On Duende: From Spain to Russia

During my recent trip to Granada, Spain for a writing workshop, I spent time — along with a group of fellow writers and authors — exploring the Spanish artistic concept of Duende, which can be translated as a physical and emotional response to art, or an elevated state of authentic emotions, that is often associated with Flamenco. We learned that music and poetry which evokes Duende shares common roots of love, and suffering, and death.

Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director, Federico García Lorca, first developed the aesthetics of Duende in 1933.

Behind  the art of Duende,  lurks  a  terrible  question  that  has no  answer.  I  read  about Duende  — and  a pain  so  strong that  it  supersedes  death  almost  —  and  thought  about myself,  and  my  inability  to  dawdle  in  pain,  my  need  to  move  beyond  it,  through  it, into inspiration.  Russian  stories  about my father came to mind: Stories, rituals, and music.  

While reading Lorca,  and  about  deep  song — songs  heard  in  the  distance — I  came  back to my  childhood and to Russian songs. To  gypsy  music. To songs of love and yearning and an ache for a country that is gone. It is all wrapped into music.  

Although I  rejected  religion, I love the music of my church. Church singing always makes me cry. I found myself in San Gregorio church in Granada, where nuns were chanting, and the experience helped me remember how the music from my father's side can transport me.

Nuns chanting in San Gregorio church, Granada, Spain

I know  very  little  of  the  culture  of my mother’s  land,  even  though  I  was  born  there.  Yes, I  am  steeped  in  the  music  and culture  of my  father’s  land,  even  though  he  left  it 30  years  before  I  was  born.

I  only  need  to hear  a  tune,  or  a  poem,  or  a  line  of  a  song  and  I  am transported.  I only  need  to  smell  the  wafting  of  incense  from  the  priests   and  I  am  transported.  I  only  need  to  imagine  the  raucous  laughter  of  a  vodka-sated  crowd  and  I  am  transported.  

Could this, too, be Duende? 

Stories and exploration in Trieste

Whenever I visit Trieste, I cannot help but think about my roots and the time my family spent living in Campo San Sabba. 

The Risiera di San Sabba, an old rice factory, is next to an area that slowly curves upward, toward the Karst hills to the south. 

During the Second World War, it was converted by the Fascists and Nazis into a concentration camp for Serbs, Croats, and Jews. After the war, that camp became Campo San Sabba — a refugee camp for people displaced by Communist regimes. It was there that my family waited four years for our visas to move to America.

Sixty years later in 2014, my brother Sasha — now Alex — and I, headed back to Trieste to revisit our roots in the Balkans. 

Trieste was part of ancient Illyria, part of the Roman empire, and then part of the Austrian empire for 500 years, until World War I ended that era. In 1921 that northern coast of the Adriatic was granted to Italy, an action that turned my infant mother, born some 50 miles to the south in Croatia, into a refugee in Serbia.

As the Cold War replaced the World War, my mother’s marriage to my Russian father — himself an exile of the Russian revolution — forced her new family to flee once again. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were at odds, and we were declared stateless. By then, my mother’s hometown had been returned to Croatia, but now Trieste, like our family, was a stateless orphan, a United Nations protectorate.

Alex and I traveled to San Sabba the way we remembered doing so as children with my mother after trips to the vegetable market — By tram. 

In 1913 James Joyce wrote a melancholy little poem about his brother rowing in the waters of San Sabba. It was now an industrialized part of town that did not bring rowboats to mind.

Joyce wrote many of his works here, but he also wrote his only play. It was called Exiles. 

One of my favorite authors, Jan Morris, wrote a book called Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. She spent many years in Trieste after the war. In the book, she distinguishes the melancholy from the merely sad. 

I don’t see Trieste in that way. 

The city experienced a major financial collapse when the Berlin wall fell and the people of Eastern Europe could suddenly shop anywhere in Europe. The harbor, in particular, showed the effects of the crisis, but it seemed a new wave of refugees had found their way there. 

I wandered through the abandoned port of Trieste, through hauntingly beautiful remnants of a long gallery built from giant stones. Toward the back of these buildings — which stretched at least 500 yards toward the old, abandoned train station — I found many makeshift homeless shelters built into the colonnades. 

The dirt fields toward the seaside were filled with men playing cricket. I asked if they were from India, knowing that country’s love for the sport. No, they replied, they were all from Afghanistan. Hundreds of them — clearly refugees  — with nothing to do. I wanted to tell them that I, too, was once homeless in this town, but we didn’t have a common language.

