Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance

by Robert Crisp

  There was also, I hoped, another path along the coast that would take me to Sfakia. If there wasn’t it looked like Omalos after all. Unless I sold the donkey in Roumeli and ended my circumperambulation ingloriously by boat and bus.

  However, I didn’t want a debate about it then and there. I pointed to the laden saddle lying on the jetty.

  “Who will carry that if I sell the donkey?”

  It always ended the discussion.

  I turned to Manouli who, having discharged his duty to Roumeli, was anxious to set off for Gavdos, a low dark smudge on the horizon.

  “How much?” I asked. He hesitated just a moment.

  “200 drachmas.” Just under thirty pounds.

  I looked at him with surprise and disapproval. The normal fare for one human being was forty drachmas.

  I hoped that in paying without protest I hadn’t established an inflated precedent for other voyaging donkey owners.

  Chapter 37

  A Hell of a Day

  If that dawn at the mouth of the Samaria Gorge I had known what awaited me in the White Mountains, I think I would have settled for the afternoon ferry to Chora Sfakion – only an hour and a half’s boat ride along the coast.

  The previous evening I had been assured there was a good unmistakable path along the shoreline and that I would reach Sfakia in six hours.

  Well, the path was so good that I was about to lose at least six of the toenails that had so recently reappeared after their earlier bashing and was so unmistakable that I needed all the talents of Daniel Boone to follow it but I ended up at a 3,000-foot high village called Anopolis instead of down by the seaside at Sfakia.

  It all began well enough. Apart from the sand, that is. The gorge was still dark and sinister when we set off and for the first hour we plodded along the coast through sand. Every ten minutes I had to stop and empty the beach out of my boots. Underfoot conditions improved briefly when the path left the foreshore and began to climb among the pine trees. There is nothing nicer to walk on than a carpet of pine needles.

  But we didn’t arrive at this temporary deliverance without incident. At the end of the long beach a rockfall guarding the ascent into the mountains narrowed the path.

  A few moments of contemplation persuaded me that it might not be possible to get the donkey with its overhanging baggage through but that it was worth a try.

  Gaithuri, as usual, knew better than I did, but against her better judgment, she was coaxed into the narrow opening until she felt herself wedged. She must have suffered from a form of claustrophobia because as soon as she felt the pressure on either side she jerked back in panic and whirled around so violently that the baggage, saddle and all, were hurled to the ground.

  That took me a good twenty minutes of precious time to sort out in the course of which I discovered she had put her foot through the canvas of my folding bed. That was the first of four loading and unloading operations that day.

  At one stage, late in the afternoon, I started trembling at thirty yards of narrow ledge with a fearsome chasm on one side, a sheer wall of rock on the other. I was so frightened that Gaithuri would get scraped off the mountain (would I have let go of the rope?) that I repacked my belongings so that the load was all perched on top of her saddle. She looked more like a high-rise development project than a donkey but I achieved my purpose. The path repeatedly disintegrated, whenever we emerged on some plateau into scores of goat tracks and scores of goats.

  What made it all the more frustrating was the frequent vision of Sfakia nestling restfully in the sunshine way down there just beyond the next headland and the knowledge that I was constantly going up when I should have been going down and north instead of east.

  When I realised the path I was on led to a flock of houses on the high mountainside, I gave up all hope of reaching Sfakia that day. It was not just a matter of time and distance. We were both exhausted when we struggled up to the first house and I was all for establishing Base Camp One for the night.

  There was the usual hospitable reception from the lady of the house and her family. I asked if there was a cafe in the village where I could spend the night.

  “No. There is no cafe here. We would be happy to give you a bed but my husband is away. I am sorry.”

  It may sound an odd argument to more sophisticated Western ears but I had heard it a number of times on my way round the island.

  “But,” she added, “why don’t you go on to Anopolis? It has restaurants and rooms to rent and is only one hour-with-the-feet.”

  “Is the path good? Better than the path from Roumeli?”

  “Much better. As good as a road.”

  It sounded a reasonable proposition and I was relieved at the prospect of being within an hour of Anopolis where I knew there was a good road down to Sfakia and even a bus service to Chania. I wanted to get out of those mountains for a while.

  I gave Gaithuri half an hour’s rest, supplemented by a bundle of lucerne from our hostess.

  We could both have done with an hour or two, but I was less concerned about our physical state than about the ominous black cloud masses which were already hiding the summits, and the gradually increasing rumble of distant thunder. It looked like the first rains of the season had arrived and I didn’t particularly want them to fall on me.

  Instead of being at Anopolis one hour later I was still climbing and all for establishing Base Camp Two there and then had it not been for the imminent threat of a violent storm. The path underfoot was good enough but it proceeded at an incredible angle which limited movement to ten minute bursts with five for recovery, and twisted and snaked alarmingly round the edges of precipices and rims of ravines that had me sweating with vertigo as well as exhaustion.

