CHAPTER 17: Samos.

As soon as we dock, I head for the travel agency to see when the next ferry leaves for Lesbos. I want to see Samos, but I’m also concerned about getting stranded and missing my flight to the States. I learn a ferry will leave for Chios tonight at eight. Good news but still sooner than I hoped. I’ll miss seeing Samos. Besides the ferry gets into Chios at one-thirty in the morning, and the ferry to Lesbos won’t arrive until three-thirty, a two-hour layover at an ungodly hour. I ask when the next ferry goes to Lesbos, but he says this one may be the last for a while. He tells me to stop by the agency later in the day. They’ll get a weather check this afternoon and an updated ferry arrival time.

I’m uncertain what to do. I want to see Samos before I leave and don’t want to get stranded on Chios tonight, spend several hours out in the cold rain. Back at the hotel, I take a room for a full day. The perpetually-smiling woman at the front desk is English but has lived in Greece for twenty years. I tell her about my predicament, wanting to see some of Samos but also wanting to get to Lesbos, and about the middle-of-the-night layover in Chios. She says I still have time to see the temple of Hera. “ And you must see it,” she says. “It’s a magnificent site. Take a taxi. You can get there and back in a couple of hours.” She also tells me the layover in Chios may not be as bad as it sounds because the ferry to Chios is always late. I may not get there until morning. Chios is a major center for ferries to Lesbos and Peiraias. She believes I’ll have no trouble finding a place to hold up in Chios regardless of the time.

Sounds like I’ll spend the night traveling.

Before catching a taxi, I stop off at the fast-food restaurant and have two gyropitas while thinking of my brother’s remark. I walk back to the hotel through a light rain. Shortly I’m whizzing along eleven kilometers of mountain road to the southwest in the rain. We dip down to the coast to Pythagorion, where ruins of the ancient city are located and then on west.

The taxi goes on west another eight kilometers to the Ireon, the ruins of the temple of Hera. In antiquity, civil engineers built a stone-paved footpath, called the Sacred Way, to connect the site with Pythagoria. They diverted a branch of the Imbrasos river.[2] The Sacred Way stretched for six kilometers and was lined with two thousand statues. By the time we reach the site, the light sprinkle has become a downpour. Rain falls in sheets of glistening wetness. We’re at the edge of the sea. In the distance a few kilometers off the coast, lying faceless under a shelf of heavy clouds, is a protruding peninsula of the Turkish coast.

According to Samos tradition, white-armed Hera who walked in golden sandals, mother of gods and men, was born here under a lygos (willow) tree in a thicket at the mouth of the Imbrasos river. The tree was imprinted on Roman coins. When Pausanias was here in the 2nd century AD, he saw it and pronounced it the oldest living tree.[5] Archeologists uncovered a tree stump in 1985 which was thought to be the tree, but subsequent tests have shown it wasn’t a lygos but a juniper. Carbon 14 dating revealed the tree died sometime between 750 - 450 BC and had lived only eighty years.[6]

Hera, the most beautiful of all goddesses, was married on Samos. She was the sole wife of Zeus. To mortals, she was the goddess of marriage and the life of women. All marriage ceremonies occurred during the winter month of Gamelion, our January.[7] Earthly couples viewed marriage as a sacred act owed Hera and performed in her honor.[8] Marriage was a three day affair:[9] the offering and sacrifice on the day before, the feast and procession on the day of the wedding, and the songs and presentation of gifts on the day following. The offering was most frequently locks of hair left at the temple of Artemis for protection of the goddess during the transition from a maiden to a woman. Sacrifices were also made to Artemis for the bride giving up her virginity.

The day of the marriage started with the nuptial bath in a river or spring followed by the feast provided for by the bride’s father. Homer describes the feast during the marriage of Menelaus’ and Helen’s daughter, Hermione, to Achilles’ son Neoptolemus after their return from Troy:  

Down the great hall in happiness they feasted,
neighbors of Menelaos and his kin
for whom a holy minstrel harped and sang;
and two lithe tumblers moved out on the song
with spins and handsprings through the company.[10]

During the evening as the feast wound down, the parents of the bride presented her to the groom. The groom clasped her, not by the hand, but by the wrist, a symbolic act of taking possession. The songs sung during this time were of ritual lament, reflecting the close association between marriage and death.

