CHAPTER 11:  Rhodes

We steam into Rhodes with light fading from the sky leaving a surrealistic glow. Rhodes is an almond-shaped island twenty kilometers off the southwest coast of Turkey. The island is only fifty kilometers from tip to tip but still the largest of the Dodecanese, which spread in a swipe of small land masses along the coast. I’m at the edge of Greece, its southeastern extremity. As we enter the harbor, off to the north I get my first look at the dark, foreboding landscape of Turkey. Turkey is an enigma to me. I’m afraid of the place, and now that I’m so close, I wonder if I'll have the courage to go there alone. I’ve heard frightening stories of the violent nature of Turks, and I speak none of their language. Plus the two countries are still at odds with each other. Greece was under the subjugation of the Ottoman Turks for almost 400 years from 1456 AD until it was liberated in 1830.

The silhouetted skyline of Rhodes is intriguing because of the medieval fortress wall surrounding Old Town. It’s more massive than I expected. The city of Rhodes, the island’s largest, is on the island’s northern tip. It covers the entire peninsula which extends northeast toward the coast of Turkey. We dock on the east side of the peninsula where three harbors are separated from each other by protruding cement docks. The northern harbor, Mandraki, has a small shallow entrance and is for local traffic. Just south is the Commercial Harbor used by large ferries, such as ours, and international traffic. Acandia Harbor, just south is also for commercial traffic. The city is separated into new Rhodes, which covers most of the peninsula, and Old Rhodes, a walled fortress close to dock. Old Rhodes has changed little in five hundred years. The walls were built by the Crusader Knights of St. John of Jerusalem after they took over the island in 1309 AD.

I exit the ferry struck by the glowing sky silhouetting the huge turrets strategically placed along the ancient city walls and walk along the cement dock with the sound of sea waves lapping. Across the road along the end of the dock, light spills from an open doorway. It’s a travel agency with signs out front telling of ferries to Israel, Cypress, Turkey, Patmos. Even though I’m anxious to find a room, I step into the flood of light.

An atmosphere of excitement fills the place. Perhaps it’s the sparkling eyes of the Greek girl who greets me; perhaps it’s the knowledge that the Holy Land is so close and accessible from Rhodes that has caught me within its spell. I could just as easily abandon the rest of my journey through Greece and visit Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth. While I’m talking to this bright-eyed girl about the ferry schedule to Patmos, I overhear a conversation between another agent and a traveler on his way to Egypt. The Sphinx, with a pyramid in the background, glares at me from a wall poster. I’ve stepped into a smorgasbord of world traveling and have access to every place I’ve ever wanted to visit. I feel like Paul on his way to Tyre, or Kadmos who also put in here, on his way from Tyre, 1400 years before Paul.

The girl puts my concern to rest. Ferries leave Rhodes for Patmos daily at noon. I’ll accomplish with ease what the travel agent in Athens told me was impossible. I once again shoulder my pack and walk around the building and through the huge medieval wall of the old city. The rock wall, which is in excellent condition, is fourteen meters thick, and must stand three times my height. Rhodes is the first place I’ve been where the bronze-age Mycenaean world and Christian history come together with such impact. Only an hour south of here along the eastern coast of Rhodes is the ancient town of Lindos where Menelaus and Helen stopped on their voyage home from the Trojan War. That’s where Menelaus had to come to terms with what he would do with the recently-retrieved, adulterous Helen.

I enter the city through a huge stone archway with no sidewalk and cars zipping within arms reach. I stand in a sparsely-lit courtyard waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. I see trees, a fountain with splashing water, park benches. Pigeons warble on a dark rooftop nearby. After asking several people, who all tell me the hotels are closed for the winter, I finally get directions to a pension off the central plateia, along a deserted cobblestone alleyway between dark stone buildings. It appears to be a residential district, not a place for a pension, but I notice a small dimly-lit sign over a doorway in an old building, Fantasia Pension.