  Near thunder rolled and reverberated through the gorges and vivid flashes of lightning struck the mountaintops with whiplash fury. There was a smell of sulphur and brimstone in the air and I began to feel like something from the Ride of the Valkyries. Gaithuri did not seem to be emotionally involved but she was stopping more and more often just when I wanted her to go faster before the rains came. They were moving towards me over the mountains like a grey wall.

  In different circumstances I would have found the scenery and the whole environment of the storm breathtaking in its awesome beauty. But I’d had a surfeit of scenery for one day like too much Lobster Newberg or too much Ernest Hemingway. All I wanted was to get to Anopolis and one of its restaurants as soon as possible.

  It was a vain hope but I was, thank heaven, away from the precipices by the time the first big drops hit. For the first time since the previous March, I put on my lightweight weather-proof which very soon proved that it wasn’t.

  As soon as she felt herself getting wet Gaithuri stopped in her tracks. How could an animal lay claim to intelligent thought when it did that sort of thing?

  We had a real tug-of-war on the top of the mountain and pretty soon the gorges were reverberating with other than thunder echoes as I hurled Billingsgate curses at that obstinate head.

  It was a contest of wills which I had to win or drown and it went on for another full hour until I had literally dragged her into Anopolis and its friendly electric light and distorted television screens.

  It had been a hell of a day. One that I would look back on as the most strenuous and frightening of the whole journey – unless there was worse to come.

  Chapter 38

  A Mixture of Sadness and Joy

  The clatter of a bucket awoke me. I stuck my head out of my sleeping bag into a cold dawn knowing exactly what was happening. It was my donkey, Gaithuri, sticking her nose into the remnants of the bucket of water which was the final chore I performed for her before turning in for the night.

  It was a familiar noise and I had wakened to it often enough when sleeping out. There had been no room at the inn in the small seaside village I had staggered into the previous afternoon. This followed Gaithuri’s refusal to clamber over a heap of rubbled rock on the short cut along the b
each that I had hoped would lead me quickly to journey’s end at Matala.

  This dawn was not like the many other dawns of my walk around Crete. This was the last one. Matala, where it all began and where it would all finish, was only four easy hours away. It was with very mixed feelings that I saddled and loaded Gaithuri for the last time. How many mornings and middays and evenings during a whole year of continuous movement had I gone through this same ritual?

  Each item of baggage had its own fixed place into which it had been fitted so often that it almost went there of its own volition.

  Each piece seemed to have acquired a personality of its own that was part mine and part the donkey’s and part an absorption of all the sunrises and sunsets and the myriad other experiences they had shared with us.

  Even the ropes seemed to weave and tighten through their established twists and knots without persuasion from my fingers.

  My thoughts drifted back through the years searching for identification of my own emotions as I looked down on a day that would bring so much to an end. A mixture of sadness and joy.

  The recognition eluded me until I had travelled back in time to my schooldays. That was it: a mingling of all the feelings of the last day of term with the last day of the holidays.

  Gaithuri was her usual indifferent self. There was no way (at least to my knowledge) she could know that this was the last day of a journey that would make her the first donkey ever to have walked around the perimeter of Crete.

  It was just the beginning of another day’s march for her in the footsteps, literally, of a foreigner who had become more familiar to her than the Cretan family with whom she had grown up. In the gathering light we set off along the beach. In half an hour it was light enough to read the notice – not a very emphatic one – indicating that the sands ahead were part of a Greek Air Force landing ground and prohibited to the public.

  “What the hell,” I said to Gaithuri, “I can’t read Greek anyway.” And plodded on.

  At first, I paid no attention to the noise of the helicopter. Anybody who spent any length of time on that coast had to become more or less immune to helicopter and aircraft noises whenever the American Sixth Fleet was in those waters – which was far too often.

  I was just beginning to think that this particular noise was getting too close for comfort when my arm was nearly jerked out of its socket as Gaithuri suddenly reared back.

  A startled look upward as I felt the sudden downdraught (downgale more like) revealed that a helicopter was not only directly above us but about to land on us.

  I had little time to attend to helicopters. Gaithuri showed every intention of taking off herself in the direction of Agia Galini on the other side of the bay. In which case she would damn well have to take me with her. I was certainly not going to let go.

  Perceiving the commotion he was causing, the pilot sportingly moved ahead and up a bit and succeeded in enveloping me in a minor sandstorm.

  Through the murk I could dimly and briefly see the Greek Air Force insignia and also the pilot making unmistakable signals that we should return whence we had come.

  It was a superfluous gesture. All I wanted to do was restrain Gaithuri from going there too fast. The helicopter sheered off with some friendly waves from the cockpit and some obvious hilarity and another crisis was over.

  It proved to be the last.

  Back unwillingly but willy-nilly on the tarmac of the main road I was diverted fortuitously by a barely legible sign pointing its ancient finger along a footpath which said Phaestos.

  It led me mysteriously through aisles and naves of bamboo and palm and olive to the patterned plinths and patios of the great Minoan ruin.

  From there we followed another little-used track to the saddle between the mountains from which I, at last, looked down on the tree-shaded huts and villas and tavernas of Matala.

