360 Degrees Longitude (19 page)

September 25–October 13
The Planet of Turkey, with a Dash of Greece

T
hirty-six hours after leaving Pompeii, we found ourselves sitting in the main cabin of an all-night island-hopping ferry leaving Athens, Greece. An elderly woman about 200 pounds overweight went up and down the aisles singing at the top of her very capable lungs. No one paid her any attention, because she seemed the most sane person in the crowd. This was our first experience with Greeks in large numbers. I was reminded of a scene from the movie
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
in which a lamb is being roasted in the front yard, except we were missing the guy with the bottle of Windex.

Pulling out of port we had to leave behind any notion that we could ever blend in again. Our Northern European skin and hair betrayed the fact that we were not members of the surrounding clan; two little girls, about ages four and five, stood staring at me through wide and unblinking eyes, mouths so agape that I could scrutinize their dental work.

Although we could no longer
blend
in,
fitting
in seemed within reach—at least in the midst of a ship full of Greeks. Surveying the scene before me, I could not help but sit back and fully relax for the first time in ages, realizing that my noisy children and our tendency to spread our belongings out for all to trample would not raise an eyebrow. Throughout Europe I had felt like we were water buffalo stampeding through a delicately constructed society.

But no worries here; people were setting up little fiefdoms throughout the cabin, with blankets on the floor, sleeping bags, pillows, boom-boxes, and all manner of stuff. Each fiefdom had its own crowd and they all seemed to be making political ties with the neighboring tribes.

This wasn't some college student's coming-of-age drinking party, either. With each tribe having its share of kidlets, aunts, uncles, and cousins, this was an affair the entire family could enjoy. While nobody was roasting a lamb on board, it looked like all the maternal types had brought a potluck dish to share.

“I thought we'd try and find a quiet corner of the deck and try to sleep,” I said. “But I don't think this deck comes with a quiet corner.”

September gave me a mischievous look. “Well, then … when in Rome, do as the Romans. When on a party boat, party. Did you bring the Bundt cake?”

• • •

We were dumped unceremoniously on a Greek island I had never heard of at 3:30 in the morning. The Greek party boat sailed onward into the night toward its final destination. Rumor had it that at dawn we could catch another boat to Çesme on the mainland of Turkey, 30 or so minutes away.

Ordering a round of hot chocolates gave us, I assumed, the privilege of sitting at a table in an outside café overlooking the pier; we waited to see what might happen when the sun rose. I thought for sure that the kids would fold their arms on the table, put their heads down, and collapse, but they both put their books in front of them and nursed their hot drinks.

Thus composed, I spent a few hours contemplating what it meant to leave easy, predictable Europe. Ahead of us were a few weeks in Turkey, then the Arabian Peninsula, Africa, East Asia, and eastward. In Europe it was possible to blend in with the local population; going forward, this was simply not possible. With disconcerting news stories filling up my e-mail inbox from well-meaning friends, I was not feeling completely confident about setting foot in this new land. It was beyond dispute that folks in most of the Middle East were not too keen on Americans at the moment. There was the wretched war going on in neighboring Iraq, and as hard as I tried to wish it away, every morning when I woke it was still there. Whispers of doubt echoed in my mind: “You are all walking targets.” What was I getting my family into?

Yet, we were on this trip to get past the stereotypes and prejudices in order to “know” and “experience.” But talking the talk is one thing; it was now time to walk the walk. I looked at my children lost in their books in the predawn hours. I was envious. They didn't feel my anxiety, because they weren't encumbered by the stereotypes of my generation. I simply had to appear completely confident, even though I wasn't.

While I was lost in my thoughts, another ferry arrived and with it, a young Turkish woman named Dilara. She asked if she could sit at our table, explaining that it was, of course, rather dangerous for her to sit alone outside in the dark, in “the West.”

“Of course!” September answered, as she pulled a chair up to our table. “Can I offer you something to drink?”

