close your eyes and hope for the best

Montreal Olympic Stadium (click image to enlarge)

It remains, however, one of the most audacious and extraordinary building projects ever attempted… As a point of comparison, most of the blocks that the Pyramids of Giza are built from weigh just a few tons, with only some of the very largest, at 150 tons, in the same range; but they’re not suspended in mid-air!

The Olympics are coming to my city! Truthfully, I’m less excited than I was the first time that happened. There’s the commercialism, the consequent drug scandals, the acrimonious arguments about misplaced economic priorities. In Vancouver itself, protests over highway upgrades for the 2010 event have led to draconian legal measures against distinguished senior citizens, including the probable death of one elder from illness exacerbated by her jail sentence.

But in 1976 I lived in Montreal, and the noble ideals of the Games, that be-the-best-that-you-can-be philosophy were highly inspiring in my faster and stronger days.

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Women on bench. Mani Greece (click image to enlarge)

Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak had not yet been invented, but I might as well have been wearing one. It was as if I could wander into homes, or move close in on someone by the roadside, with none aware of my presence.

I don’t speak Greek, I explained.

“Why not?” The person whom I had gone to see at the Greek National Tourist Organization in Athens was incredulous. Both my first and my last names, as written and as pronounced, have more than once been misconstrued as Greek. In defence, I avowed that I was indeed fluent in the language of my parents: Latvian. Not very useful in southern Europe.

I needed his help. I was on assignment for Equinox (which unfortunately no longer exists; it was a great magazine to work for). Their photo layouts always emphasized people, and the story I had to illustrate concerned the remotest portion of the middle of the three long peninsulas of Greece that fork far into the Mediterranean. Mani, as this rugged, isolated place is known, ends in the cape that is the southernmost point of mainland Europe, but its history is even more extreme than its wild geography.

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