solid ground

retreat finishing on thursday meant that none of the volunteers from out of town returned to their dwelling/employment places—but remained for various lengths in Sarajevo. i had [more] meetings and stayed with Keziah last night before joining up today with the Fretzes (who did more skiing on thursday) and, thereby, obtaining a free ride to Hrvatska.

driving northwest from the city—in the fashion it's hard to avoid when traveling anywhere near Sarajevo (and, in fact, the entire region)—it wasn't long before we veered into another (the northwest arc of the boomerang) part of Republika Srpska. that Clarke and Heather have a hard time with cyrillic and, in fact, noted the border as one, first and foremost, pertaining to scripts was my first indication as to the smally-radical differences between life in Srbija and Hrvatska (Bosna, for obvious reasons, stands between and between).

following the Bosna/Hrvatska border crossing, the Croatian version of RS (the Krajina), however, leaves a far more bitter taste; who would not drive faster through these abandoned, ruined houses: the ones to which no one has returned—nor might they, ever? apparently, the website devoted to such matters is not exactly solving entire centuries of conflict....

driving is, itself, an odd phenomenon and one which grants me a different view than from train or bus, even if the objects outside are roughtly identical. that i'm squeezed in among carseats and many luggages, between two small and intense boys, causes another shift of focus/zoom: they, alternately, chatter and nap (both of which activities utilise the 10 cm between my shoulder and ear that would otherwise be doing something airy-theory about language). perhaps the single most perspectivally striking aspect of the 5-hour journey is that relating to the land itself— fields and crops, soil quality and elevation.

the Fretzes are farmers from Canada, working on getting one in Bunjani (near Zagreb) back to a level of self-sustainability it has lost, even before the war years. when Clarke and Heather look from the window of the auto, they see the double hopelessness of fields left empty, can determine with a glance how long it has been since the soil was turned. the potential they see pertains to water supply, and the small patches that are, mysteriously, still farmed. of course, the scene must and does "include" the [absent] people, the reasons in and because of which they have fled, the obstacles facing both those who come back and those who cannot. but the physical, germinant earth stops not to puzzle about the political gnarl and fray—at least not for long. neither can the farmers who tend it afford to do so. their conception is the necessary one and, as such, full of futility and determination: if Serbs do not return to farm the Krajina, there are others who shall willingly come—from EU countries and beyond—to pick up the project that has stalled in its own explosion. there are other wastes besides spilled blood.

when we reach the farm, it is pitch dark and the house has been empty for five days. the fire with which it is, solely, heated has long since burned to embers; the neighbor instructed to light it in preparation for our return has not done so. we gather warm eggs from chickens in the barn and sit close around the table to eat them before crawling into beds that cannot offer warmth sufficient for sleep.