The stupidest thing I have ever done.

Ahmet and I alit from the bus onto the sweet, sweet earth at Çanakkale (cha-KNOCK-kah-lay)perhaps a little more quickly than usual for two reasons: one, we'd been on it since we'd boarded the night before in the stale underbelly of Ankara's enormous otogar [bus garage], and two, the bus had begun to smell like an unwashed dead man's feet in snowboots in August.

* A word on busses in Turkey *

The bus is the primary means of transportation in Turkey, and for good reasons: it is mothertouching cheap and the busses depart and arrive at their destinations with nearly Swiss precision. The busses are enormous, deadly clean and are staffed with immaculately uniformed hosts/hostesses who wander about in the cabin bringing you cold and hot drinks, a squirt of lemon cologne freshener (for your hands and face; it's like a wet-nap without the wipey-thing) and bracingly embalmed, frooty cakes. Yet, for all of their splendor, Turkish busses (as of 2001) were utterly bereft of restroom facilities, necessitating stops every three hours at specially-designed bus-stop places on the outskirts of every major Turkish town and city. The term "restroom facility" in this case may be misleading: one pays a largish male or female bouncer-creature a few lira for the luxury of squatting over a pit whilst holding a little blue plastic jug filled with water with which one is supposed to cleanse onself. Me? Well, let's just say that while I had become freakishly adept at the subtle ballet that was the Middle Eastern commode experience, I had no intention of utilizing these "facilities", as they often resembled the open pits ordered dug by death-squads. Attached to the corralled-off pits was frequently a smallish restaurant serving inexpensive Turkish fast food. More often than not I was ambushed by this particular cuisine upon my first bite. Corn on pizza? Potato salad on a hamburger? A bun filled with weird nut-paste? The bus would disgorge itself, the plebe would empty themselves and then refill their now-hollow bodies with bus-stop rot, and clamber back on for the next three hours.

At this point in the night the passengers begin to settle in for a fitful nap. It was at this point - every God-forsaken time I was on one of these things - that all of the men ALL OF THE MEN I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP would take off their shoes in a syncronized motion and sweep them under the seat in front of them. This was, on some of the larger and fuller busses, easily seventy pairs of black sock-clad men's feet.

Seventy pairs of sweaty, formerly black shoe-encased men's feet, free and exposed and - on a memorable trip to Antalya - on my lap as the gentleman beside me shifted in his slumber. The mere memory of the ensuing bouquet brings tears to my eyes, and I can guarantee you that it is not out of misty nostalgia -it was a hastily arranged defense mechanism which I utilized so as to not allow the rising fog to sear my retinas out of my very skull.

* resuming story*

Upon our arrival in Çanakkale, Ahmet and I simulaneously ascertained that the town's major charms could be consumed within the span of an afternoon; apart from being strategically one of the most important cities on the earth as the guardian of the Dardanelle Straits, Çanakkale's draw was primarily focused on World War I heroism and the nearby battlefield of Gallipoli (Gelibolu). Neither Ahmet nor I were enchanted by the thought of looking at a big field where twentysomething men died by the thousands. One thing became clarion: even though it was only seven-thirty AM, we needed some beer, and needed some fast.

We checked into our hotel which, like many Turkish hotels, has the shower spigot just hanging off the wall in what appears to be an ordinary bathroom; a small drain near the toilet serves to clear away some of the water. In other words, unless you desire to brush your teeth with your friend's dead skin-water, you kept your toothbrush in your ditty-bag. "Conveniently", most hotels also provided shower-shoes, though of course the image of the one hundred-forty unwashed black sock-encased man-feet gave me pause.

We bought the beer (fo'ties of Efes Pilsen), and from a street-cart I bought two kilos of the freshest cherries I have ever eaten. It was one of the most sublime breakfasts I have ever consumed - eaten al fresco on a bench on a jetty which abruptly thrust itself into the azure Dardanelles.

