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After Kathy bundled Olivia away, I headed back to my cabin for a shower. The thunderstorm followed me, dark clouds swarming overhead, fat raindrops splatting on the ground, on my head. The guests were nowhere to be seen—probably upstairs in the library game room playing card games or checkers, or hiding in their cabins from the storm.
Back in my cabin, I stripped and stepped into the shower, standing under the hot, steaming spray, muscles releasing tension in the heat. I hadn’t been afraid during the storm, except when Olivia disappeared beneath the water. I’d been with a lot of guys who flipped their boats, went for an unexpected dunk, swallowed water. I’d been there myself—a couple of times in the winter when the shock of icy water robbed me of my breath and threatened to drag me to the depths. I had never been afraid for myself or any of my racing buddies.
But I had been afraid for Olivia, a kayaking novice.
Scrabbling over scree at seven thousand feet on McGregor Mountain, she moved fearlessly, like a lioness on the hunt, while I had quaked as I stumbled over shifting, slippery rock fragments at the precipice of the perilous drop-off, crawling on hands and knees, humbled.
Water was my domain since childhood. I maintained a healthy respect for frigid lakes and rushing rivers, but no fear. I navigated liquid territory as precisely as Magellan.
Not so for Olivia. When I pulled her out of the drink, I could feel her utter confusion and shock, along with a sobering expression I had encountered before—someone who had looked death square in the face and accepted it, only to find themselves unexpectedly alive.
In Yugoslavia, right before the war, after Croatia and Bosnia had declared independence, and all hell had broken loose, I had been visiting Anya and Nik in Bosnia, hanging out in their apartment, when a knock sounded on the door. Nik opened the door cautiously to find a neighbor, an older woman named Sonja who lived across the hall.
“Something’s going on in town,” she said. “There’s busloads of people at the Hotel Paviljon and they need supplies.”
We all looked at each other, then took off for downtown. The icy sting of winter rushed our steps as we made the ten-minute walk to the hotel. A crowd had gathered around a line of buses parked in the hotel’s car park and along the street.
From the bus windows, scruffy-looking people stared at the gathering crowd with blank faces. Some stepped stiffly off the bus into the cold evening, wearing rumpled clothing too thin for the winter temperatures. Some of them talked to us. They were hungry and thirsty, with no possessions except the clothes on their backs. They said they were Croatians from Vukovar, a city on the Danube, a place where Nik and Rad and I had raced for the Yugoslav Republic Cup in 1986. Rad won that one, Nik second, and I took third.
The whole city of Vukovar, about seventy-five thousand people, had been surrounded by the Yugoslav—now Serb—National Army for months in a siege that kept food and supplies out. The army shelled the city relentlessly, destroying most of the homes and buildings.
In Vukovar, the army, along with a paramilitary group called Arkan’s Tigers, had crushed Croatian resistance fighters. They couldn’t kill everybody, so they loaded the survivors, mostly women, children, and the elderly, onto buses and shipped them out. The Serb army wanted every last Croatian to vacate so the Serbs could claim the city as their own.
I burned with anger to see my countrymen in this condition, and a wave of guilt washed over me that I wasn’t fighting as part of the resistance. The biggest change for me back home in Croatia during these first months of conflict was that instead of training during the day, I was required to work long hours at Elektrodalmacija Split to repair damaged power lines and replace destroyed transformers. I had fumed that my workouts were suffering, an embarrassing recollection when I witnessed authentic suffering.
I’d heard about the Vukovar siege, but hearing and seeing are two different things. Nik, Anya, and I stood open-mouthed as people recounted their thirst as their water system had been destroyed, the hunger they had endured, the horror of watching loved ones executed in the street.
Overwhelmed by the need to do something, we hurried back to the apartment and gathered clothes, grabbed all the canned and packaged food we had, collected spare blankets, and returned to the hotel. We joined others in handing supplies up through bus windows. Restaurants donated food, bringing trays full of sausages and flat bread.
We watched as the people ate—hurriedly, hungrily, joylessly.
The buses didn’t stay in town long.
A couple days after they’d left, a cousin of Anya’s who lived in Bosanski Samac, Bosnia, near the Croatian border, called in a panic. “We are surrounded by soldiers,” she’d said. “They’ve taken all the men and we’re prisoners in our own houses. I don’t know what to do.”
And still, we hadn’t fully understood the violent storm on the horizon.
As I turned off the shower in my cabin, memories of the past dried up. I dressed and went in search of work, anything to keep me busy, to keep the past at bay. I reset a breaker blown out by a guest using a hair dryer of too high a wattage, repaired a failed light switch, solved the simple electrical problems of a pampered people demanding the comforts of home during their wilderness adventure.
