Greece Journal: 2003 part 5

The Drive from Athens to Florina, part 1.
My car was a Toyota Yaris, a nifty little car which handled very well. It had a clear display in the middle of the dashboard so I didn’t have to hunt around.
At the toll station the toll taker didn’t look at me. She was talking to/at her colleague, “Tha fai xilo ean tha to kanie” (“He will eat wood (he will be beaten) if he does this.”) She handed me the ticket out the window, then realized she had to give me change, which she did, still without looking at me.
There were no English stations, like the BBC or the American Forces Radio, so I listened to Greek music.
The hills have trees creeping back on to them. When I lived in Athens my apartment looked out on Mount Hymettos, which appeared barren, though up close it was covered with small vegetation and glorious wildflowers in season. My Greek neighbor told me that Hymettos had been stripped of trees over the decades of the 20th century when war, poverty, and famine turned the population desperate. At first I had found the barrenness depressing, but as I took my walks there, I realized that the hillsides were rich with wild greens, wildflowers, grasses, birds, and small animals. Many times I walked on wild irises, beds of chamomile, and through hundreds of kinds of wildflower. They are not visible from a distance, but are thrilling up close. Still, it was good to see taller trees growing on the hillsides as I drove up the eastern coast.
There might have been a sign giving the speed limit, but I didn’t see it. If there is, nobody is paying any attention. I am going 110 kph, and many people have passed me on the right and on the left, or across two lines in front of me, going twice that fast. The one cop car I saw waited for me to pull into the right so that he could pass. Imagine that. The cop car obeyed the traffic rules.
Large wheeled metal containers, like half-size construction containers, show up from time to time at the side of the road, both in the city and in the country. They are for the garbage, and are mechanically lifted and dumped into the garbage trucks. There are no open bags on the street as there had been when I lived here.
Between Thebes and Lamia lay a fertile plain where great hoses spewed irrigation water. Huge sprinklers 30 feet high sprayed water in twenty or thirty yard circles. So much of the water is wasted that way, I wondered why they didn’t use drip irrigation.
The road wa spotted with little industries too. There are also many unfinished buildings. One was a concrete structure with no front or back, just the concrete of the floors, with a big sign “Café.”
There was a large lake to my right. The water lay in a basin surrounded by round, brown hills. There were no houses built around the lakel. I don’t know whether it is a reservoir or just an unused recreation area. Obviously, the seashore is more popular with the Greeks than lakes. Since my trip to Greece this lake – isolated, sparkling – has appeared in my meditations. I close my eyes and see myself walking across a field which looks barren from afar but is actually covered in tiny wild flowers, and cross to stand at the edge of this clear lake, entering into it and exploring its many levels. It has become a vehicle with which to plumb my own subconscious.
I passed two trucks with three deckers of sheep, their tails swishing back and forth slowly, their legs moving back and forth to keep their balance, providing an interesting geometry of view. They were probably on their way to getting their throats slit.
Coming down from the mountains, the island of Evia came into view across a misty sea. It looked like the water was evaporating, making a band of white vapor right above the water line. Evia was two miles or so to the right, and to the left there were the rounded, old hills that abound in Greece. Between the rounded old hills and the beach, which is twenty yards to my right, were olive groves. I stopped for a while to walk around in the fields and smell the wildflowers. There were wild gladioli growing out in the middle of fields. There were masses of rounded plants bursting with yellow blooms. I thought maybe it was Broom. Pines covered the mountains.
As I drove off again, I passed Evia and the land mass of Greece once again showed itself as hazy, barely outlined mountains. “Mountain” is perhaps an exaggeration there. They are round old hills with faces of beige and pinky beige on them, occasionally gouged out for marble. Trees slowly were covering the scars. There continued to be many cement skeletons. They just leave them there. A Greek once commented, “They don’t think ahead, and they run out of money.”
Many white or pale yellow, beigy, pinky beigy, sometimes sand colored, sometimes whitewashed houses with orange tile roofs, sometimes sporting a grape arbor, ranged along the hills. The effect is similar to Tuscany. Some of them have a fenced-in yard. Some of them don’t. Some of them are just plunked into the middle of a field or an olive grove.
The olive trees swayed, the leaves turning their silvery undersides over so as to make a highly textured picture. They are a grayish, dusky green, not an open green like the pines and the other trees about. There are also fruit trees.
