The Medicane

For nearly a week the weather news has focused on an approaching cyclone, referred to alternatively as a Mediterranean hurricane or a “Medicane.” Over these days the winds and surf have built up, punctuated by periods of calm and large swaths of blue. We have continued to swim, three times a day. The sea temperature is over 80 degrees—so why not?

Peter and I dashed to Kalamata yesterday afternoon, arriving just as the rains began again. We used our time well touring the brilliant archaeological museum in Messenia’s capital city— a highly sophisticated collection of finds from the Neolithic period  

(pre-10,000 bce); a vast trove of Bronze Age finds (3000 bce to 1200 bce); and everything since: the classical, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, and early Christian eras.

We walked the warren of streets and narrow alleyways of the old city, poking our heads into shops, engaging merchants, and navigating our way (remarkably) back to our parked car.

We returned in the darkness and amid the deteriorating weather, over narrow mountain roads, arriving at our house in a building gale. Dinner at Dionysos in Finikounda and home by midnight.

The intermitent summer was cast aside—rudely and decisively—late last night. Our little house on the mountainside withstood 100 mph winds and torrential rains throughout the night. We ventured out at 9 am and drove to the beach, where twelve-foot surf thundered to shore, utterly obliterating everything in its path. It was beautifully terrifying in every respect. With great care we drove to Methoni, only to find a region-wide power outage and the weather becoming more severe by the minute.

Unable to buy gas, we entered the town on Messenia’s southernmost tip to find carnage on the beach—along with a collection of assorted lunatics (like ourselves) viewing the many boats broken on the beach, whole cafeneions drifting out to sea, and a huge surf driven by class 4 hurricane force winds.

Back in Finikounda, with great care and some trepidation, we observed a wide range of yacht and fishing boat devastation, including a half-million-dollar trimaran (which we had admired only days before) broken into pieces on the rocks.

With the power out and most storefronts boarded up, we made our way to the heights at Elena Restaurant, which was powered by generators, meeting our English friends R and A for coffee and refuge. The incoming surge and breakers were annihilating storefronts, sailboats, and anything on the waterfront—a truly terrifying storm, as bad as either of us had ever witnessed.

While there a camera crew from EPT 1, Greece’s national television, interviewed me in Greek about the severity of the storm. Tonight I will be on the Greek national evening broadcasts, sputtering in sixth-grade Greek. Fifteen seconds of fame.

Today is Peter’s thirtieth anniversary of his twenty-ninth birthday and our plans included a night in the powerless town. If the town is still standing.

——