With each new course, we lose a hitchhiker. Tripe soup with marjoram petals sees a young man in a ratty track suit off into an orange Fiat. Schab bosmanski—a.k.a.

“Bossman’s pork,”—a total eclipse of the pork by an even larger piece of pork—attends to the departure of a Slavic carnival worker, his whorled comb-over an errant star from a Van Gogh night. Now all that remains at the edge of the highway, just a few yards away from our table at a rural petrol station, is a supernaturally lithe blonde girl with crème de menthe fingernails and a straw cowboy hat. 

“You have never seen hitchhikers before?” Arek asks through a mouthful of potatoes. 

“These just seem more confident of not being murdered.”…

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above On a summer afternoon, Jan Krasinski, heads out to his field near the town of Jarentwoskie Pole to cut grass for his animals. His tool of choice is a scythe he made by hand more than 40 years ago. Jan is now 87 years old, but his cutting stroke, like the blade itself, has not lost its edge.

Photo: Dave Karczynski