  One more hour and I was being greeted in the village square by handshakes and claps on the back and the familiar phrase of welcome after long absence: “Kalos sas iltharlay” if I can spell it the way it sounds.

  While I was trying to prevent them from slapping Gaithuri on the back as well, Andreas, the proprietor of the Glasshouse Hotel ran up to me with a bottle of Greek champagne in his hands.

  “An Englishman and his wife were here two months ago,” he said. “They told me to give you this when you arrived.”

  I felt it and told him to put it in the fridge for half an hour. Later it was far from the only toast I drank to unknown benefactors, absent friends and, for all I cared, unknown warriors.

  But first, there was Gaithuri to be attended to. The only cause she had for celebration was having the load and saddle taken off her back.

  Then I led her, as usual, to a patch of sand where she had a delicious roll. Finally I tethered her to the telephone pole in front of my hut on the hillside where there was a patch of reeds and where the winter rains had produced a fine crop of grass and edible weeds.

  I bought a loaf of bread and the largest apple I could find to supplement half a bucket of grain, and tried to explain when I saw the look of surprise and delight in her eye, that this was in lieu of the bottle of champagne in which I regretted she could not join me.

  “Your wanderings are over, Gaithuri mu,” I found myself saying, and wondering how long it would be before I stopped thinking of her as a talking companion as well as a walking companion.

  Suddenly, I recalled a poem by a bloke named T. S. Eliot:

  “We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.”

  Gaithuri took a big bite at the apple I held at her lips and reflected gravely as she chewed. Whatever she was thinking she kept to herself.

  Chapter 39

  Donkey for Sale – Speaks English

  Since I couldn’t take Gaithuri with me when I left Crete the time was bound to come when, in her own interests, I would have to dispose of her.

  There had been so many cash offers for her on our way round the island that I didn’t anticipate any difficulty in finding a buyer. What I did anticipate was some difficulty in finding a buyer who would please us both.

  I would say the common factors required by Gaithuri and me – and there was no need for any prolonged consultation – were an adequate supply of food and water, a minimum of labour and an absence of small boys and girls.

  The third requirement may need some explanation. The relations between Greeks and their animals were curious and in many cases would have been disapproved of, especially by the English.

  It was strictly a working arrangement and although the Greek farmer may often have seemed to treat his beast of burden harshly he was fully aware that without a sufficient supply of energy-giving food he was not going to have an energetic animal.

  Also it would have been very wrong to confuse a Cretan donkey such as Gaithuri with the ones you’d have seen on England’s summer beaches. On the whole, master and donkey in Crete understood each other pretty well and got on well enough together.

  As far as small boys and girls were concerned they seemed to think that all donkeys – and dogs and cats for that matter – were there to be kicked or to have stones thrown at them.

  Gaithuri hated children and this hatred was obviously founded in unhappy experience. She would lay back her ears and snort with rage whenever any child under the age of twelve came anywhere near her.

  One of my constant worries on my journey was that Gaithuri would lash out (as indeed she often did) and catch some unwary child on the head.

  The fact that Gaithuri ended up very much preferring me to her human compatriots demonstrated that I had introduced some new elements into her life that were clearly appreciated and which revealed perhaps the need for a general improvement in the living conditions of all Cretan donkeys.

  It was this which now complicated the matter of her disposal. What most of her fellow d
onkeys accepted as a normal pattern of existence would now be judged by Gaithuri against a different sort of relationship.

  And I didn’t think she would like the change.

  My job was to find somebody who would treat her more or less in the same way as I had and naturally I thought, at first, of other foreigners, preferably English, who were walking and hitching round Crete. At the same time I couldn’t help feeling that Gaithuri had done enough walking for a while and had earned a long period of peaceful, well-fed immobility.

  So it was more to test the market than to find an immediate customer that I spelled out in capitals on a sheet of white cardboard DONKEY FOR SALE SPEAKS ENGLISH, and took Gaithuri for a stroll through the village with the sign prominently displayed.

  It was, as an attraction, more successful than I had expected. A quick crowd of young people gathered round us.

  “Hi. How many dollars you asking?” a bearded student asked me.

  Before I could stop him or shout a warning he had slapped Gaithuri heartily on the rump. The reaction was predictable and immediate. Her ears went flat, her head went down, her back buckled and her hind hooves flashed out all in one simultaneous movement.

  The student, an alert young man, saw it coming and received the double impact going away like a boxer rolling with a punch. Fortunately, also, he had turned his back on the donkey.

  But he made no further proposition nor did anybody else and that particular form of sales promotion was hastily abandoned.

  That night I talked the situation over with my friend Xenophon who kept a taverna in the village and who had a small farm on the outskirts.

  I soon came to the conclusion that if Xenophon would buy Gaithuri the three requirements would be fulfilled. A kindly man, he would be sure to feed her properly and not overwork her, and there were no small children around his farm who might abuse her. Also, and this was the biggest advantage of all, I would be able to see her every day whenever I was in Matala.