I walk through a small unroofed entryway with large plants lining the walls. A woman comes to the door then calls her husband. I smell dinner cooking, the unmistakable odor of garlic. The pension is actually a home. To get to my room, I walk through two small work areas where the family congregates. A barefoot old man sits in his undershirt with his pant legs rolled to his knees. He works his toes like fingers. They interrupt their conversation to greet me, and the hallway is so narrow they stand for me to pass.

My room is spacious and has two single widely-spaced beds with natural-pine frames, a nightstand beside each. I have a private bathroom. Two small shuttered windows on the far wall are recessed in thick stone. I have three wrought-iron patio chairs with plastic cushions and a table with a green-and-white plaid tablecloth. A small dresser and a circular mirror stand against the right wall.

I drop my pack to the floor and go back out into the dark in search of a fast-food restaurant. I need a gyro fix. I haven’t had one since I left Santorini. I’m tired and anxious to get to bed early.

The occupation of Rhodes dates to Neolithic times, and according to Greek mythology the island belongs to Helios, the sun god. After Zeus defeated his father Kronos at Olympia, he gained power over gods and men and divided the world between himself and the rest of his brothers and sisters. According to Pindar:

... the tale is told in ancient story that, when Zeus and the immortals were dividing the earth among them, the isle of Rhodes was not yet to be seen in the open main, but was hidden in the briny depths of the sea; and that, as the Sun-god was absent, no one put forth a lot on his behalf, and so they left him without any allotment of land, though the god himself was pure from blame. But when that god made mention of it, Zeus was about to order a new casting of the lot, but the Sun-god would not suffer it. For, as he said, he could see a plot of land rising from the bottom of the foaming main, a plot that was destined to prove rich in substance for men, and kindly to pasture...[1]

Helios named the island after the nymph of the island, Rhode, whom he took as his mistress and who bore him seven children, one of whom was Pasiphae, the wife of Minos who gave birth to the Minotaur.

The island has always had a close connection with Crete because the Minoans were the first Greeks to settled here. Catreus, the son of Minos and Pasiphae, had a son named Althaemenes who exiled himself in Rhodes because of an oracle saying he was to kill his father, a story similar to that of Oedipus. In his old age, Catreus came to Rhodes to get his son to return to Crete so he might bequeath his kingdom to him. But Althaemenes mistook his father for a pirate and killed him with the thrust of a spear thus fulfilling the oracle. Menelaus, king of Sparta and the grandson of Catreus, came to Crete to preside over his funeral. While he was gone from Sparta, his wife Helen ran off with Paris of Troy, thus releasing the forces which resulted in the Trojan War.

After a couple hours sleep, I wake from a dream about my ex-wife. She and I were still married and my son and daughter were small kids. My wife was getting in the car to leave to spend Christmas with her family, taking our son and daughter with her, leaving me behind. She explained matter-of-factly the necessity of visiting her family at Christmas and gave more reasons why she would not return until after the first of the year. She acted as if taking the kids and leaving was no concern of mine. I overheard women wondering among themselves why she married me anyway. They said I should learn to be a man. My son was crying and being led off by another man. I was powerless, only an observer to the pillaging of my home.

I hear voices from the other room, a child crying.

  7 Nov, Sunday

I rise early and hurry to catch the bus. I’m worn out from Crete, but this morning I feel compelled to get to Lindos. Perhaps it’s the dream of my wife deserting me that has me on the move so early. I’m still reeling from a sense of inadequacy and wondering if this is how Menelaus felt when he heard Helen had run off with Paris.

Several times during our marriage, my wife tried to get me to move out, to get an apartment and live separate from her and the kids. They were bizarre, unprovoked requests, as heartless as her words in my dream last night. I never thought anything would come of her fits of dissatisfaction, but in 1980 on the day after Thanksgiving, she made her own attempt to leave. That morning she packed her clothes and left to stay with a friend, but after being gone only six hours, she returned. I was in the kitchen drying the last of the Thanksgiving dishes when I heard a noise and turned to see her standing before me, crying. She asked if she could come back home.

Five weeks later on New Year’s Eve, we stayed home instead of going to a party at the neighbors and argued heatedly. I ended the war of words by throwing the ottoman into the sofa and standing over her shouting. The next morning we decided to divorce.

