It had been a visually gorgeous day, and an entirely exhausting one.
We walked along the beach at dusk, the kids goofing off, expending the last of their sun-sapped energy. I walked alone, away from the group, trying to find some peace. Our breaks from Mrkopalj always seemed to get me emotional and introspective, but I rarely had the breathing room to sort out my feelings.
I looked out on the water and the Velebit mountains, Croatia’s largest range, an odd mix of windswept karst and lush forest. Venice was built on pillars made from its trees. Among its incredible caves was the largest hole in the world at almost 1,700 feet deep. (For comparison, the Empire State Building is 1,250 feet tall.)
I’d dreamed of this trip as an escape when we were back home. But life follows us everywhere. I could be as restless in Croatia as I was in Iowa. Jim was still a mother hen. The kids were still four and seven. Parenthood still had a tendency to trump romance. The lesson sank in as the sun set: You can’t run from those things that make up the very fabric of your life—even if you change the scenery. You just have to ride the waves. Roll with it.
The sea had smoothed into a mirror, reflecting a pink sky. The entire stretch took on a rose and gold cast. Jim snapped a photo of me as I walked.
“You’ve been in such a rotten mood all day,” he said. Then he flipped to the image and showed me. “But you look really peaceful in this one. And pretty. Then again, I always think you’re pretty.”
I bumped him with my hip. It was only a glimpse of the boyfriend I married, but it would do. In his photo, I really did appear more calm and free than I’d felt for a long time.
As we drove home, I kept my eyes on the Velebit mountains, where the world’s largest hole gaped in the darkness. Both Zadie and Roberta snuggled against Ivana’s shoulders. Sam played out the Star Wars Battle of Endor under his breath.
When we left the island road and hit the straight-on highway, Jim took my hand. I resolved not to fall into the hole of the darker side of our journey and of myself—the part where I felt lost and adrift—but instead to stay on the surface and see.
chapter eighteen
To thank the August 5 party planners, Robert threw another party three days later. Same place—Zagmajna—different menu.
At dawn, the men had impaled a full-size male sheep on a mechanical spit hooked up to a car battery. We roasted slabs of bacon for breakfast as it cooked. Gemišt flowed as a few of the men sliced bread and green onions. Tomo, outwardly grimacing, grumbling like a troll, asked Jim to help heft the sheep onto a great wooden plank when it was done.
While the men worked, I wandered around the forest edge, seeking herbs and tea flowers. When Tomo saw me puzzling over a delicate purple blossom, he slid on a pair of small gold bifocals and walked over to identify it for me. Just for fun, he named every tree, too. If I couldn’t understand a botanical term, he’d gently take my notebook and write it down.
As crabby as he looked, Tomo was surprisingly sentimental, and a bit mysterious himself. He’d been some sort of special-ops guy in Tito’s private guard. When Jimmy Carter visited Yugoslavia, Tomo was assigned to protect Carter during his morning jogs, hiding in the bushes all along the route because Marshal Tito didn’t want the American president to think Yugoslavia was dangerous. But we didn’t learn this about Tomo until our last days in Mrkopalj. He didn’t talk about himself. These were just the facts of his life; no big deal. And he was a rare moderate in a village of passionate politicos. The guy who identified alpine plants for me, then returned to violently hacking up a sheep with a meat cleaver. I liked him.
Tomo severed the sheep’s head from its body, and it sat there, looking at us, next to its own torso, as Tomo sharpened his knives. He pointed to the sheep face as Jim and I stood watching. He raised his eyebrows in question. Did we want to eat some of it?
“Why not?” Jim said. “Da.”
Tomo carved off a bit of sheep cheek. Jim flicked it into his mouth. Tomo stood back, apprising Jim’s reaction.
Jim smiled and nodded. “Dobro,” he said.
Cuculić sidled over. “Do you want this face?” he asked Jim.
“No,” Jim answered. “We were just tasting it.”
“I will make a soup from it,” Cuculić said, grabbing for the head.
Tomo held up his hand. The two men spoke in Croatian.
Cuculić sighed. “My cousin says maybe you want to taste more of this.”
