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Herd Immunity
"Croatia, as a nation, doesn't seem to recognize how good they've got it and what it is about themselves that's so wonderful that other people will want." - Anthony Bourdain
Tuesday I finally began to venture out and reclaim some of my independence. Alan had gone back to Zagreb (where he and Iris lived for most of the year) for work for a few days and with Iris house-bound with the kids, I had to find other ways to keep myself occupied.
Iris' friend Adriana came over in the morning for a playdate with her two girls, and when the group migrated down to the beach, I saw an opportunity to strike out on my own. It felt good to stretch my legs on the walk into town, about fifteen minutes from the rocky shore where the kids were netting waterbugs and baby crawfish. Iris said they would be there at least a half hour, and if they weren't there when I returned I knew the way back to the house. I assured her I wouldn't be more than a half hour. I was gone an hour and a half.
Relieved to finally be moving at a pace that wasn't regulated by the shortest legs in the group, I kept walking until I reached Crikvenica's urban centre, a cement plaza on the waterfront bordered with souvenir and ice cream shops. I stopped in a local mini market to buy conditioner, toothpaste and a gift basket to give to my host family before I left, then I treated myself to a warm cheese borek (a flaky, baked pastry of stuffed phyllo dough) at the pekara on the corner before finally heading back toward the beach.
Two days ago I'd asked Alan and Iris about horseback riding in the area. It had been about a month since I'd last set foot in a stirrup and the old hankering was beginning to itch. I sensed an oncoming spiral into insanity if I didn't get back in the saddle soon. The Crikvenica Riviera, with its lush mountains, rushing crystal streams and meadows freckled with wildflowers constituted an idyllic opportunity for trail riding. Strangely, though, I hadn't seen a single horse since arriving here.
Iris knew of one place, a friend of the family in Tribalj. She called for me, and a time was set up on Monday for me to go and ride. Unfortunately on Monday it poured rain all day, so the appointment was pushed to Tuesday. The weather was perfect. It was torture to wait until the afternoon, but finally, after a hearty lunch of bean-and-barley soup with sausages, I was ready to go. Then, out of nowhere, the heavens opened up again.
"She wants to talk to you," Iris handed me the phone when the organizer of the ride called.
"English?" I confirmed with Iris, then brought the phone to my ear when she nodded. "Hello?"
"Hi there!" The voice on the other end of the line was warm and bright. "Sorry you're having such bad luck with the weather this week." By God, she speaks North American!
"Oh," I did a lame job of hiding my surprise. "That's okay. It's not so bad." I'd lost count of the number of similar apologies I'd received since I got here. Apparently used to being spoiled with winters that rarely dipped below freezing and summers of endless sunshine, Croatians, I'd learned, thought it downright inadmissible to go anywhere or do anything if there was even the hint of an overcast sky. "We think we would like to go here," I'd heard over and over again, "but I don't know because of the weather." "Tomorrow maybe we will do that, but the weather..." Coming from the Great Ontarian Deepfreeze of 2014, I was having trouble communicating the fact that seventy degrees with a sprinkling of rain here and there was paradise for me.
The organizer told me she couldn't say for sure what the weather was going to do; I could try rescheduling for tomorrow or the next day, or I could give it a shot now. Ultimately it was up to me.
I glanced out the window. The rain had stopped for the moment, and the sun was pushing feebly at the back of the cloud cover. There was no telling what tomorrow would bring. I told her I would still like to try for today if that was okay. I'd ridden in the rain before, I assured her. It didn't bother me.
When I arrived at the farm, called Audax (Latin for "courage"), the sun had broken through and was highlighting the tree canopy in gold. "Good call on the weather!" Rebecca, the organizer and owner of the farm raised a palm to the sky.
"Are you...English?" I couldn't resist asking as I shook her hand. Her pronunciation tipped on the edge of an accent, but her handle on North American grammar and slang was flawless.
"Swedish," she corrected with an open smile, "but I lived in California for many years while I was getting my degree in psychology and linguistics from UCLA." She'd started Audax in 2012, she told me, as a therapeutic riding program and non-profit rescue centre for abused horses. Entirely funded by parental contributions, local sponsors, donations and fund-raising events, Audax was the only organization of its kind in this part of Croatia. With the economy still reeling from the war of 1991-1995, almost no one owned horses anymore, and those who did could rarely afford to keep them in good conditions. Rebecca had found her first three horses living in a WWII bunker, knee-deep in their own urine and feces and riddled with laminitis and bronchitis. The owner wanted an exorbitant amount of money for them, which Rebecca of course refused since she would have to pay twice as much in vet bills once she got them home, if they lived. For five months she fought for them, until one day, after repeated failed attempts to sell them, the owner called Rebecca and told her to come pick them up or they were going to slaughter.
You could tell by looking at them that the horses, like the country they were in, had been through a lot. Many of them showed signs of kissing spine and clubbed feet from overgrown hooves. These were chronic problems resulting from years of neglect and would likely never go away, but otherwise, thanks to Rebecca, they were healthy as could be.
"That's a sad story," Rebecca said, pointing to a big chestnut in the paddock with a distended broodmare gut. "She used to be a police horse. Outstanding bloodlines. Then she was sent to a stud farm with hundreds of other horses, and after that sold to a guy who kept her alone in a field for years. She got depressed and stopped eating and sleeping. Eventually a vet said the man had to either get her a companion or sell her, or she would die."
Inwardly, I shied away from the impulse to relate the mare's story to my own. Horses were herd animals. They couldn't survive without their families. Given my innate connection with them and the way I felt coming to my relatives in Croatia after weeks of total solitude, I had to wonder about myself.