As we'd anticipated, Çanakkale yielded little but bizarre pottery (a çanak is a locally-produced style of jug) and a cannon-guarded harbor filled with ghastly green urchins. As we boarded the dolmuş (mini-bus) to a tiny village further down the coast the next morning, I became siezed with the intense, burning desire to visit one of the only Turkish Aegean islands, Bozcaada (BOZE-jah-ah-dah). The woman seated to my left had a live poult partially hidden under her petticoat and her husband - a stoic man in his mid-fifties - was missing two of his fingers just below the first joint. They tried desperately to make pleasantries with us once they'd overheard me say "Bozcaada" - apparently, they were natives - but our conversation was derailed by the poult, who chose that moment to become uppity. After a few moments of furious activity, a muffled *snap* was heard throughout the bus, and the poult became unnaturally still. "Would you like to have lunch with us?", the kindly old woman asked. The glint in her eye suggested that, should we decline, we'd need to have an elaborate excuse other than having seen lunch while it still respirated. We told her that I had to catch a plane in İstanbul for the United States and, despite the fact that we were clearly travelling due west instead of northeast, she smiled and wished me the best of luck. "I would like to give you a gift", she said, and began rummaging under her petticoat where the bulge of the still warm, silent poult could clearly be seen. For a hellish moment I imagined that she would give me the carcass of the taken-before-its-time fowl, but she instead pressed a little pin with a nazar boncuk ['evil eye' amulet] into my palm. "The sun is too hot in Bozcaada; maşallah" she breathed, and at the next stop - a dusty piazza with a braying ass drinking from the overgrown fountain - they disembarked. Maşallah in Turkish usage is "God protect." I turned to Ahmet and asked him if he, in that moment, felt a little like Jonathan Harker traveling through the Carpathians to Dracula's keep - you know, the part where that Romany woman pressed a crucifix into his hand because "the dead travel fast."

The ferry ride to Bozcaada was uneventful save for my assertions that I'd seen one gull peck another to death over the gummi bear I'd tossed to them. A half-hour later the craft drew into the tiny harbor of Bozcaada (pictured above). Bozcaada is, for those of you who have read the Iliad, the island of Tenedos. After the Greeks had filled up the tinder-horse with soldiers, they sailed away and used the outcropping of the island to hide their fleet.

[ Ahmet and I had already gone to Troy earlier that week, and, despite each of us feeling a detachment for, um, fields where thousands of twentysomething men perished, Troy is different and you all know it. ]

Nowadays, Bozcaada is known primarily for being one of maybe ten Aegean islands that belongs to Turkey (and not Greece) and for being graced with miles of untouched Aegean beaches. Having scuttled through the ruins of nearly every civilization that had stopped long enough to cop a squat in Turkey for the four months previous to this trip, I found the idea of an island known for natural beauty to be alluring. That, and Bozcaada was reputed to be the epicenter of octopus cuisine in Turkey, which thralled me unduly. [I ended up eating it thirteen different ways in two days]. Once we'd gotten to our hotel -which we were lured to by a tout who greeted the ferry - Ahmet opened up his cat's-bladder-sized knapsack and took out his swim trunks pointedly. As I was rummaging through my somewhat more substantial luggage, I noticed that I'd not honored my Cub Scout past by thinking to bring any sunscreen. When I mentioned this to Ahmet, he shrugged dismissively. "I'm a Turk: I will just brown more." I knew that I would crisp like a cheap burrito in the microwave and we left the hotel to search the mean streets of Bozcaada for something to protect my pallid flesh from the searing Northern Aegean sun.

To say that we went everywhere in the town to find suitable protection would scarcely be an exaggeration. At each stop, we were greeted with blank stares like we had chosen that moment to quaff a sheep's placenta. This was not a pathetic effort by a solitary, non-Turcophone American guy; Ahmet, a native speaker of Turkish, was doing his level best and still the locals beheld us with a measure of compassion and horror. Cream that one spreads on one's skin so that the sun doesn't hurt it? Is there a hidden camera? When we finally found the pharmacy, we thought we were going to be home-free, but the young woman working behind the counter looked over the rims of her glasses and asked who had 'put us up to this.' She suggested - helpfully - that we pour Coke over ourselves to "brown up."

