SOUTH TO ALASKA

SOUTH TO ALASKA



From the Heartland of America

to the Heart of a Dream





by

Nancy Owens Barnes





Published by Rushing River Press

P. O. Box 95

Priest River, ID 83856

Copyright © 2010 Nancy Owens Barnes



All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without expressed written permission from the publisher.



The print version of this book is distributed by Ingram Book Company and available through bookstores, online booksellers.



Front cover photos:

Melvin Owens and dog, Oklahoma, circa 1926.

View from Pennock Island to Ketchikan waterfront. Photo © 1995 Jerry Owens.

Interior photos by Don Owens, Jerry Owens, Nancy Owens Barnes and others.

Maps: Art Attack Design and Sign





Dedication





Cecil Marie and Melvin, Alaska, 1961.



To the loving memory of my parents, Melvin George Owens and Cecil Marie Owens, whose contributions and sacrifices for the love of our family will always be treasured. And to my three brothers—Jerry, Gene and my late brother Donald—with love and admiration.





Author and brothers at Perkins farm, Oklahoma, 1951.





Acknowledgments





I especially want to thank…



…my husband Tom, for his consistent encouragement and faith, and who answered all of my periodic fears and doubts that surfaced while writing this book with, “Yes, you can.”



…my sons Devin and Nicholas, who, when I first began writing this book, waited patiently for overdue dinners and undone laundry. Their drive for excellence makes me proud, and their shining imaginations have often stirred the pot of my preconceived notions.





I also thank…



…Winona, Kathy, Janet, and all the family and friends who cheered me on and waited so long for the arrival of this story.



…Mike Burwell of the University of Alaska at Anchorage, my first “official” writing instructor who helped light the path to this book.



…Rhoda Carroll of Vermont College for her early reassurance.



…Elizabeth Lyon of Editing International, for her honest and crucial advice.





“Hook your wagon to a star...”

―Ralph Waldo Emerson





Table of Contents





AUTHOR’S NOTE



ROUTE OF THE RED DOG



PROLOGUE





SECTION ONE



A Watery Highway



False Start



Warm Winter



Troubled Waters



The Train from Tampico



A New Crew





SECTION TWO



A Luminous Crossing



Reefs and Roller Coasters





SECTION THREE



Shades of Green



Dollar on a Dime



A Pacific Primer





SECTION FOUR



Phones and Feathered Friends



The Wind and the Wild





SECTION FIVE



Danger and a Baby Duck



Fools Rush Inland





SECTION SIX



A Bath and a Bottle of Pop



Red Dog to Pretty Lady



The Tide of Time





EPILOGUE





ABOUT THE AUTHOR





AUTHOR’S NOTE



The following story emerges from first-hand accounts, research, interviews, and entries from the Red Dog’s ship log. Some suggested I fictionalize the story. By doing so would allow me to drive drama to a higher level and to void my worries about maintaining truth. But I felt turning the story into fiction would detract from my primary intent: to give my father credit for his achievements, which was never in his nature to claim for himself.

Even though I interviewed my parents extensively, none of us can remember exactly what we or others did or said moment by moment after so many years. But by knowing the circumstances of certain situations, the habits and character nuances of the people involved, and with my parents’ review of the manuscript, I feel I have presented an accurate rendering of events.

Excerpts from the ship’s log remain as my father entered them, with only occasional minor revisions for clarity and consistency of format. Because he made the majority of his journey aboard the Red Dog alone, I have drawn from a variety of sources to help illuminate the backdrop of his travels, such as references on sea life, geography of Central America and Mexico, profiles of various ports of call, and seamanship. Two valuable resources included David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, and The Oceans: Their physics, chemistry, and General Biology by H. U. Sverdrup, Martin W. Johnson, and Richard H. Fleming.

South to Alaska takes the reader on two journeys. On one, the reader becomes a passenger aboard the Red Dog as it makes its way from Arkansas to Alaska in 1973. On the other, the reader follows a dream that begins in a one-room, Oklahoma schoolhouse in 1926, and ends decades later on an island in southeast Alaska.

