Chapter 3: Croatia — Water!

A return to the elemental things that make life so sweet.

The third installment in a serialized memoir of my year-long romp around the globe as a reluctant tourist in search of a life less ordinary. Catch up with Chapter 1, and Chapter 2. Check back weekly for the next installment.

Maybe I should call this memoir “Tired feet. And another mile to go.” Or “hell is other people’s tchotchskes.”

Travel in this nomadic mode — living a life in other’s apartments, neither on vacation nor settled — is wearying. Three months now of always navigating, phone in hand, never quite certain of your way, back-tracking as a way of life. Never knowing what is good in a place — which restaurants are good, which grocery stores are the place to shop, where to buy clothes, get a haircut. The persistent need for snap decisions — do we go left? Should we eat here? Is the train on Track A or Z? Never a cheese grater or corkscrew of any worth, no top sheets, questionable gas stoves, and how is there a clothes dryer within a washing machine?

Worse, always feeling like an outsider, not knowing the mini-customs of life anchored in a place — In restaurants, do we just sit down or order at the bar first and then sit? Do you stamp your ticket before or after getting on the train? Is this park safe?

And always, always killing time waiting for planes, trains, boats, Ubers.

Ok, as I write this on a plane to Dubrovnik, our launching pad for the Adriatic Coast, the flight attendant delivers a Mimosa, compliments of Mike and Todd, four rows back. So travel isn’t that hard.

And Croatia, beautiful la dolce vita Croatia, is beckoning.

Scene: Mike in a barber’s chair in Zadar, Croatia, making small talk. “Your country is amazing, so beautiful and relaxing. You really have it made.”

Barber, nodding: “I know.”

That’s the Croatian coast.

I for one was skeptical when this spot was first broached. I’m old enough to remember Tito, so there’s that. And, well, it’s “eastern” Europe — I was bracing for a lot of black bread and sausage.

But, turns out, they have a good thing going here. Croatia would turn out to have the umami of place — a mysterious combination of disparate elements that make it essential for the soul.

But before the four of us can actually get to la dolce vita, I must relent and stop in the pharmacists. I have a knot on my arm the size of a small egg, which I am declaring is a bug bite. In my usual approach toward doctors, I had hoped it would just go away. But after a week of it only getting bigger, I began to wonder if in six months someone would read my diary after I’ve died and say, aha.

Croatia would turn out to have the umami of place — a mysterious combination of disparate elements that make it essential for the soul.

Alas, the pharmacist seems nonplussed. She gives me an antihistamine but does raise an eyebrow when I say it has been with me for three days. It is really ten days, but I always shave off the truth for doctors. “How much do I drink? a doctor asks at my annual physical. “Oh, a glass of wine with dinner a night.” I had that down so convincingly that after four years of it, my doctor told me he knew I was telling the truth because my story never changed from year to year. Yep, you’re working with a pro here.

“Maybe visit the doctor if it doesn’t go away soon,” she advises. “One week is too much. Go if it doesn’t go away by then.”

“Sure thing,” I nod.

My mother would roll over in her grave if I went to a doctor for a bug bite. I grew up in a home in which doctors were for really, really sick people, and stitches. Our hometown doctor was a military medic in Vietnam. He didn’t believe in wasting Novocain, and was a wee bit of a sadist, so our family went off doctors. We never went to the doctor because of the flu, or a cold, or anything resembling a run-of-the-mill symptom like a broken toe or the mumps. Instead, Mom had a bevy of home remedies, many of which included Witch Hazel or tea bags, but none of which ever truly worked.

I take the prescription and nod happily because I’m not dying, just a European bug with a big bite, and head to the ferry that boasts the charm of an EasyJet airplane. Rows and rows of seating, luggage piled high at the exit doors.

I now know why so many always die on ferry sinkings

The four of us find a spot in a booth alongside the engines and strategically near the bathroom lest my mal de mer makes an appearance. Just as the engines are beginning to bellow, into our booth slides a lanky blue-eyed blonde Minnesotan. Kelly, she says by way of introduction, “mind if we squeeze in here. Seems like this is the last seat.”

