Matching Tracksuits

“So what’s new in Lipnica?” I asked as we bounced and bumped along the rough roads of southern Poland. It was June 2000, and I’d been gone from Poland for a year. A number of unexpected developments led me back much sooner than I expected, and I was in the car with two of the first guys I met in Lipnica, two guys I’d consider my best friends of my time in Poland, K and J.

What could have possibly changed in a year, I wondered. Lipnica is the end of the trail: it is on a road that literally led to the base of a mountain and nowhere else. No one passes through Lipnica; one can only go to Lipnica.

“So what’s new in Lipnica?” I’d only meant it metaphorically. What could be new in a village that sustains itself through a bit of logging and a lot of working abroad? One could pass by house after shuttered house in the village, its occupants in Germany, Austria, or even America, working to earn money to finish the house, to improve the house, perhaps even to forget about the house. Lipnica is not a village on the rise, I thought.

All images via Google Street View in anticipation.

“So what’s new in Lipnica?” Perhaps I was asking about gossip, for everything I saw out the car window as we neared the village looked essentially the same. Fields and forests, forests and fields. Probably the same view for generations.

“So what’s new in Lipnica?” I asked as we came out of the last forested area before the village.

“You’re about to see,” came the reply.

I probably cursed at the surprise of seeing a gas station in the pristine fields leading to the village of my dreams and often frustrating reality for three years. A travesty; a sacrilege; a profanation.

I’m told the changes in Jabłonka are even more shocking. “You won’t recognize it,” I’m told. “You won’t believe it,” I hear.

And Lipnica?

It’s been almost twenty years since I first went to Poland with seventy-some other Americans in an effort to save the world. We were young. We were idealistic. And truth be told, most of us we were probably a little naive. We were probably there less for altruistic reasons than we would have cared to admit.

We arrived five hours late, thanks to a mechanical issue with the plane and the necessity of flying a replacement part from Atlanta to Dulles, so when we pulled up to the ul. Bolesława Chrobrego 33, it was early evening as opposed to midday. The sun was setting, and all around the square, socialist-realist building where we volunteers would soon be spending so much time, dozens of Poles — our host families — milled about as kids were rollerblading on the sidewalk surrounding the building. We all stood around as the staff matched host families to volunteers, and I stood with my tired bags, wondering where I’d be spending that night. A young man, newly-graduated from liceum, approached me, led by a staff member and accompanied by a middle-aged mustachioed man.

“This is Piotr, your host brother,” said the staff member, and soon, I, Piotr (who insisted I anglicize his name to “Peter”) and the man I assumed to be my host father were roaring through Radom’s streets in a Maluch — a Fiat 126p, a small, ubiquitous car with little leg room and a 24 horsepower engine — arriving at ul. Perłowa 12, where I stayed for twelve weeks.

I never saw the man again, but I saw the arrival grounds on a daily basis, taking a bus (the the number fifteen, was it? or twenty-something?) up ul. Słowackiego, eventually getting dumped an empty lot where the bus turned around and headed back the other direction. I and two other volunteers — a married couple — were the first to get on, and as the bus lumbered along its route, more and more volunteers boarded until there was a little knot of Americans at the back of the bus.

Our days usually started in a small shop next to the bus stop, just a bit in front and to the right of the training facility where we learned to teach English, to speak Polish, to protect the dziennik with our lives, and to do all the little things that were supposed to make our two years in Poland a success. We started at the store, though, because that’s where all good days in Poland start, and because we needed water for the day and perhaps a snack or two. The water was obligatory: with no air conditioning, the buildings that housed our classrooms grew almost unbearable by late morning. Learning to decline Polish adjectives with sweat rolling down your back at ten in the morning is unpleasant to say the least, and the water served to mitigate and to hydrate.

I’ve only been back to Radom a few times since training concluded, and I returned to the training center only once. Every time I’ve been in Poland since, I’ve wanted to return, to photograph the classrooms with the pealing linoleum and stained ceiling. The wonders of the Internet, though, show me that that’s now impossible: where the long buildings once stood there is only a grassy field. The socialist-realist building that housed the cafeteria that served potatoes with dill every single lunch and that held the large meeting room where we gathered as a group is now a library for the Uniwersytet Technologiczno-Humanistyczny im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego, a tech/art (what an odd combination) university.

The one thing that really hasn’t changed: the clump of bars just across from the bus stop. A group of us almost always ended the day there, having something cool to drink before heading back to the rigors of host-family life.

Every time I arrive in Poland again, I think of these first weeks I spent in the summer of 1996. The frustration of learning a difficult language, the adventure of always being out of my element, the ironic simultaneous newness and oldness of everything around me new — all these things made each second seem more alive than anything I’d experienced before.

When I return now, nothing is new. Familiarity doesn’t necessarily lead to contempt, but it does threaten complacency. K and I always visit the same sites, spend time with the same people, drive the same roads — it’s only natural when you only make it back once every couple of years. This summer, though, I’m determined to see things anew again.