The Throumbes of Thassos

Tassos of Thassos, whose olives we shall pick, has been drinking tsipouro at a wedding all night - until just hours ago, in other words - when he greets us at the port we can see he's a cheerful disaster. The list of things Tassos Kouzis can do is daunting: With equal proficiency he manages to be a restaurateur, farmer, shepherd, octopus fisherman, rabbit hunter, traditional dancer, and wedding singer. The fact that he served in the Greek Special Forces means he has still other skills he can't disclose. On top of it all, he's indisputably handsome - black hair, close-cropped beard, irrepressible smile - and his dashing good looks help him play his various roles with perfect sprezzatura. hurts me to drive slowly, he tells us, so put on your seatbelts. In spite of his hangover, he attacks each switchback with a surge of acceleration. We zoom past the massive marble quarries, huge that the cranes and bulldozers at the bottom look like toys; through the village of Panagia, where the competing, identical kafenia in the main square are opening simultaneously; past three deserted beach towns; around two herds of errant sheep and one meandering cow. Abrupdy, as we round the southern shoulder of the island, the dense shag of pine and oak gives way to a barren forest of boulders that drops jaggedly down to the sea. Tassos pulls up next to the guardrail on the wrong side of the road we can orient ourselves. The wind is blowing hard from the southeast that every cloud has been shoved up against the mountains on the mainland behind us, making visible what is usually obscured: Samothraki, most haunted and pagan of all Greek islands, which agitates the horizon like a purple gash. Beyond that we can see the faintly pulsating outline of Asia Minor, the low molars of Limnos, and after two more bends in the road we spy in the distance pyramidical Mt. Athos, sacted home of a thousand monks and hermits and not a single woman (legend has it no woman has set foot on the peninsula since the Virgin Mary herself). It was just a few degrees above freezing on the mainland at Keramoti, where I waited for the ferry with my brother Aaron and my friend George Kaltsas two hours earlier. Even the seagulls seemed unwilling to budge from their perches along the sea wall. We huddled in a closet-sized kafenion on the fishing dock, its proprietor trying to light a little wood stove in the middle of the room when we entered. He boiled sweet mountain tea and Greek coffee for us on propane burners. Aaron, who had just arrived in Greece from California, sat in a stupor, his hood pulled over his head. George Kaltsas manages a hotel in Kavala, the largest port city in eastern Macedonia, just across the water from Thassos. The air of bureaucratic efficiency he gives off at the hotel belies his brooding, philosophical nature. Some years before, he welcomed me to the Hotel Oceanis with truly Homeric hospitality. After setding into my room, I was invited to join George for a bottle of superb local wine and a table full of expertly prepared mezedes, the tapas-like dishes that make up the bulk of Greek dining. Nothing was requested of me until after I'd been properly fed and watered; then I was asked to tell my story (poetry, perpetual education, Greece, poetry, Greece), which turned out to be much less interesting than the story George had to tell. Just shy of thirty, having discovered he had bladder cancer, George turned his back on chemotherapy, the job that was killing him, and even his family. One morning he stripped off most of his clothes and swam from the mainland to Thassos, where he landed dripping saltwater and with nothing but a few drachmas in the pocket of his swim trunks. Fired by a newly adopted Zorbatic philosophy (Nietzsche filtered through the novels of Nikos Kazan tzakis), he lived a life of solitude, vegetarianism, and manual labor, all the while opening his senses to a routine of simple pleasures. For a year, he worked out the kinks in his existence on the island, then returned to his still-faithful wife and children, his cancer in remission. …