Her husband took the foreign service exam on a midlife crisis fluke and Kelly encouraged him, on the assumption he’d fail. The secret of wives everywhere.

“Of course,” we say, scrunching in a bit more. Kelly is in her early fifties, gnarly hands and short fingernails, ample laugh lines, and silver jewelry set off against her deep tan. She carries herself with that graceful self-possession of the rich, likely guffaws without inhibition.

And she has a great backstory to boot. Her husband, we learn, is in the foreign service, stationed now in Paris. In other words, a spy.

Her husband took the foreign service exam on a midlife crisis fluke and Kelly encouraged him, on the assumption he’d fail. The secret of wives everywhere. But lo and behold, he passed, so they uprooted their lawyer lives from the Bay Area and decamped for the foreign service. His first posting was without her, a hardship post in Afghanistan, but after that: Paris.

Green. Envy.

There was a time in my life when I was working as an editor for the Appraisal Institute in Chicago — wait it gets more exciting, as an editor of a journal at the Appraisal Institute — when I fantasized about the foreign service. I wonder why.

Mainly because my colleague talked about it incessantly. Her and her new boyfriend were threatening to take the test and defy her matronly, bougie parents. I had never heard of it before. I thought it was something to do with old French men in WWI uniforms. But then I looked it up — in a reference book no less. And I was momentarily hooked.

But like all things, those dreams are a blink and gone, along with the dream of being a homicide detective or ship captain. My colleague and her boyfriend would never take the test and instead plod a well trod path. The last time I saw her she was complaining about the smoke hanging thick in my favorite bar.

Her parting advice: “If a Russian ever approaches you just wanting to talk, don’t do it. Europe is filthy with spies.”

But here, here was someone who had done the dream. Not to mention being a spy. What must that be like to pass through customs with a black “dip” passport — (lingo!). What jealousies that can evoke.

Her parting advice: “If a Russian ever approaches you just wanting to talk, don’t do it. Europe is filthy with spies,” she says, laughing.

As the ferry pulls up to the dock in Split, we say our goodbyes and race to the bus station — yes bus, the dreaded worded — for our three-hour trip to our next “home.”

Rex and I have a long-running losing streak with buses. Mine predates our coupledom when my eighth grade class took the bus to Minneapolis, three hours away, to see a musical. Us girls all went shopping for our first pair of high heels for that trip, it was that big of a deal. Mine were a wooden clog-like platform shoe while everyone else got traditional pumps. First clue.

Rex and I have a long-running losing streak with buses.

But it was on the bus ride home that marked the occasion for me. The excitement of the trip must have disrupted my typical ear-stomach disconnection on the way to Minneapolis because all was well (or my mom slipped Dramamine in my Shredded Wheat). But the post-dinner-theater let-down left me vulnerable on the ride home.

We were on one of those big plush tour buses that glide like a mattress on wheels, deadly for the motion sick among us. I could feel the wooziness coming on as I tried to keep a conversation going with my best friend, Netty. But to no avail. My stomach lurched and flipped.

So I did what any self-preserving preteen would do in the moment: I threw up in my mouth and swallowed.

That was my inaugural bus ride and I can’t say things improved from there.

Twenty-odd years later, Rex and I found ourselves in Bangkok for our Christmas-Eve anniversary without a planned train ticket south to Phuket. All trains were booked, our driver, Sam, told us with a sad shake of the head. Sam had adopted us the moment we stepped out of the hotel on our first morning in the city. He’d ushered us to his souped up 1973 Chevy and claimed his allegiance to us for the week. He adored Americans, he said, having served with them in Vietnam as a translator.

On our last day there, he was to secure us train tickets on an overnighter in first class (we were splurging as it was our sixth anniversary). But he came back with the bad news. “But,” he said, brightening, “I have found a solution. A VIP bus,” he said.

“Very good,” he assured us.

Relieved at a solution, we agreed. In hindsight I suspect that Sam got a cut from bus tickets but not train tickets. But who cared, it was VIP. What’s not to like?

Our rest stop at 2 a.m. included a bathroom I’d rather banish from memory.

