Anatomy Trains

It had been blowing at 20 knots from the north all day, and it was forecast to blow from the northwest all night.  Most harbors are protected form the prevailing southwest, but Georges Harbor, between Allen and Benner – awful in a southwest - would provide good protection in this wind and sea.  We rounded Old Cilley Ledge, bouncing over a cross-chop in a shiny metaled sea, but it settled down immediately we entered the narrow passage of the harbor.

Andrew Wyeth bought these islands many years ago from a group of owners who included my father.  Since, he cleared the north end of trees and built a series of buildings in various New England architectural styles.  At first, they looked a bit Toytown, but with age they have mellowed into the island landscape.

A woman with gray hair on the dock, I presume Betsy Wyeth, offered us a mooring on our way in, and we gratefully accepted.  The afternoon waned in peace, the goats who keep the brush down wandered onto the high pier, the evening descended upon us; we and the Wyeths, judging by lights out, went to bed at the same time.

In the morning, after a good breakfast to shore us up for the long sail home, I raised the main, left it loose and backed the jib to turn us on a dime, slipping off the mooring and up the slender harbor between the other boats.  The screen door of the perfect, spare, silvery gray Cape opened, and a spare old man with silvery hair and wide shoulders lifted his arm and said “Beautiful!”  We lifted our arms in return salute, too floored to speak, until we thought to offer a belated “Thank you” for the use of the mooring.

It’s not often you get called beautiful by the most understood painter in America.

I traversed the country on my thumb in the 60’s and 70’s, but circumstance threw a 60-year old out on the highway, just a couple of hours drive from Belfast to home.  No rental cars, bus already gone – what choices did I have?  It took about 4 hours – a sampling of who picks you up:

The first guy pulled over in his pick-up, with his angelic face and gut spilling over his belt, he cheerfully maneuvered a computer out of the front seat into the back of the cab to give me room, and offered a critique of my sales job as a hitchhiker.  “Button up your shirt, and the sunglasses shouldn’t even be up on your head, and you’ll do better with a sign saying ‘South, please’.  And a book – ax murderers don’t read books.”  A full-on marketer:  “You only have a couple of seconds to make your impression.”  McCain.

He dropped me at a store, and armed with a sign and reading my book, I awaited the next ride, which came from a young man, whose bandana sloped his hair straight back from his forehead while his goatee, in the manner of kids these days, pointed straight ahead.  Obama.

Next came a blonde in a white summer dress, maybe a doctor as she said she worked at the health center, who made me sit in the back of her SUV and wasn’t inclined to conversation.  Obama, I guess.

The next ride was also from a woman, a Subaru with a couple of huge white dogs “Hope you don’t mind hair!”, who had just spent ‘four hun-dred dol-lars’ on stuff to send her 14-year-old to school with.  Obama.

Another woman, traveling secretly down to Brunswick to buy music while the rest of her family camped for the weekend, took me the rest of the way down the coast to Damariscotta, where an older couple looking over brochures for pumps lifted me from the bypass into town (Obama, they had a sticker), and here I broke down and asked Quan to come fetch me.

Slow way to travel – I spent about 15 minutes between each ride waiting, but I was surprised at how many women were willing to give me a ride.  I suppose, with my gray hair and unprepossessing manner, I am not that threatening, but excepting the doctor and the old couple, nobody who stopped was moneyed.

I put the 2nd edition book galleys to bed in Jonesport, the manuscript spread out on the boat table, on the cell phone with Joannah’s lilting brogue from Edinburgh, we leafed our way through the final changes in each chapter.  With this year-long project finally in the bag, we leapt out of Moosabec Reach on a singing north wind, with only jib and jigger (two of the three sails) up.  Two were enough – we roared around the corner in gulps of air, the rigging keening in the wind, up into Chandler Bay, pausing only because we caught a lobster pot on the rudder, which in the end we had to cut.

My dad used to chant “Robert Augustus Gardner Monks carried his money around in trunks”.  The Gardners (or the Monks, don’t know, they married) own stately and beautiful Roque Island, the easterly goal of our cruise.  I had been there once, years ago, and had put my boat on a rock and otherwise not acquitted myself well.  My father, alive at the time, had been philosophical about my troubles, having gotten himself into many scrapes in his sailing days.  I hated sailing with him when I was young – he was a yeller, which I now realize from my own tendencies happened when he was scared – but had reveled in it since I had grown and become the captain myself.

