Palaiochora Unbound by Michael Robinson Morris

Lying awake in an adobe-style pension in the extra early morning, I tried to figure out the pattern of the chickens’ clucking outside in the yard. Or at least find some kind of logic to it. God help me.

Cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck…cluck-cluck-cluck—cluck…cluck—cluck…B’K-CHAWW!! Cluck-cluck-cluck…cluckcluckcluck. Cluck. Cluck/cluck… B’K-CHAWWW!! Cluck cluck. Cluck. B’K-CHAWWW!! (Silence). Cluck cluck. B-K’CHAWWW!!

The sun was hours away from waking up, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out. It was completely impossible to predict when the next nerve-tingling “B’K-CHAWW!” was going to rattle the fraying inseams of my early morning insom-maniacal cranial fibers.

The walls of the adobe pension were a bleached white. Blue doors and molding accents. A girl was lying somewhere next to me, as far away as the heart could reach. We came here together to be closer, to have privacy in our intimacy.

But really, we came to pick olives.

We thought it would be a great idea. We were young. We were running out of currency and drifting about Southern Europe with little more than a Eurail pass and an intangible longing to drive our youth like a freight train into the unknown.

“We can make money picking olives in Crete,” Ginny said.

A friend had done it, or she had read about it. Foreigners welcome. Not skilled labor, just a willingness to toil with one’s hands. We had already tooled about in Tübingen and Bavaria, Germany, staying with some of her relatives in the suburbs of Munich before heading south through Italy—but something was missing. Something left undone.

We saw the Acropolis in Athens. Great. Done. Barely could see it through the thicket of TV antennas and a maple haze wafting over the city, the Ancient Greek landmark diminished by the onset of rapid and confused progress. It was better to see it from a distance—more easily digestible in the face of our hungry agenda to consume the world.

It was on the slow, overnight ferry crossing from Piraeus to Chania, Crete, that I first took note of what corner of the world we were in. A gypsy family huddled in an encamped spot on the floor of the ferry’s main indoor hall, the children’s eyes darting this way and that, looking for roving treasures in the bags and pockets of tourists. It struck me. These were survivors on the fringes of modern civilization. The parents, of which it looked like there may have been 3 or 4, never made eye contact with anyone but their own, only surveying and presiding over the expert instincts of their children, whom they had trained to be the foot soldiers of their relentless business of scratching an existence out of the rest of us. Admiration is what I felt, mixed along with the usual caution, dread, and luxury of objectivity, the lot of which I must have bought at the expense of genetic and geographical dumb luck. They did what they had to do; morality and human sentiment be damned. It was like I was witnessing in their dark eyes, matted hair, and Egyptian-tapestried garments the time-honored ritual of our early species long before you or I ever got here, or as if I was observing warriors surviving in the wild, except the wild was the space between tall buildings, and survival was not a question.

In a way, they were me too. I have always been something of a survivor. Still, I kept away from them and a hand on the money belt I kept tucked beneath my waistline.

***

I discovered something curious and funny about myself not long after Ginny and I stepped from the ferry onto the docks at Chania. As we ventured toward the narrow and winding catacombs of the town’s streets and alleys—cats everywhere! Roaming free, presumably not fixed. The thing I already knew about myself is that I consider it my duty to pet and make friends with strange cats, an impulse stronger indeed than my desire to do the same with humans. I bend low, stretch out an unthreatening paw of my own, and make gentle mutterings to entice a particular white-and-vanilla tabby with my assurances that I am nice, friendly, and harmless. But here is what I did not necessarily know about myself at that time in my life, the thing that made Ginny laugh and snap pictures, barely suspecting what raging river surged beneath the fun. I had just wanted a new little friend. But when the tabby shifted warily away from my enticements and loped back into one of those secret alleys to escape from me, I instantly broke into a sprint, tearing furiously after it. I wanted to scare the shit out of that damned cat. Of course, it disappeared into some narrow vestibule in a heartbeat. Ginny’s laughter rang out. She wanted me to repeat my apparently comical Buster Keaton antics so she could get a better shot. But the secret was that I wanted that cat to know my wrath, my power to crush the little things that ran away from me.

