The shores that launched a thousand ships.
There is but one road that connects Platanaki to Anthidona, formerly Anthedon. We drove it almost daily on our way to the beach. I should have liked to walk it but once, as did the local Boeotians bound for Troy some three thousand years ago.
Admittedly, it’s a two-hour tramp — I know, a tiny speck of hourglass sand compared to the ten years Odysseus needed to weave his way back to his beloved Ithaca. And I’d be marching off to a sunburn at worst, not war.
Still, here, it is easy for the mind’s eye to keep a vigil for the sights and sounds of the past, the unperturbed peace of the land broken by the tectonic rumble of 1,100 pairs of striding Boeotian feet, the colossal fleet of ships dotting the Euripus Strait up the mouth of the Gulf of Euboea stirring restlessly under the tidal moon, eager for daybreak to weigh anchor and go fetch Helen.
Like I said, this is where the gangplank from now to then stretches near. Where you need not be a mystic remembrancer to conjure up the legions of oars bruising the waves, curling them against the undertow, marshalling them full circle to these very shores that now alight on your toes as you slurp a freddo. I remark to myself no way so many vessels pull away from this narrow channel and onto the open Aegean Sea without a little providential poke from the gods.
Had I walked from Platanaki to Anthidona, I would have welcomed the opportunity of the wormhole just beneath the road. These shores, however, I had the sense to tread repeatedly, of water and sand carving an alliance as if to piece time back together, a lasting armistice between memory and the present moment. I remark to myself this now is a portal to the next, it happens in the blink of an eye, and becomes then for eternity.
Next walk, lift your feet with purpose. As the momentum carries you forward, acknowledge that you are simultaneously stepping into the future and creating a past. That in-between moment when your foot is suspended above the ground, that is when time tugs at the imagination. Let it fall like yesterday a thousandfold and lay nothing but possibility before you.