As we rounded from Chandler’s into Englishman’s Bay on the north point of Roque, the Gardner-Monks compound revealed itself – house after large house on a beautiful green sward, surrounded by the grey granite cliffs of Roque, to which the trees cling with Maine tenacity.  As we changed tacks in Shorrey Cove, there was a strange thumping roar we didn’t understand, and then a helicopter lifted out of the trees, and tilted off through the thick northerly air toward Bangor.

We worked our way up the bay to Roque Bluffs, where we anchored of  frigid beach, and I went overboard to check that the lobster pot and all its line was well and truly out of the propeller.  The water was so cold that after surfacing I could not find my testicles for some time, except by the ache.

By the time we left, the wind had risen to a shriek, and we roared down Englishman’s (past a castle – three stories complete with crenellations, the whole Rapunzel bit, on a small island that marked the border between the two bays – like an English folly.  Who pays to cart an entire castle – every worker had to be imported, every stone would have to be loaded into a boat and unloaded again – to be carted out to a small, remote, treeless island?  Another Monks?) into Machias Bay, with the huge round antennae of the sinister Cutler naval base.

The sky was grey, the sea was up to a steep chop, and the boat was straining downwind at 7+ knots, but we were exhilarated – this was as far east as either of us had been, and certainly the farthest east I had been with a boat under my command.  At that moment I decided “This is enough”- as modest an easterly run as it might be for real sea sailors - and shaped around the Libby Islands to turn back to Roque for the night.  Just as I uttered that order to myself in my head, a large dark blue dragonflty flew under my arm, around between Annie and I, and then disappeared upwind.  We are talking a mile or more offshore, with a heavy wind – what’s a dragonfly doing out there?

My father always appears to us in dragonflies – even when he was alive, it was his totem – he often commented on them and their colors and their flying ability, and a dragonfly swept similarly through his hospital room at the moment of his death.  So forgive me, it’s unutterably New Age, but I believe Edward paid us a congratulatory visit, toasting our easterly achievement.  I am glad he’s still around.

Now, it’s not like that barge hanging up on a bridge abutment in the Mississippi, but:

The Beals Island bridge over Moosabec Reach way Down East by Jonesport is on the chart at a 39’ clearance.  Although I have never measured my mast, I approached this bridge with a measure of confidence, born of my previous experience.  That first time, 10 years ago, I looked at the bridge with trepidation, and my sailing companion took the outboard dinghy and went well away from the boat as we approached the bridge, and came back reporting that he could see light between the top of my mast and the bottom of the bridge.  Not being a geometer, I pressed him on the math until I was convinced, and we passed under the span with several feet to spare, as he promised.

So this time, as I neared the ominously low-looking span, I was blithely assuring my sailing companion of this time that there was plenty of clearance.  Even so, we reduced sail and put the engine on in reverse to slow our hull caught in the fast moving tide that was shooing us down the reach.  Turns out my confidence (oh, it was ever thus) had about a foot of arrogance in it, and the top of the mast struck the bridge with a clang, crash, and then a series of scraping, sickening metal noises.

My utter surprise and Annie’s utter shock stopped us for a second.  The very upper part of the mast has antennae, instruments, and a light on it, and bits of plastic and metal clattered onto the deck, followed by flakes and almost sooty stuff that I though was part of my boat, but turned out on later inspection to be shards and flakes of bridge paint – apparently we gave nearly as good as we got.

We caught on the first girder, turned sideways under the bridge, freed that one and caught the second, and then (the crashes!) the third, but the fourth was lower than the others, and there we caught more solidly.  We were in a pickle – if we tried to go upstream we would have to pass under the three girders we had already buckled under.  To stay where we were would slowly, as the tide rose another 5 feet, poke our mast up through the roadway, or (more likely) down through our boat.  Every minute the tide rose (13 feet in six hours around here) would mean we were more stuck.

Using the engine, backing and filling between the two girders penning the mast above us, I got the boat sideways to the current, parallel to the roadway, and let her float back into the girder (crash, again).  Then I cut the engine, and the strong tide carried the hull out from under the bridge, tilting the boat and the mast until it slipped under the girder and with a shudder we were free.

