The Unwritten Land, Part 2

In the morning I climbed through overgrown trail into browned terraced fields, cherry trees and their red fruits the only company to a host of collapsed houses, their shells tumbling down and mingling with the earth. The massive peak of Delidhimi peered up over the lips of the hills. Below it a little hut stood, its white roof removing it from the gaggle of trees clinging to the hillside. Below, dogs barked.

I walked down and heard beneath the dogs human voices and the bells of sheep. Several haggard dogs charged me at the bottom of the creek, one biting at my heel before the young shepherd loped over and pulled him away. I made a wide berth around the dogs and climbed up to the hut I had seen, passing through lines of laundry while chickens scattered between my feet.

The house had the appearance of something very old held together only by the lives that filled it, their breath and not the beams. Plastic sheeting - the white I had seen - covered the roof, pinned down by a piece of wood like a giant rubber band around the lid of a jar. The wood windows were old and long since bleached of their color, the stones still cool with the memory of the night, hard and compressed through years of waiting and weathering. The trail ended at the house’s wood gate.

I walked in and was immediately greeted by an old woman wrapped in black. She insisted I sit and take off my pack. Her daughter appeared from the doorway, sly smile on her face. They served me coffee with water and a slice of a sweet, dry cake. How far to Asprorema, I asked. They smiled. “This is Asprorema," they said.
A short while later the shepherds - the sons - appeared, milk sloshing hot in the buckets they carried. Their mother went to the back of the house and tended to the chicken baking in a subterranean pot. Beyond the porch the house was covered in the multi-colored occlusions of their lives - buckets, bowels, strings, pots, broken chairs, tools, cans of olive oil, rusted machine parts, spare nails and tufts of errant wool. All of it sprouted chaotic and profuse as mushrooms after rain.

Her daughter swept crumbs and shooed flies from the faded tablecloths and blankets draped over the seats. I was struck by the care in her hands as she brushed and cleared and patted the cloth—as if the small act of taking her hands to the cloth was the only thing that made the meal possible.

Lunch was greasy chicken—so perfect—with strong olives and silence. I asked about the trail over the mountains. Kostas, one of the sons, would drive me. I showed him the trail on the map. He dismissed it. It was no good, he said, he would show me a better trail to the top of the mountain. From there, I could hike the ridge back to Epiniana.

Yet again I threw my pack in the back of a muddy pick-up truck. The family had insisted that I weigh my pack before I leave—it was nearly twenty-five kilos and I braced myself for another rant about how I would die. They laughed. That I was crazy was a given. Maybe they just weren’t that impressed. Kostas and I rumbled away from the house through the hail of barking dogs chained to trees beside the road. Pieces were missing from their ears.

We drove on. In a little while we had crossed the creek and Kostas stopped where the road, little road as it was, turned to grass. "The trail is there," he said, pointing up at the vertical gulch, zigging and zagging his finger as if he were writing quite clearly on the mountain where I should go. All I could see was a towering wall of scrubby brush, loose soil, and broken scree. “It’s there, he said, it’s just very small. When I was young, ” he went on, “I could climb it in an hour.”

An hour later I was nowhere near the top. The trail faded in and out and most of the time I scrambled straight up the hill or over fields of broken rock, battling with thick, tangled masses of bristling pines or rivers of ankle-twisting shale. The innumerable small cuts on my hands, arms, and face stung with sweat.

The view to the other side of the range became more and more astounding, but at an hour and half in I had completely lost the trail and my boots were filled with the broken shoots and seeds of wild grasses, flowers, and fragrant thyme. Everywhere I stepped, the smell of it erupted from the broken stalks. It was the smell of being lost.

Near the top I hopped across boulders in the total, particular silence that marks the borders of the far highlands. My boots made hollow thumps on the enormous, misshapen boulders. Shadows of clouds raced and tussled and bled into each other on the bare heads of the mountains surrounding me.

At the top I was nearly blown off by the wind To my right, a ridge narrowed to nothing. Ahead, mountains of immensity, as if the gods had grabbed the earth and twisted it straight up. To my left, red and yellow-dappled grass swirled in the gusts, no sign of a trail, and nowhere, seemingly, to go.

