Letter from Romania, by a Leelanau native
By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor
Dear Leelanau,
I was busy teaching in the Peace Corps all year, but school just ended. I’m writing to you on the Fourth of July. It’s weird to be in a place that’s a holiday only for me. I’m thinking of the Fourth of July on the Leelanau Peninsula, the families with their picnics, the bonfires on the beaches, fireworks in the night sky over Lake Michigan, dancing in the park up in Northport. I’m thinking of all the carpenters I know who loaded up their trucks and drove to New Orleans after Katrina.
I miss Pleva’s hotdogs — of course! — but what I miss most is the way people think nothing of helping each other, of saying what’s on their minds, the way they wink and smile benignly and support the eccentric geniuses in their midst: the guy standing in a field with a kite tied with metal keys in a lightning storm trying to figure out electricity, the quiet little neighbor lady who’s secretly saving seeds to spite Monsanto, the long-haired, college dropout working in his garage to develop some new-fangled thing he calls a computer. I love my country and I’m not ashamed to say that.
I miss the sense of humor. The day before I left for Romania I saw Thaddeus Grant in the credit union in Lake Leelanau, and I said, “Oh, hi, Thaddeus. For a minute I didn’t recognize you, I thought you were Buzz Long.” And Thaddeus, not missing a beat, said, “That’s the look I’ve been goin’ for, so I guess it’s workin’ then.” I miss that big-hearted, I’m-talking-to-you, American-ness that you can’t get anywhere else. I can’t come home for another year and so that’s why I’m inviting all the people from the Leelanau to Romania. My love for the Sleeping Bear Bay makes me love this place, too.
If you come to Romania you should see the Carpathian Mountains and the Danube River. The Carpats, as they are called here, are wild and beautiful, 8,000 feet high with lots of bears and wolves. They are part of the great central mountain system of Europe and curve protectively over a 900-mile swath of northeastern Romania. The Danube is majestic, like the Hudson River except longer. It starts in the Black Forest in Germany and winds its way south for 1,770 miles, sometimes roaring between high cliffs, sometimes flowing wide and serene around large flat islands until it reaches the Black Sea.
Romania was, for centuries, just like America, a place of roaming tribes, plural cultures. There are villages even now of mostly Germans, mostly Hungarians, mostly Slavs; and they’ve even kept their various languages. Different regions have different dialects, the way the United States used to, but that’s changing rapidly with television and the Internet. Rich noblemen had fantastic castles here and a cohort of wealthy Europeans still favor Romania’s remote hunting and fishing lodges.
This is an old civilization. In Targovista in the center of the country there’s a museum with 27,000 year old cave artifacts, including those clay female fertility figures, like the Venus of Willendorf, with round feature-less heads and bodacious ta-tas. The 42,000-year-old bones of homo sapiens have been found here, some of the oldest in Europe.
There are still bears and wolves in the mountains. One day my friend’s train hit a bear and my friend’s father went and harvested the meat. From the train windows you can see shepherds tending their flocks. In the mountains it’s free range grazing, the way it used to be out west, and in the plains each village has grazing rights going out several miles around the village. I’ve seen a man lowering a bucket into a well with a rope on a pulley, while he talked on his cell phone. I’ve seen horse-drawn hearses in Bucharest. These are things you won’t see, even in Romania, in another 10 years because it’s changing fast.
Bucharest was like Paris 100 years ago, filled with budding artists and a café culture, but the Great Depression, the bombing during the Second World War and the razing of beautiful old buildings by the megalomaniac dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (pronounced: ChowCHEScu) changed all that. Ceausescu wanted to make Romania more like North Korea. He was assassinated by his own countrymen in 1989.
There are still cafes in Bucharest, but they are lackluster compared to, for example, the new Starbucks at the new Afi Palace Mall. They do have art museums in Bucharest, established in the city’s 1920s Paris phase, but as one friend who visited said, “These art museums have the world’s most suspicious and untrained docents. They’re like angry dust kitties. And they don’t know anything about the art! Where do they get these people?” Sometimes when I’ve gone with friends visiting from other countries, who never fail to remark on the demeanor of the docents, we’ve been the only ones in the museum. Bucharest is faded compared to what it once was, and on weekends almost deserted. The roads on the outskirts in the suburbs are dirt trails.
