There's a remote ghost town in Utah that for a brief moment was the most important place in the world. Promontory Summit, known in 1869 as Promontory Point, was where the two teams building the First Transcontinental Railway met and turned two tracks into one – connecting America from coast to coast.
The importance of a transcontinental railroad seems somewhat obvious – of course the United States needed infrastructure. To a society that has split the atom, unlocked the genome, edited DNA, traveled to the moon, explored Mars and flies around the globe, pounding the last spike on a railroad doesn't seem like much. However, it's almost impossible to overstate the significance of achievement.
First, it was an incredible feat of engineering. Anyone who has ever played Oregon Trail on an Apple IIc or e knows perfectly well how dangerous the paths across the country were in the early 1800's. Building a railroad across numerous terrains, weather systems, rivers and mountain ranges was daring. No one had ever built a railroad spanning an entire continent. More importantly, that golden spike at Promotory Point could be considered the catalyst. Once the United States could be reliably and efficiently traversed overland from one end to the other, the Frontier was on borrowed time and a fully integrated, developed powerhouse of a country was on the rise. Industrialism had won.
Today trains are a largely antiquated form of travel – serving their real value primarily in the freight and logistics. We can go wherever we want, whenever we want using vehicles parked in our garages to navigate massive highway systems connecting everyone to everywhere. Or we drive to our nearest airport and fly anywhere from within our region to the most remote and faraway places in the world in less time than it took a wagon train to move 30 miles.
All of this to say the free movement we take for granted – which forms the foundation to our world and lives – is actually a massive achievement living quietly in the background, unnoticed and almost invisible to our eyes.
In a similar way, one of Greece's major feats of engineering lives quietly, almost invisibly in the background. It's easy to see Greece as a relaxed place with a slow pace of life and equally slow economy. It's also a modern country with all the same comforts and standards of living as the rest of Europe, America and Canada (we can put the European eschewing of dryers, dishwashers and garbage disposals to the side – they can get them if they really want, even if they aren't as good – but that's a whole separate discussion). America worked hard to develop across a contiguous land-mass. Greece had to do it across an archipelago.
Making it so plumbing, electricity, communications, fuel, food and access to a variety of goods is equal and functioning from islands as large as Crete to as small as Arki is almost a kind of magic. The logistical planning that goes into Greece's everyday functioning is tremendous.
Larger islands like Rhodes and Kos have many gas stations with competing brands. The populations are large enough and infrastructure good enough to make it so Shell, EKO and Avin to all extend their supply lines to those islands. On Patmos, there is room for only one gas station – and that station had better function! Avin has the rights to it. To keep every car, truck and scooter moving on Patmos, Avin sends a fuel ship every-other-day. The gas truck is parked at the gas station itself and then shuttles back and forth to the port bringing back the boat's liquid cargo.
That said, gasoline distribution might be one of the simplest essentials to architect. Imagine being presented with the task of bringing electricity to all 300 inhabited islands of Greece plus the entirety of the hilly mainland. At some point in the early 20th century someone was given this exact task and it had to be daunting especially considering many if not most of the cities, towns and villages of Greece existed for not one or two hundred years, as in the oldest parts of America, but thousands of years. How do you wire up a 1,000 year old town on a remote island?
If you look closely in both Skala and Hora, the areas where cobblestone or in some cases pavement was pulled up and replaced are visible. The process – especially in the older town on the hill appears to have involved pulling up cobblestone, digging trenches in the "streets" and laying pipes, cables, wires….whatever infrastructure. But how to do it without disfiguring what could easily be a UNESCO World Heritage Site? I'm sure the people who brought infrastructure to Jerusalem would have a lot to say about that.
So might some retired civil engineers in Indonesia. When I lived in Bali, one of the most shocking things was that people didn't have electricity or phone lines until the late 1980's. There were adults only ten years older than me who could remember life before power. Why? Indonesia – the largest and most populated archipelago nation – has 6,000 inhabited islands among its 17,508 total. Given Indonesia had a much lowed per capita GDP than Greece, a much larger area and 20 times the inhabited islands, it makes sense it may have struggled to spread modern infrastructure. Yet, the idea that I was riding Star Tours at Dinseyland while people in Bali still didn't have basic lighting is kind of mind blowing.
I've mentioned before how the vast majority of goods (including food) and packages arrive daily by ferry. Because ferries are so vital to the life of Greek islands, the government mandates they have a regular, if not reduced schedule all year. Therefore the ferry companies are somewhat like our regulated utilities – technically private but under the government's thumb. The ferry providers – several of which have consolidated under Attica Group – need to turn solid profits in the summers in order to have a profitable year given the money-losing winters.
Perhaps the biggest hole in the supply-chain system is the time it takes for shipping and deliveries. I once sent a FedEx International Overnight envelope from San Francisco to my attorney here on Patmos. It took seven days to arrive. I've since learned – most recently from an order Michelle placed that it doesn't matter which level of shipping service anyone chooses – it takes at least five days for a package or letter to make it from Athens to Patmos. End of story.
Still, despite slow shipments, the overall effect of a working first-world country across an archipelago remains impressive. I think it speaks to the adage that making it look easy is the hardest thing in the world to do.
Sometimes when I walk around town or use the now very speedy Internet (my house here often gets up to a ridiculous 200 mbps download), I think back to July 29, 2010 when Emily and I crossed by ferry from Marmaris, Turkey to Rhodes. I had thoroughly enjoyed Turkey and thought nothing was lacking about it. When stepping off the boat, my immediate first thought was, "We're in Europe!"
This is what I wrote then:
More importantly, Rhodes is Greece. And Greece is Europe. It's far more polished, easy and refined. Really, Rhodes is Europe Lite – all the stuff of Europe without any of the rules or pretension. There's no reason why the bathrooms can't be spotless and yet everyone can dress like it's Saturday at the beach.
So maybe I did have some negative feelings about Turkish restrooms….
Sure, unlike the spike at Promontory Point, engineering modern, consistent, high functioning systems within the Greek archipelago didn't light the spark that changed the world. However, it probably played a critical role in Greece – which sits on the cusp of East and West – leaning West and becoming a founding member of the European Union and an important part of NATO. And for supporting all the freezers responsible for the ubiquity of gelato that defines this great nation.