Was there really a trail out that could stitch itself to these mountains? I had no choice but to go. The shepherds, I hoped, would keep this trail clearer than the Asprorema crossing. No roads could reach me now, and this was my best hope.

Everywhere else, the roads had brought only ruin to the trails. There were no paths preserved for and from joy. There were only paths of necessity. The Asprorema trail will likely soon disappear, and I flew down this highland trail as if it at any moment it would cease to be useful and vanish beneath my feet.

Several times it almost did. The steep drop on my right rarely crept back, and the trail had a bad habit of crossing loose scree and wobbling rocks. Every time I took my eyes from the trail, I slipped, came close to toppling, and barely regained my balance. Once I fell on my side, slid down the mountain for a moment and caught myself as the rocks bounced and cascaded down the gulch where I might have gone, filling the air with chalky dust and dying cacophony and a smell close to that of gunpowder as the rocks struck one another spilling sparks.

I got up and walked on. I passed a small stone shelter on a saddle and I felt the light begin to change—evening was coming, and I had only a guess of how far I had to go. Gold light started to condense like vapor on the peak of Plaka behind me, and the few pines I could see in the distance were rivaled in size by their shadows that tattooed the mountains with abstract blooms. But there were trees, which meant I was losing altitude and getting closer. The sun melted upon the gargantuan peak of Fteri to the my right, and I off I went.

A hour later the evening was longer still. If noon stands straight upon the earth touching only with its feet then evening reclines and wrinkles the earth with shadows like earth were wool. I paused in the ring of an old house, the trace of its stone foundation like an immense, empty fingerprint. The mountains cut up into the sky.

I came across three old men. In their hands they held combs and scissors at right angles forming a shape like an archaic sextant. They told me they were going to their sheep. I looked up to where they pointed. There was only the mountain and what moved upon it. But no movement seemed like much; everywhere was far. I could see no sheep but I heard them. They had become only their bells.

I descended to a small stone hut on a pinnacle around it wet earth pressed and distorted by many small prints. The hut, its roof bolted with metal, was scarcely larger than an American SUV. The doorway was dark. Hello? I called into it. There was no response. I walked a little closer to the dark door. A pair of eyes appeared, one atop the other, glinting a dull silver in the murk.

The old woman, dressed all in the black, sat up from her bed and whispered to me. “Come, ” she called, “come, ” as she teetered forward into the deep of the house, shifting from one foot to the other in a strange shuffling walk.

I entered and was swarmed with flies. My eyes took in the dark and I saw another old woman, shrunken into her black clothes, staring up at me from a simple bed—a wood platform with a grey blanket, its rough wool long since abraded into softness. The earth floor was uneven. A pot squatted over charcoals in the hearth. Garlic hung in long streams from the sagging wood beams. The white bulbs dipped into the swirls of flies beside bags with contents unknown and objects of strange utility, blades and hooks and scoops with empty hollows. Barrels clustered in the corner like frightened animals. Cats, silent as light, played in the slab of white evening cast slanting from the open door. The smell of earth. Whispers.

The sitting woman watched me from her bed, waving her wrinkle-warped hands like a maestro. My host pulled a square of cheese from a tub in the corner. It was soft and mild. She offered bread. It was stale, and she threw most of it to the cats who pawed at the pieces. Their hair was like fire in the cool light. Their tails and their bodies wrapped into each other and passed light between them. We sat. The flies swam in the languid air.

Sometime later one of her sons appeared carrying a bag of peaches. I ate one and he said he would drive me back to Epiniana. “There’s a road now, ” he said.
A little while later the son and I bounced and rocked down the road. His name was Stereo, and his English was about as good as my Greek, so we had a good time barely understanding each other. We discussed bears (they steal his honey; I had a good impression with lots of snarls), the NBA championships, the footpath that had been bulldozed into this awful road. “Blame Karamanlis! ” He said. “Tell him to come here and build more roads, better roads!”

All the roads I had seen, all the roads I had gotten sick of, and again I met someone who only wanted more of them. To me they were only destruction. To the people of the Agrafa, they were a sign of prosperity and connection—when they were good, anyway—and a sign of lingering poverty and isolation when they were poor. To connect with the world no longer meant destruction; it meant survival. It meant escape.

