chapter eight

In the morning, I took my first jog to the neighboring village of Tuk. I’d driven the smooth blacktop road in the Peugeot, snaking through a flat green cleave between mountains. The odometer read 2.8 kilometers. There and back, just shy of two miles.

Still, I could not make it all the way without stopping. Charla the GPS had told me that Mrkopalj was 880 meters above sea level, about 2,887 feet, roughly comparable to an Adirondack village. The slightly thinner air didn’t seem to power my lungs properly, but that probably had more to do with my lungs than the altitude.

I jogged to the sound of the hiss of distance, flanked by the wide-open fields from which Mrkopalj took its name. Long ago, in my great-grandparents’ time, every family dreamed of having a plot in this fertile stretch between Mrkopalj and Tuk that they called the polje (POLE-yay). Land was everything. Land meant possibility. Houses were crammed into the far corners of properties, to allow maximum space for grazing sheep or extra gardens or another house for a son’s family. I learned these things in my fledgling efforts to engage, forcing Robert to translate for me over late-morning coffee in Stari Baća.

I huffed past fields now abandoned to weed and wildflower, a few still planted with krompiri. Wooden watchtowers loomed at the edges, lookouts for hunters of brown bear or wild boar or deer. A Renault Twingo whizzed past on the narrow road, so close I could feel the driver’s-side mirror shearing the air at my elbow. I braced for death, and the imagined brush with mortality made the exertion even more intoxicating. At the end, I walked home dripping wet down Novi Varoš, feeling watched, seeing no one, exhilarated nonetheless.

At the same time, we commenced afternoon drives in the Gorski Kotar, through tunnels blasted into white rock, under cathedrals of spruce trees so old their needled branches seemed to melt to the earth. The mountains tumbled low and rounded, their thick wig of forest studded with shocking white calcareous rocks. The slopes worked their way up in height to the narrow ridge of Bjelolasica, the highest peak of the Gorski Kotar’s Kapela mountain chain at 1,534 meters, or a little over 5,000 feet.

The names of the villages sounded so funny on our tongues: Belo Selo; Zahrt; Čučak; Skrad. We passed river towns plumed with ferns, campgrounds strangely empty but for rows of overturned canoes. We drove mountain roads so cockeyed they felt like amusement park rides, not a guardrail in sight, giving ourselves over to a perpetual state of danger and carsickness. The kids and I got into the habit of tucking extra grocery bags into the pockets of the car doors. “To barf in,” explained Sam, when Robert’s girls saw us ferreting away plastic sacks. Eventually we figured out that burping eased queasiness, and the Peugeot became a fantastic acoustic stage for great croaks of relief.

We didn’t see many people; there hadn’t been many to begin with. The five thousand square miles of Gorski Kotar land had barely been populated until the Turks came sniffing around, spurring the Habsburgs that ruled Croatia into protecting their resources by forcing people to actually live here. They had to import settlers: Orthodox refugees from the Ottoman Empire seeking religious freedom, plus large clans of legendary troublemaking coastal pirates called Uskoks. My ancestral land: settled by exiles and criminals. Secretly, I hoped I was a rowdy Uskok from way back.

Because Cuculić remained useless in a tourism capacity, we learned all of this as we would have had we never left home—from Wikipedia. But, like the mosquitoes in Minnesota, the lack of user-friendliness kept the rabble out. We felt like the first visitors to this place. We weren’t sure if this was because of the intimidating density of the forest backcountry or the perpetual morning slivovitz buzz of any potential outdoorsmen. Whatever the reason, the upside was a very soft footprint: Nobody had ruined the nature yet. It was the thickest wilderness we’d ever seen.

Plus, the weather was great. Even on warm days, the air exuded a hint of glacial coolness that smelled of bark and rock and moss. The Gorski Kotar seemed both vast and hidden—a curiously tucked-away pocket of backwoods. I’ve felt this way while paddling through Iowa stretches of the Upper Mississippi River, similarly untouched by people, a lone patch of the original state of things. Traveling in such a place, earning entry to it, is the reward itself for the isolation that goes along with getting there. If you could deal with the narrow roads with the sheer drop-offs, if you could dodge the bears and the wolves and the pine martens, if you averted the GPS mix-up to find the appropriate forest hobbit to whisper the correct password to the wood-sap nymph and snatch the key from the lumberjack troll, you could enter this insanely untamed territory.

We didn’t venture far on those first drives, staying within the ten-mile radius. We drove north to the village of Lokve, where we threw rocks into a mirror lake at the foot of a huge mountain and considered walking the lakeside trail. We chickened out when we realized we were the only souls in sight, save for a creepy wooden sculpture of a woman watching over us. So we looped our way south to Fužine, perfectly placed along its own mirror lake, reflecting a pleasing arrangement of quaint houses and a church spire, a scene worthy of its own Franklin Mint plate. Buses discharged hordes of elderly tourists into the streets. We judged them to be German, based on sheer size and paleness of skin.

“What’s going on in Fužine?” Jim wondered aloud.

“This must be where all the people live,” said Sam. “I think these are the first people I’ve seen today.”

