I'd made a final decision to visit the peak of Athens. The highest point here in town. A welcoming enough moniker of Lykavittos - "Hill of the Wolves".
Left to my own devices, I always make the choices that make the most sense to me. No different from anyone else you would say, except for the fact that I'm always wrong. My internal common sense is so skewed from what The Right Way Is, that I end up in situations like this one. If you've got a map of a city, and you have a hill you intend to ascend, a dark bloch on your cartography, you would think that following the proper named road closest to that bloch would lead you to the nearest easy path up said hill. But not in this world, apparently.
I wired back and forth on streets until I'd reached the very edge of Constructed Civilization. Here I am at what appears to be the closest I possibly can get to where I want to go, and there's nothing. No sign, path, beaten track, or even the sounds of an elevator nearby, like I was told the would be by my teacher. In normal situations, you pull back and regroup. Get your directions right and hit it again, tomorrow. Luckily, whatever it is that works my off-center Muse when it comes to normal common sense also applies to what normal people usually do in normal situations. The press of time helped keep me from thinking straight as well. The Point of this little stroll was to take in what was far and wide agreed on as the best place to see the sunset in all of Athens. So the creeping purple of the sky was like a slow falling gullotine, and if I didn't hurry right, I'd have nothing to show for all this walking.
Taking off from what can only complimentally be called a backyard of some stranger's house, I went up. Nothing else to do. Find a hole in the fence. Go up. Ignore the rustles in the bushes, sounds of animals that don't quite sound like dogs. It's just your imagination. Watch people on roof-tops within eye shot of catching you, and tell yourself that it's not their property, none of their business, why would they bust you? you tell yourself as you find yourself creeping lower to the ground anyway. Sandals in brown-green underbrush, since my Logic avoids shoes as well, no matter how bad the trek I'm undertaking might end up being. Slight thorns, gnarled branches that one would usually avoid, I get to grab whole handfulls of, tightly, for levers up. Oh this is going great.
Hearing voices, my imagination runs away with me: Running for my life from brown-skinned foreign tongued kidnappers waiting to use my skin and bookbag for their knapsacks, I keep my eyes moving and my ears peeled. I find enough road to decide to follow, taking every fork, as long as it looks like it's going up more than the one I left off.
Eventually, I reach a paved parking lot. Closer to civilization, for sure. Those stairs go up. Why not? Up. At least now it's really steps, but The Orb is going lower. Keep walking, keep an eye out for the more upper paths. Looks like this is the only one. I'm on the right track. Resturaunt, but there is higher. Porch, but still higher. Now I'm there. There's a church, and about 40 tourists on the gated edges, here for the same thing I am. The sticking point for me is that I look like the only person there alone. I feel myself pretending to hate them for crowding God's sights with zoom lenses and bad t-shirts, but being honest with myself, I knew that if I had company I'd be ruining some solitary pilgrim's trip just as much as they are for me. It's not solitude I want, it's company. Their crowd is just reminding me more, which is why I wish they were gone and would leave me alone. So I wipe the cranky out of my brain and take a seat, near a group of American kids (you can judge a book by its cover a lot more than people would probably want to admit).
Watching the slow swoop of the Sun, I didn't think much. Trading jokes with the kids next to me - "Make sure you don't miss it, it might not come around again." "Sunrises are the harder ones. They don't happen nearly as often." - I watch the effect I've always liked with sunrises over mountains, where you can actually see the range even farther than you would've in the full light. Some kind of dark shading effect, where direct sunlight keeps them hidden somehow. Falling between a wedge in the two, the sun makes a rounded and 4-sided diamond, llike a doorway to a whole other place. Like I've caught a look through a closing hole in the canvas, and behind it all is a bright light you weren't supposed to see. I didn't even want to explore it. I didn't want to go there. I was just feeling lucky I'd found it and seen it.
The walk back down took somewhere around an hour due to a habit of mine to want to take both paths when I reach a fork in the road. I doubled back around, left, right, and double-tracking, looking like I was lost if someone had been watching. I happened on a small ledge, no more than a 3 foot drop down, and I heard barking and running, heading my direction. I turned around a little, but before I'd completely turned my back, the yellow-colored mountain mutt that had made the racket that had made my heart jump for .00013 seconds came into view. He looked at me long enough to make sure I didn't want a fight - my half-retreated pose probably hinted at least that much - and walked back without giving me another thought, to the thing he seemed to have been protecting. Nothing more than a friend of his. I couldn't tell if it was a female mate, or just a best friend partner, but either way, the two of them wandered off, leaving me by myself again.
I sat on the ledge and thought. Mostly about my view. To my 3 o'clock, about where the dogs had disappeared, there was garbage. But with a little imagination, I thought I saw structure, enough of a circle, for The Gears to run again. I imagined that this was, is, had been a camp. Something for the very gypsies I'd thought were going to kidnap and kill me on the other side of the hill. The area looked lived in. At least long enough until the next hassle. And even if it wasn't, I thought about how it could've been. How a person can learn to use just about anywhere as at least a place to fall asleep and wake up again. And my mind went out further. I thought of Hunter S. Thompson and his book on the Hell's Angels. How could someone get in with people like that and tell their story? I didn't know how, but I wanted to. This was a flash of some kind of inspiration - a kicked-out left for dead and worthless part from The Civilized World that had some magic spells, some Habits of the Highly Effective People of their brood, that worked for them. And I wanted to know them. What made them different but the same with us. They still found a way to work their hustle and not get shoved off the food chain. I saw my expose that I'd probably never write, my fact-gathering and roving reporting that might not ever happen. But I saw myself, in my mind's eye, working for The Story, because I had to know it. All of it.
In time my head came back together, and I made my way to the bottom of the hill. Taking twists and lost turns of course, but not coming up with anything as interesting.
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