The Gold Coast

45

So they fly to Crete, another of Jim’s ideas. “We’ll give you one more chance, Jimbo.…” They land at Heraklion, eat at Jack-in-the-Box, rent a Nissan at the Avis counter. Off to Knossos, a gaily painted reconstruction of a Minoan palace. It’s quite crowded, and just the slightest bit reminiscent of the Pyramids.

Jim is disappointed, frustrated. “Damn it,” he says, “give me that map.”

Sandy hands him the Avis map of the island. Minoan ruins are marked by a double axe, Greek ruins by a broken column. Jim looks for broken columns, understanding already that on this island Minoan ruins are first-class ruins, Greek ruins are second-class ruins. Find one away from towns, at the end of a secondary road, on the sea if possible. “Whoah.” Several fit all the criteria. His mood lifts a bit. He picks one at random. “Humphrey, drive us to the very end of the island.”

“Right ho. Gas is expensive here, remember.”

“Drive!”

“Right ho. Where are we headed?”

“Itanos.”

Sandy laughs. “World famous, eh Jim?”

“Exactly not. The Pyramids are world famous. Knossos is world famous. Red Square is world famous.”

“Point taken. Itanos it is. What’s there?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea.”

So they drive east, along the northern coast of Crete.

It strikes them all at the same time that the land looks just like southern California—to the extent that they know what southern California looks like, that is. Like the middle section of Camp Pendleton. Rocky dry scrubland, rising out of a fine blue sea. Dry riverbeds. Bare bouldery hilltops. Some tall mountains inland. “The first wave of American settlers always called southern California Mediterranean, when they tried to tell the people back east what it was like,” Jim says slowly, staring out the window. “You can see why.”

It’s the same land, the same landscape; but look how the Greeks have used theirs.

Scrub hills.

Scattered villages. Concrete blocks, whitewashed. Flowers.

Untidy places, but not poor; Jim’s ap is smaller than any home here.

Olive groves cover the gentler hills.

Gnarled old trees, crooked arms, silver-green fingers.

The road is spotted with black oily circles: crushed olives.

Do you live here?

Blue-domed, whitewashed church, there on the hilltop. Inconvenient!

An orange grove.…

“This is how it looked,” Jim says quietly. And his friends listen to him, they stare out the windows.

They stop in at a village store and buy yogurt, feta cheese, bread, olives, oranges, a salami, retsina, and ouzo, from a very friendly woman who has not a single word of English. After Egypt’s ceaseless venality her friendliness pleases them no end.

Late in the day they drive down one last blacktop ribbon of road, which follows a dry streambed to the sea.

Scrub hills flank them on both sides.

Hills breaking off in the dark blue sea.

A beach, divided into two by a knoll sitting in a small bay.

The knoll is covered with ruins.

The landscape is empty, abandoned. Nothing but the ruins, the scrub.

“My God!” Jim jumps out of the car. His recurrent dream, walking about in some great ruin of the past—ever since the effort to find El Modena Elementary School, it’s been haunting him. On waking he always scoffed. No site exists without fences, ticket booths, information plaques, guides, visiting hours, lines, roped-off areas, snack bars, hordes of tourists milling around and wondering what the fuss was about; isn’t that right?

But here they are. He pushes through shrubs, climbs a tumble of broken blocks, stands in the shattered entrance of an ancient church. Cruciform floor plan, altar against the back wall, which is dug into the knoll. Columns rolled against the walls.

The others appear. “Look,” Jim says. “The church is probably Byzantine, but when they built it they used the materials at hand. The columns are probably Roman, maybe Greek. The big blocks in the walls that are all spongy, those are probably Minoan. Cut two thousand years before the church was built.”

Sandy nods, grinning. “And look at the stone in the doorway. They had a locking post on the door, and as it swung open it scraped this curve here. Perfect semicircle.” He laughs the Sandy laugh, a stutter of pure delight.

