Thoreau Bound, page 6
In the morning the sun bullied the stars away, the skies dazzled, the sea kicked in with laughs from the rollicking waves. In those early October mornings I would lie on a bed of sand and discover not the thought for the day — as if one thought was enough! — but the theme for the day, that would give meaning and focus to my wanderings. In Greece I had made one astonishing discovery. For hours and hours every day I experienced a deep joy, a feeling of marvelous aliveness I called “the fire.”
The sages say: “Be open and all things come.”
Whenever I felt this fire inside, whatever I needed would come to meet me on my path. Money, not yet; but all the other great necessities would come. When I needed food, some kind old man would give me bread; when I felt lonely, some far kinder young woman — a tourist, never a native Greek — would welcome me to share her sacred bed. It all worked because my face was handsome, my needs were simple, my sincerity was genuine, my spirit was strong enough to sacrifice the so-called luxuries. I could live without water for a day, without food for a week, without a woman for umpteen nights.
Jung and Hesse had called this notion ‘synchronicity’, a meaningful coincidence in time. No one should ever be so laughably foolish as to attempt this wish-come-true philosophy in the middle of a major city. Hoping for synchronicity in what has been grossly misnamed ‘the real world’ — in the heartless megalopolises — would guarantee you nothing but a hard park bench, a relishless hot-dog from a garbage can, or a sleepless night in the local jail. Here, inside this less complicated Greek world, life is lived with more freedom and spontaneity, and therefore the traveler finds more chances for adventures and serendipities. In traveling, as in real estate, location is the most important fact. With the right mind, the hungry bag-man in Manhattan is a holy wanderer in Greece.
A sea gull glided lazily above me as my mind soared with a vision of the Meteora woman who had touched my fingertips. The light, the sea, this perfect morning and that woman’s glowing face set fire to my soul. I threw off all my clothing — T-shirt and shorts — then tied a bandanna into the shape of a hat to cover my head from the sun. Is it not written that every dawn shall bring forth a nude day? The sky was growing lighter but it was still early enough for a clothes-free frolic — no native Greeks would be awake until the sun stood two hands higher than the skyline above the sea. I ran across the dry sand to the wet sand and my feet splashed the foamy sea-toes along the water’s edge. Naked as a peach I danced the hasapiko, learned from many watchings of the film Zorba the Greek. Dancing up and down the beach, barefooted in the wet sand, chasing the tide out and in again, stepping faster and faster, singing and shouting, leaping wild leaps into the air.
Something hit my head. I reached down to the sand and found a small green apple. Looking up I realized that the apple had been thrown at me by a person standing near the road.
A woman! A woman I had never seen before but would have loved to see again! A well-endowed woman with sun-blonde hair! A powerful Amazon standing beside a bicycle, first laughing, then smiling as she looked openly into my eyes. One glance and I knew her type. She wore home-made shorts cut at the middle of her thighs, and a loose-fitting cotton T-shirt, all on top of a body so strong and shapely that it made women envy and men drool. She was a child of the new counterculture, with a fresh face that loved the outdoors, and the worlds she felt at home in were green, vegetarian, progressive, feminist, sexually liberated and emotionally unattached. Every woman was her sister; every living being was her friend; yet she always mistrusted and often maligned the one group that dominated all the others: that immature species known as the human male. The young woman stood still for a few moments, calmly gathering her long golden hair into a ponytail.
Would she be a song of innocence, or a dirge of experience? Except for The Tyger, I’d neglected the poems of Blake. Blake saw a tigress and her dread face made him shudder; I saw a bikress and her body made me sing: The Phallus —
“Phallus! Phallus dangling loose!
Man is such a lazy creature
He would never rise to reproduce
If he did not possess this feature.”