What’s not to like? Ten hours of freezing cold air, a paper thin blanket, and a fat German woman in the seat ahead of us with its broken recliner. She banged into Rex’s knees the entire way. Our rest stop at 2 a.m. included a bathroom I’d rather banish from memory. A pitch-dark squatter outdoors, with metal footprints like those on shoeshine boxes of yore pointing out the position for the best angle. A slithering something over my bare flip-flopped foot in midstream. A gecko, please god make it be a gecko. No toilet paper of course. Air dry only. Shudder.

And as I later grabbed a bag of dates from a pile on a wooden shelf, big tropical roaches ran across my hand.

Remembering my Minneapolis trip, we bolted after a few more stops and hired a driver from a small shop with a skinned goat hanging from a hook.

Our next bus adventure was in Morocco, in the Atlas mountains, on our way to Ourzazate and our trek into the Sahara. We had the back seat — a hard wooden bench where we were increasingly squeezed tighter with each passenger arriving. By the third stop, the bus was packed with chickens, people, and suffocating desert air. We inched along, stopping at roadblocks seemingly every ten minutes, where the driver would consult with the armed men in army fatigues and offer a bottle of water, the currency of the desert. Remembering my Minneapolis trip, we bolted after a few more stops and hired a driver from a small shop with a skinned goat hanging from a hook, flies swarming its pink body.

For our return trip, we flew.

Unfortunately for us, Mike was not tuned in to our bus aversion and had booked us on this three-hour wonder.

I’m hoping against hope this ride is the one to break my losing streak.

While we wait for our coach to arrive meanwhile, the four of us are sweating in the 90 degree swelter in a Soviet bus station in Split. Yes, it is just as you imagine a bus station in a former communist country is like, including a locked turnstile to the bathroom and the Kafka-esque search for a person who bestows the token. One line to exchange money for exact change, whose attendant has stepped out. Then another line for the token, whose attendant has stepped out. Three bank-teller windows later, I have token in hand. But no toilet seat or toilet paper. And no running water in the sink. Or soap. Ick.

All this only took 40 minutes. Rex has ordered me a toasted cheese sandwich and a warm Coke Zero. Given the lack of soap in the bathroom, I pass.

The bus arrives. Hurray. We pile on, and I assume the lack of air conditioning is because the bus has not been powered up for very long.

The stories we tell ourselves.

Three hours, 90 degrees, and no AC. The bus burps its way along a winding two-lane route along the sea, stopping regularly for random people along the roadside. Mike is trying not to panic as the bus fills and the walls close in. Todd is checking on Mitzi, who is panting loudly. I wish I could pant.

Eventually, there are no more seats and people stand in the aisles. The heat closes in like being trapped in the back window of a sinking car.

My google map is mocking me. It seems to be getting longer every time I check. 3:20 minutes is the estimated time. 3:50 minutes. 4:10. We are stopped in traffic now.

I am about to explode. Why are we stopped? Why are we not MOVING? WHY IS THERE NO SCHEDULE, NO ANNOUNCEMENTS, NO MAPS? I have to KNOW when we will arrive.

I take a breath and focus on the scenery. The seat material feels like sitting on a Scrubbie, burnishing a spot on my ass. A five-minute break in a shithole bus station standing amid the smokers desperately dragging on their ciggies is no break at all.

The seat material feels like sitting on a Scrubbie, burnishing a spot on my butt.

Back on, it’s even hotter, if that’s possible.

Finally. Four hours and counting the endless stretch gives way to what appears to be a muscular city. We are entering Zadar. As we pass the Golden Arches, the four of us look at each other, each thinking the exact same thing. There would be only one thing better right at this moment than a Mickey D’s burger and fries and that would be an iced cold beer and a Mickey D’s burger.

The bus deposits us in a low-slung depot that could be in New York City circa 1978. But it’s not the bus. In that there is enormous joy.

Like all landing days, we find a cab driver to take us to our new home. Mike and Todd are a few miles from us in a Soviet panel-house highrise and we’re in a relatively modern high-rise that didn’t have any hookers out front, so we consider it a success. Our host is late but we cool our heels at a outdoor bar downstairs with thumping Euro-pop throom-throoming. Two men in black leather jackets from the 1980s smoke and sip espressos. Again, though, not the bus.

