On The Rocks

Recently,  British TV personality and author Michael Mosley died while on holiday on the island of Symi in Greece.  He had been with his wife and friends at a beach they had arrived at by boat.  Sometime after midday, Mr. Mosley decided to walk back to the town of Symi.  It was a 40°C day, and though Mr. Mosley had taken an umbrella with him for shade, it is not known if he took any water for the trip.   Symi is a small island of mostly barren bedrock, with a form that could be a many-petalled flower, a coastline of sharply indented deep bays with tiny beaches and barren points of land.  On his hike back to Symi, Mr. Mosley reached a small village of Pedi, from where it was a 2km hike over a saddle of hills with a rise of about 100 meters. Because Mr. Mosley was unfamiliar with the island's geography and hadn't taken his phone or a map with him, he seemed to have ignored this direct route and taken a path that led along the narrow bay he had just traversed one side of.  Perhaps on such a hot day, he thought he would stay near the sea instead of making the climb that would have led him to Symi.  Along the route he walked, he may have seen far below, another beach with a cafe and umbrellas.  When he discovered that his path didn't lead anywhere and he would not be able to hike around the point, which had become steeper as he went along, he doubled back with the intention of going down to the cafe.  Unfortunately, he lost his footing and rolled down the almost vertical rocky slope, coming to rest beside a stone wall that marked the perimeter of the beach property.  His body was spotted from a boat four days after his disappearance because it had ended up behind the perimeter wall.  It was estimated that he died on the same afternoon he fell.

This tragedy has stirred up difficult memories for me because it is so close to what could have happened to my nephew when he visited me on the island of Rhodes in the late 1990's.  He was a young man, and as soon as he arrived, I had a talk with him about Lindos in summer being a place where, if he indulged in bad behaviour, there would be nobody to lecture him about it when he got home.  He should behave like an adult and set his own limits so he was not one of those sun-roasted cocktail-swigging casualties who had scraped their way along the white walls as they stumbled home.  Sometimes they didn't make it to their accommodation and passed out in the middle of the street, where the other tourists, after checking that the drunk was still breathing, would step over the casualties on their way home.  

One night, my nephew Ben met some people in a Lindos bar and went with them to their apartment in Pefkos so they could continue their party.  At the first sign of morning, my nephew decided to go back to the girlfriend he had left in Lindos, so with a bottle of Sprite in hand, he set off for Lindos on foot.  Rather than walk home 5km along the paved road, he decided to take a shortcut.  Unfortunately, he had not looked at a map and assumed that Lindos was "just over the hill" from Pefkos, which it is not.  With this in mind, he began climbing the steep rocky hillside behind Pefkos.  Somewhere up the steep slope, he lost his footing and fell, injuring himself worse than he thought.  After sitting for a while to recover his senses and decide what to do next, he started again on his upward trajectory, but he fell again.  He remembered waking up again and trying to get up and carry on, but had trouble doing so.  Sometime later in the morning, perhaps around 10 am, a carpenter named Manolis Koukouras, who has a house at the bottom of the slope, was out on his back terrace having a coffee when he thought he saw something move far away up the hill.  He thought it might be a plastic bag stuck on some rocks and thorn bushes, so he called one of his sons to look.  With binoculars, they searched the hillside until they found the strange object, and after passing the binoculars back and forth, decided that what they could see might be larger than they thought.  There seemed to be some movement from whatever it was, perhaps a goat that had fallen.  Manolis sent one of his sons up the hill for a look, and he soon came running back to report there was a man up there, a tourist who was dazed and injured, with a face covered in blood and who was unable to remain steady on his feet. He was thirsty because he had lost his bottle of Sprite in the first fall.  Since Ben had set off about 4 am and wasn't found until after 10 am, he had been up there for 6 hours in the morning summer sun.  Ben insisted he had only been there for five minutes.

That day, I had been in Rhodes shopping, but when I got back to Lindos, everyone was looking for me to tell me about Ben, who was in Rhodes hospital.  I jumped in a borrowed car to go find him, and caught up with him in a bed in the emergency department of Rhodes Hospital.  His head was covered in dried blood, his arms and legs were scraped and dirty, and he had lost his shoes.  When I was finally sure it was him, because I wasn't convinced at first, he immediately asked where his shoes were.  They were Vans, and he had bought them especially for the trip.  Considering his state, it was surprising he was so concerned about his shoes.  An air ambulance had already been arranged to take him to the hospital in Athens because some of his injuries were serious enough that they required specialized attention. 