Within minutes we were laughing between adrenalin bursts.  We are now sailing without a wind vane or a masthead light, but luckily the radio antenna was a whip, and survived, and all the truck that holds the top of the sails is scraped but intact.

Never again will I assume. (I assume I’ve said that sometime before.)

Sometimes life is to be lived, not written about. The past few weeks have been fully experienced, so no posts to this blog. But now let’s start again.

Cute

At the moment, I am surrounded by the child-like energy we identify as ‘cute’, not the usual aura for us old fuddy-duddies with grown children and no grandchildren, a harried lifestyle, and anti-social tendencies.

The word comes from a shortening of ‘acute’ - implying quick-witted intelligence and perception, relating it to the word ‘cunning’, which has two interestingly dichotomous meanings, both of which are related to the word ‘know’ – connaitre in French, gnosis in Greek – a cunning politician and a cunning baby.

Our 12-year-old nephew has been spending some time here this summer, and he is cute in the smelly sox, hair-across-the-eyes, finding-his-way manner of that age. Actually enthusiastic but trying to be cool, he is cute to us knowing adults because his nascent social stratagems are so obvious. Loves sports, hates to lose, loves to fish, hates ‘girls’ (Riiiiight – actually his sexuality, just cracking the husk of latency, has a hidden, almost predatory nature to it – we hate girls at that age for the power they have over us.).

Different from the ‘cute’ of the five and a half year old who showed up last week, a Chinese adoptee, whose sensitive but earthed father came to help me teach a class. He is totally besmitten, and why not? Mya is sma-art, a gifted mimic, disarmingly frank about her weaknesses or yours, and totally comfortable in her body. This is a kid to root for, one of the ones who will save the world.

Put them together, and Mya drove Joseph. When we stopped the boat at the picnic spot, she was the second over the side after her father. Though Joseph was unfamiliar with the sea, expressed a fairly profound fear of sharks, and clearly was opposed to exposing his body, he could not be outdone by Mya, and jumped in grumpily only to enjoy himself thoroughly.

(Another day, we took Mya out again, without Joseph, and she wouldn’t go in the water at all – the drive works both ways, I guess.)

But can anything compare with a kitten for cuteness? Hermes is the first animal I‘ve ever chosen for any house I share with Quan. Angelina was ostensibly ‘my cat’, but actually Quan brought her by when we were still just friends, 16 years ago: “You have Misty here sometimes – she has to have an animal.” I travel so much, I didn’t want the bother. Quan didn’t so much insist as simply act as if I hadn’t spoken – a trait I should have recognized before I married her, though it is one I have come to adore, and have watched her use on many other people besides me. It’s surprising how often she gets her way, and how often her way was better than what she didn’t bother to oppose.

Anyway, Misty is four and up for a visit, Quan shows up with three kittens, saying I can choose any one, but that one’s spoken for already and anyway you should really have two to keep each other company, and drives away leaving Misty and I with the impression that we had ‘chosen’ Angelina and Josefina, whereas Quan had simply delivered the cats she chose for us.

We have had a succession of maybe a dozen cats since then, sadly lost to old age, cars, and woodland predators, including Josefina. As well we’ve had horses, a hundred plus rabbits, a couple of chinchillas, the occasional wounded bird – not one of which have I had a hand in choosing. So when the doddering Angelina finally lost it and died this spring, I determined I would choose my next cat.

Quan tried to steer me, but I am by now hip to her ways, and went to the shelter myself. She still tried handing me one she liked. I saw Hermes right away, but you want to be fair so I checked out all the cats, a heart-rending parade of cages with cats showing all the five stages of grief, the newest giving their best ‘take me!’ silent appeals, hard on a cat’s dignity.

You can’t take them all, so I took Hermes – the Greek messenger god, associated with Loki in Norse mythology, Coyote in Native American lore – and what a love he is turning out to be. No point in detailing how he crawls up your pant leg (or, for a short time until he learned, your leg if you’re wearing shorts) or tears around after a feather, or how he won over the other cats – it’s all familiar.

Mya and Joseph both loved Hermes, so they were all cute together. Cute implies innocent – in its original sense of ‘no harm’ – and – every parent’s fervent and useless prayer - may none of these cute beings come to harm themselves. We can’t expect cute to survive – Hermes is growing out of it in cathood, and both of the children will hit puberty and become explicit about the inherent sexuality in their nature, and the long journey upwards to conscious use of sexual power begins.

