Dave Wood

Several years ago, Ruth and I toured both Greece and Turkey. We liked the latter best and thereby hangs a tale of my brief tour as a devil-may-care man of the world. Our first stop was Istanbul, an exotic place, with its continual calls to worship, its spice bazaars and outside shish kebab vendors, sirens of the palate.

Our bus approached the strait that separated Europe and Asia. It was the first body of water I had ever seen in the Middle East. Before that I had always thought “the beautiful tan Danube” resembled a mud hole. But Istanbul’s offering beat it by a mile. The water looked like the caramel topping my mother dolloped on her sundaes at the restaurant back home. Amid the strait swam skinny little Turkish kids, having a ball diving off the hulls off half-sunken freighters. into the roiling murk.

I asked our guide, Soli Gokh if he swam in the Bosphorus and he replied that he wouldn’t dip his big toe in it. “But don’t worry, Mr. Wood. These kids swim here every day and have developed an immunity to all manner of filth.”

We continued our tour of this amazing country and eventually ended up staying in a small village on the shores of the Dardanelles, called the Hellespont by the ancients. I remembered from sophomore Lit that British poet and adventurer George Gordon, Lord Byron had, like the Grecian Leander and Byron’s soldier pal named Ekenhead, swam the Hellespont and taken ill halfway across, and, blaming the lunch for his tummy ache, he vomited the sardines into its waters, writing “Once I returned the sardines to their native habitat I continued on until I reached the other side.” Seized with an irresistible urge to follow in Byron’s  breaststroke feat,  I shouted to Ruth, “Dig out my swim trunks, I’m going to swim the Hellespont!”

“Have you lost your mind? You’ve got to stop drinking that Raki!’

I replied “Soli said the kids were immune…. And maybe I am, as well. Just remember as a kid I swam all summer in our mill dam, below where the slaughterhouse dumped all of its guts and blood!”

Miraculously, she caved and brought me my trunks. I took a dip, tried not to inhale, made a U-turn, got to the cottage and took a very long shower and four fingers of Raki, the delightful licorice flavored cordial that Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk reportedly consumed by the Jeroboam.

My model George Gordon, Lord Byron was born in London in 1778, later railed in the House of Lords over the death penalty, became an acclaimed author with the publication of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” at age 24. He later exiled himself and required friends and guards to protect him in case the very sight of him roused the crowd to riot. He died on Easter Sunday 1824, in Greece where his heart and lungs are buried. Ever the self-promoter, Byron immortalized his dip in another famous poem, “Don Juan”: A better swimmer you could scarce see ever/ He could perhaps , have passed the Hellespont/ Once a feat which we once prided, / Leander, Mr. Akenhead, and I did.