Roommates

The names and identities of the characters in this story have been changed to protect the innocents.

The three of us lived in a triple-decker, on a middle floor of a drafty 1906 wood frame, just beyond the “defoliation line” dividing leafy Cambridge , MA from the blue-collar street car suburb of Somerville.  Proudly named Caldwell Avenue, it was a just a short alley without an outlet, right past an oriental rug store eternally going out of business.  Long before craigslist, I found my room there through an ad in the paper.  Susan was looking for replacements of two roommates: Sal, who left for NY, and an Indonesian woman who never lived there (she lived with her boyfriend but had her family believe that she lived with Susan).

I was back from my summer job in NY for a weekend and was house hunting with Aubrey.  We first went to see an apartment where “a female roommate was sought”.  The rent was cheap but we had to be careful stepping through a jumble of amp cords and dust bunnies nestled in their kinks.  Long-haired emaciated guitarist who played for spare change in Harvard Square answered my inquiry about the wording of his ad: “Look at this place!  We need a girl to clean it up”.

It was time to check out chez Susan’s.  She opened the door with a towel on her head and said that she already sort of rented the place to a nice German guy.  It looked like there was just enough room for one more.  I instantly liked the spirit of the place.  The rooms were bright and one was suffused with a pastel glow from a stained glass window.  The floors were warm lacquered wood and the walls clean white.  Susan announced that we will have to share food.  I was not sure about how that was going to work, but, on the other hand, I did not want to label every single egg like someone else I knew.  I said yes.

While I was back in Manhattan, a friend who was going to England asked if I could store his bed for a year.  I had no furniture, so I gladly accepted.  I gave them the address and they carted it off to Susan’s.  Interestingly, the bed consisted of two I-beams pilfered from a construction site and two doors.  When I moved in in September, I had to lug the heavy metal and plywood into the front room.  It turned out that the room where Alberto dropped off the bed was already claimed by Dieter the German.

Dieter, who was not blond and square jawed at all, had only one question: “whether I was going to cook Polish food”.  Our roommate coexistence was sweet.  We were all busy in different ways: Susan biked every day to her non-profit job, Dieter was pursuing a PhD in the School of Government, and I was continuously leaving after dinner “to work in the studio” till at least midnight. We took many happy trips together to the Star Market grocery store (Savenor’s, the Julia Child’s hangout, was right around the corner, but was too fancy).  I remember one day making a shopping list, and insisting that we needed “soap dish”.  Somehow my sleep-deprived brain was not arranging the words correctly.  Susan and Dieter were staring at me open-mouthed.  “Why?”  “Because we are out”, I shouted, “It is all gone, used, no more”.  I should have said dish soap.

We decorated the place with cinder blocks, milk crates, and draped a white cotton throw over a threadbare pink couch.  We had great parties, if neighbors calling the police is any measure of success.  Dieter turned out to be an excellent dancer and Susan was great to talk to about anything.  At the end of the school year, though, Dieter was leaving to move in with Tom from his department, and Susan was thinking of going to school in New York.  For the summer, however, we needed someone to rent the back room.  A parade of candidates moved through our sunlit rooms while I nervously twisted my necklace beads interviewing people.  We instantly took to Bobbie the Glassblower, a gentle soul who made gilded cherubs in a basement workshop off The Square.  He did not materialize as a subletter, though.  We ended up spending three months with Todd who traveled from San Francisco on the Green Tortoise and scared us a little by doing heaving shirtless push ups and pull ups on the porch.

I distinctly remember one of the potential housemates who sat crosslegged on the kitchen floor, asked if we did not mind if she did yoga often, and posed a lot of personal questions.  We liked her a lot.   She seemed thoughtful, centered, and responsible.  It was a disappointment, however, when at the end of the interview she stood up, thanked us, and told us she will make sure to have our names changed in her novel.

Loudspeaker

A pea in the pod of a 747 belly I am jostled from a quarter-slumber by the last of the turbulence.  I open my eyes and through a thick yellowing glass near my window seat I see that we are about to land.  “Flughafen” pops into my sleep-deprived mind.  I am going back for the first time in nine years and I have been awake for twenty four hours.

