Friday, September 4 — En Route

This day, minus the ten hours of it lost by crossing time zones, has been spent entirely on airplanes or in airports.  It is mind — and body — boggling, really.  On the one hand, I can’t complain about the ten-hour flight from San Diego to London or the three-and-a half-hour one from London to Istanbul, when only a century ago  the famous Orient Express train took three and a half days to get to Istanbul from Paris — the cutting edge of speed and luxury at that time — and, obviously, there never has been a train from San Diego to London or Istanbul.  On the other hand, traveling close to halfway around the globe in less than a day does boggle the body and the mind.  All that matters at the moment is that both were functional enough to get me through the airport, find my transportation, and land me in my hotel by 2:30 am …

Saturday, September 5 — Istanbul, Turkey

… and after what felt like the best shower of my life — seriously transforming, if not exactly the work of a goddess like Athena who makes Odysseus look like a Greek god after being wracked by his travels — and a few hours of sleep and some breakfast, I felt perfectly fine.  I was suspicious about believing that I could get away with no real jet lag but was happy to be up for my half day in Istanbul.  I walked down to and around Sultanahmet Square, so stunningly bracketed by Hagia Sophia on one side and the Blue Mosque on the other, but I’ll tour those when I return in just over a week, so I wandered down some charming cobbled side streets, bits of ruined walls or arches or towers everywhere, either forming a backdrop or incorporated into  newer buildings, ending up at the Archaeological Museum.

One whole floor was devoted to finds from excavations of Ancient Troy, dating from roughly 2900 BCE (Troy I) to the Roman-era settlement (Troy IX).  Seeing objects that people made and used makes the scope of the inhabitation of this place more concrete, whether the object is something as simple as a pottery bowl, as personal as a comb carved from bone, or as unusual and intriguing, at least in my experience of ancient artifacts, as bronze bridle bits and pieces of tack for horses — the Trojans being famous for breeding, taming, and worshipping horses — that look remarkably similar in shape and style to those used today.

Through the artifacts, it is possible to see the evolution in technology (knowledge and tools necessary to fashion items out of clay, stone, or metal) and craftsmanship (creating objects that are beautiful as well as functional). One  case displayed the finds from the Schliemann and Dorpfeld excavation (~ 1870 to 1894). The gold jewelry from Troy VI (Homer’s  Troy) is beautifully crafted from very thin, delicate pieces of pure gold, but the two dozen small pieces displayed here are nothing in quantity or quality compared to the jewelry that Schliemann snuck out of the country illegally — the elaborate gold headdress, long earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings that he dubbed the “Jewels of Helen” — along with the rest of the “Treasure of Priam” that has now turned up in Russia, after decades of being “lost.”  The decorated pottery in this case is also beautifully crafted and, again, a mere fraction of what these two actually found.

It is an old, familiar story in archaeology (and hardly limited to archaeology): conflicting ideas of what constitutes ownership or a right to claim it.  Legally, Schliemann knew full well that the permit to excavate here issued by the Turkish government made any artifacts its property, but he felt that some “finders keepers” rule trumped a legal document. There is some parallel here with notions of property and ownership in Homer, whether objects are given as gifts, inherited as birthright, or taken by piracy, force, trickery, or audacity.  I mean, as I reread the Odyssey in preparation for this trip, I was reminded of how much mention there is of material objects and wealth; right from the start of his journey back from Troy, Odysseys’s decision to leave the company of other Greek contingents and head north along the northern Aegean coast seems to be motivated by a desire for plunder, for himself and his men.  Many other details, such as Telemachus’s observations and comments at the courts of Nestor in Pylos and Menelaus in Sparta, indicate that Ithaca and the surrounding islands and areas comprising Odysseus’s kingdom are not nearly as spacious and fertile, nor is his palace as large or well-appointed as theirs; the number of ships he brings to Troy is another measure, but the bottom line is that he is simply not nearly as wealthy as these other kings.  And that does seem to be a motive for his stopping for some plundering on his way home instead of sailing home more directly.

My small taste of Istanbul felt like a tease but was enough to convey the feeling of its age and cosmopolitan nature, the thing behind Napoleon’s statement that if the world was one country, Istanbul would be its capital.  Of course, Napoleon’s view is Eurocentric, but Istanbul straddles both Europe and Asia, and even in the modern world, this general area where East meets West plays a significant part in global politics, as it has done for millennia.

In the afternoon, it was time to head down to the port to embark on the ship I’ll call home for the next eight days.  Since this will be my first cruise of any sort, I did not know what to expect, but at the end of the day, I was pleasantly, even dramatically, surprised.  The main surprise, as silly as it sounds, was discovering that the Star Clipper is a real sailing ship, a tall ship, not just a cruise ship with sails, and that this is why all the passengers I’ve met so far, whether repeat customers or first-timers like me, are on board: for the sailing.  As we prepared to literally set sail after dinner, some British repeat customers, two couples who also are sailors and former sailboat owners, described the upcoming ritual to me: raising the four main (out of sixteen total) sails to the music of  Vangelis’s “1492: Conquest of Paradise” (part of his score for a 1992 film about Christopher Columbus) while toasting to the upcoming leg of the journey.  As “cheesy” as we all agreed this was on some level, it was also undeniably inspiring, with the palpable sensation of lift from the wind in the sails.  I have quite a bit of experience sailing smaller craft, so I love this familiar sensation, but I was surprised to feel it on such a large vessel.  Quite a few people stayed on the foredeck to watch the sights as we sailed away from Istanbul, and only then did I begin to get my bearings about the geography of the city, translating my mental images from maps to the actual on-the-ground, or on-the-water, views.

Arriving in a city by air, rather than by land or sea, amounts to being dropped from the sky, and arriving at night and being driven to one’s hotel only continues the disorientation.  It was great that my hotel was so close to the major attractions I wanted to visit, both since I could walk to them and since I needed to get my bearings only within a relatively small area, but I really had not gained any sense of where this relatively small area was in relation to the rest of the enormous metropolis and its fundamentally important waterways until I was on this ship moving through them.  At first, I had no sense of which direction was north or south, east or west, and when the former divides Europe from Asia and the latter determines whether you are heading toward the Black Sea or the Aegean, such disorientation seems pretty serious.  But I figured things out pretty quickly, as the relatively small area where I’d spent most of my day was clearly recognizable via the landmarks of Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and the Topkapi Palace.

 

When, about an hour later, night had fallen and we had left the lights of the city behind, a fog settled in that obscured everything in front of us.  The captain and crew have all sorts of technology to assist their navigation and also love passengers taking an interest, so I checked out the computer monitor showing our location, course, and all the technical data.  Still, even when properly oriented, sailing through a fog like this without the information, charts, and devices developed over the millennia would be sailing on faith alone, sailing into the unknown.

