Ammi Midstokke: The adventure of getting to the adventure
Sometimes, a new adventure destination is a familiar unknown. Upon first inquiry, people seem familiar with the place, as if they have spent their lives or perhaps last week, doing just the thing you are thinking of doing. But their reliability, like the terrain of your quest, is unknown.
“Yes, yes,” they say, sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette and adjusting their belly over a pressing buckle. “I’ve been up the mountain many times.”
Because of the confident tone of their vast experience, or maybe it was their neighbor’s, or a reliance on knowledge bred into the locals, or something overheard at a tavern in 1998 that took on a life of its own, you ask a lot of questions. Just to be sure. And you are given a lot of vague but essential information from as recent as yesterday, which has either been heard, assumed, or made up, all manners being equally reliable.
The road, they will say, is difficult, probably washed out with the recent rains. It will take an hour to drive, but if you have to park your car and walk, that might take an hour as well. And it could be a few miles or maybe a few more miles, but in any case you will want a four-wheel-drive, so regardless of how far you drive, you are not leaving the entrails of your vehicle on the road.
These were the specifics a group of friends and I had independently gathered before our adventure, which was to climb the highest peak of the Peloponnese’s Taygetos Mountains, in southern Greece. While I had a map and the map had squiggly lines on it, I have noticed there are seldom keys on Greek maps. Instead, somewhere in Greek, I think it just says, “We drew a line from a low point to a high point and one could, in theory, go that way.” At least once, someone did, because they spray paint red dots on rocks as wayfinders, hidden among the rubble like dried blood blotches reminding you to pay attention to where you are going and not to the view.
We would only discover this if we actually made it to a trail head. We could drive this way or that way, but no way appeared better than the other. However, there was a single maybe-known: One way would take three hours and the other might take three hours. We debated this for about three hours, then we tossed a shovel and several wood planks into the low-rider rental Peugeot, because it was not explicitly forbidden in the rental agreement.
Most of us had done some pretty terrifying things in our life, and at least two of us had delivered live humans from our insides, but none of us had ever white-knuckled a 4 mph drive before that day. Most of our exercise came from jumping out of the car at the behest of the driver, in an attempt to give the vehicle another half-inch of clearance. Then, we ’d run or wander or take a pee break, and eventually all pile back into the car 50 feet or yards up the road.
Sometimes, when we were feeling daredevilish, we would stay in the car as it crawled over the river rock of road rumble, all of us holding our breaths in anticipation of the calamitous crunch-scrape that would, based on how tight our sphincters were, probably result in the car exploding like a land mine. Or maybe we would just leave an oil pan behind. But trust me, it was very scary.
To calm ourselves, we discussed whether it was safer to try to eject from a rolling car, wear a seatbelt, or keep the window open to slither out after the car had been crushed in its tumble down the gorge.
When not in fear of my life, threatened as it was at the speed of a shepherd’s flock meandering up a mountainside, I was calculating my half-marathon time with the slow revelation that we had been given accurate advice: Walking the road would take just as long as driving it. However, our kidneys and adrenal glands would fare better on foot. Exhausted, and near the trailhead, we parked the car and walked the last bit, which proved to be the smoothest, safest stretch of the road.
Then we climbed a mountain, saw some views of stuff: wide expanses of the sea, Mediterranean gulfs nestled by coastal villages, islands like stones resting in a puddle, distant ships, millennia of trade route history, and the tiniest stone church at the summit. And while we traversed steep rock and shale, clambered over exposed ridges, and slogged out a few thousand feet of gain in howling wind gusts, we all knew the real adventure was going to be driving back home. In the dark.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com