before I was a teenager. It only flares up occasionally. The last time I complained to a doctor about it he took a bunch of X-rays and diagnosed arthritis.¹⁰ I’ve learned how to avoid it when it feels like it’s coming on, and I’ve got medication for when it does — or I would have had medication, if I hadn’t just grabbed my computer bag and left everything else back in the apartment I rented in Vilnius.

It’s hard to describe how it feels; it’s painful, but it’s not actually that painful. If you’ve ever managed to slam your hand in a car door without breaking anything, maybe it feels like that after you’ve had ten minutes to recover, if your hand were located alongside your spine a couple inches south of your shoulder blades. It’s kind of a steady ache that sometimes requires you to stop and catch your breath, and sometimes is sore and bothersome but not all that bad. It ebbs and flows.

But what people who don’t have chronic pain don’t really understand is it’s usually not the intensity that’s the problem. It’s the incessant nature of it. It keeps hurting, hour after hour, and soon all the muscles in my back are knotted and tense, I can feel the sides of my chest constricting like I’m having a heart attack, and trying to read or think or even just watch television becomes nearly impossible. The only thing you can really give your undivided attention to is the pain.

So, of course, I did what any sensible person would have done. Took three hot showers trying to relax the spasms, did some breathing exercises, and went out to do everything I had planned to do anyway. I hadn’t done as much research as I could have, so I narrowly missed the ferry and had to wait a half-hour for the next one, and then I discovered the bus schedule up and down the spit is rather loosely paced — it runs roughly every hour, except when it runs every couple hours, and with a half-hour drive between the things you’d might want to see, I decided to cut back on the things I was going to check out to ensure I didn’t miss the 15:15 bus home.

But I got to do everything I really wanted to. The big thing (in several senses) is the Parnidis Dune — a massive sand dune which formed near the village of Nida hundreds of years ago as a result of deforestation. For a long time it used to kind of wander around the island swallowing some of the villages, but it’s been stabilized in one place. It’s currently 52 meters high, and you can climb up the side and look out over the lagoon. It’s really breathtakingly gorgeous, especially if you’re climbing up the side in early afternoon with the sun overhead, the waves sparkling, and your back pain finally fading away after eight hours of suffering.

I for some reason booked a 6am flight today¹¹ so I’m currently sitting in a cafe in Lviv waiting for my room to be ready. I stayed up all night rather than risk missing it — there was a warning that the Vilnius airport had notoriously slow security, and you should arrive 3 hours before your flight to be safe, although after showing up at 04:15 I was through security and at my gate by 04:30 — so I’m a bit woozy and looking forward to a nice lie down.

Rereading this entry, I’m realizing it reads a little on the grim side. And that’s probably compounded for the week by the fact that the Muller report was released just before I got to Vilnius, so I’ve been assiduously avoiding the shadow of US politics for the whole time. And that’s without the backdrop of reading Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning.

It hasn’t really felt grim, though. Parts have, of course. And a big part of the reason I’m bouncing from country to country is that I couldn’t stand the one I was living in, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to be better any time soon.¹² I suppose the most optimistic reading of the moment is that the world has always felt like it’s in crisis,¹³ and it survives just the same. People have always be lousy predictors of what politics is going to look like in a couple years, let alone a decade (remember the coming Permanent Democratic Majority?). This could simply pass.

There’s a different way of looking at things, of course. One of the things I got to see on the Curonian Spit is Witch’s Hill, a vast collection of wooden sculptures by various folk artists just outside of Juodkrantė. The sculptures represent various Lithuanian folk tales, and they’re all on a hill that was traditionally used for Midsummer Night’s Eve celebrations, which were a mix of Christian and pagan traditions.

At the start of the trail the sculptures are friendly, animals and dwarves and fairies and towers. And the trail matches, all sunny and light and spacious. But as you reach the peak, things start to change. You pass a burning witch tied to a stake. You start to see misshapen creatures. And the trail down the hill is dark, overgrown and twisted and blocking the sun. Soon you’re passing through darkness, surrounded by devils and demons and the gates of hell.

But then, right at the end, the forest brightens, and you come to a giant sculpture of a rooster, calling the dawn and banishing the spirits. Because that’s how all stories work. You are faced with a crisis, you suffer trials and tribulations, and eventually you emerge, scarred, sadder, wiser, mourning what you’ve lost. But the dawn comes, eventually. It always does. Even if you aren’t there to see it.

Next: Lviv (LWO) to Warsaw (WMI)
Prev: Düsseldorf (DUS) to Vilnius (VNO)

Footnotes

¹ It was previously called “The Museum of Genocide Victims” which is clearer but also so incredibly depressing you can see why they changed it.

² If your history is rusty, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were informally ceded to Russia by Germany as part of their nonaggression pact and forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union, then invaded and occupied by the Germans anyway during World War II, only to be handed back over to the Soviets afterwards.

The museum does acknowledge the German occupation — the building was used as the headquarters of the Gestapo before the KGB occupied it — but the bulk of that is addressed by the Holocaust Exposition across town.

³ Note that stress positions were one of the approved activities on the United States’ slate of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

⁴ Female interrogators at Guantanamo would reportedly reach into their underwear and cover their hand in red ink, which they would then smear over prisoners to humiliate them.

⁵ The Escape Artists: A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War

⁶ Although, solitary confinement?

⁷ Let’s not forget the vogue for reviving them that briefly flourished in the 1990s, though.

⁸ Part of that weird exclave that’s the Kaliningrad Oblast

⁹ If I miss nothing else about Lithuania, I’ll miss the dotted “ė”.

¹⁰ And then refused to offer any sort of opinion over whether it was likely to get worse over time. So who knows?

¹¹ I’m sure it was a very good deal or something.

¹² I’m not all that far in, but Albright’s book isn’t helping much, since we’re going though the historical causes of Italy and Germany and Czechoslovakia falling into fascism and she hammers home the point that it was the collapse of the center and the resulting inability for normal politics to address increasingly intractable problems. Faced with a choice between Socialists (who, to be fair, were largely talking about the need to abolish business and the government entirely) and Fascists, most of the business class chose the Fascists, lacking alternatives.

And of course the Fascists went ahead and threw out the government anyway, because they were lying the whole time. But by then it was too late.

¹³ Hiding under your desk practicing for an atomic bomb detonation can’t have done much to avoid distilling a constant feeling of dread in kids throughout the ’50s and ’60s, much like hiding under your desk practicing for an “active shooter incident” today.