On a Slow Boat

As we turned the corner, we saw a woman in her late forties walking towards us with a sheepish look. She didn’t immediately greet us when she saw us, instead turned her gaze at the gravel path. Her black sweater and jeans were somewhat dirty, the kind of wear that accumulated over a day’s hard work on the farm. She didn’t look disheveled but she looked worn out and tired, like she hadn’t taken care of herself very well.

“Seline?” she hesitantly asked, pronouncing my name as if my name is spelled Celine, like Celine Dion, the Quebecois singer. I nodded, grateful that this encounter meant we were closer to a shelter, and food.

She turned out to be a nervous chatterbox. She started talking non-stop about how busy she was with the new guesthouse she’s building and how she had been so scatterbrained from running back and forth between her house and the construction site, and how she was sorry for not putting up signs for the guesthouse, and so on and so forth; her English sounding more Staten Island than Albanian. Curious, I asked her where she’s from. “Here,” she said. “Right here in Theth.”

Before we reached the house, I took the opportunity to tell her that we would only be staying at her place for one night. I made up some lies about our new plan to go to Montenegro ahead of time. She looked disappointed, but she said that it was fine with her.

Her house turned out to be the one that looked abandoned from the outside. We passed by it and decided it couldn’t be a guesthouse based on its look. However, her plot contained two buildings with the main house being set further back from the road, while the old house by the side of the road was left crumbling. “They should have put a sign upfront,” she said to no one in particular as she opened the gate and let us in. I wondered who “they” might be.

She showed us our room, on the second floor of the stone house where three single beds had been arranged against the walls. The floors were creaking and the ceiling was just at Gabriel’s height. But the beds were clean and covered with thick comfortable blankets, and I was already dreaming of getting into them after a nice hot shower.

“Is this okay?” she asked.

“Yes, this is great.” A warm bed. A shower. Perfect.

We shed our backpacks on the floor and were looking forward to resting before dinner, when she sat down on one of the beds, making herself comfortable.

“So,” she began, “your phone number is from the States.” This was a statement, not a question. We had told her on the walk to her house that I was from Indonesia and Gabriel from Colombia. It seemed that she was curious as to how we had obtained a US phone number. We clarified that we used to live in Colorado.

“Ah, that’s nice,” she said, alluding to her plight that we would soon learn in detail. Her curiosity didn’t end there, however.

“Do you have a US passport?” she asked.

It sounded like an innocuous question but we knew the next question — “How?” Surprisingly, this is not an uncommon line of questioning that we often get on this trip when people learn that we lived in the US despite having been born in Indonesia and Colombia. I suppose everyone at some level is curious about the logistics of moving to another country / living in another country. But for me, the question is a little bit personal because I knew that my story could so easily be stereotyped as “oh, she married an American to get US citizenship and she divorced him once she got what she wanted” so I always prefer to deflect the question. I don’t believe I owe a stranger an explanation as to how I managed to have the coveted blue passport instead of my useless green one. So, to her question we simply said that we stayed in the US to work after we graduated from school.

She looked at us wistfully, a wry expression on her face. “I used to live there,” she started. She then told us her life story, how she was living in Upstate NY for many years as an undocumented immigrant, working at a grocery store. A few years ago, she met her husband – an American – got married, had a baby, and moved to Michigan, where he’s from. She thought she would never have to move back to Albania. She had made it and was looking forward to a lifetime of happiness with her husband and her son. But one day an ICE officer arrested her as she was on her way to work. Within weeks she was deported to Albania, while her husband and her two year old son were still in Michigan. She didn’t know if someone tipped them off but she blamed it all on Trump and his administration’s policy on immigration. “I worked, I paid taxes, I followed the law,” she said. “How is sending me back to Albania equal to making America great again?”

But her sad story didn’t end there. After she was deported, her husband came to Albania with her son to explore the idea of moving the whole family there. But after a few weeks he told her that it was better for the son to be with her in Albania while he figured out how they could make this cross-border household work. A few months passed and they seemed okay. It was tough but they talked to each other over the phone every day, trying to figure out how she could earn a living in Albania, start a business. She renovated her parents’ house so that it could be rented out to tourists, and gathered enough money to build a bigger guesthouse with 11 rooms. She thought they would pull through, but one day, her husband went missing. He didn’t call, didn’t show up at work, didn’t reply to the numerous emails she and his coworkers sent. She wasn’t able to get a hold of her husband for days. It turned out that he had committed suicide.

Her voice cracked as she recalled the call she received from the police. Grief filled her face. She started lashing out against Trump. To her, he had personally destroyed her life and her son’s life. He was the enemy and the person responsible for what she went through.

