Europe: May 2010 Archives

Lastovo: isolated Adriatic island of jagged hills clad in holm oak and aleppo pine, where the sea laps sunbleached stones with tongue translucent blue. 

Settled by Illyrians and later controlled by Rome, over the centuries it was destroyed by Venice for harboring pirates, joined the Dubrovnik Republic, and passed through the hands of Napoleonic France, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, to finally become a part of independent Croatia. 

Unlike other island settlements, Lastovo Town faces inland. It's stone buildings cling to a natural amphitheater whose basin is fertile with olives and vines. Earlier settlements consolidated on this more defensible site when the people abandoned piracy and turned inward to a life of agricultural self-sufficiency. That same independent spirit is still evident in Lastovo islanders today.

It's a quiet place of lazy heat haze days sipping cappuccino and soaking up village life. Outside a café, an old man in a patched jacket shouts insults at passing youngsters: "Cut your hair Stjepan! You look like a girl!" The other old men chuckle and cough. Stjepan's defense is to talk back in a normal voice as he continues to walk, resisting the urge to look back over his shoulder.

On Lastovo's south side, rocky beaches and barren hills abound with hidden coves - the perfect place for a private swim. I spend my island afternoons plunged in the briny deep, or in sun-soaked sophistry on shore. At sundown, hitchhike back across to my room in Lučica - a narrow inlet of half-abandoned 15th Century stone houses, where we wash down seafood dinners with house wine. And it really is house wine - each house makes their own.

I'm alone in my compartment as the train leaves Slovenia and enters the broad rolling fields of Hungary. The dark blue seat upholstery smells of dust, and the nautical gloss of the walls have faded to matte.

I see "Magyar" go past on a rusted sign, and I'm reminded of a stamp collecting album someone gave me as a child. It was filled with names like "GDR" and "Magyar Republic", names I couldn't find on a map. Names that sounded so strange. Now here it is outside my window. Did I ever imagine I would see such places? Or did I ever doubt that I wouldn't?

Deeper into Hungary, the train to Budapest keeps changing directions. One minute we're traveling forward, and half an hour later we're going backwards. An hour later it will change again. It feels as though we're tacking like a sailboat into the wind, approaching our destination obliquely. Or perhaps they just keep forgetting things and have to go back?

Hungary is a country where the people look just like the etchings on their money. I see that crazy looking guy from the 1000 forint note walk past my compartment again and again. I slip a few notes from my wallet to compare. He's dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket, but otherwise the same.  

There's something about a train that never fails to fuel my writing. I don't know if it's the way a train snakes across vast open land, the metrical clack of the wheels or the grinding of the steel. It's all right there before me in a gently rocking panorama, and all I have to do is take it all in.

The land as it unrolls like a film matches my thoughts, and I roll back through them, peeling away years to connect events into patterns and condense thoughts into notebook words.

I watch the rain bead on the glass and roll down the pale reflection of my face. As I stare through this transparent counterfeit of myself, I realize that I've always lived my life in compartments, with walls of various types and thicknesses, a variety of opacities and stained-glass stains. It began as an antidote to the fatigue that comes with always being the odd one out. But now I contain so many compartments it's become difficult to recognize my core. Which one is truest? Are any of them real? 

I uncovered that core once in Central America, and I managed to free it for a brief period of time. But now it feels like I'm living two types of life: the ideal sort of world that I would like to experience, the one I express in my writing. And the quieter, lonelier life I actually lead in between. 

I begin to wonder if, the more I write and the better I get, if I'm putting the best of myself into my writing, and if what's left over is what's left for my day to day life?

These are the kinds of things I like to think about on trains.