It’s half an hour until the end of my shift at Athens International Airport and I’m thinking about tomorrow, thrilled there’s a severe storm warning for eastern Attica, where my family and I live with seven cats and two dogs. My plan is to ride my off-road motorcycle to work through the storm.
A Canadian woman in her fifties places her Sampsonite near my baggage wrapping stand and sits down on the pay-to-weigh scale. I don’t say anything. Let her rest, I tell myself. At the back of my mind is the worry my supervisor, Kostas, might pass by and see this. I know he wouldn’t take kindly to it.
Four minutes tick by and a couple from the Philippines approach to use the scale.
I look at the woman sitting on it. “Excuse me,” I say and nod at the Filipinos, “but these people need to weigh their bags.”
With a sour expression, she sighs audibly and rolls her eyes skyward like I’m asking for something unreasonable.
“Why did you just roll your eyes?” I ask her, point-blank.
She sighs again. “I’m on my own today,” she complains.
“I’m on my own, too,” I say and watch her get up, shake her head twice in disappointment, and move down the departures hall toward the gates.
The high-pitched bark of a small dog fills the terminal. It’s a Yorkshire terrier and the stupid thing won’t stop. It ruins Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” playing on the PA system, annoying me. The young man holding the leash — I guess he’s an Australian or a New Zealander — keeps telling it to be quiet, with no result. When the toy dog reaches my post, I frown and shake my finger at it. “I’ll wrap you if you don’t shut up!” I warn it. The animal completely ignores me and goes on yapping, but its human friend laughs. Some people don’t take kindly to jokes, of course. The other day, a woman from Belgium gave me a death stare for offering to wrap her poodle for free.
I pick up the broom and sweep my post’s linoleum floor, dumping a panful of nylon shavings, airline tags, and a few torn rubber rings from suitcase wheels into the trash can. For a reason I don’t understand, dark thoughts visit me. I’ve fallen deep in the autumn of my setting sun. Snap out of it, I tell myself and again think about my plan to ride my brand-new Honda CRF 300 L to work through tomorrow’s storm.
For men my age, purchasing a motorcycle or sports car is often the tell-tale sign of a midlife crisis. Not me. I’ve ridden motorcycles since I was seven and haven’t experienced a midlife crisis yet. However, what happened to me when I turned sixty and entered the “death zone,” as a Greek friend jokes, definitely qualified as a real crisis. During the Covid pandemic, the director of the private school where I taught International Baccalaureate history for seven years gave my job to the twenty-two-year-old son of a powerful friend. This forced me into unemployment, which is no joke in Greece because only the first twelve months are covered by social security. For a long year and a half, everything seemed lost. Providentially, I was able to land minimum-wage work at the airport. That’s about eight hundred euros a month after you pay the tax authority, called “eforia” in Greek and pronounced the same way as “euphoria,” though the only happy party involved is this “transaction” is the state. It helped, no doubt, that I showed up at the job interview with a bounce in my step and my motorcycle helmet on my elbow. “You’re no spring chicken,” the company’s head of personnel said, looking me over. “We’re not ageists, but the work’s physically demanding and you’ll be lifting heavy bags.” “I’m as fit as a horse,” I told him, and lied about playing football (soccer, if you like) three times a week with my eighteen-year-old son and his friends. The last time I did that was five years ago.
My mind fills with images from films I’ve seen about life at the bottom of the barrel, including Steve McQueen in Papillon keeping himself alive with crushed centipedes and cockroaches on Île Saint-Joseph in French Guiana. These are succeeded by images of terminally ill cancer patients you find on cigarette packs in Europe. I try to look at the bright side. Unlike most guys my age, I get a lot of daily exercise. The airport’s a free gym for me. There are also some collateral psychological benefits from working here. Psychologists say it’s good for your mental health to interact with people you don’t know, and I do talk to a lot of strangers. Over the course of our lives, most of us exchange a word or two with about seventy thousand people. When you work at a large airport like Athens International, the figure is closer to seven million. People constantly stop and ask me questions. If I had ten cents for every time I told someone where the bathroom, VAT refund office, or check-in counter was, I’d be rich.