That makes me think of another mythological Greek hero who sailed the other way through these waters, heading east:  Jason, with his crew, the Argonauts.  I’ve read in numerous sources that Odysseus’s wanderings are at least in part a reworking of this earlier mythological material.  Jason was a Greek hero of an earlier generation than the Homeric ones (Achilles and Odysseus and the other warriors who fought at Troy) but there are connections with this earlier generation in Homer, so he was clearly aware of the stories.  Jason sailed past the site of Istanbul and into the Black Sea, an area rich in natural resources, including gold.  The Golden Fleece which was his main object does seem to have some historical basis in the practice of using a sheepskin, or fleece, to gather gold from streams, using the same principle as the California Gold Rush practice of panning for it a few thousand years later.  But along the way, Jason encounters foreign people and fantastic creatures and has a series of adventures that are rather similar to Odysseus’s.  I won’t get into a comparative analysis about that, but it is worth noting that Odysseus’s tales set Jason-like adventures in a western frontier — somewhere west of mainland Greece — rather than the eastern frontier of the Black Sea region.  One thing that intrigues me, though, is the matter of natural resources, the gold in the Golden Fleece of the Jason story, if you will.  I mean, I love the larger-than-life stories of mythological characters, but I also wonder why the historical people who sailed the Mediterranean went where they did, when they did.  I’m not saying they weren’t seeking adventure, but I wonder what more practical motives they may have had.

Well, I’m not seeking gold or anything practical beyond knowledge and experience, so sailing into fog and into the (to me) unknown feels a perfect way to launch my adventure and wrap up a great day.

Sunday, September 6 — Canakkale and Ancient Troy, Turkey

 

After breakfast, I went up to the foredeck in time to witness our entrance into the Dardanelles, the narrowing (to about 1200 meters) from the Sea of Marmara, and noticed that it was marked by a stiff wind darkening the surface of the water.  My particular sailing experience has made this way of reading the wind by observing the water natural to me, since small shifts in the wind affect small craft much more than large ones.  However, I know precious little about reading charts or tides, or operating and navigating a large vessel, so I am really enjoying the company of the other passengers who are more experienced sailors, and I have discovered that there are quite a few of them onboard; for example, this morning I chatted with a couple from the Seattle area who sold their 37-foot, ocean-going sailboat two years ago.  I am also enjoying the company of fellow passengers who are simply into hanging out up front watching what I have begun calling “the show” — the actual sailing — and this morning’s show was all about navigating this famous passage, made famously challenging by its winds and currents in addition to its narrowness.   The winds, which most often are northeast winds (that is, they blow from the NE to the SW), and the strongest of two opposite currents (one on the surface, the other deeper down) both  head toward the Aegean, favoring ships (especially small engineless ones) heading out of the straits but also challenging them with a double-whammy that can act as a slingshot as they do.  Our ship is neither small (has a steel hull 376 feet long) nor engineless, but soon after we entered the Dardanelles, a tender boat approached to deliver  a pilot to guide us through to Canakkale, the last port before entering the Aegean, roughly 50 kilometers of the 65 kilometer length of the Dardanelles.  Apparently, it is required by law for large ships to be boarded by a local pilot; the pilot did not steer himself, rather took command, at which point the operational method reverted to the traditional: a sailor took the wheel and steered the three-digit bearings called out by the pilot, who mostly stood on, and intermittently paced back and forth across, the bridge peering through his binoculars.  Once he had us safely docked, his tender reappeared to take him back to his station.

In ancient times, the bay that existed right at the mouth of the Dardanelles, or Hellespont, made a perfect place for ships to wait for favorable conditions to navigate this passage, so it is no wonder that a settlement sprung up there and grew into a wealthy kingdom: ancient Troy or Ilium.  This bay long ago silted up from deposits of two rivers feeding into it, the Skamander and Simois, and became fertile alluvial farmland, so it is no longer possible to sail right up to Troy’s doorstep.  Instead, we docked at Canakkale, and those of us interested boarded a bus for a thirty-minute ride to the site of Ancient Troy.

Our guide, Ennis, started off by telling us to lower our expectations for the ruins of Ancient Troy, especially if we had seen any of the Hellenistic ruins that are so abundant in Turkey (he used Ephesus as an example), since what remains of Troy simply does not compare.  My expectations already were lowered because I had read much about and looked at many photos of the site and already knew that, as Ennis went on to say, much of what remains at Troy is more than a thousand years older, and some of it more than two thousand years older, than any Hellenistic ruins.  In fact, the most recent inhabitation during the Roman era (Troy IX, 48 BCE to 550 CE) was significantly smaller than Troy at its peak in about 1250 BCE, generally agreed to be Homer’s Troy (Troy VIh or Troy VIIa).  However, once we arrived and toured the ruins, I was awed by their extensiveness, just how much real estate they spread over, despite all the pieces not being there.  It was easy to see just how destructive Schliemann’s trenches were — in the 1870s archaeology was less developed as a science, but Schliemann was not a trained archaeologist, rather a treasure hunter, so he dug a deep trench right down the middle of the remains, ruining a great deal in the process — but in more carefully excavated sections, we could also see the complexity of all the site’s layers through its more than 3000-year history (Troy I dates to 2900 BCE) — definitely not as simple as one  level being built over the previous one, nor as simple as the initial archaeological division into nine settlements (designated by Roman numerals, to which 46 subdivisions designated by lower-case letters have been added).  In other words, there never could have been an excavation of the whole ancient city here because inhabitants have built and rebuilt so many times over the remains of earlier portions destroyed by natural or human forces: earthquake, fire, war, time.  I took lots of photos but don’t know how to capture the extent or complexity of the site any better than all the photos and diagrams I studied at home.

Ennis, our guide, used a  great analogy to put the history of the north and south sides of the Dardanelles in context.  The north side is the site of a famous battle of World War I, Gallipoli — which I will visit in a week — but it is hardly a coincidence that the territory on both sides of the entrance to the Dardanelles has been fought over in wars spanning more than three thousand years.  I had not thought about this connection, but Ennis suggested that the Trojan War was “the real First World War,” groups of allies coalescing around the two major powers of the day, centered in Asia Minor and southeastern Europe, and just as the assassination of the Archduke was a “spark” that ignited the economic and political tensions that were the real causes of World War I, the abduction of Helen (if it is historical fact) would have been an igniting spark, too, rather than a real cause of the Trojan War.

