"I was the richest man in ten villages," Dobrivoje Mojsic, an elderly farmer, told me. "My family used to get along with the Albanians. One evening we were drinking coffee with them. The next evening they came to kill us." He said his life was spared only because a neighbor who owed him money paid it instead to Mojsic's captors for his freedom.

The 78 days of bombing left a mammoth job of cleaning up the river. Much of it has been undertaken by the Budapest-based Danube Commission, funded largely by the European Union and nations in the Danube watershed.

"About a thousand ships were trapped, upriver and downriver from Novi Sad, in the ports of all the Danubian countries because of the bombed bridges," said Danail Nedialkov, the commission's top administrator. Besides the Freedom Bridge, two other nearby bridges were destroyed, then hastily replaced. A temporary pontoon bridge made of barges takes up some of the slack. It is opened to let ships pass, but navigation is still hindered because that is done only briefly a few days a week.

The commission has prepared an environmental impact statement for the river clearance, addressing such issues as neutralizing undetonated bombs and removing collapsed bridge sections—perhaps using explosives—without damaging historic sites or parklands.

Farther downriver, near Belgrade, the attacks crippled the city of Pancevo, destroying fertilizer and petrochemical plants and an oil refinery. The fallout: noxious gasses in the air and ammonia, mercury, crude oil, and petroleum derivatives in the river and groundwater.

"An environmental catastrophe," declared Borislava Kruska, Pancevo's mayor, who branded the bombings "a crime against humanity. The international community is primarily concerned about Novi Sad bridges not because of our suffering but because they want their navigational route opened."

There's no doubt that clearing the river has high priority for the Danube nations. Ocean-going ships off-load onto river vessels at Galaţi, Romania, and the bridge downings far upstream are costing Romanian shippers ten million dollars a month in lost business.

The bridge disaster affected people of all incomes. In the town of Tutrakan, Bulgaria, on a hill overlooking the Danube and Romania across it to the north, 65-year-old Dimo Kovachev sat idle on a tree stump. Below, on the waterfront, sat the town''s crane, which he operated before retirement five years ago. It was also idle. "There's just no work here," he said. "People hang out on the streets. The crops are good, but people can't afford to buy things." Fishing has declined because of environmental degradation and habitat loss. "Thirty years ago I caught four kinds of sturgeon in the Danube." That was before wetlands on islands and along the riverbanks were diked to create cropland. In spring, when the water was up, the marshlands flooded, providing a place for fish to spawn. If the marshes are restored, the fish will come back. "

That kind of habitat restoration is the goal of three young Bulgarians—Edita Difova, Ivelin Ivanov, and Gradimir Gradev—who work with Green Balkans, a federation of environmental groups. Downriver from Tutrakan the trio gathered one evening atop a concrete bulkhead, part of a system of channels that alternately drain and irrigate a broad swath of former marshland to make it suitable for growing corn and wheat.

"Our goal is to restore the wetlands by cutting the levees, which were built up in the 1950s, and allowing the water back in, Edita said against the sound of cuckoos and a chorus of frogs. Green Balkans owns two abandoned fish farms that it hopes to flood as nationally protected wetlands, primarily as waterfowl habitat, a plan for which the group is seeking private and government funding.

As Edita walked along a dirt roadway, two pygmy cormorants and a flock of white herons flew by in the waning sunlight. A small deer bounded through the fields. "These are second-growth forests," she said. "Were applying for funding to reintroduce the natural species, mainly on the islands." "

Among those islands is Belene, site of a Cold War–era prison where political dissidents were tortured and killed. Belene today remains a prison farm. A scowling young guard opened the gates onto a pontoon bridge that carried us on a teeth-chattering drive to the island. Armed guards are always around, but prisoners move about the island unrestrained as they tend crops and livestock.

""This is one of the biggest and best conserved marshlands in the area," said Edita, who prizes Belene because of its habitat for pelicans, threatened eagle species, herons, and cormorants, and for mammals such as wild boar.

On the coast of the Black Sea lies the river's biggest wetland: the Danube Delta, a labyrinth of channels, streams, oxbows, lakes, forests, and dunes that provides habitat for more than 300 bird species.

This watery land has only a handful of small villages and one city, Tulcea, Romania, from which the delta fans out with three main channels. Sulina Channel, the route for oceangoing vessels, has been dredged and straightened to create a virtual beeline east to the Black Sea.

Only a boat small enough for narrow, shallow waterways can reach the delta's secret places. My craft was a red-and-white runabout called Gipsy, piloted by a rangy, square-jawed young man named Adrian Cacencu. He took me on speedy, exhilarating rides along back channels. We also slowly motored past day huts fashioned by fishermen out of reeds, through marshes where coots skimmed the water, and across lakes that exploded with flights of pelicans.

After we overnighted in the small port of Sulina, I asked Adrian to take me to the Danube's end. We set out just after dawn, with the waves growing bigger and choppier as we went east. Gipsy's hull smacked down harder and harder. With cold, salty spray in our eyes and the lighthouse on our right, we knew we'd hit seawater.

We crossed over to the south channel, passing cows and bulls munching grass on the banks. Then it struck me: The Danube had shown me a variety of colors but never really blue. But here, filtered by the delta's reed beds, the water was a deep, dark indigo. Far from Vienna I had found the beautiful blue Danube. If Gipsy hadn't been so small, I might have stood up and danced.