Kotor, Montenegro

The drive from Split to Kotor, Montenegro included three border crossings and winding paths through the mountains along the coast. By the time we arrived, the light of day was dimming, which fed an urgency already stirred by exhaustion: we expended ourselves to see the beauty of the Bay of Kotor, and the sun had dipped already behind the peaks above.

Though Sophie, Amelia and Maisie were ready to get to our apartment and stretch and spread out, I still stopped haltingly around the bay, if only for moments, to snatch what beauty I could, to freeze it and bind it up in my camera. I saw the mountains, rising from the clear surface of the lake like a ladder to the sky, and that the lake was a delicious blue; I saw medieval towers and mysterious monastic islands across the bay, and knew these were things to be cherished; but I was racing still, to get to the apartment, to leave the car, to settle the girls, to get to the sights, and to grab as much as I could of it all before the night fell so heavily I could no longer take pictures.

Perhaps I was tired, and truly, I must have been anxious about Dad's operation, and what would come of an examination of his kidney once removed, but I did begin, finally, to relax: the view from our rooms, from everywhere really, was outstanding, and the old center of Kotor was a wonderful surprise -- a labyrinthian moated Venetian fortress town centuries old and steepled, claimed by the Ottomans, by Napoleon, by Habsburgs, Yugoslavia, and now us.

But it wasn't until the next morning that the joy came, and the beauty of this place was finally felt. Starting with the early morning stillness and gold light hitting the tip of range across the lake, and accelerating in the mountain air with each step as we climbed to the top of the fortress walls begun by Justinian a millenium and a half before, our walk in this extraordinary place was like a prayer to the munificence of the earth.

We arrived just above the flag pictured in the final frame of the video below.

While my desire to photograph was no less on this venture -- definitely not, given the exquisite light and vantages up the cliffside -- the crispness and full breath of the experience was something pictures don't show and I don't need them to. We ate pastries and looked down at the red-roofed town and tree-green lake and then up at the cragged peaks in equal amazement. Stone carvers helped us midway over their rubble. Sophie drank from carbonated water she resisted all the way up. Maisie surprised us by adventuring with her sisters up a steep case of stone stairs. Amelia ran nearly all the way to the top and skipped nearly the whole way down, declaring she was running on "Amelia power." And Stephanie and I felt fortunate and good.

The walk up was like a prayer, and we would find the next day, when Dad's kidney proved to be free of cancer, that life was as good as it smelled among the wild irises and mountain stone.