Afterward followed the wedding procession which is also described by Homer, but this time as depicted on the shield of Achilles, forged by the great god and artisan Hephaestus:  

          ... wedding feasts and brides
led out through town by torchlight from their chambers
amid chorales, amid the young men turning
round and round in dances: flutes and harps
among them, keeping up a tune, and women
coming outdoors to stare as they went by.[11]

During the procession, the bride’s mother carried torches to protect her from evil spirits. When they reached the bridal chamber, the groom’s mother met them at the doorway, also carrying torches. The door to the bridal chamber was closed and guarded by a friend of the groom. Friends of the couple stood outside the door singing songs, pounding on the door and cracking obscene jokes.

The morning after the wedding, the newlywed’s friends sang to waken them and presented them with gifts.

Zeus and Hera were brother and sister born to Kronos and Rhea. Hera married her own brother even though marriage between brother and sister in ancient Greek society was strictly forbidden and considered the only true incest. By marrying Zeus, Hera was given a husband who was her equal, a unique honor among Greek goddesses. The two of them lived happily together for three hundred years but eventually quarreled. Zeus was forever unfaithful, and Hera dealt out her jealousy against both other goddesses and mortal women pursued by Zeus.

An old man with a cane and a young woman dressed in black exit the site as I enter. The huge site is spread over several acres of swamp at the edge of the sea. Hera’s temple was the largest of its day and the envy of the citizens of Ephesus. The temple of Artemis at Ephesus that I visited a few days ago was patterned after this temple. The site was used as a stone quarry for hundreds of years, the buildings being dismantled leaving only the foundations. The lone standing column, one of the original 155, may have been left standing so those coming to pillage the site could more easily spot it as their ships approached the island.[12] Today the ruins have been reclaimed by swamp. The surface of the water is broken by ancient stones and tufts of marsh grass and reeds.

The marshy landscape was an archaeologists dream. The permanently waterlogged earth preserved wood artifacts that at other ancient sites vanished due to natural decay. The wood artifacts came in a range of types and artistry, from more practical utensils and well-crafted furniture to sculptured masterpieces. Hera’s sacred animal was the cow, “cow-eyed” was one of her epithets, and the bones of sacrificial cows predominate the site.

After a few minutes sloshing about the site, my hiking boots are soaked through, and I return to the taxi. The driver is glad for my return, and we make the drive back to Samos Town while lightening bolts streak to earth and thunder shakes the car.

What strikes me about the ancient Greek marriage ritual is the emphasis on satisfying the spiritual and the emotional needs of the couple getting married, the focus on the transitional nature of the act. They saw it as a sacred and psychological experience, both of which were treated with ritual. Today we see marriage as a literal, external change: cohabitation, mingling of finances, shared sex.

During the ride back, I think of my own marriage because of both minor similarities and major differences. My wife and I were married in Reno, Nevada in January 1963, the proper month according to Hera’s cult. It was a modern marriage, a sudden decision following several months of being engaged and followed immediately by a long drive from California to Reno where my older brother lived. A friend of ours went with us, a guy she had dated before me. Me and my buddy sat in the front seat and my fiancée in the back.

We bought the license in Reno and got married at some indiscriminate Christian chapel the next day. My brother was my best man. After all of us went to dinner, my new wife and I spent the night in a fancy gambling hotel, the name of which I can no longer remember. The next morning we spent the day with my brother’s family, and my brother took me to his friend’s home saying we would return shortly but we spent the entire afternoon there. I didn’t have the courage to tell him I had to get back. My wife was not pleased. The following day we made the long drive back to California. We didn’t have a honeymoon. My wife-to-be didn’t say anything but told me later she regretted making the decision to marry me all the way up there and back.

After a few days, I realized, with her continued prodding, what a debacle I had made of our marriage and can still feel the embarrassment. I regretted the hell out of what I had done but was still more than pleased to have that young woman with me for what I thought then would be the rest of my life. Perhaps I had already sewed the seeds of dissatisfaction that grew inside her and yield the fruits of divorce eighteen years later when she left me.