The bus negotiates the turns along the eastern coast with the sun easing into the sky above the sea. After passing several small coastal towns, the boxy window-pocked whitewashed buildings of Lindos come into view on a peninsula beyond a sandy beach with another giant fortress cresting the landscape. To my dismay, the bus lets us off outside Lindos. I’ve had my share of walking lately, but the town is only open to pedestrians and donkeys. No vehicles allowed. The sparkling-white buildings below the overpowering presence of the dark medieval fortress make me regret I left my camera in my room. I’m absolutely sick of having that albatross around my neck. I don’t have just a camera. I have two camera bodies and three lenses in a case which hangs by a strap around my neck. I also have forty rolls of film. I left it all.

I feel a chill even though the sun sparkles brightly off the sides of buildings as I walk the narrow streets. I wanted to zip through Lindos, but I’m caught up in the atmosphere of the place: vined trellises, blooming flowers and stone mosaics in courtyards. My chill is short lived. The town is small, and on the other side of it the grade increases to the fortress which was also built by the Knights of St. John, a tougher walk than it looks. The fortress is not my destination either. Inside is the acropolis containing the ruins of the temple of Athena Lindia. Artifacts from the Neolithic age indicate the site has been inhabited since 5000 BC, and a temple has been here since 1510 BC. According to an ancient inscription, both Helen and Menelaus came to the temple. One of my guide books suggests their visit followed the Greek siege of Troy.

As I round the top of the enormous open-air stairs, the world unveils before me. I’m facing east, the sun just overhead at it’s fall-time zenith. The Aegean spreads in the distance to the pale faceless coast of Turkey, the water glittering with the sun’s rays on its rippling surface. I walk to the edge of the ruins, past the temple of Athena Lindia, the stark columns standing like skeletal remains of some petrified beast, and look down the cliff to the Aegean far below where waves break on rocks leaving swirls of foam. The world seems ancient this morning, like it aged three thousand years during the night. That boat I see drifting a ways from shore could belong to Helen and Menelaus returning from Troy.

Even though the island belongs to Helios, Athena claims it also because she was born here, high in the sky above Lindos. Athena’s mother was Metis, Zeus’ first wife. Metis was “wiser than all gods and mortal men.”[2] But it was foretold she would have two children, first gray-eyed Athena who would be her father’s match “and then a male child, high mettled/ and destined to rule over gods and men.”[3] Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent the son from being born and also ensuring he would have access to her wisdom. Since Metis was pregnant with Athena when Zeus swallowed her, she did not have a conventional birth. Zeus’ head was split with an ax. Pindar tells of the birth, midwifed by Hephaistos the god of fire, high in the emerald-blue sky above Rhodes:

          ... in olden time, the great King of the gods [Zeus] shed on a city a snow-shower of gold, what time, by the cunning craft of Hephaestus, at the stroke of the brazen hatchet, Athene leapt forth from the crest of her father’s head, and cried aloud with a mighty shout, while Heaven and Mother Earth trembled before her.[4]

Pindar also describes how the temple of Athena Lindia came to be:

Then it was that the god that bringeth light unto men, even Hyperion [father of Helios], enjoined his dear children to give heed to the rite that was soon to be due, how that they should be the first to build for the goddess an altar in sight of all men, and, by founding a holy sacrifice, gladden the heart of the Father, and of the Daughter with the sounding spear.[5]

Athena was not a goddess of peace, though she was the bringer of civilization. In ancient art she was depicted with crested helmet, spear and shield. She was the “... weariless leader of armies, dreaded and mighty goddess,/ who stirs men to battle and is thrilled by the clash of arms.”[6] Athena sided with the Greeks in the Trojan War. After Menelaus retrieved Helen, this would have been the perfect place for him to sacrifice her to Athena.

Menelaus initially planned to kill Helen, but when his eyes once again beheld her beauty, he decided to wait until the siege was over. Later he made further excuses, saying he would kill her when they arrived home. I wonder, when they entered the bay far below this promontory, if Helen feared he would sacrifice her to Athena, rip her throat with a dull-edged knife and let her warm blood spill forth on the cold stones of the temple.