Liverpool FC’s song, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” flitters through my mind. I tell myself that though all my dreams are tossed and blown, at least I’m in pretty good physical and mental shape, the latter of course being more important. As Mikhail Bulgakov once put it, there’s no greater human tragedy than the loss of reason. Another good thing about my job is that I’m in a position to help others, and I’m not talking about wrapping bags in nylon. Because of strict luggage weight restrictions and other regulations, travelers are often forced to forsake some of their belongings. They sometimes leave them with me, and I pass them on to the airport’s facility maintenance and passenger assistance workers. The holy grail of freebie finds is olive oil, naturally. The strangest thing that’s landed in my lap is a brand-new washing machine. The Chinese lady who gave it to me said it was too expensive to take along with her to Beijing. I passed it on to Stavros, a cart attendant who owns a car and lives nearby in the town of Spata (not to be confused with Sparta one hundred miles south in the Peloponnese).
Liverpool’s anthem returns to me and I repeat the stanza about walking through a storm, though what I plan to do tomorrow morning is ride through one. No, I’m not crazy. They say you don’t need a shrink if you ride a motorcycle. This is especially true if you ride offroad, where dropping the bike and falling are par for the course. There are exceptions, to be sure. Like the guy on a side street near the Acropolis I once saw wheeling with no helmet and crossing himself with his clutch hand as he raced passed a church. There’s a small, stubborn category of people who always cross themselves when they see a church. My point though is that you can only learn to ride a motorcycle properly on dirt. It’s no coincidence most MotoGP riders have a motocross background. Dirt provides much less traction than asphalt, so you learn to get comfortable gliding and sliding around corners at great speed.
Tomorrow comes and I kiss Julia goodbye. Once again, my wife tells me it’s too risky to ride my bike in the storm. “Can’t you take the car instead?” she asks me to reconsider. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” I tell her. “Everything will be alright.”
I set off wearing all my gear. The sky is black and it’s raining hard. I’ve spayed wax on my boots and armored motorcycle jeans and jacket. The ride to work includes some pavement but it’s mostly a long, gnarly dirt trail with a few tricky rock gardens thrown in. It crosses through a huge field of about eight thousand square acres between the towns of Pikermi, Rafina, Spata and the airport. This is a former Jurassic park – literally. It is the world’s most famous late Miocene paleontological site, known as the “Acropolis of Paleontology.” Paleontologists have been digging here on and off since the mid-nineteenth century. It all began by mistake when a Bavarian soldier (King Otto I, the first king of modern Greece, was German) collected crystals inside the cavities of fossilized bones he discovered in red clay after a heavy rain, thinking they were diamonds.
The ancient ecosystem in this zone was richer and more varied than modern-day Africa’s. Thousands of specimens have been found representing some sixty species, including turtles the size of VW bugs, mastodons or early elephant relatives, primitive giraffes, rhinoceroses, huge three-toed horses, saber-toothed cats and ancient hyenas, bovids and primates, early snakes and prehistoric pheasants and ostriches. Near the town of Pikermi, which gives its name to the Pikermian Palaeobiome with its expansive, savanna-like habitat, they dug out an ancient watering hole with the bones of different animals stacked on top of each other in the order they crossed the Styx, with the hyenas and other predators forming the top layer. The theory is that they sated their thirst during a particularly arid prehistoric drought by drinking the blood of their prey before they too succumbed to the hellish conditions.
I’m off the asphalt of Marathon Avenue now and I’m standing on the footpegs for better control. I see the first sign warning drivers to cross bridges at their own peril when there’s rain – and it’s coming down in slanted, 9-Beaufort reams, the drops exploding on my helmet’s visor with a rapid percussion.
As the saying goes, God created nature and humans created cities. This zone is one place a town, even a small village, was never sustainable because the area is Netherlands-flat and when it rains heavily for a long time, it fills with water coming down from Mount Pentelikon to the north, the source of the Parthenon’s marble, and Mount Hymettus to the west. Nature rules supreme here. There can be no battle between trees and concrete here.