Jelena, our host, arrives apologizing profusely and leads us to the elevators. The lobby has an air of desolation. Dim lights, pink walls, a lone elevator with a buzzing fluorescent light. We brace ourselves.

We’re in a relatively modern high-rise that didn’t have any hookers out front, so we consider it a success.

But Jelena is a doll, and her place is bright, fresh, modern, and it has a balcony. I babble on in relief and can’t wait for her to leave so I can shower and collapse. She walks us through the operations: We’ve become mini-engineers by now, figuring out appliances that beep and burp with warnings, buttons that do the opposite of what you expect, and air conditioners without venting, so we ask few questions.

And bless her, she has real towels, plenty of toilet paper, olive oil, salt and pepper, and she left us a bottle of wine and premade dinner. I adore her.

Bonus: she has a plug-in mosquito repeller. I do not need another bug bite.

We crash on the (comfortable!) non-Futon, non-lumpy couch and slug back the wine to help me banish the return bus ticket from my mind.

The next morning, far below in the parking lot outside the apartment building a group of rag-tag kids are squealing. The kids have no toys that are not repurposed from something once functional — an inner tube, a plank on buckets, an assortment of bikes far too large for their small frames. But no matter. The screaming rises to a crescendo, the result of a game with rules that only ten-year-olds could come up with. It appears from my perch that a boy in a yellow t-shirt is riding his bike past two others while the two throw something at him. The goal, it seems, is to avoid being hit. They stop often to argue about the rules.

This somehow captures the essence of Zadar — making new rules to a new game, past meet future in a jumble of optimism and history’s scars. Zadar is not posh. It is not polished. The people on the street are the type who you’d see gathered in church basements for AA meetings — world-weary, but happy to be alive.

A generation-shaping war will do that to you.

In cafes, the ubiquitous Costco white plastic chairs substitute for Paris’s cane chairs, and men in Nike shower shoes smoke cigarettes and drink espressos under vintage Coke signs. Shops offer utilitarian signs (“Copy Shop,” “Eyeglasses”) — no whimsy of a salon named “Curl up and Dye” here. In the evenings, the fluorescent lights from pigeon-hole shops selling magazines and cigarettes cast a glow right out of John le Carre novels.

The history of the communists and war is shunned like an embarrassing uncle at a party. Ominous sock-eyed buildings in a scale far too large for human interaction loom in the shadows of scrubby pines, their unpainted stucco walls chipped and pockmarked with shrapnel. A gloomy mansion where, in my imagination at least, a high-ranking bureaucrat once lived with his tawny haired children, is a study in Grey Gardens neglect. A down-at-the-heels park of sun-scorched scratchy grass and a desultory stream thick with summer algae gets no takers — a learned resignation lingers.

The history of the communists and war is shunned like an embarrassing uncle at a party.

Graffiti below a row of dented air conditioners sticking out like bared teeth on a wall says “We’re Undone” — the double meaning left for the viewer to decide. I decide it means stay tuned, more to come.

That’s the “real” side of Zadar. On the other side of a shimmering port across a gleaming bridge is the Old Town. The limestone under foot is polished to a high sheen on the streets of the old quarter. Lace shops and postcards, candy stores and gelato beckon tourists in search of a memory.

The four of us head to our new-favorite terrace for Valentino, I mean for a happy hour cocktail. Gorgeous Valentino with the blue, blue eyes. Mike, Todd, and I surreptitiously follow his every move as he floats from table to table delivering cocktails or stands at attention, laughing with his fellow waiters, waiting for the raised hand or slight nod of the head of a patron. We watch as he retracts the awning with the setting sun to reveal the pale yellow stone Roman arches of the building. “Better?” he asks solicitously. “Oh yes,” we gush. Swifts dart in the night-blue sky overhead from bell towers.

Into this scene strolls an American woman with her family in tow. She imperiously waves away the maître de as she reads the menu — she will not be rooked into eating at any tourist traps. Her young son and daughter and husband wait behind her, obediently. Mom, in a flowing dress no doubt bought for the occasion, likes what she sees and agrees to be seated. She surveys the glamorous crowd with a tense smile. The family chats amiably in that hyper-aware way that descends on people not used to posh places. Mom beams. Valentino springs into action. She orders a G&T, a civilized drink.

