We Were Going to Sarajevo Again

Somebody was in town to play music and we needed to be there.  Four of us from Gornji Vakuf with no car to get there.  We would split up much easier to hitch hike and we would go different ways.  Logic was in the water in Bosnia not the words.  Through Kojnic or Turbe didn't really matter we were going around.  About three hours each way from the cross roads of route Diamond.  Most of the ways on the Balkans were like this.  In Mostar we were driving for the coast and the signs said Sarajevo was the other way, but it didn't understand it was also the other way around with this beautiful drive up the coast.  Was always better driving.  I liked to tell people how  I watched individual trees grow.  Takes longer to get a ride for four and we would be on different roads different opportunities.

We got our first ride to Dornji Vakuf and we walked across to the other side to find the next.  In the middle there is this river which usually is crossed by one bridge but today was joined by another temporary one.  Ifor they were called then were fixing the bridge.  The army took this town back the last months of the war.  Made our journey a bit shorter opening the road to Turbe as well.  It isn't strange newly recaptured territory because it is your people.  Nobody is from there recently so it has this unique feel that surprises you and feels completely comfortable.  He asked me if I knew why they put another bridge.  This moment I never forget.  He said so our people wont throw trash in the river.  It would just go on the next bridge.  It was a trip.

Thing is not that long ago there was no garbage in Bosnia.  There were three of us traveling this way I think and three traveling the other but I always remember him and me alone on that bridge.  Math was usually fuzzy there.  The last ride into the city was not long but odd.  It was a car from Serbia which I had never seen with an old license plate I only saw in movies.  The communist one which they didn't change till I later lived in Serbia.  Some times in life you see physical things from your future.  No one ever calls it time travel but we have a built in machine for it.

I don't remember a word he said.  I spoke ok then.  Like those Americans who couldn't see the ships when they first arrived.  Just didn't cognitively relate that it was possible this experience.  The car was carpeted.  And there were three of us in the car with this guy going to Sarajevo.  The thing is I'm not sure right now.  I felt safe because I wasn't alone; no one was.  We walked the early morning eating the first bread sticks.  We got home somehow in a day or two.