Had she hit me with the apple to get my attention, or hit me to express her hatred of happy men? Determined to find out, I jumped into my shorts then dashed in her direction. The bikress leaped onto her saddle then pedaled slowly, with her arms folded across the T-shirt topping her mountainous chest. Like Aesop’s hare toying with the tortoise, she pedaled with arrogant nonchalance. Forward I charged to the asphalt road, and with the utmost efforts I sprinted closer to her bike. For an instant — almost close enough to grab her bike rack — I felt a wisp of hope. Too late! In one motion the woman bent down arching her back, placed both hands on the handlebars, churned her legs, then accelerated forward with heartbreaking velocity and deerlike grace. Swiftly the woman rode forward and never looked back. As her figure grew smaller my eyes could do nothing but admire the flowing form of her strong back, slender waist, rounded buttocks, dancer’s thighs.
He who chases two doves catches neither. Before this race I had been heading in the opposite direction to search for clues about the woman from WANDERBORE. Now there was a choice: should I go west to find the dark-haired woman from the Meteora, or east after the blonde woman on the bike?
‘Our main business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.’ ... Wisdom from Thomas Carlyle. Pursuing the impossible — an impractical ideal, or a fairy-tale kingdom, or a perfect love — is often a fearful excuse for avoiding the struggle to live the tangible life here and now within your grasp. But the whole problem is that we can never know what is possible, or impossible, until we try with all our might.
5
The Beauty of Women Tweaks the Inner Peace of Men
What is Beauty? For Plato, Beauty is a soft, smooth, slippery thing, which easily slides in and permeates our souls. For Emerson, Beauty holds something immeasurable and divine, hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky. For Keats it is a joy forever; for Plotinus it shows us spiritual light. Gazing up the empty road where Beauty biked away, a simpler definition drifted home. Beauty is just the right amount in just the right places.
Beauty had tagged me then run away. In my mind she left her body, a blazing vision brilliant as the red-gold morning sky. I ran from the roadside then plunged into the cool sea for a brief swim. Returning to the beach I dried my body with a T-shirt, capped my head with the bandanna, then slipped both legs into sand-covered shorts. I picked up a book about Greek grammar and literature, then — as I did every morning of the journey — I studied the beautiful language of the Greeks.
Swarms of beachflies wanted my skin for breakfast; I waved to scatter them away. My morning muses spoke to me.
“There’s something very simple I don’t understand at all. When today began, the splendid sunrise made the world look like Utopia, and the moment I awakened I was lighted with the brilliance of the day: serenity, quiet joy, thankfulness for all the gifts from the new dawn. I felt whole, I felt complete. I understood the self-sufficient Whitman who sang ‘I am good fortune,’ — he had his worlds within, he needed nothing more.”
The sky’s lone clouds hung in the air above me like billowy breasts.
“What is the secret of that attraction between a certain woman and a certain man, what Goethe called the ‘elective affinities’? ... From nowhere a ravishing woman appears and in seconds everything is changed! When Woman appears she plucks me from my private peace. How many days, how many golden moments will be lost in thinking about her? Now the perfect sunrise is not colorful enough. Freedom forgets its sweetness. Self-reliance loses its manly charm. Instead of appreciating the ripe moments in this here and now, the Garden of Desire tempts the man with the serpents of longing and regret.”
I laughed out loud, then wondered:“Should a man stop chasing women? Or should he run after them faster every time?”
Into one large rucksack I crammed everything I owned: a tent, a blanket, notebooks, empty food containers, assorted travel gear, and my equipment for mental survival — one hardback and more than fifty paperback books. From a water bottle, I drank one long swig of water then picked up a seashell and flipped it high into the air.
“Let’s let luck select the path today. Heads and I’ll go west for WANDERBORE, or tails I’ll travel east for the bosom on the bike.”
The shell fell onto the sand with its pearly-bottom up. I would look for the bikress by walking on the road to the nearest tourist-infested town.
The ball-of-sun now sat six fingers over the horizon and it was time to dress for work. I threw on my cleanest dirty T-shirt, donned a pair of shorts (‘Real men don’t wear underwear’), blister-proofed the feet with grimy socks, then added two high-mileage sneakers, each one with more holes than a Swiss cheese used for target practice. A dash of elegance was added to this attire by tying two cloth bandannas around my neck, one yellow and one black.
