The Long Way to Sarajevo
She pretended to shoot me, the woman in the front seat of the car. She turned, eyes blue and hair white, cupping her arms with an imaginary machine gun. Pfoo, she said, jerking her arms in recoil. Pfoo, pfoo. I had told her I was born in 1992, when the siege of Sarajevo began. She was bringing us to this city, the capital of Bosnia.
I shifted next to my partner, Kenzie, in the back seat, my beard dusty and clothes worn from two weeks traversing the mountains of the Balkan peninsula. We were walking a section of the Via Dinarica Trail, Europe’s newest long-distance hiking route stretching 800 miles from Slovenia to Albania. The woman’s violent mime was not surprising but articulated what bullet-chipped houses had whispered throughout forested valleys. Violence was near and recent. We communicated this with hands and gestures.
We had walked through Bosnia step-by-step at three miles an hour, the same pace at which humans spread to every corner of…
Categories: The Expeditioner