Left and Up
By Owen Clarke
“Vroom vroom,” I said, motioning inanely with my hands like I was turning a steering wheel, my foot thumping an imaginary gas pedal. “Vroom vroom. Maglič!” I pointed up, into the shadowy mountains looming above us. “I want to go Maglič. Climb mountain.”
I didn’t speak a word of Serbian, or whatever it was they spoke here, and the old woman looked at me like I was fresh out of the asylum. She was gnarled, shawled, and hunched—a figure plucked from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale—but she was smiling, doing her best to understand this moronic American standing in the doorway of her shop. It was the wee hours of the morning in the village of Tjentište, in far eastern Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Tjentište is nestled in the rugged peaks of Sutjeska National Park, home to the highest peak in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Maglič (7,828 feet). Reaching the mountain’s summit was my (poorly) planned objective. In other words, it was why I was pantomiming car noises to an elderly woman outside a hut in the mountains in the middle of the night. I’d been hiking a long-distance trail in the Slovenian Alps on a magazine assignment and bused over to Bosnia for a couple of weeks in-between obligations in Ljubljana.
This odyssey began with a train from Sarajevo to Mostar, then a bus from Mostar to Gacko. Now, after a torturous taxi ride with an obese, violently sweating Serb who inhaled an average of 20 cigarettes per hour (while refusing to lower the window more than a hairs-breadth), I finally found myself in the half-abandoned village of Tjentište.
Maybe it only seemed half-abandoned because I’d arrived at midnight, with no clear plan other than to hike up Maglič the following morning. Absent any camping gear, I stumbled around in the moonlight, eventually checking into the only joint in town, a sprawling Soviet relic of a lodge. The gargantuan lodge had hundreds of rooms, but save for the scowling Serb presiding over the barren lobby and a five-man film crew from the Baltic who milled around a table in the bar, I had the place all to myself.
The lodge was an eerie place, the area outside it even more sinister. The rolling grassy fields beyond the lodge stretched up into dense, inky-black woods, trees swaying in the evening breeze that seemed older than time. Set in the middle of these fields were two monolithic cement war memorials, looming out of the gloom. Vague and abstract, these relics from the Soviet era watched the lodge from the darkness like hulking beasts, just out of clear sight.
In any case, it was the only place in town. So I checked in. Squatting over the toilet in my room a few minutes later, I took a closer look at my GPS and realized I’d bungled this expedition already.
The trailhead was over 20 kilometers away. But I had no way of reaching it. This desolate village had nothing in the way of a taxi, but I’d need to start first thing in the morning from the trailhead to make the summit.
So I wandered out into the night and knocked on the door of the only other building with a light on in the entire village, the little meat and cheese shop of this hunched old woman, who appeared to have fallen asleep at her counter with the light on.
“Vroom vroom. Maglič,” I repeated. “I need a car to go to Maglič.”
The woman eventually began to nod, evidencing some level of comprehension, then went outside and shrieked something into the night. A few moments later an old man stepped inside out of the darkness, equally hunched and sporting a beard like Rip Van Winkle. I repeated my entreaty and the accompanying charade, but he, too, spoke no English. He did, however, pull out a cell phone and make a call, passing the phone to me.
The phone’s speaker crackled with a semblance of English. In short, the communication went something like this: “You need car? Give you car. 10 euro. 6:00 morning.”
I went back to the lodge and got what sleep I could.
⸻
The old man and his wife were waiting for me at 6:00 am, along with a brutalized mid-70s Volkswagen Golf, so dented and scuffed it looked like it had probably seen action in the Balkan wars. The old man began giving me a tour of the vehicle.
Woefully, I realized the car was probably a stick shift. This wasn’t ideal. I knew how to drive stick on a theoretical level from riding motorcycles, but had never owned (or even driven) a car with a manual transmission.
But hell, how hard could it be? This was my only chance at the mountain, and there was no way I was going to get another car in time. So I listened to the old man’s rental schpeel.
The car had several peculiarities. First was the way one opened the door. The old man bent down, then shouldered the driver’s side door of the car like a mini-NFL linebacker. Upon impact, the door cocked inwards slightly. Then he reached down to the bottom of the doorframe, grabbed the lip poking out, and lifted up and out, prying the door open.
“Eh?” he said expectantly, gesturing. “Eh?”
He hammer-fisted the door closed and repeated the procedure. I memorized the process, like studying a sequence in high school chemistry, and gave him a thumbs up. Hit door. Reach down to bottom edge. Lif up. Pull out. Simple.
A piece of the driver’s side floorboard was also missing, so you could see through to the ground like you were driving Fred Flintstone's car. The windshield was nearly-spidered, and the key could only be inserted in the ignition in such a nuanced way that it felt more like jimmying a lock than starting a car.
Worst of all, the shifter had no knob. Instead, it ended in a broken piece of the metal stick that someone had wrapped duct tape around. Points of metal still poked out, so you had to gingerly grip it with a few fingers, like you were holding a pencil, to avoid lacerating your palm. To make matters worse, this lack of a knob meant there was no diagram indicating gear positions. This wouldn’t have been a problem for anyone who drove stick regularly. For me, it was a bit tricky.
After more pantomiming, the old man also indicated that if the car sat for more than a couple of hours it probably wouldn’t start without a push, but the road down from the base of the peak was so steep I’d be able to pop the clutch and start it by myself on my way down.
