by Victoria Semmelhack
It was a putridly, infuriatingly hot day on Anydros. I had chosen to wear my long hiking pants and shirt so as to avoid getting my already-scratched limbs even more beaten. By the time noon hit, however, the relentless sun forced me to roll up my pants as far up as they could go on my thighs and to take my shirt off entirely, tying it around my waist.
Anydros means “no water” in Greek; an apt name because the island itself does not have any water, besides the vast sea that surrounds it. Thus the island gets particularly hot in the summer and, understandably, is completely uninhabited. I was a researcher that summer for professor Alex Knodell’s archaeology project, in which he surveyed uninhabited Cycladic islands to determine their historical significance. Every day for the past three weeks I had risen at seven, gotten on a boat, and gone to a Cycladic island to look for pottery and lithic remnants of past civilizations. Every day a new island. Every day a new boat.
The people stayed the same: Jeff, Magda, Anna, Hallvard, Amira, Rosie, Evan, and MJ. These were familiar, and beloved, professional archaeologists with whom I had become acquainted the year before. Now that it was my second year with the project, they treated me with a sense of seniority. I was no longer an eighteen-year-old college student, but one of them. I had endured the long hiking days, the bushwhacking, and the heat, and still decided to return for another year. I, too, was now an Adrenaline Junkie With a Penchant for Drinking Mamos.
Jeff coined that name one night, a can of Mamos beer in his hand. “You know what you are?” He drunkenly slurred one night, pointing at me. “You’re an adrenaline junkie!” He pointed at Amira, “and you’re an adrenaline junkie!” He pointed at Hallvard, “and you, you’re definitely an adrenaline junkie.” He leaned back in his chair, and lifting his beer can into the air as though initiating a toast, added, “and we all have a penchant for drinking Mamos.” The rest of us found this so entertaining that we made it the name of our project group chat.
Jeff is a peculiar man, middle-aged and perhaps a drunkard, but nonetheless one of the most endearing individuals I’ve ever met. A former marine, he made us sing sea shanties as we hiked for miles to a new unit, called me a “mountain goat”, and always wore his green marines backpack. He and his wife, Anna, a pottery expert on the project, had a rather ridiculous relationship. It seemed like they were always mad at each other; always making snippy comments, or rolling their eyes. And yet they also held hands constantly, and from time to time I would spot them on the beach together chatting and laughing. None of us understood their dynamic. I still don’t.
I suppose that I found Jeff so endearing because he seemed to be viscerally human. He had an immeasurable number of noticeable flaws, but he also didn’t deny that his flaws existed. When he made mistakes, he pointed them out to us and laughed, almost finding joy in the act of making a mistake in the first place. Anna had a habit of giving him rather bad haircuts, and so his leathery face was framed by a haphazard flop of greying hair. This appearance, combined with his favorite ripped blue jeans with dirt stains, gave him an air of humility—of humanity—that made me feel as though he was an older brother, and I found myself increasingly treating him as such. His status as a quasi-older brother, however, also meant that he teased me to no end.
Jeff was always my team leader. He was known for requiring his team to hike fast and cover a lot of survey ground, and that day on Anydros was no exception. When we survey, we are divided into teams of five, with four people walking lines and one person leading the team. With twenty meters between each line, or person, and one hundred by one hundred meter units, it is easy to lose sight of your teammates in rough, steep terrain, and so it was the team leader’s job to maintain communication with all of us regarding directions and when to stop or start walking. Ironically, what is meant to be a meticulous research process takes place in completely unpredictable terrain; standard protocol cannot really exist in such a wild place.
And yet, armed with my usual walkie-talkie and Garmin compass, I dutifully followed my 0300 transect for the fifth unit of the day. Because these islands are inhabited by no one besides goats, there are few, if any clearings in the thick, spiky brush. My sweat clung heavily to my skin, and the nape of my neck felt burnt. Jeff still hasn’t called lunch, and, huffing, I checked my compass again. Fifteen meters to go.
The landscape of Anydros is covered in deep, stone-lined ravines where the mountains meet each other. Looking ahead, I saw that my next fifteen meters consisted of going into and coming out of a plunging ravine. I searched for my teammates but they were further below me on the mountain and thus out of sight. Where is Jeff?
Ravines were nothing new, and so, perhaps overconfident, I began a crouching walk down the steep slope. I could not see my next step through the comically-dense brush, instead trusting that the stone foundation would continue all the way to the ravine’s base. That was a stupid assumption. Before I knew it, my foot landed upon a bush that had no stone beneath it, and I fell through the maquis. I felt a gust of broken branches hit my face and I squeezed my eyes shut. Then, suddenly, I stopped falling. My feet had gotten caught so entirely in the brush that I was now hanging upside down over the ravine far below. Well shit.
My hands scrambled for the walkie-talkie in my backpack and, still swinging gently over the rocks far below, I radioed Jeff.
“This is Victoria. I think I need a hand dude.”
“What’s up?” He responded leisurely. That bastard.
“I’m a bit stuck in some maquis and can’t get out.”
“You seriously can’t get out? Use your legs, dude.”
“I can’t.”
“Bro.”
“Can you just come? Jesus Christ.”
I heard nothing more from him, so I assumed that meant he was on his way. A fewminutes later I heard him guffaw loudly from somewhere across the ravine.
“Are you upside down? Are you fucking for real right now?”
“Can you just pull me out?” I yelled back, my head feeling rather heavy.
Instead of responding directly to my question, I heard him on the radio.
“Victoria is currently stuck upside down. Amira, MJ, if you wouldn’t mind coming from your transects to briefly set her right side up again. Victoria, I’m going to take a picture of you hanging like this.” That damn rat bastard.
Within two minutes, Amira and MJ had made their way to my pitiful location and grabbed my feet. While they yanked me backwards, I pushed on whatever I could get my hands on. Finally I was on the ground again. I flopped to the sandy floor, with Amira and MJ grinning above me.
“Rough day?”
I stuck out my tongue at them.
###
That next summer I did not return to the project, instead choosing to do sociology research for my comps. I felt like, in some ways, I had to grow up; that the glorious summers in Greece were a camp of sorts, and that it was time to enter the real world. It nonetheless seemed so odd that all the activity would continue in this fantasy realm and that I wouldn’t be there for it. I felt a pang of longing for a time when my greatest problem was getting stuck upside down and laughing with my friends. Now I analyzed data at a computer. I conveyed this longing to Jeff on the phone one night and he laughed.
“You miss it, huh?”
How could I not? Those two summers marked the most scintillating seasons of my life. I had jumped into crystal blue water every day, slick with sweat, hands covered in pottery dust. I had spent late nights dancing in tavernas with some of my closest friends. I had slept in tiny beds, giggling with Amira and Rosie about this or that, and flinging open the windows to let in the cool Cycladic night air. I didn’t just miss it. I yearned for it. And yet I knew it was time to move on.
“I do, yea.” I didn’t share my feelings about moving on. I thought I might confuse him, or perhaps wound our friendship somehow.
“Well, you could always come back.”
He paused again. I remained silent.
“You know, Amira fell upside down today.”
I giggled, relieved for a change in topic, and asked to know more.
“She just ate shit. Almost completely upside down. I told everyone that she had pulled a Full Victoria.”
That goddamn stupid bastard.