It is not my intention to enter into any serious debate about the historicity of the Trojan War or Homer’s representation of it, but there seems to be no question among scholars that there was a war, or at least military conflict, between the Bronze Age Greeks, whom Homer called Achaeans and scholars call Mycenaeans, and the Trojans, who seem to have been affiliated with or at least in contact with the Hittites of western Anatolia (the area in Asia Minor that forms the majority of the country of Turkey).  However, I am interested in getting a sense of what may have happened here politically and culturally from the period in which the Trojan War would have occurred (around 1250 BCE — and for simplicity, I will stick with this date, though some scholars place the war sixty or so years later) through the time when Homer, whoever he was, is generally agreed to have lived, or the time when the Iliad and the Odyssey are generally agreed to have been composed (750-700 BCE), which involves migration and colonization on the part of Greeks after the Trojan War, though it seems to have begun to some extent earlier.

One thing that impressed me from my visit to the ruins of Ancient Troy was how old they were.  That probably sounds silly, but it is difficult to get a perspective that doesn’t just lump all of antiquity into some vague category.  For example, some of these ruins predate Homer by almost as many years (2200 years) as Homer predates us (2700 years).  Students (and plenty of others) tend to have one category — old — for anything that happened before they were born, which is an understandable feature of human awareness, but the corollary attitude that old means out of date and, therefore, unimportant or irrelevant presents an obstacle to understanding and prevents gaining wisdom.  Just as is it impossible to understand what is happening in the Middle East now without grasping what happened during and after World War I, it is impossible to fully grasp what happened then, in the early 20th century, without some knowledge of what happened after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem or during the Byzantine or Ottoman Empires.  Even beyond the political history, I’m interested in the human experience that literature captures, of course, but for today I’m focused on what the ruins of Ancient Troy can reveal about all these themes.  And my silly observation goes back beyond Homer the poet: to the residents and rulers of Troy as well as to invading Greeks during the Trojan War, Troy was a very old city, too, more than twice as old and established as any “city” in the United States is to us now (and my quotes indicate that pre-European inhabitants of North America tended not to build “cities” — and, beyond that, forgive me for oversimplifying, since I am merely making a comparison about perceptions).

The remains of the oldest settlement, Troy I, include some of the dwellings at the most protected center of the site — interpreted as the location of the palace of Troy VI, which would have been built on top of several layers of inhabitation that no longer exist — which have been  reconstructed out of mud brick, a material that crumbles upon excavation; now they are protected from the sun and rain by a large canopy.  This mud brick is familiar to us in the American Southwest as adobe, and I must say that these dwellings, with their box-like shapes, small windows, and roof holes — used as entrances and exits, not just for letting smoke from heating and cooking fires escape — reminded me of Native American pueblos.  The similarities undoubtedly owe to a couple of simple facts: one, that mud brick is much easier to come by and build with than stone, and two, that small openings placed high up on walls or roofs add security.  My association helped me think in more straightforward terms about the similar strategies that exist, across time and space, for deciding where and how to build centers of community and power (“cities”) that can endure, that are meant to be permanent or non-nomadic: one of the primary features of what we call civilization, which was just beginning in this area around the the time when Troy I was begun.

From the heights of Ancient Troy, it was not difficult to see why this site was selected or to imagine the scene when  the waters of the large, protected bay covered where the farm fields now lie.  The heights provided a commanding view — obviously an important feature for situating a citadel, to be able to see what and whom was coming, and how — and the bay provided proximity and easy access to both the sea and to the inland waterway — obviously an important feature for trade and travel but also a motive for defense, since easy access works as well for other peoples as for one’s own.  The “thousand ships” launched by Helen’s “face” are certainly a poetic exaggeration, but the arrival of even a fraction of that number, full of warriors, landing on the beach below would have been daunting.  I would definitely want some serious walls to protect my citadel here, and there are remains of more than one set that once surrounded and protected different sized Troys in different periods.

The first walls visitors encounter, and the most impressive ones, date from Homer’s Troy.  I knew from my research that the still extant stone walls dating from the time of Homer’s Troy were only the base of much higher walls whose upper parts were, like the early houses, constructed of mud brick.  The extant stone walls are still pretty impressive, as is the design of the gates in them — not a simple opening which might have been closed by huge wooden doors, rather  a sort of corridor with a huge U-turn that would expose the unshielded side of those trying to enter to attacks from above, and then capture them, after they breeched the first wooden gate, in an exposed-from-above chamber where they could be shot, like fish in a barrel, outside a second gate.

Remarkably, some stone perimeter walls from Troy I still exist as well.  They are constructed from smaller stones than the walls of Homer’s Troy and are not as high, but they were built at a similar angle and were also originally surmounted by mud brick portions that extended their height.  There is a stone ramp forming an entrance in the stone walls dating from Troy II that is beautiful, so I could understand why Schliemann believed that it was this ramp that the Trojans used to bring the Trojan Horse into the city, but these earlier walls and this ramp are actually well inside  the walls dating from Homer’s Troy.

My research turned up some interesting speculation, based on images represented in artworks, that the Trojan Horse may have actually been an early siege machine/tower: a raised platform with some construction to protect warriors inside it that could be wheeled up to the wall.  I am not an expert in military technology, but having visited the site, I can see how devising and building this sort of siege tower in order to attack the weaker upper walls made of mud brick instead of huge stones, rather than try to breech the elaborate gates, might be more successful.  And, of course, it strikes me as endlessly fascinating how such things become transfigured in myth.  In other words, whatever the real Trojan Horse was, or if there was a real Trojan Horse, it probably looked nothing like the one standing out in the plaza near the entrance to the site.  That one is no more authentic than the distinctly Roman (not Bronze Age) costumes provided there for photos ops with the wooden horse.

If my description of the site of Ancient Troy seems a bit jumbled and unorganized, well, that parallels the experience of visiting the site.  There is a circuit that tourists must follow which makes a pretzel-like loop through the site but does not, and cannot, serve as a chronological guide.  So I won’t try to rework my description to be more coherent; instead, I will insert a diagram that helped me at least partly untangle my impressions.

