Border Runner

Restarting, "Peacemonger" a year later.

When I come to, I realize that I’m running across the Serbian Border for the second time in one weekend. One time at night when I had to chase down a Serbian Coca-Cola Truck to hitch a ride back to the capital of Kosovo, and one time during the day, on the border of Bulgaria and Serbia, because I really had to pee.

The tarmac stretched out, long and hot before me. By this point in my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I have a learned many things. One of the most important of which is- I know how to ride on busses for long periods of time. Part and parcel of knowing how to ride on busses for long periods of time, is knowing exactly when you will have to pee, and if an opportunity does not present itself- you make an opportunity. Travel teaches one to live in the moment, and balk at stage fright.

A group of Serbian border guards had come out of the customs booth, where I had just been questioned. Around fifty Bulgarian passengers stood with the border guards. As I looked back, I wondered what it was that had propelled me so quickly towards the shack at the other end of the border which had a duct taped sign that proclaimed, “Tualet.” It was either that I was afraid of being shot by the Serbians or that I really had to pee. This would be something that I had to figure out, after I relieved myself.
I swung around the doorway to the bathroom finding a sign demanding fifty Dinar for entrance. I slapped fifty euro-cents down on the table and for a moment, enjoyed being alone.

***

I thought about the first time I had run across the Serbian Border. I bought a bus ticket from Gjakova Kosovo to Vienna Austria. When I got on the bus, the driver looked at my passport and noticed I had a lot of stamps from Kosovo. His eyes widened considerably.

“Do you have an Albanian passport?” He asked.
“No,” I said, smiling broadly, as if maybe, if I made him like me enough, he could change the international conflict what had just three months earlier, led to the customs station I was passing through to be fire bombed and bull-dozed by Serbian activists. I’ve smiled my way out of worse situations than this, I thought to myself.
He handed me back my passport and said, “I give you a 75% chance that you make it through.” For some reason, I thought of the scene in Star Wars where the lady in the cream colored shawl tells them about the exhaust port that they have to hit with a photon torpedo in order to blow up the Death Star. Everyone claims that it’s impossible, but Luke used to nail wamprats in his T-16 back home, so he has faith. I had faith that I would make it through the Serbian border... And blow up the Death Star.

Night has fallen long before the bus had approached the border crossing. Because it was previously destroyed, this border was heavily fortified. Trucks parked along the sides of the roads were being searched thoroughly by teams of Serbian Border guards with dogs. My passport felt red hot in my hand. Having an American passport with 20+ Kosovo stamps in it at the *Serbian\Kosovar Border Crossing is like having a copy of Penthouse at the Vatican, it’s not going to win you any friends.

As the lights came on in the bus for us to be inspected, I realized that my palms were drenched in sweat. I was very far from the capital city of Kosovo. If I was kicked off the bus I would likely be sleeping in a field on the border of Serbia. As the border guard approached, I handed him my drivers license, as the Kosovar bus driver instructed me to do. The Serbian official looked me up and down. I smiled, these are not the droids you’re looking for.

“Passport.” He said in heavily accented English. I handed him my passport, thinking of the pages and pages of Kosovo stamps decorating the pages. I still had hope that maybe they would look at the one page without any Kosovo stamps on it. After a moment the guard returned with two other guards.

“Eric, American!” One yelled. The jig was up. When I saw the other two border guards with him, I wondered briefly if they thought I was going to give them any trouble**. They brought me over to a booth and questioned me about the Kosovo stamps. I spoke to a man in a box with a computer in front of him. He smoked a cigarette and looked at me as if I had just woke him up from the best dream.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I pleaded, thinking about how many Euro I had in my wallet, and trying to figure out an appropriate number for a bribe.
“No,” he said blankly sucking on his cigarette.
“So, I can’t go through the border at all?” I said, raising a saucy eyebrow.
“No.”
“And there are no busses going back to Prishtina?”I began pleading, my eyebrow returning to it's normal position.
“I don’t know.”
“So, what am I supposed to do?” I asked finally- seeing that he was not interested in my lightly insinuated bribery.
“I don’t know. Goodbye please.” He said, waving me away like an American fly.


I collected my enormous backpack and stood there trying to figure out what to do next. One of the things that you get used to being an American abroad is being judged by the actions of your military and your celebrities. Rather than being, say, an Austrian abroad who would be surely judged off of the quality of Red Bull, and the merits of Flugtag.

I stood, still jittery and wild eyed after getting tossed out on my ear in the middle of the night in the middle of no where. I wondered what my friends back in the states were up to. Then I wondered where I would spend the night.

