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Out of the Blue
Confessions of a onetime ramp rat
Two months as an airport baggage-handler almost cost me my life.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[10/19/99]

Searching for Mr. Watson
Two frat brothers make a healing pilgrimage to a legendary renegade's retreat in the heart of the Everglades.
By Bill Belleville
[10/16/99]

Wanderlust
Love letters in the sand
I was his English teacher, 14 years older. But on the beach in Mazatlan, love is love.
By Susan McKinney de Ortega
[10/15/99]

Travel Advisor
Day of the Dead
I want to participate in Oaxaca's festivities, but am worried about the recent floods. Can I still go? Plus: Our expert's tips on touring Big Ben's private gears and finding a teaching job at sea.
By Donald D. Groff
[10/14/99]

Book Bag
It wasn't funny at the time
Lonely Planet's new anthology presents an I'm-glad-that-wasn't-me collection of delightful disasters.
By Don George
[10/13/99]

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I'm sitting here in the bone-warming sun in Berkeley, surrounded by students, as I was so often at the school where I was teaching in Greece, and that whole long-ago year is rushing back to me -- all the wonder and mystery and discovery of my days there, fresh out of college, half of my lifetime ago.

Ah, Greece. I had boarded the Orient-Express -- the real Orient-Express, not the tarted-up private version that now runs under that name -- after a post-graduation summer in Paris, and chugged through increasingly unfamiliar landscapes until suddenly I awoke to the dry rocks and dirt and dusty green trees of Greece. It had seemed forbidding at first, worlds removed from the blue mountains, lush hills and flower-bright fields of Northern Europe. Yet what wonders that world held -- and still holds -- in my mind.

Everyone should have a year like this, a year that opens up the world for them. I arrived in September thinking I would go to graduate school and eventually teach comparative literature at some ivy-laden East Coast university. Ten months later I left to ride Arabian stallions into the Sahara Desert, climb Mount Kilimanjaro and enter a creative writing graduate program to practice poetry.

What was it about Greece? I re-read my journals and letters from that period, leaf through the books that meant so much to me -- the magic and madness of John Fowles' "The Magus," Henry Miller's incomparably romantic, exuberant "The Colossus of Maroussi," Lawrence Durrell's sensual and poignant "Reflections on a Marine Venus," translations of Cafavy, Seferis and Kazantzakis -- and try to puzzle it out.

What I remember best, now and always, is the light. It was dazzling, dizzying in its clarity, a kind of clarity I had never seen before. That Grecian light demarcated everything, wrote the landscape in capital letters . Each rock was ROCK. Each branch was BRANCH. And when, a few days later, I climbed breathless and in awe to the Acropolis, each column was COLUMN.

The light was rugged and pure in a way that, after a while, made the land seem equally rugged and pure -- and the people, too, free of artifice, solid, rooted. I remember the extraordinary kindness of so many people all across the land: the teaching colleague who would habitually spend his entire monthly salary the day that he got it, taking me and the three other young American teachers out for a night of retsina and plates of mezedes delicacies under the stars; the families that spontaneously invited me to join their children's wedding festivities on Crete; the mothers in mountaintop villages who would sweep me into their homes, feed me honey cakes and show me albums of their relatives in America; the painters and poets whose love of words and colors and lines overflowed in ouzo-fueled conversations until dawn.

If I close my eyes and sweep my brain clean, I am there again: It is late afternoon, classes are over, and I have just returned to the campus apartment I share with Jeff, another teacher at Athens College in Psychico. As usual, Jeff is sitting at the room's sole desk, a glass of retsina in one hand and an ancient Greek text in the other. Jeff is a student of ancient Greek, and his idea of a good joke is to walk into a small downtown shop and ask for a bar of soap or a loaf of bread in Homeric verse.

The antiseptic apartment -- really one sprawling room with two beds at one end and the desk at the other -- has cream-colored walls and earth-tone bedspreads and tiles that the dormitory maids scrub every day. The room's sole saving glory is a balcony that looks over the Attic plain, and after I put my books away, I pour a glass of retsina and pull a chair onto the balcony, and Jeff and I watch the sky turn peach and pink and purple and slowly fade into star-pricked blue, and talk about the philosophers and poets who watched the light fade centuries before.

Next page | Dionysian nights on moon-drenched beaches