Ordering breakfast in Berlin I discover that, even though Dieter the Teacher cried “Wunderbar!” every time I answered a question at Goethe Institut classes in San Francisco, my command of the language at this point is not enough to explain the solid state of eggs.  I resort to English.  I am understood and, I think, slightly pitied.  I am sooo tired, and yet have to transit through Germany with luggage, and alone.

I am on the train.  We have arrived in a border crossing town that has been cut in half by a river and the Second World War politics.  We are waiting as some of the cars are being detached and shunted somewhere else.  I have had the presence of mind to sit in the one that will go beyond, into Poland.  I have the whole compartment to myself, with its green curtains woven in a gold pattern of Polish State Railways initials and a miniature formica table folded under the window.  It is dark now, and I am resting.  I am glad that I am wearing my comfortable suede shoes.  I lie down and put my feet up.

And then, I hear it.  The voice I have not heard for years, with the intonation and the pronunciation unspoiled by foreign influence.  Slow and proper are the words; they bring memories of train trips to the seashore.  She may be my age, in her late twenties.  She is sitting in a station office in front of a microphone, repeating with flawless diction: “Express train from Berlin to Wroclaw is at the platform 3, track 1″.  There is a certain timbre to it, a stirring familiarity.  I welcome it, embrace it. I am very glad to be going home.

“Passport control!” A young soldier yanks the handle and slides the door open.  He is gruff and maybe as tired as I am.  Everything checks out, but he orders as he leaves: “off with the shoes!”

My uncle picks me up at the destination. He is not much older than I am, due to the complicated histories of post-war families.  His wife drives a Maluch, a Polish Fiat 126, an ultra-popular vehicle with the engine in the back.  The design is a well known death trap: in any head collision, your legs are gone.  I stretch mine into the passenger well.  “Nice shoes” my aunt says.

They live in our old apartment now.  I will be staying in my room which is now her brothers’.  But, where is all my stuff?  Half of the furniture is gone, there is no sign of my clothes or books…   I need to find out if a stash of mimeographed anti-government leaflets from 1982 is still hidden in a secret space at the back of one bookshelf.   My leg and arm muscles are beginning to tremble from exhaustion and I will probably collapse any minute.  But my family sits me on a stool at the plastic laminate kitchen table whose gray grid I know so well from drinking my before-school milk.  I register a a plate of sandwiches out of the corner of my eye.  “Talk”, they say. “Spin your tales”.

Bag in the Wind

One of the consequences of a long-limbed teenager no longer fitting in the back of the car is the loss of my control over the dashboard.  Suddenly, the vents are spewing hot air in my face on Volume Three and the radio is emitting the sounds of Katy Perry instead of Terry Gross.  A van full of boys is singing along to Firework.  Have you noticed the lyrics?  I quote: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind, wanting to start again…”  What happened to similes taken from nature?  Are floating plastic bags so prevalent in our landscape that we started comparing our emotional states to them?  They do  billow, handles down, in peculiar ways.  Lifted, they get stuck on trees.  They fall and coil in our ponds.  Sheets of plastic have very different physical properties from cloth: a plastic construction tarp blown by a gust of wind fills and flaps in a flatter, louder way than its cotton equivalent.  Maybe our world is richer in experiences than the world of the ancient Greeks, who invented the simile.  They were only familiar with the ways of cloth sails.

When I was little, plastic bags were very valuable.  I treasured my set of several see-through ones which I used to pack everything  for a 7th grade “wandering camp” in the Polish mountains.  My backpack was made of heavy orange cotton fabric and was not waterproof.  There was a faint diamond pattern on the surface of each bag.  They did not lock; none of the bags we had did; I just rolled the tops very tight or wound them several times around my change of shoes, for example.

Later in high school, there came a fashion to sport large plastic bags with logos that came from a single store in town where you could buy things with hard currency, i.e., dollars.  The store was called Pewex and sold things like: hard liquor, cashmere sweaters, cigarettes, and Levi’s.  My bag had a color rendering of a large denim bottom.  I carried schoolbooks in it.  I even continued to take it to classes at a university in Texas in 1983 when finally, a professor I did not know took me aside and presented me with a free American backpack.

