By Joel Stratte-McClure
Sometimes I run into trouble during my trek around the Mediterranean Sea.
After walking 34 kilometers from Salerno towards Agropoli (Italy) recently, I decided to get off the sandy beach and saunter through a dense seaside pine forest.
Big mistake.
I encountered a small tribe of Gypsies and three of the younger guys started cackling at me. I retorted with my usual Tule Lake goose call before I realized that I’d put myself alone in the middle of the woods with a trio of taunting thieves.
“Domadoro, domadoro, domadoro,” they shouted in a well-practiced chorus as they approached me. “Give me gold, give me gold, give me gold.”
They all looked very thirstily at the gold band on my right wrist, a gold bracelet on my left wrist and a gold chain around my neck.
I take two of these flashy ornaments off when I walk through cities like Naples, but didn’t even think of removing them on a rural stretch like this. Another big mistake, I reflected as I made a quick beeline towards the beach and told the Gypsies in Italian to “Watch out, I’ve got some friends with guns.”
That ruse didn’t confuse them for long. They knew, much to my chagrin, that they’d found a solo peripatetic jewelry store.
“Domadoro, domadoro, domadoro,” they spit again in unison when they confronted me at the edge of the sea. They stared, fixated, at my right wrist.
That’s the wrinkle.
The gold band on my right wrist is a permanent fixture. It’s been there since I had it made in 1969 when gold was still worth $32 an ounce. To get the bracelet, they’ll have to cut off my right hand.
That just didn’t, from my perspective, seem like a decent solution. And when one of the 20somethings grabbed, and broke, the chain around my neck I knew it was now or never.
“Attenzione,” I yelled as I pointed behind them. “Polizia!”
As they turned around to see the non-existent squad of policemen, I took off (I know you’re supposed to politely comply with a mugger’s requests but out here, in the middle of nowhere, I had no idea how they might deal with someone who’d seen their faces, knew the location of their campsite and was worth his weight in gold) running faster than I have since sprinting the 220 for time in the seventh grade at Sequoia Middle School.
Saturday morning on Italian TV, and in the newspapers, there was a story about someone who had been killed/assassinated and was found in a sandy grave on a beach near Naples. I’m happy to report that it wasn’t me. And that I should cross the 5,000-kilometer mark on my Mediterranean ramble when I enter the hopefully Gypsyless Cilento National Park on Monday.
Additional details concerning this caper will be found in my next book “The Iliad and the Oddity: Walking the Mediterranean II” or “The Idiot and the Odyssey: Still Walking the Mediterranean.”
Joel Stratte-McClure, an American journalist/adventurer who lived in France for over three decades, has been writing about his global trekking and hiking adventures since the 1970s. His work has taken him to over 100 countries and his articles on a variety of subjects have appeared The International Herald Tribune, Time Magazine, The London Times, People Magazine, Who Weekly, Fast Thinking and numerous other publications. He’s currently based in Los Angeles where, when he’s not hiking, he writes the Tinseltown SpyWitness column for the Los Angeles Daily News and is completing a book entitled “Hollywood’s Twenty-Five Hottest Latinos: How They Got There, What They’re Doing Now And Where They’re Going.”
