The Road to Sparta, Page 3

  Once a runner I may have been. But that was then. Now was a time to move on.

  * * *

  1 Pronounced HEE-mer-O-drome-mos. The plural is hemerodromoi.

  Off to the land down under

  4

  UNITED BY CALVES

  Though running had exited my life, I still remained restless with an insatiable wanderlust and never-ending thirst for adventure. During my junior year of high school, I relocated to Sydney, Australia, as an American Field Service exchange student. Sure, I wanted to be a global ambassador and spread goodwill across borders, but mostly I wanted to pursue my new life’s passion, surfing.

  Australia is well known for some of the best breakers on earth, and it was the vision of riding the perfect wave that truly fueled my fire. I made it a point to attend school and be a good citizen when the surf wasn’t up. But when it was, school became optional. I had my priorities squarely aligned.

  The laid-back Aussie lifestyle suited me perfectly. My schoolmates were a hoot. The teenage Australian vernacular suffixed everyone’s given identity with an o. For instance, Johnny Phillips was Johnno, David Smith was Davo, and Daniel Wojciechowski was Wojo. I was Karno (no one could ever properly pronounce my surname anyway, so it was just as well they called me Karno).

  Endless days were spent laughing, surfing, and hanging out at the pub, an Australian institution where young men were taught the finer things in life, like choosing the best ales, picking a balanced pool cue, and throwing a straight dart. I hadn’t a care in the world. Life was pretty much perfect. Until one day I got a strange phone call.

  The voice on the other end was shaky and trembling. “Is this . . . Constantine Karnazes?”

  Nobody called me Constantine in those days. My Greekness had long since departed. I was Dean. Or better, Karno.

  “Yeah, this is Constantine Karnazes. Who might this be?”

  There was a moment of silence in which I thought I heard muffled weeping and muted sobs, then the caller regained her composure, “We would like to meet.”

  Okay, who is this weirdo? I thought. And how did they get my number?

  We hung up. The next day officials from the American Field Service headquarters contacted me. They explained that if such a meeting were to occur, representatives from AFS would accompany me. I agreed to the meeting, even though I wasn’t sure whom it was I’d be meeting. It was like being a character in a surreal Kafka novel in which an important meeting is arranged but the party’s identity remains a mystery. What happened next blew my mind.

  Australia has some remarkable eateries, and at the time one of them happened to be a 360-degree revolving restaurant atop the Sydney Tower. It offered (and still offers) stunning views in every direction as you dine. As I walked past the buffet table, the smorgasbord of food was astonishing and the aromas were intoxicating. I couldn’t wait to rip into some of those fancy meat dishes and gourmet cheeses. It was hard not to salivate in anticipation as we strode by. My hope was that this meeting would end quickly so we could roll up our sleeves and get down to eating.

  As we approached our designated table, I could see three women awaiting our arrival. One of them was older, most likely in her seventies, with frosted, wavy hair and deep brown eyes. The other two bore a striking resemblance to each other. All of them were nicely clad and neatly groomed. I wore my standard attire: T-shirt, grungy surf trunks, and flip-flops.

  When we reached the tableside, the older lady’s eyes grew wide, and it appeared she was trembling. I tried not to take notice, but there was uneasiness in the way she stared at me and carefully watched my every movement, assessing, evaluating, and analyzing, as if looking for clues. Who were these people, and what did they want with me?

  We sat down together, and a dizzying exchange of introductions and formalities ensued. Eventually the handshakes, name verifications, and ID checks concluded, and the officials who’d escorted me to the meeting politely excused themselves.

  Now I was sitting alone with these three women, partitioned from the world in an awkward cell of silence. The older woman continued inspecting me with her eyes, as if searching for some meaning in a piece of art. Finally, the tension was interrupted. One of the two younger women spoke. Her voice was genial; her words were warm and articulate, soothing and disarming. She explained to me that we were related, somehow, some way. Things got progressively hazy from there. It wasn’t that her explanation lacked clarity, but that my mind was awhirl with thoughts. She spoke in a rambling stream of consciousness about relationships, connections, coincidences, and family ties that all somehow related back to me, but her words streamed past me in a three-dimensional ticker tape of undecipherable code. The restaurant was spinning around in circles, and so was my head. Categorization is what I needed, hierarchy, some anchor of understanding to serve as a foundation for this tangled web of interrelationships that she was revealing. Her lips moved, but what came out was a mystifying cascade of names, pedigree, links, and associations like biblical gibberish. It was clear she held the advantage of time and perspective to piece this intricate chain of events together. But I had no such prior knowledge.

  And so I sat there in a clueless fog.

  “May I ask about your grandfather?”

  Suddenly I was jolted from my daze. “My grandfather?”

  They seemed surprised at how this question jostled me back to the present. “Yes, your father’s father.”

  I thought about this for a while. As I did, I noticed the older lady sitting upright, attentively leaning forward seemingly readying to lurch ahead. She was clutching a handkerchief and kept rubbing it through her fingers. The other two glanced at her with that subtle look you give someone as a helpful reminder to remain composed and show restraint. Still, she hung on my every word.