He nods. “Yes madame.”

All is well.

But then the drink arrives. She takes one sip and practically explodes. “This is all wrong!”.

But then the drink arrives. She takes one sip and practically explodes. “This is all wrong!”

“But madame, you ordered a gin and tonic, no?” Valentino is worried, solicitous.

“Not like this,” she cries, thrusting it back at him, as her startled husband and children exchange looks. And with that, her pre-dinner drinks on a stone terrace under Roman arches and a descending sun is ruined.

This is the pressure-cooker called the American vacation combined with the recognizable need to live life as in a magazine. In a mere two weeks we must learn to relax, enjoy a different place, and see absolutely everything so when we return to our cubicle and our smug coworker asks, “Did you see the Mona Lisa?” we will say “yes, of course.” We race around to every conceivable sight, crowding in with the hordes to see a painting someone has deemed the best example of modernism, classical Renaissance, or Dutch Masters, take your pick.

Our work of self-improvement never ends, not even on vacation. We take the funicular, we walk the plazas, we file into another church just like the other church. The threat of a bad vacation haunts us into overplanning. We read the brochures, triangulate our apps of Trip Advisor and Yelp and Oyster, whose insidious tagline is “because you can’t return a bad holiday.” We follow our GPS like a puppy on a leash. We snap, snap, snap the photos so we can post fabulous selves to Instagram and Facebook.

Our work of self-improvement never ends, not even on vacation. We take the funicular, we walk the plazas, we file into another church just like the other church.

And then the pressure of it all snaps back in our face like a rubber-band. Witness said G&T.

Despite (because of?) all the preparation. It’s like being told by the dentist that you have four cavities despite flossing daily. Perhaps Zadar was not all that she had seen online. Maybe the hotel room smelled musty despite the pictures. Maybe a waiter was rude at breakfast. Maybe the hordes with their narcissticks had invaded with their primping selfies. Or the museumgoers with e-guides had swarmed her like gnats in the outfield. Maybe she was hot and sweaty. Despite all her planning, all her accommodating others’ wishes and needs, she had been overwhelmed by the travel and underwhelmed by the place. Or more likely, because of all her planning. And it all coalesced in this simple drink.

Her dream day was shot.

I wanted to go over to her, put my hand around her shoulder, and tell her to ditch everything and go to the swimming coves, sit on hard rocks, and when you’re really just too hot, plunge into the Adriatic and let the cool water refresh your spirit. You will remember that dive from a rock more than any church or any fortress or any t-shirt you buy.

Adopt the phrase, “so sue me,” as in “No I didn’t see the Mona Lisa, so sue me.” And remember: The G&T might not be just as you have it at home, but at least you’re not at home making it yourself.

Instead I flagged down Valentino and ordered another Lillet spritz because there is nothing worse than a sanctimonious travel advisor.

We bid adieu to Valentino and head to dinner at a small restaurant in the shadows of a squat limestone church, standing vigil for centuries. We eat grilled octopus salads and squid ink risotto and drink a couple bottles of Procip. I feel it seeping in. That word I despise: contentment. But there it is.

The breeze is cool and people are out in droves, families, friends, eating, laughing — except one table of ten near us who say nary a word to one another the entire meal, fully concentrating on their dishes or lost in their own thoughts.

Or maybe they deeply hate each other.

The four of us are in expansive moods and talk about our childhood summers — the joy of wandering everywhere and nowhere with friends, being idle, no cares. It is one of those sense-memories that are so easy to pull up: lazy days watching game shows with a fan blowing, later outside, shucking corn for dinner or riding bikes around town. More than the events or things we did, it is a memory of the freedom — bare feet, shorts, bikes, stealing apples from trees, bachelor buttons in the garden, mowed lawns in shade, soft-serve ice cream, hot tar underfoot, swimming.

This place, Zadar, stokes those memories.

