Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (22 page)

“Is this private?”

“It used to be very private but it's not now.”

“So it's all right for me to tie up here for the night?”

“Yes and you will find a spring of lovely water in that grotto.”

Water! Suddenly, I realised that I had forgotten to fill my water container. It was like setting out across the Sahara without any.

I could see the gush of water from the rock near the head of the jetty and prodded Nicky gently towards it. I hoped the girl wasn't looking as I was still like a walrus out of water getting in and out of the boat.

I pushed Nicky's nose softly into the sand and climbed carefully overboard into ankle-deep water. The rest of the keel was floating free.

The spring water was delicious – soft on the face, cool and delicious in the mouth. As I filled my container with the nicest water in Corfu the girl came past me on her way home.

“There is another spring further up the hill,” she told me. “Do you know the legend of Kardaki?”

“No,” I lied.

“Whichever foreigner,” she quoted, “wets his lips, To his homeland he will never return.”

“Lead me to it,” I said.

It was necessary to scramble over a lot of untidy rocks to reach the foot of an ancient stone staircase up which once trod the feet of Nelson's sailors to replenish the fleet's water supply from Kardaki.

I swallowed three cupped handfuls thinking I didn't really need the promise of the spring. We said good-night-hope-we-meet-again and I followed Nelson's footsteps back to Nicky.

It was so peaceful and lovely beneath that green cliff of oak, cypress, fern, pine acacia and even palm and aloe – all competing for existence and all succeeding brilliantly – that it was unreal.

The occupants of Buckingham Palace might have been interested to know that I spent the first night of my adventure hitched to the jetty at the bottom of the garden of the house in which Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was born.

This was, apart from one wartime experience in the desert, the worst and longest day of my life.

It was the day that brought the Expedition to Circumnavigate Corfu to an untimely end.

The expedition had started in July when I set out in my rowing boat from Corfu Town. Now, about a third of the way round the Greek island, it was over.

How had I put myself and my boat, which I had called Nicky, into such a situation?

It all began in the peaceful dawn of Agios Georgios (St George) a fishing village near the Korission lagoon on the southwest coast of Corfu.

The water was barely rippled by a slight breeze as I pulled unhurriedly towards The Point, a sandy cape about a mile away, which gives shelter to the fishing boats. But I was conscious of an unease in the movement of the water beneath the boat. It was strange how you became sensitive to such imperceptibles.

The change, as I rounded the point, was dramatic. There was a sudden wind, a choppy sea and further out in blue water, the white-maned horses were beginning their prancing – the infallible sign of one of those north-westerly gales which come rushing down from the Italian Alps, funnel into the Adriatic and explode in full fury over Corfu.

The coast for as far as the eye could see was totally exposed, the near cliffs being succeeded by miles of open beach.

It was obviously necessary to do something pretty quickly. There was a choice of going back to the shelter of Agios Georgios or heading for the calm of the Korission lagoon, which was connected to the sea by a ten-yard-wide passage.

As with the walk around Crete with Gaithuri there was an unwritten law: Never go back unless there is no alternative. I pointed the bow towards the lagoon entrance.

It was a struggle getting there and I could see the waves pounding on the rocks guarding the passage. Fifty yards out I saw something which ended any hopes of a safe anchorage in Korission. The entrance was closed by a wooden barricade.

I began probing the beach for a place to run ashore. But whenever I drew near I would find myself lifted on the crest of a big wave which rushed under me to curl over and crash on the beach in a cascade of foam and spray.

It was a frightening sight and I feared that the boat would be broken in half if I attempted to go in. At the very least, she would probably capsize and I knew I would be lucky to escape without injury and the loss of my possessions.

From adolescent reading I remembered that ships caught in typhoons poured oil on troubled waters and threw out storm anchors. The only oil I had was in a small bottle for salad dressing and I wouldn't know a storm anchor from an anchorite.

But I did have an ordinary anchor. Two in fact – one
in the front and one in the back. With what was left of my strength, I forced Nicky a couple of hundred yards from the surf, threw the front anchor overboard, gave it all the rope I had and said something to St Spyridon.

We went with the wind for about thirty yards and then the anchor gripped and held. Thank you, St Spyridon.

There was precious little else to be grateful for. My whole world was heaving about and the wind was making horrible noises going past my ears but I reckoned it would be just about endurable if it didn't get any worse.

To get out of the wind and with some idea of adding stability by lowering the centre of gravity, I sat down in the well of the boat. It felt a lot less precarious there and only my head and shoulders were exposed to the gale.

Slowly, slowly, the sun crept up to its zenith. Then, at 2pm the full force of the gale came down on me like a wall and I suddenly realised that it was not a question of how I was going to endure the next few hours but whether I was actually going to survive.

I did not believe there was so much wind in the world. The boat was performing every possible acrobatic except a complete somersault and only the rope, anchored somewhere down there in the unmoving sand, prevented that.

I began to feel an enormous admiration for Nicky. The battle for survival was joined between her and the elements. To this I contributed nothing but ballast and blasphemy – especially when intermittent bucketsful of cold spray hit me in the back of the neck.

With the sun now well into its descent, I began preparing mind and muscle for whatever steps would be
necessary if the storm continued past nightfall – which it was clearly going to do. I was quite sure I was not going to sit there through all the hours of hostile, heaving darkness.

Various contingencies were being calculated when the big decision was made for me. Suddenly I was horrified to see those monstrous waves on which I had turned my back all day coming at me from the side.

Jerking my head round, the frayed ends of the rope on the prow told me all I needed to know. The anchor rope had parted.

The moment for action had come. I would have to row the boat ashore. Hallelujah.

The big question, of course, was could I row the boat ashore?