After driving back to Canakkale, boarding the ship, and spending a few hours writing, I chatted a bit with an older man I’d met this morning along with his partner, and ended up having dinner with them and the two women they are traveling with, whom I hadn’t seen or met before.  They all lived in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, and the more we talked, the more we seemed to have in common.  The four of them had toured Turkey for a couple of weeks prior to this cruise, so I was interested in hearing their descriptions, and after this cruise they will tour Greece for a couple more weeks, so they were interested in hearing what I knew about some of their destinations from my prior travels.  They are all very experienced travelers, have taken other trips as a foursome, and knew a lot about a form of travel I haven’t done before but will do a bit later in my journey: hiring a driver and guide.  I’ll be curious to see how my experience goes (unfortunately, I am not sharing the cost with three other people), but it seems like an appealing middle ground between completely independent travel (using public transportation or renting a car and driving oneself, relying on guidebooks and research to interpret sites) and organized tours (one of which I’ll be joining in Turkey after this cruise).  They are all interesting, down-to-earth people overall, so I feel happy to have connected with them.

Monday, September 7 — Myrina, Lemnos, Greece

I decided to follow Captain Sergey’s advice from yesterday’s talk and get up to watch the sunrise.  After all, I could hardly do all this sailing around the Aegean/Mediterranean without observing Dawn, with her rosy fingers, arriving.  At first I prepared to be disappointed, since it seemed that Dawn would have to get her  fingers through a considerable layer of haze on the horizon, but soon after I had given up on seeing much of a sunrise, much less seeing one worth trying to photograph, there it was, or there she was, happening above the layer of haze, reflecting the rosy pinks and oranges off the few clouds to the east.  Lovely.

I had been able to see a land mass off to the starboard, undoubtedly Lemnos, since we were due to arrive at 9:00 am in Myrina on the western side of the island.  One of the few other passengers up on deck this early brought it to my attention that we were operating completely under sail — three of the main sails plus three of the square sails on the forward mast — at a modest pace but heeling slightly.  As soon as the sun rose, though, the wind picked up significantly, and so did our speed and the angle of our heel.  Apparently, the increased heeling was enough to get more people out of bed and up on deck, where we were treated to quite a show on the forward deck: watching the crew lower and furl these sails in preparation for our arrival.  One of the mail sails was quite uncooperative, didn’t want to settle down and be furled, kept billowing up in the stiff breeze that was whipping up small whitecaps in the water.  But we soon set anchor and began the shuttle service on our tender boats to the harbor.

According to Hesiod, Lemnos is where Hephaestus landed after Zeus booted him off Mount Olympus for taking Hera’s side in a marital argument; this fall from heaven and landing on Lemnos caused Hephaestus’s lameness.  This story does not appear in the Odyssey, but another one involving this god and his favorite island, Lemnos, does: the one in which Hephaestus is ridiculed for catching his wife, Aphrodite, in bed with another god, Ares.  It is sung by the resident bard in Scheria, where Odysseus later tells his own tale, but it hardly the only story in Homer that involves sexual or marital relations, not by a long shot.  It is, however, the only one I can think of that puts a humorous spin on a husband’s inability to keep his wife’s sexual appetites and activities under control.  As is so often the case in Homer, mortals are the ones who suffer serious consequences from such husbands’ flaws and actions.  I mean, Helen’s unfaithfulness to her first (and ultimately last) husband, Menelaus, sets in motion events that result in the deaths of countless Greeks and Trojans, and her less beautiful but also powerful sister Clytemnestra conspires with her lover Aegisthus to murder Agamemnon when he arrives home from the war.  No laughing matters, these.

The ruins of a much later-than-Homeric era Venetian castle, or kastro, dominated Myrina’s harbor from atop a peak.  Odysseus does not stop here on Lemnos, but since his first stop after leaving Troy, and the other Greek flotillas, is a pirating raid along the coast of Thrace, the kastro here was a reminder that theft and piracy have always been a danger for seaside settlements.  I ended up wandering around the town, poking into shops (but not raiding or stealing anything!) with the two women from Santa Rosa whom I met at dinner last night.  I was aware of not wanting to intrude on their excursion, but whenever I said that I might peel off to find a little cafe (thinking that I might sit and write there), they urged me to wander the town with them first, so I did.  Even at a very leisurely pace, it took only an hour to do the whole town, so when we arrived at a quiet beach bordered with tavernas and bars, we decided to sit in the shade at one and have coffee.  In the course of conversation, one of them mentioned the name of someone I used to know when I lived up in the Bay Area thirty years ago, and long story short, it turns out that this fellow passenger and I had met once or twice back then.  It’s early in my trip, but I certainly never expected to see someone I hadn’t seen for more than twenty years, as is the case with Odysseus and his family.  I don’t want to get into too much personal detail here, but it really wasn’t our having met once or twice that was the connection, rather that her friend told her various stories about me.  Who knew?  Her friend was someone I had not known well and, honestly, had not thought about after I’d moved to San Diego, nor expected to have remembered me, but apparently she did.  For example, when we walked back to the harbor and, admiring the sailboats moored there, I mentioned the sailboat I used to own, this friend of hers said, “Oh, you’re the sailor!”  I had forgotten that I had taken her friend sailing all those years ago, but when she told me the story about it that her friend had told her, I recalled that I had.

 

It’s been one thing like this after another all day.  I’m not suggesting that what this woman’s friend had told her about me was anything remotely akin to the stuff of legend — as the Phaeacians have heard about Odysseus and his exploits during the Trojan War nearly twenty years earlier — but it was strange to discover this connection and to feel like we knew each other, or that she knew me, in some way.  Somehow, things became more familiar with these shipboard acquaintances in a way that none of us anticipated.

Back on board our ship, we shared a bottle of Prosecco to celebrate our serendipitous meeting, followed by the ritual of setting sail, music and all, and then dinner.  Since we have been setting sail around sunset and sailing through the night, we are not exactly observing the Bronze Age preference for sailing (or rowing when necessary) by day and both eating and sleeping on shore; we are doing the opposite.  As Severin points out, based on sailing a replica of a Bronze Age galley ship on what he proposes as Odysseus’s route, it is difficult if not impossible to cook aboard a Bronze Age galley ship, and not much easier to sleep aboard one, aside from the obvious difficulty of navigating at night.  I was hoping to get a sense of distances and visibility, but after sailing all night, by the time it was light enough to see anything, we were already close to our destination — and I could see that this will be the case every day.  We do have one longer sail coming up, so maybe I will be able to observe enough to satisfy my curiosity then.

Tuesday, September 8 — Ouranopolis, Greece

Rough seas at night, also apparently a thunder-and-lightening storm: Zeus and Poseidon at work? I got up early, around 5:30 am, because of all the ship’s rocking and rolling.  It was not making me seasick, fortunately, something I have never experienced but don’t want to if I can help it, only prevented me from falling back asleep.  I showered very carefully (the bathroom in my cabin is essentially a shower that has a sink and toilet in it and is very slippery when wet), and then headed up on deck, only belatedly feeling that I’d been pretty silly and stupid to either shower or go up on deck in these conditions.  I knew that I had because I’d found it exciting and assumed everyone else would, too.  Something was happening, and I wanted to witness and experience — and share — it.

