Bashtik (Nov25)

Three or four days after the holy day we hiked up to the village. It had been twenty-eight years since the last time we had gone up together. Nedjo had been driven up the previous year in a lightning visit that had left him unsatisfied. When he learned of the intention to return in the Spring he brought forward his own plans for later in the autumn. We slowly hiked along the new roadway about three hours with bread & cheese in our kit. The descent on the Morinj side four days later would take about two and a half hours, rain half way down making the descent quite treacherous. As it turned out these climbs up and down were secondary to the scaling of one of the big peaks that overlooked the village itself. Up behind our clan at Radonići a massif named Baštik stood 1500m above sea level—something like six hundred metres above Village Uble itself. A trek and a half it turned out of about eight hours in all, which included a 30 minute lunch on a rocky outcrop casting about the terrain. With the creaking body of course it was unlikely ever to be repeated. From the peak the view buffeted the head like some kind of decompression, uncanny and a little disturbing. One got weak at the knees and actually fearful of being lifted away by the wind. On a clear day the Italian coast might have been visible. The old folk said when the weather was right the bells at San Pietro could be heard from the peak of Baštik. Towns along the water were laid out as if na dlan, on the palm of the hand. Surprisingly, the village itself was completely out of view. The gouging of the runway at Tivat was visible. Wild swine was common up at the heights; a few years previously a wolf had wrestled a rifle from one of the villagers who still remained up at his old house year-round. The man had the tooth marks on his barrel to prove his story, which had made the local newspaper. With the assistance of the vet from town, at this man’s house we had helped pull a calf from a labouring cow. Thankfully the largest animal sighted on Baštik itself had been a mouse in the forest cover a couple hundred feet down. The acid trip of the climb and then the levitation on the summit would knock in the brain the whole while the wiring and synapses lasted.

‘09 / Feb25