10 Oct Greece — Jumping Ship in the Ionian Sea

Peggy and I wound up with three other couples on a sailboat in the Ionian Sea because our friends from Australia invited us. How the captain wound up on that boat was never made clear. He was from Peru, the Ionian Sea is off the west Coast of Greece, and he’d never been there before, either.

The boat came fitted with a mast and spars and lines and a sail and a rubber dingy trailing along behind. Mostly, though, we motored from one place to another. And, even though the islands were filled with little coves where we could have dropped anchor for pleasant, quiet nights rocking beneath the Ionian sky, we never did that. The Greek government had a rule, or so the captain informed us, that we needed to spend our nights tied up in port next to party boats and flashing neon signs. The rule had something to do with storms, but that didn’t make sense. Every American knows that the Mediterranean is a sheltered little backwater of a place and the Ionian, if Americans know about it at all, is a backwater of a backwater. Real storms are reserved for the North Atlantic where entire islands sometimes get washed over. Or the Western Pacific where hurricanes are called typhoons and have Oriental names. And, because our boat didn’t have a galley, if we wanted to eat we had to go ashore and find a restaurant.

Wherever we spent our nights it was hard for Peg and me to complain. We’d been the last to arrive, the others had been too polite to take the good cabin, and we’d copped the one with the skylight where we could lie in bed and watch the stars.

The Ionian is a picturesque little sea with caves you can swim into, and clamber around in the back of, and imagine cyclopes,

 

 

and towns built right down to the water.

 

 

A lot of Greece appears to be built on the waterline, which makes sense once you get a good look at the land.

One evening we tied up on Ithaka, which was fun because of the legendariness of the island, but turned out to be tangly and brush-covered the next morning when Peggy and I climbed the small mountain behind the harbor. Oddly, given what I thought I knew about history, we came across the ruins of a Mycenaean acropolis

 

 

cordoned off behind a serious-looking fence welded out of lengths of rebar.

That afternoon, if I’ve got the sequence straight, we motored past Skorpios, the island Jackie Kennedy ran off to when she married Onassis. We meant to land on the little beach, but were set upon by a sinister-looking guardboat

 

 

who’s job, our captain announced, was to protect the island from the likes of us. With Jackie and Aristotle and even that opera singer he used to hang out with all crossed over the River Styx, it wasn’t clear why anybody would care. Or, even, have the authority to tell us no. But the closer that boat came the more it started looking like something out of a James about Bond movie, and we sheared off.

We would have stayed on the trip with the others if Peg’s sister hadn’t emailed about her church group touring the monasteries at Meteora, and thought we should go see. We didn’t know anything about Meteora but, with a recommendation like that, how could we pass it up? The next morning we were tied to an island with a causeway to the mainland, so we rented a car, headed up the left side of Greece almost to the border with Albania, and turned inland.

It probably should have occurred to us that any place famous enough to be visited by Christians was probably famous enough to draw a lot of other people, too. Which we discovered when we pulled up to a charming little guest house and found a line of would-be guests being turned away. The owner asked us the same thing she’d asked everybody else all morning, “do you have a reservation?” Not knowing any better, I told her, “No. But we do have money.”

I don’t know whether she was trying to dodge the tax man with an unaccounted-for cash payment but, whatever the reason, space magically opened up and the lobby filled with un-Christian mutterings from people who’d arrived ahead of us but didn’t get rooms.

Meteora turned out to be a series of impossibly high rock outcroppings with Eastern Orthodox monasteries

 

 

perched atop unscalable-looking cliffs

 

 

that, in the old days, could only be reached by ropes winched up hundreds of feet from the valley floor

 

 

There’d been twenty-six of them, some built as long ago as the Fourteenth Century. They’d survived the Ottoman conquest and on through the long, Turkish occupation right up to modern times. But modern times aren’t kind to monastic orders and only six are still going, if not strong, at least puttering along with a total of fifteen monks scattered between four monasteries, and forty-one nuns in the other two.

 

 

with storerooms loaded with more wine and fresh produce than those monks and nuns could ever consume on their own.

 

 

Which made me wonder what went on after the tourists left. And thinking that, except for the celibacy thing, life in one those places might not be so bad after all.

The afternoon wore on and the sky clouded up, as if a storm were brewing toward the south. The crags and mountains and valley filled with a light that looked as if it came straight from Heaven.

 

 

God light, Peggy called it. And, I think, her sister would have, too. You could see why religious people would want to live there.

The following evening we were on the roof of a hotel in Athens along with the other couples from the boat, looking out over the city. But, mostly, gazing at the Acropolis lit up against the night sky.

 

 

That seemed like another kind of god light, older, and in some ways more human because the gods it represented were more human.

We’d done the right thing jumping ship. While we were in Meteora, the Peruvian captain tied up in a port, only to discover he’d hitched the boat to a working dock. Since the slips were all booked and he hadn’t thought to say, “no, but I have money,” he had to moor on a buoy a couple of hundred yards out in the harbor. Which would have meant nobody was going to get supper that night. Except,

“No problemo,” he announced, “we can use the dingy to get ashore.” Or they could have, if the outboard motor hadn’t fallen off sometime during the voyage.

Still, no problemo. Another boat from the same company was in the harbor and he’d row over and borrow their motor.

Which would have worked better if he’d checked the tide tables, but he didn’t and got sucked out to sea. Where, much later, he was rescued by a boatload of Swedes who dropped him off at the neighboring boat. Where he borrowed the outboard motor.

Which didn’t work.

Which still wouldn’t have meant more than a missed meal or two if the storm that looked so picturesque from Meteora hadn’t smacked into that very harbor with a fury that displayed an entirely different face of god.

At the very least, it made me realize I’d been misinformed as to the kind of weather that can brew up in the Mediterranean. Or, even, the little backwater of the Ionian. That storm would have ripped entire palm trees from the ground and sent them flying all the way across Cuba.

The wind screamed, the rain slashed sideways and, even protected from the open sea, the little boat heaved and yawed and stood on its stern, and plunged down by the bows. Other boats broke loose and crashed into one another and the skylight Peg and I had lain beneath gazing at the soft, Ionian stars flew off and flooded the couple who’d upgraded to our cabin.