ADVENTURES WITH FREEDOM

I jumped in a Chevy van in the East Village of Manhattan with a small bag, enough for a rideshare across the country. It was just myself, my twin sister (we're from Poland) and this guy behind the wheel I never met. My sister had an instant curiosity about him. He introduced himself as Freedom Goraç. "Ready to go west?" Hell yeah.

We drove out of a snowstorm and chased the weather all the way to Pittsburgh to get to Freedom's mom's house where we crashed the first night. There I learned a little about Freedom. His parents are divorced. His mother's family is from Italy, his father’s is from Croatia. Everybody’s from somewhere in the U.S. Freedom went to college four years and joined an original metal band after graduation. He plays guitar. That's just the thing to do in Pittsburgh. We hit the nightlife there, ending up in a far-off bar with a group playing 80s retro to a full house of big locals drinking and "dancing." The singer was like Dale Bozio from Missing Persons. Freedom met a women's college basketball scholarship student and they lit each other's cigarettes. Freedom doesn't smoke.

So on the road again and thanks to some advanced trucker intelligence (Freedom's mom dated a trucker for ten years), Freedom took us on an alternate route due West instead of the seemingly sensible southern route through Tennessee, and bypassed a fierce storm that would have snowed us in for days. We drove through the night clear to the Oklahoma flats and then things got pretty boring in Texas by day. Tumbleweeds whipped across a limitless expanse and we might have gone out of our minds had it not been for Freedom sharing the story of how he once stumbled upon his timeless identity in the wilds of Croatia.

Freedom quit his Pittsburgh band to move to New York City. Working a bartending gig, someone gave him his first club pass. So the first night on the scene he meets this manager from Long Island who got him sent to Europe as a fashion model. So Freedom's learning Italian and French and how to match ties whereas before he always shopped at the local Army surplus stores. He modeled Harley Davidson leather jackets in Milan and sang "Born to Be Wild" at a New Year's Eve party in Budapest. He wasn’t making much money, but he moved in with an Italian girl and things were going well, until he got a letter from the States from none other than his father, whom he hadn’t connected with for some time back home, offering to pay for a car rental to seek fraternal roots in Yugoslavia as a holiday gift for dear ole dad. Freedom would never pass on an adventure.

Lucky to find a Spanish-make rental car last minute (a distant maternal relative was found managing a rent-a-car agency in Milan—a perk for those with Italian bloodlines is that you have family everywhere who can help you), he kept to the right of speeding Mercedes with no limits on the autostrada. He drove himself all the way to the border checkpoint past Trieste. A burly guard questioned Freedom about his intentions in Yugoslavia, a communist nation. Freedom sincerely cooperated, “I’m going to find my family roots!” As the guard took Freedom’s U.S. passport into the booth to check it, Freedom studied the man, searching for signs of humanity. Of course there is humanity in every person, no matter their station. A new song lyric entered Freedom’s mind and, after the guard opened the big gate for his car to pass, Freedom pulled over to write it down. He sang it for us as we drove through Texas. “Noticed you today. I’m looking your way, and it feels like we feel close enough. There’s a hundred things outside to see, but I noticed you today.”

Freedom pushed the little rental car into the Yugoslavian night for as long as he could before tiring. It was a new moon and he could only see as far as the headlights would illuminate. The car kept ascending a long steep grade until his ears popped. Freedom pulled over and slept until sunrise. He opened his eyes to a scene so unreal it took his breath away. Perched on a high snow-covered slope in Slovenia, he could see for miles. There was nature in all her glory: snowy evergreen-covered mountains peeking through billowy clouds. Freedom released the brake and coasted down the long slope into the morning wonder for miles until a river appeared as an oxbow lake surrounding a little island with smoking chimneys. Freedom decided to steer off course onto the little bridge to that island in the river. He found a tiny old castle surrounded by a marketplace with smiling faces selecting fresh fruit and vegetables from a local farmer. The farmer gladly accepted Freedom’s Italian lire. The economy was so poor that a little foreign currency went a long way. Freedom bit into a juicy plum.

For the first time Freedom pulled out a map and plotted a course to Zagreb, Croatia. In a few hours he was driving slowly through the city without a plan. Finally he pulled into a small strip mall. The stores were all closed and empty except for one. There were stacks of phone books in the window. When he entered he was greeted by a young woman who spoke a little English. She was a college student on holiday from a Sarajevo art school. Freedom explained that he was looking for a way to call his father in the United States for any information about locating family roots in Croatia. She informed him that the only way to do that would be at the Central Post Office. But she insisted first that Freedom accompany her to a Miro exhibit in town, her favorite. They walked through the city in the bitter cold. Freedom was glad to be anywhere indoors. Later at the Central Post Office Freedom placed the call and got the name of a town: Lasigna. He drove the art student home. Her family lived in a gray public housing complex, even though her father was a college sports program director and her mother a surgeon. She wrote down some key words in Croatian to help Freedom on his journey. He plotted a course on the map for Lasigna. It was only around thirty kilometers south of Zagreb and Freedom thought he would be able to make it in time to find a relative for a holiday surprise to call dad and that it would be mission accomplished.