Childhood sexuality is a hard subject. Of course we also describe our first sexual honeys as ‘cute’, but we don’t mean it in the same way as I have been using it. The British tabloids – I am told, we don’t see them here - have had Gary Glitter’s guts for garters for his having sex with pubescent girls in foreign climes (aging glam rocker – think a cross between Boy George and Paris Hilton 20 years from now).

While Hermes is definitely asexual, and Joseph stands on the edge of explicit sexuality, what are we to make of Mya? She is not asexual, she simply has a different relation to sexuality. All human energy is at base sexual – read The Selfish Gene. I have certainly seen young children with a high sex drive – disconcerting, how do you handle it without either playing into it or squashing it? I can understand an attraction to it, meaning I could find some resonance with it in myself, though I have zero desire to act out, and haven’t since I played doctor in 4th grade.

Then of course there’s the other side: Are these girls being sold or duped into sexual slavery, or are they choosing among options? It is very difficult in that pubescent age (people mature earlier in 3rd world countries, they have to) to determine what’s ‘choice’. I am told that each of the prostitutes in Bangkok supports an average of 22 Thais in the countryside, often their families of course. What would they say about the sex tours that provide the money that they send back home? It is easy to be righteous from the safety of our Calvinist homes.

Mya, growing up in America with the very best of parents, will escape this choice which some of her Asian sisters will have to make. May nothing or no one violate her trust of the world, but may no one stifle her natural energy either, as mine was carefully curbed, snuffed, and buried by my well-meaning parents.

In the course of my career as a therapist, I have treated many survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Here’s the surprising thing: for many of these women (it is predominantly women), it is not their relationship to sexuality that is disturbed by these early events – many of these women are orgasmic and perfectly normal sexually. What is always disturbed is their relationship not to sex, but to power. Every one of these people has a problem relating to power, wounded in either responding to it or wielding it, though how it manifests differs markedly.

The problem with sleeping with your clients, or children, or your groupies is not the sex per se, but the power differential in the relationship. Here’s where my own sexuality reaches its natural curb: I can find no desire in myself for a sexual relationship where I have to overpower. The heat for me comes with the joyous mutual consent – fully-informed consent as they say nowadays – and without it I would be a limp puppy.

Last week, while the entire world was experiencing a loss of liquidity in the strange but useful energetic metaphor for love called ‘money’, I took off for as much literal liquidity as I could manage.

The one part of it you don’t want liquid is the boat itself, 35′ of ‘frozen spit’ (fibreglass) designed to keep the water out, but otherwise designed to dance between two fluids, wind and sea.

Here are a few images from the time I spent on the ocean:

The first few days, while the landlubbers were hot, we were in a grey dome of fog, a couple of hundred feet wide, like the grey dome of my brain, fried from assembling the book. Islands and rocks and the occasional fishing boat would loom up out of this greyness - reassuringly on schedule due to our radar and GPS - and then fall away again. The sameness, hour after hour, gets to you, but the water itself is in constant motion, even under the fog.

The huge seals of Matinicus Rock, sensing us somehow in the fog, set up a racket, shuffle into the water, and soon their heads are around the boat - curiously doglike in their confident wariness. Overhead, sea ducks (guillemots?) shoot out of the fog like bullets with wings, careening purposefully across our brief field of vision in straight lines.

Add the liquidity of night, slowly weaving itself into the fog in these summer evenings, long after the fog itself has gone orange and purple with the sunset.

The wind makes the air liquid, suddenly coming up on our second day, the mountain of Isle au Haut bouncing the fog into the air above us, the sails sculpted into shape by the fluid flow of the air molecules. The scud, tattered remnants of the fog, flies above us like the grey flags of a retreating army.

The boat is in constant motion, and the only time I stepped ashore in those first days - onto a dock in Frenchboro to find some eggs we missed packing - it is the solid dock whose floor seems to be undulating, not the boat. This illusion persists after the cruise - my house’s floor seems liquid too as I walk on it.