We headed up the street, passing an overcrowded pizza shop before settling on a fancy-looking hotel restaurant. The posted menu declared bear paw as its specialty.

“Don’t waste the thirty-five dollars here,” Jim said as we sat down. “Edo told me he knows the butcher in Fužine, and he can get us fresh bear much cheaper.”

I stared at Jim, incredulous. My husband already knew a guy who knew a guy.

“Who is Edo?” I asked.

“Oh, just a friend,” Jim said, looking over the menu. “No big deal.”

Jim and I ordered hunter’s stew and bacon with a side of sausage and sauerkraut over boiled potatoes. It was an oily mess of goodness that we ate until our faces were slick. We’d switched to Karlovačko because we liked the Croatian checkerboard on the label, and now we ordered two as chasers. The kids picked at their fries, looking disgusted with us.

“They’ll eat anything,” Sam said to Zadie.

Driving did us all good. It made us feel that we belonged, and gave context to our existence in the Gorski Kotar.

On the first Sunday in July, the Starčević girls mentioned that it was the day of the annual church festival in Sunger, and so we drove a kilometer west to see it. The afternoon rain threatened to electrocute the sound guys amping the string band in matching black suits with peach shirts. All of them looked like Anthony Hopkins. We settled under the awning of a café-bar built right in the church parking lot. The speakers crackled through “Love Me Tender” as the kids browsed the handful of nearby toy vendors. It was kind of a bust, though, as most of the toys were just fake guns. Sam asked for a semi-automatic sniper rifle. Zadie was partial to a fake pistol with a removable chamber called the Warmonger.

“No,” Jim and I both stated flatly, in unison.

“I wouldn’t mind a plate of those sausages,” Jim said, looking out over the rows of picnic tables where churchgoers feasted and smoked and drank and stared at us.

“Same here,” I said.

“Well, how do we do it?” Jim wondered aloud. This appeared to be a church picnic. People were even bringing some form of roast beast from a cookfire next door. Was it free? If not, whom did we pay? Small mysteries such as these baffled us most. Our cell phones still languished at the bottom of empty suitcases, because figuring out how to purchase minutes would be a daylong affair.

Jim tipped his beer toward me. “It’s your turn to get in there and figure something out.”

I looked over at the man frying sausages in the Sunger church parking lot. Stout yet compact, inexplicably tan, he cut the figure of a high school softball coach. Not to be braggy, but I was first-team all-conference my senior year, and The Coach is a breed of man I am familiar with: body of a teddy bear, face like Dick Van Patten. I stood up and straightened my sporty skirt. A captive audience in the steady downpour appeared to collectively wonder what I was going to do next. I took a deep breath, steeled my soul, and made a mad dash across the parking lot, my head down, running as fast as if I’d bunted a dribbler down the first-base line. I slid under the canvas tent top where the Sausage Man of Sunger was lighting a tabletop grill with a rolled-up paper plate set on fire. I felt the eyes of the entire gathering upon me, the interloper at a party that had hosted the same guests for a hundred years. I beat back self-consciousness and pretended I was the kind of person who casually orders meat from a softball coach.

The skinless sausages appeared to be of the Jimmy Dean variety. The Sausage Man of Sunger basted them in their own grease with a silver spoon before rolling them onto paper plates dabbed with a thick red sauce from a jar labeled “ajvar.” Next, he piled on sliced white onions and bread and doused each plate with a final blast of oil before handing it to a server. There was more fat involved than at a Wisconsin fish fry.

I stepped forward. The Sausage Man of Sunger looked up from his work and scrutinized me with the full-on Croatian stare. A hush descended on the crowd.

“Slika?” I asked him, holding up my camera.

“Da.” He nodded once, his mouth still but his eyes smiling.

I snapped a picture of his shiny hands, fingers thick like sausages themselves.

I held up two fingers. “Dva, molim?” I asked. Two, please?

He looked up at me with a radiant smile, his face slick with grease. “Dobro hrvatski!” he said loudly. Good Croatian! He pointed to the sausages and named them: “ćevapćići!”

He rolled a few onto a plate for me, pronouncing the word again, something like cheh-VOP-chee-chee, and made another plate for Jim. “Da!”

I was so pleased that I actually clapped. I successfully paid for the sausages—another victory!—and returned to the table amid a steady stream of approving words from the Sausage Man of Sunger, who, when I turned to glance back at him, was watching my backside intently as I walked.

The four of us wolfed down the spicy little sausage rolls. There was something familiar about this food, and it made us all happy.

People stared at us. We stared back. Something struck me during all this staring. There wasn’t anything menacing about it. We were just getting used to each other. If I was going to meet my goal of becoming a Slavic people person, I would have to submit to the Croatian Stare. It was easier to do with Jim and the kids nearby. Most things were.

With my belly full of sausage in a church parking lot bar, being serenaded by Anthony Hopkinses dressed in formal wear while my kids shopped a toy artillery arsenal, I felt pretty good. I’d accumulated a few tools in my emotional toolbox over the years. It was time to start using them.