The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (30 page)

One of the women, who has seen my awkward dive out of the path of the oncoming goat, laughs knowingly. "No goats in the Nativity," she says.

With the darkness comes Živko in his yellow van. He has been out buying a
rakija
still, he says, and I am unsettled by him from the beginning; perhaps it is his portly stature and red face, or the fact that he is not nearly as old as I expected, or the thick hoarseness of his voice, which betrays his having just eaten a large meal, or the moonlit circumstances of his arrival.

He tells us about what people believe, about ghosts in a neighboring home, about the spells necessary to cast an evil spirit out of the house. He tells us about a scorned woman who would come to his bedside to throttle him in his sleep, and how he would awake to find his house empty, a cat staring at him from the open doorway. Živko's brother, an elderly man who has caned his way out of the house and is offering us grape juice, chuckles at this, and says something about how Živko's amorous attentions turn women into cats. Undeterred, Živko describes his ability to commune with the dead, a gift with which he was born but discovered only as the result of his uncanny experiences with a children's game; about the communications he has made on behalf of friends, of family, of the loved ones who tend to be far more restless than those who are already gone.

He tells us about the
vile
, Croatian mountain sirens, jealous spirit-women whose whims range from seducing men to fomenting war to playing girlish tricks on the villagers. "You come into the stable in the morning," says Živko, "and the horse's mane and tail have been braided tight, like the braid of a girl." He has seen it himself: no human hands can untangle a braid a
vila
has made, and cutting the hair will kill the horse.

Night has fallen, and the generator across the street has gone quiet. The village is empty, and there is barely enough light for me to see Živko's face. It takes me a while to realize it, but his arrival by night was carefully orchestrated to create the atmosphere for this interview. The moment this occurs to me, the goats in the stable let loose a chorus of shrill, vein-stiffening screams.

"Ungodly, aren't they?" Živko says, laughing and patting my arm as he pulls me back down to my chair, from which I have leaped without realizing it. "No goats in the Nativity, you know. They are the Devil's beast."

 

The Balkan vampire consistently arises as a product of hard times. As so many people in Serbia and Croatia grumbled at me, the reign of Josip Broz Tito was a time in which the primitivism of ancient fears had no place. For a region as war-ravaged and unstable as the former Yugoslavia, it is no wonder that the devastation and disillusion of recent decades precipitated a return to the mainstays of tradition, and especially to supernatural stories in which evil, if indefatigable, is always easily identifiable. Villages overcome their vampire plagues as they would more secular hardships: the story becomes in its own way a narrative of hope, a throwback to the surety of old beliefs, old customs—to tiny, frightening truths that stabilize a community against the world. The vampire is an agent of chaos, a self-inflicted spiritual trauma, but nevertheless manifests the Devil in a form that society can, occasionally, defeat.

If we consider the vampire a cultural necessity, an adaptable product of a society's fears and obsessions, then his role in the Western world is not so different. Here, too, the story of the vampire offers hope. Refined and beautiful—and stapled into his obligatory leather pants—he is a far cry from that dirty, bloated wanderer of graveyards, that product of a people for whom the desolation of the dead cannot surpass the cruelty of the living. He is too well traveled now to linger at crossroads, too hygienically inclined to dig his way out of coffins; having spent eternity studying art, literature, philosophy, he is no longer confounded by a crucifix; as a lover, he has worked hard to overcome his cadaverous locomotion, his ungainly south Slavic diction, and his indirect Victorian fumbling, so that the mere sight of his fangs now inspires young maidens to bare their throats of their own accord. The Americanized vampire is the ultimate fantasy for a nation in decline: the person who has been able to take it all with him when he dies, who has outlived the vagaries of civilization itself.

Having abandoned the culture that forged him, moreover, he deceives us into thinking that he has moved beyond what he always has been—a disease. Now the plague he spreads is a therapeutic fantasy in which an embarrassment of wealth and youth and hedonism is acceptable as long as its beneficiary is equipped with the right intentions. We have forgotten to be afraid because as long as he protects his loved ones, as long as he is conscious of his own dangerous nature, as long as he pits himself willingly against others who share his wrath but not his noble motivations, we are willing to believe that a weapon of evil, in the right hands, can be transformed into an instrument of good.

