isoglossia

“Hell Over Paradise” indeed

Last summer Magda begged me to send her to camp. Metal Camp. That’s correct, right here in little Slovenia you can attend Metal Camp for three furious thrash-metal head-bangin’ devil-shoutin’ blood-quaffin’ days in Tolmin, in the heart of Slovenia’s peaceful Julian Alps.

Sadly, last year’s event coincided with our trip to Greece, so I had to let Magda down. (In my defense, she was four months pregnant with what she claims is my child when Metal Camp convened). This year the event is coming nice and early in the summer, so anyone who has been considering a soothing visit to Slovenia’s cool, pristine Soča Valley should waste no time in booking for 24, 25, and 26 June. As of this writing, Slayer and Anthrax have been confirmed as headliners, and the list of supporting axe acts is impressive: Bastard Peels, Bleed In Vain, Bleeding Eyes, Bloodfeast, Brutart… And that’s just the B’s.

If you are unfamiliar with this genre of music, or need to brush up on Bach’s and Pagannini’s influence on Ozzy Osbourne, go here. Some intriguing pictures from last year’s festival can be seen here.

Such a bloodfeast doesn’t come cheap, of course. Still, we salute the organizers for holding prices down to 27,400 SIT, or €74, for a three-day ticket, which includes mysterious “fees” and three nights’ free camping. In true isogloss style, you can order tickets on-line in Slovene, English, German, and Italian. Dedicated headbangers should note that these on-line entries are collectible “ORIGINAL-TICKETS,” and that “All the other Presailers can only give you a computer-generated ticket.”

Last year it wasn’t the promise of a souvenir ticket or a Metal Camp mousepad, nor a glow-in-the-dark T-shirt that held such allure for Magda. It wasn’t even the idea of “aggressive, driving rhythms and highly amplified distorted guitars, generally with grandiose lyrics and virtuosic instrumentation.” No. Magda’s dearest wish was to take part in Metal Camp’s Bible-Throwing World Championship.

So, see you at Metal Camp! We’ll be the ones with the baby. Probably not the only ones.

The time was long overdue to change the header photo*. Originally I thought I would do so every month, but guess what? However, the snowy peaks of April/May’s photo were becoming increasingly antithetical to reality here. I played with many different ideas for an early-summer theme, but ultimately ice cream seemed like a good idea for June. Slovene sladoled = sweet + ice.

When I was very young my father used to take us out on summer afternoons for ice cream. This was as much to give our grandparents a break from the havoc of five small grandchildren as it was to give us a treat. We would walk along the rocky Maine coast to Perkin’s Cove, where each of us would consume one peppermint stick ice cream cone. Until my older sister learned to read and revealed that the world contained flavors other than peppermint stick.

The ice cream on the isogloss is fantastic. Soft-serve stuff in small stainless-steel bins, like Italian gelato. A little goes a long way, and the best stuff has flavors that are intense and delivered in an unctuous, creamy base. Our favorite place is a tiny booth on the main square called La Pinjola (pinenut). They claim to make all their own ice cream, and it is excellent. One of the many joys of going there is that you never know what flavors will be available, as they rotate on some sort of random basis.

I categorize ice cream into three classes: fruit flavors (my favorites); the chocolate spectrum (which to me includes coffee & nut flavors, as well as other more exotic ones that combine well with the chocolate palette); and flavors no one in their right mind would eat. These include such things as Red Bull®, Telebajski (Teletubbies), viski, Smarties®, and so on.

I consider ice cream’s most important attribute to be a quenching quality, and for this the fruit flavors enjoy a clear advantage. I can usually be perfectly happy with a standby like lemon, though I can also be swayed into ordering something like mango, papaya, limetta, raspberry, blood orange (oh, yes) etc. Also worth considering is the key combination: two scoops can deliver through synergy a joy that would be missing from either one in isolation (pear and pineapple, e.g.).

We have our favorites, but there is also an ever-growing list of flavors we want to try, either because they are enticing (After Eight® calls to Magda, zuppa inglese to me), mysterious (beli cvet, white flowers, intrigues me), or vile-sounding enough that they just need to be sampled purely for research’s sake (Red Bull®, čokoko).