Humphrey and Angela walk to the north side of the knoll, investigating what looks like a small fortress, its walls intact. “Well preserved,” Sandy remarks. “It’s probably Venetian,” Jim says. “A thousand years newer than the church.”

“Man, I can’t really grasp these time scales, Jimbo.”

“Neither can I.”

On the beach below them are a pair of decrepit boats, pulled onto the sand. One appears to have an outboard motor under a tarp. From their vantage on the knoll they can see far out to sea, and back inland. Emptiness everywhere; the land deserted, the Aegean a blank plate.

“Let’s camp here tonight,” Jim suggests. “Two can sleep in the car, and two on our beach towels in the sand. We can eat the rest of the lunch food.”

It’s late and they’ve spent the day traveling; they all like the plan.

The sun nears the hills to the west as they bring the food up to the ruined church. The slightly hazy evening light brings out the orange in the rock, and the entire knoll turns deep apricot. Frilly pink herringbone clouds are pasted to the sky. The fallen blocks on the church entryway make perfect stools, tables, backrests.

They eat. The food and drink have vivid tastes. There’s a group of goats on the hillside to the south of them. Sandy holds his hand up to the light, framing a pair of black rams. “Back in the Bronze Age.”

After dinner they sit back and watch the florid twilight clouds as the light leaks away from the land. An abandoned, still, dusky landscape. “Tell us about this place, Jim,” Angela says.

“Well, the back of the map has a few sentences about it, and that’s all I know, really. It began as a Minoan town, around 2500 B.C. Then it was occupied by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines. Under the Greeks it was an independent city-state and coined its own money. It was abandoned around either 900 A.D. or 1500 A.D., because of earthquakes.”

“Only six hundred years’ difference,” Sandy says. “My Lord, the time scales!”

“Immense,” Jim says. “We can’t imagine them. Especially not Californians.”

Sandy takes this as a challenge. “Can too!”

“Cannot!”

“Can too!”

About five reps of that, and Sandy says, “Okay, try this. We’ll go backwards from now, generation by generation. Thirty-three years per generation. You tell us what they were doing, I’ll keep count.”

“Okay, let’s try it.”

“Last generation?”

“Part of Greece.”

Sandy makes a mark in the dirt between flagstones. “Before that?”

“Same.”

Five generations go by like that. Jim has his eyes squeezed shut, he’s concentrating, trying to recall Cretan history from the guidebooks, his history texts back home. “Okay, this guy saw Crete deeded over from Turkey to Greece. Before him, under the Turks.”

“And his parents?”

“Under the Turks.” They repeat these two sentences over and over, slowly, as if completing some ritual, so that Jim can keep track of the years. Sixteen times! “That’s one big Thanksgiving,” Humphrey mutters.

“What’s that?”

“Lot of Turkey.”

Then Jim says, “Okay. Now the Venetians.”

So the response changes. “And their parents?” “Venetian.” Ten times. At which point Jim adds, “We’ve just now reached the end of Itanos, by the way. The end of this city.”

They laugh at that. And move to the Byzantines. Seven times Jim answers with that. Then: “The Arabs. Saracen Arabs, from Spain. Bloody times.” Four generations under the Arabs. Then it’s back to the Byzantines, to the times when the church before them was functioning, holding services, having its doorsill scraped by the door’s locking post, again and again. Fifteen times Jim answers “Byzantine,” eyes screwed shut.

“And their parents?”

“In Itanos. Independent city-state, Greek in nature.”

“Call it Itanos. And their parents?”

“Itanos.”

Twenty-six times they repeat the litany, Sandy keeping the pace slow and measured. At this point none of them can really believe it.

“Dorian Greeks.” After a few more: “Mycenaean Greeks. Time of the Trojan War.”

“So this generation could have gone to Troy?”

“Yes.” And on it goes, for eight generations. Sandy’s shifting to get fresh dirt to scratch. Then: “Earthquakes brought down the Minoan palaces for the last time. This generation felt them.”

“Minoan! And their parents?”