Back in Lindos that evening, I managed to arrange a flight to Athens for the next morning so I could follow Ben's progress in Athens.  I already knew from visiting acquaintances in Rhodes hospital that families were expected to assume some of the workload of patient care, and to supply extra food and drink if the patient wanted it.  The hospital in Athens was an old hospital, where we were introduced to the future prime minister Karamanlis, who was visiting hospitals on behalf of his party.  Like the rest of us, he had no choice but to overlook the battered condition of the place.  Ben was conscious when we were able to visit him, and though he had a bandage wrapped around his head, he was as dirty and blood-covered as I had seen him in Rhodes Hospital.  As next of kin, one of the doctors called me into his office to tell me that Ben had fractured his skull and that the next few days would be critical in determining how well he did.  He also cautioned me that Ben may not make a good recovery, that his brain might be permanently damaged, and that perhaps his behaviour would change.  On the second day, we visited with McDonald's hamburgers in hand, and Ben was in the same condition we had found him the day before.  Peeling back the neck collar that had been on him since he had first been put in an ambulance, I saw he had a huge gash on his neck, which looked to be festering as if it had not even been cleaned.  When I asked the nursing staff why nobody had attended to him and cleaned him up, I was told they didn't have time.  When I pointed out the ugly wound on his neck, I was assured they were doing what they could, but that his head injury was of more concern than the neck wound.  One of the nurses was kind enough to inform me that it was possible to hire a private nurse to come in to look after Ben, and I immediately asked the nursing staff to organize it for me.  The next morning, a kind and motherly Romanian lady was there when we went to visit Ben. She had been there since the evening before, had washed his entire body, cleaned up the dried blood on his face, dressed his neck wound, and made sure he stayed hydrated and fed.  Things were looking less desperate, so we could only hope his fractured skull knit together properly with no complications.

Ben was in the hospital for 5 days and was discharged into my care back in Rhodes. He could have gone back to Canada, but didn't intend to cancel the rest of his summer vacation.  Although he carried on drinking too much along with most of the rest of the tourists his age, he never went hill climbing again. The aftermath of this was that although he seemed not to have any permanent damage from the broken skull, he was deaf in one ear, which put paid to the career he had intended to have in the military.  He also still has a keloid scar on his neck that looks like an unsightly gash and needs treatment and reduction occasionally. 

When I heard about the disappearance of Michael Mosley, I was reminded of how treacherous a sunny hillside under a blue Greek sky can be.  It also brought back to me the fate of a handsome Greek man I knew who had goats that grazed on the hillsides around Lindos and sometimes jumped over garden walls, decimating gardens.  I complained to the mayor that the village needed to do something to keep the goats out of the local gardens and houses.  One of my clients had woken one morning to find a huge, smelly billy goat in her bedroom, chewing on her sundress.  I told the mayor it shouldn't be us who were living behind concentration camp barbed wire fences, but the goats.  A few years later, the owner of the goats disappeared, only to be found a week later, deceased at the bottom of a crevasse where he had fallen while chasing after one of his wild flock. He had injured himself in the fall, but the crevasse he was in had a false bottom, so he was not visible from above.  A searcher eventually noticed the glint of his wristwatch.
 
As we grow up, most of us learn to respect the power of nature, whether it be land, sea, or weather, but miscalculations are made, and the results can be disastrous and tragic.  My sympathy goes out to anyone who has experienced this kind of tragedy, and I am aware that if it hadn't been for the attentive carpenter who noticed something strange on a hillside, my nephew Ben, who now has two teenage children, might not be around today.  Others who have ventured out of Lindos Bay on pedalos or air mattresses have been carried far out to sea and had to be rescued.  The beautiful scenery makes people forget that they are not in an enclosed, protected resort, but in a place with a climate, landscape, and sea conditions they know nothing about, and which can, if taken lightly, prove deadly.

The Banality of Evil

Nothing is good or evil in itself.  Evil is a concept that people who are not religious have trouble understanding.  It can be thought of as an absence of good, but action or inaction can push things to one side or the other.  When they hear the word evil, non-religious people might think of torturers, murderers, dictators, or regimes, but what puts these villains on the wrong side of the fence is their actions.  Those who hold power are adept at justifying their actions, whether they are for the common good or the common ill, but their actions will be judged negatively by the population if they are based only on expediency, selfishness, ignorance, or neglect. 

The Italian media was recently occupied by the case of a 35-year-old mother who, in a hot July, went on a trip to another city with a new boyfriend and left her 18-month-old child to die of thirst and hunger.  She originally gave birth to the baby in a washroom because she didn't know she was pregnant, and had been heard to say the baby was an obstacle to getting on with her life.  She defended her neglect by saying, "Nobody liked me when I was a child. I had no friends." Using her own pain, she used these mental gymnastics to allow her helpless daughter to die.  Some mothers suffer from postpartum depression and have been known to kill their children.  Was her inaction evil?  Was it a mental illness?  

People who do evil are aware of the consequences of their actions, but mentally ill people are not always aware of them. The evil one is assumed guilty, while the person with serious psychological problems is not. Psychiatric conditions are considered to be involuntary, while in behavioural disorders, choices are made.  One of the choices available is inaction with full knowledge of the probable consequences. If a person has a toothache, they can go to a dentist to have the problem resolved, or they can do nothing.  Their inaction will probably result in even more pain, but there may be factors that stop them from going to the dentist, like fear or finances.  Their teeth might completely decay, and they will have painful abscesses, but they will not act, as if by closing their eyes and ignoring the evidence, magical thinking will make the problem go away. 