Up on deck, however, only a couple of other passengers were up, perhaps because it was as difficult to remain standing on deck as it was in the shower, but I felt a goofy, childish joy at lurching from one handhold to the next and looking over the side of the ship at the three-to-four-foot swells on the seaward side, then lurching over to look at the surf on the other side.  Land was definitely in sight — Mount Athos, at the southern end of the eastern finger of the Chaldiki Penninsula — but just visible at the waterline and maybe a couple hundred feet above it because of the low clouds.

 

Eventually some other passengers emerged, the ones who liked the show, and when the sun began to poke through the clouds, we were treated to the sight of a rainbow.  Despite our modern grasp of the conditions that produce a rainbow, there is still an excitement about seeing one that feels almost primal, perhaps more so when you are on a ship rolling on the sea during a storm.  It’s not as though we worried that the storm would do us in or continue for forty days and nights, but it was still pretty cool.

We spent the morning and early afternoon tracing the inside (west) coast of this peninsular finger, ultimately anchoring and taking the tender boat into the town of Ouranopolis, with its distinctive Byzantine tower.  The current town was founded by refugees from Turkey after World War I and was accessible only by sea until a road was built in the 1970s.  I don’t know enough about the history of that, the relocation of Greek refugees from Turkey, but in this place I gather that they were given a patch of uninhabited land without, necessarily, much thought about why the patch of land remained uninhabited in the 1920s.  At least in this case, though, people were allowed to relocate and settle with their families and community members, even if they had to literally start from scratch.

Today, despite the road built fifty years after their initial relocation, it seemed that all new arrivals came by sea, the majority of them by ferries, two of which docked just as we hopped off our tender, and that the road served mainly to connect the town with the monasteries and retreat centers that this peninsula is famous for.  I knew that visits to these monasteries were allowed only for males, and even for them needed to be arranged far in advance and for a legitimately religious reason, but none of us were prepared for the rush of male pilgrims exiting the ferry boats:  from

the first clusters of twelve-year-old boys excitedly shoving their way past everyone on the pier, looking “like they were going to summer camp,” one of my companions observed, to Greek Orthodox monks of all ages in their black garb and hats, to non-monks of all ages, carrying all luggage types, from roller-boards to backpacks.  All were clearly en route to some monastery or center for a spiritual retreat (wandering around town I saw the Pilgrimage Office where these visitors check in).  Someone on board our ship had told us that the European Union was pressuring these Greek monasteries to be more open to women, to perhaps open a convent or retreat center to offer a similar retreat for women, but the answer so far has been a firm “no.”  Anyone, including women, can visit Ouranopolis, but only males with official permission to experience a religious retreat at one of the many Greek Orthodox monasteries on the peninsula can go south from here.

The religious focus of this peninsula was apparent in Ouranopolis from the preponderance of shops selling religious items, primarily icons, though we saw one vestment shop for priests: shops for serious religious customers, not casual, non-Greek-Orthodox tourists.  In fact, we seemed out of place here in that regard.  This place did not seem like a tourist destination for anyone but religious pilgrims, though maybe it had once been, or tried to become, one; at least, across from one stretch of beach we passed a row of boarded up restaurants that once sported grand courtyards and fountains that were now dry and weed infested.  Eventually, after wandering the few streets of the town, we discovered a row of tavernas along the town’s other stretch of beach that were alive and faring better, so we stopped at one, and only when my companions asked me outright how old I was did I remember that it was my birthday.  I have become aware that I share my birthday with both the Virgin Mary and Molly Bloom, a fictional character in Ulysses,  James Joyce’s modern version of Homer’s Odyssey, who represents both Penelope and Calypso; I won’t analyze that beyond noting that these associations cover a wide expanse of stereotypical options for women: virgin, faithful wife, and goddess.  I am not saying that any of these describes me, but I will say that I am fine with the other usual roles for women, whore and crone, being left out.  Anyway, my new friends helped me celebrate at the taverna, and after dinner on board the ship there was singing and cake — a little embarrassing, but I knew it was coming; one of the Brits I met the first night had her birthday celebrated at our first dinner, and I had introduced myself after dinner to wish her a happy birthday but also to ask if someone in her party had arranged the celebration, which they had not, and admitted my reason for asking.

 

Wednesday, September 9 — Skiathos Island, Greece

Once again, we sailed all night, and once again the weather was stormy, reminding me that Odysseus, too, encountered storms when sailing through this part of the Aegean.  After his ill-fated raid on the coast of Thrace, where the Cicones retaliate and kill seventy-two of his men before the rest beat a hasty seaward retreat, a storm blows his squadron of twelve ships past the Sporades, a group of small islands where they most likely would have stopped for food and rest had the wind and weather allowed.

Fortunately, we fared better, and by the time I got up to try to catch the sunrise, some of the islands of the Sporades were already in sight, though the sun was hidden by the low clouds.  Still, I stayed on deck to watch our approach to  Skiathos, curious to witness what was visible from the sea.  These islands were largely wooded right down to their rocky shorelines, whose limestone was pitted with caves carved out by the water.  Odysseus’s account of his adventures mentions several caves inhabited by various characters, from the cyclops Polyphemus to the nymph Calypso, but I was struck by just how ubiquitous a feature of Aegean (and probably Mediterranean in general) geography these seaside caves were — and thus the impossibility of confidently identifying any of them as the location for one or another of Odysseus’s cave-related adventures.  I mean, one could place Odysseus at virtually any coastline in this sea and find a cave there to fit his story, it seemed to me, even if none these islands of the Sporades had been nominated by anyone as a location for one of his adventures.  But Odysseus’s account of his sailing route through the northern Aegean is actually detailed enough to trace, at least roughly, and there are no stories of strange foreigners or supernatural creatures in this first part of his tale, presumably because these lands and islands were familiar.  It is only after his ships encounter a second storm off Cape Malea, a particularly hazardous cape at the southeastern tip of the Peloponnesian peninsula in Greece many miles from here, and are blown off course for nine whole days that he enters waters and lands unfamiliar to him, and the fantastical adventures begin.

