Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 8

Eight

My First Greek Friend:

I have gone a mile or two toward Thessaloniki when I am attracted by a little blue and white Greek-style church beside the road. It has a graded parking lot, which is empty, and there are some dry sand hills behind it where I can probably be alone to cook up some more hedge soup—it’s lunchtime.

During this long pilgrimage I have learned to subsist on hedge soup which is a boiled concoction of edible plants I gather as I ride. Edible plants of all kinds grow along most highways. It’s easy to learn to identify them, they don’t take much cooking, they are tasty, nutritious and, best of all, free!

Well and good.

I have leaned my old bicycle, loaded with saddlebags and bedroll, against a tree at the parking lot and am carrying off my lunch-making gear, when a guy riding a big new touring motorcycle rumbles into the lot, parks his machine beside my bike and disappears into the church.

Bikers can be trouble, so I hastily prepare and eat my lunch in the hills behind the parking lot, then quietly return to my bike and am pushing it out of the parking lot when the biker comes out of the church and calls to me. I stop and wait while he walks over. He speaks a little broken English. He invites me to sit and share his lunch.

Though I just ate some yummy hedge soup, I’m always ready for “real” food and I’m curious too about what kind of a biker would pause at a church, so we sit, eat and “chat” mainly in sign language. The tid-bits he shares with me are those little grape-leaf wrapped Greek morsels that are so delicious. He says he makes them himself.

He asks about my bicycle travels and is curious about my pilgrimage.

He is an Orthodox Christian, of course, (“If you’re Greek, you’re Orthodox., he says.”) and he seems to think it is quite normal that an American should be here making a pilgrimage to Holy Mountain by bicycle.

Why not?

He knows several of the monks on Holy Mountain and knows all about their strict visa requirements.

Do I have any friends in Thessaloniki? He asks. No? Than, he says, he will be my friend. He writes his phone number on a scrap of paper for me, tells me he will see me in a couple of days when I reach the city and roars off.

Tomasito, 2009


...