They are no longer treasures.  Ubiquitous: pink ones on the 1 California bus in San Francisco, with “Thank You, Thank You” from Chinatown; thin white ones with store logos, clear ones from fruit or bread packaging, black ones for trash…   Many years later, after several stints of cleaning the shoreline in Oakland, CA, and learning about the island of plastic n the Pacific Ocean, I now make a point of not taking plastic bags in stores.  Can I carry a bunch of bananas and a box of cereal to my car using just my bare hands?  Yes, I can!

Katy Perry’s song reminds me of another.  I start singing: “Bag in the wind, all we are is bag in the wind…”  It all began twenty years ago when another long-limbed youth explored Ocean Beach in San Francisco.  Having entered an abandoned fortification tunnel he started waving his arms and shouted : “Kasia, come and see this!  The shadows and the rays of light are moving in an incredible way!  It is so cool, it is like…  it is like…  an MTV video!”

We used to compare stuff to nature.  Now, more and more, we are comparing nature to trash.

A new Polish film

This entry wanted to be a tweet:)

There is a new Polish film about growing up during Solidarity years.  It is trying out for Oscars

http://www.allthatilove.pl/home

I have to see it soon to find out if it reflects my youth…

Slupca – Part 1

Here is my first memory: I am standing with my fiance in a hospital garden facing a chainlink fence. In our right hands we are holding bundles of weeds. We have yanked them by their hair, liberating them from the crusty earth. We heard a painful, yet somehow satisfying crack as their roots tore in two: the part still left underground and the part covered in a clump of soil, now in our triumphant grasp. It is time to shake! We stretch back, swing our arms, and hit the rootballs against the sturdy diagonal metal grid. Earth is flying into my eyes, blinding me, I inhale the wet dust.  The roots must be naked! I am getting very dirty, but I love this game I play with my fiance. Of course I am going to marry Pawel. He is the only boy I know. I am three and a half.

Dear Svieta

Dear Svieta,

I received your letter.  It made me very happy.

Thus began every piece of correspondence with my pen pal from Soviet Union.  We had an unspoken agreement to always start that way, with a canon of epistolography.  Many years passed since either of us wrote these words.  A few good weeks have gone by since I last wrote for this blog.  I feel like writing an opening phrase to you:

Dear Reader,

I am sorry I have not written for a while. I hope you understand.

I will write about Svieta, who I really knew in person.  She remained my friend through letters for a couple of years  after I returned to Poland in 7th grade.  In the USSR she lived upstairs, in a long concrete block of flats in a 1960s development.  Ours was one of several parallel buildings.  I remember them as  frozen grey-brown slabs in a leafless landscape, exposing the short sides of parallelepipeds to the street frontage.  Each windowless side wall had an enormous propaganda painting: a face of Lenin, a bust of a strong female farmer with a sheaf of wheat, or a picture of an atom (we were living in a Soviet version of Springfield from the Simpsons) .  The murals were clearly visible, at a slight angle from the main Komsomol Street.  That street was often used by scary funeral processions, with coffins on truck beds draped in red and brass orchestras playing loud and slow in a minor key.

Each big block had a single-digit number, and, even thought there were multiple entrances, the apartments were given “running numbers”.  Ours was 54, Svieta’s 61.  This was in a telling contrast to the Polish System.  In Wroclaw every entrance had a double-digit number and the apartment arrangement repeated in every “stack”: numbering from 1 to 10, for example.   Even as a fifth grader, I realized that the Russian system significantly obliterated individuality.

I spent hours in Svieta’s apartment, even though I did not understand her obsession of prank calling a blond curly hair bespectacled eighth grader named Kiril.  I did not have many friends.  I was shy and small.  I was a foreigner who refused to wear the scratchy brown wool pioneer outfit and instead wore a bright baby blue polyester frock that buttoned down the front.  You might think my brother and I could have been popular, as some unknown kids regularly lined up under our windows and chanted “zhevachku” for chewing gum they thought we had.  But I seemed to gravitate to the outcasts: tall and skinny Olya or round-faced Svieta.  Svieta, with her short hair and a red pioneer scarf askew around her neck, smiling and welcoming me.  We sat in Svieta’s entry hall, where the phone was, and we could smell the cooking of the neighbor sandwiched between Svieta’s and my floor.  Her name was Anna Ivanovna and she was a master of  pirozhki with cabbage and mushrooms.  When I ran down to my flat, she opened the door and treated me to a warm glazed oval roll with a steaming center.  She smiled, too, from under her bushy black eyebrows.