My marriage followed the confrontation with my father by about a year and half. During the intervening months I dropped out of college, took a job as a teller in a bank just south of San Francisco, quit the job after a few months and returned to the farm to work with my father. I still had an identity problem. The impact of my father loading the deer rifle and learning that I had set up my brother to be raped by a homosexual cost me all sense of who I was. But my marriage, though not an elaborate ceremony compared to that of the ancient Greeks, accomplished that transition from the kid I was to the young man who joined the Air Force, educated himself at both Arizona State and Stanford University and fathered two children, worked in the space program helping to put two robots on the surface of Mars and working on several satellites that flew on the space shuttle.

I guess, what I’m questioning now is if all the problems I had were a sign of dysfunction. Were they possibly the cornerstone my life was successfully built upon? Even my marriage ritual was not a happy experience, but the marriage lasted eighteen years, the most wonderful years of my life. In spite of the fact that it ended in divorce, I consider my marriage my most successful venture. At no time was I ever loved so much or did I love so much. I wonder if divorce for me wasn’t necessary during my mid-life transition if continued personal growth was to follow? Odysseus was “divorced” from Penelope during his years of wandering.

But one problem remains: what was going on inside me when my father loaded the deer rifle? If the process was ultimately healthy, does what I felt matter? The answer is, yes, and the reason is that even though we get along, a gulf exists between us. Every time he tries to come closer, I turn my back on him.

---

As soon as I arrive at the hotel, I walk to the travel agency with my hiking jacket hood pulled up over my fisherman’s cap. The ferry will arrive at eight this evening and is a ninety percent certainty. I sit in my room looking out over a courtyard of palm trees and red chrysanthemums surrounded by blue-shuttered patio doors and balconies with wrought-iron railings, three floors of them, all in brilliant white stucco. Is that holly I see, or do I have Christmas fever?

Gradually the light fades, leaving a dull lonely darkness. I still can’t quit thinking about my daughter. Against Hera’s marriage ceremony of a young woman’s happy public attainment of life’s most precious gift, an ancient cult practice was posed depicting the emotional transition of the maiden who was marrying for the first time. What happened to her internally was closely associated with the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. Iphigenia came to Aulis under the pretext of being married to Achilles but instead was sacrificed to Artemis by her father. This constituted a rite of passage from the maidenly, virginal state to that of the married woman, the bride participating in the betrayal and sacrifice of her own maidenly self. The maiden comes assuming she will be married, only to discover she, as a maiden, is to be sacrificed, die and be reborn as a woman. This cult practice also is closely connected to the disappearance of my daughter.

At the time my daughter disappeared, I hadn’t seen my ex-wife for a couple of years. The afternoon following her telephone call, I caught a flight to Phoenix, arriving just at sundown with sunlight casting a golden flow over the cactus strewn landscape. My first stop after getting a rental car was my ex-wife’s townhome. My daughter’s dog, Brandy, was the first to greet me, my ex-wife, standing behind him with puddles of tears in her eyes. She was glad to see me, but introduced me to her live-in boyfriend who was in the kitchen doing dishes.

My ex-wife no longer thought our daughter might have been kidnapped. She had found a note from Cyndi’s girlfriend Danielle saying, “Guess who’s back in town?” She was concerned that Vicki, the girl who had tried to burn her parents home down and ran away the year before, was back in town. She believed Cyndi had run off with her. After getting the names and addresses of Cyndi’s closest friends, most of whom my ex-wife wasn’t very complementary about, I left for my son’s apartment where I was to spend the night, feeling somewhat relieved.

It was late when I arrived, but he fed me and we talked for awhile before he made a bed for me on the sofa in the living room. He said something that evening I should have taken to heart, but it seemed insignificant at the time. He said that his sister had changed during the last two years, that he had seen Cyndi at rock concerts with a crowd of kids fogging around her like she had a following. I understood him to mean she was popular and thought, Sure, she’s bright, beautiful. Why wouldn’t she be popular?

The next morning, I rose early and started the search for some of the derelicts she ran around with. The most promising was Danielle, a sixteen year old who had been pronounced sui juris by the courts because she wouldn’t stay in school. Her mother had given her up for adoption when she was in elementary school, and her foster parents had also given up on her as a teenager. Danielle worked at a laundry, but when I questioned the manager of the place, she told me Danielle hadn’t been at work for two days.

