June 27, 2005: Hvar Island

Waking to the sound of the sea lapping the rocks under my bedroom patio. The cicadas have not yet begun their heat song so I close my eyes again, dream of clear water, schools of fish, clouds.

The clink of forks and plates and glasses wakes me again. On the patio there is turkish coffee and milk, procuitto and swiss cheese, bread and butter, jam, and 4 minute eggs. I am the only diner, the five Austrians are still sleeping or, more likely, hiking or snorkling.

A day spent doing exactly as I please. In the hammock, contemplating the various greens of pine needles in the light and shade, the way they bristle at the ends of long gray stems, how strong and pliant the branches are, and how color is an offshoot of function, the process of photosynthesis creating unintentional beauty.

Brac island stands tall in the near distance, gray and brown, stark, with the same three white puffy clouds hovering over it all morning. One looks like a puppy crouched with its tail up, ready to play. The other two are just cotton balls. These clouds contain the only humidity in the air. In the shade it is cool. In the sun, hot.

Water. Glittering blue against rough white rock, some pitted lava stone but mostly chunks of white rock the size of San Francisco heaved up and cracked. "It seems like all the rock in the world must have come from Hvar Island," remarked one of the Austrians. Two of the women spent the afternoon on an upper terrace sorting, cutting, and shaping the lavender they harvested on last evening's hike. The lavender here is strong, much stronger than the lavender of Provence in France.

There are five of them here. A couple who were taken by boat to a remote beach by Jacov's son this morning, and another couple and their friend (sister? mother?). There is a dog, a Maltese who has warmed up to me and lets me pet him.

That's on land. Breakfast and the Austrians and a hammock and terraces. Under water, through my snorkle mask, I see the deep blue sea going to nothing, and at the edges of the rock a carpet of green dotted with the dark oozing shapes of sea cucumbers, some outcroppings of tiny white mushroomy creatures, sea urchins, crabs inching along carefully, their backs bearded with green algae, schools and schools of little fish - sardines and also something blue with a yellow stripe. Larger fish, some colorful, some not, picking at the rocks or hiding still, blending into the bottom, and they beyond there are the little caves and crevices. and caves.

On the kayak I find a neighboring cove with a hotel and a small guesthouse. The hotel staff, like everyone here, speaks German and a little Italian and not much English, so my questions are met with some confusion and subsequent stress. No I do not want a room, I just want to know about the hotel. It's a nice hotel with patios that look over the sea and simple, clean, modern rooms, but Jacov's place, where I'm staying the next cove over, is the jewel.

Nestled in the cove itself is a guesthouse with a nice beach flanked by sheer cliffs one of which has a large cave in it that I can see from the water. I pull the kayak up on the beach of smooth pebbles and walk there on a little used path, singing and clapping all the way - I haven't forgotten the snakes in Albania - and put my face through a huge spider web. The spider is, naturally, also huge, black, with a body the size of my thumb, and it skittles away highly insulted.

The cave is blocked off by an old iron fence so I can only peer in and wonder about its depth. The opening is 100 feet high and inside, too, it looks to have the potential of being massive, and suddenly a half dozen bats I think at first, no...they're birds, rush noisily out, one of them looks like a falcon and it definitely has a mouse in its talons.

Back down at the guesthouse I find that it is run by a Croat (away to get a part for the water pump, which failed early this morning) and his New Zealand born wife, Fila Zencic, who is there with a woman named Mary Bucat from from Australia. They seem to have been here so long that they've forgotten to speak English, it is so heavily accented with New Zealand Australian Croat that it takes a little time to get used to them. When they talk to each other they speak Croat, then translate for me in English. Like the people at the hotel, they too are confused by my questions and squint at me suspiciously. Fila is not old but she is wrinkled by the sun and looks what might be described as a bit pinched. Mary is at least eighty, white haired, in a blue housedress. I took them off guard but they eventually warm up, maybe they don't have many visitors who speak English (just the Germans and some adventurous Italians) and soon I am offered a chair and some water and they begin to impart information. The lavender used to be more prolific on the island - it was absolutely famous for it - but there were some fires and then the young people are moving away, you know, to get educated, not to live on this rocky island where to grow lavender or anything you have to stack rocks in a pile with a hole in it - a gomela, Fila called it - and fill it with a little dirt, or rock walls - gdinj - and hope that it will grow. But grow it does. All the way from Hvar Town to Poknyenik the scent was practically an assault - dusky purple lavender, rich green pine, lavender again and the sound of the cicadas and the pale glittery blue of the sea and beyond that the next rock over, Brac Island, or if I'm at the ridge, Brac on one side and Korcula on the other, white and brown and gray, rising like creatures.

Fila writes the name of this place "Pokrvenik," not Poknyvenik as shown on my map, but it's close enough, as everything has been. Here at Jacov's with his nice wife who cooks great fish and bean soup and spice cake, and their kids - a daughter and son in their twenties - and the Austrians and the sea - I would have no problem at all staying put a week.

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