The Flood

through the Balkans with friends old and new

After the social intensity of Turkey, I felt like I needed a little break. Some time to decompress, to think, to write, to work. So I took the night train to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, and booked five nights at the cheapest hostel I could find. It was a huge old inn with blackened wooden beams and white stuccoed walls and a tile roof. My bed was in a long attic room with nineteen others, just under the single skylight which let in the bracing fall air and the milky sunlight filtering through the rain clouds. I ventured out to find local currency, a grocery store, and a tea house. I knew nobody, I could no longer talk to the locals or even read the signs, and I was looking forward to the quiet and the boredom. Of the last three nights, I’d spent one night in a hostel in Kadıköy bunked with a man who snored and a man who cried out fearfully in his sleep, one night hidden under a bay laurel tree in a park near the Halkılı train station, and one night in a tiny sleeping compartment with a Dutchman on vacation, an Indian who lived in Poland, and a Turk who lived in Dublin. All interesting experiences, it’s true, but none of them very restful.

After a good night’s sleep in the attic, I got up early, took a brisk walk to the grocery store, and came back to the kitchen to make the huge salad I’d been craving. A young man with a mustache and a long mane of curly dark hair came into the kitchen to make coffee, brewing it in a Turkish-style cezve and scooping spices from a set of tiny jars. We struck up a conversation and it turned out he was making café de olla; he let me smell and name each of the spices in turn. He’d grown up in Mexico but had been living in Australia for many years and I’ll call him Inigo¹. After Inigo drank his coffee and did his morning meditation practice, we sat down at a table in the common area to talk. I told him about what had drawn me to Turkey and about my translations of Yunus Emre’s poetry, and he was interested to read some. He asked me to pick a poem that spoke to me, and I chose “I Need It Back” (see below for the text). As I watched him read it and saw tears come rolling down his cheeks, I knew I’d just found a fellow traveler and hopefully a lifelong friend. We started talking about how we’d both discovered the beauty and necessity of feeling painful feelings, and about the wide vistas this discovery had opened up for us. His life journey had taken a sharp turn when he fell in love with a wandering free-spirited folk musician, who landed on his heart like a dragonfly and then took off again, leaving him blown wide open. The joy and grief of it all was like rain in the desert, and he wrote a beautiful poem about it in Spanish, and the wanderlust came over him, and off he went to travel the world.

As we were talking, a young German man who I’ll call Konrad joined us at the table. He had long blond hair and a fresh face; he’d just recently graduated from college and was travelling around operating video systems at football games and figuring out what he wanted to do with his life. He read the poem too, and it reached him in a different way, and we broadened the conversation. And that’s how we formed the core of one of those little temporary communities that sometimes develop at hostels. We drew another pair of travelers into our orbit, two women, one French and one Australian, who’d met each other in Albania and loved the country so much they’d spent five months there. We all hung out a lot around the hostel and traded stories, songs, haircuts, and massages². At night I cooked lavish feasts for the five of us and anyone else who wanted to join in. The only touristy thing we did was on our last day in Sofia, when Inigo, Konrad, and I went on a tour to Rila Monastery. Although the paintings there were very beautiful, and we had such a lovely picnic in the sunny courtyard, my favorite parts were hiking on a mountain trail, climbing through a hermit’s cave, and sitting alone quietly by a rushing stream. The beech trees had just shed all their leaves, and the forest floor was a rich tapestry of browns punctuated by white boulders and green moss. Winter hadn’t dimmed nature’s splendor at all; there was a fierce vitality under that carpet of leaves, and I felt it too in my own life, felt that now might be a time to hibernate, to digest, to ferment.

autumn forest in the mountains of Bulgaria, near the cave of Saint Ivan Rilski

As we got ready to part ways, Inigo and I both felt the urge to travel together, but we had different destinations in mind. A woman he’d fallen in love with over the course of five days in Norway was travelling down from Berlin to meet him, and he was planning to cross North Macedonia and meet her in Albania. I’d been planning to visit some friends in Croatia, so our paths were in different directions, but after giving it some thought I realized I might not need to compromise. I reached out to my friends in Croatia and asked if I could invite another person or two into their home, and being travelers and creative types themselves they agreed. So, shortly before midnight, Inigo and I boarded the night bus to Zagreb. If there were a kama sutra of bus sleeping, we would have worked our way through many of the possible positions, but overall it was a restful journey. The cozy warmth of the bus was punctuated by intervals of standing in the cold night air at border crossings, first to enter Serbia, then Croatia. We bought a bar of chocolate at a gas station. The sunrise showed up muffled in a thick shroud of fog. Breakfast was a plain croissant and some bananas. After the surreal texture of the night passage, we came to earth again in a cafe in Zagreb, and were soon on our way to my friends’ apartment.