We were stunned silent. I stood up, walked across the room and gave her a hug, because I couldn’t think of anything to say. What is there to say to someone who has suffered so much? What is there to do to comfort someone who has gone through such tragedy? I was ashamed to admit to myself that it was uncomfortable to hear her full story, to really listen to it and to hold a space for this much human suffering. I wished for a fast forward button so I could skip over the sad part and get to the happy ending where she and her son overcame all adversities. My mind struggled for a response, while the full weight of her story sank down all around us, through the heavy wooden planks of the second floor, through the first floor, through the Earth, until there was nothing but a post-apocalyptic barren landscape around us. I’m no stranger to sad, tragic stories. I know the world is filled with them, with human suffering. But there’s a big difference between learning about them from books or newspapers or documentaries and hearing it firsthand. When told by a third party, there’s an extra layer of distance that makes the suffering, or the sympathy for other’s suffering, more bearable. But when it’s told by the person sitting in front of you, empathy is the only thing one can offer. And real empathy, is hard. It’s uncomfortable, impossible to fake and it’s genuinely hard. I looked at her and said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all these. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how hard it must be.” She wiped her eyes with the end of her sleeves.

“Thank you,” she said. With that, she snapped out of her blues, apologized for bothering us with her story and quickly left the room. “Dinner is at 7,” she said. She shuffled out of our room, closed the door and went downstairs. A ghost of her previous self.

I could tell that it wasn’t the sadness that ate her from the inside. It’s the rage and fury that were bubbling over as her composure came loose at the seams. She was angry at Trump, angry at the immigration officer who arrested her, angry at the police who found her husband dead, angry at her fellow Albanians who couldn’t seem to get the country together, angry at her life, at fate, at everything she could and could not name for letting her story ended in the country she struggled so hard to escape. “What hope is there for my son,” she had asked, rhetorically, as she described how impossible it was to get a good education or a good job in Albania. When we tried to offer encouraging and supportive words, she refused them. She didn’t want to hear any soothing word. She wanted to keep the fury going, just as I wanted to keep mine just an hour ago.

This is Theth, a small village in the karst valley of the Albanian Alps, by River Theth. It’s an old settlement famous for their kullas, tall stone towers where people would go into ‘hiding’ after killing someone as their and their victim’s relatives settled the blood feud. The main drag consisted of a clinic, a minimart, and a grocery store whose parking lot also served as the pick-up point, i.e. terminal for buses and vans. We joked that in Theth, there’s not much to do besides hike, look at the pretty mountains and admire the clear blue rapids. If not for tourism, all the locals probably would have already abandoned Theth save for a few farmers.

We had hastily booked our accommodation in Theth the day before on Booking.com without paying careful attention to its location. We knew that it’s a few kilometers away from the main drag, but as we walked further and further away from town and still no civilization in sight, I became more and more irritable. Only after we passed all the farmhouses, crossed a few streams and a bridge that we reached another settlement called Okol, with a few guesthouses and a large lawn packed with tents. However we didn’t see any signs bearing the name of the guesthouse we’re supposed to stay in and from the GPS that we were given, it looked like the guesthouse was quite a ways behind the road but we couldn’t find any roads leading to it. We asked around but nobody seemed to know the place, so we kept walking until there was no more houses along the road. An old man was walking out of the house and we asked him if he knew where ‘Cold Spring Guesthouse’ was. He shook his head side to side at first, but when we showed him the name of the guesthouse, he pointed to the road uphill. He said something in Albanian that we guessed meant, “That way!”

But the road uphill took us up a gravel road towards the woods with no houses in sight. This did not look promising at all.

“Do you think he actually know where we’re trying to go?” I asked Gabriel.
“Maybe we should turn around?” Gabriel asked me.
We were both unsure if we should keep going or head back down to the settlement and ask someone else. It was frustrating and a somewhat philosophical quandary. We knew exactly the GPS location of the guesthouse and we knew exactly the GPS location of where we were, but knowing your location and your destination is pointless when there’s no road to the destination.

We kept comparing the reality of the woods that surround us and the two-dimensional colored maps on our phone screen. The pin – where the guesthouse was supposed to be – was located right in the middle of the hairpin loop that was the road we’re on. “Perhaps the entrance is on the other side of the loop?” we guessed. But that means climbing further uphill, further away from Okol, from settlement where we knew there were houses and people and food.

Right, we were exhausted from the hike, and hungry, so the lack of direction and the not knowing when we’d finally be able to put our bags down and rest and eat was particularly frustrating.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Gabriel again. It was the second or third time in the last hour that I said it. Admitting my mistake loudly was my verbal self flagellation that I hoped would invite pity and pre-empt blame. “Stop saying that,” Gabriel said. “We all made mistake. Now let’s just move on and find the place.”