 

In the early fall, three months after my departure from Croatia, I receive a hesitant e-mail from Veljko. He writes with information he's restrained himself from sharing until my journey was over and I was safely home. The morning of my departure from Otrić-Seoci, he says, he stood by and helped load my belongings into the bus having already learned, from village gossips, that Živko's brother—cheerful alcoholic, generous host, mocking unbeliever—had died suddenly the previous night, a few hours after we left Živko's house. In some ways, as Veljko sees it, the suddenness of the death is a good thing, because liver failure is a slow and excruciating process. But something about it still leaves him unsettled, and he has spent months wondering whether he should tell me about this, weighing anew the consequences of explicit communication. Is it possible that our conversation with Živko loosed some infernal force that night, upset the delicate balance of something unseen, and felled Živko's poor brother as a warning to the rest of us? Veljko isn't certain. But he is, he tells me, entitled to his superstitions.

FROM
Harper's Magazine

O
N MY FIRST DAY
alone at Bird Cloud, my ranch near the Medicine Bow range in southern Wyoming, a bald eagle sat in a favorite perch tree across the river. It was December 30, 2006. The day before, two of them had sat side by side for hours, gazing down through the pale water sliding over the rocks, waiting for incautious fish. This was eagle-style fishing. Sometimes they stood in the shallows, cold water soaking their fancy leggings. Bald eagles are skillful at their trade, and I have seen them haul fish out of the freezing water onto the ice, or swoop down, sink their talons into a big trout, and rise up with the heavy fish twisting futilely. Bird Cloud's construction crew was lucky enough to see one of them dive onto a large fish, lock its talons, then struggle to get into the air with the heavy load, meanwhile riding the fish like a surfboard down the rushing river.

The house at Bird Cloud took two years to build. During that period I tried to identify the habits of the birds in the area and gradually recognized seasonal waves of avian inhabitants. Watching a large number of birds took concentration and time—there was nothing casual about it. The bald eagles were permanent residents. Some hawks stayed and some hawks went south. The great horned owls stayed. The ravens raised families every year and then went somewhere else for the summer to hunt once the young began flying. They came back in autumn to tidy up the nest and poke around, then departed again before the winter storms came. In early spring hundreds of red-winged blackbirds hit the copper-stemmed willows on the island and the cliff echoed their yodeling
aujourd 'hui! aujourd 'hui!
I put out feeders to attract the smaller birds, but days, weeks, and months went by with no visitors. These wild birds were too naive to recognize feeders as a source of food.

I was impressed that the bald eagles stuck around. The
Stokes Field Guide
stated: "Once a pair is established on a territory, they are very reluctant to move elsewhere to breed." That fit the case. Stokes also warned readers to stay at least a quarter of a mile away from the nest during the "egg-laying to early nesting" period, as alarmed parents might abandon their young. But these eagles hadn't read
Stokes
and tolerated all of us. The house itself was roughly a quarter of a mile from them and they warned us away only if we stood on the riverbank directly across from the nest or got over to the other side of the water and walked near their tree. The bald eagles have raised two chicks every year except one, when only a single chick survived. The books say one surviving chick is the norm, but these eagles have been calm and laid-back—wonderful parents with a high success rate. Whenever a stranger came to the house the bald eagles took turns flying over and scrutinizing them. Anything new—lawn chair, garden hose, shrubs—piqued their curiosity, and they flew over low and slow, examining the object. In fact, they were nosy. It was quite fair. I peered at them through binoculars, they peered back.