Menelaus, like Odysseus, wandered seven years with Helen at his side before returning home. They had been blown off course by winds from Zeus, and Poseidon’s mountainous seas. After wandering from Kypros to Phoinikia, Egypt, Sidon, Arabia and Libya,[7] they returned home. Fair-haired Helen was in Sparta living with redheaded Menelaus when Telemachus visited them seeking news of his long-overdue father, Odysseus. Homer describes Helen in The Odyssey as “a moving grace like Artemis, straight as a shaft of gold.”[8] Menelaus had put aside his jealousy and anger and forgiven her for running away to Troy with Paris. At home in Sparta, they were congenial, close, even affectionate. Menelaus addressed her as “my dear.”

Helen had lost her desire to stay with Paris in Troy sometime before the city fell, or perhaps she saw the hand writing on the wall and switched allegiance before doom struck. Helen tells of her change of heart and her regret about going to Troy in the first place:

               ... I had come round, long before,  
to dreams of sailing home, and I repented
the mad day Aphrodite
drew me away from my dear fatherland,
forsaking all--child, bridal bed, and husband...[9]

After my own wife moved out, she pushed relentlessly for a divorce during a stormy six-month relationship with a doctor. Then several months after it was final, she called expressing the desire for a reconciliation. Our two kids had spent the intervening months with me. She thought she would have but to enter the front door to resume her place as mother and wife as she had done at Thanksgiving. I said no. The next Thanksgiving, just after a young lady I had grown affectionate toward moved in with us, I received a screaming-and-crying telephone call from my ex-wife demanding I get that bitch out of her home, out of her bed. But I didn’t have the forgiving soul of Menelaus.

I leave the temple of Athena Lindia and walk to a spot on the promontory to view a small bay to the south. Almost two-thousand years ago, an Alexandrian grain ship docked there on its way to Rome. The Apostle Paul was aboard. He was on the final leg of his third missionary journey to Greece and on his way back to Jerusalem. When he paused briefly here at Lindos, he had money donated by Greek Christians for those less fortunate in Jerusalem. He had made the decision to return there when he left the port of Kenchrea on the Isthmus of Corinth. When I was in Corinth at the canal across the Isthmus, I remember reflecting on Kenchrea and regretting I didn’t have time to visit the port.

From Kenchrea, Paul sailed north to Thessalonica and Philippi, gathering the donations for the Jerusalem Christians. He spent a week in Troas, near where the Trojan War had been fought 1300 years before. From Troas he sailed to Mytilini on the island of Lesvos, then to Chios, Miletus on the coast of Turkey, and on to Kos and finally to Rhodes. He docked here at Lindos then traveled to the city of Rhodes. From there, he transferred to another ship bound for Tyre on the Phoenician coast and eventually to Caesarea where he went by horseback into Jerusalem. Jerusalem at the time was in turmoil and anti-Christian. Paul was imprisoned and after two years sent to Rome for trial and beheaded.

The bay spread out below me, where Paul came ashore 1,945 years ago, is the most gorgeous I’ve seen in Greece, a deep circular lake nestled among black twisted volcanic rock with only a small outlet to the sea where fishing boats exit and enter. It’s past noon, but I have no desire to eat here in Lindos. I’m tired and though the expanse of sea  before me certainly merits a more lengthy visit, I’m anxious to get back to Old Rhodes.

---

Mid afternoon, I sit at the top of the stairs overlooking a courtyard inside the National Archaeological Museum. The sun casts a shadow over the north side of the courtyard. It’s warm and no breeze blows. I hear fussy sparrows in a tree top. This building was at one time a hospital run by the Knights of St. John. The second floor of the museum, where I sit, is a mezzanine-like corridor all the way around the square. Centuries ago, the rooms behind each pillar of arches were filled with doctor’s offices and hospital beds but now contain artifacts, statues, vases, jewelry, headstones, some dating from Minoan times.

All these buildings in Old Rhodes were built by the Knights when they came here in 1309 AD after being expelled from Jerusalem, thus ending their influence in the Holy Land and effectively ending the Crusades.

