Maxie Goes to Greece
Or, How an Itinerant Ex-Philosopher and Writer-Wannabe Tooled Around the Aegean and What He Saw There.
Chapter
4
Bataan Deathmarch 2: Electric Boogaloo
He's trying to kill us. That's all there is to it.
Andy Horton, the program director, has taken out millions of dollars in life insurance on us -- his trusting charges -- and is trying to kill us.
We
saw it early on, of course. A premonition when we saw a truck of happy
hogs loaded onto the island ferry with us -- A vacation! they seemed to
cry -- and saw them later that afternoon, gutted and hanging in the butcher's
window. Visions of things to come.
At nine o'clock the island's bus arrived at the hotle -- too early, as breakfast didn't begin until 8:30am. After a rushed meal, we boarded it and followed a long and winding track up and over the crown of the island. But not too far down the other side. "There it is!" Andy cried as we dismounted, several miles from the coast and hundreds and hundreds of feet above sea level. "There's the beach we're hiking down to!"
The plan was to hike down to the ruins of an ancient town, where we would swim at the isolated beach and then commune over lunch with the spirit of Homer. Between you and me, at the time the prospect of the latter sounded distinctly more gruesome than the prospect of the hike.
Which wasn't bad on the way down. The path begqan as a wide paved avenue, but then abruptly changed to a dirt track and narrowed to single file. It then turned down the steeply sloping side of a hill to drop into a terrifyingly deep and narrow valley. Not that there was any danger of falling, however. The path was hedged in on both sides by what were plainly very old and anciently maintained walls, of flat frown stones stacked atop each other. The slopes above and below us had been terraced into long strips of narrow ground, suitable for planting or herding on the slopes. The slopes on the opposite side of the valley had been similarly terraced, giving it the appearance of a ziggurat minutely constructed from very dainty platforms.
In places the trail plunged narrowly down, and in some places was so steep that steps -- of what age I could never guess -- had been set into the hillside: a staircase made of broad paving stones, each of which still aimed down at a sharp pitch. The climb down of course was never strenuous, just hard on the knees and calves, and the prospect of ascending it later in the day quickly began to prey on alert minds. Three-quarters of the way down the trail forked, with one arm leading down to a spring -- a stone wall with a bit of metal pipe from which flowed cold clear water to fill a stone pool; wasps and bees and other insects swarmed about it, the only water to be found in the valley. The other path continued down a short distance before coming to the bottom of the valley, where it continued along the dry and stony bed of an old river which had cut deeply into the floor to form a gorge. Above us grasses and bushes and small, dessicated trees grew on either side, out and over the gully to form a canopy of green and yellow and brown in places, thick enough to plunge the track into deep shade. The harsh buzzing and sawing of insects carried from nearby, all the clearer for being out of the breeze that missed that covered path, and the still air was heavy with the dusty perfume of sage and lavendar and oleandar.
At
the end, the trail opened out into a shallow cove with a narrow beach,
curving around a wide bay dominated on two sides by steep and rocky cliffs;
a few hundred yards out, in the middle of the bay, a tall sheer rock rose.
Looking behind us, we saw that the valley was broader than it had seemed;
the gully we had followed had cut very deeply indeed, and the valley was
dominated by low walls that set off long-abandoned pastures, some of which
still contained the remnants of ancient orchards. This was the town, apparently.
On a low knob under one of the cliffs we found the ruins the of a temple
to Athena: little was left, however, but a foundation and the low outlines
of some walls, and the cracked bases of Ionic columns. On the opposite
side were three votary shrines of much more recent construction, one with
a wide portico on which we left our bags and provisions. Then -- hot and
tired from the trek down -- we plunged into the water.