I’ll call my friends Torch and Tungsten. Torch was a sculptor, jazz drummer, and thrill-seeker about my age who grew up near me in North Carolina and who I’ve known for something like 14 years. Tungsten was his fiance, a Croatian woman who’s at once passionate and deeply grounded. Over dinner in their tiny attic apartment, they told us the story of how they met on a bus in Thailand just before the pandemic, and fell in love over the course of one charmed night, and how their romance had grown and developed in spite of all the restrictions and cancelled flights and closed borders. Inigo told the story of meeting and falling in love with the woman he’d met in Norway, who I’ll call Arwen³. I’d been betting on everyone getting along, and thankfully I wasn’t wrong, because the apartment really was tiny. Tungsten had grown up in it with her two parents and three siblings, and it was hard to imagine how, but I think the answer was that they’d mastered a kind of intimacy that most Americans struggle with, the kind we tend to protect ourselves from with plenty of extra space. That night the four of us went out on the town, to a jazz show that Torch had been wanting to see for a long time, rubbing shoulders with a dense crowd of locals in a basement pub. It was a strangely timeless atmosphere, with low ceilings and old stone walls, colored lights filtering through clouds of cigarette smoke, and the sax player whispering sublime melodies into our ears. It was an intense rush of sensations, far from the quiet hibernation I’d been thinking of, but rich and precious for all that.

The next day I could feel something breaking open in me, a husk that had been around my heart for a long time was finally loosening. In that moment there was a special mixture: Inigo’s interest in a song I’d written over a decade ago, talking about home with Torch and feeling it as a real place with real friends and real country roads, and being in this place that was poised somewhere between familiar and foreign. That morning our hosts were in bed, recovering from the aftereffects of the jazz show, and as Inigo and I went out to buy fruit and pastries, I could feel a song bubbling up in me. When we got back, I sat at the kitchen table, pulling apart a pomegranate and crying hard, only stopping to write down a few more lines of the song. It felt like something was being pulled out of me, something rough and painful but very beautiful for all that. I spent the rest of the day polishing the new song⁴ and cooking a winter vegetable soup, while Inigo walked the city to clear his head. Coming back with some cacao he’d bought, he brewed up a pot of it with chile and spices. Although I’d kicked the caffeine habit I picked up in Turkey, hanging around Inigo had gotten me into chocolate instead. He described cacao to me as an emotional lubricant, and so maybe that too was part of the special mixture. I felt like my emotions were well lubricated.

the wind they call the bora blowing off the Croatian island of Krk

The next day Arwen arrived by bus from Budapest, and now there were five of us in the apartment. She was a singer-songwriter from Scotland, but currently based in Berlin. We all ate dinner together and shared travel stories and songs, and again everyone got along really well. The plan was to travel to the Croatian island of Krk in the Adriatic, where Torch and Tungsten had bought a little off-grid cabin over the summer. They had some building materials to move there, and also the weather in Zagreb was cold and foggy, and maybe the island weather would be a little nicer. The car was small and Inigo and Arwen wanted some adventure, so they decided to hitchhike while the rest of us went in the car along with Tungsten’s sweet and elderly dog Tiny.⁵ Unfortunately the weather was still cold and rainy on the island, but the hitchhikers did have a grand adventure, and we all wound up in the little cabin, warming it by roasting chicken and root vegetables in the oven. Late that evening, as we laid out dinner and lit candles to conserve the scarce solar power, Arwen said it felt like Christmas, and somehow it really did. Torch said this was their housewarming party, and he put on Christmas jazz, and even though it was still November the music felt just right in that cozy family-like atmosphere. I realized once again that dinner parties with dear friends are one of my favorite things in the world.

The next evening, Torch made a fire from sticks we’d pulled out of the woods, and he roasted chestnuts on it, playing the appropriate Christmas song, of course. The weather continued to be mostly gray, but the clear blue-green waters of the Adriatic were still stunning for all that. During a brief interval when the sun broke through the clouds, Inigo, Arwen, and I walked to a secluded pebble beach, stripped, and ran into the sea. At first the water was bracing, but it soon turned invigorating, and we lingered in it longer than I would’ve thought possible. As soon as we were dry and clothed, the sun disappeared again behind the clouds. I realized once again that being in full contact with the world in this way was something I needed like some essential trace mineral; if I didn’t live like a wild animal every so often, a part of me would waste away like the heart of a songbird in a cage.