A week passes of swimming in the early morning off a pier followed by bobbing while eavesdropping on a group of regulars who intrigue me. The Adriatic as coffee clatch. Now that I could get used to. This same group is here every day — middle-aged, stout, the women each take a few languid back strokes before joining the clatch to discuss the latest neighborhood news. What a life, I think as the sun sparkles off the water warms. Could I live here? Perhaps. Just perhaps.

Since I can’t understand a word of Croatian, I join Rex on a patio for an espresso. We talk about a lot of nothing and then walk back to our apartment through the weedy park and shrapnel-pocked abandoned buildings.

We had passed by the kiosk renting motor boats four times but today we decide to take them up on their to rent a boat and skipper for a day’s outing. We opt for the “just us” version as I flunked Kindergarten “sharing” lessons. Gloriously, given my love of water but penchant for puking, a small speed boat never makes me sick. The speed and thumping slap of the bow over waves keeps my ear unconfused about its place in the universe. That and the ability to dive off the boat when we anchor.

The next morning we meet at the rendezvous spot on time. And alone. No captain, no salesman, no one. We both begin to wonder, keeping it to ourselves of course, if we’ve been had. But no, thirty minutes later, a strapping young kid in his early twenties with a serious case of bed-head shows up. We manage awkward greetings, feeling like rich Americans burning through money on holiday. He extends his hand to me as he would a doddering matron on board, probably coached at the beginning of the season on how to treat these hothouse customers.

We race past the towering face of granite cliffs, sheared off like a block of parmesan cheese.

“Where you want to go?” he asks in his best English. This doesn’t exactly surprise me. The young men manning the booth last night were already drinking cold brews and having a good time by the time we arrived so writing down my aversion to tourist spots wasn’t going to happen. Summer jobs. Plus, things run loosely around here. But I have no idea where I want to go. He runs down the obligatory tourist spots — a blue cave, a pretty island.

No, I say, take us somewhere else. We just want to swim and see the coast.

“Ok,” he says, “we’ll just go. Like free, right?”

“Exactly,” I say.

We race past the towering face of granite cliffs, sheared off like a block of parmesan cheese. From high above on the cliffs we must look like an airplane’s sky-trail. The boat bangs hard through the swells as we both grip our seat edges. Salt spray, speed, glinting water, the rise and smacking fall over waves, like a summer carnival ride.

I cannot contain my childlike glee.

We pull into a cove, and our skipper, Milos — we’ve learned his name — cuts the engine and sprawls prone on the boat’s bow to drop anchor, his orange Calvin Klein briefs peeking out from his beltless shorts and his big spongy feet dangling over edge of the small bow.

“Ok,” Milos says, as if I’m supposed to know what that means. “Swim,” he gestures to the water. That I can do. But like the coddled and protected American I am, I wait for some kind of safety demonstration and life-jacket protocol.

“You don’t like to swim?” he says, puzzled.

“Oh, yes, love it,” I say, “but are there life jackets or anything? Where do I dive from? Is it deep enough? Are there sharks?”

He smiles, puzzled. “You just go,” he says, pointing to the back or the front. “I’ll dig up some life vests if you like.”

“Nah,” I say, “we’ll manage.” This is like riding in the back of my dad’s pick-up bed on the way to the quarry when I was ten. Illicit freedom.

I climb up to the bow, which is bobbing like a Coke can in heavy surf, nearly losing my balance as I stand upright.

With no time to think or I will indeed tumble off the edge, I just dive. I haven’t dived into water for years. I was a decent diver in our family, though my mother was the pro. She’d have me on the diving board in front of the broomstick she was holding at my mid-thighs and make me go up and over it. We all learned that way.

And now I’m in the air — it’s an interminable span before I hit the cool water. The fresh cold plunge is elemental. Enveloped in silence, instantly cooled, holding my breath. The sea grass far below me undulating in a suspended, silent sway. A school of tiny fish dart en masse away from my sudden presence. I surface to a smooth sea, and flip onto my back, feeling small and insignificant, put in my place out of place in this water world.

The fresh cold plunge is elemental.