Pope Urban II initiated the 1st Crusade in 1095 AD with a call to arms to fight the Seljuk Turks who were expanding into Asia Minor. The church had been frustrated for years by the Turks' interference with European pilgrims traveling through Asia Minor on their way to worship at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The knights took Jerusalem in 1099 following a massacre of the Muslims and Jews who held it. The crusaders lost Jerusalem in 1187 during the 2nd Crusade. Six more crusades followed, but Jerusalem was never regained. Christians were ejected from the Holy Land in 1291.

The Muslims who occupied and controlled the Holy Land before the Crusades were tolerant of Christians. Two-hundred years of slaughter by the crusaders not only turned the Muslims against the Christians but also destroyed much of Muslim intellectual heritage. The Muslim’s pre-crusade tolerance of Christians never returned.

After leaving the museum I walk to the pier outside the walls of the old city, walk the dock watching fishermen, young men with girlfriends, an old man. One guy scrubs a pale-pink octopus against a large rock.

He has it by the dome and scrubs the eight-legged apex, the octopus’ mouth, against the rock. What this does for the octopus, I’m not sure, but I don’t believe it enjoys it. The rock is white with octopus residue. He slaps it against the cement deck, throws it with a splat. The octopus is limp, jelly-like.

Another young man catches a long thin fish. Skinniest fish I’ve ever seen, and stiff like a stick. It has more of a beak than a mouth, long and pointed. He has trouble getting the hook out. I notice a dark blob at the water’s edge. At first I think it’s seaweed. Then I noticed another, and another.

I step out on a large rock to get a closer look and discovered they’re jellyfish with pale-violet pulsating domes. Several limp tentacles hang from their aft ends. The longer I look the more I see, five, eight, ten of them, fifteen. And suddenly out of nowhere comes a dark streaking object, long black and thin. A water snake? An eel?

Nereus was the ancient sea god, the Old Man of the Sea. He had the power of prophecy and the ability to change shape. The fifty Nereids, the sea nymphs, were his daughters. All that feminine energy must have been quiet a show. Proteus was another form of the Old Man of the Sea, Poseidon’s sealherd. When Menelaus and Helen grew tired of their wanderings after the Trojan War, Menelaus captured the shape-changing Proteus to learn why the gods wouldn’t allow them to return home. Menelaus and three of his best fighters disguised themselves as seals and waited in ambush for the kind and just, if elusive, Proteus on a sandy island off the coast of Egypt. A goddess dabbed their noses for them with ambrosia to drown “the stench of those damned seals.”[10] Menelaus describes Proteus’ shape-shifting, when they captured him:

First he took on a whiskered lion’s shape,  
a serpent then, a leopard, a great boar,
then sousing water, then a tall green tree.[11]

Seeing no way to escape, Proteus asked Menelaus why he had captured him. Menelaus replied that he wanted to know why the gods wouldn’t let him go home. Proteus replied:

You should have paid   honor to Zeus and the other gods, performing a proper sacrifice before embarking [from Troy]: that was your short way home on the wine-dark sea. You may not see your friends, your own fine house, or enter your own land again, unless you first remount the Nile in flood and pay your hekatomb to the gods of heaven.[12]

Since my wife left me, I’ve also been drifting. Perhaps that’s another reason I’m in Greece. I’m trying to find my way home. I’ve quit going from woman to woman and now live alone. I can’t get back what I lost. When I was married, at times I would wake at night, cuddle against her warm body, and she would roll over into my arms. I’d drop into a mesmerizing glow of love. This, like the feeling of panic and also the feeling about my own death, was a profound feeling, shocking in its depth, as though the experience was sacred. When she left, my life unraveled, as if it was an intricately woven fabric, with the sound of her receding footsteps. I wonder if I must perform some sacrifice before I can go home, or if my home will always be on the road?

I walk down to the beach where barely make out the slim silhouette of the Turkish coast in the distance. I look back at the skyline of the old city and watch the sun set behind the walls and tall white spire, red church domes. Off to the right, boats come into harbor from the open sea. The end of another day and the start of another evening in Rhodes.