Then I saw it. Pulling away from the Kosovar customs station like the last chopper out of Vietnam. A Coca-Cola truck. It was like when Han Solo flys in and shoots Darth Vader's tie-fighter out of the sky. But first I had to catch it.

I ran through the dark trenches on the side of the road, dodging teams of border guards searching trucks. Blinded by the floodlights of the customs booth, I tried to keep my eyes on the form of the Coke truck which was slowly pulling away. I will not sleep in a field tonight, I thought. I ran faster than I ever thought I could, and resolved that I would beg the driver more pathetically than I ever assumed was possible. My enormous pack jounced from side to side, threatening to throw me into a ditch or into a group of Serbian police.

When I finally caught up to the Coke truck, I clamped onto the side of it and started yelling in a mix of good English, polite Albanian, and absolutely terrible Serbo-Croatian- “LET ME IN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I’LL PAY YOU ANYTHING!!!!” The Kosovar border guards were yelling at me for some reason, I assumed that I had dropped something from my bag. Whatever it was, they could have it.

Somehow the point got across, and the driver let me into his truck. I sat clutching my enormous bag, like a big wet dog on my lap. Just then I realized that the Border guards were yelling, because I never checked back into the Kosovo border. People get arrested for that. I just accidently ran right through a border I thought and waited on pins and needles for sirens, none came.

After a few minutes I began chatting with the driver on the way back to the capital of Kosovo. He was twenty-three, a Serbian, a truck driver. His English and my Serbo-Croatian were not enough to get very far. I looked into the back of the truck to notice a small bed.
“Sleep here?” I asked placing a hand on it.
“Da.” He said scowling and nodding.
“Work, hard? Difficult?” I asked.
“Da… Yes.” He said.
“Respect.” I said, knowing that it’s a generally understood and used word through out the Balkans.
“It’s nothing. Thank you.”
“Thank you.” I said.
We didn’t talk much for the rest of the ride. He dropped me off. I tried to thank him in Serbo-Croatian, which didn’t seem to work. And he drove off. I had to find somewhere to sleep that night.

***

And then I finished peeing and had to face the bus load of Bulgarians and Serbians that I had inconvenienced considerably with my thimble sized bladder. I walked out of the bathroom to see that the bus had pulled up, directly outside of the door. Everyone in the bus was staring at me. They were accompanied by several border guards. I sheepishly took my seat on the bus again. Needless to say, I was relieved*** to have some place to call my own for a bit.


I’ve gotten really good at riding on busses in my time in the Peace Corps. The other thing that you have to be good at, is staring out the window for long periods of time, thinking about nothing… and everything.


If given enough time staring out a window at the passing countryside, everything becomes allegorical of your past, present, and future. That cloud hushing by in the upper stratosphere, a metaphor for the reckless abandon of your teenage years. The crumbling building in the distance, a bittersweet reminder of the fact that all things must come to an end. The Serbian gas station, a sobering realization about the connection between consumerism and pizza flavored snack foods. You are, at this point, hallucinating from boredom. But, as they say, life happens in the cracks. Between the slabs of concrete where you see a flower growing, or between the trailers and the start of the film, where you realize that you have forgotten what movie you went to see any way. For me, those cracks are bus rides. This is where my life happens now.


A year and a half has passed. I just traveled out of country for the first time. I rode on a lot of busses. I think I’m ready to talk about what happened this last year and a half.

Between the 10th post "Munich" and this post a 15 months have passed. And a good deal of my experiences have been recorded in Live Theatre Blog, some of which I will redux here. From now on I will consider "Peacemonger" as "Live Theatre Blog; The Blog." Apologies for any confusion. I'm just not the best at blogging.





*Here’s some quick background. Kosovo considers itself a country independent from Serbia which is largely ethnically Albanian. America agreed with them during the collapse of Yugoslavia. In the late 1990s we bombed the Serbian Capital, and supported the development of Kosovo as an independent country. To this day there is a statue of Bill Clinton in the Capital city of Prishtina. AKA Kosovo=America, YAY! Serbia=America, BOO!

**Every time I’m at a border crossing, I busy myself with fantasies of being Jason Bourne. If I ever have any trouble, I have the entire situation worked out in my mind, it goes thusly:

Throw my passport at the guard in front of me.
Throat chop to the one on the right.
Groin kick to the one on the left while removing his baton.
Whirlwind baton attack on the group, knocking them to the floor.
As the one on the right falls, I’ll retrieve his gun from his holster and stand there-
Looking awesome.

***Hehe...