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Sleeping Disease

The handful of visiting yachts docked stern-to the quay are an elegant swath next to the jumble of colorful fishboats. Shoppers along the waterfront are a swarming buzz of negotiation, their sparring partners a constant refrain of retail. Blue and green shutters dot the white, angular flats that climb up the mountainside like a haphazard house of cards. Snaking alleyways hint that they might be the path to the soul of this scene, if only one could negotiate the hundreds of blind corners and endless levels of stairs.

Everyone arrives by boat to Hydra, an island with no airport and no cars southwest of Athens, and so for everyone, the harbor’s gestalt is the first impression. Individual faces can’t be discerned. Smells blend into hopeless entanglement like melting crayons. All that is certain is the taste of salt air—and the desire to find a sweet spot to tie up the boat and stay as long as possible.

Within this mesmerizing blur, Pantelis is the first thing to come into focus. His salt-and-pepper beard seems to grow from his chin and cheeks and neck in unwieldy corkscrews. His thick gray eyebrows squat atop clear blue eyes that seem deceptively small after so many years of squinting at visitors. It’s uncertain how his rumpled baseball cap remains perched atop his long, bushy mane. His shorts are rainbow-patterned cloth, the kind on children’s television shows. His vest is sleeveless and camouflage. He’s probably in his mid-50s, all of five-foot-nothing.

He prowls the quay, responding to each boater’s cell-phone request for docking help. Berths are at a premium in this paradise, and nobody gets in without Pantelis. As unlikely as his appearance makes it seem, he just might be the most powerful man on the most beautiful island in Greece’s Saronic Gulf.

At least that’s what I thought the day after I first saw him. It was a bright morning in late September when I asked him to breakfast aboard Oh Que Luna, the 85-foot private charter boat that was serving spectacularly as my ride. I was clad in Eddie Bauer khakis and a stylish leather belt. He donned an outfit as memorable as the previous morning’s: a T-shirt as blue as the Greek flag and a pair of fluorescent yellow shorts.

As trinket-shop owners pushed open their doors along the quay in the background, I sat at Oh Que Luna’s dining table with Pantelis and asked him to tell me about himself over coffee and cake. I expected tales about life among the pack mules that serve as Hydra’s only transportation.

He opened with a story about the time he had spent in the States during its radical heyday, mentioned his service in Vietnam and expounded on his resulting thoughts about geopolitical philosophy.

Between bites of breakfast, I nearly swallowed my own tongue.

 

 

A few days earlier, when I had arrived in Athens and boarded Oh Que Luna, I had no knowledge of “sleeping disease.” Still, I knew Greece’s ruling class had a reputation for doing as little as possible at the very last minute, and I was not surprised to see cafes full of working-age men enjoying a midday ouzo as sites for the upcoming Olympic Games went unbuilt a hundred yards away. It was not so much that these Greeks seemed careless as that they seemed to be without the kinds of cares that permeate cocktail hours in London and construction projects in New York. I found it hard, as a go-go American, to settle into what I saw as the dreamy rhythm of the place.

By the time I arrived in Hydra later that week, though, I was well in tune. My basic needs were all I sought to fill. It might’ve been the hot sun. It might’ve been the lulling motion of the boat. Or maybe it was this sleeping disease they spoke of, a strange blanket that wraps itself around visitors and suffocates their compulsions, their will to do. All I knew when I arrived on Hydra was that I simply wanted to be. The afternoon I first saw Pantelis, I’d just awoken from my second nap of the day. I knew I felt hungry, and I knew I felt thirsty, and I knew I would be tired again soon.

For some reason, I felt the urge to meet him before I went back to my luxurious slumber.

Sitting in the motoryacht’s salon the following morning, he told me his father had come to Hydra from Trenton, New Jersey, to explore much the same way I had. “He met my mother and got stuck here,” Pantelis chuckled, gesturing with short, thick fingers. His parents married and took him to Brooklyn to meet an aunt when he was a teenager. He stayed for two or three years, got a good taste for the place, then returned to Hydra. A young man with a big vision, Pantelis saw more opportunity back in the States, so he returned for what would become a 20-year stay.

It was the late 1960s or perhaps the early ’70s, as best as he can recall. “Everything was happening,” he said. “All the movements, protests. It was the greatest years, when America was alive.”

Before and after his service with the U.S. Army in Vietnam (which he won’t discuss; “too personal,” he says), Pantelis spent most of his time crisscrossing America on a Harley Davidson. He visited New York, California, Florida, the Midwest. He got to know the people, the culture, the system.

He was about my age at the time, also looking around and seeing as much as he could see. Only unlike me, he grew sadder every day.

“You see them spending billions worldwide, going to the moon, while in Missouri or Nebraska a loyal taxpaying citizen can work 35 years and not have enough to pay the mortgage,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair.”

