Awoke upon that fog bestraddled road I always seem to ride along, all the way till Jamno. There is something Wellesian about this geography. These cadaverous trees line my way, on either side, like that last boulevard Joseph Cotten walks, alongside Alida Valli, in Reed's The Third Man. No cemetery awaits me at its end though, and this morning the road ahead seems to have no end at all, revealed to me, as it is, in creeping increments reclaimed from this hungry fog.
Jamno is a serpentine village a few kilometres to the north of Koszalin. Its winding main road branches off into two possible directions at its northern end. One way will take you round in a loop toward Labusz and the main road to Koszalin. The other way, aptly named ul. Promowa, takes you out onto an increasingly desolate high road, resembling that lonely stretch of dirt and tarmac from A Touch of Evil, where Charlton Heston fatefully deposits Janet Leigh in the second weirdest motel, besides the Bates.
At the end of ul. Promowa is the wide, open water of Lake Jamno, a stretch of water so perpetually filthy that it has come to resemble a kidney in renal failure, polluted with the detritus of the surrounding towns of Mielno, Uniescie and Osieki. Screened off behind this amorphous wall of whispy whiteness, the lake, for once, seems almost magisterial, as if in haughty isolation.
Last year they built a paved parking area, pinewood pier and timbered shelter for all those tourists who, during the hectic summer months, would rather take the short twenty minute foot passenger ferry to Mielno, than wait hours in backed up traffic along the single-lane road. At this early hour, with no other person here but me, or at least no other person I might be able to see, the pier in its perfectly symmetrical T seems to stand alone against the water and the white wall beyond.
Somewhere a demented cuckoo trumps all the other cracks, rattles, chirrups, cheeps and whirples, with its repetitive two-tone call. Ducks burst into and out of view, skimming close to the surface of the mindlessly motioning water. From the head of the pier the ripples of the water run like the steady spiralling progression of grooved, waxed vinyl under a needle. I can see the flat side of a dead fish, its silver scales no longer glistening, its one visible eye an empty grey hole.
To the east the sun is a whiter hole in the thick heart of the fog. Underneath this hole a line of trees seem to stand upon the exact frontier between the present moment reality and those less tangible workings of memory and imagination.
All around the far perimeter of the lake the pale horizon line is aglow with the hazy ascendancy of the whiter sun. It appears as if, stood upon this pier in the early morning damp, I am being approached by an unfathomable number of silent on-rushing cars, headlights glaring out from the mist.
A black, white and brown plumed wagtail follows me all the way back to my bicycle, relaying information back-and-forth to its nestbound neighbour about my present movements. I have no intention of disrupting the quiet mutterings of the bullrushes. Instead I sit upon the clammy wood of the bench under the shelter and feel the cold grow claws and dig itself into my bones. Last nights pizza boxes and beer cans lie recovering in the rubbish bins. The sun, now blazing high in the sky, cannot stop me shivering. A moment ago I felt as if I was approaching the far frontier, the furthest shore, the very edge of the world, the road beneath my tyres materialising momentarily only to fall away. The only thing telling me I'm not inside the most narcotic of dreams, the pungent salt-kissed air that now infuses my lungs.
I glide past the tasteless new-build bungalows and villas, back into the small centre of Jamno, on ul. Posagowa, where the barns are dank, dull and dilapidated and the early-morning rooster has right of way.
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