The tide brings another aspect of liquidity, that of pouring. The tiny motion occasioned by the moon (mostly) on the meniscus of the ocean means that 10 feet of water pour in and out among these islands twice a day. Sailing with the tide is a joy; sailing against it a challenge. As we round Ironbound, with its tall cliffs of granite looking in the afternoon light like a set of Easter Island faces, stone giants locked into the cliffside, waiting perhaps for their king, since there is a huge throne at the end of the island, an absolute straight ‘chairback’ (natural, not quarried) with a rounded back and arms of stone on either side …

Ooops, got pulled off into solidity - we were describing the liquidity of the tide - when we rounded between Ironbound and Jordan, we could literally see that the water was higher on the other side of the passage, and we were fighting that pouring water for every inch. But Tycha is true, and we made it uphill to the Porcupines and Bar Harbor.

The stark, shardy liquidity of the seawater when we drop into it on the next hot morning from the ten-million year liquidity of Penobscot’s soft-edged tawny pink granite rocks, the velvety liquidity of the quarry pond we dive into on Green Island to rinse off the salt.

The next day, sailing past Placentia, we see a strange shape on the shore that looks like a round orange tent or something.  We tease the boat toward shore to see more closely, and it is the body of a baby humpback whale.  About the size of a pick-up truck, this poor unfortunate is upside-down on the shore, its flippers and flukes akimbo, the hydrodynamic streaks of its underside visible on top.  The underside should be white, but the sun has tanned most of it a vivid orange. A bird perches atop the carcass, which seems to have dried rather than bloated, although liquefaction in the heat of July and August is an inevitability.
Sad death - why? - of a fellow mammal.  We tease the boat in close, but due to tide rips, the bold shore, and fluky wind, we cannot disembark to offer more than a hail and farewell across the water.  It reminds me of my earlier encounter with the whales on the Stellwagen Banks (see the first entry in “Sea Stories” under Tom Myers in Explore).
The last morning, we awaken to a tumble of the heavy humid air you find in the morning in the tropics. We know we’re in for some wind. Today the dance between the wind and water is passionate, heavy breathing, sweat, and the occasional uncoordinated bump and grind. The waves - the swells from Bertha, the cross chop from today’s wind - look like pewter mountains coming at us, but we rise each time to their peaks, only to find a hole in the ocean on the other side. The boat drops into the hole, the spray flying over us, the shrouds whistling, and the boat, bucking like a horse, must be reined into position second by second, a totally Zen exercise that keeps us in the very moment for hour on hour, while the sun and wind burn the skin off my face.

Gone is the yielding, accommodative liquidity of a calmer day. Pushy, solid, metallic, with a jarring, slapping force, water becomes another element. Thales thought everything was made from different forms of water, and in the middle of this run I believe him, as everything around me seems water-born.

By the time we turn into our bay and the still-building wind chases us up the river (”And stay out …”), we see the result of another form of liquidity: Fire. While we were gone a freak fire took out one of the last local shipyards, the huge wooden building going up quickly in a series of explosions - propane, varnish, paint cans, acetylene. As we rounded up in front of it, there was a gap in East Boothbay like a kid with a missing tooth, a couple of tug-boat hulls still smouldering among the wreckage. No one was hurt, but a lot of folks are out of work.

By the time we are at the mooring, the wind is over 30kn, and has a solidity that makes it hard to speak into. White caps like a Barbara Cooney painting keep us from the mooring, and we have to seek the shelter of an island to get the sails down and creep ignominiously back to the mooring under engine. The wind is so wild we must leave everything aboard for tomorrow and we barely make it to the dock in the little dinghy, so insistent is the wind.

One more liquid: the absolute gratitude of a hot shower after all those days at sea.

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This morning in the early cool Quan and I turned away from the dramatic caldera view where all the pricey hotels are perched like birds (or guano, viewed from afar), and walked down the long apron of farms on the far side to the Aegean where the mountain of Anafi floats in the sky some miles out to sea. Oh, how I’d love to sail these islands! A few observations:

The old CD’s hang on strings and flash in the breeze to scare away the birds from the farmers’ crops.

The donkeys have stalls that are pumice caves into the sides of the cliff. The donkeys work all day carrying the tourists up the steep side of the caldera from the ferries and cruise ships to the tourist towns on the lip (“Asses for the asses”, quips Quan). With no natural water on the island, all the tomatoes and grapes and figs – as well as the donkeys – look dry as can be – and we wonder how they grow.