I’m in a good attack position, to use the motocross jargon. My back is straight, my hips unlocked, my elbows raised to better leverage the bars. I’ve got two fingers on the clutch, two on the front brake, and I’ve angled my heels behind the pegs, adding my leg muscles to the bike’s soft, under-sprung factory suspension.
In third gear, I pick and weave my way around large, fast-growing puddles. There are a few treacherously deep ruts and holes lurking under the muddy waters, but I know where they are. A burst of joyous laughter leaves my lips as I enjoy the feeling of being one with my machine. The concentrated focus on the trail I’m exercising blows away all my worries like cobwebs and brings on a liberating dopamine high few other legal activities can offer. Torrential rain and all, I’m on Cloud Nine.
I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my mid-twenties – not for the philosophy, but the brief passages where Robert Pirsig describes the 305-cc Honda Super Hawk he rode all the way from Minnesota to California in 1968. But there’s definitely Zen in this zone between my home in Rafina and the airport. You can’t get lost in the zone, but it can be dangerous. A handful of people have died in it during severe storms.
As I ride, I remember the bad fall I took two months earlier on my bike’s stock tires. Silky smooth on the asphalt and designed for a deal-closing test ride, they were woefully short on traction when it was wet and muddy out. It all happened so fast – and I hit my head on the ground going about forty miles an hour. Mercifully, the ground was grassy and I was wearing my helmet. But my Honda now has honest-to-goodness off-road knobbies: a French Michelin Tracker up front and an Australian Motoz Terrapactor on the rear. The traction is good and I increase it by pressing down on the footpegs. I’m confident my tires won’t play tricks on me and lowside the motorcycle on the inside of a turn.
I raise my eyes and am absolutely shocked to see a sea of water a few feet in front of me. Instinctively, I twist the throttle hard, trying to wheelie over a small wave – and the Honda disappears from under me! The next thing I know, I’m swimming in the swift, cold current, gasping for breath, trying not to drown. I’m carried, arms flailing, about fifteen meters before I manage to grab hold of an olive tree’s branch and get myself to shallower water. I can’t believe this is happening. Looking all around, I can’t see my bike. It’s completely submerged somewhere nearby.
When I finally reach higher ground, I stop. My heart’s beating like a trip-hammer. Calm down, man, and have a smoke, I think witlessly. When I fish my pack of cigarettes out of my jacket’s inner breast pocket, I see all the cancer sticks have melted away, their yellow filters floating on top of a soup of tobacco shreds. My next daft thought is to call Julia and tell her the awful news, but my phone, a birthday present she gave me last year, is also destroyed.
The most difficult thing for an army to do is retreat, and I experience this feeling intensely. Cursing my stupidity, I head up a black, burned-out hill, all its trees destroyed in a forest fire two years ago. Slipping, sliding, sweating and cursing, I must’ve muttered, hissed, and yelled the F-word three hundred times. Falling, getting back up, climbing the fences and cinderblock walls of scattered farm houses, I try to get out of this damn place.
I jump down a terraced stone wall and find a car. It’s a lady turning her Toyota Yaris around before a small bridge with water running over it instead of under it. I’m fortunate in my misfortune because she also works at the airport and is heading there. We take a long detour on Marathon Avenue and the Spata-Artemis Highway.
I arrive at work soaking wet. My coworker Dimitris gives me a dry shirt and trousers to change into. I’d later hear it from Anastasia for bothering to show up at work. My daughter has worked as a waitress in cafes and restaurants since she was sixteen, and knows what’s up. Yet why put my fellow workers through a nonappearance, increasing their load, when I know all I’d do at home is sulk? There’s no insurance for my kind of stupidity, but even if there were, no vehicle other than a small submarine could come anywhere near the general area where my motorcycle drowned – not even one of those Dakar Rally Kamaz or Tatra trucks that have tires so large they rarely get stuck anywhere.