With Afghan refugees in 2014, in an abandoned dockyard at the port of Trieste
 

I continued along a beautiful esplanade laid with half moon patterned bricks that were set by hand and required maintenance. I tried to take a photo of a man re-laying the bricks, but he quickly stepped out of the scene and refused to be photographed. I noticed his accent and asked where he was from. 

"Belgrade," he replied, reluctantly. He told me about his neighborhood, and smiled broadly when he learned that I, too, was born in Belgrade, but now lived in America. 
 

Stretching the imagination: Then and now

After spending time in Spain for a travel writing workshop, I made my way to Italy, to revisit San Sabba — the refugee camp in Trieste where I spent the early years of my childhood. I went to take photos, and to remember. 

My friend Gay and I exchanged photographic assignments. This one is “distorted vision," taken on my way to Campo San Sabba. 

Then I went on to San Sabba, to create the image below.

Over 60 years separate the two parts of this image. On the left, my father’s image of the camp where we lived in 1952. On the right, I finally found the spot and completed the photo after scaling a wall, crossing live tracks, and stretching my imagination.

Tangled webs of history in San Francisco's North Beach

This is a true story. I promise. My belief in coincidence was stretched by the tale of Lidia Bastianich’s link to my mother’s hometown—Lidia, a world famous chef and restauranteur lived in the same refugee camp that my family did, just a few years after we did— but this coincidence stretches it even further.

I recently met with my friend Carol at Bodega, a favorite wine bar on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. 

Carol is the publisher of The Semaphore, Telegraph Hill's (the site of San Francisco's famous parrots) neighborhood newspaper. I shared my photographs her with for the newspaper's last few issues, and am now an honorary member of that hood. 

I wanted to talk with Carol about publicizing my upcoming book. Knowing I had grown up in San Francisco’s Russian community, she had recommended finding Russian-focused bookstores. 

That’s how much she knew about Mother Tongue, which focuses on the Balkan side of my family.

Before we had time to discuss the newest hot topic — the replacement of Columbus Day by Indigenous Peoples’ Day — she said, “I’m working on a story for the next issue.” I sipped my wine as she continued. “It’s about all of the Italians in North Beach who fled Istria.“

The look on my face was probably worthy of a photograph. My mouth opened and I just kept staring at her. She knew nothing about my mother, or that she too was forced out of Istria — by Italians.

And, like me, she assumed that most people had never heard of Istria. 

I listened in amazement.

It turned out that Carol had been talking to Bruno Viscovi, the owner of Albona Restaurant, an Istrian eatery that I had taken my mother to several times.

She proceeded to tell me the story of Bruno's family’s eviction from Istria. Apparently, there were quite a few others — including the founders of Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Café, and, Caffe Trieste.

It’s not that I don’t know these places. Caffe Trieste has been a favorite since I was a teenager being ‘hip.’ I just had neglected to think of them in the context of my own story about Trieste, spending part of my childhood living there at San Sabba refugee camp.

My obliviousness to this possible link was embarrassing, but suddenly it all sank in.

I didn’t have to look for a New York restaurateur to connect my book to the Italian American community. I just had to look around my neighborhood. Thanks to Carol, I am newly re-invigorated in this search!

In North Beach, with travel writer extraordinaire, Don George. 

Richard Le, the manager of the North Beach Public Library — whose name was misspelled at immigration from Lee — was gracious enough to schedule a reading for me.

Hear about the interwoven history of a common Slavic and Italian homeland on Saturday, June 2, 2018 at 1:30 p.m. at the North Beach Public Library, 800 Columbus Ave., in San Francisco. 

A little background:

Bruno Viscovi was born in Albona, or Labin, Istria. In the 1950s, both of our families fled their country of birth, but for very different reasons. In 1988 Bruno opened Albona —then the only Istrian restaurant in the Western United States — in San Francisco’s North Beach.

Gianni Giotta, founder of Caffe Trieste and one of North Beach’s great personalities, was born in Rovigno, or Rovinj, on the Istrian peninsula, two years before it was transferred from Croatia to Italy. Like my grandfather Martin Marinovič, Gianni came from a fishing family. He and his wife, Ida, immigrated to San Francisco and, in 1956, opened Caffe Trieste, the first espresso bar in San Francisco.

