You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are. We share something—last week, my Peaks of the Balkans guide was your mountain guide. He told our group about you—that you stopped every few minutes to suck on your water. He demonstrated. He said he tried to dissuade you from attempting to climb Gjeravica, Kosovo’s tallest peak, but you said it was your dream. He told us he knew what would happen—that you wouldn’t make it, but you were on a private tour, and you insisted. You told him you had climbed mountains before, that you were sure you could do it.
You were standing on the side of the windswept mountain when you realised he had been right—you would not, in fact, make it. And so you cried. Not just the small tears that escape without much notice. No, you sobbed (our guide demonstrated for us). “She was 50-something, and she went like this—over not climbing a mountain.” He buried his face in his hands and mimed weeping, his shoulders shaking. He then told us you had recently climbed Kilimanjaro. “And if she can climb that mountain,” he said, “then anyone in the world can.”
I will say something we both know: our shared guide is a lovely young man—much younger than we are, but his life has been such that he carries with him a type of wise kindness (even if he’s a gossip). This week, in a rainstorm, my group took shelter under a Beech tree. I had hiked through food poisoning, hurt knees, exhaustion, and jet lag. Our group huddled together there in our slicked raincoats, rivulets of mud at our boots, and the smell of wet earth and decomposing leaves rising like steam. Raindrops tapped a rhythm on the canopy above. Our guide said, “There is nothing in this world so wonderful as a tree. They give us shade from sun, they give us fruits, and they give us shelter from the rain.” I nearly cried then, not because I was tired and now wet, but because of the sweet truth of the goodness of trees.
And then on another day, our guide saved a dragonfly from drowning in a nearby pond—its blue-green wings, gauzy and soaked—and he placed it among the bright pink fireweed, blowing on it gently, willing it back to life. And later in the week, we sat eating fresh sheep’s yoghurt, wild blueberries, and locally-made honey in an open-air café built from spindly Beech branches that held up a roof of dry, brown leaves. Chickens scratched on the ground beneath us. We asked our guide about the call to prayer, what they were singing. He said they are saying, “Come pray; there is only one God. And God is good.” Then he told us about the special song for grief, and how it comes at dawn and dusk after a beloved village member has died. And how it comes in the grey mist of morning when those left on the side of the living are pulled from dreams, and the shadowy curtain between the dead and the living is a diaphanous, winged thing. In these moments, I hid my tearing eyes, not wanting to appear as I am—another silly middle-aged woman, someone who has not suffered a life under dictatorship and war.
Dear American woman, I’m guessing that when you reached the memorial to those who had been shot at the Kosovo-Montenegro border, our guide told you his family’s story, as he did for us. That his village in Kosovo was invaded by Serbia when he was four months old. “They raped the women and killed people. Children, old people. I will not tell you how, because that is too much. It isn’t just the killing but in how. Then they took everything they wanted from our homes and set fire to the village. We walked away through the snow as our houses burned.” Our guide’s grandfather was shot, and his father was supposed to be killed, but by some miracle, he survived. His mother fled, carrying her three young children, including our four-month-old guide. They walked through January snows in the mountains for two days to reach the Montenegro border. “My story,” he said, “has a happy ending. It was a miracle. We were the lucky ones”
So dear American woman, I know why you cried, and that it had little to do with not making it to the top of that mountain. You were raw from jetlag and newness, and maybe your family—a husband and two sons—were frustrated with you for hiking slowly. And maybe you were annoyed by your husband’s incessant questions (we heard about those, too). Perhaps like me, you had recently undergone knee surgery, and your leg buckled beneath you when you were tired. Maybe you are afraid of heights, as I am, and coming down the steep, exposed rocky passes meant you were travelling even more slowly, and everyone stood waiting for you. Or maybe your stomach was off despite your attempts to filter the water, sending you behind trees to dig a trench and unleash the contents of your bowels into the earth. And when you did this, the guide reprimanded you for not telling him beforehand, as keeping the group together in grizzly country was always on his mind.
Or maybe you realised that at 50-something, yours is a body in decline, and this is as good as it’s ever going to get. Like me, you can no longer do all the things you once could, and a 20-something mountain guide knows your limits better than you do. And so that mountain wasn’t just a mountain—it represented all the things you think you can still do but can’t. But more likely even than that, our shared guide told you his story along with some genuine kindness from his sweet, young heart. And it was this offering of kindness that did you in—the sheltering tree, the dragonfly, the call of prayer, the song of death at dawn.