The sun came out as we approached, in time for today’s shore excursion briefing, which was for some unknown reason held on the Sun Deck, positioned on an upper deck between two masts with a small pool in the middle and few places to sit or stand, instead of the Tropical Deck, where there were no masts or pool and plenty of seating.  During this briefing, I was standing near one mast, along with at least eight or ten other people, when I suddenly felt something hit me hard in the side of my left knee and shouted, “Ow!”  Long story short, some of the crew were hoisting a sail  using an electric winch but failed to remove the rope (halyard) from the wooden belaying pin, so the pin broke off, and the bottom half, a two-inch thick wooden dowel about eight inches long, shot about twelve feet across the deck, and hit my leg.  Fortunately, I was not injured badly.  I caught up on my writing while I elevated, iced, and compressed my knee, as directed (my new friends include a doctor and a nurse who were vastly more helpful than the ship’s “nurse”), which really did work preventative wonders, leaving me to endure just a bruise and some soreness — and much teasing about shouting “ow” instead of something saltier.

I went into the main town on Skiathos later on, about 5:30 pm, in order to meet up with these friends for dinner, our only opportunity on this cruise to have dinner on land due to our very short sail to our next destination.  However, our plan devolved into a process of sightings and missed or nearly-missed connections over the next couple of hours that reminded me of the Aeolus episode in Joyce’s Ulysses.  In the Odyssey, King Aeolus offers a guest-gift of the infamous leather bag into which he has had all the “ill winds” (all the winds except those that will carry Odysseus’s ships back to Ithaca) sewn up; the ships sail the men swiftly and easily almost all the way home, but within sight of Ithaca, not knowing what is inside the leather bag, the crew feel that Odysseus plans to keep King Aeolus’s gift for himself without sharing it, so they open it up to  claim their share —and the “ill winds” blow them all the way back to King Aeolus’s island.  The second time around, King Aeolus is unwilling to provide further help, believing that some god must have it out for Odysseus, so he is once again on his own.  In Ulysses, Joyce sets this episode in a newspaper office, where “windbags” unleash and hold forth about their opinions, as Leopold Bloom (modern corollary for Odysseus) experiences a “near miss” of connecting with Stephen Dedalus (modern corollary for Telemachus).

Skiathos town itself would be an easy place to get lost or lose someone, one of those Greek island towns whose labyrinthine streets were designed — or so I was told on Mykonos years ago — to foil pirates and raiders, but as I explored the town, I was careful to keep track of landmarks so I could retrace my steps back to the harbor to meet up with the tender boat shuttles that my friends might be on.  (They had taken an excursion that day but wanted to go back to the ship to clean up and change before meeting up for dinner.)  After a couple rounds of my hobbling back to the harbor to meet a shuttle that my friends were not on, a taverna owner accosted me saying, “Five times you have passed by here!  Please come have dinner!”  I replied that I was waiting for my friends to have dinner with them.  “Well, please wait here then!  Have a drink or a cappuccino,” he said, so I did, since my knee was hurting.  Anyway, due to the “Comedy of Errors” of the tender boat shuttles, and people missing them, only two of my friends made it back to the island for dinner, but we enjoyed a delightful meal on land in a charming restaurant situated in a tree-lined courtyard.

Thursday, September 10 — Skopelos Island, Greece

Due to the weather, mainly high winds — similar conditions to those Odysseus encounters — our ship was unable to anchor in the harbor of the main town on Skopelos (Chora, but chora is simply the Greek word meaning main town), so we sailed around to the leeward (southwestern) side of the island and anchored outside a small port named Agnodas.  It was interesting to watch and listen as the captain and crew steered into this harbor as far as was safe and then set anchor, the captain calling out three-digit numerical bearings, the helmsman repeating them and spinning the wheel.  Then, as usual, the tender boat shuttle service began, but since we were not anchored in the main harbor, those wanting to visit the main town needed to take a bus there, which was my choice (rather than tour film locations for Mama Mia).

My first impression was that this was a sailing town and island.  On Lemnos, the local boats in the harbor were fishing boats; on Skiathos, they were tour boats advertising day trips to local beaches and places of interest, dozens of vendors offering the same tour.  But here on Skopelos, they were all sailboats for rent or charter by the day or half day.   I instantly felt that this was my kind of place.  The large marina also had many sailboats visiting from elsewhere or chartered here but sailed by people from elsewhere; flags were flying from all over Europe, mainly France, Germany, and England, as well as lots from Australia, and I wandered its whole extent, even noted some web addresses for companies chartering these sailboats.

 

As I had told my new friends, some part of me was already thinking of coming back, in part to explore places that I just hadn’t been able to arrange to visit on this trip but also in part to explore possible options for future summers, specifically staying longer than a few days on some Greek island, maybe connecting with some locals, maybe doing some sailing myself, maybe writing.  I wasn’t quite sure.  I simply was aware that I hadn’t  taken an entire summer off in a number of years and that I hadn’t really found a way to use my ten-month contract, and its potential to take summers off, that satisfied something in me.  As is the case with such things, one needs to grasp what it is that one wishes to satisfy before one can explore ways of satisfying it, but I was aware that I was partly engaged in some process about that.  One evening at home, sometime in the process of planning this trip, I became curious about what it would cost to rent an apartment for a month or two during the summer on some Greek island, so I took to the internet and discovered that it might be more possible than I had thought.  On a well-known, touristy island like Mykonos or Santorini, it would be expensive, but I’d already been to both of them (Santorini twice); on lesser known islands, however, the cost dropped dramatically.  I had no idea whether I would ever decide to do this, because I still wasn’t sure why I might want to — I could sail, go to the beach, and write at home, and doing so would save both the experience and expense of a long journey to and from some Greek island  — but Skopelos appealed to me.

Call it what you will — wanderlust, curiosity, a desire for adventure, or just a sort of restlessness — it did seem to me, when I read and reread the Odyssey, that Odysseus had it, too.  I mean, sure, there are so many things that happen that are out of his control, but if he really was so keen to return home right away, he could have sailed with the Greek contingents that returned home quickly and safely, and as Telemachus’s sea journey shows, Ithaca is just a relatively easy day’s sail from Nestor’s home in Pylos, so had Odysseus sailed with Nestor’s fleet, he could have been home in a week or less.  And, sure, while I’ve noted Odysseus’s possible motive for choosing  not to do so — further plundering or hoping for guest gifts — the fact is that neither he nor Homer mentions his desire to return home until we meet him after he has been marooned (or held captive) on Calypso’s island for seven years.  Before that, he and his crew spend a full year on Circe’s island, which Odyssey spends as Circe’s lover, and then it is only the complaints of his crew and their desire to return home that prompt Odysseus to leave.  I am not saying that he doesn’t love his wife, Penelope, or miss her, or that he doesn’t love his son and miss him, or that he doesn’t love his home and miss it; I’m only saying that he doesn’t behave in ways that put these things first and foremost until after he’s been stuck on Calypso’s island for seven years.  What he was seeking before that, it seems to me, can’t be completely reduced to wealth, though I think it’s important to consider how much he does seem to be interested in that, in accumulating valuable stuff.  Heck, Menelaus, who is far wealthier and has gotten back his trophy wife, also gets blown off course and takes seven years to return home, which he uses to his advantage in terms of accumulating more stuff.  Anyway, this material motive does not seem to completely explain Odysseus’s choices, at least in my reading of the poem, which opens the door for another sort of speculation: not exactly where, geographically, he went, rather what he was (consciously or unconsciously) seeking.