Yes. That was clearly going to be an option.

It was then that we noticed that every local - even the newly-extruded infants in their tiny Turkish prams - had brown, leathery skin like one might find in a good Milanese pump. These people had, over the centuries, developed skin that was seemingly impervious to the rigors of ultraviolet radiation on this simple, unpretentious island.

Our choice then became simple: frolic on the beach and risk being transformed into human bacon or sit in our hotel room, drink warm beer and stare at each other. We chose the former and within minutes we were the only people on a stretch of Aegean sand that would make Margaret Thatcher weep. As I made merry in the sea with a school of tiny, color-shifting squid, Ahmet cozied up on the shore. After I'd exhausted myself in my attempts to capture one of the squid in my bare hands, I reclined on the beach and closed my eyes for a moment.

Two hours later I woke up, Ahmet snoring softly to my right on his towel.

Maybe you didn't get that. Two. Hours. Later.

I shook him awake and threw a blanket over him. We covered our bodies as swiftly as a high-school couple caught in delecto flagrante in her dad's basement den, but the damage had been done. Sitting in our hotel room in the dark with the air conditioning set on "McMurdo Sound", we could fairly hear the heat radiating from our violated skins. About an hour later, still plunged into total darkness, Ahmet moaned like a whore and began to strip.

"Uh, what are you doing, Ahmet?", I asked in a voice that didn't resemble my own; it was higher, squeakier and more desperate. "I can't stand to have these clothes on so I am stripping. You should try it; we're in the damn dark and I don't fancy blokes." Twenty minutes later two twentysomething men clad only in their underoos were to be found laying, bathed in their own brine, on brick-hard hotel beds in the dark of a Turkish hotel room. I had never experienced pain like that - even the backs of my knees were fried - and I began to supplicate.

"Dear little bead-thing that the creepy bus-lady gave me", I began, "take away the sensation that I have been raped by a blowtorch and give me back the ability to make facial expressions without a grisly crunching sound."

It was not to be and we boarded the ferry back to the mainland the next morning. The locals had gathered in their outdoor çayhane (tea 'garden') and they beheld our leprous, fire-engine-red skin and politely said nothing while we were in earshot. The young woman who'd suggested that we cover ourselves with sticky cola tutted softly and lifted her eyebrows slightly as she spooned some lentil soup into her mouth. No doubt she would tell her clientele about the two yabancı (strangers) who did not heed her sage advice and proceeded to heedlessly give themselves third-degree burns on forty percent of their bodies for years to come - assuring our immortality on a tiny island forgotten by time where the Coppertone Baby was assumed to be a punk-rock band.

The ferry vomited several islanders and ourselves onto a jetty where awaited yet another dolmuş to the nearby town. The old man driving the mini-bus had some insane Arabesk music playing at nearly supersonic levels, and yet as Ahmet and I boarded and handed him our lira he hit the "Mute" button to address us.

"Coca Cola yok mu?" he asked, and I felt my blood pressure quietly triple. He said "Was there not any Coca Cola?" We said yes, there was, but it was imbibed and not utilized as a tanning agent. What fools we are, we laughed, and sat in our seats to quietly reflect on how satisfying it would have been to part his head from his shoulders with a scimitar.

I found myself at the summit of the acropolis at Assos (Behramkale) the next day - clad in long sleeves and jeans and sneakers and a hat - looking out over a stretch of Aegean so perfectly blue that it cannot be described to the Greek island of Lesvos, less than a mile away. Ahmet and I were the only people within visual distance and, as I examined the Doric glory of the ruined temple to the goddess Athena with only the lonely call of the gulls in my ears, I felt my heart swelling with the astoundingly aching beauty of the country I'd come to know and love those five months. I knew that at that moment that I wouldn't be able to leave Turkey without surrendering my heart to it. The stupidest thing I had ever done happened while I was doing the one thing that grounded me as a man - the thing that, to this day five years later, shapes what I think, who I am, and where my dreams live.

One day I will go back and try to find my heart.

And the pound of skin I left behind.

I remain, as ever,

Domonic