A large flat empty Go-Kart park filled a forest of every driving sign known to Europe, where they obviously teach the island kids how to drive (too bad so little of it sticks – we are honked at, swerved by, and it’s a miracle more accidents don’t happen). The ‘streets’ are very small; I imagine they use the numerous little dune buggies and ATV’s that are lying fallow tourist-free months of the winter.

After an hour’s walk, we cool our feet in the velvet sea, and meet an old widow gathering the red volcanic stones on the beach backed by badland formations of water-shaped pumice. I really have so little Greek, but as soon as I speak one word, she assumes and is off at 60 miles an hour, so I soon am at a total loss, but the gist is Obama up, Clinton down, Bush way down, and everything is expensive and going downhill. I am ashamed – I couldn’t carry on one coherent sentence in any language about current Greek politics, and this woman – certainly neither educated nor cultivated nor English speaking - knows more than many Americans about our election.

In the little harbor next to the beach, only two traditional caiquies remain; the rest are all fiberglass motorboats. Though the nets look the same as they ever did.

It was a long, hot walk back up the mountain, a couple of thousand feet up the squiggly road, back from the women sweeping the front terraces in their ‘jammies, back from the mustachioed men on their mopeds, back from the gangly children shuffling to school, back from the shady figs and hard green grapes, back into the indulgent world of the island visitor – the poolside sibilance of the Italian, German, and French sybarites taking showers on an island with no natural water.

Later, back in the tourist town, the Americans from the ships shuffling through the narrow streets among the Tag Heuer watches and €2000 gold chains and tacky Santorini fridge magnets have plastic stickers with numbers stuck to their chests designating what? Their boat? Their bus? Does it get any worse than this? Could they be any more like cattle?

Quan asks me what I will remember most, and the answer is the process of buying some religious icons in Oia, involving several trips to the dark below-street shop with its arching roof sheltering the angels and archangels, madonnas and apostles. We share coffee with the muscular painter with the ravaged face while both the art and the relationship are weighed, as that all figures in the final price in this negotiable culture. Another high point was sharing an hour of songs – trading back and forth between the English pop and the Greek traditional, using guitar and the tiny bouzoukis in the Mad Greek Michaili’s taverna served by the Californian who is a dead-ringer for Misty – hair, body, carriage, attitude. Bless her and keep her safe.

Within a few years, it will be difficult to find someone who speaks good demotic Greek, and the old signs, with the old Cyrillic alphabet, will be on sale in the shops as novelties. I suppose it is a good idea for world understanding that we are headed for one world culture, but in the particular, it just seems sad and demeaning to the establishment of centuries of individualized points-of-view.

George Kousaleos - head of the Core Institute, a ‘competing’ Structural Integration school, our host for this trip along with his wife Patty, and my co-teacher for the course part of it - is a large man. Not tall, especially, but broad and expansive, with an Old Greek smile that widens to take in his cheeks, and then his ears, and then the whole wide world. George has a flexible agility (he runs the morning stretch class, comfortably encircling his foot with his bear-paw hands where my thin artisan fingers are fighting my short hamstrings and bound hips to claw for my ankle), belied by his stocky legs and almost ponderous movement through his daily life. I feel like a darting hummingbird beside his calm ursine warmth.

His large head is necessary for all those brains; his bull neck was forged in rugby and football; only large ribs could encircle such an expansive heart. His girth probably started with a Greek’s love of food drenched in olive oil, but additionally I recognize a brother: he has been playing the role for a long time that I took up only a couple of years ago – that of padrone. He is literally a grandfather, with a Greek’s eye on the extended family of cousins, nephews, and assorted associations. But he also has his school, his employees, his students, and the bodywork community under the umbrella of his generous care and intelligent concern, and after a time this responsibility begins to induce a gravitas inside that expresses itself in a belly-centered heft outside. Or so I’ve found.

George and I have just discovered we were both at Harvard at the same time. He completed his degree in the famous Soc Rel (Social Relations) program that was sweeping Harvard at the time, which combined psychology with sociology in a world-saving reach. The real opportunity at Harvard, besides Widener Library, was that one could get close to truly great people, leaders in their field. While I was being inspired by the sonorous tones of the playwright William Alfred in Mem Hall and Shakesperean actor Dan Seltzer and learning evolution from Ernst Mayr, George was across Prospect St. in the William James building, riding the elevator with B. F. Skinner, and learning how to bring people back from addiction with Erik Erikson. What a playing field!