With this somewhat comforting knowledge in my brain (I didn’t relish the idea of being stranded 20 kilometers up the mountain), I packed myself into the Golf and the old man jumped behind the bumper and pushed. I jammed in the clutch pedal, pinched the broken shifter, and slotted her into second, letting out the clutch. She turned over.
Grinning like a fool, I went back down to first and began clunking my way up the rugged mountain road leading 20 klicks to the trailhead.
This isn’t going to be so bad.
⸻
In fact, it was quite bad. Save for perhaps a unicycle, this bite-sized Golf was the worst possible vehicle for navigating this 4WD road. Its tires were nearly bald, suspension non-existent, and the road was perilously steep and rugged, the dirt pitted and pocked with craters like the skin of a smallpox survivor. I jerked the car between first and second, stalling and starting, stalling and starting, navigating around potholes that could’ve swallowed the little Golf whole.
Staying on the road wasn’t just a priority because of the shoddy car and its bald tires, though. Sutjeska National Park was supposed to be free of mines, but in Bosnia, a country with over six million active land mines, you could never be sure.
I’d met a man in a bar in Sarajevo the week before who’d evacuated during the war, returning to his home shortly after the Dayton Accords in 1995. His brother had been trimming a tree in their backyard in 2008 and stepped on a landmine, obliterating his leg to the upper thigh. They eventually learned that half a dozen mines had been planted around their two-acre property during the war.
In this little VW, it really wouldn’t do to go toying with any landmines. The car already looked like someone could throw a rock at it and it’d collapse into a heap of spare parts. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if I drove over a mine. I’d queried the old man about mines before I left, but he’d merely shaken his head. I didn't know if this meant, “No. There aren’t landmines,” or “No. Don't go off the road,” or “No. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”In any case, there was essentially nowhere else to drive, the left side of the road was frequently a sheer cliff, the right sloping upward into crumbling rock faces.
It was on one of these sheer sections that I noticed an SUV charging up the hill behind me. It was a bulky, ruggedized thing, quickly muscling over potholes that I’d taken minutes to navigate.
Unfortunately, eyeing the SUV in the rearview led me to lose focus, and I stalled the car again. I disengaged the transmission, turned her back over, and tried to get rolling again. Clunk. Again. Clunk. The SUV was stopped directly behind me now, and I could see two scowling men, wearing some kind of military dress, glaring at me and jerking their hands for me to get out of the way.
The road was only a few meters wide, there was no way around on either side. Again I eased out the clutch, pressing on the gas. Clunk. Again. Clunk. An ominous black smoke was now seeping from beneath my hood, and in the rearview, I could see the SUV door open.
The next thing I knew, the air erupted with rapid booms.
As someone who isn’t particularly gun-savvy, I had no idea what was happening. It sounded like several earthquakes and bombs going off in rapid succession. I jerked my head and saw the driver of the SUV standing in the open door, holding what looked like an AK-47 (based on my Call of Duty experience) in the crook of his arm. No earthquake, just half-a-dozen rounds shot up in the air. Small comfort.
He let off another burst, yelling the Serbian equivalent of “FUCKING MOVE!”
He wasn’t shooting at me, the rifle was angled high in the air. He was just pissed off, but that logic didn’t cross my brain at the moment. All I could think of were scenes from Behind Enemy Lines. I hunched down in the tiny little Golf and worked the clutch and ignition in rapid succession, starting the car and stalling it again, freaked beyond existence, with no time worry about the black smoke billowing out of the hood or the tortured battery.
OK. Let’s start over. I pinched the stick and wiggled it into neutral. Then I put it in first again.
It dawned on me.
In my nervousness (and the lack of a diagram on the knob), I’d been trying to start the car in third gear, not first. I’d been moving the shifter directly up, not left and then up. Thus enlightened, I put the Golf into first, properly this time. I let out the clutch and gave it gas. The car fired up instantly. I rocketed up another 100 meters, potholes be damned, until the road widened and I found a pullout. The SUV roared past, but I kept my eyes glued to the steering wheel, too petrified to look over.
A few kilometers further up the road, I passed the SUV parked on the shoulder. The two men in military fatigues were dumping large trash bags into a ditch a few meters off the road. It was probably nothing, but it didn’t seem smart to stop and investigate.
So I continued on up the road.
When I shared this tale with my friends here at Dead Foot, everyone felt it was unfinished. I think they were right. After all, if you’re writing a story about going to hike up a mountain, you don’t stop the story before you make it to the mountain, right?
So I could tell you about how I got to the base of the mountain. I could tell you how I scrambled up to the top, clinging to via ferrata chains and clinging to soggy tussocks of thick alpine grass. I could talk about how, after summiting, I took the long route down the eastern slopes of the peak, crossing the border into Montenegro and making a circuitous 30-kilometer loop to get back to the car.
But honestly, I don’t remember much about all that. Nor was it important.
The mountain was a mountain, the trail a trail. What I remember is the car, and I remember driving it to the base. I remember jamming the car into third gear when I thought I was putting it into first, stalling it. I remember doing that over and over and over and over again, until black smoke was billowing out of the engine.
What’s the lesson here? I’m not sure.
Maybe the lesson is that when you’re in a high-intensity situation, where speed seems like the best option, in fact slowing down might be exactly what you need. Maybe it’s that the journey sometimes ends up being more memorable than the destination. Maybe it’s that poor planning is often the catalyst for the best adventures.
All I know is that these days, I don’t much mind driving stick.
Owen Clarke is a freelance journalist, motorcyclist, and mountaineer, and the founder of this publication. You can find his work on his website.
