“Confluence, Robert Creeley & The Bridge Over The Mavrozoumena River”

VazamBam

by Vassilis Zambaras

“Confluence”

—by Vassilis Zambaras

Nightingales near
The river—

No superfluous noise.

“I know a man”

—by Robert Creeley

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

Meligalas, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—4/26/10—My place of residence, the Peloponnese—“Pelops’s Island”—begins where the Corinth Canal severs it from mainland Greece and culminates at mainland Europe’s most southerly point—Cape Matapan (Tenaeron in Greek) in the Mani. Besides being a region gifted by natural beauty, it is also overflowing with classical archaeological sites such as Olympia, Mycenae, Ancient Messene, and Epidaurus; medieval ruins and old Venetian castles like those in Nafplion, Methoni and Koroni; Byzantine cities such as Mystras and Monemvasia. Not into ruins? No problem—the Peloponnese is also a perfect destination for those who want to get “off the beaten track” and explore all the other magic it has to offer: Massive, craggy mountains and expanses of fragrant citrus; lush vineyards and silver-green olive groves; finely-pebbled or sandy beaches; hundreds of villages tucked away in valleys and hanging from mountainsides. If you get this far south of Athens and remember to look out where you’re going, you will be amply rewarded in more ways than one. So follow me, intrepid sons and daughters of Pausanias!

Once you find yourself in the Peloponnese, you might consider driving through Meligalas to visit  the Zambaras family before going on to explore the impressive ruins of Ancient Messene, a few kilometers to the west behind Mount Ithome. If you do, after leaving Meligalas you’ll have to cross the historic, three-pronged, multi-arched, stone bridge over the Mavrozoumena River (see photograph above) just before the village of Neochori (the birthplace of Maria Callas’s father). Mentioned by our one and only Pausanias in his Travels, this narrow(3.5m) bridge is believed to be the only one in Europe built over the confluence of two streams, and is surely the only one with a hairpin turn at their meeting point right in the middle. As my three-line, seven-word poem suggests, it is also a superb spot to listen to nightingales in the evening or early morning, when the air is flooded with their mesmerizing song. (Hint: Do your listening on foot.)

I must have driven back and forth over this bridge hundreds of times, as it is on the way to my home village of Revmatia, but on the 11th of November, 1978, I found myself driving off it with a friend and into the shallow, muddy waters of the Mavrozoumena River ten distant meters below. There were no safety railings at that time, we were traveling at about 90 km-per-hour in a brand-new Ford Fiesta I had driven across Europe from Belgium one month earlier and were just returning from a leisurely 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. ouzo-drinking bout with two other friends in Neochori’s main square where one ouzo with hors d’oeuvres drove us to order another and another and another until we lost track of just how many there were . . . and then, sure enough, there was the hairpin turn and there we were trying to straighten it out but failing miserably and falling over the right side of the bridge.

Luckily, the span was flanked by some thick plane trees which miraculously broke the vehicle’s momentum. However, I was dumped out the hole left by the now hanging open door of the upside-down car and plunging ahead of it in a thundering, unconscious descent through the snapping, crackling, popping branches into the murky waters (my friend remained trapped in the falling car) only to have the Fiesta land right on top of me. Fortunately, the autumn rains were late in coming that year and the river—which might otherwise have been a raging torrent had the superfluous gates of heaven opened on schedule—was now only a shallow stream with just enough mud to cushion the car’s fall and my head was still above the mud, though I couldn’t move my legs because they were under the car and I thought they were crushed until the dumbstruck villagers raced from the main square and pulled me out of the muck and my friend from the car. I was so drunk and in shock that I got back into the newly and violently transmogrified, badly deformed amphibian and tried to start it, though I couldn’t very well see what I was doing because my cool-looking, wire-rimmed glasses were now adorning some fishy-looking, mud sucker of the murky shallows who had had the sober foresight to be lurking under the bridge, waiting for the spectacle of a soaked-to-the-gills “Squint-eyed Kid” to drop in.

NB: In my1964 photo of the Mavrozoumena Bridge, if you travel left to right and focus in, half-way between the man and the donkey and the man upright in the horse-driven cart, you can pinpoint the exact place where all this came together and where I should have remembered Creeley’s best-known poem, looked out where I was going, and stopped—

By the way, my friend’s name was George.