But the late ‘60’s was a rebellious time. George’s rebellion was not to complete his doctorate, a sin with which his father (“I’m only thinking of you and your future!”) beat him about the head. I was an English major (what you did in those days if you didn’t know what else to do, though for me it was a way of getting credit for what I would have done anyway – hang around the Loeb Theater), a year ahead of George.

In the ferment of ’68, when the ‘revolution’ was in full swing and the cops in the baby blue helmets clubbed us out of University Hall, I dropped out – not because of the heavy-handed response to the war protest, but because in the aftermath there was suddenly a socialist revolution, with all these classes on Fanon and third-world farming that I, television revolutionary, found unutterably boring. My father, a Republican WASP, kept his counsel with only a disapproving look on his face that well I could read. I went on to a minor college to study with Bucky Fuller and never went or even looked back to Harvard. George, however, is still associated with the Harvard Admissions, and says he could help me complete my undergraduate degree based on my book and other work – tempting.

What George and I both share from that time, more than any intellectual snobbery or revolutionary fervor, is a deep and abiding conviction that the body means something more than a vehicle for the mind, that this rise in massage and somatic education is more than just an upper-middle-class indulgence in sybaritic excess.

Both of us were inspired into this field based on an intuitive flash, and only later realized the fuller social and evolutionary – essentially anthropological - implications of the ‘Me Decade’, better named at the time as the Human Potential movement. Both of us stayed in it despite the re-appellation ‘New Age’ and the population of well-meaning but needy do-gooders who tend to populate the associated professions. Both of us conform to the laws and rules of schools, buffeted by market forces and everyday business realities rather than hiding in the tenured womb of academia.

George got his SI training from Bill Williams, one of the first of Ida’s ‘buds’ to feel the frost of the Rolf Institute’s exclusivist attitude that lasted 30 years until the formation of IASI, though it still remains in some hearts and minds. I confess to having the same thoughts myself – that CORE and Soma and Hellerwork were ‘cheapening’ the work by teaching it … what? Too short, not high concept enough? not in the direct line from Ida? – some such bullshit until in 2000 I myself was outside the pale and the scales fell from my eyes. In any case, George combines a massage school and the SI program, and has had deep ties with the development of massage as a whole and is a leading light in the AMTA, sports massage for the Olympics, and school standards – but his heart remains with the structural work. I lay on the table for him to demonstrate his take on Logan Basic, and I defy any Rolf-trained teacher to do a better job of freeing the back.

We are all doing our best to revivify and re-incorporate a society gone mad into somatic alienation, where physical education and remedial medicine daily walk ever closer to the robotic, disembodied way of doing things where human beings are just adjunct pieces to be used for the good of the stockholders, whoever they may be. George’s intellect, coupled with his intuitive sense, is a force for re-inventing our society in its fully psychosomatized form, where we prepare our children for the demands of the 21st century, where we teach the Neolithic bodies our children are born with to live fully, successfully, sensually, sexually, and autonomously in this electronic world. Thank God for his intelligence applied to this problem, for his calm warmth, and for his steady, water-like pressure on the cold logical machine of maximum profit and minimum involvement. George is a human, in the sense the Greeks invented them.

We have our first view of the Santorini caldera exactly at sunset (I am sure George engineered it this way).

Easy enough to find pictures; hard for those pictures to convey the drama of emerging from the close little alleyways of the town (almost Arabic in their coolness, though totally cruise-ship oriented in their contents - good jewelry, bad painting, “We ship anywhere” on crockery) to a sudden view of the whole circle of the volcano - raw, edgy, dipped into the sea opposite us, but clear in its crescent moon-like embrace of 24 square miles of ruffled water dotted with ships, bigger than Haleakala in Maui, with us perched on its highest point above the absolute black cliff straight down a couple of thousand feet into the harbor far below.

