GJIROKASTËR, ALBANIA—
One fell into the coffee. She died. I watched.
To avoid a repeat, the other I rescued from a glass of wine. I scooped her out and put her on the table. She was dying, I thought. I watched as she slowly dragged her wine-soaked body across the wood. I got up to pay the bill. When I returned minutes later, I was amazed: She had dragged herself a foot away to the base of the wine glass and was beginning the ascent for more.
The little ol’ bee was going to get one more drink even in defiance of death.
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I sat and watched this marvel of nature: the bee, having had a taste of wine, was going to do the impossible and drag her dying self up the difficult contours of the glass all the way back to that sea of red for just one more.
My mind, weary from being alert to drones, spies, and missiles, was not happy about confronting the sharp twisting angles.
I am in a stone city on a mountain in southern Albania, resting and getting stronger for the war ahead, after four years of the war before in Ukraine.
I spent all summer in Portugal, France, the UK, and Albania. In the first three, while making sense of the war I had seen, I was busy meeting people and strategizing for the defense of the West. Here in Albania, in relative isolation, the mission has been first to heal thyself.
All summer I went running each morning—on Portuguese beaches, along the River Thames, laps in the Tuileries of Paris, through Yorkshire fields, on Normandy beaches. I found a stride, got faster, was making sense of war memories.
The whole prospect was dizzying and terrifying—because, well, why?## Because it was so beautiful and the war is so horrible? Because
a panorama opens the soul to possibility, and right now possibilities are terrifying?
Gjirokastër, about 20 miles from Greece, promised to be a peaceful hamlet: its centuries-old stone buildings nestled on the side of a mountain. The houses are stacked so steeply that a street at one level runs past the rooftops of the level below. The lanes are cobbled and narrow and they turn constantly, so you cannot see where you are going or where you have come from.
Walking up, the road tilts into your face. Walking down, it falls away and the whole valley opens underneath you at once. You hear a car or a motorbike and think it’s coming your way, so put your back against the wall on a narrow lane only to realize the vehicle is on a lane above your head or below your feet. Ismail Kadare, who was born here, wrote of a city that looked as if it had been thrown up in a moment of madness and never quite settled.
Pushed to the brink of physical exhaustion, in a beguiling, confusing setting, I could not manage the war memories and the weight of what we still must do while also running up the steep paths.
So instead of running, I decided to jump rope at 6:30am each morning, before retreating to the cool quiet confines of Bizant, my Byzantine-era guest house, to write, read, strategize, and then to a café in the evening. I had found a safe routine. And I was increasing my reps and speed. All was going well.
**Then my jump rope broke. **
Damn it. I had made great progress with working out all summer. If I wanted to keep it up, I was going to have to face the hills, and in the heat, with daily temps above 90.
That evening I went to the café called Bon Appétit, in Gjirokastër’s “bazaar,” or hilltop town center. A seven minute walk up the steep road from my guest house, it was a
At Bon Appétit, Mihal, the café owner, and his family, including the women cooking in the kitchen, are adept at connecting their guests. Mihal was passing around complimentary shots of homemade raki, and several of us from France, the UK, and the USA clinked glasses. One of the guests was Mark, a British entrepreneur, in Albania for a few weeks because it is outside the Schengen zone, which lets Americans and Brits stay a while without counting toward visa limits in the European Union.
Having recently completed the Welsh Ironman and in training to swim the English Channel, the Brit said he was running up the steep lanes beyond the town every morning.
Ah, I said, describing how my jump rope broke but how I wasn’t ready for the hills yet, neither physically nor mentally. “The war, and all,” I said.
“Come on, mate, you got to crack on,” he said. He challenged me to join him on morning runs up the steep stony lanes of Gjirokastër, where cars cannot tread, to the Ali Pasha aqueduct—memorialized in an 1848 Edward Lear painting—in the mountains above the stone city.
Emboldened by the raki—that’s the beauty of such a drink—I accepted the challenge, for 8am Monday.