We decided to continue walking uphill on the road to see if there was another entrance on the other side. At this point we were both in a foul mood. I was blaming myself for not double-checking the location of this guesthouse before I booked it and felt so defeated by such a rookie mistake. In my desperation and frustration I started composing a scathing online review of this guesthouse, about how impossible it was to find the place, how far it was from town, how unreliable the provided GPS location was. I would write the most negative review I’d ever written without sounding the least bit like a privileged whiny tourist with a first-world problem.

Another 1 kilometer and still no guesthouse in the horizon, so we stopped to consider our options. We could walk to the next guesthouse at the top of the hill, or walk back towards town.

“Or I could try calling the guesthouse,” I said.
“Or that.”

Why I didn’t try doing this earlier could only be attributed to my precipitously low blood glucose level. But now that we’re further away from town, the cell signal wavered between full bars and no bar. So there I was holding my phone up, even though I read somewhere that doing so did nothing to cell reception. I dialed the Albanian phone number listed on the booking confirmation. The phone on the other end was ringing but no one was picking it up.

We were just about to give up and walk to the other guesthouse when my phone vibrated. Albanian number.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Someone called me from this number, American number.” On the other end was a woman, with Eastern European accent, but perfectly good English.

“Yes! This is Selina. I’m supposed to stay at your guesthouse tonight,” I said as quickly as I could, fearing I might lose the cell signal at any moment.

“We’re lost,” I finally said, admitting the pickle we’re in. “We followed the road up the mountain and now we don’t see any houses. We could not find the entrance to your guesthouse.”

“I’m right here,” she said. “I sent you the GPS.” I thought she sounded defensive.

“Right,” I replied. “But we didn’t see any signs or any roads leading to your GPS location and a guy told us to go up the road leading to the mountain and now we don’t see any houses. Just trees.”

I must have sounded so pitiful or exasperated or close to tears, or all of the above because as soon as I said it, she changed her tone and started apologizing and begged us to turn around and that she would meet us on the road.

“Yes, just please turn around. We’re right across the white house with all the tents.”

I wanted to tell her that that was a vital information that she could have included in her last message to me, along with the GPS information. We started walking back towards Okol as I continued to perfect the imaginary negative review in my head. I felt angry, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was angry at.

Does anger always require an unfortunate recipient? Is anger like a burning ball of fire one has to spit up and throw at somebody else lest it burns oneself? Gabriel tried to talk me through my seething rage but at times like these, I recognized that it often feels better, more “fun” to keep the anger burning than to accept and let go. For to accept seemed like a defeat. A passive acceptance of the external circumstance. No. When the strong wind blows, I want to be the sail that’s battered and tattered fighting against the wind, not the folded sail.

In that moment, I saw so clearly how my desire to keep the anger burning was my choice, and that was the truth. That our angers (and fears) are there because we choose to keep them by our sides, because there’s something so satisfying about nurturing these inner demons that also allow us to maintain the story in our heads that we’re the heroes fighting against our adversaries, forgetting that we are our own enemies.

I asked myself, which is the truth and which is fiction?

I made a mistake for not checking
the location of the guesthouse
prior to booking and now we
realized it's 5km from the town

We are tired and hungry

I am an idiot who makes this kind
of stupid rookie mistakes all the
time and now the Universe is 
giving me a lesson for being an
idiot

I am being punished by my own 
stupidity. 

The owner of the guesthouse is 
deliberately making it difficult for 
us to find her guesthouse by hiding 
information from us.

Once I separate the truth from the fiction, the anger slowly subsides…

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At dinner last night, Mark, our host, asked what time we’d like to have breakfast. When we said 6:30, his reply was: “No. Seven [is] better.” OK, Mark, whatever you said.

So this morning we woke up to a breakfast of fried egg and thick toasts, fig jam, farmer’s cheese and, get this, freshly churned butter. Soft, tasty, savory, yummy butter. I could eat it on toast with nothing else all day. We scarfed down all the food on the table, thinking we’d need all the energy we could get for today’s long hike.

Before we left Mark gave us our packed lunch and bade us goodbye.

We walked to the trailhead and spent the next three kilometers walking on the bleached white pebbles on the dried-up river bank. Every so often a 4×4 drove past us, the pebbles rumbling underneath the speeding tires. They were carrying tourists who wanted to skip this first section. I recalled reading an online blog that recommended bypassing this section with 4WD because “the scenery is not that interesting anyway” and for a good half an hour I wondered if we should have followed the advice. In the end, my internal monologue led me to decide that, “No, faster isn’t always better,” and “Who’s to say that this stretch of trail is or is not worth my time?” Definitely not some random person on the Internet. In the end, we enjoyed the ‘boring’ walk across this lithic landscape, which gave us more time to admire the view of the mountain ranges beyond.

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