To the outside world, some would have considered my father a common rural carpenter. To those of us who knew him, though, he was a gentle genius—not of mathematics, science, or literature, but of determination, resourcefulness, and independence.

Here is his story. Here is how the manifestation of one boy’s dream came about.





ROUTE OF THE RED DOG

Arkansas to Alaska





PROLOGUE

Dawn of a Dream



AT THE SOUTHERNMOST surge of land rising from the vast footprint of the Rocky Mountains, a tall fin of peaks known as the Sangre de Cristo Range straddles the Colorado-New Mexico border. From the chain’s eastern face the terrain tumbles, dropping and flattening to form a swath of interior plains that tilt and sprawl eastward across Oklahoma. Near the border of eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas, the land again lifts, elevating into the Ozark, Boston, and Ouachita highlands before sloping down into the Mississippi River basin and the Atlantic plain of the Gulf of Mexico.

Snowmelt and rains drain from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, collecting and growing into the Cimarron, North Canadian, and Canadian Rivers, each etching its watery path across the arable and pastoral lands of Oklahoma, then washing into the Arkansas River at the eastern edge of the state.

Melvin’s story began near the center of Oklahoma where the North Canadian River wigwags through Oklahoma County. Oklahoma County once held a place in the Unassigned Lands, a donut-hole of land surrounded by the Oklahoma Territory when the territory served as a reservoir for relocated American Indian tribes in the 1800s. After President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, the Unassigned Lands opened to homesteaders in the Land Run of 1889 when, in April of that year, thousands lined its boundaries and, at the boom of a canon, rushed to stake their claims. Some homesteaders encountered “Sooners” who snuck past U. S. Army cavalry patrols the previous night to claim prime land. Many of these encounters gave rise to cuss fights, fist fights, and occasional gun fights as the homesteaders pushed toward their dreams of one-hundred-sixty acres of free land. Overnight the area billowed into a tented city of thousands, a city that some say was “born grown” and became known as Oklahoma City. Next to Oklahoma City, across the North Canadian River where it loops to the south and many homesteaders landed, sprouted Capitol Hill.

In the early 1900s, a bricklayer named George Owens purchased two lots at the edge of Capitol Hill. Using salvaged lumber from a relative’s construction job, he built a twenty-by-twenty-foot box house for his wife Nellie and himself. There, they raised two children: their daughter Marguerite, and her older brother Melvin.





Melvin Owens, circa 1918



Melvin possessed an innate sense of adventure, and at Lee School in Capitol Hill in 1926, a single photograph sparked the point around which his life began to pivot.

“Alaska...,” his fourth-grade teacher had said.

That was the only word among the long string of others that caused ten-year-old Melvin’s slouch to straighten and his dusty leather shoes to shuffle and rest flat against the wood plank floor beneath his desk. He leaned over the geography book and eyed the photograph to which his teacher had referred. His hair—black as a mine shaft—stuck out from the crown of his head where his mother had cut it too short.

He studied the black and white photo. A cabin sat at the edge of the woods where snow had tucked it in with a thick comforter of white. A bundle of fur traps hung outside the door above an orderly stack of firewood. Smoke curled from the chimney like a genie from a magic lamp.





Melvin at Lee School, Capitol Hill, Oklahoma, 1923

Second row from front, third from right.



Melvin had heard relatives talk about what life would be like in Alaska, a place so far beyond their reach there was little danger anyone would prove them wrong. Their imaginations still stirred by stories of the Klondike Gold Rush less than thirty years earlier, they talked dreamily of wilderness, abundance, and independence. Melvin envisioned the cool rush of rivers in the distant north, of having his own cabin one day, of living near the mountains with lakes and streams where he could hunt, fish, and trap. He imagined scouring untamed land for game and surviving on his own know-how and inventiveness.

Though Melvin had heard of Alaska, he had never seen any pictures of the place. Now one lay on the desk before him, the incarnation of all he wanted: the woods, the mountains, the wild, the undiscovered. It was an image that would never fade; an image that raised the first ripple in a dangerous journey through a watery world he knew little about, to a world he could not forget.

