It takes some time to reach the sea from Sabile by public transport. Our destination is Liepaja, and the bus is comfortable, spacious, and rolls slowly along, as if on a flexible cushion. The sun shines. A few storks are spotted, in the fields or on nests. One wide river, which I discover later is the Venta. Stopping points at Kuldigas and Aizpute. Kuldigas bus station is a pause, the driver gets out, talks to someone for a while. A couple of people board. Aizpute is just a couple of minutes halt. There are concrete posts dividing the (quite empty) area, different stances for the various buses that perhaps once arrived and left from here. But Aizpute has been overtaken by a sleeping potion and it slumbers in some dream. The concrete dividing posts separating one stance from another are rust stained from the iron strips embedded in them, show the slow deterioration in the world of time. Aizpute has slipped out of the time world and no one gets off the bus here, no one gets on.
It’s very different by the time we get to Liepaja, with its modern bus stances, its electronic displays, its illustrated panels and photographs inside the numbered shelters, and you can see black & white photos of past historical events, even if you cannot understand the written explanation. The station building is vast and empty. Apart from the ticket sales kiosk and another one at the back, that sells souvenirs. Its spacious emptiness reminds me of the train station at Rijecka, Croatia. Both of them speak of a former time, the grass growing up between the marble paving slabs of Roman villas, the undergrowth and earth covering up the detailed floor mosaics.
From outside the station we take the little tram into the town centre. We go too far because I somehow unaccountably forgot to put the guide book in my bag this morning and I don’t remember where the Tourist Office is. My reasoning is that if the tram keeps going we will reach the sea. It is wrong of course because the tram swings round and runs parallel to an invisible sea. We get off the tram, and S manages to find a map on her phone. We take a tram going back the way we came and get off at the University, in the city centre and very close to the Tourist Office. Where we can get hold of real, readable foldable maps made of thick paper, which can be stuffed into one pocket or another – pulled out, creased, dropped even – a kindly young man picked it up for me – and generally referred to in order to pinpoint location, to know ‘where you are’, the outer piece of paper with its abstractions and its symbols connecting with the visible streets, buildings, open areas, parks, trees, and finally, sand dunes and the beach and the sea itself.
Sand hard beneath the feet, and so white, almost silver. Sea with its little waves, washes over the feet, warm shallow sea. A long white beach, only a few people in the distance. A building further up the beach looks as though it will turn into a bar or restaurant, but not now, not yet. Tourists may come later, the sun will become hot later in the year – though it is warm and pleasant enough today – and people will walk into the sea, immerse themselves in the water.
But for now – a man who walks past while we are taking photographs suggests he could take one of the two of us, which he does. He asks where we are from. Scotland, and Austria. He worked he says, on the last paddle steamer in Scotland, which was based in Glasgow. Then he went on to work in Liverpool. Now he works on the ferry that runs from here, Liepaja, to Travemünde in Germany. It takes 22 hours he says, the Stena line. When S asks him if he lives here he shrugs and says I am a seaman, which suggests a life lived on the water itself, an ocean life, a travelling life, a life where you can see the stars each night, if skies are clear, a life where the movement is more important than the port, the sense of passage more entwined with the substance of one’s life than the times and places where one is moored, unmoving, the floor not swaying slightly underfoot, the walls rigid and enclosing. This might be ‘at rest’ or it may stir an incurable restlessness. Should it be cured? Is it an illness? If it is, then so is life itself. Even now, when he is not at work, this man walks up and down the white sand, close to the sea. Perhaps he doesn’t have a base at all, perhaps his whole life is lived on the water, sleeping in a cabin on whichever ship he is working. He strides along the sand, looks fit and healthy, speaks good English, and is cheerful and smiling.
To be by the sea, that was the reason I came to Liepaja, to dip my feet into the Baltic Sea, wade in its waters. But the town itself has a great charm, with its narrow streets of old buildings. There are wooden ones, some art nouveau, some with peeling facades, some smartly painted. There are funky red brick buildings, courtyard music bars, and a square behind the coffee shop, an outside seating area with a fountain. And the people in the tourist office and the book shop & the cafe could not be nicer.
I increasingly get the feeling that this country can only be accessed through a secret portal that you stumble on by accident. There’s an element of through the looking glass, but it isn’t so much a reversed world as a secret & alternative dimension, with quaint old-fashioned trams, almost deserted beaches, few people in the streets, very little traffic on the roads, hardly any advertising billboards, more space, tranquillity and a lot more woods and trees. Or is it that I’ve died and gone into an alternative world which may be what happens when we die, I often wonder, how are we going to know?
You could also reach this relaxed and friendly world by ferry from Travemünde, Germany. Apparently. That could be the ferry coming in now.
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