Somewhere between Dest and Baia Mare, in Romania, our car came upon a dead body in the road. It was lying nose-down on the pavement, and despite the torrential rainstorm, no one had bothered to cover it up. A few feet ahead, we squeezed past a police van and the car of the driver who'd probably run the dead man down. Visibility was approaching zero.

When our car skidded into a fallen tree about 20 miles later, my Romanian lover, Romulus, and I got out and tried to move it aside. The tree was too heavy, and soon we were drenched with freezing rain. Images of death from exposure (or at least a back-end collision with the next driver to come up behind us) began to course through my mind. Then a strange, swinging light penetrated the forest at the edge of the road. A peasant who'd heard the collision was coming to help us, with lantern in hand. An hour later we were drinking tzuica at his fireside, bundled in thick sheep's-hair blankets.

We were on the edge of Maramures, one of the last places on the continent of Europe where farmers still work the land with oxen and where some villagers still observe pre-Christian rites. My eerie memories of the region have nothing to do with the dead body in the road or the fear that shot through me as Romulus and I bent over the fallen tree. Instead I remember the strange lack of ambivalence I glimpsed in our savior's face as we sat by the fire, and his total lack of curiosity about where we had come from or who we were.

That night, as we waited out the storm in narrow beds in a room where cheap reproductions of paintings of Orthodox saints stared down from the walls, I wondered if our host would have made us quite so comfortable if he'd known anything about us. For we were, in terms of the values he lived by, an abomination. Not only were Romulus and I homosexual lovers, but Romulus had long ago been corrupted by that great shifting of populations that occurred during Communism and its collapse. Along with thousands of other Romanians, he'd forsaken the piety and subsistence living of rural Romania for the cities of the West, for the hope of quick money, for petty crime and for sexual pleasure.

It's true that Romulus's grandfather had been a peasant like the man who had taken us in, rising at 5:00 a.m. to milk the cows, knowing no toilet that wasn't an outhouse, and eating only from the labor of his own hands. But during the Ceausescu years his village was razed, and a petrol plant was built in its place. The family was moved to one of the countless housing projects that still ring the outskirts of every Romanian city. Growing up in those surroundings years later, Romulus learned all the survival skills associated with urban poverty. When I met him while on assignment in Bucharest three years ago, he was an emaciated hustler who had snuck across seven European borders, and had also learned to steal cars. The average monthly salary in his country was less than a hundred dollars a month (even for professionals), so he had developed little interest in higher education or a full-time job. Instead, he'd become a kind of urban hunter and gatherer a world apart from the backbreaking labor and delayed gratification endured by our evidently pious host. Romulus's cheap city dugs and uncallused hands must have told him as much. Still, I read in his eyes no condemnation or suspicion.

Early the next morning, the tree had been moved by a road crew. And that afternoon, north of the city of Baia Mare, we headed for the tiny settlements on the other side of a mountain, to get a look at their people and architecture. Our car climbed a steep, narrow one-lane road through thick fog. As we drove, the terror of tumbling over the edge gradually changed into a kind of ecstatic trance. My past melted into the fog. All that existed was the sense of having left everything behind.

Halfway down the mountain, the fog lifted cinematically to reveal a line of towering, ornately carved wooden gates. A muddy-booted farmer trudged toward us, leading two horses and a cart piled with laboriously sheared branches. His dirt-caked, weather-raw face betrayed a bit of curiosity about us, but he was focused on his routine, which had no doubt existed his entire life—not to say for centuries before—and he seemed not to think of or want anything else.

Nor was there any awareness in the farmer's face that the tentacles of the European Union were groping, however haltingly, in his direction. Romania has been panting at the door of the EU for 12 years, hoping against hope that it will be able to bring its infrastructure and economy up to the requisite standards for entry. One day rather soon, the farmer could find EU functionaries at his doorstep, suggesting better ways to till his field, frowning at his unlicensed homemade plum brandy, or smilingly promoting sanitized cartoon versions of his seasonal rituals as packaged by an ethnographer in Bucharest.

Meanwhile, in the cities, politicians, businessmen, workers, and students are going to bed each night with that wild, forlorn unrest of people hoping to win the lottery. They dream of owning small lucrative businesses, getting a degree in public relations (unheard of until the fall of Communism), or even marrying an American. Such longing feels out of place in this Balkan country where Byzantine, Slavic and Latin cultures mix, and Eastern Orthodox mysticism remains a powerful force. That the people's wildest dreams would focus on the West and its magical service economies, military might and vast territories for worker exploitation is odd, to say the least. Despite Romania's past engagements with Western Europe—the once close ties to France, the mythical kinship with the Latins, the unholy alliance with Germany during World War II—its vision of the West remains a figment, the object of a magical incantation.

Yet reality has dealt harsh blows to this fantasy. Last October, when the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and seven other eastern countries were promised EU membership beginning in 2004, Romania was told it wouldn't even be considered until 2007 because of its lagging economy. But fiscal problems aren't the only variables that have put off the EU, which is governed by an unmistakably Western sensibility. In 1993 when Romania was admitted to the Council of Europe the organization began monitoring it for human rights violations. The charges stemmed in part from a string of brutal arrests and interrogations of gays, and an ambiguous law called Article 200, which forbade homosexuals to congregate in public places. The Romanian parliament later repealed the law in an obvious gesture of submission to the West, only to face new charges of having neglected orphan children and having failed to crack down on human trafficking. Accurate as these charges were, they stemmed from a complex of distinctly Western social values that seemed suddenly more complicated when applied to the East. While the pressure to sanction homosexuality was characteristic of the idealistic rhetoric of the European Union, it also inadvertently challenged the Romanian Orthodox Church, an institution whose conservative mysticism has long been an important source of comfort to Romania's impoverished population. Though the accusations about the orphans' misery had been true, the population against whom they were leveled were themselves facing joblessness and homelessness.

My week in Maramures provided other time-warping experiences that illuminated the sharp contrasts between rural Romania and the capitalist West. An old farmer with cataracts, dressed partly in traditional clothes but wearing a down vest from America, patiently showed me the ancient craft of building a fence without nails by joining wood and weaving twigs. The farmer with the largest, most elaborate gate in the village proudly took me into his dowry room to show off all his earthly riches: mountains of handmade rugs, lace, and beadwork.

Later, in Sibiu and Brasov, the temporal dissonance was less pronounced, despite those cities' huge, largely unrenovated medieval sections. Still, tokens of the "alien" East popped out here and there: rugs being beaten on almost every balcony, the serpentine song of a doina spilling from a pub. And then, suddenly, a new hallucination spread over these Old World images like molasses. I was thinking of my own country, America, where every state is protected by a powerful Constitution and where individual cities and suburbs blur into an unbroken chain of malls and office parks.

Like the United States more than a hundred years ago, the European Union is ingesting ever more exotic peoples as it expands sometimes benignly, sometimes ferociously, and often self-righteously. Romania may, and perhaps should, turn out to be the thorn in the lion's paw.