The mother who allowed her baby to die was able to convince herself to stay away from home longer than she knew was reasonable, but she deceived herself into believing everything would turn out fine.  She left the child with two bottles of milk, two of water, and one of iced tea for the days she was away, but when day three came around, and she couldn't get a ride home, she figured the baby would be good for another day.  If anyone she knew asked her about the child, she told them her sister was looking after her daughter. She was afraid to ask her new companion to take her home because he didn't want to know about the baby and was full of insults about her stupidity.  When enough days had passed, she began to doubt her own fantasy that her sister or mother had gone into her flat to look after the child.  If the child was already dead, she reasoned, there was no hurry to go home, so she stayed away for six days, while a small part of her brain continued to believe she would find the child alive. The deceased child had eaten part of her diaper.  The mother said she never meant to harm her daughter.

"I was worried about her," she said, "but I was afraid of my boyfriend's reaction. I was afraid to talk to him because he was aggressive. He said he loved me, but it wasn't true. He just used me.”

She claimed she was abused as a child at the hands of a family friend, shunned by her family, and grew up sad and solitary.  There were drunken parental fights, missed birthday parties, no gifts, and no school friends because the other students thought she was too serious.  She married young but miscarried, and her husband divorced her, saying the miscarriage was her fault.  Her family disputed all of these claims and said she was a normal child, perhaps on the slow side. 

As a writer, I am curious what her thoughts were while she put off going home to save her child.  "If my boyfriend is in a better mood tomorrow, I'll ask him again if he'll drive me home. I could take the train, but that costs money that I'd rather spend on other stuff.  Maybe the baby hasn't finished all of her bottles.  I left her five, which should be enough for at least two days.  Yesterday would have been the right day to go back, but my boyfriend was really affectionate in the afternoon and asked me to stay for another day.  He told me if I loved him, I could stay, so that's what I did.  Sometimes the baby slept so soundly she went through the night without a bottle, and that was ten hours, so she could go for a while before she got hungry.  She was a chubby little thing anyway, everyone said so, but I really must go tomorrow one way or the other."

"My sister must have stopped by.  She knows where I leave the key.  Did I leave it there the last time I used it?  The baby would be so happy to see my sister because she would have been lonely and calling for me. I knew what being lonely was like.  I'd gone away for a day or two before, and the baby wasn't any the worse when I got back.  She'd have to be an independent sort to make her way in this world.  Maybe she'd even found her way out of her crib.  She could stand up if she held onto something, and if she was hungry or thirsty enough, she could get out."

"I really should get home, no matter what my boyfriend says.  I'll ask him again tomorrow.  The baby must be really hungry by now.  I would be starving after five days, but then she's just small and doesn't need much to keep her going. For sure, my sister has passed by, and the baby is all right.  It would have been polite if she had phoned me to tell me what she'd done, but then she was one of those who said I should have given the baby up for adoption, so I don't trust her. My phone is out of minutes, and I asked to borrow my boyfriend's phone to call my sister, but he told me I needed to learn to be independent.  What did I care about my family?  They'd never done anything for me.  He was right.  If I called my sister and she hadn't checked on the baby, she'd give me an earful I didn't want to hear."

The ability of a person to convince themselves of something contrary to all logic is boundless, even if it means the death of an innocent.  "They probably had it coming," they'd say.   People are killed in so many tragic circumstances that one wouldn't think the human race needed to add to the carnage by engaging in wars for territory or resources.  The way humans can mobilize their populations to go off and kill other people is the same way that humans can kill their fellow man, which is by "othering".  If a person, a tribe, or a nation are not like us, it is easy to put them into a box called "them."  They are less human than we are.  If these people look different from me, dress differently, have different customs, worship differently, it is easier to keep them at a distance, and our fear of the unknown encourages that.  Governments are adept at manipulating people into believing that the others are the bad guys, while an "other" government does the same.  Judging others as separate from ourselves is easy to do, and some factions, let's call them the evil ones, or the bad actors, encourage us to exaggerate our differences instead of appreciating them.  So-called evil, or incorrect behaviour, can lurk just under the surface of any of us and is usually kept under control by society's expectations, but it doesn't take much of a scratch in the surface of a supposedly good citizen to reveal a darker, nastier, selfish side.  The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde illustrates this.  The surface of Dr. Jekyll's respectable life is disturbed when he ingests a drug.  Although the good doctor can't remember the details of the reprehensible things he did as Mr. Hyde, this does not excuse the fact that he was the one who took the wrong action. He, and not Mr. Hyde, is the guilty party because the sane Dr. Jekyll knew there was a risk, but he took it anyway.  Hitler and his ilk knew the consequences of their actions but did them anyway.  Whether we are soldiers marching off to a so-called patriotic war or shrinkers from truth and responsibility, the scales of good and evil can easily be tipped in the wrong direction. 

When the court gave the neglectful mother a life sentence, they accepted the theory of evil and ruled that although the mother had certain delusions, she was sane enough to know that what she did was wrong.  Once the sentencing was over and the mother was back in prison, she went on a hunger strike, which some thought was fittingly ironic, but she was in the hands of the judicial system, which didn't permit her to make a serious error of judgment on their watch.  They reasoned that she should be alive to remember what an evil thing she had done.