THAT WAS THE LAST time I saw Saulius, but I wrote about him in a book about that trip, Off the Map. Now, remembering our friendship, I pulled it from the shelf and read the opening passage about Saulius:

"Sometimes you meet someone you know.

"You have spent nights together. You've camped together beneath the sky and sung songs together and drunk beer in each other's homes. You have hugged and cried and laughed together. And you've never met.

"There are few such people in the world, but they are the ones you will always know and who will always know you. They are living in parts of the world where you haven't been. They are living lives you cannot know. They have kitchens with bright windows you can't imagine, where you had coffee. These are the people you meet, and know, before you speak."

Sixteen years later, my words sounded presumptuous. How could I have felt that I really knew this man? We'd spent so little time together. Were we really that close, or was it just the circumstances?

I was leaving for St. Petersburg in two weeks, on a pianist exchange program for my two daughters. On the off chance they could help, I dialed the University of Wyoming's international-students department and asked if they knew of anyone in Laramie who spoke Lithuanian. They did: Rimvyda Dreher, a Lithuanian-American who worked as a business manager at the school. Lithuanian was her native tongue.

I explained the task to Rimvyda. I had only his name: Saulius Kunigenas. I didn't know where he was or even if he was alive. Amazingly, after multiple online searches and a half-dozen dead-end phone calls, Rim found Saulius.

The connection was so staticky she could barely hear him, but she managed to catch an e-mail address. Though it struck me as odd that e-mail didn't exist when I first met Saulius, I wrote immediately and got a response from Laima Kunigenas, his daughter. I hadn't even known he had a daughter. She was 24, spoke English, had worked in California, and had just finished her master's in economics at Kaunas University of Technology. Laima wrote that of course her father remembered me.

"He says for you to come to Lithuania. Bring your bicycle. He will be waiting for you."

A month later I was on the night train south from St. Petersburg to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, then west to Kaunas, Saulius's hometown. As I rumbled through flat pine forests in a sleeper, watching the sun sink at midnight then bounce annoyingly back up at 2 a.m., the enterprise suddenly seemed mad.

Would we even recognize each other after so long? And if we did, what would it be like to see each other again? I remembered an agile, athletic man, but what is memory? Mostly what you want to remember, heedless of reality. I'd imagined that perhaps Saulius and I could bicycle across Lithuania, a country the size of West Virginia on the Baltic Sea. But was he even still cycling? So much happens in 16 years. Unnervingly, it occurred to me that I actually knew very little about Saulius. I never knew how old he was or what his profession was. We'd just clicked on an emotional level. Our shared landscape had been the brutal, irrational Soviet empire, but now the USSR was dead.