At my baggage-wrapping post, I ruminate about my disastrous morning. My mistake was an elementary one. I wasn’t looking far enough ahead. Instead, I was focused on obstacles in the terrain just ten meters in front of me.
Between wrapping bags, I keep looking out the terminal’s floor-to-ceiling windows, cursing the rain. It won’t let up and I can’t stop worrying about my Honda.
A man approaches with a Burberry scarf coiled around a neck so fleshy, his Adam’s apple is invisible. He parks his baggage cart by my wrapping post’s scale, tosses me an impatient look, indicates his large suitcase with a flip of his bulbous chin, and says to me in Greek, “Put it on the scale.”
“Do it yourself, Sir,” I say in my demurest tones. “I’m not your servant.”
He blushes. “I’m sorry. I’m having a stressful day.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I understand.”
A bright-eyed young woman comes up to my post and hands me her suitcase. She’s accompanied by a person I guess is her mother. As I wrap her bag, we get to talking. It turns out the proud mademoiselle is flying to the Big Apple to attend Columbia University. My feet are wet but my woolen socks are keeping my feet warm enough. “Columbia’s a good school,” I say off-handedly, noticing the surprised look on both their faces when I add, “I got a Ph.D. in history there.” Not the best advertisement for my alma mater, but what can you do?
During my lunch break, Dimitris offers to drive me in his car to the zone when our shift is over. This is exactly what I need. With some luck we might locate my bike – provided it stops raining.
Dark thoughts visit me again, thoughts about my mortality and the meaning of life. Physicists are painfully clear immortality is out of the question. Our planet will disappear one day. Long before that, we and our descendants will all be dust in the wind, and the atoms that form us will return to the non-us universe. I think of the Fermi paradox. Indeed – where the devil is everyone? Where are all the aliens? Could we be really be alone? Are we the universe’s consciousness, the crown of creation? And yet most people don’t live very well at all, to put it mildly. What kind of highfalutin “consciousness of the universe” are we when we treat our fellow humans the way we do? I think of Trump, Putin, Netaniahu, Hamas. We Homo sapiens are fairly good at developing new technologies, but not so good at organizing our societies and economies. We’ll only deserve the accolade if we manage to create a sustainable society where the needs and desires of the majority dovetail with those of the individual, and vice versa. One thing is perfectly clear to me. As Kurt Vonegut once said, the purpose of life is to love those who are lovable and protect and develop the basis of human life – the human community.
A group of Hasidic Jews ankle past with their black coats, black fedoras, and white tzitzit strings hanging out of their shirts. A few minutes later a gaggle of Arabs, probably from Kuwait or Qatar, walk by. Ironically, the El Al and Israir check-in counters are right next to the ones for Qatar, Emirates, and EgyptAir. Counterintuitively, there have been absolutely no unpleasant incidents between Israeli or diaspora Jewish passengers and Arab or Muslim passengers since October 7, 2023. Everyone is on their best behavior.
Looking down the terminal at the passengers lining up to check in for the 9:55 a.m. flight to Tel Aviv and those next to them doing the same for the 10 a.m. flight to Cairo, it occurs to me that most people aren’t galvanized either way by what’s happening in the Middle East, or Eastern Europe for that matter. None of the airport’s employees have said anything to me about these wars — other than to rue them. Inflation is rampant and the price of everything has gone up. We all know nothing good can follow if these conflicts balloon into regional wars and send the price of oil shooting above one hundred and fifty dollars a barrel.
Kostas surprises us by letting Dimitri and me leave work twenty minutes early. My friend drives his old Opel Corsa to the zone and parks on the side of a dirt road. Following a two-kilometer trek in knee-high water, we reach the place where my Honda drowned. Although it’s still raining, it’s not coming down as hard, and much of the water has receded. Dimitri spots the motorcycle first. Covered in sticky, reddish-brown mud on the edge of what normally is a shallow river in winter and a totally dry one in summer, only its right mirror and handle-grip is visible above the murky water.
