Nida

The ferry from Klaipėda to the Curonian Spit takes ten minutes and crosses a strip of water that feels much wider than it is — the Curonian Lagoon on one side, the Baltic on the other, and the spit itself a thin band of pine and sand in between. I drove the full fifty kilometers of Lithuanian spit road to reach Nida, which is as far south on the Lithuanian section as you can go before the Russian exclave begins, and the drive itself is something: a narrow two-lane road moving through pine forest so consistent it becomes meditative, with glimpses of the lagoon on one side and, once, through a gap in the trees, the open Baltic on the other. The dunes appear without warning.

Nida is a village of painted wooden houses along the lagoon shore — dark browns and deep blues and ochres that the traditional fishermen’s families used to distinguish their houses from each other at sea. The harbor is small and still active, with fishing boats tied at the dock and a smokehouse at the end of the pier that sends a sweet birch smoke smell across the entire waterfront. I ate smoked eel at a picnic table on the harbor and thought about the fact that I had been eating smoked fish at harbors across Europe my entire adult life and had somehow not had smoked eel before. It was remarkable — softer than I expected, the flesh parting in layers, the smoke flavor deep but not heavy, with a quality of richness that lingered.

The Parnidis dune is the thing that stays with me. A fifty-two meter sand dune rising at the southern edge of the village, climbed by a wooden boardwalk that takes about twenty minutes, and the view from the top is — I want to say impossible, but that’s the wrong word. The Curonian Lagoon stretches east, grey and vast, and the Baltic is visible to the west, and between them the spit is narrow enough that you can see both bodies of water simultaneously, the dune dropping away on either side to pine forest. The sand is fine and pale and very dry, and the wind on the top of the dune is constant and strong enough to move it. The dune itself is alive in that way — still migrating, still shifting, covering and uncovering things. I stayed up there until the cold drove me down.

Thomas Mann spent three summers in Nida in the early 1930s, writing at a small wooden house on the lagoon shore that has been preserved and opened as a museum. It is modest to the point of austerity: bare wooden floors, simple furniture, a writing desk at a window that looks out at the water and the Lithuanian sky. He wrote part of Joseph and His Brothers there. The house has the quality of actually having been lived in, which is rarer in literary museums than it should be.

Cycling the spit is the full experience. From Nida back toward Klaipėda, a dedicated cycle path runs through the pines close to the lagoon shore, flat and easy, with occasional openings to the water and signed access to the Baltic beach side. The fifty kilometers back to the ferry take about four hours at a leisurely pace. I rented a bike from a shop near the harbor, packed smoked fish and a bottle of water, and did it in one long day that felt like the best thing I had done in Lithuania.

When to go: June and September are ideal — the summer crowds of July and August make the narrow spit road and village streets noticeably congested. September has the best light and near-empty beaches. Spring is cold but the pines have a clarity that summer’s heat haze obscures. The spit in winter is remote and windswept and not for everyone, but for a specific kind of solitude seeker, exactly right.