I was often sick in fifth and sixth grade.  One time, I had a fever in school.  Marina, one of the ultra popular and developed girls accused me of using lipstick.  She was standing in the changing rooms where we had to leave our heavy overcoats, hats, scarves, gloves, and galoshes.  She was barring my way, sure of herself:  “Kat’, ty guby krasila!”.  When I stayed home with colds and flus I laid in bed reading, learning how to file my nails, and embroidering funny cardboard pictures my dad drew for me.  One evening I was surprised by a delegation of girls from my class.  But they were not “visiting the sick” to comfort me or to give me company.  They were officially dispatched by a teacher to drag me to a compulsory meeting called “ogoniok”.  The meeting form must have evolved from a fireside sing-along; hence the name, meaning “little flame”.  But it was, from what I understood, an indoctrination session for the young, not to be missed.  I watched through feverish half-closed eyes as my parents quietly reasoned with five open-mouthed, incredulous girls, and explained that I really, truly, could not attend.

I have a small relic of these times.  It is a memory book (with a lock!) of dedications and small photos of my classmates.  Some of them were real friends and some were not.  Here is the entry on page four: Nice Katya! Many years may go by and I will not forget you.  Please don’t forget me.  Correspondence will strengthen our friendship.  Your friend, Svieta.

Where are you now?  Did you hunt down Kiril and get married?  If I were to get your letter now, I would be very happy.

Untitled (about April 10, 2010)

The plane that killed Polish President, his wife, and more than eighty people of prominence in the government, military and cultural circles came down yesterday in the same woods where my grandfather died.  My father’s father, Teodozjusz Kowalski, was an officer, who, alongside thousands of others, was executed by the Soviets exactly 70 years ago.  When I was growing up we were not even sure if he was one of the victims.  We were not allowed to talk or ask about it (the Soviets were our “dear friends”) and the records were inaccessible.  He simply disappeared after the September 1939 defense campaign.  He never saw his newborn son.  In the 1970s I fantasized that a man atop a horse drawn carriage slowing down my bus on the way to English classes could be him, my grandfather, who survived the war and is in hiding.  Even now, when I explained the strange and sad circle of events to my son, who is ten, he said: “How can you know for sure he was killed there?  He might have forged his papers and escaped.  All you have is his name on a list”.  I have to admit it is a possibility, but a distant one.  That name on the list was very hard to find, too; only in the last ten or so years my dad could get a confirmation.  Many times he talked on the phone, from Texas to Poland, with a man in charge of uncovering the records.  That man, who set up the Memory Commission, also perished yesterday.

The plane was which carried Polish officials to their tragic death was flying to an event commemorating the tragic deaths of 1940.  It was Russian-made.

I am not suggesting any conspiracy theories, but only hoping that the grim time loop will articulate the need for PEACE, once and for all.

Toy Stores in Heaven

“Do they have toy stores in heaven?”

“Probably”

“The smashed-up kind?”

“????  Why would they be smashed-up?”

“You know, when there is a big crane with a ball hanging on a line, and it hits the building.  Then the toy stores are ghosts and go to heaven.”

My six year old son was talking about demolished buildings and their souls.

I watched several demolitions; I even worked in an architectural office while the Embarcadero Freeway was coming down literally outside our front door.  I was drafting at my desk and when I looked up, I could see the dinosaur head of a giant pneumatic drill.  It dug its beak into the rock-hard concrete and iron re-bars of the elevated deck and shook the neighborhood with deafening “dok, dok, dok”.  We breathed the dust and from time to time we heard loud bangs of falling weight.  Good riddance!  I think the Embarcadero Freeway went to hell.

