Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance

by Robert Crisp

  Hardship in a monastery, for some reason, I did not expect and was not prepared for after the generous welcome the monks gave both me and Gaithuri. But they gave me a sort of couch to sleep on which would have kept an Indian fakir awake all night.

  It was this monastic experience that induced me to buy – off a passing and departing hippie – one of those collapsible, canvas and aluminium beds. And it was just as well I did because two nights later, having once again taken the wrong track, I found I had followed a dry river down to a deserted beach.

  In itself this was no hardship. I went to sleep on my new bed on the junction of sands as happily there as anywhere else. And there was plenty of grazing for Gaithuri.

  In the middle of the night, a violent thunderstorm with cascades of rain not only threatened to drown me from above but brought the river down in flood. There may not have been much danger of being washed away but there were two inches of water under my bed and my involuntary prayers were nearly all directed towards preventing my collapsible bed from collapsing.

  Whenever a lightning flash lit up the scene I could see the donkey grazing unperturbed in the downpour. Unfortunately, she was on the other side of the river and we spent the next morning watching each other while we waited for the river to drop until it was fordable.

  Of course, I had to go across to her, ferrying the baggage. She didn’t like to get her feet wet.

  Chapter 25

  It Seemed Like the Savoy Hotel to Me

  Goudouras really was the end of the road in Crete. It was not only the end of the road; it was the end of Crete, and, on the wild gale-blown day on which I arrived drenched and battered by alternate cascades of rain and hail, it could have been the end of the world. I could hardly have it much worse, I thought, in Tierra del Fuego or Tristan da Cunha. My initial welcome to the village did little to change my gloomy first impression. There were perhaps thirty houses scattered on the wide terrace between mountain and sea, divided into two groupings.

  As always, the first call was at the cafe – the social and business centre of every remote community. And as it was Sunday the males were all gathered around the tables playing cooncan and whist and drinking ouzo and raki. Naturally, there was not a woman in sight. Everybody looked up at the appearance of this strange apparition in the doorway. Nobody, in Crete, apparently, had ever before seen a foreigner walking the country with a donkey in tow. A small bow-legged man, obviously the proprietor, detached himself from one group and asked me what I wanted.

  “I want a room for the night. Can you tell me where I can find one?”

  Brief murmurings from the crowded tables and the little man, interpreting their meaning if not their content, shook his head.

  “There are no rooms here. Go to the other cafe. Maybe you will find one there. Ask Michaelis.”

  Feeling as despondent as the weather and the grey heaving sea bashing itself to foam along the pebbled beach, I trudged off with Gaithuri another four or five hundred yards. The scene inside the cafe was a replica of the first and a similar man came to the door to meet me.

  “I would like a room for the night and somewhere to tie up my donkey,” I began again in what had become for me an oft-repeated formula. Nor was the reply any different. I grew a little exasperated.

  “But there must be a room somewhere. I have a bed and blankets but do you expect me to sleep in the rain and hail?”

  The man shrugged a little helplessly and looked behind him. He got no advice or encouragement. Then a voice came loudly from a far corner: “There is a room.” This produced an immediate babble of voices to which the man in the corner retorted hotly in words which I made out to mean that there were empty rooms in the village and they could not expect a visitor and a foreigner to sleep out on such a night. He came across to me in the doorway and saw Gaithuri at the edge of the porch.

  “The donkey must go inside too. Come back to the other cafe and I will meet you there. I go in my truck to find a key.”

  Back we trudged a little more happily this time and the donkey straining to get at the grass beside the road. I found my new friend sweeping out a room in a tiny, unoccupied cottage.

  “It is not mine,” he said apologetically, as though he was used to better things, “but it is clean and it is dry. Put your things inside. I have a stable for the donkey.”

  He pointed to a rough stone hut halfway up a nearby hillside. “You will find some ashera (chopped straw) in there. It is not much but your donkey can have it.”

  I unloaded and unsaddled Gaithuri and led her to the stone hut, in which she made herself completely at home immediately as though it were her own. Then I went back to the room to prepare my bed.

  As the man said, it was clean and dry but it wasn’t much else. There were no windows but as I discovered in the night, the chimney of a corner fireplace provided enough fresh air to make me huddle into my sleeping bag against the downdraught. The only furniture was a bed, which consisted of a wooden frame covered with stiff cut grass over which a strip of hessian had been laid. It was not exactly a place for a honeymoon but it seemed like the Savoy Hotel to me.

  Before I went to sleep that night, I thought back on the long day’s journey which had finally brought me to Goudouras. It had been a day full of wonder and delight as I went from mountain to mountain and valley to valley with the sea always thundering on my right hand and sometimes so close that I was drenched by more salt spray than rain.

  It was these southerly gales which caused the sea to bite deeper and deeper into the land. I could virtually see it happening as I walked along and it could provide some moments of excitement.

  At one point where the road was a ledge between mountain and sea I had paused to stare up at a scarred cliff directly above me where a good deal of recent erosion had obviously taken place. Right on the rim of a cliff a thousand feet above me an enormous boulder was poised like some monstrous bird leaning out to leap into space and take flight (a roc maybe?).