Tomo cracked the skull with the meat cleaver to reveal grayish, pulpy matter. His greasy fingers slipped into the cavity to work the bones loose, carefully removing the mass of brain about the size of a fist. Bobi the dog lingered nearby for scraps. The brain turned goopy when Tomo scooped it into a sticky pile on the cutting board. He indicated that we eat with our fingers, his mouth turning up at one corner ever so slightly.
Jim nudged me. “You go first,” he said.
“Negative,” I said.
“Same time,” Jim said.
“Okay,” I agreed.
Then he lunged at the stuff, pinched out a piece, and dropped it into his mouth. I did the same, placed it on my tongue, and closed my eyes, not wanting to see Jim’s reaction because I thought I would retch.
The brain was soft and fatty, faintly tasting of liver, like a weak and foamy pâté. Though I couldn’t get past the texture of it, Jim was goofy with pleasure. “That’s really good!” he said, toasting Cuculić with his gemišt. The men nodded all around, loving Jim for his enthusiasm. I tried to stay game, but truthfully, the brain was gross.
Tomo, whose forehead wrinkles could be read for mood, changed his expression to one of joking. “This”—he indicated the animal—“man sheep.”
He tipped his head toward us and waggled his eyebrows. It was the first English we’d heard him speak. Jim and I caught his drift. Tomo fished inside the sheep to retrieve its jajas, or balls. He set down each egg-sized testicle on the cutting board as tenderly as if they were his own, and sliced them with a large knife. At silver-dollar-sized, they were awfully big pieces, considering I’d have to eat one.
This time, I joined Jim in his enthusiasm. The jajas were tastier than I’d suspected, like super-rich roasted chicken. Much better than brain.
Tomo finished butchering, using wire cutters to crack the bones. He cut the sheep into manageable chunks and laid them out before calling in the crowd: the kids; Cuculić; Robert and Goranka; Mario and Jasminka; Tomo’s wife, Dubravka; Nikola Tesla; and Coffee Carpool Zoran. We gathered around the giant cutting board piled with Man Sheep. Tomo sawed off pieces, taking requests for favorite sections.
“Hey, Jeem!” Robert called. “Tomo is architect for the sheep!”
For a few hours, in this forest clearing of centuries-old smreka and jela trees, we ate too much, talked a bit, sipped cheap wine, and laughed together. Robert drank so much that he slumped over in his lawn chair with one eye open and one eye closed.
“Dad,” Sam leaned over to Jim, “Robert’s not looking so hot.”
“Quiet,” Jim said. “You’ll wake him up and he’ll start drinking again.”
Tomo silently got up, put a callused finger to his lips, and picked up the shovel he’d been using to put out the fire. Then he pretended to bash Robert over the head with it, a jarring movement that propelled Robert out of his chair in a panic. Tomo chuckled like a schoolboy as Robert tried to collect himself.
“Robert, it looked like your friend just tried to kill you,” Jim pointed out.
“Is joke,” Robert mumbled. “Is Croatian joke.”
“When someone pretends to kill you, that’s a joke in Croatia?” Jim asked.
“Yes, something like that,” Robert said. “Or just to hurt.”
Jim shrugged. So did Robert.
Jim scootched up next to me as we sat around the fire, finishing our food, taking bets on whether Robert would fall over or remain upright, as the towering trees bowed in the breeze and scented the air with goodness.
It was that day, buzzed and confident
in our new Mrkopalj insider status, that we resolved to find the source of the Kupa River. We’d wanted to do this ever since we’d heard about it. Word on the streets was that the two-hundred-mile-long river that formed the northwest border of Croatia sprung from a petite pool of milky blue-green water a thousand feet deep, beneath vertical cliffs another thousand feet high.
“Let’s not just sit around today,” I said one afternoon in the middle of August. “Let’s go find where that big river starts.”
“Do I have to walk a lot?” Sam whined.
“Will I throw up?” Zadie moaned.
But Jim was already out of the yard swing and heading for the dorm. We prepared a kit of water and food and within minutes were on the road to some unknown location within Risnjak National Park, about fifteen miles northwest of Mrkopalj, where a phantom spring reportedly bubbled from the ground like magic. I couldn’t imagine such a thing, but I didn’t put it past Croatia to have something like it.
