Mountain Life

Thirty minutes south of Bielsko-Biała — the old Austro-Hungarian textile city they still call “Little Vienna,” in the Polish region of Silesia that once answered to Habsburg emperors — the road begins to climb, and the world changes. This is the Beskid range, running along the Czech border, and I have spent the past days winding through it. Small towns give way to villages, villages to scattered cottages, and threaded among them are ski resorts like Szczyrk, the largest in Poland, spa towns like Ustroń where Poles have taken the waters for generations, hiking paths in every direction, and fresh food markets in every square. What startled me was not the beauty, which I expected, but the completeness. These mountains are not a picturesque hardship post. There are hospitals, well-stocked stores, public services, and manicured parks — essentially everything one needs for a good life, tucked between green ridgelines. I came here as a city man, expecting a charming place to visit. I found instead a serious argument for a different way to live.

Start with the weather, ordinarily Poland’s most damning feature. Here the summer is cool and fresh, with blue skies and intermittent rain but none of the cold, wet, gray wind that pervades the rest of the country. The air itself is the revelation. Poland is home to some of the filthiest air in Europe — by the World Health Organization’s count, 33 of the continent’s 50 most polluted cities are Polish, because coal still heats roughly a third of Polish homes, and every winter the cities disappear under smog that kills tens of thousands prematurely each year. In these mountains there is no polluting industry, and so there is none of it. Even the winters, cold and heavy with snow, are blessed by sun, while Kraków and Katowice choke below. The lesson is worth stating plainly. A clean environment comes from using resources intelligently — from not building filth in the first place — and not from strangling fuel production and forcing bike lanes onto every major road, which is the American regulatory religion that cleans nothing.