Mario Crismani opened the now famous Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Café on Columbus Street in 1972. He was born in Pola, or Pula, Istria, where he met his wife Lilliana and where my grandfather worked in the shipyards. They lived in Trieste, where I spent my first four years, until coming to San Francisco. He often played bocce at the courts in Aquatic Park, below my home.

In the epilogue to my book, Mother Tongue, I talk about the refugee camp at San Sabba:

“We also learned that the Displaced Persons camp set up in this place after the war had sheltered two primary groups of people. The one we had been part of were those — mostly Russians — who were displaced by the post-war spread of Communism. The others were Italians displaced when Istria was given back to Yugoslavia.

A few years earlier, I had bought my brother an old copy of LIFE magazine from the week of his birthday in September 1947. Incredibly, the cover story was about the return of Istria to Yugoslavia from Italy that very week. It turned out that the land taken from my mother’s family at her birth was returned to her country at the birth of her son.

Just as my family had been persecuted 25 years earlier by Italians, the Italians were then persecuted by the Yugoslavs. Many lost their homes and fled the country. The issue was still so raw at the end of 2013, as I was researching this story, that Wikipedia temporarily froze their articles on the subject because of contention and disagreement.”

Breaking through borders

The first time I drove into the country of my birth it was still a Communist dictatorship under Joseph Broz Tito, the man who had declared my family enemy aliens. The very thought of it made my father fear he would never see me again. But I was a confident young American, determined to be afraid of nothing.

It was 1973 and I was working in France, near Geneva. I had a few days off and drove through beautiful Alps and Italian countryside that would in later life captivate me for years. But I drove nonstop — blind to scenery, culture and food — determined to arrive at my aunt’s house in Zagreb, Croatia. 

I remember little of the trip, and didn’t even bother pausing in Trieste, heading straight for the nearby border. I pulled up behind a long row of cars at the border station. I had anticipated this checkpoint for weeks, but by the time they were clearing the car in front of me, I was tired and bored and anxious to be at my destination. The guards made that occupant get out, and checked every inch of his car’s interior, dismantling everything that was easy to remove.

Finally they finished, the guy got back into that rattletrap, and the border gate opened. It was a long metal white bar with globally understood red symbols that meant ‘STOP.’ He painstakingly got his ancient car into gear, and it backfired as he slowly stumbled into his country — as his license plate indicated.

To my surprise, before this maneuver was complete, the guard energetically waved me forward and through the border into the country of my birth — as my passport indicated. 

My car performed far more efficiently than the previous entrant’s and I sailed through — to sudden shouting, something slapping at the back of my car, people running at me, perhaps a siren. 

I braked hard, turned my head, and realized I had misunderstood his gesture. Adrenaline and fear kicked in hard. What had I done? Were my father’s worst fears about to come true?

I threw the car into reverse and stepped on the gas pedal to correct my error.

Once more, the car performed. It tore backwards and stopped in front of the now red-faced and furious border guard. 

On its way back my car had ripped the border gate off its hinges. 

A crowd of officials gathered, waving and shouting and asking if I was out of my mind. Two of them walked away, carrying the now broken barrier. The line behind me grew longer. Tensions were high. I fought back tears. 

I don’t know what saved me in the end. Whether it was my American nationality, my gender, my youth, my visible terror, my knowledge of their language, my apologies, or the sheer lunacy of what I had done. All I remember is that they handed me my passport, shook their heads, and waved me through the now permanently open border to a once frightening place.

On bus rides and languages separated by alphabets and cultures

I often ride the 30 bus in San Francisco. Starting near AT&T Park, it crosses SOMA (South of Market), then skirts downtown, ducks under Nob Hill via the Stockton Street tunnel, embraces Chinatown and North Beach, sideswipes Fisherman's Wharf, pauses briefly at my home, then traverses the Marina District along Chestnut Street, ending near the iconic Palace of Fine Arts and Chrissy Field.

Not the 30, but my favorite line, the F, brought from Milan, Italy. At Fisherman's Wharf. 

It's a cheap but thorough city tour. Locals and tourists are mashed together. 

I usually chat with people, but sometimes I need down time. One day, I plunked myself in the middle of a three-seat bench at the front and began to read emails. Two enormous men squeezed down, engulfing me in bodies and aromas, the larger one on my left in shorts, oblivious to the cold fog.