I sit on my bed listening to my Walkman radio, bouzouki music and the machine-gun chatter of Greek. Occasionally I cross a station with the wail of Muslim music from Turkey and wonder if I’ll be in that country next week, if I’ll find the courage to cross the border. I’m suffering from loneliness again this evening and continue turning the small dial listening for a familiar voice. Quite suddenly I hear English and wonder if I’m pulling in London. Then I hear something I haven’t heard in perhaps forty years. “This is the Voice of America ....” A chill ripples through me. I haven’t heard the Voice of America since childhood. It’s such a pleasure to hear good old American radio.

I slip between the covers but feel restless, and shortly after falling asleep, I wake from a dream of the old farm where I grew up. The cotton has opened, all the stalks full of white fluffy bowls. The entire dream is steeped in the uncertainty of what my father might do. He frequently exploded over nothing. Chris, the missionary I met in Athens, is also in the dream, saying a prayer. The combination of the two, the explosiveness of my father and Chris’ words are like voodoo, generating an immense anxiety. I'm starting to feel like I did in the Alps, only this time, the source of my anxiety is driven by a dream of my father and religion.

I turn on the light and grab my journal. I can’t afford an experience like I had in the Alps, not alone. The mythical quality of my journey has been swept away by the seriousness of my problem. Writing in my journal slowly brings me out of my anxiety.

My dream's connection with religion is also troublesome because the next island on my itinerary is Patmos where St. John wrote the Apocalypse. This process I’m using to understand what happened to me when I heard my father clicking the deer rifle once again seems artificial and inwardly abusive, as I realized while in Delphi.

Several years ago, I was in another situation which cut even deeper into the facade of my life, exposing the naked essence of my superficiality, like slicing through flesh to reach bone. The event was the disappearance of my daughter. I found a shameful artificiality to myself I never expected. Saying a prayer for her safety seemed a trivial act, even an insult to the seriousness of the situation. My concern for her life went beyond my beliefs, convictions, into a shocking reality. Her disappearance tried my faith in God. And to put it quite bluntly, I found I had none.

8 Nov, Monday

I slowly surface through a dream that the heavyweight champion of the world holds me hostage. Now and then he breaks one of my fingers just to let me know he means business. My hands are mangled masses of pain. I find a .22 rifle and one bullet. Other hostages try to talk me out of killing him, but I’m very determined. Though it takes a while to find a good finger with which to pull the trigger, I shoot him. I aim at his head but only grazed his skull. That changes his tune, and he backs off. But his change of attitude doesn’t change my desire to kill him. And as daylight infiltrates the room, the images of me stalking him slowly fade into morning sunshine.

---

At noon I sit in the crowded square on Sokratous Street (mostly British here in Rhodes) enjoying the cloudy weather, a light breeze and motorbikes burping by. An old dog sleeps on his back at my feet.

I splurge by having a cup of coffee to celebrate my three accomplishments of the morning. First I went to the Laundromat which has promised clean underclothes by one-thirty for a nominal fee of 1500 dackmes ($6.30), 1000 to wash and 500 dr to dry. I don’t want to start drawing flies again. On the way back I stepped outside the fortress gate and bought some fruit, apples and oranges. Then I reentered the fortress and exchanged two hundred dollars for drachmes. The exchange rate is 238 dr/$ minus a 1.5% commission. These achievements aren’t monumental, but for a traveler they can be gratifying, something to celebrate with a cup of coffee.

During the afternoon, I walk to Mandraki Harbor just north of where we docked yesterday, where the Colossus of Rhodes stood in antiquity. The Colossus was a 32 meter bronze Helios erected in 290 BC.

It was toppled by an earthquake 65 years later. In its place, on each side of the harbor, small statues of deer stand atop cement columns. Not a very impressive replacement. I wonder if Helios isn’t a  little disillusioned over the treatment of his statue. St. Paul saw its pieces in the harbor while he was here. 

Just outside the city walls is a dry mote occupied by real deer, who are direct descendants of those imported more than eight hundred years ago to rid the city of a snake infestation.