Toward the shore, hugging the cliff’s edge is a small monastery. White limestone blocks, perfect squares making perfect corners, windows with green shutters. Rex joins me in the water and we paddle in toward the beach. We sun ourselves like sea lions on a large rock a few yards out. A 70-year-old man with goggles, his skin sagging like the King of the Elephants in Babar, stands ankle deep contemplating his swim. Toddlers, naked, walk unaware, uninhibited into the water, squat to pick up a rock, their brown bottoms like little perfect hamburger buns. A pre-teen girl bobs and dives with her snorkel, as of yet blissfully unaware of boys.

A 70-year-old man, his skin sagging like the King of the Elephants in Babar, stands ankle deep contemplating his swim.

I wonder sometimes if this is what it feels like to be rich and blissfully idle. In this year off, this interlude from real life, there are few “practical” things that call us beyond groceries and laundry. We have no home responsibilities. We have no social engagements. We have no work trips to plan for. We have no home to buy stuff for. We have no lightbulbs to change, dryer lint to clean, no shelves to dust, or cat litter to change. We are free of obligations big and small. We are adrift, literally.

It is not a vacation, and yet it is. It has all those elements of a vacation — navigating, eating new foods, feeling dislocated, the stimulation of seeing new things — but it lacks the “going home” part. By choice, this not going home, I realize, remembering the bombed out building we’d passed on our way back from a daily stroll. A very different circumstance. But when the bombs drop, the rich are able to pack up and become a nomad. They are “anywhere” people, able to leave.

The New York Times calls this freedom, this mobility a new class divide. The “somewheres” are stuck in a place by their lack of — lack of higher education, lack of money, lack of exposure. They stay and fight the unwanted war. The anywheres, meanwhile, can go and be anywhere and succeed because they have the capital of the twenty-first century — an adventurous spirit made possible by a college degree, money, and mobility.

If way back in 1980 I’d married my high school sweetheart as I so, so hoped to do at age nineteen, my life would be a somewhere. If I’d married that sweetheart, our outings would be a pontoon boat on a weedy Minnesota lake in the summer and a snowmobile in winter zooming along desolate ditches among a pack of fellow somewheres. I’d have a suburban home in Apple Valley and grandkids. I know because I lurk on Facebook.

Instead I took a fated trip to Italy with a group of fellow art class students and the rest is as they say, history. With that trip, I had taken my first step toward anywhere. And if I’d been a Croatian instead of an American somewhere, who knows what my life would have been — if I’d survived.

In my coverup and flip-flops, hair still wet, I take a seat at a tiny table under a under a pergola dripping with vines.

Back on the boat, it’s time for lunch. We are back in open water, cutting a straight line toward a small village and an even smaller harbor. We tie up amid the battered fishing boats, a shirtless man in shorts with a toy poodle at his feet sits on his boat deck mending a fishing net. In my coverup and flip-flops, hair still wet, I take a seat at a tiny table under a under a pergola dripping with vines.

Three local wines to taste, plates of prosciutto, olives, sardines, and grilled octopus. La dolce vita.

I haven’t been this happy for ages.

We are smitten. Mike and I have found a swimming spot that on its surface has absolutely no curb appeal. It is a half-acre of beachside park that has the equivalent of a kegger in a garage versus a garden party with caterers. A café under a large tarpaulin with white plastic tables and chairs is filled with men playing cards while young waiters shuttle espressos and beers between them. 1990s pop music and cigarette smoke waft by.

Beyond the café, a sea-water swimming pool green with algae so thick that pushing off the wall is an eeew and a slip. The pool is lined by stone bleachers that when not filled with water polo spectators are ground zero for serious summer flirting and watching the true stars of the place: the divers. For next to the pool, out over the water, is a three-tiered cement diving platform, the highest tier topping out at 10 meters. Below it, nothing but the crashing ocean.

Daily now I meet Mike in front of the Old Town gates at 3 pm and walk the half-mile or so to the pool, where we claim a space, kick off our flip flops, and dive from rocks into the cool, clear sea. We have perfected our beach gear — no phone, a little cash for a cold beer, goggles, towel, sunscreen, and a book. We swim like seals, first underwater then onto our backs to bob in the waves, facing the shore. For variety, we swim out to a buoy.

On return, we climb the algae slick metal ladder and find our perch on the cement wall to watch the divers.