Ignoring my attempts at isolation, the man queried me in a gentle, friendly — but persistent —manner, about phones in general and mine specifically. I ducked on pricing, confirmed usability, and kept trying to return to the screen.

“I'd like to ask you a survey question, if I may,” he eventually asked. “What person born since 1900 do you admire the most?”

I told him in today's environment it would be easier to decide whom I admire the least, but again he was gentle in his persistence. 

He nudged, “If there was one person born since 1900 whom you could converse with, who would it be?”

Finally intrigued, I decided to back away from the present political situation, and said, “Winston Churchill.” I’m not sure how I picked him, it was not a deeply considered response.

“You must be a student of history."

He then asked if I knew an author called David Irving, who wrote a book called Churchill’s War. I must've looked interested, because he described a great historian, who had been jailed in Austria just a few years earlier for his political views. My skepticism quickly led to a search.

I turned my screen toward him and said, “But he's a neo-Nazi and racist.” 

“Oh,” he chuckled, unfazed. “That's just the way he's being portrayed. He's a very thoughtful person.”

Sincerity oozed at me. “Really,” he said, as he got up and then apologized because we had reached his stop. My screen did not leave much doubt about this author’s beliefs.

The news that day was all about Donald Trump refusing to acknowledge racism and neo-Nazi chanting at a deadly event in Virginia over the weekend. I had just marked a note in my calendar to avoid Chrissy Field on August 26 because another such event was planned there. And now this? On a bus in San Francisco?

I glanced up at the women facing me across the bus. One had a black print hijab over a long blue robe. Only her eyes and a bit of forehead were exposed. The woman next to her had a black scarf wrapped around her head in the style of the women in Iran, and a beige wool Inca-patterned shawl over black slacks. I didn't want a conversation with a neo-Nazi to be their image of a bus trip through San Francisco.

“Where are you from?" I directed my question to the woman whose face was uncovered.

“Illinois,” she replied, with an Indian accent.

This has become quite normal lately, and I understand that my very question could be taken as racist. Clearly, it spoke to their clothes and the character of their faces. Most of the time, I can use an open friendliness, and perhaps my gender and age, to go deeper without offense. This woman, however, easily unbent to my grin at a response which confirmed her Americanness. 

“I am originally from India,” she continued.

“Really? I am going there next month.”

“Oh? And where will you be going? The Taj Mahal?”

“No, I am going to Orissa.”

"Orissa?”

Not confident that she knew where that was, I added, “and Chattisgarh.”

"Chattisgarh? You are going to Chattisgarh? Not the Taj Mahal? Not Agra?”

I confirmed that I go to India quite frequently but I've never been to Agra. She encouraged me to go, but finally asked me where in Chattisgarh. I showed her my itinerary, and a few photographs.

And just like that, we were friends.

She told me she was from Chattisgarh, and her husband was a doctor who had treated people like the ones in my pictures.

“He had an emergency surgery on a man with an arrow that pierced his chest,” she said, pounding her fist at a spot next to her heart. “They don't use guns, just bows and arrows.”

I absorbed this amazing story, along with the fact that they moved to America in 1993 and her husband went back to school and became a neurosurgeon.

The fully-covered woman next to her sat mute, but her eyes followed us. I am not yet fully comfortable with breaching the privacy of those who cover themselves, and usually just smile. I finally asked where she was from.

“Pakistan,” she said from behind the cloth.

“Oh, where in Pakistan?”

“Karachi.”

“And have you been here long?”

“Three years.”

“Are you together?”

I learned they were both from Illinois, and are friends because their daughters live in San Francisco. They were visiting family and helping to take care of grandchildren, one of whom now burst onto the scene, with a young woman in a beautiful long black gown, her head uncovered. They all spoke rapidly, checking out the neighborhood.

“What language are you using?”

“Urdu,” said one. “Hindi,” said the other.

In the remaining few minutes of our trip I learned that those two languages have radically different alphabets but are mutually comprehensible, something I had never understood until that moment.

“Like in your countries," the Indian woman said. She had learned in our interchange that I was born in Yugoslavia, and had mentioned Croatia and Serbia. 

“Yes, we too,” I acknowledged, “have languages separated mostly by alphabets and cultures.” 

We all laughed together as the bus stopped and they walked off, heading towards Fisherman's Wharf.

What is a Mother Tongue?

What is a mother tongue? What is your mother tongue? What is your mother’s tongue?

