Location, location, location

Thank you, Grandpa Rask, for moving to Florida 60 years ago, and for establishing an ancestral home for me to enjoy.

Even chores are fun!

Now I know what I want for graduation.

The morning commute to the breakfast spot is sublime.

And the local wildlife is friendly! Like this dude, about three feet from our canoe, giving me the evil eye.

Evil meltemi madness

I’m down on the Florida coast now, staying with family. The weather is beautiful, the dissertation is happening, and relaxation is simultaneously in full effect.

Blog writing spot.

Yes, unbelievers, that IS the sunrise. Which I have gotten up to see three times this week.

Unfortunately, my lovely peace of mind is beginning to fray as I’ve become increasingly more twitchy. And let me tell you why.

It’s the damn wind. When I first got here, the trees were still and the water was flat. Then a steady wind picked up on Monday and it hasn’t stopped since. Granted, it’s only about 15-20 miles per hour from the east, which is really no big whoop. The problem is that it’s incessant, all day and all night, with no lull. Wind in palm fronds may be one of my all time favorite sounds, but even that is starting to grate on my ears.

It’s like the meltemi, that summer wind in the Mediterranean that comes barreling through and drives the sea into a froth too dangerous to sail. Ferries stay docked and tourists complain; people sit idle and impatient; but mostly the wind just continues and doesn’t cease. I keep reading on the internet that people love the meltemi because it cools things down, but that’s not what I remember hearing in the Greek islands. Instead, there was a mixed and strained relationship with the wind - it could be soothing on occasion, but it was also infernal because it just NEVER ENDED. The constant sound of it, the constant feel of it, the constant frustration of having to right things that had been knocked over, the race to catch items before they blew away, the need to always raise your voice. I particularly remember the relentless snapping and tangling of my hair, sticking in my eyes and the corner of my mouth and twisting in my face. Eventually you just had to give up and sit in silence with your eyes shut tight, letting the wind coil around you and do its worst.

Googled painting of the meltemi by Caroline Huff.

It’s just those sorts of moments when the rumors of meltemi madness make complete sense. I don’t know if those rumors are true, of course, but I often heard about how the meltemi could make people completely lose it. People would just …snap. It may sound ridiculous, but there’s something intensely disturbing and uncanny about that hot endless wind, and the frustration it causes can just build and build until you’re ready to have a nervous breakdown. It actually feels like bad luck slithering across your skin. Even familial violence and murder were ascribed to that evil wind and I tell you, the sinister madness caused by the meltemi seemed completely understandable.

Anyways, I’m feeling a bit meltemi crazy at the moment, like I need to go run 10 miles or chop down a tree or something. I just want it to STOP, to be silent, to be still.

This is the moment when I’ll do the smart and sane thing. I’ll close the windows and go inside. And put in ear plugs.

Take only pictures

Lately I've really been interested in the idea of 'place' in religious practice. My pal Beth Shively and I have spent a lot of time talking about 'sacred' landscapes in America (or the lack thereof), and our conversations have been rattling around my head quite a bit. Last week I witnessed one aspect of the American approach to our landscape when I was hiking the awesomely-named Fiery Gizzard Trail in southern Tennessee.

The forest was all lovely and green and breezy. Now, in antiquity if you wanted to go hiking, you just attended a sacrifice, joined a religious procession or climbed up to some Cave of the Nymphs to unload an offering or two. Nowadays we like to 'hike' and 'enjoy nature' for its own sake. Our national parks are secularly 'sacred' simply for existing; they must be preserved in their virginal and pure state, kept undefiled. Yet, other peeps enjoy the landscape just as much as we do, but their interaction with it is incorporated into their religious life and mythological histories. Going on a pilgrimage neatly solves the basic human desire to get all holy, visit some tourist sites and get exercise. It's like the ancient Athenians taking a 12-mile hiking and camping trip to Eleusis, ostensibly to get initiated into the Mysteries of Demeter and Kore. But, really, in my reconstruction, that whole religious procession with its sacredness thing was also about swimming at the beach, finding the perfect walking stick, and eating s'mores.



