The Foreignist

My travelogue from our trip to Slovenia back in July (Balkan Road Trip: Part 2) has been used on SloveniaWelcomes.com, a travel website about Slovenia. I really like SLO, and I’ll give them up whenever I get the opportunity.

The hardest part of living in a foreign city for me is living in the city. Living in Dallas was no different. My need to be out in nature made it nearly impossible for me to be satisfied with living there. It’s nothing against Split or Dallas. Maybe if I had a cabin on Lake Fork or Tawakani things would have been different. I would just rather live in Arkansas where you’re never more than a few minutes drive from a mountain, river, forest, or lake.

I can remember that when I was kid, I spent hours with my friends skipping rocks across the pond in the woods across the street from my house. I couldn’t really do that in my yard or in the street in front of our house, because flying rocks have been banned from our civilized world (even in Arkansas). At the age when I spent so much time doing this, I remember reading where the main thing that dogs admired about men was ability to make objects like rocks and sticks fly (I think it was Buck in “Call of the Wild”).

After reading Wild at Heart last year, I am absolutely certain that my boys need to be throwing rocks - and a lot of them. It’s all part of being a boy. And my boys love it every time they get a chance to throw rocks, especially into the sea. It’s all about how far they can throw it, then how high. Then it’s trying to skip them (this is still in the experimental stages). Then it moves to how big of a rock can be thrown. Caleb (the 2-yr old) cries just about every time he has to stop throwing rocks when we need to leave. No amount of juice or candy can bribe him to stop throwing rocks. A few years ago, while I was fly-fishing on the Illinois River, Garrett (now 5) was downstream from me throwing rocks into the river. He did this for two solid hours. His grandparents were watching him, and it wore them out just watching how hard he was working toward his apparent goal of throwing every rock on the shore into the river.

It would be much easier for us just to let them stay in the house and watch DVD’s and play video games. Unfortunately, according to recent statistics, that’s typically what goes on here and in cities in the US. It’s much more convenient for the parents, and isn’t that what everything reduces down to these days? It’s a struggle against parent selfishness, and we don’t get out as much as we probably should. It’s important to get them away from TV, away from the drabness of man-made structures, away from all their toys - out into the open spaces where rocks are free to fly. I can’t give you a well-defined spiritual, psychological, or sociological reason why I feel this way. But when I see the looks on their faces and how much fun they are having, I know it’s important.

Croatia is still just getting started as a republic. The government institutions that existed before the 1990’s civil war were part of the Yugoslav government, not a Croatian national government. Needless to say, it has taken some time for the Croatian bureaucrats to figure out everything they need to be stifling via oppressive regulations. One activity that has been sporadically regulated is homebuilding. Squatters and land-owners building homes with no license, building permit, blueprints, or really any plan or idea how to build a house have caused their fair share of problems here.

Last year, the Sabor (Croatian parliament) passed a law that said houses that were built without a building permit could be demolished if huge fines were not paid or the house did not meet very stringent building regulations. The squatters were left with no recourse. As the government has investigated, they have found thousands of homes that fit these criteria. Many homes on the islands and along the coast have been destroyed in the past year. Many of them were not finished, but were being used. Many had been there for over ten years, but there is no such thing as common law here.

[Time-out for a story I was reminded of while reading the newspaper article mentioned below.] My friend Brandon Wood grew up on a farm in Newport, Arkansas. His dad a several fields around the White River. Some redneck came along a threw a couch into a strip of trees that lined one of the fields. It stayed there for seven years without anyone noticing it. After the seventh year, the Wood family received notice that they were being sued because this toothless redneck wanted them to stop farming his property. He explained how if you make improvements to a property and no one claims it, after seven years that property rightfully belongs to the person who made the improvements (according to common law). Obviously, furnishing the forest along the edge of the field qualified as an improvement to farmland. More obviously, the Woods retained that piece of property.

Back to my story about squatters in Croatia. In Friday’s Slobodna Dalmacija (Free Dalmatia), the newspaper here in Split, I read about a man who had built a weekend house without a permit on land he didn’t own. After a long court battle, the government came and flattened the house. I could NOT believe what I read after that. This whole thing was written in Croatian, so I’m giving you a very rough (the only kind I can give) translation into English. In protest of the government tearing down his weekend house, this guy goes to his full-time residence and burns it. In what universe does this make sense? The guy went from having two houses to living in the park, all in one afternoon. I was and still am mezmorized by this story. The guy was so proud of what he had done.

Now, more facts have come out. The house he burned was brand-spanking new. The government had built it for him to replace the house he had owned that was destroyed during the 90’s Balkan War. The irony here is that the governement wouldn’t have ever built him a new house if they had known about the weekend house. Only people who didn’t have any other home anywhere else in the former Yugoslavia were supposed to have their home replaced. But he did get a new house because the goverment didn’t know about the other house because it was built on someone else’s land without a license or permit.