HYDRA TO ATHENS
We had planned to leave on the 7:30 ferry to Athens and the 2:45 p.m. ferry was not certain because of high winds. So we had one last great morning in Hydra. It was a warm, sunny day. We were all packed up. We had breakfast at a harbor cafe and then Susie took me on a beautiful walk to the left of the harbor along a cobblestone walkway with views between the pines of distant islands.
The walkway went gradually up and up past large houses to a village high above the water to the house where Leonard Cohen lived as a young man and where he wrote many of his songs. As a young man he was part of a bohemian community in Hydra and then at 26 inherited some money from his grandmother and was able to buy a house for $1500.
He spent long periods here throughout his life and now the house is maintained as it was by his son Adam, also a songwriter. Google later took us through the house and showed us a video made by his son with the Leonard singing about the passing of his great love, Norwegian Marianne. The house is fairly large with a dark green orange tree dropping oranges in the garden. But there is no plaque on the wall and no indication whose house it was.
Across the street is the grocery store where the older woman who runs it, the granddaughter of the man who ran it when Leonard lived there, as a little girl remembers Leonard coming in for provisions. Susie and Todd took me to a Leonard Cohen concert in Asheville some years ago where he sang Marianne and Like A Bird On A Wire, another song connected to Marianne. Somehow this walk up over the hill to see his house personalized Hydra for me and was the high point for me of our visit.
But Hydra with no cars and all the produce that comes into the island by boat, including I’m sure all the produce in the little grocery store at the top of the hill, is carried up the hill by donkeys or pushed up in pushcarts. And in late November with almost all the tourists gone and the old men sitting around tables in the harbor cafes, including the Pirate Cafe under the clock tower where Leonard held his first concert, the town must in many ways be as it was a half century ago when Leonard was here the most. After our walk up over the hill I spent the rest of the morning, another old man, watching the fishing boats come in and out and the loaded donkeys walking past and couldn’t think of a place on earth that I would rather be.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 