Melvin was my father.





SECTION ONE

Fort Smith to Galveston





A Watery Highway

Hartford to the Mississippi River



A FEW DAYS after pulling away from the dock at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and heading east along the Arkansas River in November of 1971, Dad stepped to one side of the steering wheel in the pilothouse and looked at me.

“Think you can take it for a while?”

Wearing brown-leather fisherman slip-ons and his usual garb of dark-green J. C. Penny work pants and shirt, his body stood like the trunk of a tree—straight and stout, but not too tall. His black, shiny hair, slick as a raven, lay straight back from his wide forehead. Against his fifty-five-year-old olive skin, his eyes became tropical waters.

It looked easy enough; I had watched him do it for three days now. No other river traffic was in sight; in fact, because we began our journey so late in the year, we had encountered very little watercraft since leaving Fort Smith.

“Okay,” I said with a quick grin at the prospect of steering the boat for the first time.

I scooted into the captain’s seat, pushed my hair behind my shoulders, and focused on the river ahead. A thin veneer of Montana tan still darkened my arms as I took hold of the spokes of the steering wheel.

“Just keep us headed downriver and don’t get too close to shore,” Dad told me. “The speed is good where it is.”

He stood nearby and watched me steer a few minutes before thumping down the steps to the galley. Shortly after he left me alone in the pilothouse, I angled the forty-seven-foot Red Dog around a wide bend of the river to find two barges loaded with freight coming upriver toward me. Pushed by tugboats, the barges moved side-by-side as one passed the other on a long stretch of river.

Only my father, my mother Cecil Marie, and I, their twenty-two-year-old daughter, occupied the Red Dog. And with no navigation experience, I was oblivious to the hazards of cruising too close to tugs and their barges in narrow waterways. I didn’t know that the tremendous suction created when a tug’s huge propeller pulls water into it could draw a smaller boat toward the tug’s hull. I had no idea that a blind spot sometimes extended hundreds of feet in front of the pilot of a tug pushing a loaded barge. I had never heard of “wheel wash,” a strong underwater current caused by powerful tugboat engines. And I didn’t realize the risk and difficulty for tugboats with barges to change course, that they needed to maintain speed in order to steer, and that it could take them a mile or more to stop.

Sounds of rattling flatware and something sliding across the galley table drifted from the main cabin below as my parents prepared sandwiches from the ham Mom had cooked that morning. I chose not to disturb my folks by calling for my father when I saw the barges coming toward us. Instead, wanting to handle the situation myself, I began to move the Red Dog to one side of the river to avoid the monster vessels.

But the tugs and barges moved upriver faster than I expected, approaching so quickly I suddenly feared steering the Red Dog across the path of either to get to one side. So, with what looked like a reasonable amount of space between them, I decided to stay on course.

It was a dangerous decision.



. . .



My father had constructed the Red Dog in the backyard of our Hartford, Arkansas, home. After selling our farm near Perkins, Oklahoma, in 1965, where we had lived off and on for the last twenty years, he had built our house on a small hill at the edge of Hartford, a community of seven-hundred-nineteen residents according to the city limit sign near our driveway. Tucked into the rolling hills of western Arkansas, the town’s modest homes clustered around a handful of businesses that lined a single street and closed at noon each Wednesday. Small, isolated farms and an occasional long, white, broiler house where thousands of chickens cheeped and squawked until ready for market, dotted the rural terrain along dusty back roads and cutoffs. The community rested at the northern edge of the Ouachita National Forest, which spilled into the area and sprinkled the land with tall, airy pines.

The catalyst for building the Red Dog was my folks’ second trip to Alaska the spring of 1968 when they spent the summer in Ketchikan. Situated on one of hundreds of islands in the Alexander Archipelago in southeast Alaska, Ketchikan fascinated my parents. They loved its forested terrain, inland waterways, fishing boats, float planes, historic architecture, and small-town flavor. They reveled in its mild summer weather, glad to escape the scorching heat of Oklahoma and Arkansas where they had lived most of their lives. Before returning to Arkansas, they decided Ketchikan would, one day, become their Alaska home.