Where I am, in Craiova, in the southwestern part of the country, people are mixed-looking — Asian, Russian, Italian, Turkish, Iranian, Lebanese, Armenian — people from everywhere, intermingled with the majority who are Romanian-Italian. Romanian means “citizen of Rome.” Rome had a colony in Craiova for almost 300 years and the Roman Emperor Trajan built a supply line — at the time the world’s longest bridge — across the Danube. The Romans destroyed it when they left the country in AD 300 in the wake of invading Goths, Huns, Gepids, Avars, Bulgars, Pechenegs and Cumans.
People in Craiova are, true to their Dacian-Italian forebears, dark and hirsute, more on the chunky side but not fat, just heavy boned. Picture James Gandolfini or George Clooney for the men, and Gina Lollobridgida and Zsa Zsa Gabor for the women. Many women dye their hair; a favorite color is paprika red or maroon. The women are often extremely beautiful and have a flamboyant sense of fashion. Decolletage is outrageous here — everything but the nipple and sometimes ever that — and, looking at the old peasant costumes, maybe always was. Tatoos have just started and it looks like they’re going to be big.
There are feral dogs everywhere, a Ceausescu legacy. When Ceausescu moved people off their farms so he could sell the land, the dogs followed the people into the cities. But really the dogs are well-behaved. People feed them. The dogs, like the Romanian people themselves, seem remarkably mellow. Once in Bucharest I saw four large dogs cross with the light in single file, good citizens. There’s a street dog that’s adopted the Peace Corps office and protects me to the corner when I leave. He’s the smartest dog I’ve ever seen, like Kevin Costner with fur.
There are several Romanians in Traverse City, including my friend Marieta Braun who owns the Eurostop Café at the corner of Front and Park. I spent Christmas Day here in Craiova with her family and she — and her mother — are two of the world’s best Romanian cooks. Marieta grew up without running water or electricity, as did my father in rural northern Michigan, and thinking about that makes one realize how recently anyone has lived in what we think of as the modern world. One hundred years ago in Michigan and 50 years ago in Romania, most people were still farming, hauling their water from the well, and reading by candlelight.
When I take the train from Craiova to Bucharest I see shepherds tending their flocks all along the way. They farm with machines here but I also see people doing hand-labor, farming with oxen or horses. Once I saw a whole family raking hay: old men and women, middle-aged adults and small children, all with rakes. It’s rural life the way it was in Europe and America for our great-grandparents and it’s fading fast.
The wine is home-made and it’s cheap and good. I don’t know if they put “additives” in the wine but where I buy it, I don’t think so because I can drink a whole glass and never feel sick afterwards. It’s just grapes and you can save money if you bring your own bottles. I think they really know how to make good wine.
The amazing thing about the Romanian people is how gentle they are. I have never felt in danger of bodily harm here. There may not be much here in the way of the rule of law, but in general people are not prone to violence. This may be because they’ve perfected the art of “bonding,” that word for the process of connecting to others that came into vogue in the 1970s, a process otherwise known as friendship, and it’s used as the social glue in place of any codified set of laws.
If a new friend invites you to share a holiday with their family, be prepared for 12 hours of eating, drinking and talking in the tight confines of a cottage kitchen the size of a sweat lodge with all the double first cousins within 100 miles. Whatever anyone’s bones of contention might have been going into this event, after 12 hours, all’s fair and square and totally forgiven. It’s a slightly different way of making sure that nobody gets hurt and everyone’s taken care of and, for the most part it works and one gets the feeling that it’s been working for thousands of years. I have been amazed at this custom and heartily recommend this worthwhile and unforgettable process where, as you stagger out under the midnight stars, you feel certain you have morphed into some lovely person’s double first cousin.
Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990).