The night before Inigo and Arwen were going to leave for Albania, the sky really opened up. Thunderous lightning crashed so close to us that it rattled the cabin walls, and I heard Tiny’s toenails clicking around in the middle of the night; she was so scared that she got up and forced open the door to the bedroom so she could be near Tungsten and Torch. Torrential rain lashed against the roof and walls, some six inches (14cm) fell in a single night. At first it all just added to my feeling of coziness, but in the morning, just after I’d risen early and eaten breakfast, Tungsten came out of the bedroom looking worried. “Where is this water coming from?” she said. And sure enough, there was a lot of water flowing across the floor. As we were starting to mop it up, Torch came in dripping and told us we had bigger problems to solve. Outside, a torrent of muddy water was pouring down the valley, running along the base of an old stone wall, and bursting out in a series of waterfalls that cascaded into a deep pond above the house. Torch set me to patching the wall above the house while he went upstream to build a dam that would redirect most of the water. I stuffed every crack I could find with handfuls of dead leaves, and eventually the water was passing us by on the other side of the wall and the torrent slowed down to a trickle. I started bailing the pond above the house with a bucket, and then Torch’s dam started working as well. Tungsten and I moved on to digging ditches to drain water below the house, while Inigo and Arwen worked inside, mopping up the remaining water and listening to storm-themed music.

Then the rain stopped, and the clouds rolled back like a curtain to reveal a flawless blue sky. It seemed as if the whole world had been washed clean. We stood on the patio and listened to Jimmy Cliff singing, “I can see clearly now the rain is gone…” Torch and Tungsten were still caught up in the rush of action, and their new reality hadn’t quite settled in, all that waterlogged flooring and furniture, the mud and the mold. Inigo and Arwen were poised between episodes of their journey, wringing out their soaked belongings and hanging them out to dry. There was a moment of ethereal clarity as the sun sparkled and the tree branches dripped with diamonds. Jimmy Cliff sang, “I can see all the obstacles in my way…” And then, as it always does, life flowed on.

calm seas off the Croatian island of Krk

Epilog: I spent the next day helping Torch and Tungsten move furniture and rip all the laminate flooring out of the cabin, which was quite satisfying but also instantly turned the place from a cozy getaway into a construction zone. Their plans had been disrupted all of a sudden, but as they recovered from the shock of it all, they started to find all the ways it might have been a blessing in disguise. Inigo and Arwen made it to Albania, and I’ve heard that along the way they caught a ride with a couple of gypsy pirates and encountered some ghosts in the Cursed Mountains. I swear I’m not making this up.

Here’s the poem I gave to Inigo to read:

I Need It Back

Your love was raining on my heart
I need those raindrops back again
A flame has gone out in my soul
I need that burning back again

Back when I had fire and rain
I fed the stove, I reaped the grain
The sun plowed wrinkles on my skin
I need that sunlight back again

Down what strange paths my life has led
My heart hung heavy with regrets
And leaked and left me soaking wet
I need that bleeding back again

I had eyes so raw with weeping
Knees so bruised with constant kneeling
Looked up to the Friend, appealing
Bring that feeling back again

Once I knew I came to serve you
Knew the path of love and virtue
Knew my longing to deserve you
Bring that knowing back again

Once my heart cried out for yours
Each moment we were parted for
I beat my face against your door
I need to be like that again

Yunus once had crazy notions
Swam the sea and learned its motions
Found a pearl beneath the ocean
Dive and find that pearl again

— Yunus Emre (ca 1238-1320) as translated by Jesse Crossen

1. Because he looks a little like a younger version of the hero from The Princess Bride, but imagine if instead of swordsmanship he was into meditation and brewing mind-blowing cacao.

2. The idea of a hand massage had never even occurred to me, but the French woman said her family used to do them for each other all the time. It felt very nice!

3. She actually looks quite a bit more elfin than Liv Tyler.

4. I’ll publish the song here on Hinterlander as soon as I get a chance to make a good recording of it.

5. She was a part-Dalmatian mutt and I learned that Dalmatians are a Croatian breed. Croatia is also at least partly responsible for neckties, Nikolai Tesla, and a lot of useful inventions.