Driving south on winding dirt roads following a wild wide river of unknown depth past farms, unspoiled nature, and unreadable signposts, an hour's journey turned to twists and u-turns through little towns with twinkling holiday lights in the bitter winter cold with no heating system in the car. A new course was plotted back to a Zagreb motel he noted on the way. On one final three-point turn, the car got stuck in a ditch. Freezing alone on a desolate dirt road thousands of miles from home, it shouldn't end this way. A heave ho of the back end followed by a jumpback into the car for a quick gun on the gas lifted the car up out of the ditch and speeding across the little dirt road and into the wild river.

Well, almost. The little Spanish car had one feature above par—bitchin brakes. Freedom slammed on the brake pedal as hard as he hit the gas, spinning donuts in the grass and stopping inches from the lapping waves to barely save his own ass.

With nothing in his head but the sound of wind and water, Freedom rolled slowly to the next sign in the distance which read "Lasigna 5 km." How did he miss that sign earlier? It was around four a.m. Dogs barked menacingly as he pulled up to a farmhouse, waking the locals, and the lights turned on. Out came a tall lanky man with a rifle. Drawing on Pictionary experience, Freedom drew little stick figure diagrams with caveman utterances to the man speaking Croatian. The man jumped in the car and gave directions, with a point or a nod. In a village with no phones there would be no calling the States collect. The first stop was a shack. The man made Freedom stay in the car as he knocked on the door, wiping his feet dutifully before entering. He talked to his friend and turned to wave in Freedom. Of course Freedom wiped his feet before entering, only to find packed earthen floors inside. The men conversed in Croatian and offered Freedom slivovitz, a local plum brandy. This was to be the theme of that night. After three more visits to one-room shacks with slivovitz, delicious as it was, Freedom was getting drunker and colder. At that point all he wanted to hear was someone say, “You can sleep here for the night.” But the whole town of Lasigna was now enlisted to Freedom’s mission.

At long last there was a breakthrough. Freedom’s grandfather played in a touring Tamburitza band, musicians who play the folk music of that part of the world. In fact, Freedom discovered that seemingly all the men of that area played in a traveling Tamburitza, playing either a prim, a brač, a čelović, a čelo, a bas (all stringed instruments) or an accordion. But Freedom’s granddad took his popular band to America where they recorded a record album. There was someone who lived near Lasigna who once received a copy of that album.

The sun had not quite yet risen as they pulled into a farmhouse outside town where a tall woman in a long work dress and boots was walking up a hill bearing a yoke with two buckets on her shoulders. Her piercing blue eyes Freedom recognized in an instant. A single tear followed the creases of her weather-beaten face as the only man in town who spoke just a very few words of broken English introduced her to Freedom as his father's first cousin. It was almost as much emotion as she could bear since her mother, Freedom's grandfather's sister, passed away the day before Freedom arrived. Apparently the musical forces of boundless time conspired to bring the family together for a mystical funeral.

The next day Freedom joined the town at Aunt Slatitska's mother's house for a mile-long march to the top of a hill where Freedom's great aunt was to be interred. The men walked in front of a tractor bearing the wooden casket, the women followed behind. Everyone passed the slivovitz on the way to the gravesite. Above the hole in the ground where the wooden casket was lowered was a post which read “Goraç,” Freedom’s name. Beyond that little plot there was nothing to see but the rolling hills, the untamed river and uninhabited expanse. A man offered Freedom a cigarette and he took it. Freedom doesn't smoke.

Freedom stayed in Lasigna for two days during the one time of year when they open the town hall and everyone dances wildly to the Tamburitza music to celebrate the holiday. At one point a group of women began laughing and someone barely translated to Freedom that since his father's family came from that town he should marry there. It was time to move on.

Freedom drove east through the gorges and mountain passes of Sarajevo, passing farmers and smiling school children, some of whom may not have survived the brutal war that erupted the following year. He then drove south to Split on the Adriatic Sea and up the incredible beauty of the Dalmatian coast, where every turn reveals a new surprise. He turned away from the coast to get a glimpse of the stunning cascading lakes of Plitvice in the mountainous area of central Croatia, at the border to Bosnia, but the area was closed off because of a winter storm. So Freedom plotted a course back to the coast to get back to Italy to return the car in time. The coastal destination was a town named Senj. The little Spanish car chugged up a steep grade as the signposts read “Senj 20 km” then “Senj 10 km.” Freedom rechecked the map. Suddenly the road became a switchback up a steep mountain. The next signs read “Senj 6 km” then “Senj 4 km.” Was he driving to the coast or up a mountain? At the mountain’s snowy summit Freedom pulled over and got out of the car in the frigid air. There it was. The high mountain dropped directly down into the Adriatic Sea. Freedom drove the car slowly down tight curves hugging the mountain face until at last he was in sunny coastal Senj. He took off his coat.

At long last we saw the Texas tumbleweeds disappear from the Interstate as we entered New Mexico, then Arizona and saw the Grand Canyon. Freedom drove almost the whole way. We made the West Coast at last. We hung out on Venice Beach where Freedom got a job painting an apartment. He played guitar with Willow, Lost, and Autumn of the Blueberry Bus, runaway teens who worked the boardwalk selling crystals they dug up in Arizona, or doing hair braids. I remember him trying to capture the new rhythm of the Pacific Ocean in his music.

My sister and I flew back to New York and it wasn't a year before my sister flew west to stay with Freedom in his L.A. guest house in a converted garage. So we keep in touch and for that I'm glad. People like us live from the heart. In Freedom I found, for peace, a friend.