Friday, Sep 5, 2008
A lotus-eating stay on a Greek island ends with a life-changing midnight encounter.
Mar 11, 2000 | No single incident in my life has been so strange, so hard to grasp, so totally lacking in feasible explanation. It's the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me and it happened on a Greek island. I came to Naxos by mistake, but maybe there are no mistakes. Maybe sometimes we're meant to be led here and there, to certain places at certain times for reasons beyond our understanding, beyond our will or the spell of the moon or the arrangement of the stars in the sky. Maybe all the dark and eternal nameless things lurking around us have their own purpose and vision for us. Who knows?
When I was 23, I was traveling alone through Europe. Traveling alone seemed to come naturally to me, and that solitary trip was just the beginning of what would become a habit in the years to come. I'd been in the rain for two months in Britain and discovered I didn't like being wet. I wanted to dry out. And perhaps I wanted more than that -- an inner light, a deeper understanding of life's complexities, a friend. With all those rainy days traveling alone, a fire had been extinguished within me and I needed rekindling. One morning I woke up soggy. I was on a beach in Scotland at the time, so soggy was to be expected, but I was also shivering and miserable. I decided to escape to Greece as fast as possible.
Three days later I was on a midnight flight to Athens. At 6 in the morning, dragging my sleepless, jet-lagged body around the port of Piraeus, I came to a clapboard sign with a ferry schedule for various Greek islands. I was still dripping wet -- although that was probably psychological -- and dead tired, but I wanted things: a beach, the sun, a warm, dry place to sleep, a Greek salad. I bought a ticket for the island of Paros because the ferry was leaving in 10 minutes. Arbitrary, yes, but I was 23 and still arranged my life that way.
Six hours later we pulled into the Paros harbor. From the wooden bench on the boat where I'd been napping, I looked up to see a large crowd of passengers jamming the exit doors. Since I was groggy and exhausted, I decided to stay on the bench a few more minutes and let the crowd disappear. When I looked up again, in what seemed just a few minutes, I was appalled to see the boat pulling away from the harbor, the passengers all gone and me left alone on the boat. For the next two hours I worried we were sailing back to Athens, but I was too embarrassed to ask the men who worked on the ferry about it.
Fortunately, in two hours we arrived at another island. I got off the boat on Naxos and walked with my backpack along the dock, where I was immediately swarmed by a sea of short, round, middle-aged women in polyester black dresses and black socks who wanted me to stay at their guesthouses or sleep on their roofs. Assuming the roles of eccentric aunts, they took my arms and patted my hands, trying to pull me into their lives, their doughy bodies.
I didn't go to the houses of any of those women. In the recesses of my drowsy mind I remembered I needed a simple combination of a beach and sleep. Leaving the busy little port town, also called Naxos, behind me, I headed south along the beach, walking for a long time through scatterings of bodies lying on the white sand, topless French women playing frisbee, nut-brown boys throwing balls, incoming waves at my feet and tavernas off to the side. A pure Aegean light fell on my head like a bleached curtain draping from the sky. It was a lean and haunting landscape, savagely dry, yet the light was uncannily clear, with a blue sky big enough to crack open the world, had the world been a giant egg. The crowds thinned as I walked farther along the beach, and music from the tavernas faded in the distance. Finally, I spotted something under the shade of an olive grove -- a small bamboo wind shelter that someone must have constructed and recently abandoned. Perfect. I'd found the place to drop down and sleep. And although I didn't know it at the time, I'd found the place that would become my home for over a month.
I slept the rest of that day in the shelter under the olive grove, and when I woke up it was dark and all the people were gone. A night wind danced across my face and shooting stars crashed across the sky. I ran along the beach, delirious, exalted and finally dry.
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