  “I didn’t know him very well,” I said. “He died when I was a young boy.”

  My words were a dagger to her heart. A flood of emotions exploded upon her aging face, and tears poured forth in watery, sobering moans of sorrow and pain. She clasped her hands to her chest and looked skyward, columns of moisture streaming down each tanned cheek. Her two companions moved closer, and the three of them hugged and wept, trying to console one another and somehow conceal this outward display of grief.

  What had I done? What had I said?

  I felt at once both a great desire to escape from this place and return to my familiar daily routine as if none of this had happened, and also a strange sense of providence as though being here was somehow part of my destiny. Of course, I also felt their pain; it was impossible not to. We were connected in some way, apparently, flesh and blood, and I couldn’t simply bear witness to their anguish without feeling some shared sense of sadness myself. If I were somehow the conduit to this serendipitous reunion, then I bore a certain responsibility to surrender myself to faith and put aside my reluctance to engage in this public display of raw emotion. So I slid around the table and embraced them, becoming one with their heartache.

  This is how I came to know my great aunt Helen, my grandfather’s sister, and her daughters, Mary and Sophia, my cousins.

  We met on many occasions during the course of my 1-year stay in the land down under, and every meeting was similar to the first. Helen would break down in tears, making the sign of the cross on her chest over and over, and we would all try to console her. She would often hold me, just hold on to my arm, the entire time I was with her. She would touch my face, rubbing her fingers along my cheeks and down my chin in a show of affection and a desire to gain a deeper familiarity with my constitution than words could convey. At first I found this practice weird—hell, it was weird, but not in her time and place. People outwardly expressed their feelings and emotions where she came from. There was none of this staunchly puritanical reserve and stiff-upper-lip mentality of modern Anglo society. People had no such hangups in her world; if you felt strongly about someone, you let it show. You didn’t repress your feelings and emotions in the old country, and her emotional range was
quite broad. She could just as easily shift from wallowing in tears of sorrow to thunderous outbursts of laughter to deep, reflective contemplation. She was, as the Greeks say, polytropos (a person of many twists and turns, moods and emotions). Over time I came to better understand these odd behaviors, if not fully appreciate them. They provided a richer insight into who my grandfather was and, by association, who I was.

  The story of how this all came to be was quite remarkable. Helen was just 5 years old when her brother, Constantine Nicholas Karnazes, left Greece, though she remembered him quite fondly. My grandfather (aka Gus) was the oldest child in the family, and the only male. Helen was the youngest of four girls. Constantine used to chase them around the village, playing hide-and-seek with them for hours on end. They had pet goats, and she remembered him showing her how to milk one. Their mother used to make cheese out of this milk, feta cheese.

  After young Gus departed for America in hopes of seeking a more prosperous life in which he could better help support his family back in the homeland, his letters arrived only sporadically, if at all. Mail service to the little village in the hills of Greece where my family came from was intermittent and unreliable. They knew that he’d arrived safely in New York City, clearing customs at Ellis Island in 1913, but his whereabouts grew progressively vague as time passed. He moved about the country, sending money when he could, but oftentimes his letters never arrived. Eventually they lost contact completely. Helen vowed to someday reconnect with her long-lost brother. That was her dream.

  Eventually she relocated across the Mediterranean to Egypt, married, and raised two beautiful daughters. She and her husband built quite a prosperous empire before being forced to flee the country in exile after the Six Day War, when the Nasser regime took control of the country. They lost everything and sought refuge in Australia, as did many Greeks, I came to learn.

  Helen thought about her brother often over the years, but these were the days before Facebook and the Internet. Electronic mail didn’t exist. As dreams of meeting went unfulfilled, his status became progressively less and less certain. Until someone recognized my calves.

  Yes, my calves. Word circulated in the Greek-Aussie community that someone spotted a boy with Karnazes-like calves. Mary traced the lead to the Sydney Morning Herald, where a story had been published about my coming to Australia as part of the American Field Service high school ambassador program. And that is how my Greek family found me. This enchanting series of events was both magical, in that we were reunited with long-lost relatives whose whereabouts had been unknown for years, and tragic, in that I brought with me news of my grandfather’s passing. It was also quite outrageous, in that all of this came to be because of an outsize set of calf muscles.

  Although they were not athletes, Sophia and Mary had these same distinctive calves, as did Aunt Helen. On my side of the family, my father and both his brother and his sister—my uncle and aunt—possessed these same pronounced calf muscles. My dad claims it’s a result of our ancestors chasing goats around the hills of Greece. Whatever the case may be, there’s no mistaking these hulking anatomical protrusions.

  The more I tuned in to this genetic linkage, however, the more I realized it wasn’t just these oddly enlarged, bifurcated calf muscles that were unique, but also the entire musculature of our leg up to the glutes. Even in relatives who were inactive and slightly overweight, their girth showed only in their upper bodies, while their legs remained powerful and statuesque no matter how much extra heft their torsos carried. These improbably brawny specimens of legs, with their vascular networks of gnarled, rootlike arteries and capillaries interwoven throughout, appeared a freakish hybrid between a thoroughbred racehorse and an alpha male Brahma bull. Such robust lower extremities seemed custom built for locomotion over steep and rocky terrain.