Inside Risnjak National Park, 1,600 acres of beech and fir undulated over hard waves of limestone and dolomite—the geological glue between the Alps and the Balkan mountains. “You’d think they’d have signs everywhere, right?” Jim murmured absently as he drove. “I mean, this place is a pretty big deal.”
We’d set Charla the GPS on Razloge, the town near the river’s source, and she took us off the paved highway to a gravel back road that spiraled darkly down a jungle-like gorge. There was no barrier to break our fall if Jim took his eyes off the road even for a moment. Down we circled, carsick and burping, passing rickety Dogpatch-style shacks and workers smearing tar on sections of road.
When the road dipped back up, it skimmed a sunny mountaintop, a dramatic panorama of peaks and green rolling out for miles, a handful of red-roofed hunter cottages like tiny birdhouses dotting the vast ocean of trees. We pulled over onto a tiny patch of gravel where a single park bench acknowledged that yes, this was a very big deal.
My family sat. Silence and distance roared on the wind.
“I have to pee,” Sam said.
“Me too,” Zadie said.
“I wish there were road signs,” Jim added. “Or other people.”
We relieved ourselves by the car—we had seen Croatians doing this along the highways and we’d deemed it acceptable, even wise, behavior—and drove the last few miles to a tiny broken-down village with an abandoned church. Charla told us it was Razloge.
Two unshaven men watched suspiciously as we cruised the half-dozen houses that passed for a town. We didn’t see anything that looked like a river spring. When we reached the end of town, perhaps seventeen seconds later, Jim threw the car into reverse and backed up the length of Razloge. Then he rolled down the window and pointed at a small wooden sign, about the size of a human hand.
It read IZVOR KUPE, 25 M. There appeared to be a trail near this sign.
“Well,” Jim began. “This could be the trailhead.”
“What’s an izvor?” Sam asked.
“Son,” Jim said, “I just don’t know.”
The mountain men stirred uncomfortably on their porch as we got out of the Peugeot. We stood to allow the Croatian stare. Zadie pointed at them silently. One indicated the ground next to the sign, stacked with a neat pile of walking sticks.
“What do you think?” Jim said, turning to me. “Is this right?”
“Right enough,” I said. “I think the ‘twenty-five m’ means twenty-five minutes. I can start the timer on my watch. We’ll hike exactly that long and turn back when it hits time.”
I was surprised that Jim and the kids went along with this idea. Sam and Zadie spent a great deal of energy trying to talk us out of making them exercise. They had to know from the look of things that this hike would be particularly strenuous. Jim, perpetually consumed with the fear that a natural disaster would smite his family, had suddenly become adventurous. And me? Well, I suppose I was just trying to roll with it.
We stepped into a clearing in the jam-packed woods. The trail ran like a small vein through it. We neither saw nor heard other humans. It was just my family and a stiff-legged descent down a rocky path. We were surround by blackberry bushes heavy with fruit, a testament to how few visitors had been here before us. We’d traveled to Mrkopalj, a place that felt to us like the middle of nowhere. We were now venturing into the middle of nowhere’s own version of the middle of nowhere.
Zadie was oddly quiet. “You okay, kid?” I asked as we held hands.
“I like berries,” she said.
Sam picked up a long stick and declared he was going on a bear hunt. He held out some fruit as a lure, twirling the stick in his other hand like a light saber.
“Here, bear…,” he called. “Come heeere.…”
The noise was just enough to scare away any possibility of an actual bear.
The temperature dipped as we descended into the forest canyon. We came upon a backwoods farm where a woman hung laundry, shooing away chickens as she moved. We strained to find the faint bull’s-eye trail markers painted in red on trees and rocks along the way. I noted points of reference so that we could find our way back: an unusual tree; a washed-out gully forking in the shape of a V; that lady’s laundry. We were covered in sweat. I didn’t want to think of the climb back up.