The Chapter House of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco was another matter.  It was a beautifully proportioned stone structure, covered with ivy, and situated in front of the church, so that the approach to the sanctuary assumed somewhat European qualities: not a straight-on, but around-the-corner experience.  It was a lovely building, but the cathedral needed to expand.  God knows, we needed parking on Nob Hill – I lived there and sometimes spent forty-five minutes circling around looking for a spot.  If I remember correctly, someone condemned the Chapter House as unsafe, the so-called UMB (unreinforced masonry building), sure to fall down in the next earthquake.  I stood on the rooftop terrace of our apartment building at 1200 Taylor Street and watched.  With each swing of the wrecking ball more and more of the 1930′s bas-relief on Masonic Auditorium beyond was revealed.  I preferred the Chapter House as my view, but I was powerless.  Something else was visible, too.  As the chapter house was diminishing, I could see fragments of its interior structure: twisted iron and sturdy pillars of reinforced concrete.

What is there now?  The entrance to the gift store, the restrooms, and the parking garage, all underground.  The approach to the cathedral is via a very wide staircase with thin insubstantial railings.  It is an architectural statement, very grand in its flowing expression, but with an obvious “oops, we forgot about the building code” mark.  Where the Chapter House, Rest in Heaven, once stood, there is a contemplative labyrinth my children and I walk once in a while.

Crowd Dynamics: a Study in White and Red

Are you familiar with fluid dynamics?  My father is a physicist and I often heard that term at home.  I also went to a Mathematical/Physical High School where I learned about the movements of liquids and gases.   Their behavior can be affected by pressure and temperature.  Their velocity and density may vary.  Some fluids, channeled through pathways, move in a steady and orderly way.  Other fluid movements form turbulent torrents.  Others are trickles over time, building up to fill a container, only to spill over and flow through the channels they find.  Some behave in unexpected ways: I just learned that blood is a non-newtonian fluid, that is, an application of force makes it behave like a solid.

Do crowds move in fluid ways?  I will describe three dates when I experienced Crowd Dynamics.

May 1st, 1980. May Day was always a beautiful day for a teenager in the Communist Poland.  Any resentment resulting from having to attend the parade was offset by the weather.  The harsh blow of the wind against our cheeks was changing to a softer touch.  It was one of the first times in the year when you could wear your coat open and maybe put on the suede shoes you managed to find in a small town.  The sun was out.  The whole city was on holiday and transformed: the streets and bridges were cleaned, there were red flags on every building, and long banners spanned the facades, spelling unity with the Party.  The trees cooperated by erupting in hazy green veils of buds.  At corner kiosks, parents were buying miniature flags of stiff paper wrapped around balsa wood handles for their children.  You could smell freshly dug earth from the tulips planted on lawns in shapes of hammers and sickles.  Our sophomore class had spent the previous Sunday in the school gym hammering flat golden push pins to the tops of thick wooden sticks: attaching colorful handfuls of yard-long ribbons.  As part of the parade, we had to perform a dance for the party members which involved waving the sticks around.

The long snake of unwilling celebrants was flowing very slowly through the main thoroughfare of my city.  The avenue these days was named after a World War II hero.  We had to read a book about him in grade school, called “About a Man who did not Bow to the Bullets” (I later found out that the reason the general did not avoid the bullets while sticking his head out of the encampments may have had something to do with him being continuously drunk).  Our school’s group was stopping and starting, unavoidably approaching the main tribune, a multilevel plywood grandstand set out as seating for the Important Ones.  I was thinking about how strangely ironic it was that what were genuine street demonstrations in the 19th century, with red flags symbolizing spilled worker’s blood, has transmogrified into an obligatory, orderly shuffle of citizens dreading the orchestrated cheer for their dear leaders.

We were almost there.  Someone in front of me started the dance a little too early.  I tried to catch up.  In front of the reviewing stand, we ended up running around in circles, moving the beribboned batons to and fro.  Obviously, we had not rehearsed enough.  The embarrassment  was quickly over, as we moved past the tribune, pushed by another group eager to show their stuff.  At the last minute, still within the earshot, one of my friends, a self-described anti-communist, jumped up, waved his baton, and screamed “More light!”  One of the dignitaries did a double take, but I doubt he understood that Goethe’s dying words, even if he knew that’s what this outpour was, were meant as a protest cry, a demand for more freedom of expression.