The explosion of this volcano, around 1600 BC, shook the Mediterranean world. The ash has been found in the Greenland ice, and in the rings of fallen sequoias in California. It produced a tsunami of 500 feet (the Javan tsunami of a couple of years ago was 60 feet). The island of Santorini itself was of course obliterated, and the island of Kriti (Crete) to its south took the full force of the tsunami and earthquake, and these two islands were the seat of the ancient Minoan civilization, that of the House of the Ax and the Labyrinth, the bull dance and the mosaics of Knossos, which ruled the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and perhaps beyond before the rise of the Phoenicians, the Athenian states and the whole Platonic school (Plato himself, writing many centuries after the event, theorized that the earthquake and volcano sank Atlantis, placing Atlantis here in Santorini), and way before the Roman triremes ruled the waves. The mighty Minoan empire was wiped out in a matter of days, never to rise again. See Mary Renault’s The King Must Die for a fictional but brilliantly realized tale of this time.

And oh yes, one other minor effect of this huge cataclysm: the initial pull of the tsunami drained the water around the head of the Red Sea, allowing a small group of escaping slaves from a minor tribe on the Levant to cross to safety from Egypt to the Sinai, while the pursuing army was caught in the returning water of the tsunami itself. “Pharoah’s army got drownded, Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.”

“Oh, Greece”, I cry with my arms outspread in prodigal welcome and heartfelt love of your wine-dark Aegean under your flawless turquoise sky, love of your good-humoured folk with their seductive gift of gab fronting for their fundamental generosity of spirit.  My cry is tinged with despair and nostalgic regret at the invasion of American music and Anglophonic Europeanism into your unique corner of the world.

We are but a mile or two from our arrival spot, a jetport on the ancient island of Thira, known to all now as the island of Saint Irene – Santorini.  I have never visited here before, but I have visited dozens of islands just like it here in the Cyclades, so it feels like a homecoming.  And a homecoming one both welcomes and holds one’s hands against – the tiny fishing village of the 60’s that would have had a pension with a couple of rooms for the few Germans intrepid enough to cross the island by donkey is now a distended strip of tourist restaurants, with menus in English and French, everything written in the Roman alphabet.  Restauranteurs solicit the tourists like touts, with a bit of the old Greek insouciance, but a tiredness and desperation that speaks of a Johnny-come-lately to the European Union grasping for euros in place of the old drachma, no longer the proudly independent inheritors of the cradle of Western civilization.  Now they’ve inherited the printed towel maps and the crappy tourist dreck that follows the money everywhere.

This morning I stirred at 7 to find a cloudy day.  I slipped from our bed and put on my sneakers to climb through the village to the switchback road that led up through the olive groves to the pass between two mountains. It was an hour’s upward walk, getting wilder and windier as I rose above the beach and town.  The winds were flaring down off the slopes across the sea, cat’s paws and williwaws among the few caíques moored offshore.  By the time I get to the crest of the pass, the tops of the mountains on either side are shrouded in swirling cloud, the wind so strong that I am being pelted with small stones as I stood leaning into it and looking down to the similar beach town far down on the other side of the island.

On the way down, loath to take the same route home, I followed a little path across the steep slope just to see where it would lead, and ended up at one of those ubiquitous Greek shrines – a little building of blue and white so small I had to duck as I entered.  I cross myself not in homage to the Olympian gods or God of the Book, but to the Greeks and their orthodox faith.  The tiny building is full of icons to St George, St Nicholas, and the Virgin Madonna, and incense and candles and spent matches and little burners for the faithful who make the climb to this altar nestled into the rocks in the side of the cliff.  A little more investigation and I find out why it’s here in particular – a cave snakes into the hill from behind the building, and deep within, my eyes adjusting to the trickle of light, is a trickle of water that has made, over centuries, strange-lipped pool formations in the cave.

The water is presumably consecrated in some way; people use it for offerings.  I suspect, as in England, this little church is a Christian overlay on a pagan sacred site, an intuition later confirmed: this was a sacred source of water for the ancient Thirians priests who had their acropolis fort at the top of the hill. Putting thoughts of bat-shit and snakes aside, I scramble into the dark, following the sound, and drink the sweet water, tangy with the mineral earth.

As I descend the smaller switchback path, braking myself with my jelly-like quads, the peculiar heaviness, almost grief, that comes from descending back into the human world from an accomplished height accompanies me back to the sea-level hotel.  The town of Kamari is now up and moving - cleaning the streets, opening the stores, setting out the racks of postcards, and the early tourists out to get their sun cream and plan their days, overfilling them as they do at home, spreading their endless money indiscriminately among these ever-more impoverished people – in my opinion, having known them when they were really poor but still rich in culture.  Blessed, sayeth the Lord, are the poor in spirit.