La Pinjola is close enough to home that even on the hottest days we can take advantage of their banjice, little styrofoam tubs shaped like oversize gold ingots, into which the scoopgirls can pack a surprising amount of ice cream in whatever flavor combinations you can dream up. Sladoled na dom! Even in our freezer it maintains its soft creamy texture.

Magda is out with Adam now in the almost-June sunshine, and dammit I just know she’s eating ice cream as I type this. Maybe I can catch them…

*The reference to the header photo is now dated. To see the ice cream picture, go the header photo archive.

The acacia blossoms are passing. These fat ivory-colored swaths still hang from the trees like bloated white honeycombs, practically dripping sweetness, which is not lost on the bees. The Carniolan greys are kept very busy around these trees during the week of their fecundity, preparing a light-bodied, apple-juice-colored honey that works well with tea. Just before the acacias burst out we were treated to the grand spectacle of the horse-chestnuts with their towering pyramids of waxy conical blossoms. But both, signs of the sincerity of late spring, are now passing.

Now it’s full-on summer. Nearly hotter than is welcome, or definitely hotter if you are a baby. Adam, a December baby, seems a bit annoyed by all of this. What the hell? he seems to ask us beseechingly from the sweaty interior of his vozicek. It wasn’t like this when I got here…

30 degrees for several days running. The tomato plants wilt between waterings, and the Weed Garden passes through deepening shades of burnt-toast. Take that, you bastards! Blood-red poppies begin to appear, tentatively at first, surrounded by sycophantic hairy green pods that promise support once this summer thing is truly a done deal. We are in the days of hot Mediterranean skies spawning terrible stacked thunderheads. The days beat down with a threat, pink terrace tiles too hot to walk on, and the evenings evolve into a depthless deep-violet front of towering clouds out over Italy, or a sudden darkening of the windows before they shake in awe of the thunderstorm storming out of the hills to the north. The rain is violent and short-lived, leaves the air vibrating with the fight between hot and cool, but hot always wins out within hours.

It’s the time of asparagus, and of strawberries. Tiny apricots suddenly appear in the shops. Where I grew up these things, or wooden facsimiles of them, would be available year-round, but here the season truly is a season, so we eat them in surfeit while we can.

Ice cream is the thing, too. No one can get enough ice cream. Even the pigeons are eating ice cream, and well should they. The central square of Nova Gorica is a baking sheet with contested corridors of shade around the edges, and the pigeons have to hustle to stay out of the heat and out from under the heels of the hordes eating cones or tiny paper cups of apricot, strawberry, hazelnut in the tiny tight balls dispensed at every 100 meters.

The hills have yawned out their vast burden of genetic material that is pollen but that looks like goose down. The blizzards are past, the drifts of featherlike dust dispersing. The fruit tree flowers have faded, withered, and dropped so that we can eat the fruit they promised, and the grape vines and olive trees are stubbled with tiny orbs in pale green that make us think ahead to autumn.

Summer is here. Open the pool, already, city fathers.

Today Adam doubled his citizenship. It was an errand we’d been meaning to do for a long time now, but you know how errands get pushed back. Today was more or less a replay of our trip to Ljubljana back in March, during which he was declared Polish. Today this baby also got American.

It is not without ambivalence that we accomplished this task. Obviously, it would be foolish to deny a child the chance to be a citizen of a country to which he is entitled to be a citizen of (does this parse?), but lately neither of us have particularly felt that the U.S. has merited our infant’s endorsement. So we look to the future, specifically that future in which, for whatever reason, our son asks us, “why the hell didn’t you register me as a U.S. citizen?”

So, to forestall that one recriminatation of the legion we will no doubt hear in any case, we did.

Filling out the mountain of paperwork to obtain such a ruling was not a simple task, nor was it without comedy. We had had the packet since February, and the work of completing the forms over the last several days ranged from the comical (“honey, they want to know Adam’s occupation?” “Baby”; What’s his fax number?”) to the truly vexing if not impossible (list the day, month, year of every city you [the father] have ever lived in, domestic and foreign).