I finally tracked down Danielle’s stepsister, but she couldn’t tell me much either. She did say she knew of two other girls who were also missing. One of them worked at the same pizza place where my daughter worked. The girl’s name was Bear. I mentioned that if they worked at the same place and disappeared at the same time, it would be easy to infer they ran off together. “If she did,” Danielle’s stepsister said, “she running in good company because Bear is a responsible young lady. Everyone likes her. She’s more mature than most girls and will take care of your daughter.” I wondered why, if she was so responsible, she didn’t just stay home instead of running away.

Danielle’s sister also mentioned another girl, Mary, originally from California, who hated Phoenix and wanted to get back to the beach. She was also missing. She speculated that Bear and Mary had run off to California, probably Huntington Beach in Los Angeles. But Danielle’s stepsister had never heard of my daughter.

When I hung up the phone, I realized suddenly that maybe my daughter was in trouble, possibly pregnant, and that just possibly she had run to me. If I had stayed in San Diego, she might have showed up on my doorstep. I had a growing feeling I had made a mistake by coming to Phoenix. It looked as though five girls had run off together. Bear, Vicki, Mary, Danielle and my daughter. Perhaps she wasn’t as vulnerable as I thought. At least she wasn’t on her own.

I made one last stop before returning to San Diego. My ex-wife had given me the address of Troy, Danielle’s boyfriend. Perhaps he could help. Troy was in his mid twenties and the leader of a New Age church, a group of young adults who’s only connection with religion seemed to be the ritual use of drugs. Troy owned a home in north Phoenix, but when I arrived at the rundown, fairly-new home, which had no landscaping and a large tractor tire covered with plywood for furniture in the living room, no one was home. Somehow I just knew my daughter was waiting for me in San Diego. She was probably sitting on my front step right then. I called the airlines and caught the next flight back to San Diego.

During that day of searching, I reached a degree of despondency I had never experienced, not even during my divorce. I had difficulty talking. The words stuck somewhere behind my tongue. Remembering names was impossible, so I used a notebook. I could barely write. I had roamed through north Phoenix for an hour before finding Troy’s home even though I was familiar with the neighborhood. A sort of debilitating grief set in even though, as yet, I had no evidence she was even in danger. I felt as though me leaving her in Phoenix and moving to San Diego had cost my daughter her life. The lingering effect of that grief is the reason I now know I must visit Aulis, the site where Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter.

*

A little before eight, I leave the hotel and walk out into the dark rain toward Port Authority. A pack of dogs waits patiently at the hotel door for anyone who will give them a scrap. They anxiously whine after me. The large red female with the broken flapping front leg is among them. She hobbles around on three legs begging for food and fighting off the male dogs who want to play with her. The ancient philosopher Pythagoras, who believed in the transmigration of souls, once told a man who was beating a puppy, “Stop, do not beat him; for it is the soul of a dear friend -- I recognized it when I heard the voice.”[13]

Pythagoras was born here on Samos in the 6th century BC and lived here until driven out by the tyrant Polycrates. He was the founder of a brotherhood called the Pythagoreans. They believed in a “wheel of life” into which we are all born and reincarnated until we perfect ourselves. Once we lead a pure life, our soul is released into the starry heavens, the body being a prison of the soul. The connection between the Pythagoreans and Orphism was a close one, and both would later have an influence on Christianity. Pythagoras had also been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries[14] and believed the human race to be eternal.[15]

I see a small ferry in the darkness at the edge of the dock, no bigger than the one I came back from Turkey on. Not good news, the weather being what it is. I start to board, but the agent calls me over and tells me I must buy my ticket from him instead of onboard. We stand in the rain and dark together by Port Authority while he writes out the ticket. I pay my money and walk off into the night, up the small gangway onto the good ferryboat Kapetan EtamatiV, Captain Etamatis. For bad weather, this is definitely not the ferry to be on, not a very big boat. The biggest problem is that I’m traveling in the dark and will not have a reference point in the distance on which to fix my eyes to prevent sea sickness.

I stand at the railing, the lights of Samos scattered around the harbor. The wind has stopped, for now. The streaks of multicolored lights on the smooth water’s surface, are absolutely gorgeous. Christmas comes to mind again. It’s the home of the Virgin Mary I visited in Ephesus that triggered the feeling. In the true spirit of leaving, I’m sad again. For the first time I feel the closeness of the end of my journey, and realize I’ll never see these places again.