Tossing the seventy-pound canvas sack into the air, I spun around, raised my arms, slipped them through the straps, then let the bundle fall thumping against a strong muscular back. Three water bottles, attached to parachute cord and duct-tape sheaths, were tied around my waist for easy access. Packing’s last step is a quick scan around the sand to make sure that nothing would be left behind — no garb, garbage or gear.
Had my plan been to walk close to the sea, I could have dined on sea urchins and seaweed — with no impact on my meager financial resources. But inescapable is the first law learned by every loverlad: Romance costs money and trouble and time. Today, since I was heading for the town, I stuffed my left pocket with just enough Euros to buy a yogurt and a bread. My right pocket carried a threadbare wallet containing a dozen colorful but phony dollars, play-money swiped from one of my childhood board games. Any gun-toting thieves who approached me would be rewarded with these bogus bills.
I removed the hat that had been covering the “NO” on the corner of a wooden sign that said: ‘NO CAMPING.’ This white all-cotton hat — reversibly black on the inside for escaping from bedrooms at night — served as a portable survival kit. For a man like me — overrefined, hypercivilized, pampered by the ease of city living — without the implements atop this hat it would have been impossible to live the arduous nomadic life. Our ingenious humanoid ancestors survived by making tools from bones, antlers, stones, wood, obsidian and flint. My needs were far greater and my tools were more complex.
To hold the survival gear, I had perforated the hat with dozens of sewn-on grommets, then filled the grommets with metal O-rings, plastic springclips, strong twine and safety pins. As I checked these to make sure they were secure, I improvised a poem in the manner of Walt Whitman. Free verse to celebrate these small but all-important items which made it possible for me to live without credit cards and with laughably little cash.
Song of My Stuff
O multi-tooled Swiss knife! O pencil and small paper pad!
The roll of duct-tape stronger than steel, sticking-loyal like a camerado,
The matches waterproof’d, the water-purifying tablets of deadly iodine,
The string, fishhooks, compass, candle, flashlight the size of a pen,
The toothbrush which scours these teeth thirty-two,
The plastic jar fill’d with baking soda, for toothpaste and fashioning scones,
The emergency rations, hi-protein hi-calorie, two cans of fermented soybeans,
The soap bar that touches me places which only a lover would touch,
The sunscreen cream, small bottl’d, to cover each inch of this manly flesh,
Is this then a condom, polyurethane wrapp’d in foil? My son, it is siz’d extra large!
Enough! Enough! Enough!
If I parodied the wise Whitman, it was only because I loved his heartspun words. Whitman, whose literary power came from the most intimate contact with all Nature, once sang, “Now I see the secret of making the best persons. It is to live outdoors, and sleep in the open air.”
I glanced back at the sky’s long streaks of goldeny-red light. I felt so moved, so full of thankfulness. This new day would be completely free. Free and all my own, to lose or to win, to waste or to make glorious, to fill with routine drudgeries or with all the fiery encounters I could make and find.
Nomading depends on knowing what to carry, where to sleep, and when to leave. So I left the serenity of the beach and — hoping to meet the goddess-woman — afoot and lightheaded I took to the open road. Compared with the soft sand, the black asphalt felt hard under my feet. As always, for safety, I would walk on the side of the road against the flow of traffic, since so often my mind would wander out of the present moment, into uselessly joyous philosophical flights. The road — which sometimes snuggled close to the seashore and othertimes swung far away — led toward the town of Agios Nikolodeonos, a well-known tourist destination on Crete’s northeastern coast.
Walking felt wonderful, and synchronicity struck soon. Two age-rounded Greek women, dressed in widow-black, were walking toward me on the dirt-covered shoulder along the opposite side of the road. Wondering if the custom in Greece was “Once a widow, always a widow,” I could not resist greeting them with shouts and a cheerful smile.
“Kalimera! Kalimera! Good morning! Good morning!”
“Toureesta say kalimera!” one of the two replied. Both women erupted into cackling laughs then waved their hands to ask me to come near. From their straw baskets they handed me two long loaves of fresh bread. They wished me “Kalo taxeedee! Happy Treep!”, and then reached up to pinch my cheeks.