Sometimes the simplest questions take a book to answer. Such is the case with my story, with my book — Mother Tongue.

What language did you speak with your mother? What language did you speak with your father? What language did you speak with your brother?

For me there are three different answers to those questions.

Did you speak your mother tongue with anyone except your mother?

That, of course, is the most bizarre question so far for me, and the answer is no. I spoke a unique language with my mother, one I am still fluent in. And by the way, it was not my mother’s native language.

Is this story a fantasy? Is it fiction? Is it an invention of the most convoluted imagination? Are you about to read a book about zombies or science fiction? No, this is a book true to my memory, which is supported by years of historical research.

The language under discussion is Serbian. My mother was Croatian. My father was Russian. I grew up with my brother in San Francisco, California speaking English. I was born in Serbia, but left when I was six-months-old. I didn’t speak any language until I was two. 

I didn't know why I spoke Serbian, rather than Croatian, with my mother Zora. It never occurred to me to ask until I started writing this book. And by then, my mother was gone.

Mother Tongue is an exploration of lives lived in the chaos of a part of the world known as the Balkans. Following three generations of women in a history spanning a hundred years. It follows countries that dissolved, formed, and reformed. Lands that were conquered and subjugated by Fascists and Nazis and Communists and nationalists. It explores lives lived in exile, in refugee camps, in new worlds.

Long after my American passport replaced a document that read ‘stateless,’ the ‘birthplace’ on that passport changed four times in four successive renewals. Until the first time, I believed my country of birth was a fixed point. Today I know better.

Manifest of passengers on the S.S. Constitution, 1953, including my family. 

My first United States certificate of citizenship. 

Hidden in old boxes

The night before I was leaving for a recent trip to India, I had a flash of insight, realizing I could include more family pictures in my first book, Mother Tongue. I always pack light, no matter how long the trip, so, instead of packing and chasing down chocolate powder and deciding what to do with my mysteriously unstartable car, I set off on my family photo project. 

Could my book midwife make adding more photos happen? Could I find the pictures I had in mind, scan them, and reread enough of the book to figure out where to include them? 

Packing? What packing? 

My excitement over this new possibility energized me to the point that all tasks were now possible, no matter the timeline. With great joy I leafed through the albums my mother had carefully saved. 

My parents

With my brother

With my brother and our parents

I went on to read through my book, and the next day, during my flight to India, I planned where to add the photos. But before that, I got distracted one more time. 

When I couldn't find a picture of Harold, my late husband, with my mom — and couldn't get from my apartment in San Francisco to my house in Healdsburg (where more photos are stored) because my car wouldn't start — I turned everything in my apartment upside down in desperation, searching for it.

Instead, I found a Christmas card from 1965 from someone in Chicago who had been unsuccessfully trying to find me for months. I had no memory of this person, but decided that it was a good idea to look her up.

I figured that in these days of Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter, she would be easy to find. However, since my generation seems to lag when it comes to technology, all I found was an article from 2012:

Anne Kuznetsov,* 62, was arrested by the Chicago Illinois State Police at 3:45 p.m. on an outstanding La Grange Police Department warrant for driving with a suspended license, police said.

Somebody my age would've been 62 five years ago. And I realized that I must've met Anne in 1965, when I went to a summer national Junior Achievement Conference in Indiana. Like me, she was the winner of a the trip of a lifetime.

But the only information I could find was that pathetic paragraph?

If I didn't have to jump out of bed, shower, finish packing, and head for the airport, I would have had time to consider far more deeply what that all meant, and hopefully, someday I will find the inspiration to keep searching. 

*name has been changed

A Christmas story: A little girl and a little boy

A six-year-old girl stares in the window of an inner city neighborhood grocery store in San Francisco in the 1950s.

The window is cluttered — it's hard to see through the dirt. "Mike's" says the sign above the door. The little girl's eyes are determinedly fixed on an object that glows, just behind the smudged glass. It is a doll behind that window, the only doll in any window in this neighborhood, and it is there as a Christmas promotion. The store is directly across the street from the little girl's house. She can see the doll by gluing her eyes to the window of the room her grandmother sleeps in, which doubles as the family's living room. She will never want another doll as much as she craves that tall perfect blonde in her pink gown — she has to have that doll.
 
