"A man needs a little madness," said Zorba the Greek. Cristina Nehring flirts with it herself on Crete, an island with a savage landscape and proudly untamed people.

"No worry!" he beamed. "I'm too young to die." Giannis had just leaped from a cliff into his boat, slipped, and skidded wildly across the glistening deck. I looked at him as he fell—muscular, finely featured, a Greek statue. "Yes," I said lamely, "you are far too young to die."

But so, of course, were all the young men whose deaths I would hear reported quietly, surreptitiously, and incompletely during the summers I spent with my family in this western corner of Crete. "That is no country for old men," wrote Yeats in his famous poem "Sailing to Byzantium." These days, perhaps, this is no country for young men.

It is no country for young men because they disappear. You see them as we saw Andreas, seemingly a movie-star prince air-dropped into a tiny taverna in the tiny village of Livaniana, in the most rugged section of Crete's White Mountains. Livaniana is a ghost town, and Andreas lived there with his mother, a donkey, a dog, an old crazy man, in a labyrinth of deserted stone houses. Hikers occasionally come by for the sweeping sea views and an orange Fanta, just about the only thing you can buy.

Everyone was intrigued by Andreas: so solitary, so darkly handsome—but wholly undiscovered, underemployed. He had a little English, but when my mother praised the view from his taverna, he told her in a deliberate, impeccable accent: "But you, madame, are even more beautiful." It is the only sentence I ever heard him speak. The next year Andreas was gone. He had, we heard, shot himself in the head. There was talk of an argument, trouble with the law.

The next disappearance we heard of, on my most recent visit, was equally mysterious. Eleftherios was a doe-eyed boy, the first son of the most successful restaurant family in the most picturesque village of the region. You could recognize him from afar by his graceful, loping gait. He had, we learned after some inquiries, been murdered. His assailant had gone to jail willingly—the man preferred imprisonment to the revenge of Eleftherios's brother. And therein lies the rub: The most spectacular part of Crete is sprinkled with blood feuds. Whole families vacate their hometowns to save sons and lovers from the effects of these feuds; indeed, Eleftherios's family had cursorily abandoned Loutro. Their longtime restaurant there is now run by strangers. Livaniana has been depleted by feuds. Its neighbor, Aradena—poised on the edge of one of Crete's most regal gorges—is now deserted for the same reason.

And yet what you notice when you come to western Crete is the overwhelming warmth and almost limitless generosity of the people. This is so striking that I have often wondered how the Cretan economy functions: The less touristy the location, the more the taverna, restaurant, and bakery owners will shower you with their wares at no charge. They will shower you with shots of the potent national liquor, raki, and with pastries, fruit, cake, homemade goat cheese, and liters of local wine. They will give you for free everything they sell—and then, just sometimes, they will disappear. If they are under a certain age, if they are male, if they are unlucky. Indeed, this is no country for young men. But then again, maybe it never was.