Sometime in early Spring of 1982. The light of Free Trade Union Solidarity came in August of 1980, burned for sixteen months and was snuffed out on December 13, 1981 with the introduction of Martial Law.  Since the New Year, we had been hearing the underground murmuring: “Winter was yours, spring will be ours!”.  It was a school morning and I took the tram, as usual.  At the school stop, however, something looked different.  Why was the sidewalk so crowded?  When I came closer to the building I found out that all the students were outside.  No one was being let inside because overnight some “anti-socialist elements” painted protest graffiti on the school walls.  One of the signs was visible to the left of the entry stairs: at eye level, not sprayed, but delineated with a wide brush, were dripping, painted letters: Solidarnosc.

Opposite it, six hundred teenagers were teeming in a small park.  Some of my friends sat down on their book bags thrown on the wet muddy grass and began to smoke.  Suddenly, the door at the top of the wide flight of steps opened. A vice principal appeared on the top landing.  He was in his late middle age, bald, and very fond of one shiny maroon polyester suit.  He taught “Preparation to Life in a Socialist Family”, a subject which was a masterful combination of Marxism and birth control.  To us, he personified the hated System.

He took a step down.  By now, everyone was up.  The crowd took a step back.  He descended two more steps.  We mirrored it and retreated further.  He started walking down the stairs in earnest.  At this moment, six hundred people turned around in unison and started running away.  We pushed through the narrow pipeline of a street framed by five story walk-up apartment blocks from the 19th century, past the bakery where we stuffed ourselves with poppy seed stuffed buns, past the boutique that sold brown lace bras, past the travel agency with pictures of Bulgaria in the shop windows.  Tumult and tangle, pressing forward, escaping.  Feet stomping, my imitation leather yellow heeled winter boots on the cobble stones, tripping, book bags banging, sacks of shoes to change into lost and trampled.

Nobody looked back or slowed down until we spilled out onto Grunwald square, a non-space formed by the convergence of several avenues and holes made in the urban fabric by Allied bombing in the Second World War.  At that point, we scattered.  Some of us lit up again.  I decided with my girlfriends to eat pastries at a cafe on the ground floor of one of the “toilet-scrapers”: tall buildings in a brutalist architectural style whose concrete window surrounds look like toilet bowls.  We took the liberty to take the rest of the day off.  The next morning, we saw the vice principal outside, painting over the letters in white wash.  He traced the letter shapes, however, so now, instead of red Solidarity, we had a white Solidarity sign.

June 21, 1983. I did not know it then, but it was just a few days before I was to leave Poland forever.  Pope John Paul II visited my home city.   I was meeting Agnieszka, a friend from my university group, at one of the central squares.  We had to walk to the horse racing arena on the outskirts, where a million people were gathering to hear Mass. We, as everyone else, wore white, in honor of the papal visit, and in honor of peace we needed.  All morning, all over town, white figures in pairs or in small groups were incessantly moving through the veins of streets and alleys to a common destination.  On the field, I was struck by the altar design: the enormous cross was really its own absence – its shape was formed by the empty space within a tall white box.  Did a bird flow through it at some point, or is it just stuff of myths I want to remember?  The Pope was late, but it was amazing how well-behaved the people were.  We were so happy to see him!  Later, instead of the people coming up to the altar to receive Holy Communion , priests set out into the crowd to distribute it.  A million people kneeling in silence, a million people standing, holding up right arms, fingers stretched up in a peace sign (but for us it was a V for victory), singing the unofficial, banned anthem: “God, grant us back our free country”.