  Clearly it would not be long before the last of the retaining soil would be washed or blown away and I moved hurriedly on, driving Gaithuri before me in urgent anxiety. Suddenly, she broke into a gallop of her own volition and in the same moment, I heard a great crack and rumble which those side-on eyes of the donkey had actually seen before the noise reached my ears. My head jerked round and what I saw made me join Gaithuri in her gallop. The great boulder had got loose.

  The rumbling noise behind me swelled to a clattering roar, almost drowning the pounding of the waves, but I did not stop to look. By the time I thought it safe to stop, the boulder was plummeting towards the road dragging a mass of smaller rocks and earth with it like a comet’s tail.

  It struck the road’s surface with a booming thump, bounced off like a tennis ball and plunged into the sea in a plume of water and spray that rose thirty feet above the surf.

  That, I said to myself when I could breathe again, is as near as I ever want to get to an avalanche.

  The rain kept me at Goudouras for three nights. I couldn’t persuade anybody to take any money for the room.

  Chapter 26

  An Ignorant Alien Who Didn’t Know an Ass from an Elbow

  There could be little doubt that the most important thing in my life at the moment was Gaithuri, the donkey. What an intriguing, puzzling and, sometimes, infuriating creature she was. Without even trying.

  It hadn’t been what I could call an easy relationship but it appeared to have changed dramatically since my return from a journey to Heraklion which had lasted a good deal longer than I’d expected. I could only assume that she had missed me and was glad to see me back; or else she found the contrast between me and the Cretan farmer I left her with very much in my favour.

  We had got off to a bad start back in Matala. This may have been due to my ignorance of the nature and psychology of donkeys in general, and Gaithuri in particular. But the previous owner was to blame for quite a lot of it. Instead of telling me that she was only ten years old, he should ha
ve told me what a cantankerous old harridan she could be, and warned me that at the slightest provocation she would attempt to kick my guts out – what was left of them.

  I had bought her with her bridle on, and the other thing he should have told me was that with the bit in her mouth she was as docile as a sheep but without it she could be as wild as a mustang – a wild mustang.

  It was not a question of her not being tameable. She had grown old in the service of humans and the trouble was she knew too much about them. She subjected everyone she came in contact with, especially me, to instant psychoanalysis and reacted accordingly.

  Also she hated being made a fuss of. I would not forgive the other owner for telling me that if I wanted to make a friend of her, I should scratch her behind the ears occasionally. I did this at our first meeting with the bridle on and seemed to get a friendly if undemonstrative reception. I did it again the next morning without the bridle and she made a serious effort to kick me to little pieces. A friendly pat on the back would always produce a similar response.

  This wasn’t a case of xenophobia. I’d seen her do it to Greeks as well, and she couldn’t stand having Greek children anywhere near her; though from what I’d seen of Greek children and their donkeys, this was understandable. Her assessment of me obviously, was that I was an ignorant alien who didn’t know an ass from an elbow and that she could get away with anything. She had been trying to do so ever since.

  Her favourite form of deceit was to kid you that she was exhausted and couldn’t go any further. I first suspected this one afternoon when she had nearly persuaded me that she had too much weight on her back and was about to collapse. After frequent rests, born of my compassion, we came to a shallow stream about six feet wide at which she put on all four-wheel brakes and refused to budge.

  From the other side of the stream I pulled as hard as I dared without breaking the reins but couldn’t move her. This wasn’t exhaustion; this was sheer bloody-mindedness. Well, I wasn’t going to play tug-of-war the rest of the afternoon. I dropped the rein, went round behind her, and gave her a whack with my walking stick. It was a formidable instrument and it was the first time I had hit her.

  The result was startling. She went over that stream, baggage and all, as though it were Becher’s Brook, and never stopped running until halfway up the next long slope when she spied some of her favourite grass at the roadside. She was grazing hungrily by the time I arrived. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

  Towards the end of another tiring day, with me dragging the weary old woman along towards the evening’s resting place, I stopped at a carob tree to see if I could find any of the purple beans that Gaithuri likes so much. I found a dozen or so and stuffed them into my trouser pocket as a special treat for her evening meal.

  When we moved on I was surprised to find the rope between me and the donkey going slack. Up till then my arms had grown painful with continuous pulling. I increased my pace but the slack remained. I tried an experimental trot and the weary old woman trotted enthusiastically right behind me.

  This was astonishing enough to make me stop to give the matter serious consideration. She came right up to me with head outstretched and plucked a carob bean that was hanging halfway out of my pocket. I always kept a couple of carob beans handy after that and whenever I thought she was putting on her exhausted act I let one dangle from my pocket. It never failed though no doubt she’d get wise to it before too many more kilometres.

  I was pretty sure that if I had been told of all Gaithuri’s peculiarities of temperament and behaviour I would have been put off buying her. Which would have been a pity, because the shared experiences and hardships of the past weeks, and the shared food, of course, (she got three-quarters of every loaf I bought) had brought about a considerable change in our opinion of and attitude towards each other.

  I admired her independence and the toughness which enabled her to endure conditions which would destroy a more gentle spirit. She had the appetite of two horses and would much rather have spent a night outside in the freezing rain where she could graze than in a warm stable with very little to eat.