The deer killed the snakes with their antlers. Their life here seems a pleasant one. I see a doe with two fawns.

I keep eyeing the coast of Turkey in the distance. My next stop will be Patmos, and then I’ll go to Samos to see if I can get a ferry to Turkey. If I can find none this late in the season, I’ll travel north to Lesbos and return to Athens. The coward in me secretly pulls for the border being closed. Through a window in the stone wall, I see a ferry at dock.

I plan the rest of my journey till midnight and still have trouble getting to sleep. During the night I wake to the deathly stillness that has fallen over the Fantasia Pension after dreaming I’m in a deserted building reenacting an old western movie with another outlaw. This is the same character with whom I committed the two murders and robbed the bank within the dream I had on Santorini. My companion reminds me of Hermes, the Greek god who was the protector of travelers. Hermes was also a thief and the guide of souls in the Underworld. In tonight’s dream, we were actors playing prisoners incarcerated for robbery. We shot our way out of jail and got to the rooftop where we jumped from building to building and finally onto a fast moving stagecoach to make our getaway. The most peculiar aspect of the dream was the mechanical movement of the props, the stagecoach, and how guilty I felt while playing a robber.

Every time I leave one island for another, I have a strong sense of guilt, as though I’m an escaped convict on the loose in Greece running from the law. It’s a hidden perception lying just below the surface and an ulterior motive for all my moves. I plan all my escapes much like storyboarding a movie. I plan which island I’ll visit next, my mode of transportation, how long I’ll stay, which clothes I’ll wear, where I’ll go when I get there. I rehearse the questions I’ll ask, what I’ll say if they speak English, what I’ll say in Greek if they don’t. I choreograph every move. I always find a place to stay, a place to eat, a street to walk, a ruin to visit. It’s as if Hermes, that outlaw I’m running around with, is going ahead scouting out the countryside. It’s like planning a robbery, and although it’s amusing on the surface, my sense of guilt is real and a continuous problem.

At three o’clock in the morning, I’m still wide awake. Maybe I’ll sleep on the ferry to Patmos.

9 Nov, Tuesday

At noon, I stand at the rail on the top deck of the good ferryboat RODOS (RHODES) staring across the harbor at a large fishing boat coming to dock. The weather is clear, the sun blinding. Looking out across the Aegean, I see the coast of Turkey quite plainly with a thin cloud bank lying above it. The water is calm, only ripples caused by a light breeze break its mirror surface. I feel comfortable in my short-sleeved shirt. Just in front of me, a small one-man boat maneuvers slowly in the water while the man aboard retrieves a trotline, dumps four moderate-size fish on deck.

At the end of the ferry where it meets the long cement dock, people, cars, trucks, vans, motorbikes, buses, come aboard. On the other side of Old Town is new Rhodes with its glistening-white, box-shaped buildings sitting on top of a hill. We won’t be in Patmos until 10:00 PM. I’m concerned about finding a room so late at night.

As I leave this island where Helen and Menelaus made a brief stop on their way home from the Trojan War, I also think of Helen’s last visit to the island. Many years after their return to Sparta, Menelaus died, and Helen was no longer welcome in her own home. Her stepsons forced her to leave. She came to Rhodes and stayed with Polyxo, the wife of Tlepolemus who had been exiled from Argos because he had accidental killed his uncle. Tlepolemus came to Rhodes and became king. He died fighting in the Trojan War, helping Menelaus retrieve Helen. The Rhodian’s tell of Helen’s return to Rhodes to stay with his widow:

... when Menelaos died and while Orestes was still wandering, Helen was exiled by Nikostratos and Megapenthes [Menelaus’ illegitimate sons], and came to Rhodes as a friend of Tlepolemos’s wife Polyxo, who was an Argive by birth and blood, but being married to Tlepolemos shared his exile to Rhodes, and now Polyxo was queen of the island; she was a widow with an orphan son. Now that Polyxo had Helen in her power, the story goes that she wanted to take vengeance on Helen for Tlepolemos’s death; while Helen was washing Polyxo sent slavewomen dressed like the Furies who took her and hanged her on a tree... [13]

Thus this island is where Helen died, where Polyxo got revenge for Helen causing the Trojan War and the death of her husband. When Helen arrived on Rhodes, I wonder if she realized Polyxo’s hospitality was laced with animosity? Was she afraid? Did she go kicking and screaming to the hangman’s noose, or did she go quietly, preparing her final words?

