mikolaj nowacki – odra

Mikolaj Nowacki – Odra

Mikolaj Nowacki Odra Odra is the second largest river in Poland. Its waters joins three countries: Czech, where it starts, Poland and Germany. I grew up on the banks of this river in the communist …

via burn magazine: http://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2011/11/mikolaj-nowacki-odra/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+burnmag+%28burn+magazine%29

Odra is the second largest river in Poland. Its waters joins three countries: Czech, where it starts, Poland and Germany. I grew up on the banks of this river in the communist era playing with my best friend on boats and on a landfill of anchors, observing barges that transported coal. I often dreamed of jumping on such a barge and going to the unknown. When I was a teenager I often walked many kilometers along the river searching for rare species of birds as an amateur ornithologist. At that time, Odra was just a beautiful sewage – a mixture of water, fecal and toxic, irritating chemical substances.