But the roads have defied convention and modernism. Still they go, carrying along, adding continuity and warmth to seas of grain and forgotten farms.
The roads remind me of the stark contrast to American roads, where we have neo-glo road signs for everything. Like how you have fifty signs with arrows that say its time to turn right. In Poland, as in all of Europe, signs are understated and lend a certain regard for the intelligence of its citizens. The trees, occasionally, because they are near the road, kill a drunk driver. But trees don't really actually kill people, people do.
In overlawyered countries, you can imagine how oversafety turns the aesthetic of your countryside into a dump. I am no humanist, I'll keep the roadside trees.
There is an adage in the world of economics that goes like this: If you want to save more drunk drivers from death, do you cover your driver's cockpit with airbags? And external panelling of your car with safety mechanisms? Or do you regulate that every car bears spikes brimming preciously close to the driver's body? The economist might argue that the spikes, like the trees, may discourage the drunk from driving, and that oversafety, and overregulation actually make us dangerously carefree.
We arrive in Maszewo. The Maszewo Palace lies thirty miles east of Scezin on a lake in the woods. It is a former hunting palace of the Von Fleming family, the provincial nobility, for whom, in many cases, my relatives were the farmland administrators.
Like other historical buildings, this palace has been carved into a state-subsidized hotel, much like the state-run Paradors of Spain and Portugal. This one features a menagerie of old Polish carvings, a dusty collection of aging European and African taxidermy, and dank halls. An aviary lies on the property; the collection is of old world pigeons, peacocks and Asian wild chickens. It’s unadvertised, but if you wander far enough into the woods, you'll find the hotel has built a giant climbing wall.
The noise of the birds is constant enough that by evening, isolated and encroached upon by scouring trees, the palace emits a sound itself; the constant cry of caged fowl. The Maszewo Palace; another reminder that the traveler's life does not begin and end with Hilton Rewards Points.
Our Pomeranian family were immigrants, according to Uncle. They originated in what is now perhaps Holland and Belgium. We know this only because of our last name, which if you follow its tracks, seems to have gone Germanic as the name migrated west to east.
Uncle says that the spotty recollection of our family history is due to the Thirty Years War, which, he says, was as devastating as World War II for Pomerania. The Catholics and Lutherans and Calvinists and Austrians and Spanish and French - they were all frothing at the mouth, and regardless, the German states had fallen into this chaos, and therefore also into civil war. Families and records were destroyed. Our family history will forever remain a book with most of the pages torn.
According to uncle, a certain Mr. Martin Gauger 'paid himself out of bondage', and married a woman called Eva Bliesener in 1687. Forty years later, another Bliesener married another Martin Gauger. A grain mill had existed in Regenwalde since at least the fourteenth century. But it burned during the thirty years war, and was later rebuilt. The Bliesener family took over this mill's lease and handed its administration to this same Martin Gauger. From then on until 1945, Gauger's would stick close to the milling industry. Even today, of my generation's six Gauger's, half of us earn our keep through agriculture.
For lunch, I order duck liver with peach and orange sauce, herring, onion soup, cabbage stuffed with meat and rice. I order Golabki - cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and pork, served with tomato sauce. These cabbage dishes are as old as populated Northern Europe itself. Cabbage never initially existed in the traditional civilized lands of the Middle East, and so in the west, has always been connected with early Northern Europe. Its ancestral relation - wild cabbage, still grows wild on the Baltic coasts. Traders found that, like herring, the cabbage could be preserved in brine. Instead of protein, it yielded vitamins. And so the cabbage, like the herring, would cross seas in barrels. This preserved cabbage, the Germans called sauerkraut. The Poles took sauerkraut and added it to their dishes. Sauerkraut to Scandinavia and Poland on Hanseatic ships.
We are on the Palace veranda with brothers and cousins, and I'm trying to order a glass of water for Hans and Jane. A glass of water, in America this is free. In Europe ordering water is expensive and nearly impossible. And when you get it, it's like a teacup, a mouthful. If you drink your teacup in a single sip, as Americans do with water, you are fucked. It will be another fifteen minutes before your waiter comes by to fetch you another bottle of overpriced water. What you do is you say you want your water in a beer glass, what you do is you say no gasienko – that’s Polish for give me some water without those euro-bubbles. What you do is you order three waters at a time.
Dinner is uncle's 70th birthday. That means Germans and Poles and Spaniards and English and French and Dutch. It also means salmon with a mustard sauce, red cabbage, and wild boar in a chanterelle gravy.
The swampy interior of Slowinski National Park, on the Polish Baltic coast. 
