It is one of the great regrets of travel: You meet someone on a journey, come to know them intimately in just a few hours, then never see them again. You promise to keep in touch, but it seldom happens. When you return home, your own life takes over, and so does theirs, and the bond begins to fade. Some years ago, while researching a family trip to St.
I was part of a seven-person teamβthree Americans, four Russians three women, four men. We rode from Vladivostok to Leningrad, sea to shining sea, 7, miles across the largest country on Earth. It was the hardest journey of my lifeβnot physically but spiritually. Two months into the trip, I met Saulius on the shores of Lake Baikal. I remember it was sleeting. We spotted a ribbon of smoke in the forest and veered off the road to a campfire, around which huddled six Lithuanian cyclists.
We shook hands, and they shared their meager food and pushed our shivering bodies toward the warmth of the snapping birch fire. We were kin, members of the fellowship of the wheel. Saulius was the smallest of the Lithuanians, a sinewy, birdlike man with a hawk nose and burning, white-blue eyes. He and I had an immediate, inexplicable connection. We talked of the surreal Soviet nation we were experiencing: villages where there was no food, but every man, woman, and child was drunk on rotgut; cities with monolithic concrete tenements, but only a dirt road leading into and out of town.
Bread lines, vegetable lines, vodka lines, but no telephone lines, no newspapers, no magazines. The countless hagiographic statues of Saint Lenin. The Big Brother billboards extolling the virtues of Communism. The KGB trailing us in black Ladas. That evening we all rode together for a stretch, and Saulius and I exchanged bicyclesβme struggling along on his heavy, antique velocipede and him piloting my light, modern machine as if it were a glider.
While I cranked to keep up with him, Saulius explained to me in broken English the real reason he had come to Siberia: to find the work camp where his wife, Palmira, had been interned as a child. Deportations of Lithuanians began immediately after the Soviet Union occupied the country, in the summer of Between and , Stalin sent some , Lithuanians to Siberia.