That fall, behind our house, the epicenter of my father’s dream began to rattle and bang as he stacked sheets of steel, piled steel bars and clamps, shuttled the welding machine into place, and prepared to build the Red Dog.

By then I had entered my second year of college at Arkansas Polytechnic College, a ninety-minute drive from Hartford. When I returned home one weekend, I found my father under the shelter of our carport, studying the blueprints for the boat where he had spread them across a makeshift table of plywood and sawhorses.

“Where’d you get those?” I asked as I walked around the table to get a better look.

“Pete made them for me. They’re a copy of some he ordered from some boating magazine.”

Pete had worked for my father for several years and had dreams of building his own boat, but had not yet done so.

The backgrounds of the plans were as dark blue as the deepest seas. The thin white lines of the boat’s framing plans arced and stretched delicately across the sheets, symmetrical and parallel as they ticked along the line of the keel like the fine bones of a fish. Fore and aft cross sections, construction details of the keel pipe, the escape hatch, and various connections crowded the sheets with lines, notes and figures.

I read the title block of the drawings.

“Forty-two-foot, twin screw, steel patrol boat.”

“I’m going to just put in one engine,” Dad said, “and I’ll probably add five feet to the length so we’ll have more room in the cabin.”

Dad also planned to add trawling outriggers, hoping to make a living commercial fishing in Alaska.

As days passed, my father made plywood templates from which he cut the ribs, keel, and connectors from flat steel bars and welded them one by one into a skeletal grid. Because I returned home only on weekends, visual progress on the boat jumped at me like an old-time movie. Within weeks the steel grid jerked its way high above the ground and diced the sky behind our house into triangles, squares, and wedges. Dad then began the difficult task of cutting, clamping, and welding the large steel plates to the frame to form the hull.

“Well…errrats,” he often said, always using some form of “rats” whenever things didn’t go right.

The band of his cap would darken with sweat as he strained to pull each sheet of steel in at the prow where it needed to curve against the ribs. The plates weighed around three hundred pounds. Always working alone, he used cables, come-alongs, pry bars, jacks, and “a truckload of clamps” to maneuver and hold each cumbersome piece. One by one, he welded the plates into place.





Melvin building the Red Dog, Hartford, Arkansas, 1969.



The construction of the house-sized Red Dog in our backyard, hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, drew a trickle of onlookers who noticed the boat then turned into our driveway for a closer look.





Melvin building the Red Dog,

Hartford, Arkansas, 1969.



“I have a friend who built a steel boat, and it was no good,” one man said.

Some folks stopped by, asked a few questions, and nodded pleasantly, but obviously felt my father had undertaken a crazy endeavor. Others liked looking at the boat and enjoyed the adventure it brought to mind.

“You’re starting something you’ll never finish,” my father was told.

Not the chatty, gregarious type, Dad usually answered such comments by washing them away with a polite laugh. Even though he worked as a construction superintendent in charge of a crew of tough laborers, his soft-spoken manner fell upon others as easy as a gentle rain, able to nourish the fields without the thunder.

Mom, too, who became the only wife in town whose husband took on the task of building a boat in their backyard, fielded questions from passersby.

“Is your husband a genius?”

“Does your husband help with housework?”

She heard my father called everything from “Noah” to “that queer old duck on the hill.”





Red Dog, Hartford, Arkansas, 1970.



Skepticism settled on many who saw Dad building the Red Dog in our yard. The shy son of a mason born and raised in the dusty heart of Oklahoma, my father had never crossed the southern border of the United States, had never even ridden on a boat in the open ocean, and had certainly never navigated a homemade watercraft for thousands of miles in the Caribbean and Pacific.

“Learn by doing,” he often said.

Some believed he would never make it. They were almost right.



. . .



