The East Coast of Crete

Posted on June 16, 2003 in Biomes Book of Days College Travels - Past

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about an island.

A long winding road took us there, out from Iraklion, through and back to a place called Agio Nikolas, an arcing beach. We went because there was a Minoan palace, one of the grand stone halls they built when they dreaded pirates who were hung like bulls splashing in from the sea and raping their bare-breasted queens.

That’s the fantasy we are told when we stare at the ivory statues in the museum in Iraklion. If they are true,
Cretan women walked around in uplifting dresses that bared their mammaries. But we really don’t know: we can’t read the writing on the Phaistos Disk — if it is writing and not just a complex design on a trivet. No one left a traveller’s acount. What we have are foundations, staircases, and bleak stone walls. The occasional fresco, a stick of furniture, and bones from the meals they ate on crockery now smashed. That’s all I remember of that ruin: bleached walls and the foundation. Not the most impressive of Greek monuments. And a beach that opened like a parabola.

Pebbles mixed with sand. Some difficult rocks that I explored on my own, searching for tidepools; they were on the left as you faced the Mediterranean. The splash of the sea and salt in the crevices. A mandorla-shaped cuttlefish bone that I picked up as a curiosity; I threw it out the bus window because the other students said it stank.

I don’t remember the name of the place. I remember being tired from the bus-trip and sore in the front muscles of my thighs and the back muscles of my calves from scampering over the rocks. The place bears only one other mark worth the remembrance: I have never been as far east relative to my California homeland, before or since.

I don’t think I even have a picture of the place. It was fogged from about five hundred feet on up. Not worth the images I suppose I thought. I wish I had taken some, to mark the point.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: It’s who you met at a party.