Eventually the trail turned into a more distinct thing. We saw a picnic table. An actual set of stairs. A rope railing down the rock face. The trail ended at a dry riverbed overhung by great ferns and leggy lowland trees. Giant mossy rocks nudged from the carpet of the forest floor. Jim and Sam, who’d gotten quite a bit ahead of berry-picking Zadie and me, looked tiny moving through the Jurassic landscape.
“It’s been twenty minutes,” I called to Jim.
“I hear something beyond this bend!” he hollered over his shoulder.
Indeed, it was the Kupa River, flowing smoothly over worn stones, spanned by a wooden bridge and marked by an appropriately understandable set of signs. We picked quickly over the dry riverbed to get to it.
The Kupa was a meandering twist, dappled by sunlight that broke through the heavy canopy. Other families walked along the water, speaking German, Japanese, French. I had no idea where they’d come from; we hadn’t seen a soul on the trail.
I worked my way to the river’s edge, reached down, and splashed water over my face. The kids threw stones. We stared up at the canyon walls around us; we were in a very deep pocket of earth here.
“The source is over there,” Jim called, heading down a path, ducking behind a jagged outcropping of rock. We followed him. Though the woods had been warm and close, it was ten degrees colder in this divot in the earth from which sprung a pool the size of a farm’s fishing pond. A mist rose from the water’s surface. Beneath it, the pool ranged in color from turquoise to indigo. Lake trout hung in this cloudy abyss that was almost 300 feet deep and somehow flowed clear and fast when it hit the river channel that would run for 184 miles beyond.
“Mommy,” Zadie whispered, “what is this?”
“It’s the beginning of a river,” I said.
“Is there a Loch Ness monster here?” Sam asked.
“I am fairly sure there is not,” I said.
To be certain, Sam slapped the water with his stick.
“Are there wizards in here?” Sam asked.
“Yes,” Jim confirmed.
It was all silence and watchfulness by this eerie blue-green pool fringed with ferns. Every now and then one of us would get up and walk around it, to take a look from other sides. Sam and Jim waited for wizards and dragons. But mostly, we just stayed quiet in reverence of a mysterious thing.
When we finally retraced our path back through the dry riverbed, up the steep incline for an hour-long return, the hike wasn’t as horrible as I’d thought it would be. We took it slow. We stopped at intervals to catch our breath. Jim and I alternated carrying Zadie on our backs when the climb exhausted her four-year-old legs, once stick-like but now showing hints of muscle. We steadily worked our way up the slope, perh
aps fueled by the magic of that mystical wormhole that birthed the Kupa River, the heavy strain on our lungs and legs a reasonable price to pay for seeing the spectacular turquoise well. Sam jousted along with his stick, defending threats to the Jedi’s rule over the Republic, hiking ahead of his laboring parents, lost in his own place in a galaxy far, far away.
We took the final step off the trail together, in unison, and threw our walking sticks back into the pile beneath the trailhead sign. We walked slowly to the Peugeot. In that moment of silence between the slamming door and the buckling of seatbelts, before the radio would blast us with a song of triumph, or a song by Triumph, I think we each felt a surge a pride. No one had thrown up, gotten lost, cried, or yelled. We’d faced a mystery and emerged unscathed.
In the car, we sailed through the forest that had been strange to us just a few hours before. Jim and I took off our shirts and hung them out the windows so the sweat would dry as they flapped in the wind like victory flags. We celebrated at Pizza Scorpion.
Later, I found this, from an 1898 book called Gorski Kotar by Dragutin Hirc:
The path leads past an older house on the slope of the hill and then you arrive at the green source of the Kupa River. What a rare sight! The peak of Kupeški vrh rises up 300 m above the Kupa. When you look from hill to hill, there are no settlements to be seen, not a soul in sight, nowhere a human voice. The ear can distinguish only the sound of the dearly flowing water. How pleasant and lovely it is in this solitude. This is not the home of human evil, vileness, hatred, discord or envy, but is the home of peaceful souls, the home, according to the legend, of the mountain fairies. A man would leave the world, if that were possible, and move here, to live a blessed and peaceful life. The water in the spring at the source of the Kupa is dark green, turbid and completely calm. Only when a grayling jumps to catch a fly or a damselfly nymph, does its surface gently break.
Running Away to Home Page 20