I would find, to my own dismay, in later years, that this was the iceberg’s tip of a pattern for how I dealt with the psychological pain of rejection, not much unlike the cursing epithet of a homeless person who sees you try to move to the safer part of the sidewalk when you pass them.

I was hurt, and Ginny wanted a better angle to give her family and friends a little laugh.

***

It was truly time at this point to pull my head out of the ground and learn a little something about Grecian culture. For one––and this is all you get––is that your American sense of enthusiasm coupled with impatient expectations of reciprocation are thankfully befuddled here. What I mean is—please welcome The Shrug. Let’s say you’re trying to find information from a middle-aged gentleman sitting in a chair outside a place that purports to sell bus tickets to the south coast of Crete—specifically, the little olive-picking village of Palaiochora—and all you really need apart from the price is the times of departure.

“So, there’s another bus coming within the hour?”

And then The Shrug.

This is not the kind of shrug that is a put-off or a simple “I don’t know.” It is something more. It is something characteristically Greek:

(A rough linguistic translation)

“Life is full of certitudes, but this isn’t one of them.”

Or:

“I’m quite aware your moral fabric and even sense of calm is dependent on the particular arrival times of the bus, but let me just tell you with my innocuous lifting and falling shoulders (ever so slight) that:

“Well— Life is all going to work out the same whether or not the bus arrives or departs within the next hour.”

Or:

“Life is the same either way, certainties or particulars notwithstanding.”

What I am gathering by this nonverbal gesture is that because I am an impatient American hailing from a cultural cruise liner of a service industry with its over-the-counter smiles that your “The Shrug” is a civil protest against all hectic and confusing progress toward a gleaming future that leaves your beloved Acropolis choking in the maple smog and tangled jungle of TV antennas. Is that what you’re saying?

And what you get for adding more questions to the mix is, in fact, another “The Shrug,” though now smaller, subtler, or simply wearier, i.e., answers of diminishing returns.

Nevertheless, Ginny and I got onto a bus heading south across the island because—yes—it’s true. Life is all the same, either way.

***

Little did I expect that it would be a bus ride into outer space, however. What I mean is that the passenger bus was of school bus length and the mountain curves snaking across the island were of a hairpin calculus. As Ginny and I sat in the middle-frontward part of the bus, gaping through the driver’s front windshield from behind him, we very often experienced the sensation of almost jettisoning into outer space––i.e., over the cliff––at least a dozen times during our journey. On graph paper, it had something to do with the amount of frontal “reach” between the front bumper and the front tires, giving us the feeling of suspension in mid-air. Presumably seen from an angle not observable to the passengers inside, the bus could swing its front end over the edge of the cliff while its front tires still gripped the crumbling gravel edge of the road. Though the driver must have known this route either by habit or raw instinct despite the pale and perspiring faces of his foreign travelers sitting amongst the blank-faced local commuters, he may have thought the whole experience deserved nothing more than another “The Shrug.”

And it’s true. Life is the same either way, as he got us to Palaiochora alive, probably just like thousands of other high-strung American or European travelers with endemic high blood pressure issues.

We finally checked into our white adobe-style pension and thought nothing of the clucking chickens rousting about the property outside.

“Cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck…cluck…cluck…cl—”

It was time to go pick some olives and make some traveling cash.

Only it didn’t quite work out that way. There were words in broken English and Greek, some hand gestures, some shrugs, and then some waiting in an outdoor patio of an open-air restaurant before sunrise. Ginny and I had launched ourselves out of bed at the crack of dawn because we did not want to miss the morning call and selection of olive-picking workers. And there we sat. And sat.

No one came. Clearly, we were told to wait for recruitment in this spot, but no one came to claim us, and no one came to tell us to get lost.

“Go enjoy the rest of your vacation in this island paradise, scrambling for drachmas or pennies to survive,” they could have said.

Indeed, my eyes were starting to dart this way or that like a gypsy’s, desperate to pierce the veil of survival. Of course, we were not truly destitute. I had a few traveler’s cheques still tucked away, but there were no bank branches anywhere to cash them on this remote corner of the island. We just had to make do with the few bills we had till we served our term in paradise. Needless to say, the next few mornings yielded the same result—empty restaurant patios and no recruitments.