He said this to me as my chartered motoryacht’s Philippine steward smiled and offered to refresh our coffee. I was at a loss—hearing “Nebraska” and “mortgage” in a place where I had been dangerously close to equating the slow pace of life with laziness of thought.

Pantelis continued, politely funneling decades’ worth of consternation into a few sentences that punctuated the current state of affairs.

“The technology, the system, this is globalization,” he explained. “They want people to be blindfolded. They send them a computer and tell them to look at that. The youngsters always look at the computer screen. It’s worldwide. It’s already here. It’s very sad. It takes a lot of our people’s personalities. The world is going to be like an assembly line.”

As I attempted to ensure my jaw was not agape with surprise, Pantelis’ cell phone rang. He excused himself and dashed off the yacht and down the quay to help an incoming skipper find his place in Hydra harbor. He promised to return shortly.

It occurred to me while he was gone that had our roles been reversed that morning, I might’ve told him about myself something like this: I live in Connecticut, where I sit at a computer all day. I have no more debt than the average American, and I’m excited about the Italian tile I’m importing to refinish my master bathroom. I found it on the Internet.

I felt a bit ashamed. And I suddenly no longer felt tired. My eyes were quite open for the first time that week, for the first time in a long time.

 

 

"I think people are all the same," Pantelis said when he returned. "To be in peace, and to belong; we're basically looking for the same thing. I think it's very important to find a place where your soul will be pleased. I think it's very important to find your nest, your cave."

Only then, he said, can you think from your center about what's important, about how things should be, about how you should be.

He's found his nest on Hydra. He still visits America, every second winter ("I start in New York, I stop in Atlantic City, and if I have any money left, I continue," he guffawed). He returns to Hydra and spends summer days--7 a.m. till midnight--helping the visiting boaters find their places along the quay. He sleeps in a small boat across the harbor, except during the winters he spends on the island, when it gets too cold and he has to hike up to his small house in the mountains.

Pantelis is always happy to return to Greece after visiting America, he says, but he believes pieces of his culture are slipping away into the bigger world.

Take the food, he said, raising his proud, wide nose into the air with disgust. “If you want to go to get the best Greek food, go to Astoria,” he lamented.

“Astoria—Queens?” I replied.

He smirked and nodded, then shrugged helplessly.

Even the Greek music is changing, he said, raising his voice for the first time during our talk. “We would push the tables together, all together, and dance!” he shouted, stretching his arms wide and snapping his fingers. Then he grew quiet and took another sip of coffee. “Not anymore.”

He looked back toward the quay. Rows and rows of tables stood waiting for the day’s tourists. Madonna’s latest single played inside one of the shops.

As we finished our breakfast, I told Pantelis he knew my home country better than I did. He suggested I take a few years to go look around America. He said I would love it. After all, he still did.

“If they ever bring cars on this island,” he said of Hydra, “I’m going to Tarpon Springs, Florida.”

Another place back home I’d never explored. How funny that I’d traveled through seven time zones only to realize I didn’t really know whence I’d come.

Then the cell phone rang again, another skipper trying to find his place, seeking Pantelis’ assistance. He stood up to go. I walked around the table and kissed him once on each cheek. It was hard to tell, underneath all that scruff, but I think he might’ve blushed.

He smiled and looked up at me.

“I talk against America, but I love America,” he said. “Things are not right. Maybe people will wake up.”

 

 

I had spent the previous day getting lost amid the snaking alleyways that climb up Hydra’s mountainside. I had relished the surprise of each blind corner, and I had cussed my reluctance to visit the gym back home as I lumbered my own weight up each new set of steps. I had watched the sun set from the tallest point I could find, high above the harbor. The boats docked below for the night seemed tiny. I remember thinking the people looked even smaller, even more insignificant. I remember believing the place itself was the beauty I had come to find.

After my talk with Pantelis the next morning, I realized just how wrong I had been. The places we travelers visit are lovely vistas to explore, but their true grandeur is in their people and the relationships we might build. Whether we travel by well-heeled motoryacht or well-worn sandals, we really are all looking for much the same thing.

I wondered, as Oh Que Luna cruised off to our next destination, how many other visitors would engage Pantelis in conversation when their boats landed at Hydra. Surely most would shrug him off because of his bushy beard and rainbow shorts. Imagine all of them, going halfway around the world to explore and missing the opportunity to bring their very journey into clearer focus.

As Hydra became small in the distance, I sat on the aft deck and looked up Pantelis’ name in a Greek mythology book. He was named for Pan, who liked to play the bagpipes. People turned to Pan for music to which they could dance. He also was known for chasing nymphs, who were often put off by his appearance, but the immortals welcomed him on Olympus. They found him charming.

They made him god of the forests, to watch over bucolic life.  ♦

An American traveler’s spirit reawakens during an unlikely encounter on hydra, one of Greece’s saronic gulf islands