This beach, I have to say, wasn't a patch on the others on the island. Where they were sandy, this one was stony, with a floor alternately covered by broad, slimy rocks or deep patches of underwater growth. It is also the home -- and one of our members discovered to her pain and chagrin -- of spiny sea urchins. But the water is clear and teems with small fishes, and if you bring your goggles you can explore a strikingly beautiful underwater environment. I contented myself mostly with floating and swimming, though. The young pups -- our trio of 17 year olds -- swam out to the great rock in the bay, but found no place to climb up onto it. I swam around to the northern shore of the cove. Not a great idea, I found, for although the surf isn't powerful, it is strong enough to knock you against some pretty nasty rocks if you get too close, and there is no place to hang onto them and brace yourself. I got some pretty nasty cuts and bruises before striking out again toward the beach itself. Also, something stung me -- I stumbled ashore to discover a nasty welt on my knee beginning to swell.
When
I returned, I found that everyone had moved back to the portico. Feeling
weak and tender, I had a hard time regaining my feet in the surf. The
pull of the water rushing in and out unbalanced me as I tried to stand
upon the smooth and slimy rocks at the bottom, and as I stood did one
tremendous pratfall -- arms and legs akimbo, right onto my ass -- that
would have done Charlie Chaplin proud. But no one witnessed it, which
immediately raises the question: If a man slips on a banana peel but no
one is watching, is it comedy?
Lunch of cold vegetables and bread, followed by Andy talking about the [i]Odyssey[/i] while the rest of us drowsed oblivioiusly in the sun -- so now I have a pretty bad sunburn on top of the scrapes and bruises.
And then, at the height of the afternoon, we started the return trip.
It was hot, and the sun beat down from a cloudless sky. We were sore, and tender, and tired. And we were packed in salt. The return thru the gully was pleasant enough, even if the heavy perfume only made us sleepier. At the spring we refilled our water bottles, and some of us soaked our towels in cold water and wrapped them about our heads. But then it was on to the uphill climb.
One step, two steps, three steps. Creak of knee and ache of shoulder. 22 steps, 23 steps,24 steps. The sharply angled trail suddenly angled up at an even sharper angle. 57, 58, 59 steps. There's a stone in my shoe. 89, 90, 91 steps. A stitch in my side, and a patch of shade beckons. Stop. Rest. One step, two steps, three steps. Can I break 100 before I have to stop again? Can I break 130? How about 150? (No, not 150.)
At one point we heard the jingle of a bell and a bleat, and saw that a goat had been tied to a tree down below the trail. People live and farm and herd in this valley. They go up and down this trail every day. Have they never heard of escalators?
The
line of people strung out along the trail, with those in front getting
further ahead and those behind falling further back. Three quarters of
the way up I had an epiphany. It doesn't matter how soon I reach the top,
I reasoned. Once there I can only wait, either in the hot sun on hot asphalt,
or in a hot bus with stinky people, while the slow ones straggle in. On
the other hand, I can sit in a shady patch -- right here -- in a light
breeze and wonderful view and wait for the stragglers to catch up to me,
and follow them up at their (relatively) leisurely pace.
This is what is called a "no-brainer." And although I slightly mis-timed it, so that I went up with the last straggler but one, it made the final push just about manageable. Anyway, two hours after starting the return climb, we were all back on the bus, groaning and swaying as it lurched back down the road to the port.
Why Andy scheduled one of the big evening sessions of the trip for this day I'll never fathom, but we gathered at 7:00pm -- after barely an hour to recover -- to meet with Christos Dimas, a hot young Greek director -- and to view his film The Cistern. It says a lot for the film that those of us who attended were held enraptured by it. It's a very loosely structured story about one summer in the life of an 11 year old boy and his friends, who have formed a daredevil group called "The Acrobats." Two of them die during the story, drowning in the cistern of the title while practicing death-defying feats. But the film is shot through with humor and an appreciation of the potential of magic to change lives: We see cookies that act as aphrodisiacs, and meet a man who is 140 years old but looks 30, because he lives in a house where people do not age. And we discover that the hero of the story, Aaron, suffers under a grandmother's curse, because his mother refused to name him Frederica (!).
A light supper of spaghetti and tomato sauce, taken at 10pm, the hour when most Greeks take their meals. Then an hour of writing, spent in the fragrant night air, and to bed at one in the morning.