Roadtrips…

My week and a half in Slovenia and then Munich was freedom, a great pause in the Great Film Project and a sweet and sturdy wedge filled with friends, plus a nice continuation of the life I had left exactly a year ago. It’s best said with picture accompaniment.

The autobahn was not as lovingly fast as usual, Germany rolling slowly by in raining grey from top to bottom, until we crossed over into Austria where the road signs turned a lighter blue and we entered the mountains. We met long tunnels south of Salzburg and all the way through the country, a highway contained in tunnels burrowed into the feet of tall hills, one after the other each no shorter than half a kilometer. The end of one left a half minute of daylight before the next hill towered above you, with fog falling from the top down its sides and through tall thick trees and lush untouched greenery, evaporating as the tunnel’s mouth opened and the VW glided safely through the mountain’s side and beneath its belly for another few minutes. This went on for a few hours and until we came across the signs for Graz, a city I thought may be in Slovenia, but it would be another few hours before we pulled up to a muddy wet river and into a gully that was the Slovenian border. No strip search, but definitely a passport check and our one word, “Jeruzalem” before we dipped into first gear, second and third gear, up over a bridge and into the former Communist territory previously called Yugoslavia.

The signs showed towns whose names we couldn’t help but butcher and we laughed at our naïve ignorance in the confines of our German auto, four Americans on their first drive into the heart of Eastern Slovenia, listening to Cher and U2 (aka, the BonoRail) on the radio. We won’t talk about starting in the wrong direction, because we never were lost. We will talk about finding ourselves creeping up a road pointed straight for our destination, then turning off the road at the sign we gloriously and triumphantly discovered pointed us to our own promised land (Jeruzalem), and then driving up a slow road arched by tall trees straight out of Marin county California. We crested the hill, emerged from the trees and saw a great sprawling valley before us stretched to the horizon miles around, a valley literally filled with vineyards terracing in all directions from the bushy green trees at the valley base and up uneven rolling hills to the top, meeting our road and the few old houses built next to it. This one road dove and rose up every hill we could see, one ancient path now paved with a few tributaries connecting everyone, the view on both sides showed only more vineyards, more hills, houses. Infinite flowers, natural and not pristine, everywhere, green lushness in every direction.
Where on earth did this come from? In moments we rose up a hill and drove past the church where Tim and Margaret would be married, and past the place we would eat that night. We came to one of the hotels and finally up and over around and down we arrived - via a hairpin turn that almost sent us tumbling (happily?) into another vineyard - at our hotel, settled also at the crest of a hill. All of this would be our environment and our home for five days, with all our old friends from Munich coming by this same road to this same rolling valley. And as we pulled up, Margaret’s mom came out with a big smile to welcome us to her country, and there wasn’t a sound outside the car except familiar voices laughing and the scrap of gravel beneath feet.

Dinner was a long table with many plates filled with bacon, pork, sausage, lard, bacon fat, veggies with spicy peppers, local mild onions and pickled artichokes, and bread, all home-made, home-grown, or home-cured. The wine in unlabeled bottles came from the kitchen in waves, homemade from the vines outside the window (“This wine comes from over there”) accompanied by natural sparkling water that came with its own carbonation from the ground an hour away, at a spring that Margaret’s dad wanted to take us to, badly. As long as you kept eating, you could keep drinking and mixing your sweet Muscat with the sparkling spring water. Eating is essential in Slovenia, because drinking is essential in Slovenia. Therefore, the food tends to be the kind that sticks to you, so you can unstick it again, with something nice like good wine. Highly scientific, highly civilized.

The house itself was a maze of oldness, with old wood lining every angle and crevice, an old bar in a nook and the opposite staircase that turned round behind the old stove which they still use to bake their bread. The other side of the stove was ceramic and heated the room behind it where we were told stories of how children would sit on it as the bread was kept warm below. The staircase rose higher into levels of small eating areas, all contained under an old wood roof with hatch windows that showed us the starry night and the quiet valley of wine dark and silent. A room off the highest level was a bedroom renovated but with a corner that still preserved its centuries old natural ground, with a natural dirt mound for a bed, and a sparrow that had gotten in through the window and was content to rest on the dirt. I refused to look for the bathroom and chose the edge of the vineyard, standing with a very principal character at my former job, acquiring a mound of teenie bugs on my back that I returned to the group with.  They appreciated the relieving story but killed the bugs.

Back down in the dining room, the cook / owner kept bringing more wine and the people kept getting louder and the music changed from the traditional to the inane to the radio to German drinking songs to nothing. Conversation. The table went from pristine and orderly to a slew of empty bottles and mounds of meat and bread. And digital cameras. Around it sat friends from Denmark and England, New Zealand and Ireland, the US and Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Slovenia, all connected not only by this marriage but from past encounters and old friendships. It was a night that made even the most subtle connections stronger just by our seats around this common table, in this small old room in this house which had stood for centuries on a hill above terraces of vineyards with a moon hidden behind clouds above. I couldn’t help but keep saying, “How cool is this?” and “Life is so f***ing good…”, or “I’m going to go pee again… no outside… I’m serious, c’mon..”

About one hundred hours later we realized that some very important people were not really wanting to drink or eat anymore, nor could they, so they were whisked away the 2 kilometers up and down hills in the dark to the three hotels, headlights working overtime in the pitch darkness to catch the details of slowly passing crops and hedges where animals might lurk, illuminating the road just a little late around the hairpin turns, all the way home. Safe.