I came to the village of Agrafa in the morning. It looked little more than another village, newer, though, rebuilt from some nameless calamity that might only have been time. After all the distance, it felt hollow.

I left on the old footpath to Niala, one of the famed grazing grounds of the Sarakatsani herdsmen. The trail, though good in spots, was showing its neglect even worse than the trail to Asprorema: trees blocked the path every few dozen metres, and the embankments, once laid with stone, had collapsed in many spots and dribbled down the cliffs. How quickly the footpath had been forgotten, how quickly the mountain had taken it back. Below, the new forest road wound through the mountain, lost, embarrassed, and empty.

After an hour I reached another road. The bare crest that formed Niala’s western edge loomed naked and treeless above me. As I begun to walk up toward what I hoped was the trail, two men, probably middle-aged but eroded into men much older, appeared from the edge of the forest. I asked if they were going to Niala and they said yes. They easily picked out the worn trail and I followed them as we went up onto the cliff, immense and breaching from the earth as a whale breaks the surface of the sea, the sky running down the rock like water.

The men pulled reeds and grasses from between the rocks and stuffed them in their pockets or clutched them tightly in their sun-cracked hands, the soft melon-green heads of the grass shimmering silver in the sun and wind. They were harvesting tea.
The leading man’s partner stepped off the trail and evaporated into the slopes. It was just the two of us and the clouds going light and dark and painting their shadows upon us.

After a while we sat down and he lit a cigarette. He rubbed his pale knee with his boney, burned-dark hands. Nearly every bit of him seemed to have been desiccated away. He cursed his failing knee and he drank coffee from a Coke bottle while we watched the mountains far away over Asprorema soak up the blue haze and thick sun.

We climbed on through the hot, shattered rock. He kicked stones from the path and cleared the trail before us. He mumbled to himself with every miniature rockslide he sent barreling down the slopes. “No trail, no work, ” he said. “Without the trail, we cannot get tea. No tea, nothing. ” For tea, this trail existed. Nothing else kept it passable. I knew that we were climbing, ultimately, to only another road and if he could he would have taken a truck. He would have filled its bed with bags of tea, and stones would smother the trail.

Close to the top he stopped and pointed at a flat stone. Much of its face had flaked off and shattered on the ground but a few etchings remained—a Byzantine double-headed eagle, names, a few dates from deep in WWII or the Civil War. A few steps further and Niala unfurled beneath us, a great, slow-sloping basin that descended from an encompassing lip of sharp mountains into a narrow canyon. It rolled with grass. Below us, sheep swam tiny in the green, like fish deep in the sea at the edge of the touch of the sun.

The dun-colored road went on ahead, it stretched on behind, and I went on while he went the other way. I passed by goats, I passed through more green pastures high in the cupped hands of the mountains. I was saluted by a man waiting in a chair by his truck. “For tea! ” he said, pointing at the hills, his partners, I presumed, somewhere in the dark light of the evening. We compared walking sticks. His had an eagle carved in wood. I kept to the road until it vanished.

I followed ribbons tied to trees and a few cairns low to the ground as turtles. In a little over half an hour I came to the Portal of Agrafa, a narrow clef in the ridge dark and ragged. Someone had blocked the trail with a clot of shrubs and broken trees. I clambered over and walked through the narrow, gold-grass filled passage that wound down the ridge. Like two hands touching at the wrists, their fingers curved in toward one another, the rock walls of the portal curled over me as if they made to reach me but I passed swiftly as if I had never been. Looking back, the walls of the portal were black, the mountains through them viridian, and the air the color of a dust-covered lion.

I left the Agrafa. I walked down and crossed through a forest to a mountain refugee warm and smelling of cut wood. The bunks were bare but people had been there not so long ago. Candles half-melted into empty wine bottles. An axe cupped by red wood. Cups and bowls unwashed and clustered together for company. Names carved into the wood walls with a knife. We were here.

I stopped. I sat in the last light. I lit candles. Around their flames there was another light that was the evening like white moths. The cats that were the flames flicked their tails. Somewhere close there was the sound of animals of eating grass. Somewhere, their bells.