But December 25 comes and goes with the doll still in the window, removed a few days later to be replaced with a sign that advertises Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
 
The little girl is right. She never does crave another doll, for she is not a doll kind of girl. She becomes a tomboy who turns to skates and stilts and baseball and bicycles. But on that January 6, almost 60 years ago, it is her family's Christmas Eve and a large box under the Christmas tree holds the magic doll. The warm glow of that moment and the image of that perfect blonde haired beauty remains planted somewhere deep inside that one-time little girl's heart.
 
Fast forward about sixty years.
 
A little boy turning five is getting ready to start school. He spends most of his days with his grandmother — let's call her Vesna — and whenever she lets him, he is playing with her computer and watching Disney movies. One of his favorites is a Disney animated adventure film called Cars.
 
The computer also shows him many goodies that surround this cartoon. The internet brings backpacks and lunch boxes with cars on them tantalizingly close — Right there in his grandmother Vesna's bedroom. Right there behind the smudged glass where he presses his finger on this magic backpack.
 
The little boy is 8,000 miles from Disneyland. The Disney store does not ship to his country. While the backpack is not expensive, getting it to Serbia might be. But the little boy really, really, really wants that backpack. And his grandmother really, really wants to get it for him.    
 
A few miles from the Disney store in San Francisco wanders the one-time little girl — me — who had long forgotten about wanting that doll 60 years ago. There is a text from Vesna about a Cars backpack and that once little girl shakes her head, thinking about the crass commercialism that has spread a desire for this backpack to the far corners of the globe, even to a house in Belgrade, where the little boy is about to start school.
 
The little girl was born there and when she visits, the little boy's father will be warm and polite and, until pressed, will avoid saying what he really thinks about her adopted homeland, America — a place he believes is evil. It is not only the source of much of the world's crass commercialism, but of the specific bombs that fell on his town not that many years ago.
 
As she walks down the San Francisco street, however, it is the memory of the doll in the window that pulls her into the Disney store. And while the backpack cannot be teleported to Vesna's apartment in Serbia, the young salesclerk quickly messengers a picture to Belgrade where it is greeted with glee.

On the beach

In the city of Puri, on the east coast of India, a place of pilgrimage, and more importantly, beaches, I was awake at the light at 5:30 a.m. and walked on the beach, where the sun toyed with a few clouds. 

I found a bracelet in the sand — a triple band of little brown wooden beads, and asked a handsome young man— the only person in sight — if it was his. He said no, but offered that we could throw it back into the ocean. Somehow, it became clear that it was meant to be an offering—to the sea, the sky, the silence.

Women collecting pieces of wood that the tide brought in overnight.

Some women in saris collected wood along the beach. I quickly snapped a picture of them emerging from the sunrise, and we all enjoyed it, until a man walked up and asked for money — on their behalf, it seemed.

Most people here still enjoy having their pictures taken, and often ask me to take more. A fair number do check, as a passing gesture, to see if I have something to give them. I don't give people money to take pictures, preferring to walk away. I do, however, now carry a few San Francisco keychains or postcards as gifts for people I connect with along my path.

Closer to 6:30 as I was returning, crowds were entering the beach, and a drone was hovering overhead. 

I came upon a camel, a group of photographers, and two more drones. 

The photographers told me they were shooting a “preevary”— a short video, they clarified.

We continued talking, and they told me a bride and groom were involved. I walked over to the couple, who told me they were shooting a "preeveg." 

I eventually understood they were shooting a pre-wedding video and flew to the beach just for this photo shoot.

I continued along and found a group of people who would in any other circumstances be considered insane. They were old and skinny, wearing saris and dhotis. At the direction of their spiritual leader, they entered the water fearlessly, spread themselves facedown on the sand, waiting for the waves. When the waves came, they were submerged in a broiling mass of bubbles. The stronger women pulled men weighing around 60 pounds, definitely near their last pilgrimage, up to their feet and back to shore.

My own gods drove me closer to capture their images. I ran to escape a large wave, getting soaked and almost crashing into a few worshipers on my way out. This continued until they had all finished their objective, and they walked toward me, telling me how happy they were.   

“Happy! Happy!” It was either their only word of English or their joy wiped all other words from their minds. Of course, I never figured out while on that beach exactly what they were trying to do, but I assumed it was a pilgrimage. They then walked away and the beach was given back to tourists.

I was a sandy, salty, soaked mess — and my grin reached from ear to ear as I walked back to my Western hotel where the man watering the bushes obliged me by spraying my legs so I could enter the lobby.