Cloudburst

John Psaropoulos

John Psaropoulos is the Editor of The New Athenian; he is also a correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) and CNN in Greece. We had met at the start of our journalism careers working at CNN International in Atlanta. John had studied at King’s College in London, and I had a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University’s top-ranked College of Communication. At the time, Riz Khan was an anchor and top executives Eason Jordan, Chris Cramer, and Rena Golden were at the forefront of CNNI’s regionalization strategy. A decade later, John and I reconnected on Facebook through a web site set up for CNN alumni. As a guest columnist, John shares his sensibility as a modern day Athenian. 

I told myself that I could go back to sleep with rain dripping on my feet. Not unless the roof leaked on my son’s side of the bed, or on my head, would I bother to do anything about it. But Jason slept soundly under dry covers, unperturbed by nightmares. Rather, it seemed that they had broken loose from his subconscious and were ranging abroad. Lightning flashed from all the windows at the same time, so often that I sometimes opened my eyes to verify that this celestial disco really was a natural phenomenon.

It was our first night on fish hook island (I shall refer to it by its meaning), only an hour-and-a-half’s sail by ferry from Athens, with the isolated feel of a destination on some other, less inhabited side of Greece. Population: 800, divided into five villages. Ours is Metohi, which means shareholding, a term used for monastic property. The house my wife and I rented to win our escape from the city of five million and regain our sanity was a true godsend. This is the fate of urban folk, since about two years ago a majority of the world’s population: to work in clusters visible from space, and rest in the negation of them.

We were rewarded with precisely what we asked for: to be reminded of nature. At 4am the power had gone out. I had been feeding our newborn daughter when the lamp above the stove went dark and the refrigerator silent. I looked out towards the mainland. There were still clusters of light on the facing coast, but most of it was in that completely uniform dark that can only mean a blackout.

Electricity, more than any other network industry, forms the backbone of modern life. It separates us from nature and allows us to contrive the lifestyle we want. Without it, we go back 150 years, to the way we had lived for thousands of years.

The next morning we had no central heat, as the oil-fired equipment ran on an electric thermostat. There was no stove to make coffee on. We thought to buy a camping gas, but were both out of cash. The only ATM on the island was dead. There was no radio or television with which to know the broader context of our predicament. Gone were the comforts of home, the consciousness born of national news, and gone was the monetary economy.

The grocer advanced us a gas camping stove on credit to make coffee and formula. The woodcutter advanced us 100 kilos of logs to stay warm. Jason and I seized the working technology we had left. We drove around the island looking at the rain’s effect. What had been dry river beds the day before were now torrents of muddy water cutting across roads and through villages. Where they came to bridges they flowed under and around them, fanning out and rejoining the stream on the other side in cascades. These torrents were the pine forest exhaling as much as it could not absorb. They invaded the blue Aegean with deltas of yellow going out a mile and deposited so many rocks they left roads impassable.

We lingered and marvelled at this brief decivilisation. Man has prevailed. We felt we could safely cheer for the underdog.