As our Suburu sped through the Latvian-Lithuanian border the landscape immediately went flat. Gone were the rolling hills of Latvia. Vykintas and I were returning from a conference in Turaida on Baltic sacred sites. We had spent the past few days gathered together with Baltic archeologists from Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Poland, and Sweden discussing holy rivers, the significance of oddly-shaped stones in the landscape, marching across fields and forests to locate caves and cliffs that held sacred meaning to the Latvians. Vykintas Vaitkevičius was a well-published and highly regarded thirty-six-year-old Lithuanian archeologist. Much of his work was about the sacred aspects of the Nemunas River and the river’s significance in ancient Baltic burial traditions. He had spent one summer with a group of Lithuanian archeologists rafting down the Nemunas, collecting samples and folklore, documenting the cultural and archeological significance of the river dwellers villages.

Vykintas has published two huge catalogs of archeological, historic, and folkloric data: one on the Žemaitija (lowland) region and the on the Aukštaija (highland) region. Each volume catalogues in detail, with accurate citings and measurements, the historical, archeological, cultural, and geographical aspects of villages, forests, fields, and their place names. It took Vykintas nearly a decade to compile these reference guides. He visited most of the sights himself, double-checking and cross-checking coordinates and local folklore. He was now collecting material for a new edition.

Recently, Vykintas had discovered information in the archives regarding a stone called Raudys Rock. It was an important find. Raudys Rock was indicated in a fourteenth-century border treaty between Žemaitija and Lithuania as the natural marker dividing these two lands and two spheres of influence. If he were to now find the actual stone in the river at the place described in the archives, he would have, in effect, found one of the historical borders between the ancient territories of Žemaitija and Lithuania. He knew that Raudys Rock had to be located somewhere close to today’s Lithuanian-Latvian border.

Vykintas pulled out the topographical maps he had photocopied and propped them on the steering wheel, studying them as he drove, occasionally glancing up at the road and then back down at the maps again. Not very deep into Žemaitija, he yanked the steering wheel abruptly to the right and the Suburu swerved across two lanes and onto a dirt road. An 18-wheeler barreled past, nearly rear-ending us. Had Vykintas’s wrist on the steering wheel been just a tad less quick, the semi would have surely slammed into the back of our car.

“That truck was really on my tail, wasn’t it?” Vykintas said calmly, a wry half smile peeking out from under his mustache. Nonplussed, Vykintas bowed his head over his map again, looking up occasionaly to survey the landscape.

Personally, I was still trying to collect my nerves.

“Yes, this is it,” he said, “this is definitely it.” He steered the car further down the dirt road. We bounced along over cavernous pot holes until we arrived at a driveway leading to a small farm. People dressed in black were climbing out of a car, greeting each other solemnly. They must have been returning from a funeral or had gathered to mark the one-year anniversary of a family member’s death. Vykintas took his map and walked towards them.

A young man broke away from the the family circle of black-clad people and strode towards us,

“Can I help you?” he asked in English.

That was strange? Why English? The car had Lithuanian plates. Vykintas was obviously a local. Does this young man have extrasensory abilities allowing him to sense there is an American seated in the car?

Vykintas greeted the young man in Lithuania and asked him if he could tell him how he could get to the Raudys Rock. He did not show the man the topographical map, but I got the impression that the map, the backpack, the windbreaker, made an impression because the young man knew immediately what Vykintas was talking about and gave him good directions, even offered to allow him to either drive across his fields to the edge of the river or to leave his car parked beside his house and walk. Vykintas chose the latter option.

Vykintas returned to the Suburu, grabbed his GPS and his camera from the back seat, and signaled for me to follow him. We set out across the fields. It was around nine and the sun was at its loveliest, not quite low on the horizon, but just starting its descent. A pale orange hue fell over the overwhelmingly green landscape, that specific color of green one sees only in early June. We hiked across the young spring-time fields towards the Bauda River, which wound its path through that green.  On our right, crops were just beginning to sprout, light greens poking up, just a few inches in height. On the opposite bank of the river, a cow was grazing in the fields beside a small wooden cottage and farm buildings. Every once in a while the cow raised its head and mooed mournfully in the direction of the setting sun. Birds twittered noisily in the bushes.

“In the 1398 Chronicle of Salynas, this rock, located in the village of Brentys, was known as “Roda” as in “marker” and was used to delineate the eastern border between Žemaitija and Lithuania,” Vykintas explained. “Later documents record the rock’s name in Russian as ‘Radvis.’  It is now called ‘Raudys,’ which could mean either ‘red-colored’ or ‘wailing rock.’ There are a number of legends associated with this rock,” Vykintas paused. “Here’s one,” he said, continuing his lecture as we strode through the field towards the river. “The rock went against the water crying. When a man saw it, he asked, ‘Why are you crying, Raudys?’ The rock stopped crying. It stopped because the man guessed the rock’s surname. That story was recorded in this village here in 1935 from a man named Juozas Gabriūnas. The records indicate Gabriūnas was about 50 at the time, so it’s likely the story was at least from the nineteenth century.”