Back inside the cabin, the dim lights flicker and go out for a few seconds. A little frightening. The rumble of the motor shakes the boat as I watch the dock lights through the windows slipping rearward. The bay is smooth and glassy. Maybe the open sea will not be so bad after all.

The ferry lopes, a slow long-distance breast stroke, and gently rocks from side to side. By one-thirty my ride will be over, whatever the condition of my stomach between now and then. Only three passengers are onboard, me and a Greek couple sitting in a row further back. They brought their dinner, bread, sliced meat and cheese, fruit and nuts. The smell fills the air. They roar with laughter, then snicker to themselves, quiet whispers.

As the boat moves out of the bay, the sea gets rougher. The gentle to-and-fro rocking of the ferry reminds me of a whale moving through the ocean. I lean back, close my eyes and relax, think how it would feel to be a whale swimming the sea at night. My problem in the rocking boat is similar to the one I had in Delphi, my first really frightening feeling of traveling alone. It’s a problem of reference. My solution in Delphi was to realize I was at home on the road. Instead of watching the shoreline as a reference, I now realize I can switch to the reference of the boat, or perhaps even closer, to myself. I close my eyes and imagine I’m a whale lumbering through waves as they break over me.

After a short voyage, we drop anchor at Karlobasi (Karlovasi). This is a stop I didn’t anticipate and explains the relatively smooth water we’ve experienced so far. We’ve navigated close to the northern shore of Samos and have yet to test the water of the open sea.

I step out on deck for a couple of minutes to get a glimpse of the churning sea here close to dock. Karlovasi is draped in darkness except for the cocoon of glowing light around the coffee shop. I see a Christmas tree in a window just as the ferry quivers and is on its way again. Yes, I have Christmas fever.

I reach my seat, and shortly the waves grow larger, frightening. I remember that in St. Paul’s day, boats didn’t normally sail the Aegean later in the year than November 11th. We’re seventeen days past the cutoff. I feel the perspiration pop out on my forehead, and I settle back in my seat, close my eyes and resume my shift in reference to that of a whale swimming the Aegean. The sea throws waves like mountain cliffs, the boat moans. I’m no longer so concerned about my stomach as I am about my life. We’re completely at the mercy of Poseidon, god of the sea. I remember what he did to the Greeks returning from Troy, how he scattered their ships and how their bodies blossomed on the beaches.

The crew is deathly silent. I concentrate, desperately now, on the sea and imagine stroking, breaking into the huge crests. Crash, lunge, crash, lunge. Again and again the ferry plunges into the waves. I feel them against the prow, feel the waves lapping my sides, rocking ‘n rolling, splitting waves, slicing into the night.

The two people behind me are restless, and their laughter has stopped. Shortly I hear the rustle of a paper bag followed by gagging as they throw up their just-eaten dinner. I lean back further into my soft seat and force intense visions of the sea while hearing the couple’s gagging breaths bringing up chunks that plop against the floor. The sour smell of vomit.

 

30 Nov, Tuesday

At two in the morning we make dock in Chios, and I walk off the ferry into the light rain looking for shelter. The other passengers, the two Greeks, are pale green, won’t look at me and don’t speak to each other. Usually we dock at a deep-set bay, but not here in Chios. The dark dock extends north-south along the waterfront on the east side of the island facing Turkey. A taxi driver shouts at me, jumps out to put my pack in his trunk, but all I want is directions to a cafe. He points to the far end of the dock, perhaps a kilometer away. I see an oasis of light in the darkness glistening in the puddles all the way to me. “How much?” I ask. “Five hundred drackmes,” he says. Two dollars seems a small price to keep dry.

“You stay in Chios?” he asks as I get in the front seat beside him. “No,” I tell him, “Lesbos.” “No,” he says. “Must stay in Chios. I show you,” and damn if he doesn’t make a left turn off the dock and up a dark alley. “No extra charge,” he says. “Still five hundred, no extra charge.”

Here I go again. This is where I get mugged for sure. It’s two o’clock in the morning, and the guy wants to give me a tour of a dark town. I can feel it coming.

“Please stay in Chios,” he says. “A beautiful island.” A few blocks into the darkness, he stops, rolls down his window. I look past him at some amorphous sculpture in front of what could be town hall. He goes on and on about the statue, none of which I can understand. “Very nice,” I tell him. “Very nice.” 