Perched up on the seat it was like sitting on an erratic trampoline but by some miracle I got an oar out on each side and flailed indiscriminately at wind and wave, aiming for a few yards of beach that I had selected as suitable earlier in the day.

There was a moment when we rode in on a crest like a surfer and I thought: “This is a good one,” when a cross-wave came hurtling before the wind and suddenly we were knocked over sideways. I had a quick vision of bits and pieces going overboard when there was a tremendous bump as we hit the sand and I joined my belongings in the welter of surf. Even as I was being ejected I grabbed my briefcase.

I took a deep breath, my feet scrambled desperately for something solid and then, miraculously I found myself standing upright, briefcase in hand, in two feet of sea. I was very glad nobody was watching.

My roll of clothing wrapped in a polythene bag was
already stranded at the limit of the surf. All the other items, like the deckchair and beach umbrella, seemed to be heading in the right direction. So, after throwing the briefcase inland, I was able to turn my attention to Nicky.

She had righted herself and was bumping on the sand as the sea threw her about. Grabbing the prow I began the laborious task, assisted by the incoming surf, of dragging her foot by foot, inch by inch, beyond the reach of the waves.

When I could pull the boat no further ashore, I had to leave her and set about collecting my belongings.

The sun was setting into the unquiet sea by the time I had got everything together. Only one item was missing – my Veldtschoen boots.

I should have been exhausted but I felt so elated at having my feet on firm ground that nothing else seemed to matter. No longer afraid of it, I found myself hating the sea. So much so that as I turned my back on it to move inland, I spat at it.

An hour later, in the darkness and on a rough stony road I would willingly have sacrificed all the belongings I had recovered for my lost pair of boots.

Each step was painful but it was not for another half-hour that I stumbled into a farmhouse. I could not have walked another metre.

The elderly owner had no hospitality for me, but he had a telephone with which I summoned the nearest resources of civilisation in the form of a taxi.

And so to bed in an inn at the nearby town of Agios Matheos.

The gale blew for another day but on the evening of the second day, with the sea a dead calm, I returned to the beach with three hefty young men to help me get the
boat floated.

My possessions were all exactly as I had left them with not even a footprint in the surrounding sand. And in the sun and wind – good drying weather – they were in reasonable condition. We loaded her up and got her stern in the sea. I shook hands all round and clambered in. They gave a final shove and I rowed away into the sunset.

After twenty yards I was dismayed to see my possessions in the bottom of the boat beginning to float. I could see water gushing in through two long gaps on each side of the keel.

I swung the boat around and pulled frantically for the shore, yelling for the young men to come and grab my things. They were practically paralytic with laughter but they came out up to their waists and managed to get everything out before Nicky settled on the bottom.

I am proud to report that, upholding the tradition of the Navy, the captain went down with his ship, still rowing, in just over three feet of water. I decided to leave Nicky in her element just under the surface of the sea so she could still retain some dignity rather than condemn her to blistering to death under the sun.

Sadly, sadly, I walked away. With my last look back I could see the black capitals on the stern seat: NIKH, the Greek word for victory. This victory was to the sea.

The evening bus from Heraklion came down the road over the last mountain into Matala like a Mississippi river-boat going down the rapids.

At the foot of the hill the road bisected Xenophon's farm and I asked the driver – an old friend by now – to stop for a moment. He knew why without my telling him.

“The donkey?” he asked, smiling at my nod and explaining this unscheduled halt to the other passengers. It produced an immediate bus-filling buzz of conversation because Gaithuri was well known as the only donkey that had ever walked completely round their island.

I had not seen Gaithuri for four months having just returned from my shipwreck and was half-expecting to see a foal alongside her. As the bus pulled up I spotted her head down in the shrubs. Leaning out of the window I gave the call she had heard so often on our year-long walk together:

“
Hela gaithuraki mu
!”

Her head jerked up and she spun around as though she had been stung on the rump by a wasp. Big ears sought the source of my shout and started another babel of talk behind me.

“See, she knows him.”

“She can hear you but she cannot see you.”

“She knows his voice and she knows he is in the bus.”

For me, the quick recognition of my voice was the reward I was seeking.

Later in the evening I returned with a loaf of brown bread and was welcomed by that loud, mournful bray
which was as familiar to me as my voice was to her. There was no baby donkey, but Gaithuri was certainly pretty large. I asked Xenophon when he thought the little one would come. He shrugged his ignorance. “Two months, perhaps three.”

Two weeks later I was sitting on the veranda watching the waves mount their winter offensive on the still-warm sands of the beach when I saw Xenophon going past on the back of a tractor.

It was early, I thought, for him to be going home at this time of the year when he was busy till sunset working in the fields. He returned my salutation without the usual broad grin.

Five minutes later, Xenophon's son Yanni with two other men came running past and half a minute after them, a small group of cyclists pedalled furiously in the same direction. Finally, Xenophon again perched precariously on the pillion of a moped.

“What's happened?” I yelled.

“Gaithuri has fallen into…”

That was all I heard before distance and two-stroke reverberation lost his reply. Putting on my sandals I hurried as fast as I could along the mile of tarmac to the farm wondering what the end of the sentence could be.

Ten or twelve people were talking and gesticulating together with much bending and straightening of backs as I approached. The donkey was obviously somewhere among them but invisible to me behind a mound of rubble.

A new double-storey restaurant and hotel was being
built for the following summer's tourist influx, and suddenly I knew what had happened to Gaithuri. I sprinted the fifty yards from the road, and as I came round the rubble mound had my worst fears confirmed.

Gaithuri was half-buried in a lime-pit. The lime mixture, prepared for plastering a new building, was the texture of soft putty but had hardened on the surface. Gaithuri had pulled her tether free and wandered onto the lime-pit where her sharp hooves immediately broke through the top crust.