Border control guys

July 14


I took a drive through the countryside close to the Russian border. I had hoped that I could get to see the Nemanus/Memel River again and get a bit of sense of the land. I often wish that I could be on a bike because you really experience the land, and the air, and the sounds more that way. But I am nice and safe and warm in my car. It’s cold and blustery today. I little bit like a September day with the hint of fall in the air.

So I’m driving along the gravel road, after having ventured down an old cobblestone/dirt road but gave up when it started to become a little impassable, and up ahead I see two cars blocking my way. Sometimes this happens because you get two farmers passing each other and they decide to stop and have a chat. Today though, I realized, that one of the cars was a police car. They flagged me down, not that there was anywhere else for me to go. They were border patrol guys and one of them spoke enough German. They asked me for my dokumente and my auto papiere and where did I want to go. They enjoyed all of my stamps in my passport. And they wanted to see what was in my trunk so they got to see my pants and my underwear, that I had washed in the hotel bathroom sink, drying in the back window. I told them that my grandparents came from the other side of the river and I was just driving along enjoying the beautiful fields. He told me I couldn’t swim in the river, to which I replied that it was way too cold anyway. And they explained that the yellow poles along the side of the road were the border and I couldn’t cross because I didn’t have a special card to. I think it was pretty clear that I wasn’t some border smuggler from Canada. And they were nice guys.

What I didn’t get though was how these poles denoted the border, which I thought was the river and I couldn’t even see the river from this road. It was I’m sure, still a couple of kilometers away. And there was the occasional farm on the other side of the poles. Did that make them Russian farms or still Lithuanian? Or citizens of No Man’s Land? Too bad I didn’t see the border control guys again. I would have asked them.