I tied one bread to each side of the hat and continued walking. A latemodel car drove past, then backed up to a stop. The family inside handed me a plastic bag containing one large chunk of feta cheese, a bunch of grapes, a bag of black olives, and one bottle of Cretan wine. I pressed the driver’s hand between my hands and thanked him and his family twice, in the English language and in the Greek. Then I cut some string from my survival hat, tied it into clever knots, and attached the plastic bag of food onto my rucksack.
These small gifts, how much they meant to me! One month ago, in September, I saw a magazine photograph of the Meteora amidst a mountainous region in northern Greece too breathtaking to portray in words. A few days later I walked over the border into Greece with little more than a strong body, a powerful sense of humor, and a pitiful fortune of one-hundred Bedlamerican bucks. My plan had been plain: Stay until the cash ran out, then fly back home. I imagined that my budget could keep me going for a week; two weeks at most.
Courage makes its own luck, and wins unexpected victories. Thanks to camping outdoors, eating sparsely, and the generosity of strangers sharing food — living in Greece cost less than two dollars a day. When the money seemed to be holding — and the Bedlamerican dollar gained slightly on the Euro — I decided to stay, to keep traveling in this magical country until I had absolutely nothing left. Not a Euro or a dollar or a drachma or a dime. Thus, in addition to their precious smiles, these kind people who fed me had given me a priceless gift: Time. Each batch of food they shared would grant me one more day, one more day in this Greek paradise. And how many men have ever dared to imagine that paradise could be so simple and so near?
The fiery Sun, like a blacksmith’s heavy hammer, beat down beat down beat down on the hiker’s head. According to the road markers, I had walked 20 Greek kilometers, about 12 Bedlamerican miles. Except for a few quick breaks — to dab on sunscreen cream, to empty pebbles from the sneakers, to sip that greatest of all necessities: pure water — without interruption I walked.
I passed an indistinguishably-dead animal on the road; three bent-over Greek grandmothers; and a child crying, alone in a field, separated from me by a barbed-wire fence. For a moment I considered helping the howling child. Immediately, the razor-sharp points on the barbed wire won the argument for caution and not getting involved. The rewards seemed too little and the risks too great. One accident or injury, then instantly the entire journey would be destroyed. For without health and strength, no man can live alone in the wilderness, the life of a beast and a god. Far better — my cowardly self convinced me — to gracefully retreat and let things be. Zen Master Daibi advised: “What comes is not to be avoided, what goes is not to be followed.”
I stepped up to the fence, shouted to the child, then tossed all my food over the top: breads, cheese, and fruits. Last, and with great pangs of regret, I tossed the green apple, the head-plunking gift from the free-wheeling woman on the bike.
Technology is a stunning woman: first she turns your head, then she twists it off at the neck. In general, I disliked the way technology separates the human user from his body, from Nature, from real experience. Walking is the healthiest and most rewarding way to travel. But after more hours of walking, a beat-up van pulled over and stopped beside me, and on a hunch I took a hitch.
Two bumper stickers on the van said: ‘Freikörperkultur,’ and ‘Not everyone who wanders is lost.’ The driver, a young German woman, conspicuously braless, wore a T-shirt that declared: ‘Men’s promises are lies postponed.’ Her frayed cut-off shorts — which could not have been a centimeter shorter — had been designed to display her smooth, tanned, shapely legs. Her hair looked as blonde as the sun, her eyes gleamed blue as today’s clear sky. She told me little about herself except that her name was Karin, she was twenty-four, she had been lonely in Germany and now she was lonely in Greece. She apologized for being in a lousy mood; she insisted that she wouldn’t tell why. Then she plied me with dozens of questions, and seemed surprised when my answers made her laugh. She beamed when I teased her about the German word ‘Taube’, which does not differentiate between the English birds ‘pigeon’ and ‘dove’.
One half hour later when she stopped the van to drop me off, she touched my cheek then blushed as she squeezed my hand good-bye.
