Yesterday we went swimming – the classic Palanga-way, as I was used to go to swim in my childhood.
It was sunny on our drive from Vilnius to Palanga. The weather was almost hot when we stopped for lunch in Klaipeda, but as we approached Palanga, driving through Nemirseta wood, the weather changed, and the clouds hid the sun. When we finally reached the sea, the sky over the city grew darker and darker, and we covered our clothes and backpacks with our jackets to keep them dry from the rain before we got into the water.
And so you run into the sea as fast as you can, so your body can get fully in the water before your head changes your mind. The water is not really cold, around 17 degrees, the air around 18 degrees, “bangavimas 1 balas”, wave level 1, barely a ripple.
As I write those words, I hear them in my head pronounced from a loudspeaker which used to be attached to the poles on the beach, every couple of hundred metres, blasting almost non-stop commercials, some music, news, weather announcements and information from the lifeguards, usually about kids lost and waiting for their parents. Add to these the occasional whooshing of the waves to the shore, screams of seagulls, and importantly, “karšti čeburekai, šaltas alus” sellers walking across the beach, a cool bag and a hot bag over their shoulders. Palanga I remember is very loud. It has gotten stiller since my childhood.
Basanavičiaus street is also quieter. Before, there would be a live band in almost any café, blasting out the music onto the street, trying to outshout the neighbouring cafes. Every evening, I would walk with my parents on Basanavičiaus, sometimes choosing a place to eat dinner, just as much based on the music as on the menu – because the menus used to be quite repetitive – kepsnys, kepsnys, kepsnys, lietiniai. And so we would walk and stop to listen to the songs we liked more. If we liked the songs very much, we would sit down for a drink for them and a dessert for me.
I sometimes wonder if we had come to Nida and Juodkrantė rather than Palanga, would I have grown into a different person? Or just into one with a different taste in music?
Palanga feels timeless – the things are mostly as I left them in my childhood. The music on Basanavičiaus. A waffle dipped in chocolate and sprinkles. The park, sculpture of Eglė pulling her shirt away from the grass snake, the roses in the garden – and I was just lucky that the weather this year was so bad and rainy that they are now still in full bloom. The wooden paths to the sea from Meilės alėja – through the pines, then the willows and then sandy dunes uphill, until from the very top you see the sea (but while you walk, you can already feel hear whether the sea is wavy, stormy or calm today) – and then you run down the hill to the beach.
I still run. How much time do I have left to run?
The dunes – divided into smaller sections just big enough to fit one or two spreads, separated by grasses and those tiny white flowers that you put in bouquets as filler, but which I always find faintly smell of pee. The dunes are warm, and even on a cool windy day, you can properly warm up if you lie down on your lower back under the wind. The dunes have their own fragrance. I walked through them on the first day, rainy and windy and felt nothing, but then on the second day the sun came out and the fragrance hit me with memories so odd as I saw myself – me in those dunes since before I could even walk, summer after summer.
The smell of seaweed and fish and water gets stronger as you come closer to the pier, and then fades away as you walk past it. We went to the pier to see the sunset, but it was so cloudy that you couldn’t even be sure where the sun was, just a silver-grey sky all around.
Before we got disappointed, we noticed fishermen. One was especially good – throwing the line with many empty hooks on it and a little light, then moving the rod up and down for just a couple of minutes so the hooks would dance in the water, attracting the fish with their glitter, and then pulling out a garland of sparkling & silver strimeles. The fisherman had already filled his bucket with fish, but planned to stay until late at night.
He told us his all-time record was 24 kg of strimelės in just one night. When I asked what he does with so many fish, he sighed: “I am the only one who likes to fish in my family, but the rest like to eat it. So I share with my in-laws, cousins, and all the rest of the family.”
One fish got off the hook and jumped on the pier, and Mark ran to catch it and put it back in the bucket. He had some bits of scales in his hair sparkling while we walked home on Basanavičiaus, and his hands smelled faintly of fish and the sea even the next morning, after he had already washed them several times with soap.
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I already have some trips planned for the coming year. There is Budapest, Provence and maybe Scotland, and of course shorter trips around Belgium. But now that I have gone back to Palanga, I can feel it pulling me closer, and I crave the familiar, this second childhood town of mine. I have seen my coast in all kinds of weather and all the seasons. Now I find myself missing all those familiar faces so badly.
Can anything beautiful and exotic really compete with something which is a part of you?
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I spent most of my summer holidays in Palanga, and then stopped coming because I felt I had grown out of it and into Juodkrantė, then Nida, then out of Lithuania completely.
Now I brought my kids here and realised that while I was away doing life, growing up, everything stayed exactly the same and waited patiently for me to come back. I am now back with my kids and show them the same cafes, hotels, parks. They rub the head of the grass snake to make a wish, take a picture holding the setting sun in their palm, they walk uphill through the pine and the dunes, only to run down onto the beach and scream in the water and jump in the waves and not feel cold anymore until I notice their lips turn blue.
Palanga tricks you with this feeling of being young and for the young. Now I realise it is old, very old, not just the park or Birutės Hill, or the villas, but all of it, even the restaurants and loud music on Basanavičiaus, and the anticipation of waiting for your date near the fountain. It makes you believe you are the first one experiencing it, your youth, together with the town itself.
I did not outgrow it, I realise. It just humoured me, just like my grandmother used to, pretending not to know the answers to the 1st grade math questions I asked her when I started the first grade.
You come back older and find it pretending to be just as young as you left it, ready to start the whole cycle of growing up now for your kids. But now you feel you know the secret, and I see the town winking at me through the time, Palanga and I reaching some sort of understanding.
I understand. I also do the childish stuff with my kids, but sometimes – often – I feel old.