  Whether I liked it or not, I was bequeathed these same comically proportioned legs. Once again, my Greek heritage reared its Hellenic mug. The Greeks were an endearing people to be sure, but I had always maintained a detached degree of separation. Their culture was not the same as mine. They were from another place, another time. I was different from them. Or so I thought.

  As I would come to learn, I could run from my ancestry, but I couldn’t hide (unless, that is, I covered my legs).

  5

  ALL IN

  And conceal my legs is precisely what I did for the next decade. The fairy-tale story would have been that I returned from my travels in Australia, dusted off my running shoes, and performed brilliantly in my remaining high school year, thus receiving a full-ride scholarship to run track at the University of Oregon, whereupon numerous collegiate records were shattered and titles won. Reality, however, was a bit less glamorous.

  Instead of chasing running goals, the goals I chased were monetary and status oriented. I wasn’t born to run; I was born in the USA. And the business of America is business. I pretty much followed the societal prescription for happiness. I attended an academically rigorous university (Cal Poly), graduated with distinction (class valedictorian), landed a good job with a Fortune Global 500 company (GlaxoSmith-Kline), gained some experience before attending business school (MBA University of San Francisco McLaren School of Management), made a ton of cash, acquired a bunch of shit, and lived happily ever after.

  By the time I reached my late twenties, I was a millionaire (which was a good chunk of change back then, in an era before the Internet boom where “instantaires” can now amass great fortunes virtually overnight). I drove fancy cars, went to posh nightclubs, vacationed on yachts in Tahiti and in chalets in Aspen, bought lots of expensive things, and generally indulged in gluttonous materialistic lavishes. This was the recipe for success, I thought, and I was sure that eternal happiness would follow.

  Only it didn’t. Eternal happiness never came as a result; eternal emptiness did. And all the things in this world weren’t able to fill the void. I’d been living within a cloud of delusions.

  The seeds of discontent had been planted early on, when I suffered the tragic loss of my closest friend (who just so happened to be my kid sister). She was such a free-spirited and wise person, one of the few truly happy people I’ve ever known. Pary was forever encouraging me to follow my heart and do what I loved, not what society prescribed. I always chuckled at her, thinking that if I did what I loved, I’d be homeless. Corporate America was where happiness was found, I’d say. Fat paychecks and lots of perks dangled before your nose. Those are the things that fuel passion.

  Pary died in a car accident on her 18th birthday, and I channeled my anger over her untimely death into a mindless drive to “succeed,” never questioning whether my definition of success was misaligned with my personal values. Just do good and make lots of money, I thought. Those pesky little details like purpose, fulfillment, and contentment would work themselves out once the coffers were sufficiently overstuffed.

  Unfortunately, the threads of disillusionment holding this finely woven veil together started unraveling as my 30th birthday approached. Thucydides had written, “The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.” These words sounded amazingly like those of Pary, yet they were written some 2,400 years ago. Once again, the connection to ancient Hellenic mores resurfaced in my life.

  For the first time ever I started to second-guess my own judgment and began questioning things. The inscription on the Oracle of Delphi reads, “Gnōthi sauton” (Know thyself). Did I really know myself? Was I in touch with the real me? Were these corporate paychecks giving me freedom, or were they shackling me in dependency? Did I have the courage to follow my unique calling in life and be true to mine own self? Nothing that I felt certain of before retained its original grasp on me; that placating carpet of conformity was yanked out from underfoot, and I was left scrambling for some toehold to buttress the slide. But no sturdy brace could be found, and I began spiraling downhill in an uncontrollable freefall.

  This unbearable internal strife came to a head on the night of my 30th birt
hday, when I walked out of a bar in San Francisco, three sheets to the wind, stripped down to my fancy silk underpants, and started running south in a pair of old tennis shoes I used primarily for lawn mowing and gardening around the yard. I hadn’t run since hanging up my shoes back in high school, but off I went. I didn’t stop until the next morning when I hit the 30-mile mark in Half Moon Bay, completing a celebratory mile for each one of my unfathomable years of existence on this 4.6-billion-year-old rock we call planet Earth, this tiny speck of sand in a cosmic sea orbiting a single sun in the 200-trillion star Virgo Supercluster, which drifts like flotsam in an endless haze of mysterious dark matter. I lofted in those heavens that night of my 30th birthday running in the starlight, and in the morning things had changed. Everything that was important to me the day prior became less so the day after. That night forever altered the course of my life.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t have a good job, because I did, and it wasn’t that the company treated me poorly, because they certainly didn’t. It’s just that it wasn’t the right place for me. While many of my colleagues thrived in such conditions, I withered like a grape desiccating on the vine.

  I put up a convincing front, but on the inside there was misery. It was clear I didn’t belong there. But where, then, did I belong? Where was my place in this universe? That much was a little less certain.