While getting my Fiery Gizzard on, I fondly remembered hiking in Greece. If I'd been there wandering the countryside, instead of the Cumberland Plateau, I'd have come across like 17 shrines along the way, dedicated to various saints and multiple versions of the Madonna. My Tennessee trail had no such shrines. I wonder if I should go set one up just to see how fast the National Park Service would remove it. Take only pictures, leave only footprints...and votive candles. And good luck charms. And sacrificial chickens.



Of course, not all the US is a religiously barren wasteland. There's always the Mormon landscape or the sites of Catholic epiphanies of the Madonna. Just a few weekends ago I got to visit one of the most impressive native religious sites our country has to offer, the Newark Earthworks.


They were built by the Hopewell Indians at about the same time Julius Caesar and his boys were tearing up the Roman Empire with their civil war. The mounds were huge. And impressive.


Recently I saw an author speak who was attempting to emphasize the American landscape in his YA fiction. Most of us have grown up on Narnia and Middle Earth and Westeros, fantastical worlds based on European landscapes. This author said that he wanted to make our own countryside - Midwestern cornfields and southern mountains - just as full of wonder and magic and possibility as any mystical Irish loch. I dig that idea. I think it's time we stopped worrying about the musty, fussy Old Country and spent a little more time fixating on our own lands. Who needs Bethlehem when you've got Fiery Gizzards, after all?

My view

Tuesday:


Wednesday:

Thursday:

Paths and Empty Roads by Archaeological Sites in the Greek Countryside

The Regular Year program involves a lot of walking. In order to get accepted into the program, the School requires a doctor's verification that you are in reasonable health. This isn't to say that we were all fit as a fiddle, as if our first hike up Lykabitos Hill wasn't like hiking through the valley of the shadow of death. Brutal, is how I recall it. But during the fall trips we got into much better form, so that I was on my way to being as healthy as I was when I drove a pedal-cab at OSU football games.

But then the trips ended, and Christmas happened, and nowadays we do far fewer walk-abouts. This was clear to me yesterday, when we went to the ancient sites of Thorikos, Sounion and Zoster. I'd forgotten what physical activity was like, and how, on foot, the empty road appears ahead of you.

Scott Gallimore navigates a dried creek bed, directly next to the classical-era stoa at Thorikos. Up ahead of him you can just make out the collapsed blocks of the building, which at some unknown point slid into the river.

Lindy Dewey-Gallimore treads the abandoned railway line that runs through Thorikos. Over-grown and unused, several of the railroad ties were ripped out within the last day or two. They'll no doubt be more useful where ever they are now. Site formation at work!

Regular and Associate members travel the winding mountain road at Vari. Our bus couldn't make the trip because the road had been blocked by a funeral. Our destination was the shrine of Pan and the Nymphs in the Vari Cave. We made the hike back in total darkness.

The countryside is green and wet in all directions, a far cry from the dry and yellowed landscape of Greece's summer. Usually this a good thing, but some plants are apparently a nuisance.

Margie Miles, Mellon Professor, on her way to the Thorikos Stoa.

One such example is a verdant and clover-looking plant that spreads like a carpet in olive groves. It turns rocky Greece into a British countryside.

We learned about this dark and evil plant on Wednesday from Harriet Blitzer, who spoke to us during the Weiner Lab seminar. Harriet works on, among other things, olive cultivation and the domestication of plants. She is particularly forceful when it comes to this cloveresque greenery, which was imported to Greece and has thrived to everyone's dismay. It apparently acts like a sponge, holding water in, but kills all the local wild flowers; instead of olive groves starred by spring blooms, only this dread plant remains (yes, I've forgotten its name already). Think kudzu in the South, although it hasn't quite reached the point of swallowing whole trees. It sure is pretty to look at, but I imagine in the spring I'll think differently, when all the wild flowers are gone.