In Agios Konstantinos there was a large white urch right on the water. Near it was marina filled with boats, and hotels and other places to stay. The place has an air of isolation, smack on the sea. Evia protects this enclave from wind and sea. Sheltered high in the pines there were very square, white bright white modern buildings which must be very cool and pleasant in the summer time and have a very beautiful view, but would be a hefty hike from the seashore.
Oleander bloomed along the road. Poppies and purple flowers stood high, along the line of heather or something heather-like.
Someone just passed me on the shoulder on the right, and gave me a dirty look like, “What kind of stupid woman are you?” They are very impatient drivers. That is number one what they are. Greeks, especially Greek men, will sit all day in their cafeneion flopping their worry beads, observing, and chatting with other men who sit all day in the caefeneion flipping their worry beads. When they get out on the road, they push and push impatiently.
There were colored photographs of Kostas Simitis for miles on every telephone pole. There must be an election coming up. There were ads for the Communist Party on the radio saying that they would pay attention to health issues and social security issues. Social security is a key issue with now. They are overhauling the social security system, apparently disastrously according to one newspaper article I read.
Some of the mountains declined straight into the sea, looking like rounded, fuzzy buffalo foreheads.
The toilets were the water-saving kind that have just a tiny bit of water in the toilet to begin with and flush in short spurts. Sometimes they require a second or third flush. They are square-shaped with rounded corners (whatever that is called), and usually extremely clean. I remembered the hygiene facilities when I lived here, 25 years before. They ranged from a hole in the ground to toilets where you had to put the toilet paper in a waste basket, to newspaper toilet paper, and they were by no means always clean. Such toilets are not easy to clean in the first place.
A very small truck pulled up ahead of me and disgorged an old lady in a dusty black skirt and blouse and two small children, who ran around her as she leaned over at the waist to pick wild greens at the side of the road. I realized he had brought her out to pick wild greens (horta) for their dinner. Women were driven up to Hymettos near Athens to do the same thing, and, in the season for greens, were a common sight.
I passed a little quarry by the side of the road called “Asvisterion”. I guess they mine asbestos. I am suspicious of all the dust around here.
I have come halfway and have only used a quarter of a tank.
Turning inland, my ears popped. The grade was very steep, and as a consequence, the road began to meander.
I saw on the news this morning that a cloud mass bearing a lot of rain was coming in from the west. As I drove high into the mountains outside Lamia on the way to Larissa I could see clouds to the west. Everything was shrouded in mist today.
About ten yards to the left of the road, on a flat piece of land before it plunged downward, were about twenty beehives, wooden, painted light blue and yellow.
The face of the hills I was passing through were red on the left and sand-colored on the right. There were bits of vegetation holding the soil in place. The rock looked friable, easily broken up by a very very big hand. It is sort of shale-like, lying in sheets one on top of the other. Sometimes it was brown. Different colored mountains. There is a riot of yellow bushes with yellow flowers on top, about three feet high. Here the stronger cars overtook me in my tiny Toyota, made for four very small people. It has no trunk to it really, and a very flat front. It’s a little box that moves, but it does the trick admirably.
I am up very high now. I can look at great distance into the valley below. It is shrouded in mist, so I can’t see as far as I could see if it were clear, but a long way, and I thought my, how tidy the battles must have been around here. They’d find a little bit of flat land and have a battle there. All the rest is just hills to be cleared before you arrived at the battlefield. We just passed Thermopylae, for example, which is a flat swath between the sea and some rather steep high mountains. Where else could you fight around there? It’s not like the American revolution where you could run behind trees and fight a guerilla war. In those days you could have been seen from a very great distance, and somebody was going to be up in the hills watching you. No tree cover. No other kind of cover. Come in by sea and boom! Or walk over the mountains or through the valley. It’s pretty clearly delineated where you could slaughter each other.
So friable are the rocks in this place where I am starting to go down the mountain, that they have veiled them in wire mesh.
The monastery of Atini Sakis (I think it was called) isolated on top of a mountain, isolated, seemed good place to say prayers.
The only other time I have had the feeling of complete isolation, yet touched by human attentions, was driving through the Swiss mountains in the summertime. Up here they may get a little dusting of snow, but mostly a riot of purple, yellow, fuscia and bright red wild flowers, and bright red poppies. Aside from the small monastery, the beehives, and the occasional closed-up building, it is completely deserted. I guess you can’t grow anything up here, and it’s not suitable for tourists. Once in every long long while, someone has set up a roadside stand where they were selling cherries. I didn’t see any orchards, so they must be sheltered out of sight.