“Minoan.” And here they fall into a slow singsong, they know they’ve caught the rhythm of something deep, something fundamental. Forty times Sandy asks “And their parents?”, and Jim answers “Minoan,” until their voices creak with the repetition.

And finally Jim opens his eyes, looks around as if seeing it all for the first time. “This generation, it was a group of friends, and they came here in boats. There was nothing here. They were fishermen, and stopped here on fishing trips. This hill was probably fifty feet inland, behind a wide beach. Their homes down near the palace at Zakros were getting crowded, they probably lived with their parents, and they were always up here fishing anyway, so they decided to take the wives and kids and move up here together. A group of friends, they all knew each other, they were having a good time all on their own, with their kids, and this whole valley for the taking. They built lean-tos at first, then started cutting the soft stone.” Jim runs his hand over the porous Minoan block he is leaning against. Looks at Sandy curiously. “Well?”

Sandy nods, says softly, “So we can imagine it.”

“I guess so.”

Sandy counts his marks. “A hundred thirty-seven generations.”

They sit. The moon rises. Low broken clouds scud in from the west, fly under the moon, dash its light here and there. Broken walls, tumbled blocks. A history as long as that; and now the land, empty again.

Except headlights appear on the road inland. Their beams lance far over the dark land, fan across it as they turn onto the side road to Itanos. The group falls silent. The headlights go right down to the beach below them. Car doors slam, cheery Greek voices chatter. A Coleman lantern is lit; its harsh glow washes the beach, and the Greeks go to work on the two old boats. “Fishermen!” Sandy whispers.

After leisurely preparations the boats are launched, their motors started. What a racket! They putter out of the bay and to sea, lanterns hung from their bows. After a time they’re only stars on the water’s flat surface, far out to sea. “Night fishing,” Jim says. “Octopus and squid.”

Sandy and Angela find a spot to lie down and sleep. Humphrey returns to the car. Jim climbs to the top of the knoll and watches the boats at sea, the moon and its flying clouds, the rough town map below him, defined by its tumbledown walls. Again he’s filled with some feeling he can’t name, some complex of feelings. “The land,” he says, speaking to the Aegean. “It’s not abandoned after all. Fishing, goat keeping, some kind of agriculture on the other side of the valley. Empty-looking, but used as much as scrubland can be. After all these many years.” He tries to imagine the amount of human suffering contained in a hundred and thirty-seven generations, the disappointments, illnesses, deaths. Generation after generation into dust. Or the myriad joys: how many festivals, parties, weddings, love trysts, in this little city-state? How often had someone sat on this knoll through a moony night, watching clouds scud by and thinking about the world? Oh, it makes him shiver to think of it! It’s a hilltop filled with spirits, and they’re all inside him.

He tries to imagine someone sitting on top of Saddleback, to look across the empty plain of OC. Ah, impossible. Unimaginable.

How could history have coursed so differently for these two dry coasts? It’s as if they’re not part of the same history, they are separated by such a great chasm; how to make any mental juncture? Are they different planets, somehow? It is too strange, too strange. Something has gone wrong back home in his country.

He sits there through the night, dozing once, waking to the boats puttering back in, dozing again. He dreams of rams and fallen walls, of his father and licorice sticks, of a bright lantern under a cloudy moon.

He wakes to a dawn as pink as the sunset was orange, a woven texture of cloud over him. Pink on blue. In the bay below Angela is swimming lazily. She stands on the smooth pebble bottom and walks out of the water, wet, sleek, supple. It’s the dawn of the world.

A little later a pickup truck drives slowly down the road, honking its horn. A horde of sheep and goats come tumbling out of the hills at this signal, baaing and clanging their bells. Feeding time! Far up the valley someone is burning trash.

Well, Angela has to be back to work in a couple of days, and so they have to start back home. Reluctantly they pack up. Jim takes a last walk over the site. He surveys the scene from his hilltop. Something about this place… “They’re part of the land, it’s not abandoned. The story’s not over here. It’ll go on as long as anything else.” Humphrey honks. Time to go. “Ah, California.…”