My mother did not appear, at first glance, the type of person one expected to be easily excited by a move to Alaska. With the slim, straight-lined, high-collared dresses she wore and the way she fretted about people seeing her without her “earbobs,” she exuded an elegant aura. Her short, dark-brown hair matched her eyes. My father often called her “Pretty Lady.”

But regardless of her delicate appearance, my mother shared Dad’s adventurous spirit and, like him, longed to live in the north. She studied maps and read books and articles about Alaska, the Yukon, and the north country, excited by its wildness and history. After reading Laura Berton’s I Married the Klondike, she spoke with admiration of Martha Black, a stylish Victorian woman from Chicago caught in the feverish Klondike gold rush, a woman with a frontier sentiment not unlike her own.

My mother, however, was, by her own admission, a landlubber and strictly a calm-water sailor. She didn’t mind riding on a boat as long as the water lay calm, but became wide-eyed nervous if it did not.

“I’d just as soon stay on shore,” she would say.





Cecil Marie Owens, circa 1965.



Mom’s wants and ideas contrasted with those of my father in other ways. Unlike Dad who preferred to stay home and felt ill at ease whenever out of his element and around other people, Mom liked Saturday night card games with friends and keeping in close contact with relatives and acquaintances. Dad liked to read newspapers, Mom loved to read books. Dad preferred wearing his work clothes and Mom liked feeling stylish, which did not always fit well into the environment of construction sites and boat-building. Dad believed in learning by doing and Mom believed in learning by studying. She took classes on hand-writing analysis and purchased books on art, famous quotations, the origins of words, history and adventure, with a craving to learn all she could about the world.

“The two most important things in life,” she sometimes said, “is loving and learning.”

Although my mother stood solidly at the heart of our family beside my father and proudly praised his accomplishments, her actions sometimes hinted for more out of life.



. . .



My father first learned to build boats when he and Mom lived for two years in Seattle, Washington, during World War II. His earlier experience building a wartime Oklahoma gunpowder plant and assisting his father with masonry and construction projects helped earn him a job as shipwright for Barbee Marine, a Kennydale shipyard. Located on a bulge of land along the southeastern shore of Lake Washington, Barbee Marine produced wooden, ocean-going government tugboats and barges for the war.

Working with the tugboat crew, Dad studied tug drawings in the expansive loft of the shipyard building, then helped his coworkers lay out the keel and set up the ribs for the tugs below. He watched lines on the drawings become lines on the tugs as they grew from a single timber into one-hundred-fifteen-foot boats. He admired the intelligence and experience of his coworkers and tried to understand everything they did, why they did it, and to think through their methods and reasoning.

“They’re real smart men,” he would say.



. . .



Dad worked on the Red Dog in what he called his spare time, which included several hours every evening after work and all day Saturday and Sunday. He rigged up lights behind the house where we often saw his dark silhouette amid the flash and spray of welding sparks well into the night.

Fabricating much of the equipment and workings of the boat himself, Dad made his own steering wheel and pieced together the entire steering assembly from wheel to rudder. He cut the control console from steel plating and did his own instrument wiring using World War II surplus airplane switches for the pumps, alarms, fans, lights, temperature gauges, and other controls. Purchasing a surplus 6-71 Patton tank engine from a mechanical trade school in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, he gave the owner five-hundred dollars for the engine, heat exchanger, manifold, fuel filters, gear box, clutch, and anything else they found that would help him put the boat together.

Piece by piece, month by month, season by season, the piles of materials in the yard transformed into the Red Dog. Figuring the boat would provide both home and livelihood in Alaska, my parents made it as homelike as possible. The main cabin contained the galley and eating area on the port side, and the living area on the starboard side where a flower-print, hide-a-bed couch sat against the bulkhead. Near the center of the cabin stood a small Franklin wood stove, intended for cold Alaska nights. Three portholes dotted each side of the bow where the forward sleeping cabin and head, complete with bathtub, fit snug below deck.

A short set of steps led from the main cabin up to the pilothouse. The steering wheel, control panels, and built-in chart table filled the front of the pilothouse. A double-sized bunk spanned the back.

