Hills Like White Elephants

Reading Hemingway a long time ago, I could not buy his description of rolling hills as white elephants.

After all, hills do not stand on four feet, and if asleep, then how many sleeping elephants does one see through their lifetime? To this day, I personally have not seen any. Do they sleep standing up - like horses? Or do they bend their feet and stretch over the land?

I did not know.

Regardless, the hills stretched to all directions. They stretched and stretched and stretched into mountains with white tops and stretched into rolling fields and stretched and stretched like - well, white elephants.

We made our way through them, following the curves of the road. Across the whitened bellies of the elephants lay Austria. We were on the southern border of the Czech Republic, but snow still lay in patches across the shadows of the forest.

"It still snowed here last week," said Shtepanik, shifting the gears with his right hand. He snapped the car into 2nd; it nudged like a faithful horse, and began to rip into the hillside. However, this was not an old Shkoda, nor an Opel or a Moskvich. We were driving a shiny blue Passat. Driving to a remote village in the southwest Czech countryside.

If Steve Jobs would run a farm, this would be it.

"I came across this place eleven years ago," Shtepanik said, looking over the road. "And since then, my life has been nothing but trouble."
Clean and freshly shaved, he was not the image of a local farmer I had in mind prior to our meeting. In fact, there was something cosmopolitan about his nature - the gray streaks in his slightly disheveled hair, the silent schoolboy smirk beneath his clumpy nose - an air of a boy playing in the sandbox, knowing that school is in session.

Indeed, my instincts were not far off. Born in Czechoslovakia, Shtepanik fled over the border into Germany at the age of 20. There, he became a travel photographer, and as I learned, adopted his last name basis. Shtepanik, after all, was only his last name.

"They would call me all the time - Shtepanik, go there, take pictures of that, then go there, then there... Shtepanik, we need you in China or Istanbul or Paris..."
"Not such a bad life to lead, no?" I interjected.
"No, not at all - but one is always moving, in the homes of others, stuck in his lens, never in a home of his own." He paused.
I kept silent. In the distance, a cluster of rooftops appeared above a hillside. They exhaled chimney smoke into the sky, looked over the blue spec of our car, curving left and right along the road, and then disappeared back into the hills.

“I was in Austria then, doing a shoot,” Shtepanik spoke suddenly. I shifted my glance back in his direction.
“For two weeks it rained. All of Austria was under a thick gray cloud, and there was nowhere to go. We simply had to wait. And so we waited. Each day sitting in our trailers, playing cards, watching flies circle around our heads. And then I just couldn’t take it. After two weeks, I split. I knew the magazine would probably raise hell, but I didn’t care. I just had to get out of there, you know?”
He sent a quick glance my way, and I nodded in agreement.
“So, I was trying to get back to Germany through Czechoslovakia – anywhere, just to get away from this rain. I had papers back then, so the border police let me cross from Austria.”
Shtepanik suddenly paused. We were coming over another hill. Ahead, the country stretched across, an occasional line of wires black against the green of the fields – like a misplaced scar on the skin of the earth. Over the surrounding mountains, the sun was hiding amidst a group of clouds.

“Just like that, it was,” Shtepanik suddenly exclaimed, losing his reserve. “I was driving along a road like this one, trying simply to see in that god forsaken rain, when all of a sudden, the mountains came out of the fog – far, far away. Over them, the clouds were breaking, and there was a bright, bright sun. So bright that I almost lost my sense of direction on the road.
Either way, I remember I pulled over and got out of the car. There I stood, simply watching the sun excavate its way out of the rain. And so I decided right there and then – it wasn’t a decision, really – a simple truth… it suddenly seemed crystal clear to me that I must go where the sun is shining on the fields. I could not see it from where I was standing, but knew then that those sunrays had to find a place somewhere below. And so I got into my car and started chasing them. It was really the most spontaneous thing I’ve done up to that point, and probably since. And the most lethal.”
Shtepanik’s voice trailed off. Our thoughts went their separate ways, and the car grew quiet, only the occasional pebble bouncing off the frame of the car.
“So, did you find them?” I asked after a prolonged silence.
“What?” Shtepanik asked, seemingly somewhere else.
“The rays – did you track them?”
“Oh,” Shtepanik paused, “of course.” A silent smirk again set across his face. “They landed right over there.”
“Where?”
“Right over there,” he said, pointing to a tiny cluster of houses ahead of us. A road post flashed past us.
“Slunecna?” I asked.
Shtepanik nodded. “That’s what the village was called.”
“Like ‘slunecko’ in Czech?” I asked, still attempting to make sense of it.
Shtepanik again nodded. “That’s right – slunecko. Or in English –”
“The sun” I said to myself.
Shtepanik's face stretched in a grin.

…to be continued...

Coda

"“In nine months a man can think a lot of thoughts, from the height of philosophical conjecture to the most abject longing for a bowl of soup... And if at the same time he's a bit of an adventurer, he could have experiences that might interest other people, and his random account would read something like this..."

So read the words of Ernesto Che Guevara, in his memoir "“Motorcycle Diaries."

Like an onslaught of waves, time has a way of polishing even the most distinct stone into a pebble identical to the ones around it. So it goes with days. Days flow in, days flow out. Small wonders begin to take their place in the daily routine. Daily inspirations begin to turn into weekly. Weekly into monthly.

Fortunately that's not what is happening here.

If anything, the days have been utterly unselfish in their inspirations. And like a mad sailor coming upon an island full of treasures, I have been keeping them to myself. For that, I apologize.

So, visit again. And with weather permitting, I should be able to pull out chest or two.
I hope they will sparkle as much in your sun as in mine.

Until then,
-V