My motorcycle was totally submerged for at least seven hours. As we push it back to Dimitri’s car, where he has rope so we can tow it to a repair shop, I look on the bright side. Maybe things aren’t so bad, after all. I think again of Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Hamas and the fact we’re all hostages of evil bastards. Marxists often explain the absence of revolt and revolution by pointing to the lack of class consciousness among the vast majority of people. As I push the Honda over a large, slippery river stone that somehow made it onto the trail, it strikes me the main assumption these people make is that the masses are hypnotized by the system’s ideology and haven’t woken up to the realities of their existence. From this premise it seems to follow rationally that the main task of radicals is the promotion of class consciousness among workers. The only problem with this approach is that class consciousness is a component of the ideology that holds the system together and maintains its rule over its victims. It turns out radical intellectuals earmarked by fate, people with the financial wherewithal to spend their free time thinking about grand social questions, are apparently uniquely equipped to instill in the system’s victims the correct answer to all their problems. This is what these people call “the problem of leadership.” In other words, the conditions are rotten-ripe for socialism and the only thing needed for a successful socialist revolution is the right leadership. The logical extent of this class consciousness concept is Lenin’s “vanguardism.” Its elitism is explicit in the name the Bolshevik Party’s leader chose for his first newspaper, Iskra, or “Spark,” in 1900. Its masthead had the phrase, “Out of this spark will come a conflagration” — as if working people were a combustible mass waiting for a spark struck by upper-class intellectuals who call themselves Marxists. Ipso facto, the core idea behind class consciousness is an affront to socialism. In creating a conception of “class consciousness,” you inherently create a concept of those who are and aren’t “conscious.” The agents of radical social change thus become those who are arbitrarily appointed as having the “correct” understanding of social questions and not the people with a direct interest in resolving them through their grassroots struggle. The “conscious” distinction elevates the simple status of political alignment with radical ideas to the natural right to the throne of revolutionary movements. Class consciousness, however, is a collective process requiring time for the myelination of experiences and lessons from the past. It isn’t simply present in some individuals and absent in others. How “conscious” can you and I be while most of the other victims of the system around the world haven’t used their collective power to produce new experiences and lessons?
We all know Marxism didn’t work in the twentieth century. Was this because it was wrong, or simply premature? Evidently, the proof is in the pudding and we’ll just have to wait to find out. But like Galileo before he had his telescope, or Einstein before technology could prove his theories, could the idea of socialism simply have been ahead of its time?
“Careful,” Dimitris tells me as he yanks the Honda’s handlebar to get the front tire out of a deep rut.
The thought jolts me like a revelation: the ancient Greeks wouldn’t have considered any modern nation to be democratic. The existence in ancient Athens of the assembly of the collective polis, an assembly that had real power, led to a major decrease in the alienation and atomization of the individual from society. The Greeks never said, “Athens and Sparta have reached an agreement.” Instead, they said, “The Athenians and the Spartans have reached an agreement.” The collective polis itself decided its own fate. Those who participated in this process thus had some control over their lives. Their successes, but also their mistakes and errors, were theirs and theirs alone.
I clinch the debate in my head. If Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are to blame for anything, it is the exceedingly sanguine hope they gave to so many that capitalism would spread and take root quickly. Along with this came the expectation that the victory of the proletariat, by virtue of its sheer size and majority alone, would allow the world to at long last lay the awful system to rest. In fairness to the architects or communism though, the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto, published in distant 1848, is “A specter is haunting Europe.” The confusion was most likely the result of the pamphlet’s forward-looking final sentence: “Workers of the world, unite!”
Perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing that I’m a minimum wage worker instead of, say, a university professor. There have never been more workers on the planet than today and–crucially–the hold on them of political parties is largely a thing of the past. I am where I ought to be.
The other day I got in touch with an old high school friend who used to race motocross. When I told him what happened to me and my Honda, he laughed. “You’re a better rider for it,” he said. Which is true. The next time I ride through a storm, I’ll look far ahead. If I see impossible waters, I’ll do an elephant turn and find a different route.