Monday, 8am, with Mark running ahead and waiting at turning points in the twisty, steep route, with bemused locals shaking their heads, passing Germans steadily marching with poles, I with great struggle got to the top, to the viewpoint looking upon the Ali Pasha bridge and a little outdoor café in a farming family’s garden.
**The biggest challenge had been the mental one. **My mind, weary from being alert to drones, spies, and missiles, was not happy about confronting the sharp twisting angles; the perception-play of a road staring you in the nose on one side, amid crowded buildings in ever-narrowing alleyways; and on the other the vast open sweeping view of a river valley under a rocky massif through which Crusaders once trekked on their way to Jerusalem.
The whole prospect was dizzying and terrifying—because, well, why? Because it was so beautiful and the war is so horrible? Because a panorama opens the soul to possibility, and right now possibilities are terrifying? Let me just jump rope in an enclosed stone courtyard and then retreat to my room and at night to a café.
As the climb got steeper, the memories became more painful.
But I had come here precisely to strengthen myself.
Throughout that week, I met Mark’s challenge and joined him for the running trek. As he was returning to the UK, he gave me as motivation his copy of Bear Grylls's autobiography, , signed by the ninety-year-old aunt who gave it to him after the Ironman. “Read this, and crack on,” he said.
And so, I began to go up the mountain alone. Which forced me to confront the demons and fears I had been able to ignore in more forgiving settings. The September heat was still meltingly brutal for my Irish soul, so by 7am I had to be moving up the lonely mountain lanes.
It was frequently not a pretty sight and always a very ghastly sound. A few times, locals would pop out of their houses, standing above me in doorways, below me in window bays, and watch and a few of them made hand signals that clearly said, “Take it easy, slow down. Why do you try to run?” They could hear me struggling to breathe, see me struggling to stay upright.
“Training,” I said, gasping for air through the asthmatic lungs. And by hook and by crook and with a lot of stumbling and moments of thinking well this was a dumb idea, I made up the last uphill stretch—more barren, houses spread out, more lonesome, more terrifying, up to a sign where I knew I’d find level ground and relief: Ali Pasha Bridge this way.
Then as though the previous 20 minutes had not occurred, with a wild energy I ran over and around little rocks on the flat path to the precipice overlooking the bridge.
Just a bit behind that precipice, a little away from the bridge, is a farm surrounded by a ten-foot stone wall. Through a gate, a garden. In the garden, a cafe. In a hut, a kitchen, with meatballs and rice balls and steaks and grape leaves and tzatziki. And on a table overlooking the mountain valley that holds the Ali Pasha aqueduct, a glass of wine.
On the rim of the glass, the wine-soaked bee.
On a Saturday, after reaching the top, I lingered with a book at the mountain café from breakfast into lunch. That is when the bees came.
I had watched her climb for five minutes. She, like me, had paused many times to find her mettle, or to face the decision to turn around, carry on, or stop and just be or not be. Now she teetered on the rim.
Was she deciding whether to take the plunge down to the wine far below? Had she regretted the climb? How was she to get down, either way?
Do I rescue her again? And what does it mean to rescue her? Put her back on the table? Drop her into the wine to give her a delicious, deadly last libation?
I did nothing, and one bee died in my coffee. I did something, and took a bee from her delight.
Then after probably 3 or 5 minutes of watching her get up the glass and hesitate, I realized I had work to do, my role in defending the West. She would have to make her own choice. She clearly had the mettle to defy odds and get to her goal. I had to run down the mountain.
Maybe she was resting, sure. Maybe she was undergoing a necessary personal challenge. Maybe she was neglecting the work of the hive. No matter—I could not stay to watch the theatre of a drunk bee trying to have just one more. Better to work on my goals than to meddle in another plane of existence.
Still, when I subsequently got stuck on the mountain, I smile and think of that bee, dragging her dilapidated self slowly up and around the glass on the way to her wine.
*JP Lindsley, an American journalist based in Ukraine, is co-founder and editor-in-chief of UnderFire.News. *
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