As you set out for Ithaka, hope your road is a long one.
I live on the outskirts of the High Peaks region of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York where at just over a hundred miles from the city, large areas almost of wilderness are still to be found, criss-crossed by miles of hiking trails expertly laid out and maintained.
The plan was, before I left for Greece, to climb a couple of the nearby easier peaks—Panther, Wittenberg—before tackling Slide, the highest here, going on to Olympus, the highest there. That was the plan. Then one day, after yoga, I got a bit carried away and blundered my way up the Ashokan High Point, a peak that will now be known as Mount Reckless. I’d already been a third of the way up with friends and knew the trail’s beginning, which is easy enough, higher up it isn’t. At 3,080 ft it isn’t technically one of the thirty-four high peaks, those start at 3,500, but it was high enough, the way long enough and grueling enough, to make it count for me. Coming down from the summit, I took the sketchily blazed loop trail through acres of mountain laurel not yet in bloom, and was glad to finally reach my car. Ashokan is, in fact rated as a difficult climb, harder than Slide, one that shouldn’t be tackled alone, I read after I’d completed the seven hour hike and was comfortably back home.
When I told him what I’d done, my revered personal trainer was not happy. Seems I’d committed many of the things you don’t do if you hope to stay alive; I was alone, my phone was dying, I was low on water, the day was hot, and I fell down three or four times. You always come out the way you went in, he told me, among other things. When I asked if he thought I should buy hiking poles, he pointed out that I since I did tend to fall down the answer would be ‘yes’. Mostly he seemed to be suggesting that I shouldn’t be an idiot. I should be prepared. Lesson learned. I appreciated his rebuke. The experience was instructive. Beside poles, I bought a power pack, a water bladder for a backpack, and a bottle that filters water so almost anything becomes safe to drink. (As I was running low I’d sucked on frozen dusty-tasting snow that remained in scraps and patches near the summit.) Still. I did get to the top. And summiting one peak made me eager for the next.
Then I got Lyme.
After twenty-six years of living here, thirty-six if you count the weekend house we had further west in Margaretville, if this was the first time I’d become infected I couldn’t really complain. Plus I’d spent two summers at Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut, living a couple of towns over from Old Lyme itself. I’d had a dog with me; we used to walk in an overgrown, empty space behind the apartments. I got to be something of an expert at picking ticks off him every time we went out, flicking the ones I found on me out the car window as I drove to the theater. Maybe it’s because I no longer have dogs that I let my guard down. But those small deer ticks, the ones that sometimes carry the infection, are really hard to spot, particularly when they get lodged in the small of your back as one did with me a few weeks before I got sick. I have no idea if that’s the one that did it, or if it was another, one I hadn’t noticed. Either way, I still think that on balance I had a pretty good run. Still, it wasn’t good timing.
Feeling very unwell, one evening a couple of weeks back I took myself to the local ER where a nice doctor, looking at lab results, told me that I probably had one of the satellite infections but that I certainly had a tick-borne illness. Remembering my expensive travel insurance as backup, if I was worried I thought that with luck and a reasonable amount of care I could probably get it together in time. And I did. I have. Except… Well, the pain. My right leg, my hip, was killing me. After initial rest, hot baths, antibiotics, adding at my trainer’s insistence, ice-packs since, unlike the doctor, he thought my pains were coming from trauma. Turns out he was right, I’m beginning to feel like myself, not limping so much, learning how to more effectively use the pain medicine my own doctor thoughtfully prescribed.
After a couple of restorative yoga practices, I’m no longer thinking of cancelling, though I’m expecting that some compromises might have to be be made. If it’s too much to walk out from the Acropolis to where Plato’s Academy is being recovered, I guess I can take a cab. Or subway. But if I canceled this trip I could never make it again. At least, not like now. After all my preparations. This was the trip I should’ve made in my teens or early twenties, that I’m making now in my mid-seventies. Going someplace I only know from old books—when I look at Thessaloniki on Maps I’m shocked sometimes to see that there are traffic jams. At this stage of my life I’m only too aware, with each large event that happens, that if it’s a first it could also be a last. I’m aware of the great good fortune that is my state of good health—the current glitch only makes that more apparent—my overall level of fitness that costs a good deal to maintain but that is, it seems to me, money well spent. And now, with everything in place, to be thoroughly, conclusively reminded like this that I’m not twenty any more. Or thirty-five, the age at which my interior clock seems to be stuck. If I can’t be as strong as I was I can be realistic, as I was when booking museum trips and excursions, allowing myself time to rest between.
Thinking back, when I was eighteen, when I was’t trying to get an acting job I was busy trying not to get drafted. I was resident alien then and was eligible for the draft six months after my eighteenth birthday. I returned to London, where I began trying to get hired for something better than selling ice-cream and programmes at the opera. For most of us who work, or have worked, as actors, the search for work is all-consuming. You can’t leave town because you might miss out on something, and if you’ve got a job there’s no time to get away. And once the job ends, six. Or eight weeks in a dingy rep, the pittance you’ve put aside won’t take you far.
Not that I won’t be the same as thousands of other tourists, climbing the steps of the Acropolis with Plutarch in hand, but it’ll be the first time for me. If it’s been a struggle, long anticipated and delayed, I don’t for a moment confuse myself with those men, battling their way north across deserts and over mountain ranges, Xenophon out in front goading them on, the ten thousand, fighting their way north against almost impossible odds, till that day when the advance guard, cresting the summit up ahead, seeing their hoped-for goal cried out “The sea! The sea!”
It won’t be like that. Not quite.
Five hundred years after the buildings on the Acropolis had been completed, burned, and then rebuilt on a grander scale by Pericles in Athens’ glory days, Plutarch, who, five hundred years after the fact, lived in the city off and on set down his thoughts:
It is this, above all, which makes Pericles’ works an object of wonder. The fact that they were created in so short a span, and yet for all time. Each one possessed an antique beauty at the time, and simultaneously by their youthful vigor, they appear to this day modern and newly made. There is such a bloom of eternal freshness on the surface, preserving their appearance from the touch of time, as if some unfading breath and unflagging spirit had been built into them.
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I’ll be going with a limp and bad grammar. They’ll both lessen during my stay. At least I hope so. I want to see how the temples used to line up with distant mountains. Perhaps see some shadow of the ancient night sky. Breathe the air. The life of Athens lives on, its aspirations and folly, in us. Its politics too; tyrants, demagogues, grifters, and thugs. Perhaps I can glimpse where Aristogiton so loved Harmodius that he attempted to assassinate the tyrant who kept pestering him, dying by torture after their failed attempt that killed his love. But if they failed they were still revered as the saviors of the old democracy—if any of that story is true. I’m expecting… I don’t know what I expect. What’s reasonable and what isn’t. I have a list, an itinerary. My days are counted for as I drive in a big loop around the mainland and the Peloponnese. Hotels are booked. Guides are hired in a few places; Delphi, Mycenae; but not Ithaca, I plan to see Ithaca for myself.
Can it match my anticipation? Can I go with an open heart and mind to make peace with the past? Mountains loom inside us, too, as real as Olympus or Slide. Reaching the top, isn’t so important as making the effort. To finally see the sea and maybe lie for a time on an unknown beach.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
From Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy
My flight’s being called. Time to go.