"Our horses are not robots," I was shaken from my thoughts by Rebecca's voice. "They're rescues. They don't have the nose-to-tail autopilot gear most public trail horses do, but we're trying to retrain them, so we ride them very gently and with a light contact." Everything here costs the same as it does in the rest of Europe, but with the ongoing recession, Croatians generally only make one tenth of the salary. Also, there was no government funding for small NPO's. Tourism, Rebecca explained, was Audax's only hope for survival.
Gesturing to the short line of horses ground-tied along the fence, Rebecca said I could take my pick. There was a black arab who'd only come to them a week ago and was barely green-broke. She looked flighty and unsure of herself in her new surroundings. The next horse was a stocky halflinger with a face full of mischief. Still suffering pony-centric nightmares from a terror of a halflinger I'd ridden when I was eight, I moved on to the last horse, a leggy bay mare standing around 16 hands with a teardrop-shaped star between her eyes. We sized each other up. She turned her head and fixed me with the level gaze of the herd's alpha mare. There was a steadiness about her that was almost regal, a competence and fearlessness that assured me I would be safe with her. "What's her name?" I asked, approaching the mare and breathing into her nostrils - a horse's hello.
"Reina," Rebecca replied. "It means 'queen' in German."
I didn't start to regret choosing the tallest horse until I was flattened against her neck getting bushwhacked by low-hanging branches and overgrown trails. The stock saddle I was riding in was a patchwork of synthetic skirts and leather stirrups with mismatched irons. Given that there wasn't a single tack shop in the area, the only option for buying equipment, short of driving to Austria or Slovenia, was the internet.
As we rode, Rebecca kept twisting in the saddle to check with the other girl who was with us, whom I gathered was a student of hers. I didn't know what she was asking since she was speaking Croatian, but it was starting to make me nervous. "Uh, Rebecca?" I inquired finally. "Do you know where you're going?"
Her answer was not exactly direct. She explained that as a single mother running an organization, she didn't get much time to ride herself. She'd been out this way before, but the landscape changed from season to season, and she didn't recognize it. Glancing around at the sloping meadow we were in, belly-deep in grass and wildflowers and surrounded by dense woodland and the mountains beyond that, I believed it, and I didn't relish the idea of getting lost out here. Curious, I asked what kind of wildlife they had. Rebecca replied that the wild boar were pretty much their biggest pests, but the horses smelled them a mile away and made it easy to avoid them. Besides that they also had deer, wolves and European Brown bears. I appreciated her specificity. When I'd asked Snjezana what kind of bears they had the other day, she'd responded with a shrug and a less-than-helpful, "I don't know. The normal kind."
We rode around the Tribalj reservoir and through the remains of a medieval village with stone farmhouses and still-functional water wells lining the road. From there we walked alongside a river in the woods until we came to an old grain mill complete with a wooden waterwheel. Perched on its grassy hillock across a drawbridge over the stream, it looked like something out of a fairytale. All at once I found myself marvelling at the fact that Rebecca's was the only public riding resource in the area. If only people knew, I thought, they would flock here.
On the way back Rebecca asked what I'd studied in University. "English Literature and Creative Writing," I replied.
"Ah, nice!" Rebecca enthused, one of the first people I'd met who actually approved. "So will you be blogging on this trip?"
"Duh," I said, making her laugh.
"Does a horse like apples?" She concurred.
One of the banes of being a travel writer, as Anthony Bourdain says, is that we destroy what we love. One of the things I love most about Croatia is its virginity. Compared to places like Rome and Venice, the vast majority of the country is virtually untouched by tourism. Looking around at Croatia's sheer beauty, incredible food and unmatched hospitality, this fact blew my mind over and over again. There was no one here! I had only come because I'd seen a No Reservations episode featuring Croatia as the next big travel destination, and maybe now my blog will inspire a few more people to take the leap, people who will then proceed to rave about the pristine coastlines and rich cultural history in their own publications, and so on and so forth until the tourism industry snowballs and there is a Made-in-China, "I love Crikvenica" T-shirt shop on every corner and McCafe cups choking the beaches. Most of the time I would consider this a bad thing. Maybe not so, in this case. Rebecca was trying to get a fledgling tourism business started to keep her organization afloat. Maybe I could help.
We kept riding until I felt like turning back, and at the end of it Rebecca gave me two hours for the price of one.
I got back to Crikvenica just in time for a bedtime snack with the family. "So how did you like the riding?" Iris asked over a plate of olives, bread, raw bacon and fresh cheese with olive oil. I told her I was really glad I went, that the weather had been wonderful and Rebecca even more accommodating. "She used to be married to someone who lived near us," Iris told me.
I raised my eyebrows. "Oh?"
Snjezana nodded from her spot on the couch. "Yes," she said. "She is our cousin!"
Author's Note: Croatia's ongoing recession has brought financial hardship to those who are most vulnerable: special needs children. There are few resources available to their families, and in rural areas there are virtually no therapeutic services available. Besides providing a sanctuary for abused and neglected horses, Audax is currently in the process of hiring long-term unemployed and older individuals through government sponsors, and also developing a program for disadvantaged youth (Romani kids, children in orphanages and children from abusive or psycho-socially challenged homes). If you don't have the funds to donate, I highly recommend a trail ride at Audax if you are ever in the Crikvenica Riviera region of Croatia. I never gave Rebecca the address to my blog, so she will have no way of knowing about this post. This is my way of paying it forward for Tom and Cynthia in Rome.
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