The Missing Path

Summer Brenner

In a palatial building in Chania, a small city on the northwest edge of Crete, is Rosa Nera, an anarchist squat. A place that friends in California recently visited and encouraged me to visit as well. I arrive and after introducing myself, I’m ushered into a sunny kitchen. A troupe of Greek belly dancers, also visitors, sit at a large table. I sit beside them, sipping oregano tea. I ask if they have a suggestion for a solo trip.

“Lissos,” one of the dancers says, smiling warmly. “It’s the umbilicus of Greece.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“Everything passed through,” she says.

And who better than a belly dancer to explain umbilicus as geography, history, anatomy, and metaphor?

By this time I am gloriously alone. My son and his girlfriend have left for Sweden, my cousin flown back to the States. The next weekend I will follow on a small jet to Athens. But now I am free. With no one to confer with about anything, I can wander.

At the bus station I buy a ticket to Sougia, the village near Lissos. I’m reminded of past moments when random people would say random things, and I’d become bewitched with curiosity. That’s how umbilicus of Greece plays in my head.

The bus leaves midafternoon, lumbering around mountain curves. The terrain is rough and hilly, dotted with olive trees and terraced vineyards, a little fatigued after centuries of cultivation. The diesel fumes, drifting through the open windows, make me slightly sick. Thankfully, the driver is slow and careful. I only suffer nausea, unlike buses charging through the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca, when my nausea was compounded with terror.

Most of the passengers are hikers with backpacks. They disembark at Agia Irini, a famous gorge. A few miles later, the road ends on Sougia’s empty beach. A hotelier waits with a packet of discount coupons. He leans over to take my bag, but I restrain him. It’s September. Off-season. There is no pressing need to book a room.

I walk along the water, enchanted by the pearly sky, the pearly colored pebbles, the gentle waves. At an outdoor bar I ask a German couple about accommodations. They say to avoid the beach, pointing to the discos. Instead, they recommend an inn on the north end of town. After registering, I go back to the water and float in the warm sea, bosomed by a warm wind. In the evening I feast on grilled sardines, dakos salad, and cheese pie inside a roofless rock room. The sky is a spangle of stars, olive trees branch over the tables.

***

I wake to a chorus of roosters and dogs. Soon I am on the path heading west from Sougia into a deep canyon. I follow a dry serpentine streambed lined with oleander and filled with birdsong. The official E-4 marker, part of a network of trails across Europe, points the way out of the canyon through a forest to a flat narrow plateau. At the top of the escarpment, mostly treeless, it is hot and arid with wide vistas of the Sea of Libya. I gape at the invisible littoral of Africa, wishing myself a bird or fish.

An hour later I scamper down the talus slope of Lissos, strewn with boulders, blocks of marble, fragments of columns, pedestals, pilasters, some vertical, others askew. I am awed by the ancient remnants, the compression of time, the sensation of vanished worlds. But whether Greek, Roman, or Byzantine, I can’t tell. As I now know, Everything passed through.

There is a small symmetrical cove between high scarps, a pebbled shingle of beach, a wooden dock, and a cuff of sand. A notice with a phone number is posted that if needed, Captain Georgio will come in his boat for twenty euros. The beach is empty except for a naked man sunbathing, and two naked women standing in the water. Atop the dock, I strip and climb down the crude steps where I dive and swim in the Sea of Libya. Then shimmy up the ladder, as nimble as a skinny girl in a skinny hag’s body.

For many minutes lolling in the sun, I am elated. Watching the sea and scribbling in my notebook. But born from a bloodline of superstitious women, I am also superstitious. Lissos is a heavy place, beset by eerie vibrations. After the naked man and women leave, I leave, too.

Up the talus I follow the cairns and arrows painted on the rocks. The plateau is hotter, the sea still. After a reasonable amount of time, I begin to look for the marker that leads through the forest and into the canyon. I find no E-4, no cairn, no obvious division between the parched plateau and woods. Only a path that goes directly east and stops at a bluff that sheers fifty feet below to Sougia’s beach. Puzzled, I tramp back and forth, always starting at the same place, always ending at the same vertiginous drop.

Now it’s late afternoon. There is little chance of meeting stray hikers. My thoughts turn to the chilly night, my thin clothing, my lack of provisions. I haven’t left a note at the inn. If I don’t return, nobody will assume I’m lost. Rather, that I’ve made a new friend. And gone off with him or her.

Lost boomerangs inside my chest. I am not lost. I am stuck. And unsure which is worse. I try to calm myself. Above all I have to stay calm, rational, and strong. Not muscle strong but certain of my inner strength. I search the sky and utter a prayer. And then I count. Counting is soothing. A way to enter space and time. A way to distract myself from fear. A way to clear the mind. Zero, one, two, three up to ten, I say aloud. Ten, nine, eight, back to zero.

***

Across the canyon and echoing from the far side of the streambed, I hear bells. The tinkling bells of goats call out from other eons, which I take as a sign. Sign is the upside of superstition. I ask if I really need E-4. Haven’t goats scaled these hillsides for thousands of years? Can’t I bushwhack down the side of the ravine? Steep yes, but not vertical.

I look for a stick to bear my weight. Then I begin to tramp over patches of prickly shrubs. My open-toed shoes are totally unsuitable. My feet are soon bloody and raw. I tell myself that I must not fall. But stay sure-footed like the goats. As the slope steepens and the brush gets denser, I concentrate on taking tiny, mincing caprine steps. I move cautiously, surprised by wide marble steps buried in the hillside. Greek, Roman, or Byzantine, I do not know. Everything passed through.

Ah, there are people below. With a hop, skip, and jump, I am in the sun-drenched canyon. Back in my room, happy and relieved, I recall how alone I felt on the escarpment. Doomed to traverse the short but futile path between the ruins and precipice. I wonder what I usually wonder in difficulties. Was it a test? A punishment? A cosmic prank?

It was goats, not gods that I asked, Dare I do this? Dare I make my own path?

Yes! they bleated. Yes! Yes! Yes!