After a couple more memorable stops, he navigates back to the dock and drops me off at the coffee shop. “Think about it,” he says. “Chios is a beautiful island. Many nice pensions.” As I pay him, he looks resigned to me not staying. “Ferryboat to Lesbos, right here, three-thirty,” he says, pointing to the dock in front of the coffee shop. “Good coffee shop,” he adds as he gets back in his taxi.

I wish I did have time to spend a couple of days here. This is another possible birthplace of Homer. In the Homeric hymn to Apollo, the poet makes reference to the island and himself when speaking to the Delian maidens who are followers of Apollo:   in time to come whenever some man on this earth,

                                  I ask you to call me to mind
a stranger whose suffering never ends, comes here and asks:
“Maidens, which of the singers, a man wont to come here,
is to you the sweetest, and in whom do you most delight?”
Do tell him in unison that I am he,
a blind man, dwelling on the rocky island of Chios,
whose songs shall all be the best in time to come.[16]

Even though most scholars would agree the hymn was not written by Homer,[17] the idea that Homer was a blind poet living on Chios persists.

Sophocles was also once here, on his way to Lesbos to fight a war. The poet Ion wrote of meeting him here.[18] He describes Sophocles as agreeable over wine and witty. Sophocles related Pericles’ opinion that he, Sophocles, was a great poet but not much of a general.

I squeeze through the door of the coffee shop expecting to be confronted by the proprietor, but he’s busy arguing with another man who’s eating and doesn’t even acknowledge me. The open kitchen is to the left and a row of glass-top tables to the right runs the length of the long narrow room. I dump my backpack on the floor and take a seat at one of them, wondering if he’ll kick me out if I don’t buy something to eat.

I pull out my journal. I can’t shake the feeling of that ferry ride, plunging into the sea, plunging into darkness. For five hours I was a whale in rough seas and had no trace of seasickness. And I’m still swimming. Even though I sit in a small darkly-lit coffee shop at a table with a red and white plaid tablecloth covered with glass, a kilometer from where we docked, I still swim the sea. I still rock, I still roll. During those hours of self-imposed blindness, I don’t know that I’ve ever had such vivid images of the primordial time, possessed by the spirit of Poseidon.

Finally the perpetually-eating Greek and the smell of food overcomes me. I walk to the glass counter and look at the pots of food sitting in the dark recesses of the metal cabinet, most with little left in them, large chunks of pale broiled chicken, something resembling eggplant, noodles and beef stew. I have the stew and some of that firm Greek bread I’ve been missing. My bill comes to 900 dr, no tax, no tip. The price you see is the price you get.

---

By four in the morning, the ferry is a half-hour late, and I’m still in the coffee shop waiting it out. I’ve had time to think over my last ferry ride and apprehensive of what I’ll encounter on the way to Mitilini. Nine people now wait with me, drinking coffee from small clear glasses. Three more dressed in suits enter carrying briefcases. The coffee shop is filled with cigarette smoke and the jabber of Greek. Outside the taxis have staked out their territory in the darkness, and cars and trucks wait in the wings to board the ferry which is not yet in sight. The long beams of flashlights stab the darkness and reflect from large puddles.

A mad scramble for the door brings me to my feet at the same time I hear the ferry horn bellow, a call from the depths of darkness. It’s a wonderful reassuring sight, a huge ferry, the largest I’ve seen. Shortly I’m inside the hold, up the stairs and waiting at a reception desk to buy a ticket. It’s the most plush ferry I’ve been on, deep carpeted floors, sparkling mirror-lined walls, well-dressed crew. I’m so tired, I sit on my backpack at the desk, my head in my hands, eyes closed wondering if I’ll get a chance to sleep before we get to Lesbos.

When I finally make it into the passenger compartment, I throw my hiking jacket between a row of seats on the clean carpeted floor, put my black sweater on top of it and lay my head on the sweater. Sweet oblivion.

---

Two hours later, I’m brought back to life by the loudspeaker telling those of us who are staying in Lesbos to prepare to disembark. I’m surprised it’s already day, bright light coming through the row of windows on the sides of the ferry. Yet the sky is overcast, heavy clouds sagging pregnantly.

| Top |