The lower perch is the realm of the five-year-olds. A little girl — no top, oversized pink Crocs strapped to her feet — flings herself with mad abandon off the platform, her speedo’d father watching from the ledge. She flings, pops up in the water, swims with a frantic thrashing to the ladder, along with the other children swarming the ladder like piglets to the feed trough, grunting and pushing each other underwater to get there first. One little girl is crying and grabbing for the ladder in an adrenaline fueled scramble to not be last. An adult lifts her up. She runs again to the edge, never looking back. Our little girl in the pink Crocs is climbing up the ladder — the gaps between the steps nearly as big as she is. She runs to the edge, elbows her way in, and throws herself off again. Over and over.

These are the kinds of children New Yorker writer Joan K. Davidson was thinking of when she wrote about the perfect beach day. If you must bring children, she said, bring only certain children: “Small or middle-range children but only of the independent and cheerful sort. Whiners and naggers-for-attention impede the cure. Contributions of good children: ecstasy of the water squeal; the high seriousness of sand construction; shining hair, smooth skin, and the salt-white outline on tanned arms and legs.”

That’s my Croc girl to a tee.

Far above, a yell goes out, “Jump,” or “Don’t Jump,” and the teens on the second level look above toward the highest tier, and wait. A girl in a bright blue bikini struts to the edge of the highest tier, parting the gaggle of boys. She looks down. Sits. Contemplates. Stands up and falls forward. Her body plummets like a fall to her death. She hits the water feet first –fruup — and disappears. It seems like eternity, but she pops up, grinning wildly.

Right behind her, a swan dive, so graceful and slow, gaining speed as gravity pulls him land-ward. A tandem dive goes off next — beautiful — in perfect sync. Pop, pop, they land and disappear under water. On the second tier, the cry goes up, “Don’t jump,” and the third tier takes a break. Groups of friends approach the edge of the second tier. Newcomers, this is just high enough for a first go. They pace. They suffer the taunts. The flutter their hands. One, two, three: jump. A scream. And then the joyous exhilaration when they pop up out of the water.

Mike can’t resist. He climbs the ladder to the second tier. I watch him from below. He’s on the platform, checking out the back. He approaches the front and takes a peek over the lip. I can practically see him gulp.

He waves, retreats. But the shame of climbing back down the ladder propels him. He returns to the edge. And then he is airborne. He slices through the air like a spear. A 10! And now he is hooked. The third tier beckons, but it will take more courage.

Two hours pass like the snap of a finger. And then, near 5:00 pm, a hush falls over the platform as five young men scamper up the ladder like monkeys. The pros have arrived. They joke with their friends atop, confident, kings, an earned status.

One young man in bright orange-red swim trunks approaches the edge. Yells go up for the tiers below, “No jump!”

He teases us, and retreats. But then as if on second thought, he turns and lopes toward the edge, one, two, three running steps and he is airborne, flinging himself upside down into a graceful one-and-a-half flip. I clap like a giddy kid at a circus. Not to be outdone, another of the trio approaches the edge. He looks over and then gracefully kicks his feet up into a handstand, holds it, and then drops forward, tucks, rolls and enters the water feet first. Kids on the second tier stare in awe. Me too.

But the best is last — the smallest of the trio, a skinny kid in a bright blue speedo. He approaches the edge, turns and twists on the balls of his feet, scooching backward until his heels are dangling off the ledge. Up on his toes, arms outspread. A slight leap into an inward, twist, one-and-a-half ending in a noiseless slurp as the water swallows him. Even a Russian judge would give him a 10.

After a couple of hours, itchy suits getting to us, we head home, parting halfway, me to climb a hill to my apartment, Mike to his. I will remember this spell in Croatia as the best time of my life. More than anything it’s the feeling of well-being. Of simple life, health, and water. Even my bug bite is gone.

Like all good things, our summer comes to an end. Like teachers on their way back to school in the fall, we board the dreaded bus for the return trip to Split, endure a hot, crowded Toledo-sized airport filled with body odor and resigned travelers, board an equally dingy, not aptly named EasyJet and land in Berlin, back to concrete and gray that is city life. But little do I know, I’m about to be wowed.