Walk to Betania Monastery

The Walk to Betania
04-27-05

The taxi driver asked a local for the turnoff to Betania Monastery, and when we arrived at the advised spot, it was a mere dirt track leading off into the woods. I descended the cab, giving up my four dollars and shouldering my small pack. The day was gray with clouds, leaves laden with a continuing drizzle after last night’s rain.

Just a hundred yards into my journey the road split in two, one trajectory leading to a series of half-built houses lined up in a row, all concrete and rebar, the other winding down into a tame looking beach forest, trash lining the streets. Ghost town or garbage track?

I glanced at the hand-drawn scribble of a map Giorgi had given me the night before, sitting over tea in my apartment. ‘John, I really don’t think you should do this. It’s very difficult to find the Monastery, and no taxi can take you there because the road is in such bad condition.’ The map had no road-forks on it until I was to come to an obviously visible spring pipe, where I was to take a left. The next turn would be at the landmark of a house with a double A-frame roof. If a dog barked I was to turn right, if a chicken, then turn around and head home... just kidding.

The map told me nothing about my immediate dilemma, so I chose the downward track. After ten minutes through the forest, I gained a vantage point where I could see a bit of a village not so far below me, and another village on the ridge far to the left, the way the road could have taken me if I had gone towards the ghost-town. In which village would the spring-pipe be? I wondered if there wouldn’t likely be a spring-pipe in every village on this mountain... so I played my hole card and give Giorgi a call.

‘John, you should go into the houses, the road should be near the houses.’ So I trudged back through the forest and up into the ghost-town. These were big, half-finished mansions, with amazing views down the long valley. In fact, though we were a half hour taxi ride outside Tbilisi, I could see the gray apartment blocks of one of the city suburbs creeping up the valley several miles away. Why weren’t these houses finished? Father Theodore, an American monk living in Betania Monastery, and to whom I was going to visit, would later characterize the houses as the ‘dream houses of all the crooks from the pre-Revolution days (1991-1994).’

The ghost-town option led nowhere. The road out of town quickly became a four-wheel-drive track a few seasons from happily being at peace as rehabilitated forest. I started to get pissed, so I took a piss. It started to rain. Frustration was at a peak, but just as I was getting angry, mostly at Giorgi for his ridiculously inadequate map and directions despite his repeated advice not to take this crazy trip, I heard a car grind to a halt and saw a man vault a gate at the front of a mansion. Suddenly my hunter-hunted instincts took over and I hid behind a tree. In these situations I become keenly aware that I am in the middle of nowhere in a country where my shoes are worth an average monthly salary, my camera four months salary, and those are the people with jobs. Who would be jumping a mansion’s gate in the rainy afternoon, at the end of a line of ghost-town houses?

I peered from behind my tree half expecting to hear the sound of a glass breaking, to be the unwitting witness to burglary!

But then I came to my senses and walked up to the two guys inside the opened gate: ‘Gamarjobat, which way to Betania Monastery?’ They looked at me strangely, then pointed down the forested path nearby and said, ‘go down that way, when you reach the bottom, there will be more people who can direct you.’ So I set off again, and not five hundred meters from my grand beginning on the main road, the only thing I knew for certain was that I was that I was not on Giorgi’s little map.

In retrospect, everything has a point to it, and I’m glad that fate led me this way, if only for two basic things: The first was a good walking stick, scavenged from my favorite walking stick material, ironwood. The second was the realization that I was on a classic John adventure again, and damn, it had been a long time! I realized this because in Ireland seven years ago I had whittled an ironwood walking stick, and again another in Hawaii the next year. In New Zealand four years ago I whittled an ironwood walking stick, and took it everywhere with me.

The walking stick took me back to those times, to the feelings of absolute freedom I felt then, and suddenly it was a new day. Those were the times of my life, and boy if I wasn’t excited to be at it again! The only rules for a John adventure are: no prior planning, a destination, intuition, and love of detail in nature.

This little forest track put me back on the road about three hundred yards from where I had originally called Giorgi an hour earlier. I decided not to call Giorgi again and turned my phone off.

Remember I said once the magic of life is when everything that is gray suddenly turns to color? That’s what happened to me. I walked off with a new wander in my step, a step not looking for a random spring pipe, but a step interested in local geology, old houses, the first flowers of spring... and avoiding puddles of course, always a hazard when I’m in this super-spacey state.

I wandered into another ghost-town of empty mansions, some half-built, and at the barking of a dog, found the only inhabitants in the whole wide field of fifty buildings: two old women in a farm yard behind a rickety fence, their dog as suspicious of me as they were. ‘Gamarjobat, which way to the Monastery?’ I asked. They pointed downhill and off I set, following a barely visible set of vehicle tracks I was beginning to suspect would lead me to my destination. Father Theodore had been to Tbilisi a week earlier I knew and maybe the rain hadn’t completely wiped out his tracks....

In the forest again, the road diverged, the wheels taking the less obvious road. I studied the situation carefully and with strong resolve to follow my intuition I chose the road not taken by my vehicle tracks. Plodding on resolutely, questioning this decision to abandon my only tangible hope of being on the correct path, I was self-awarded several hundred dummy points to realize that the roads merged only thirty meters further on, the result of a simple mud-induced rerouting.