In my case, I felt this added motive for exploring the rest of the main town on Skopelos; maybe this was I place I would decide to return to in my quest for some as yet undefined something I was seeking myself.  I found a similar sort of design as on Skiathos — the labyrinth of winding streets with painted outlines of the stones meandering between the whitewashed buildings hugging a steeper hillside straight up from the harbor — but this time I explored the town more thoroughly — and my knee was feeling much, much better.  I climbed up almost to the top, further beyond the shops, cafes, and restaurants clustered near the harbor, and was greeted by plenty of locals just starting their day at about 10:00 am.  Some seemed surprised to see me, but all were friendly, and many hopped on motorbikes or Vespas to scoot off to work or some errand.  I continued poking around for a few more hours, looking into some shops that were now open.  Many sold interesting local arts and crafts rather than the standard tourist souvenirs, and many of the local art and crafts involved pomegranate designs or simply ceramic pomegranates.  At one ceramic shop selling many items with pomegranate designs, I asked the artist proprietor if there was a special connection with pomegranates on this island, but he said no, that pomegranates were common in Greek arts and crafts because they symbolized good luck.  He didn’t mention their association with the myth of  Persephone, whose taste of a single pomegranate seed dooms her to spend half of each year in the underworld with Hades — the mythological explanation for the dormancy of plant life during the winter months — but I think the more relevant point is that pomegranates are associated with fertility, particularly female fertility, and that Persephone and her mother Demeter are goddesses associated with crops and the plentiful harvests needed to sustain agricultural cultures.  Still, I seriously considered buying one of these ceramic pomegranates and decided not to only because I didn’t want to carry (and worry about breaking) a fragile item for five more weeks.

Eventually, I returned to the harbor and walked all the way around it, up to a church perched on the promontory at the end, out to the end of the jetty, and then sat at in the shade of a harbor side taverna to have a cold drink and write a bit.  The owner asked if I was a writer and told me that Skopelos is a great island for writers, especially in the wintertime, mentioning “famous writer” Michael Carroll who wrote a book about the island and all its local “characters”; I am unfamiliar with this author and book, but will check it out when I get home (I didn’t see it for sale anywhere here).  I’m not saying that I had any thoughts of writing something similar in the future, but now I felt even more at home here.  What was not to love about a place that valued sailing and writing — and English-speaking/writing foreigners?

 

We set sail from Skopelos around 3:00 pm with the usual music, but this time the sailors in the know remarked how amazingly the captain had “sailed off the anchor” — that is, managed to dislodge and raise the anchor as well as turn the ship around and get underway, all without using the engine at all, only the sails.  And today the captain and crew raised eleven sails: two jibs and the five square sails on the forward mast as well as the four main sails.  Heading south, we were sailing pretty much downwind on the prevailing northeastern wind that Homer describes, and I found myself surprised by feeling the same sailing downwind sensations on this large, heavy ship that I am very familiar with from small sailboats — not the lift from sailing at an angle to the wind, but a different sensation that comes when the wind is behind you, the feeling that the water is picking you up and rushing you forward, that your boat can’t quite go as fast as the water wants to carry it, even though you actually are sailing much faster than it feels like you are.  Hard to describe, but when I mentioned it to a couple of more experienced larger-boat sailors, they knew exactly what I meant.

Also, as we left the Sporades behind and set our course southward, the mainland was clearly visible and would be from much farther out to sea.  Unfortunately, there were low clouds obscuring the mountain tops, so I couldn’t try to identify Mount Olympus.  From my reading, I understood that this peak was used as a navigational landmark in ancient times, which makes good sense, but from my experience today, I was reminded that landmarks are only as good as the weather and visibility make them, which I’m sure Bronze Age sailors knew only too well.  I was reminded, too, just how mountainous this country is, including many of the islands; the land masses I have seen so far rise high up above the water and are unmistakeable as land.

Today, the crew finally offered the opportunity to climb the mast, now that weather conditions permitted it.  Before my accident and injury, I was planning to make myself participate, mostly because it scares me, to be honest, but I now watched the dozen or so passengers climb, including one of my new friends who had been eager to do it (because it doesn’t scare her).  One at a time, they strapped on harnesses, clipped into a rope, and ascended the rope ladders (I don’t know the technical term) up to the first platform where a crew member gripped their harnesses until he could unclip them and then clip them onto the platform’s railing.  This was as high as they went, one third of the way to the top, probably at least thirty feet up from the deck — something I did not know previously.  As a non-participant, I had no room to talk, but it was going all the way to the top that scared me; going just this far probably would not.  All the way at the top, I imagined that one would feel much more movement from the ship rolling on the waves, as the top of the stick on a metronome makes a much wider arc, swinging far beyond the base of the instrument, than it does only one-third of the way up, where it stays within bounds of the base.  It was that “top of the metronome” aspect that scared me, not so much the height.

One of the Brits from Bristol was watching, too, and entertaining me with stories from his days in the British Royal Navy, when everyone had to climb all the way to the top of the mast of some training sailing ship — without being clipped in like today’s mast climbers — as some test of manhood, as he put it.  He is very funny and self-deprecating, always, though I believed him when he said that it scared the bejesus out of him, but he was young and more afraid to not do it.  He also told me to watch a Youtube video of the mast-manning ceremony on the HMS Ganges — the same basic activity, but in the formal ceremony only one sailor does it and ends up standing with the very top of the mast between his knees, again without being roped or clipped in.  When I said that at least if he fell, he would probably fall into the water rather than onto the hard deck, Reg said that it didn’t matter, that falling from that height hitting the water would be like hitting concrete.  So I suppose that my fear may be plain old common sense.  It is dangerous, and a test of a mental capacity to overcome emotion, the most primal emotion being fear, and the most primal fear being fear of death.

