Halfway down the Danube

Automatic for the People

Today we drove up to Sinaia, to go hiking in the mountains there.

Sinaia is an old resort town about two hours north of Bucharest; the former Romanian Royal Family had a palace there. Today it's a big ski resort, right at the southern edge of the Carpathians.

Maybe tomorrow we'll write about hiking around Sinaia with the babies. Tonight I just want to describe the drive up. The drive out of Bucharest isn't exactly delightful; very crowded, with the usual horrible and hair-raising driving. Then once you hit the countryside, it's sort of stop and go; the "highway" keeps going through small towns, with the speed going down to 50 km/30 mph. And for the first half hour or so, both Alan and David were fussing from the back seat.

But after a while they quieted down and fell asleep. And the road got, not better, but at least less busy.

Claudia had bought a few tape cassettes in Hungary when she and Michael drove down last month. We grabbed one more or less at random and popped it in.

Meanwhile, we were taking the bypass road around Ploesti. Ploesti is the site of Romania's great fields of oil and natural gas. Or it was; the oil is mostly gone, and the natural gas is going. But much of Ploesti is still a Communist-industrial moonscape of oil rigs, refineries venting flames, huge cooling towers, vast inexplicable pipes diving in and out of the ground.

Meanwhile the R.E.M. tape is playing: "Automatic for the People", their dark and strange album from the distant year 1992. The only song that got much airplay was "Everybody Hurts Sometimes", but there are at least four other tracks that are as good or better. ("Everybody Hurts" is actually one of the more upbeat songs on that album. Listen hard to "Try Not To Breathe" sometime, which is about an old person trying to die. It's a great song, and actually sort of uplifting, but it's not what you'd call feel-good whimsy.)

So anyway, there we are driving through this crumbling industrial landscape of megalomaniacal concrete monoliths and rusting pipelines... and on comes "Man On The Moon", their tribute to Andy Kaufman. Followed by "Night Swimming", which is one of the most sweetly melancholic songs ever written by a rock'n'roll band. (I mean, it's piano, violin, and Michael Stipe's voice. With a little bit of oboe at the end. Brrr.)

And, I don't know: the kids were sound asleep, the car was rolling along, and I just thought how strange it was to be here, but how good. Sitting next to this particular woman, driving across this particular ground. Maybe it was the blighted land around us that made me suddenly feel how precious was this moment and these people. And maybe the music helped. Yeah, it's sort of jejune and hokey to get that kind of feeling from pop music, even good pop music. But that album is about how death and sweetness, hope and decay and absurdity are inextricably tangled. So it was weirdly, obliquely, absurdly appropriate.

Or maybe it's just that I love my wife, and don't have too many undistracted minutes with her these days, to just put my hand on hers and be quiet together.

Anyhow, it was just a... happy moment. Strange but true.

Then after a while the cooling towers and refineries dwindled into the distance behind us, and we saw the first blue line of the mountains against the northern sky.

Posted by douglas at September 20, 2003 10:20 PM