I walk back inside the ferry and sit in a soft padded chair next to my backpack that I’ve thrown on the floor. This is the nicest ferry I have been on, deep carpet, mirror-lined walls, well-dressed crew, overnight cabins for those traveling to Athens. I feel a slight lunge as the ferry leaves dock. The city slowly recedes behind us. 

Ten hours to Patmos.

Just before nightfall, we arrive at Kos and execute the 180 degree dipsy-doodle to dockside. Kos looks to be the rockiest island I’ve seen so far, no sign of foliage. The cove is surrounded by black mountains, the city of Kos resting on their flanks. Town lights speckle the blackness. A little cocoon of glowing neon surrounds the shops. High above, the pastel-blue sky softens to pink just above the silhouetted hills. The ferry rumbles in stasis.

Hippocrates, who was born around 460 BC, was from Kos. He was the father of medicine and gave us the Hippocratic oath by which physicians swear their ethical conduct. A large temple of Asklepios was on Kos, and that is where Hippocrates practiced and taught the budding science of medicine. He was one of the Asklepiadae, the sons of Asklepios. Asklepios was said to have been taught the healing arts by Cheiron, the immortal centaur, who was also the teacher of Achilles and Jason. This island, which I'm reluctantly not going to visit, is one of the many jewels of the Aegean. So many islands, so little time.

The docking process has become a fascination of mine. The ferry comes up to dock nose-first, stops short and executes a 180 degree maneuver, which I call the dipsy-doodle, to get the rear of the boat toward the dock. The rotation then stops, and the boat goes into reverse, backs up close to the dock, lowering its gangway to seventy degrees. The crew throws the weighted ends of two coiled ropes on dock, where they are immediately picked up and pulled ashore. Attached to these ropes, one on each side of the ferry, are the huge docking ropes that the dock crew pulls ashore and slips over a large lipped lugs. Then the gangway is lowered the final twenty degrees and the ropes winched tight. The mad rush of people follows, bicycles, cars, buses, motorbikes, trucks. A crowd gets off, a crowd gets on. We’re at dockside for no more than thirty minutes.

The gangway comes up now, the docking ropes thrown back onboard. Time to leave Kos.

St. John came to Patmos by boat from the northeast, from Ephesus, but I’ll be coming in from the south. Sailing in the Aegean can be dangerous during winter. In antiquity sailing was cut back in September and boats rarely sailed after the 11th of November.[14] Few boats would attempt the sea today, the 9th of November. On John’s trip here, a tempest came up and swept a man overboard. While the others panicked, John remained calm and called upon God to quiet the waters. The sea gave up the man alive.

St. John came to Patmos during the winter of 95 AD. He was living in Ephesus, just a short ways from here on the coast of Asia Minor. Unlike Paul, John was one of the original twelve apostles, the first apostle to join Jesus. John was also a second son, his brother James, also an apostle, was the older of the two. James, John and Peter were the closest to Jesus. John was among those to whom Jesus spoke the words, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” John was at Golgatha and witnessed the Crucifixion and saw the risen Christ. The Christians were later expelled from Jerusalem, sometime between 37-42 AD and went to Ephesus. The Virgin Mary was with them.[15] After Paul’s decapitation in Rome, sometime after 67 AD, John settled permanently in Ephesus and became the leader of the church. While in Ephesus, the Roman emperor Domitian had John taken to Rome and tortured then exiled to Patmos.

It’s dark when we make a half-hour stop in Leros, and after another hour, at 8:25 PM, we get word over the loudspeaker we’re coming into Patmos. Time to disembark. I put my journal away and hoist my backpack. We’ve docked at the town of Skala in the center of the island on the eastern coast. We’re one and one-half hours early.  

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