Filled with hope and good will, Agnieszka and I were returning to the city center on foot.  So were the others.  There was one main artery to take.  A white river was peacefully flowing on it.  Suddenly, with the sound I hate to this day, low-flying helicopters invaded our space with their deafening whirl.  “Disperse! Disperse!”  The militia had loudspeakers.  Where could we disperse to?  Agnieszka and I ducked into a nearby building entrance and waited it out.  We did not see any, but blood was spilled that day.  A body of a student beaten to death was found the next day in the river…

A little later, Angieszka and I said good-bye at the same square we started from. It was then called Dzierzynski square, after a blood-thirsty revolutionary.  It is now renamed Dominican, after white habit-wearing monks from a nearby church.

Venus de Cerkiewnik

She was quickly stuffing rubber boots in her backpack.  Any time, her mother could enter her room and ask: “Why would you need them for visiting your aunt in Cracow?”  Most of her friends already left for a camping trip to the Lake Country.  She would to catch up to them.  Shouting quick goodbyes she ran down the two flights of her apartment block and darted one entrance over to her friends’ flat to borrow a sleeping bag.  She made it to the train station on time, but she went North instead of South.  Many hours and train changes later she stepped off onto the platform of a town called Good Town.  The backpack was heavy and she had a few miles of solitary hike to the campsite.  She hooked her dark blond hair behind her ears and set off towards the lake.  She went through the village, the fields, and entered the forest.  According to the directions the tents should have been here, in this clearing.  Here was a steep path down to the water, there were tall evergreen trees encircling the plateau, but the site was abandoned.  She could still see the faint rectangles of flattened grass where several tents had been.  It was late afternoon and big birds started congregating in the tufts of greenery on top of black branchless tree spires.  Their eerie creeking sounds only made it more obvious that there was no human sound or sign anywhere.

But wait!  There was something sticking out of the cold embers of the fire pit.  A vodka bottle with a screw top – a strange place to put a bottle, she thought.  She dropped down the bulky load of her pack and crouched down to investigate.  The bottle held a piece of paper.  She shook it out, scanned it and sighed.  It was getting late.  She spread some plastic sacks on the ground, unrolled her sleeping bag and prepared to spend the night.  She was a very level headed girl and she was on a mission.  She liked a boy who teased her all throughout the junior year in high school.  That boy was somewhere here.  She was going to deal with it all in the morning.

What a beautiful and deserted site it was!  Hidden from view, yet very near the shore of the expansive and clear lake, it was perfect for us.  We pitched the tents, including the kitchen tent, where we kept the food and utensils, around the fire circle in the middle of the meadow.  We loved the isolation.  The birds were a little creepy, however, especially when the boys, late at night, scared us with stories of dead scouts buried nearby.  For several days we were tanning ourselves, swimming, and cooking meals in nature’s paradise.  Unfortunately, one day Little Bear (really not aptly named, as he was quite large) swam a little too far and was spotted by the lake patrol.  The policemen on the motor boat tried to “card” him right there, wanting to see his swimmer’s permit.  They followed him to our hideaway.  We had to leave immediately.  It turned out that our campsite was in the middle of a native bird preserve.  The police, thankfully, did not fine us, and offered us another, officially sanctioned site.  One of them waved in the direction of the far shore and said: Cerkiewnik is the name.

We had a couple of pontoon boats.  We dismantled the tents and loaded them on one boat.  The boys went on a reconnaissance trip.  When they came back, they reported that they were able to secure a site next to the shore, but nowhere near as nice as the one before.  It was close to the road and there were other campers there as well.  In our campsite the kitchen tent was still standing.  I looked at it, then at my friends, and back to the tent we went, picking a corner each, bundling it with its contents into a huge bulging sack.  We carried it down to the water and lowered it onto the second pontoon.  I went in that boat, slowly rowing across the water’s expanses, singing “Caravan” by Duke Ellington all the way.

That morning I woke up very early, maybe around 5 am.  Something was amiss.  I shared my tent with two girlfriends.  I sat up in the foot or so of my allotted space, trying to be very quiet and not wake them up.  I heard that sound again.  A big creature was moving outside.  I crawled out of my bag and carefully unzipped the bottom of the tent door.  I stuck my head out and there she was.  Standing in the center of the camp, dripping onto the ashes of last night’s fire, was Venus de Cerkiewnik in a yellow bikini who swam across the lake at dawn.  The stones of the fire ring were forming a  Boticelli-like conch around her feet.