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's not known if he took any water for the trip. Symi is a small island that is mostly barren rough 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. It is presumed that 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 own 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 off 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 10am, 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 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 4am and wasn't found until after 10am, 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, and that he 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 the state of him 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 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 McDonalds' hamburgers in hand, 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 knitted 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 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 Pefkos. Sometimes the goats jumped over garden walls and decimated gardens. I complained to the mayor that the village needed to do something to keep the goats out of the local properties. 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 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 wrist watch.
As we grow up, most of us learn to respect the power of nature, be it land, sea, or weather, but miscalculations are made and the results can be disastrous and even 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.
