August 23, 2015
Gaski, Poland: Meeting the old salt of the sea
ADAM spent most of his life at sea. He's still only a short walk from its waves. "Today you eat on my verandah," he told me when I arrived. "We will talk and you will meet my wife."
Adam ran the campground I found while looking for somewhere improvised. He was 60, round-faced, comfortably padded. He'd travelled the world and had rarely stopped thinking about escaping communism.
"I was a captain, a navigator," he said after I'd washed and changed and walked back to his house at the campground's entrance. He wasn't the first to show interest in my ride or in yours, but he was the first to offer sausage and bread and bottles of beer in return for the story. But his own tale turned out far better.
"I sailed on the biggest ships in the world," he said. "For a long time we sailed from Antwerp to Montreal and back, over and over. But I went to many other countries and I had many offers to have a job and stay there.
"My wife is a doctor, in nervous illnesses in children, and we could easily have stayed. There was work for both of us. But we had family in Poland and, what's more, someone had to stand guarantee for me when I went abroad. He'd have had to pay the cost of all my training if I didn't come back. That's how it was in the communist era."
It's been a decade and a half now since he commanded or navigated shops. He misses it but he still goes to sea. He teaches navigation to the coastguard.
I asked about the banners against nuclear power. The government, it seemed, wants to build the country's first nuclear power station on the edge of the village, between the campground and the sea.
"You'll pass the place when you ride tomorrow," he said. "We had a referendum and 97 per cent of people here voted against. Now the government is considering it but it still hasn't said no. It's not going to affect me because they still have to make a decision and then it'll take ten years to build and, from what I've read elsewhere, another five years at least to get it working.
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The campaign against is led by the lighthouse keeper, "a very clever man". Everyone knows who voted for the power station.
One of the advantages of being at sea was that he could bring his children things from the West.
"I remember we couldn't get fizzy drinks in Poland. So one day I came home with a tray of Pepsis or Cokes or whatever. And my son, he was only a child then, he kept drinking them. And I said 'I think you'd better stop now,' and he said 'Just one more', and he had it coming out of his nose, out of his ears, everywhere. It was very funny."
Right then his son was working in the driveway at the campground entrance. He grinned in agreement.
The end of communism was welcomed, Adam said, but it didn't bring immediate benefits. Under communism, everyone had a job, however menial, and everyone except business managers was on the same level. It all changed with capitalism. There was a new system to learn. Things may have been depressingly assured before but now they were uncertain.
"And the European Union, they put billions into the country, but it went on big projects like roads and agriculture. The ordinary people didn't notice much," he said, adding that the standard of living is higher than it was but still below the West.
"Young people, they are all going abroad to work. They are all going abroad. There are two million Polish workers just in England. The population here has dropped by three or four million. And those left behind are getting older and older. It used to be that life expectancy in Poland was lower than in the West, but now that's going up.
"Well, there's nothing in the bank for pensioners and the young. But millions of young people are now paying their taxes abroad, in Britain, Germany and so on. Not in Poland. And that's a big problem.
"The government proposes measures to attract them back. They might do this, they might do that. Might, might..."
He takes another sip of his whisky and his wife gives him a disapproving look.
"She doesn't like me drinking," Adam whispers. "But she won't say anything while you're here."
Today's ride: 107 km (66 miles)
Total: 4,669 km (2,899 miles)
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