We came to a slight incline and there we saw it: spread out before us in the bend in the river — a rather large rock. Indeed, the rushing water was breaking up against the rock and spraying over its top, giving the impression that the rock was spouting tears. The rock was white and smooth, worn down from the constant rushing water swirling around it. The rock’s color disclaimed the theory that the name of the rock referred to its color. The spraying water supported the other myth, the one that the rock was crying because its surname had become known.

Although rivers often carry mythological meaning in the ancient Baltic religions as a border zone between the world of the living and the dead, in this instance it seemed quite clear from its positioning in the very middle of the river that the rock must have served as a marker, dividing two territories, two linguistically and ethnographically diverse regions.

Vykintas paused to take a photograph.

“Records indicate that Raudys Rock is about 6, 5 x 4, 5 meters,” he said, “But, it appears as though the greater part is under water.”

We walked closer. The sun hit the rock at an angel, illuminating it, almost dramatically, as though the rock had been expecting us and wanted to make a grand appearance for our cameras upon its discovery.

Vykintas sat down in the grass and began recording the stone’s exact coordinates in his notebook. “This is the poetry in archeology,” he said as he wrote, “what we don’t see and don’t know, what we intuit from the evidence we find is more of our life’s work than the analysis of what we actually do find.”

I watched the water rushing around the edges of the water and I wondered if the people living on either side of the river’s banks — the ones on the side that would have been Lithuania and the ones on the side that would have been Žemaitija, the ones who had addressed us in English and had showed us where to find the rock — knew of its significance, knew that once people on each side of this river considered themselves “other” and “foreign” from those on the other side.

“When I was a student I read the ‘Tao Te Ching,’” Vykintas said, continuing to jot notes in his notebook. “I was struck by one of his passages: When you consider a wheel, it is not the spokes that are most important, but the emptiness of the axis inside of the spokes. When you consider a pot, it is not the clay walls that are important, but the emptiness inside the pot that holds its contents. And I thought to myself then — that is the essence of archeology. It is not the objects we find that hold meaning, but the emptiness around them, the unknown, the questions we ask.”

After Vykintas was finished writing, we stood for a while and admired the view spread out before us: The sun setting leisurely, the expansive flat fields, the wooden tiles on the roof of the cottage emerging just barely out of the landscape on the opposite bank.

“I go through all this trouble to find these places,” Vykintas said, “and to record them because for me it is a way of returning the history that was taken away from us during the Soviet period. We don’t know who we are anymore. We don’t know our history. We don’t even know why it ought to be important to us to know our history.”

We began our long walk across the fields towards Vykintas’s rusting old Suburu, fueled by gazas, propane. The propane was cheap fuel, but it caused the engine to sputter and took away the car’s pick-up. With all the hundreds of kilometers Vykintas drove to investigate find-spots, as he put it, he’d have to be a millionaire to afford actual gas.

“This was an easy and lucky find today,” Vykintas said, “often it’s much harder than this.”

We walked along, both of us elated with the significance of what we’d just discovered. On one level, what we had just seen was a white rock, worn down by river erosion in a polluted river running between two run-down farms in a poor country on the outskirts of Europe. On another, it was pure magic, poetry, an archeological discovery, the historical border between two powerful expansive Grand Duchies, evidence that once this place, this land, held great worth and significance. People had fought and died for this land for centuries.

Vykintas’s cell phone bleeped.

He stopped walking. He pulled his cell from his jacket pocket and read the message. He shook his head in disbelief, “It’s my son writing,” he said. “He’s asking me to bring home a pizza with four toppings. That’s his souvenir request from Latvia.”

The teenage request for pizza had been innocent enough, but I burst out laughing over the absurdity of the text message. Vykintas’s 12-year-old son’s lack of interest in archeology, in Lithuanian history or folk culture had been a constant topic of conversation for us on the drive to Latvia and back.

Vykintas joined my laughter, doubling over as he laughed harder and harder.

Then, my cell phone bleeped. I stopped laughing. I composed myself and pulled out my cell and took a look at the screen. It was a message from my daughter, Saulė.

“Well?” Vykintas asked, with a look of wicked mirth on his face.

Now it was my turn to read my message out loud: “Mom, I’m at a millionaire’s birthday party!”

Now Vykintas enjoyed another round of a good laugh. This time at my expense.

Saulė was staying with friends, a French family, while I was away at the archeologist’s conference. They were here in Lithuania working on a democracy project with Belarus. Our friends had mentioned that they would bring Saulė and their daughter, Iris, to the birthday party of their daughter’s classmate from the private international school she attended. The birthday girl was the daughter of a famous Lithuanian fashion designer. Her mom drove her to school in a Bentley, my French girlfriend informed me.

“Ah well,” I sighed, “we have landed back in the twenty-first century.”

And we continued walking through the sunset fields, the sun glinting off of the tips of the grass crunching under our boots.

Laima Vincė, a New York native, is a Lithuanian-American non-fiction and children’s book author, Fulbright scholar in creative writing at Vilnius University, journalist, memoirist and translator. For more information about her work, visit her website at www.laimavince.com and to order her acclaimed memoir “Lenin’s Head on a Platter” go here. Two translations she did of Lithuanian authors can be found here and here.

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