September excels at extracting life stories from the unsuspecting. Maybe it was because being lost in their books, Katrina and Jordan never entered or otherwise aborted the conversation. Or, maybe it was just because I was too tired to take one of my normal “wireless walks” where I wander off looking for an unsecure Wi-Fi network. Whatever the reason, I was able to quietly observe an artist practice her craft and I would grunt approval or disapproval when prompted by the Lean, Mean, Talking Machine.

Dilara was returning home to Turkey with only hours to spare before her student visa expired. “Some of my family disapproves of my studying in Europe,” she explained. “But I want a career in which I can meet lots of different people and do something important.” She explained that she loved studying in Europe, even though she bristled at the idea of the upcoming “ascension” talks for Turkey to be admitted into the E.U. “As if Turkey needs to ‘ascend' to Europe!” Then she added, as if an afterthought, “I simply
must
make it to Turkey today; otherwise my student visa will be lost. Do you know when the Çesme ferry leaves?”

“No idea,” September replied. “The good folks on our ferry gave us a gentle shove down the plank when we asked them that question. We've looked, but there's no obvious ferry service, no postings, nothing. The waiter is pretty sure we can find ‘something' in the morning, though.”

Dilara informed us that she keeps abreast of world events by watching CNN. “I watch it in English to help learn the language better.” Over a period of an hour Dilara gradually approached the subject of life in the United States. It felt like she was tap dancing around something; finally, it came out. “Life in America must be … difficult with so many guns and all those gangs.”

That comment caught me off guard, but I let September do the talking for the two of us. I gave her a one eyebrow raised, one eyebrow furrowed look, to signal her to probe deeper.

“You've been watching too much CNN,” September replied conversationally; then she shot me a meaningful glance. “A lot of us are guilty of that.”

Dilara was proud of her liberal cosmopolitan attitude. She told us that in spite of all the “obvious” dangers, she even planned to visit the United States someday. “I'm certain that some parts of the U.S. are safe,” she explained. “By the way, could you please tell me which parts those might be?”

My reaction was to blurt out, “It's safe everywhere!” But I knew that wasn't true, nor was Dilara's view that nowhere was safe. The truth was somewhere along the continuum between “nowhere” and “everywhere” and it was impossible to portray that concisely with economy of words. After being together for so long, September and I are able read each other with just a glance; I could tell she was thinking of the best way to respond. After a pause she said, “You'll find most people in the United States are friendly wherever you want to go. Just go, and trust your instincts; you'll be fine.”

That is, after all, what we were doing now. I saw in Dilara a reflection of my apprehension of traveling to an unknown country. Thus continued the process of discovering how alike we humans all are, no matter which passport we hold.

• • •

Several hours later we found ourselves on Turkish soil. We hadn't yet been through customs when a machine gun-wielding official at passport control decided that Jordan's blond hair looked too flat and tousled it. Trying to keep the encounter positive, I said, “Wow, Jordan. A guy with a machine gun touched your hair. Can I touch your hair, too?”

“Dad,” Jordan protested, pushing my hand away, “when we left Italy you said personal force fields didn't get any smaller than six inches.”

“I wouldn't worry about it,” I said. “Guys carrying machine guns feel like they can get away with anything. It probably won't happen again.”

The pier and passport control in Çesme is a long walk from anywhere. We started to slowly make our way toward town. Katrina was hobbling along with her one crutch, pulling her suitcase with the other hand. Jordan was still using the other crutch, occasionally for its intended purpose, occasionally to pole vault himself over some imagined obstacle.

Suddenly, ten weeks of frustration came out.
“I hate this crutch!”
Katrina exclaimed, tossing it aside. “I'm going to try to walk without it.”

September and I froze. “Katrina, you don't want to rush it,” September advised. “Remember your last X-ray wasn't that long ago and …” But September couldn't finish the thought.

“You've already told me, but the doctor said I would know when I was ready, and I'm ready
now.”
Katrina had come out of the womb with her will forged in iron. Nothing we could say would change her mind. I just stood there with a look of horror on my face as she took her first steps, preparing myself to pick up my daughter from the sidewalk after her leg folded under the weight.

