This has been a hard weekend. One where in my personal zone I have gone through a great searing change; and on the global scale, one where a whole country has been blazing out of control, victim to greed and carelessness and the planet’s own revenge.

In my efforts to forget my own transitions, I have been relentless in my anxiety over Greece. All summer there have been forest fires there, most of them started intentionally. Every year there are fires: there is some obtuse law, poorly formulated, that seeks to protect the environment but somehow ends up destroying it: forest land is not open to development, but if it is unforested, it can be developed. Beware of Greek developers bearing matches.

But this year, this week, something cataclysmic, apocalyptic has been happening. I would like to think that the Greek talent for exaggeration might be guilty for the scale of the fires, but it would seem not. One look at the satellite photo tells a story. That familiar map like the shape of a hand, that I have known since the fourth grade, that is as iconic to me as the Acropolis itself: the Peloponnese, trailing no clouds of glory but sad frightening plumes of destruction.

Zahoro, where thirty people died in the fires, remains in my memory from a visit in 1986. We were camping on the beach some 10-20 kilometers away, a long vast deserted (then) beach with dunes and forests and an odd thermal spa like something out of a Resnais film. We had run out of something and drove up to Zahoro; the shops were closed. An unfriendly man told us it was Easter Monday.

How could we have been in Greece and not known it was Easter the day before? It seemed like a bad omen, a real failure of the imagination. We had been staying indulgently on our vast lonely beach with only the Greek air force buzzing over our heads from time to time; now we had ignored their most glorious feast, a time to be shared with others, even if you don’t believe. Greek Easter is one of the rare honest feasts still left. And we had missed it.

We passed an open newspaper kiosk; the headlines were surprisingly large. I made some comment about exaggeration but could not decipher what cataclysm had befallen the country. We went back to the campsite and only five days later learned that Chernobyl had exploded a week or so earlier. If we had been nuked, swimming out there in the Adriatic, there was nothing we could do. It has left me with a sort of fatalistic stance about life and mortality.

One day we cleaned up the beach. I found large cans that had washed up onto the sand that threatened a high degree of toxicity. I didn’t know what to do with them. I have lived with my doubt and an edge of guilt ever since. We put all the trash where it belonged—in a municipal trash can—but those toxic cans…were they meant to stay buried at the bottom of the sea? If so, why, what right did those toxic waste barons have to do that? Where was Greenpeace? What should I have done?

I have not been back to the Western Peloponnese since 1986. I imagine it has been developed. I remember thinking it was an achingly beautiful landscape, much as it had always been, still lush with forests and small stone villages where people lived quiet hardworking lives rewarded with a pleasant climate, beauty and an incomparable quality of life.

Like all dutiful tourists, I went to Olympia. I tried hard to enter the spirit of place and imagine the games, the beauty of the athletes, to be in awe of a vanished civilization. I have never been much of one for old stones; the beauty of a landscape, in its spontaneity, takes me much farther than a man-made monument into a realm of awe or appreciation. But still, Olympia is symbolic. Lay down your arms, warring Greeks of Sparta and Athens, strive for peace in friendly combat. Something to that effect.

Olympia belongs to the world, not just to Greece. The fact that the fire is burning all around this ancient site is not merely the doing, this time, of an arsonist. The terrible heatwave and meltemi winds have run wild with the flames. Meanwhile, thousands are stranded in Romania from torrential floods.

Not wanting to sound like Nostradamus…I’ll go no further with my scenarios of global warming apocalypse and holocaust. My heart is broken, for the villages of Greece, for the ancient site of Olympia. If we lose Olympia, we lose a great deal indeed: it is not merely marble and a heritage; we lose the physical memory of one of man’s nobler efforts to overcome his terribly evil nature, to lay down his arms, and keep his matches safely out of reach.

Let’s pray that nature herself will cause the fires to abate, for I have little faith left that man will.