19. Head for the Hills

Now for our mountain sport: up to yond hill.
——Cymbeline, III.iii

Everywhere you go in Athens, you will see stray cats. They hide in alleys, sun themselves in front of ancient monuments, and beg for scraps at sidewalk cafés. You'll also find the occasional dog, but it's the cats who run the place. Late one night, walking back through the Plaka, we spotted nine of them sitting in an alley behind a metal roll-down gate. They'd arranged themselves in a neat 3x3 tic-tac-toe grid, and cast appealing glances at us in unison as we passed by.

I don't know how they got up there, but stray cats even roam atop the Acropolis. I know, because that's where I went with Sarah and Desiree on Wednesday morning after we returned from Starbucks. Q. had postponed morning worship until 1 p.m., so we finally had some free time. Hannah and Holly were supposed to come along, but they changed their minds.

I'm sure you can find 1,001 flowery descriptions of the Acropolis on travel sites if you want. Providing another such description is not the purpose of this essay. As theatre geeks, Sarah and I were most impressed with the Theatre of Dionysus, which, although it lies in ruins at the base of the hill, still has perfect natural acoustics. There we were, on the spot where theatre began 2,500 years ago. It doesn't get much cooler than that.

A little further up the path is another theatre, the fully restored Odeon of Herod Atticus. As I gazed at this marble-seated marvel, it suddenly occurred to me: I was standing on the very spot where Yanni recorded his sublimely fantastic Live at the Acropolis album. As I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply but serenely through my nostrils, the cerulean of the sky echoing against my eyelids, so near I could almost taste it, the clear limpid notes of his synthesizer seemed to float past my ears on the morning breeze, and I could sense that the spirit of peace and harmony summoned by his deep, healing melodies had not entirely left that sacred place—no—no, there was still something of it on the leaves of the trees, in the dust of the ground, beneath the wings of the insects, hanging in the atmosphere like a gorgeous blanket woven with invisible silver thread, ah, the remnants of that delicious landscape of sound, still pulsating through my brain in delightful waves...was it possible my consciousness could absorb such powerful mystical potency and still remain connected to this earth, or had I at last stepped beyond the thresholds of time, through the veil of space, past the mailbox of mundaneness, into another dimension, a new level of awareness, a hitherto unknown plane of existence where all my difficulties with Q. would be no more relevant than a third-generation cassette copy of a mimeograph of a shortwave radio broadcast of a telegram of a barely remembered nightmare?

Then I heard Sarah's voice and felt a hand on my forehead. Seems I'd slipped on the stairs and gotten a pretty good bump. So in reply to the previous paragraph, the answer is no, and Yanni sucks (although I knew another violinist or two in California who made good money playing for him and John Tesh).

There's a pretty good museum atop the Acropolis now, containing what's left of the original statues and carvings (i.e., what wasn't blasted off, or cut down and hauled away by the Turks or Lord Elgin) from the various ancient buildings there. (Any statue you might see outdoors on the Acropolis is pretty much guaranteed to be a modern copy—the Caryatides on the famous Porch of Maidens, for example.) The Parthenon was surrounded by construction scaffolding; it's undergoing the latest in a series of renovations to repair the damage it suffered in 1687 from a gunpowder explosion. The idea behind the current project is to restore as much original marble as humanly possible. So there are piles of blocks and bits lying around, all numbered and waiting to be fitted back into the puzzle, and providing shelter for the stray cats in the meantime.

The Acropolis is hot, dry, and dusty, so don't forget your water bottle when you visit (that pretty much goes for the entire city of Athens). There is a drinking fountain at the Odeon if you need it. While it's not the world's hardest climb, the Acropolis isn't all that convenient either—and must have been even less so for the ancient Greeks. So visiting the temple of Athena couldn't have been an easy task. This got me thinking about where various religions fall on the difficulty-convenience spectrum. Ancient Mayan temples had steep stone steps to climb. Islam has the hajj to Mecca. Roman Catholicism has pilgrimages, labyrinths, and Stations of the Cross. And American Protestantism builds megachurches 3 minutes or less from freeway exits.

When you buy tickets to the Acropolis, you also get admission to several other sites, including the Ancient Agora, the famous former open-air marketplace, now a partially wooded park filled with crumbling ruins. So on the way back we walked across the Agora to Adrianou Street, on the edge of the Plaka. We visited a bizarre little antique shop crowded with shadow puppets, jewelry, and dusty musical instruments, where we persuaded Desiree to buy herself a beautiful beaded clutch for 20 euros.

It was fun to get Desiree away from the rest of the group and get to know her a little better. I don't think she'd done much touring or been out of the States before. And perhaps, lacking experience against which to compare the trip, she was better able to take Q.'s abuse in stride. We learned that she'd been offered the trip because she won a prize in a regional teen talent show sponsored by the Assemblies of God. And she was talented—had a powerful voice and was a solid guitarist. As I recall, we had no particular desire to drag her into our misery, so we tried to keep the conversation positive.

We sat down at a Cretan sidewalk café and had, for the first time in days, a decent meal. Since Pandora's departure we'd subsisted on Starbucks pastries, whatever Ken brought from the grocery store, and gyros. Lots of gyros. Or souvlaki. But we had come to understand that while they taste yummy, gyros and souvlaki are greasy fast food, and a steady diet of them can't be that good for you. If we had been working on Συπερσιζε Με, our documentary film, this would have been fine. But we were instead trying to keep our moods and energy levels sufficiently elevated to survive the stress we were under, and you can't do that on a steady diet of gyros. So we had a nummy little sampler plate, some salad, and really terrific bread. I got brave and tried a frappé, which is a cold blended instant coffee drink that everybody in Greece seems to love. Everybody but me, that is.