Twenty more minutes through the forest uneventfully, my mind suppressing any self-doubts with curiosity diversions into the scenic beauty of the forest, an environ I’ve missed dearly in the concrete stacks of Sabertalo. Coming to a gate, I walked into a strange place: a huge institutional-looking building, it’s three or four stories looking very out of place in the middle of this forest, standing right next to the dirt track I was following. Smoke rose from a chimney, hanging in the treetops, and as I walked past, a farmer entered the building without saying hello. Pigs squealed in a nasty-looking farmyard across the street, and I noticed the disrepair on the old building, looking as if several families might be living inside, here in the middle of the forest.

I approached a young man fixing his car and deployed my question, ‘Gamarjobat, which way to Betania Monastery?’ The man looked at me without curiosity and launched into a complicated series of directions involving several great mouthfuls of air and gesticulations up towards the way I had come. My heart sank. How far had I come, never having found the now mythical spring pipe? Would I have to traipse miles back uphill to the suspicious old ladies?

Understanding nothing of what he said, I took a new tact; ‘one hundred meters back, there is a turn. Do I go right or left?’ I received the same lengthy, speedily delivered response. I think I asked the guy ‘right or left?’ about three more times before nodding without comprehension and walking slowly back the way I had come.

I decided on lunch over despair, so sat myself down for a bite of ‘lobiani,’ Georgia’s famous bean-bread, the staple of any non-cooking bachelor who decides to undertake the eight week vegan fast of Great Lent.

Within minutes an old Volga appeared (possibly the classiest car in Georgia), laboring up the hill. I hailed it, and when a young man jumped out with an encouraging smile on his face, I launched my question. Before answering, he said with a look of incredulity, ‘where are you coming from?!’ But I understood, ‘where are you from?’ so responded, ‘I’m coming from America’ in the straightest face a Lost in Translation moment can produce. He burst out laughing and I heard cackling from inside the car where it looked like the whole family was hiding, from Grandpa and Grandma in front down to kids in the back.

Grandma turned out to be the local expert, and when everyone had piled out of the car to inspect me, I was invited to stop by their house to be their guest when I came back from the Monastery. Grandma pointed at a narrow footpath turning off of the road not twenty meters from my luncheoning and nodded confirmation to my surprised question, ‘that track goes to the Monastery.’ Neglecting to ask how long the trail would take, I waved goodbye as they drove off, promising to come to their house in the near future.

This story is almost over, promise. And just in case the suspense has been too much for the reader, the spring-pipe will not appear in the forest ahead, next to the cows, at the campfire, or the great cross.

At the beginning of the trail, a curious sign hung from a tree. A big arrow pointed at a little picture of a church. I was overjoyed! But above the arrow was written ‘145 min’ while below was written ‘15 min.’ I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what they meant, and why, in this remotest of forests in Georgia, were there english letters on a sign? And if they were trying to mark a time distance, why both 145 and 15, and why would anyone write a precise 145 minutes especially in this country of timelessness?!

But forgetting about all these silly questions, I took hope in the sign of the church and set off down the trail. For another hour I walked trustingly, only once coming to a crossing where I needed to choose between right or left. When I came on a group of cows in the forest, I sang them a chant twice in two parts, and set off again. Did you know cows love music? I discovered that at Kimberton where as kids we used to squeal with the grossness of cows energetically expunging while community members sang Christmas carols by candlelight to the cows every Advent Sunday evening. And again in Scotland when one day Dad and I were running around finding Standing Stone sites and I amused myself by singing opera at the top of my lungs to a herd of cows a hundred yards distant. They must have thought I was the mayor of feed, because within ten minutes, two dozen cows were lined up steaming in front of me, more attentive than a Puccini audience at the Met.

Walking along again in the rain, I employed my worthy staff in my second favorite erosional activity (the first being to throw several thousand rocks into water over the course of an afternoon), knocking dead branches off of trees in precisely aimed sword strikes. Engaged thus, I suddenly spotted a big campfire ahead through the trees. I jumped behind a tree, full of my former suspicion, and listening cautiously tried to analyze the nature of my adversaries. The sound of women laughing put off my fears, and wandering placidly up to the fire, I was seated for wine and toasts by ten or twelve happy university students having a picnic! My fasting status limited me to more bean-bread, but the rest of them were feasting on meat shish kabobs, and all sorts of things they had packed out into the wilderness.

I only stayed long enough to make a toast and have a picture taken, they promised me the monastery was just over the next hill.... could it be true?!

A huge wooden cross stood planted at the top of a bald hillock. Emerging from my familiar home in the beach forests and ascending this promontory, a long deep valley stretched from far right to far left, intersected by a deep gorge at my feet. Just across the gorge and perhaps two hundred meters below me, the red roofs and yellow stone of Betania Monastery glowed in the rainy afternoon light. A single tree stood at the west end, a pristine green lawn displayed the order and disclipline one longs for in the ritual and dedication of a monastery. Several black robed figures moved sedately around the yard, appearing to be engaged in gardening. I rose my hand in quiet salute, and grin spreading across my dirty face. I had found the monastery at last.

Postlude:
Two days later, as Father Theodore gave me and several soldiers a ride up to the main road, I became increasingly perplexed as nothing seemed familiar. Arriving at the main road a half hour drive later, I realized that I had never even been on the road to Betania Monastery. The taxi man had dropped me off at the wrong dirt road. There was no spring-pipe, no left-turn at a double A-frame house, in fact, I had never even been on Giorgi’s map. Remind me not to tell my mother.