The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [133]
I LOOK OUT THE PLANE’S WINDOW AT THE EARTH BELOW, THE sun raking hot and brutish across the Argolid plain. Old, weathered hills, brown, scrubbed, smoothed down by eons of pelting rain, but mostly by the sun: that unrelenting light with the power to wear down, to weather…to patinate.
The sea comes up suddenly, jarring—turquoise, violet and emerald layers swarm the suede coastline. The enormous metal carcass banks over the Saronic Gulf, gliding over the seaside villages south of Athens on its approach to the airport, a pink sheen dusts their whitewashed veneer. The sun is setting; a wedge of moon illuminates a purple eastern sky. I know to expect these extravagant sights, yet under my breath, like a tormented child rocking herself to sleep, I am muttering familiar words to myself, over and over.
I hate this place. I hate this place. I hate this place.
A knot tightens in my stomach. Greece and I are engaged in a battle, and it is my destiny to search for myself in this landscape, to stand on these slippery rocks and feel the earth inhabit me. I want to be that conduit, that Persephone, that mistress of the in-between. I can feel the water…it is transmutable; plasma. I can touch that rock and hear its ancestral sound. For reasons I’m not sure I’ll ever understand, I have chosen to return—again and again—to a land that I hopelessly manage to both hate and love.
The writer Lawrence Durrell tells a story that captures the quintessential paradox of Greece—it warns the uninitiated that this is not a postcard destination; is a place with a seamy underbelly, dirt under its fingernails, and voices in the wind that are not always benign.
An acquaintance of Durrell’s was backpacking one afternoon, the story goes, in the mountains of Corfu, in search of a plant specimen on the central ridge of the island. He stopped to enjoy the view from a famous outlook when he found himself suddenly surrounded in a white mist, which had risen off the sea. He described it as an emanation with a distinct outline; inside he heard the cries of seagulls and the calling of human voices. The experience was so terrifying that he grabbed his belongings and fled the scene, panicked. A few months later, he was found dead, having fallen from a high apartment building in Athens, the phone, torn completely off his apartment wall, still clenched in his hand.
Such tales betray the soul of Greece. It is a place that, if you are not prepared, will tear back your skin and expose your soul to the elements. If you survive this baptism by fire, you are eternally addicted to this numinous, often unforgiving and utterly seductive earth.
Mythology has a way of creeping into modern terminology, and the root of the word panic is found in Pan, the god of the noonday sun. It is the idea of something scary making its way into your waking life, the way shepherds are known to fear the arrival of the cloven-footed god as they doze under the olive groves in the mid-afternoon. Beware, they say. Pan will get you. I know it is true, because he found me in an Athenian apartment, one September morning in 1976.
The sun slants through the shutters, thickly shellacked with dust. My view through the balcony window is a tangle of ugly concrete buildings stacked on the slopes up to Mount Imitos, barely visible beyond a jungle of television antennas and clotheslines.
Flying out over New York harbor a few months before, on July 4th, I celebrated my own independence day by leaving behind all that was familiar to study in Greece. But now I am second-guessing my decision.
The director of the program has a motto: “drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life,” and her curriculum resembles a version of Outward Bound. Instead of leaving you alone in the woods with a book of matches to see if you survive, she sent me to live on a remote island with no knowledge of Greek, and now I’ve been dropped into the wilderness of Athens for the rest of the year. In these initial months since my arrival, the everydayness of life here is still so foreign, so strange—I wonder