Little communities on the Kupa

September, 2023. Walking beside the Kupa river where it forms the border between Slovenia and Croatia

What a day for walking. The sun is roasting hot, never more than a single stray cloud in the sky at a time, but a steady breeze blows through the Kupa valley. I’ve finally found a sunscreen that I can tolerate on my skin, so the shirt sleeves are rolled up and my forearms are glistening.

All along the river are tiny clusters of buildings, too small even to call a hamlet. Abandoned farms, crumbling walls, orchards left to decay. But there’s life and activity too, tight little communities, people helping each other out, lifting each other up, everyone known to one another, the kind of places where trips to the grocery store have as much to do with socialising as sustenance. Whole families out in the yard splitting and stacking firewood together; a young couple putting the finishing touches on a pizza oven; two-stroke communities: chainsaws whirring, tiny little motorbikes that obliterate the peace. A man in his 70’s delivers the mail from one such moped, his cargo of letters hangs from one of the handle bars in a plastic carrier bag, a helmet swings pointlessly from the other.

But the footbridges over the river have fallen into disrepair — most of them have fallen further, into the river itself — so these communities are viscerally, vascularly bisected. There’s something in that. In how the auto-mobile killed, and still kills, the pedestrian. To cross the river now requires a car, but only because we have the car. Communities immobilised by mobility.