The wind came up around three in the morning. I know because it found the gap in the shutters and rattled them until I gave up on sleep and lay there listening to it work the whole town over. By the time I walked down to the port at eight, the sea was the colour of dishwater with white tearing off the tops of it, and the man in the ferry office had already taped a single handwritten word to the glass: ΑΚΥΡΩΘΗΚΕ. Cancelled. The meltemi, the summer wind that runs the Aegean on its own schedule, had decided I was staying on Naxos another day, and there was precisely nothing to discuss about it.
I'll be honest about my first reaction, which was not graceful. I had a booking on the next island. I had a plan, the kind I'm always telling people to hold loosely and never quite manage to myself. I stood in front of that taped-up word doing the useless arithmetic of the stranded — is there a later boat, a different company, a flight — until the man behind the counter looked at me with the patience of someone who has watched a thousand tourists do this exact thing and said, "Tomorrow. Maybe. The wind decides." Then he shrugged in a way that closed the subject.
So I had a day I hadn't asked for, on an island I thought I'd finished with.
What I did with it
Nothing, at first, which felt like a small act of defiance and then just felt fine. I got a coffee at a place on the waterfront and watched the harbour cats conduct their morning business among the moored fishing boats. One of them — orange, missing part of an ear, clearly management — sat on the chair opposite me with the confidence of a creature that has never once doubted it would be fed. I fed it. We had an understanding.
When the coffee was done I walked up into the old town, the Kastro, where the lanes are too narrow for cars and the white houses lean across the top to shake hands. With nowhere to be, I let myself get properly lost in it, which on the first day I'd refused to do because I was busy seeing the island. I found a tiny shop selling the local cheese and the citron liqueur they make here, run by a woman who let me taste both and then sold me neither because I had nothing to carry them in and she clearly thought I hadn't earned them yet. Fair.
The afternoon got hot and I gave up entirely and slept. I want to record that, because I'd never normally admit to sleeping through an afternoon abroad. It felt faintly criminal and was completely wonderful.
The good part, which I almost engineered away
In the early evening I walked out along the causeway to the Portara — the huge marble doorway standing alone on an islet at the harbour mouth, all that was ever finished of a temple to Apollo from two and a half thousand years ago. I'd seen it already, on day one, in the flat light of mid-morning, and ticked it off. This was different. The wind had cleaned the sky, the light was going long and gold, and half the island had wandered out to the same spot to watch the sun drop through that empty stone frame.
Nobody was performing it. People just sat on the warm rock, not talking much, while the sun did the thing it does. A couple shared a bottle of wine straight from it. Two kids dared each other closer to the edge and were retrieved. The orange cat was not there, having better things to do, but its colleagues were.
I sat until the colour went and the first lights came on behind me in the town, and I realised I hadn't checked the time, or my phone, or the ferry situation, for a couple of hours. The day I'd been so annoyed to be given had turned, without my permission and slightly against my will, into the best one of the trip.
The ferry, eventually
It ran the next morning. The wind dropped overnight as suddenly as it had arrived, the man in the office peeled his sign off the glass, and I got on the boat to the island I'd been so desperate to reach. It was fine. It was nice. I remember almost nothing about it.
I remember the orange cat, the woman who wouldn't sell me the liqueur, and the light through that two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old doorway with no temple behind it. None of which I'd have got if the wind had behaved.
I'm not going to dress that up into a lesson. It's not one. The wind cancelled my plan and I had a good day instead — that's all it is, and that's enough. But I think about that taped-up Greek word more than I think about most of the things I actually planned. More notes from the road in the journal; more islands and places worth the detour over in destinations.