As we ate we realized it was past 1 p.m., and we were missing worship back at the church. But we didn't make particular haste to return, which turned out to be a good thing. Our Russian friends came by the café while we were finishing up, and told us we were going to have worship on top of the Areopagos, a/k/a Mars Hill. Which is right next to the Acropolis, so we'd have wasted the walk back to Athens Christian Center if we had taken it. Which brings me to...

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: I don't know why Q. hadn't told anyone he intended to meet at Mars Hill. Maybe he thought we couldn't find it. Or maybe he wanted it to be a surprise, in which case he had failed to realize that the last thing anyone needed from him was another surprise.

In ancient Athens, Mars Hill was the hangout of the Areopagites, a/k/a the Athens Philosophy Club. The Apostle Paul preached to them on one of his missionary voyages (Acts 17). In an early example of the importance of contextualization for missionaries, he referred to an altar he'd seen bearing the inscription "To an Unknown God" (it was probably in Piraeus, the port city just to the southwest of Athens), and even quoted Greek poetry.

Just like the worshipers at the Parthenon, the Areopagites must have been dedicated fellows. Mars Hill is accessible by a treacherous old stone stairway and a less treacherous modern metal one, but I'm not sure either was available in Paul's time. There's nary a flat place to stand on the summit, which is surfeited with jagged rocks worn slippery by thousands of years of sore philosophers' feet. Nonetheless, we clambered up there, French, German, Russian, Yank and all—even Gilbert, who never let his disability get between him and someplace he really wanted to go. It was thrilling to stand and sing on the spot where Christianity was introduced to Athens. The only noticeable problem with the picture was Q., who stood sullenly by and glowered the whole time, something he'd been doing a lot of lately.

Back at Athens Christian Center, Q. was wearing out his welcome with Haris, the overworked part-time youth minister. Whoever was sleeping in the church office had failed to keep it locked, so Haris asked Q. to move those people out. Church members were tired of stepping over air mattresses and having their microphones and gear messed with, so Haris asked Q. to move the mattresses out and desist from further use of the sound system. Meanwhile the Youth in Action group had returned from their trip to Corinth. As a consequence of all this, Sarah and I lost our "conjugal room"—the only one on the ground floor with a door that locked—to Q., E., Ken, and Barbie. We got back from the Acropolis to find our mattresses and suitcases against one wall, and theirs on the floor.

I spent the rest of the afternoon with B., trying to finish our arrangement for Hannah. This actually involved finding an Internet café near the Plaka and printing the lyrics off the Web, just so we could make a fresh chord chart (the first one having been obscured by the corrections, transpositions, and key changes we'd made). This endeavor made me late for the evening's gathering at Hope Place. When I did get there it was packed to the gills. I walked in, had an attack of claustrophobia,* and walked out.

Q. and I barely spoke together after Monday morning. Instead we used B. as a sort of shuttle diplomat. His first mission was to offer me and Sarah the chance to leave the band and go home early, provided we could change our plane tickets. Since I didn't know anything about our flight home, I asked him to get our travel itineraries from E. so I could call the airline. (I certainly wasn't going to trust E. to make that call for me.) As I've said, Q. seemed to respect me more than the other band members (even though I no longer held any regard at all for him), so maybe this was his idea of a polite way to get rid of me. I chose to defer any decision about leaving the band until I knew whether it was possible to fly home early. So I continued to play gigs.

Speaking of gigs, this evening we were back at Eleftherias Square in Koridallos. I'd love to say it went much better than Sunday night, but that's only partially true. I tuned up my instruments and left them too close to the fountain. They didn't exactly get wet, but thanks to the humidity, my violin popped a peg and went severely out of tune, which I didn't discover until I picked it up and tried to play the introduction to "Breathe on Me." After two days of arrangement work, Hannah finally got to sing her song. Qedem had their distortion pedal and played their first full-on rock sets of the trip, which took some of the pressure off of Loudmouth in terms of the number of sets we played. By now we knew Q. wasn't going to feed us, so we hit the neighborhood cafés for more greasy souvlaki in between sets.

Somehow, though, Sarah again got nothing to eat, which doesn't make me look like a very attentive husband. I barely remember seeing her that night, even when we got back to Athens Christian Center—because of course we weren't sleeping together, having been evicted from our conjugal room. The idea of a married couple sleeping apart on a road trip may not sound so bad, but believe me, at this point in the trip we needed each other's support and company as much as possible. We didn't know who else we could trust. Our fantastic four leaders had each other's company and a little privacy, even though they all were sharing one room at this point. But somehow it was OK to split up Martin and Sarah. I think Sarah was in with Holly and the U4ic girls, while I grabbed my mattress and headed unhappily for the courtyard. On my way there, E. offered to let me sleep in the sanctuary. I took this to mean that she and Q. were willing to give lip service to Haris' instructions and then flout them as soon as his back was turned. Wanting no part in that, I told her to forget it.

*I'm only mildly claustrophobic, and my use of the term may not even be clinically accurate. I've only had two such attacks in my lifetime (both in Europe, oddly enough).