Ginny also had the idea that we could ask for bread, olive oil, and vinegar without the restaurant asking for any money. So that’s what we ate for several mornings in a row. I myself was able to scrounge together a few drachmas to buy a couple of feta cheese pies from a street vendor. So thus, I became obsessed with acquiring samples of feta cheese wherever I could. I had never been intimate with feta before, but now it had become something of a passion mixed with the spice of survival.

Near the end of the week after scrounging out a meager existence, we found out that we had chosen the wrong year. Evidently, the “olive picking season” that Ginny had read or heard about was only every other year. We got the time of year right, but it was the off year.

What else could I do but lie there in the early morning dawn listening to the chickens cluck at uneven and unpredictable intervals?

While Ginny lay somewhere next to me, sleeping or pretending to sleep, I attempted to count the potentially Morse-code pattern of the “cluck-cluck-cluck…cluck” between the “B’K-CH” and the––” Ah! Forget it!

The chickens didn’t make rhyme or reason of their own on-again-off-again patter; why should I?

Making sure Ginny was still and breathing, I snuck out of the room and attempted to serenade one of the chickens in the pre-dawn gloom with my acoustic guitar. If I could just lure it closer to me, I could pounce on it and serve my lady like a queen for a day. But Ginny soon peeked out the door into the yard, an annoyed and sleepy expression on her face, “What are you doing?”

So much for providing for your woman.

***

It’s not true that we found the white stucco pension the day we dropped into Palaiochora from the space capsule bus. We had attempted, in truth, to sleep right on the ground next to a compound wall at the top of a hill the day before we mutually decided to cough up just enough drachma to afford a pension. It had cost us a fitful night under the stars where, like two young people undaunted by the wide-open world, we learned why our parents put so much stress on having the right kind of steady job to pay the mortgage. You can’t just sleep under the stars so easily, not when there are bugs clicking and reptiles skittering all around you, the stars gaping down at you without mercy. And not without having installed a bathroom at the top of a mountain.

With no available alternatives that next morning, Ginny just squatted on her haunches, her skirt hiked up to her waist, bare knees triangulating toward me, there she went, her urine trickling down the sloped embankment, the little river snaking toward me. I sidestepped womanhood. I didn’t know they could do that. I thought they had to complain first about how guys have it so easy, then grumble about having to squat in the bushes under the lascivious gaze of local wildlife. But Ginny just did it right in front of me, her own version of The Shrug, though with knees, not shoulders. She didn’t even pause to concern herself with what I thought. She had the need and simply answered it. It made me think of the tenuous future we had together and what other needs of hers I could or could not fulfill in the long term.

Well at least she marked our spot, one that would soon be dried and covered over by the sands of time like many of the Greek relics they thought would triumph over the dissolution of the ages.

***

I made a mark of my own. Not in stone, not in time, but perhaps in the hearts of a handful of villagers in the lighted houses lining the Mediterranean shore at dusk. I had brought my acoustic in a heavy case, trundling all throughout Europe—Amsterdam, Vienna, Salzburg, Barcelona––looking for a place to welcome my minstrel strains, until finally gazing over a hilltop with my guitar strapped around my shoulders at the seaside row of houses below, I belted out my best rendition of the Beatles’ Golden Slumbers. Like Ginny and her bare-naked squat, I didn’t care anymore what people thought of my quaking voice. Not at least till I finished the song and the whole village below seemed to erupt with cheers and applause! Neither Ginny nor I knew there was anyone down there listening.

That’s when I started to care. I wanted to please my new anonymous audience down below. So, I belted out a few more tunes until the applause eventually dwindled by the inevitable shrugging of diminishing returns. Perhaps the first song was just at a lucky moment when the locals were in the mood for a little serenade to accompany their evening repast. Or perhaps I had overstayed my welcome.

Timing is everything. Or so the Mediterranean olives told us.

On our last night together on the rocky shore in Palaiochora, Ginny and I sat gazing into the dark sea that, around a slight calculus bend in the earth, led to the northern tip of Africa. We had made promises that night, our young figures bathed in the moonlight, that no matter what happened to us, no matter what we were doing with our future lives, we would meet again at this same spot in ten years. We promised in private dread because, even at that non-mortgage-lending, lizard-squirming age, life would take us to other drawing shores.