It appears that Poland and the U.S. are among the few countries, coincidentally, which continue to allow the dual-citizenship thing without making a lot of noise about it. I think that being able to claim the citizenship of both parents is a very fine thing, and wonder why more nations don’t follow the same line of thinking. I chafed greatly recently when a colleague of mine (Kansan) opined loudly that the U.S. should shut down the born-there = citizen policy. On some level, it bothers me that Adam’s having been born in Slovenia means exactly nothing to Slovenia.

Embassy Row was a mess when we got there. Both the U.S. and German embassies are making major changes to their security systems, so the entire block was cordoned off with rigid metal fencing that looked semi-permanent and a battalion of heavily riot-geared local police restricting pedestrian traffic. I love Ljubljana as a city, but negotiating the center and parking is daunting under the best of circumstances and this didn’t help. Still, the whole thing went smoothly, as did our corollary errand, which was getting Magda a visitor’s visa for our forecast summer trip to the New World. In fact, her visa required just a few hours’ wait, so we killed time wandering around LJ on an almost painfully beautiful late-spring day. Faux-Mexican food, ice cream, skirt shopping, and so on to make a nice day out in spite of the bureaucracy.

The results of this admittedly major excursion arrived in the dappled shade of a beer garden across from the U.S. embassy: Magda appeared with no notable delay bearing a Consular Record of Birth for the boy (“under the provisions of Section 2705 of Title 22…is proof of citizenship”) and her own visa for our U.S. visit. Total damage: perhaps 20 hours and $272. Well worth it.

We spent both Saturday and Sunday sitting by the river. Our place is a pleasant 15-minute stroll from it, through the ancient village of Solkan. A good place to relax when the weather gets hot, as the water is mostly snow-melt at this time of year, icy cold, and it cools the air around it for a remarkable distance.

The Soča, or Isonzo as it’s known in Italian and in dire ignominious military history, has its source high in the Julian Alps, where it emerges from a mountainside as a dramatic little waterfall. It winds its way southward, gathering volume and speed, providing livelihood nowadays in the form of white-water rafting on the snowmelt, canyoning when it abates a bit, bungee-jumping from its rare bridges, and what is said to be some pretty fine fly fishing for an endemic species of golden trout (which animal is featured on the superfluous 1-tolar coin). You’ve got your occasional Yugoslav-era hydroelectric project, too.

The Soča typically has a startling color which in the (26 glommed-together) photos above is a bit muted by the turgid snowmelt. After heavy rains in the Alps the river looks like most, coffee-colored or gray, but when the weather has been serene and a heavy snowpack is not dragging silt down its course, the river is an unbelievable deep opalescent turquoise color. Quite literally unbelievable, and if you’ve gotten one of our postcards of it you probably thought the photographer had monkeyed with the color saturation. I’ve been told that “nobody knows” exactly why it is that color, but I don’t buy it. I assume it comes from minerals dissolved from its limestone bed, but no one I’ve talked to has been willing to commit to this theory.

The Soča would seem to make a natural border between Slovenia and Italy, following as it does the artificial one on a parallel course for nearly its entire length from Austria to the Adriatic. It did play a large part in the Isonzo front, where the armies of Austria-Hungary and Italy faced off in a stalemate that cost over a million military casualties over the course of two and a half years which saw 11 pointless battles and one calamitous breakthrough, which threw the Italian army back nearly to Venice (which was worth holding despite sinking). The many villages dotted along the river were largely destroyed; no one knows how many civilian casualties were suffered. That Hemingway fellow got his famous wounds near Gorizia, just across from where we sat this weekend, and of course A Farewell to Arms is his description of what came to be known as the Disaster at Caporetto (or the Miracle of Caporetto, depending of course upon your viewpoint). The village of Caporetto, Kobarid in Slovene, was the rally point for the two largely German breakthrough forces that finally pushed the front out of the mountains, where it had been locked for three hot summers and two snowy winters, and on to the Friulian plain.

If you look at the hill in the picture above, you are looking at both Italy and Slovenia. The border runs right across it but does not descend to the river until a few kilometers further south, to the left. The hill is called Mount Sabotin, and on its summit are the ruins of a stone church destroyed in the war. Limestone letters 20 meters high read Naš Tito (Our Tito) below its peak on the southwest face. It’s possible that Adam was conceived there.