 

The North Platte River runs through the property, taking an east-west turn for a few miles in its course. Bird Cloud is 640 acres, a square mile of riparian shrubs and cottonwood, some wetland areas during June high water, sage flats, and a lot of weedy overgrazed pasture. On the lower portion, about 120 acres, Jack Creek, an important spawning site for trout, comes down from the Sierra Madre, thirty miles distant, and angles through the property to enter the North Platte. Jack Creek is big enough to need a bridge, and it has one, a sturdy structure made from the floor of a railroad freight car. Just below Jack Creek there is a handsome little island, a shady cottonwood bosque, in the North Platte. The bulk of the property, more than five hundred acres, lies at the top of a sandstone cliff, a sloping expanse of sedge and sage. The cliff is four hundred feet tall, the creamy cap rock a crust of ancient coral. This monolith has been tempered by thousands of years of polishing wind, blowtorch sun, flood and rattling hail, sluice of rain. After rain the cliff looks bruised, with dark splotches and vertical channels like old scars. Two miles west the cliff shrinks into ziggurat stairs of iron-colored stone. At the east end of the property the cliff shows a fault, a diagonal scar that a geologist friend says is likely related to the Rio Grande Rift, which is slowly tearing the North American continent apart.

On that first solitary day at Bird Cloud, I walked east to the Jack Creek bridge and looked up at a big empty nest high on the cliff across the river. It was clearly an eagle nest. Had the bald eagles used it before moving half a mile west to the cottonwoods? Had it belonged to another pair of eagles? The huge structure was heaped with snow. Somehow it had a fierce look, black and bristling with stick ends. At 4:30 the sun still plated the cliff with gold light. Ten minutes later it had faded to cardboard gray. I looked again at the distant big empty nest, then noticed that on the colluvium below and a little to the west of the nest there were two elk, likely refugees from a big herd that had moved through the property several weeks earlier when hunting season opened. Twenty or thirty geese flew upriver high enough to be out of gun range. Dusk thickened, and then, in the gloaming, I saw a large bird fly into a cranny directly above the elk. Roosting time for someone, but who?

 

The next day—the last day of the year—the sun cleared the Medicine Bows at 7:45. It was a beautiful, clear winter morning, the sun sparkling on the snow, no wind, two degrees below zero, and a setting moon that was almost full. As Richard Lassels, a seventeenth-century guide for the Grand Tour, said of fireflies, "Huge pretty, methought." By noon both bald eagles were in the trees above the river, watching for fish below. After half an hour they flew upriver to try their luck in another stretch of water.

In mid-morning out of the corner of my eye I saw a large bird flying upriver with steady, brisk flaps, and remembered the one I had seen the previous evening taking shelter near the big, empty nest. Was it the same bird? What was it? It was too large to be a hawk.

New Year's Day was warm and sunny, thirty-two degrees, encouraging a few foolish blades of grass to emerge from the snow. A flock of goldeneyes, diving underwater to forage, dominated a part of the river that stayed open all winter. I thought there might be a hot spring there that kept it clear of ice.

At the end of the daylight the bald eagles sat in trees three hundred yards apart, merging into the dusk but still staring into the river. Their low-light vision must be good. At 4:40 a dozen Canada geese flew upstream. An orange ribbon lay on the western horizon. I waited, binoculars in hand. Two minutes later the last sunlight licked the top of the cliff, then was gone. The sky turned purple to display a moon high and full. I did not see the large mystery bird. Perhaps it was an owl and had no problem flying after dark. But I doubted it. I had a strong suspicion that it was an eagle, the owner of the big, sinister nest.

 

For me the keeping of a list of birds sighted has neither value nor interest. I am more interested in birds of particular places, how they behave over longer periods and how they use their chosen habitats. What the birds did, ate, and raised attracted me. I suppose I could say I was drawn to their stories. But in thinking about all this the next morning I once again missed seeing the big mystery bird. In the fleeting seconds it was in view I saw that its coloring was uniformly dark. The rhythm of its wingbeats was similar to that of an eagle. Could it be a juvenile bald eagle from last year's hatch? Or was it a golden? Maybe.

Days of flailing west wind, strong enough to push its snout under the crust of the fallen snow wherever the hares or I had left footprints, strong enough to then flip up big pancakes of crust and send them cartwheeling east until they disintegrated in puffs. Eagles love strong wind. It is impossible to miss the joy they take in exhibition flying. The bald pair were out playing in the gusts, mounting higher and higher until they were specks, then splitting apart. After a few minutes of empty sky the unknown big dark bird flapped briefly into view before disappearing in a snow squall.