  She seemed impervious to the environment and was as much at home munching grass in a Minoan ruin or nibbling thyme in some dark gorge that would make an appropriate entrance to Hades as she would have been on her home slopes above Matala. In many moments of uncertainty and concern about the immediate future this imperturbability of Gaithuri’s had bolstered my own morale.

  I often wondered if she knew where she was. She couldn’t possibly have known where she was going yet there had been several occasions when we had actually disagreed about a choice of path and when she had refused to follow me along the one I had selected. In every case, she was right. I didn’t know how to explain this except in terms of inexplicable instinct, but I also had a suspicion that her sense of smell, which was acute, may have had something to do with it.

  Now we had arrived at a point at which our change of attitude could be defined as increasing respect on both sides as an essential prelude to the increase of affection. For I believed, with some reservations, that Gaithuri was actually beginning to like me. I knew I was beginning to like her. I also knew that at the slightest demonstration of friendliness on my part those hind legs would start lashing out.

  But she would come towards me as far as the tether would allow her whenever I approached and, although I realised this had got more to do with the piece of bread in my hand than anything else, she would also follow me around when she knew I hadn’t got anything.

  The fact was, we were beginning to compromise on each other’s quirks, tolerate each other’s weaknesses and even enjoy each other’s company.

  Haven’t you heard all that before somewhere? Probably at a marriage guidance bureau.

  Chapter 27

  An Explicit Manifestation of a Trackless Waste

  This was the day on which my expedition to circumperambulate Crete nearly came to a premature end. I had missed the path I had been sent on at dawn and found myself in an explicit manifestation of a trackless waste. Fine white sand held together by scrubby bushes so densely packed with thorns that I could walk on top of them – nature’s impenetrable last line of defence in her struggle to keep the earth in place against the allied forces of wind and rain and the goats of man.

  Finally, I came to the gate in the sheep fence, which I had been looking for and which I was to make sure I closed behind me. From there I could follow the morning’s directions accurately: two kilometres to another gate. “Close it behind you.” Three hundred metres to a fork in the path. Take the path along the sea to Lower Zakros.

  I never did reach the fork in the path. That final 300 metres was a wilderness of sharp-pointed boulders which I could only traverse by stepping from point to point using my walking stick as a third leg. And if that had not been impossible for the donkey the waist-high rock barrier I came to certainly was.

  There was no way round it between mountain crag and sea-plunging cliff and no alternative to going back. Full of gloomy thoughts about the two day march back along all the roads I had tried to avoid when I knew Lower Zakros was only two hours away along the coast, we reached the outskirts of our overnight village.

  A man’s voice interrupted my brooding. He was working in a tomato patch and of course he wanted to know where I was going and lots of other things besides like where was my wife and how many children did I have. Finally I was able to explain my situation and my disappointment.

  “But there is another path up the mountain here.”

  I stared unbelievingly at the precipices to which he was pointing.

  “There’s a path up there?”

  He indicated a tamarisk tree growing at the foot of a slight break in the range.

  “You will find the path at that tree,” he told me and added, when he saw the incredulity on my face. “It is all right. My wife went up there with a donkey two weeks ago to pick olives.”

  This was good news.

  At
the tamarisk tree, I found the path. It led me straight to what seemed to be a vertical wall of rock and then went up it. I stared in dismay at what lay ahead. Goats, yes; Tenzing Sherpa, yes; Gaithuri, no.

  I turned to look at her. She clearly shared my opinion. She was looking up that goat track and her ears were two exclamation marks of horror. Since one of the unwritten rules of this expedition was never to turn back unless there was nowhere else to go I physically compelled Gaithuri up the first ten feet of rock. After that she realised there could be no turning back (there literally wasn’t room to turn) and that the only way out was up.

  Having made up her mind, she was magnificent, though I never really lost my doubts that we would ever reach the top until we stood panting on the ultimate rim. There, as usual, the reward was waiting.

  I stood on the topmost tier of a vast amphitheatre, a bowl of pure space enclosed by the encircling summits. It was breathtaking. But I had precious little breath left for contemplation of anything but the thin brown thread of path that unrolled at my feet to disappear briefly in a riverbed at the bottom of the bowl and then to zigzag up the opposite slopes into a ravine, which, presumably, was the way out.

  The sun was at its zenith and I knew I would have to hurry if I was going to get out of the high hills by nightfall. But first the donkey must be refuelled with food and water. And so must I.

  We stopped in the shade of an olive tree in the river bottom where a stream of clear water chuckled and I put out a few handfuls of barley on a paper bag for Gaithuri, promising her a bucketful in the evening.

  Then I passed round behind her to reach the oranges and apples on the other side of the saddle. As I did so I made the mistake which I kept warning everybody against. I gave her an appreciative pat on the rump.

  The fierce snort from the front end did not give me time to get clear. It came simultaneously with rear end events. Loaded and harnessed as she was, she could not, fortunately, bring all her weapons into action. She let fly with one hind hoof and caught me on that round piece of bone that juts just below the knee. I went down as though I had been shot, and it felt as though I had been. I really thought my leg was in two pieces.