Her stride was slow and each step deliberate, but she left her crutch there on the sidewalk and never looked back. Picking up this newly discarded treasure, Jordan exclaimed, “Cool. Can I have it?”

Fresh off the boat, we hadn't yet acquired any local currency. It was time to feed ourselves and I had a hunch the corner shop by the dock would accept my euros, but had no idea what the exchange rate was. Selecting a few food items, I handed the cashier a 20-euro note and acted as though this was a perfectly normal transaction. To my relief, he simply handed me a bunch of Turkish lira as though this were a perfectly normal transaction.

When I got out of the store, I looked at what the clerk had handed me, eager to familiarize myself with the exchange rate. To my extreme befuddlement I found myself holding three five-lira notes, three one-lira coins, and a one-MILLION-lira note. Being an engineer, I can only work with two, sometimes three, significant digits. Looking at the one-million-lira note I wondered why I cared about the fives and the ones.

“Check this out,” I said, handing Jordan the one-million-lira bill. “They gave me a million dollars.” We had been using the word “dollars” to denote the local currency, whatever it happened to be, because through Europe it seemed we changed currency types every other day and couldn't keep track of what they were called.

Jordan's eyes bulged to the size of saucers. “COOL! Can I have it?”

What we later found was that Turkey had recently devalued their currency by a factor of one million (!) and that there are both new and old flavors of lira in circulation. The one-million-lira bill and the one-lira coin were equivalent.

The difference between the “new” and the “old” money, however, was lost on Jordan. Over the next few days whenever I got another one- (or five-) million-lira bill, Jordan would hoard it, thinking that the store clerks kept making mistakes. By the time we left Turkey he almost had enough to buy himself a Happy Meal, but to hear him talk about it, you'd have thought that Donald Trump had better watch out.

• • •

Çesme is a beach town; in late September Çesme skies were a brilliant blue and the sun seemed to be brighter than normal. After a quiet day of recovering from disembarking at 3:30 a.m., we were ready to head to the beach. It was pleasantly warm and the lightest piece of clothing I owned was my Bill's Burger Barn shirt.

“Cheap communist construction!” I said, pulling the shirt on. “It's little wonder that this shirt was on the clearance rack.”

“Mmmm?” September looked up from what she was doing.

“Oh, it's just this cheap shirt. Now the seam across the shoulder is unraveling. That's the last time I buy a shirt from the clearance rack in a former Eastern Bloc country. I'm throwing it away.”

“You don't have to. I can fix it,” September said, reaching for her needle and thread. “It'll only take a minute.”

“I thought you hated this shirt.”

“I do. But I'll fix it if you want.”

“That's okay,” I said, wadding up the shirt and tossing it into the circular file. I put on my old T-shirt.

We strolled along the shops on the way to the beach when a man approached us. “Hello my friend!” he said. “Where are you from?”

“California.”

“Really? Me too!”

I eyed my new “friend” with suspicion. Then he continued, “We have all types of beautiful handwoven carpets that will complement your home in California.”

“No thanks,” I said, without breaking stride. “I don't need a carpet.”

We continued to make our way toward the beach, but it wasn't long before we were approached by another carpet salesman, then another.

After we had disappointed a few carpet salesmen, Katrina gave me a devilish smile and said, “You need to replace your Bill's shirt with one that says, ‘No Thanks, I Don't Need a Carpet!'“

“Yes, I suppose I should,” I said, but something at the beach took my mind off shirts. “Wow! Check out the bikinis!”

“No thanks. Doesn't do much for me,” September replied.

“No, that's not what I meant. Well, perhaps a bit. But I never would have guessed I'd see women in bikinis in a Muslim country.”

“I guess there are Muslim countries, and then there are Muslim countries.”

“Yeah, if it weren't for the five-times-daily call to prayer blasted over loudspeakers from every street corner, I'd have thought we were in Mexico.”