I had done other things in the past that had given me a taste of that, including the specific part that being high up and possibly falling onto something “like concrete” tapped into, though in those cases it was rock that had seemed “like concrete,” not water.  I won’t relate them all, but I will relate part of my first outdoor rock climbing experience.  I had scaled part of a rock cliff successfully, while being clipped into a belay rope, and reached an outcropping that served as a platform I could stand on.  There, one of my more experienced companions switched my clip to a sturdy piece of webbing attached to a piece of hardware bolted into the rock so that our other more experienced companion (the one providing the gear we used) could clip into the belay rope and climb up.  As we belayed him from above, I felt relaxed and secure…until I noticed that the knot in the webbing I was clipped into had untied.  Yikes!  I was not clipped in to anything secure at all!  If I had slipped, or lost my balance from belaying him, I would have fallen off the side of this cliff onto the rock at the base of it where we had started our climb!  When I pointed out the untied knot to my companions, they said, “Well, tie it.”  There is more to this story, which I won’t get into, but let’s just say that the whole thing was a lesson in both trust and self-responsibility.  Yup, when it comes right down to it, there really is no place for whining.  If you are lucky enough to avoid what could have been a fatal fall or blow that you thought someone else should have protected you from, you should be grateful, but you should also learn from it and accept responsibility for your own survival.  Homer doesn’t get into rock climbing or mast climbing, but he surely gets into surviving by your own wits — and that is really what is heroic about Odysseus — in ways that absolutely involve trust and relationships.  Agamemnon’s nostos is repeated several times in the Odyssey as a cautionary tale about trusting an unfaithful wife, for example.  Anyway, to return to my point, I actually did overcome my fear after that first rock climbing experience, but I was also quite aware that rock cliffs don’t sway back and forth like the tip of a metronome.  Nevertheless, the next time I get a chance to climb a mast, I will do it, I swear…as long as I check the gear myself and am securely clipped in.

Fortunately, the mast-climbing activity was all finished before two fighter jets did a very low fly-by, quite loud and seeming to come out of nowhere.  Most likely they just wanted to take a look at this tall ship under sail, but it still gave everyone a jolt.

Friday, September 11 — Poros Island, Greece

Before we reached our next destination, the island of Poros, the captain hoisted all sixteen sails and gave everyone interested a chance to go out in one of the tender boats to take photos of it.  The ship was pretty impressive in full sail and looked beautiful and surprisingly graceful.  Just as our tender boat made its way from the starboard side of the ship to the port side, the crew lined up out on the bowsprit in their cute sailor outfits (some days they wore a less formal uniform of blue-and-white striped tee-shirts and blue  pants), and I have to say that, despite my getting injured, I have really enjoyed the opportunity to be so up close and personal with them while they are working, as has everyone, I  think.  The calm morning made perfect conditions for the full complement of sails to be raised, so I was happy to have the opportunity to see it.

P0ros has a lovely, large, protected bay on its mainland side and is very nearly part of the mainland itself, almost a peninsula instead of an island, and it was very difficult to tell which it is.  In ancient times, in fact, it was a peninsula during most of the year, and during the wet months when it wasn’t, people easily walked through the water to get to the mainland, but as speculators repeatedly mention, sea levels in the Aegean and Mediterranean are different now than in antiquity.  By the time we anchored, the calm morning had turned into a very hot afternoon, and  as soon as we got into town we discovered that it was too darned hot to explore and that there wasn’t much to explore, anyway, so we headed back to the ship and caught the Zodiac shuttle to a beach in a secluded cove.  This was my first time in the water on this trip, and I had forgotten just how lovely — and salty — the waters of the Mediterranean are, so buoyant that you don’t need to tread water, don’t need to move a muscle to float whether lying horizontally or “standing” upright.  It took me a couple minutes to adjust my stroke in order to swim in it because my legs and feet kept floating to the surface, an odd sensation that is hard to describe.  The water was the perfect temperature, being in it the perfect antidote to the oppressive heat, and being able to stay in it indefinitely, swimming, floating, hanging out and talking, the perfect way to spend the afternoon.  One of my friends had brought a mask and snorkel and reported that the rocks forming the cove were riddled with underwater caves.  I had noted earlier the futility of trying to identify any particular cave as the location for any episode in the Odyssey, but when she described looking into one of the caves around our swimming cove and seeing a single eye staring back out at her, I said that was perfect, that I was going to use it as my “cyclops episode” in my journal.  “It was probably some sort of eel, just turned so that only one eye was showing,” she said, but I jokingly plugged my ears and said no, I didn’t want to hear that.  It was a one-eyed creature in a cave as far as I was concerned, and I needed one for my story.

On a slightly more serious note, I have read many theories about the origins of the mythological cyclops, from imaginative but misguided “forensic reconstructions” of elephant skulls, misinterpreting the nasal trunk opening for an eye socket, to distorted folktales about three-eyed cannibalistic humanoids, but I have my doubts about Bronze Age people believing literally in these and other mythological creatures, not that I or anyone else can prove conclusively what they literally believed.  The foreign can quickly become fantastic, both in the simple “fish story” way of exaggerating and in the common way of misinterpreting physical or behavioral surface details, and the fantastic simply makes for a better story — more entertaining, more serviceable as a cautionary tale, and more effective for elevating members of one’s tribe to heroic status.  So, back to my less serious note, give me a little time to embellish my story of the one-eyed creature in the underwater cave, and give my story a little time to pass from my telling to other tellings, and my friend might become some sort of Amazon-like female heroine, bravely exploring beneath the water’s surface with her magical mask and snorkel given to her by some goddess.

The water sports crew had brought a couple of kayaks, stand-up paddle boards, and a single-person sailboat for us to play with, so since the wind was light and the water had made my knee feel almost fully healed, I decided to take a turn on the sailboat.  Unfortunately, by the time the previous sailor returned, there wasn’t time.  When I was thinking about it aloud, the woman who knew the woman I used to know in the Bay Area asked me if this sailboat was like the one I had owned back then, a Laser.  I said yes, it was similar, but this one had a heavy plastic hull, whereas my Laser had a much lighter, sleeker fiberglass one, and the sail on this one was much smaller.  Then she said that she thought so, that she remembered my sailboat and recalled driving her friend to meet me at the lake (reservoir) where I took her sailing.  When she added that she remembered my “white sailing shorts,” I knew she must have come that day because I did wear white tennis shorts often when I sailed back then. So we added one more time when our paths had crossed years ago.

Back on board, we had our Captain’s Dinner, a farewell dinner with some entertainment by the entire crew and staff, including their singing a heartfelt, touching rendition of “We Are the World” as each carried a flag (or two) of his or her home country.  There were also many farewells among passengers, since everyone would be departing at different times, depending on their travel plans, once we dock in Athens (Piraeus) early in the morning.  I exchanged contact information with my new friends and hoped to keep in touch.