While Matt spent last week swimming 8k a day around the Adriatic with his SwimTrek friends, I wandered.

I spent my days wandering the tiny island of Prvić, home to two small villages and just one car. I felt invisible in the best possible way—free to quietly observe people enjoying the summer without seeming self-conscious, while understanding almost none of what they were saying to each other.

It made me notice everything else.

A woman drew my attention to two bright red starfish beneath the water. To help translate the Croatian name, she pointed toward the sky.

I kept noticing people singing. Not performing. Just singing. Children, alone and together. Grown men doing chores. Two small groups gathered at the church doors during Sunday mass. Small fragments of song woven into ordinary summer moments.

And when people weren’t talking or singing, they were playing just for the sake of playing: card games, chess, bocce ball. On our walk to dinner along Bačvice Beach on our last evening in Split, I watched hundreds of people standing in the shallow water, batting a small white ball around, trying to keep it from touching the water. I later learned it was a 100-year-old game called picigin, often described as a “water hacky sack.”

Beneath it all was the steady chorus of cicadas, whose persistent singing became the soundtrack of the island.

I learned that Croatia’s first head of state, the poet Vladimir Nazor, devoted one of his poems to the sound I’d been hearing all week. The first stanza includes the phrase “cvrči, cvrči cvrčak,” pronounced “tvrchi, tvrchi tvrchak,” an onomatopoeic line that sounds like cicadas chirping.

I had to look up the words trochee (a two-syllable metrical foot in poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable) and dithyramb (a Greek choral hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus).

And the cicada chirps, chirps on the knot of the black spruce
His deafening trochee, his sonorous, heavy iambic.
It is noon. — Like water, the
Sunny dithyramb is spilling through the silence.

From “Cvrčak” by Vladimir Nazor poezija.hr/cvrcak-vladi…