Walk­ing up the shore it was easy to miss Sǟnag. Its loca­tion was only iden­ti­fied by an aban­doned Sovi­et-era look­out post and a rick­ety tow­er that my friends told me was the local light­house, though I nev­er saw it in oper­a­tion. I couldn’t say if it had always been so, but walk­ing through Sǟnag it seemed that it and Vaid were sis­ter com­mu­ni­ties that flowed into each oth­er. Unlike the oth­er towns, it was dif­fi­cult to tell where one com­mu­ni­ty began and the oth­er end­ed, save for a wood­ed patch no more obvi­ous than those usu­al­ly found with­in the coast com­mu­ni­ties. It was a day typ­i­cal of this stormy and cold sum­mer, clouds mov­ing over­head, occa­sion­al­ly break­ing to let in the sun­light. The­se pic­tures were tak­en walk­ing through Sǟnag from Irē on the way to Vaid.

Dur­ing the Sovi­et occu­pa­tion, much of the coast had been mil­i­ta­rized and declared off-lim­its to most out­siders. Today many of the relics of this peri­od are still vis­i­ble. An aban­doned mil­i­tary base, mys­te­ri­ous odd­ly-shaped hunks of met­al, and look­out posts like this one, once manned by Sovi­et sol­diers. Lat­er I would find that some­one had pur­chased one of the­se tow­ers and the land sur­round­ing it, fur­ther down the coast near Pizā, mak­ing it into a rest stop for hik­ers walk­ing up the coast.

The path from the beach to the vil­lage was marked by the­se fish­ing boats. It was rumored that the fish­ing indus­try was dead on the coast, that the fish­er­men no longer ven­tured out dai­ly into the waters of the Baltic. Lat­er I would hear that this was just a tale told by the fish­er­men them­selves to keep away com­pe­ti­tion and curi­ous out­siders from their secret fish­ing spots. That sum­mer on the coast, I would eat some of the best smoked fish I’d ever had.

Close up of one of the fish­ing boats on Sǟnag beach. Most of the boats I saw that sum­mer were reg­is­tered in Roja, one of the larg­er towns in the area fur­ther south on the coast of the Gulf of Rīga. No one could remem­ber a time when Roja had been Livo­ni­an. Though its name, derived from the lan­guage, seemed to tell a dif­fer­ent sto­ry.

A sign post in the Sǟnag woods mark­ing a camp­ground with the Lat­vian name Līvze­me — Land of the Livo­ni­ans.

A coun­try home sits nes­tled among the trees. As the sun begins to dip below the tree tops, the shad­ows of the coast forest grow longer, the grass flames in the evening light.

The sun shi­nes through the tree tops, cast­ing beau­ti­ful shad­ows on this forest path, show­ing the way to Vaid.