Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 18

18

On the Edge

My next project with Max is something far grander. I will help him in re-building the porch roof that protects a staircase leading to some upper rooms attached to the main church

I like this kind of work. I like working in odd locations out of doors with hand tools and to say the least this was one of the most outstandingly odd locations I have ever worked out of doors with hand tools in!

Max was fun to work with too. A lay worker, not a monk or a priest, Max was a clever workman who liked the uncomplicated life at Holy Mountain, but also liked to get back to civilization during much of the year. I would guess his age at about fifty
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Evidently Max had a drinking problem when he was on the loose outside so he would retreat to Holy Mountain to help the monks when his outside problem got too serious. This is part of what Holy Mountain is, by the way—a sanctuary in the old sense of the word, where men in trouble on the outside can come to let things cool off for a while and then go back when the heat is off—sort of like serving a voluntary prison sentence.

I guess Max had a family of some kind on the outside, but he was doing time here and he was a very good worker. As a matter of fact Max had been trained in Germany, picked up some of the language and had absorbed a Teutonic obsession with quality workmanship that is not very Greek. I speak a little German, so that is the language we communicated in—though I like to think I make a very good assistant anywhere because I have worked in foreign countries so much that I can usually see what needs to be done in advance without any talking at all.

I always try to learn as much as I can from masters too—and Max was not only a master of his craft but a fun guy to be around. He was very religious and very respectful to the monks and priests, but when we were working alone together he would sometimes point out some of their more humorous foibles and make gentle fun of them.

Max also loved to eat and always made sure he and I had plenty of the best food. “They’re not paying us anything for our work, so at least we should eat all we want.” he told me. Breakfast was very important to him and since we would eat together in the refectory he would pile my plate with halva and black olives and make sure I had lots of fresh bread with olive oil and coffee. I was pretty lean after my bicycle pilgrimage, so the extra food probably did me good.

Some of the work we did was in what you would call dangerous places. If you have ever seen photos of Holy Mountain (National Geographic did a story about the place with their usual great photographs a few years ago) you will know that most of the monasteries are built on high cliffs overlooking the sea. When you work on the cliff side of the building, you are working literally hundreds of feet above the brush-covered stones of the mountain below.

As I have said, Max was a German-trained perfectionist.

One day my task was to stand on the wooden handrail of the outdoor staircase and hold a very heavy length of wooden beam over my head while Max tried to measure and cut the butt-end so that it would fit snuggly into a very complicated wooden socket on the building side. This was a bearing corner beam and so the fit had to be just right he said. Max was doing the main cutting of the heavy beam with a chain saw and we were recycling some beautiful aged wood that had been cut centuries before. He said that the wood of the beam was at least four hundred years old and probably much older since it came from a very old part of the church—he was also re-using ten to fourteen inch hand wrought iron spikes for nails and he said he had no idea how old they were but that they were probably ancient. He bored new holes for the nails with a hand auger so we could see that the wood was sound all the way through and in such excellent condition it would probably last another two or three hundred years more, he said.

So I balanced on this rickety handrail with my heels hanging out over the edge and nothing behind me but air for several hundred feet straight down to the rocks below lifting this heavy beam over my head while he measured, took it down and cut, put it back up and measured some more, took it down again, cut and measured and cut and measured until I was exhausted. At first I didn’t notice the danger of the situation so much, but as my arms got tired I started to be more aware that the slightest mistake on his or my part would be the last mistake I would ever make in this body! I began to wish he was not quite so quality-oriented! “Close enough for rock and roll.” As we used to say in my musician days—but no, I had to be working with a Prussian Greek!

The men on Holy Mountain all wear black for mourning—all the time. They are not exactly suicidal, but they do say and believe that they “do not come to live on Holy Mountain, but to die on Holy Mountain”—and working with Max that day, I probably missed my very best opportunity to die on Holy Mountain.

Tomasito, 2009


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