I hope you have experienced at least once in your life the feeling of estrangement that one can live by exploring. Let me explain starting in Vlkolinec, a Slovakian UNESCO heritage village of about 60 houses. Estrangement is a feeling I felt immediately when the bonnet of the car turned onto the crossroads from Jazierce to Vlkolinec, because there were snow-covered forests and peaks whose names I did not know. Beside the road was a surprising number of ditches from which the water rushed with a sound as of chattering, and was then lost in the moss. The village stood on a sunny plateau at the end of a branch of the valley. There was no one there, not even the leaves on the trees. No cars, no noise, just wooden houses and an atmosphere of mystery and solitude.
That's the estrangement I'm talking about: it's that principled feeling we experience when exploring a place that is foreign to us. At first we think it is foreign to everyone, even the locals. We don't know them or their habits. That boulder in the middle of the forest seems covered in mystery rather than moss. We are unfamiliar with the slopes, the abandoned mountain ridges, as if no one had ever lived there. We do not know, so nobody knows. We are the first, and the road generates a little further ahead, around every bend, so that we cannot see it. The whole valley seems foreign, to us and to everyone. I believe that this is one of the most beautiful feelings associated with exploration, the ultimate sense of estrangement: not knowing the place, nor the people who live there, and instinctively believing that everything we see is universally unknown.
As time passes, this feeling tends to fade, because it is fugacious. It fades when we see a resident walking towards the forest, or the reflection of a windscreen on the mountain road up there, where someone is logging. The valley becomes less mysterious, we see that other people live it and have lived it for centuries, and imagining their lives the estrangement projected onto them becomes rarefied, and then slowly leaves us too.
Vlkolinec is a beautiful village. Invisible, nestled in the Western Carpathian since 1300. It was April 2022 and at that time it was almost deserted, except for silent, ancient figures. The houses lapped the meadows, and these went up some undulating slopes that back up to the plateau. There, at a wise distance from each other, stood some sheds, old, inside which the grass was left to dry to make hay. It was quiet, and very windy, and one could breathe well.
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