Dad covered the floors of the cabin, galley, companionways, and pilothouse with bulkhead-to-bulkhead, plush, burnt-orange carpeting. Mom sewed curtains for the windows to match. Regular, non-marine, thermal-insulated house windows glazed the cabin and pilothouse.

Above the waterline, Mom and Dad painted the boat white with a light blue roof. A deep, marine blue coated the boat from the waterline down. After completing the United States Coast Guard Master Carpenter’s form and mailing it to Memphis to register the boat, my father carefully painted in tall black letters across the stern:



RED DOG

MEMPHIS



My folks named the Red Dog after a well-known saloon in Juneau they had read about in stories of Alaska. Mom liked the name for the image of adventure it invoked, and Dad for its simplicity and brevity.

“I don’t want a fancy name,” he said. “If I’m ever in a distress situation, I want to make sure the Coast Guard doesn’t have any trouble understanding the name of my boat.”

After three years of work, the completed boat housed a fuel capacity of two-thousand gallons and a two-hundred-gallon water tank. Dad calculated the boat to weigh about eighteen tons.





Interior of the Red Dog, Hartford, Arkansas, 1971.



The Red Dog surprised many who drove over the rise of the hill by our house to find a large ocean-going vessel sitting high and dry. My father knew that people who saw the Red Dog thought they were seeing the beginning of a journey. But like the stout-bodied cicada that finally emerges from its seventeen-year slumber to unfurl its wings and let its long-hushed song rise and fall in hot summer air, the past was hidden from them by time. They couldn’t see that the Red Dog would be my father’s song, and the final unfolding of a dream that had slumbered against his thoughts for many years.





The Red Dog completed, Hartford, Arkansas, 1971.



. . .



On a sunny September day in 1971, family and a few neighbors stood anxiously to one side and watched men load the Red Dog onto a long, house-moving trailer. Dad had built the boat on skids and a crib that supported the sides at the front and rear sections. After lowering the tail of the trailer, the truck driver switched on the winch. The winch whined then groaned as it pulled the boat forward and onto the trailer.

“Looks good back here,” someone yelled just before the winch stopped.

Not long after the movers secured the boat to the trailer, the bulk of boat, truck, and trailer moved as one across the slope of our yard toward the highway, swaying and listing as it maneuvered the contours of the yard. Once on the highway, it followed the winding, forty-mile drive to Fort Smith; then, with the help of a police escort, crept across town to the Paul Latture Marina and Park on the south bank of the Arkansas River. My folks would keep the Red Dog docked at the marina while they completed the sale of their house and settled their belongings.





Hauling the Red Dog to Fort Smith for launch on the Arkansas River, 1971.



Dad hadn’t called the newspaper; never wanting to draw attention to himself, that’s the last thing he would ever do. But there, poised on the riverbank with note pad and camera, stood a reporter from the Southwest Times Record. The young man had showed up with forty or fifty other strangers who saw the huge boat sloth through the streets of Fort Smith, then gathered to watch its launch. The reporter worked his way over to my father and stood beside him.

“Melvin Owens,” Dad said when the reporter asked his name.

“So you’re goin’ to Alaska huh?”

My father answered the reporter’s questions, keeping his eyes focused on the truck as it positioned itself to begin backing toward the river. With the Red Dog nearing water for the first time, Dad worried about its launch. But as he stood on the bank of the river with his hands in his pockets and talked with the reporter, it was difficult to tell.

As the truck moved closer to the river, my father made an apologetic escape from the reporter and motioned to the truck driver.

“Easy now.”

His forearm pivoted back and forth at the elbow as he moved near the edge of the water and signaled the driver to back into the river. The tail end of the flatbed trailer dipped into the water as the front wheels of the cab crackled across gravel.

My father worried about how the boat would sit on the river—whether the painted waterline around the perimeter of the steel hull would match the surface line of the water; whether all of the angles, lengths, and bends he had figured, measured, and welded would now rest in stable equilibrium on the river, or if the nose of the boat might dip downward; and whether, in full view of family, friends, and the crowd of strangers, the boat he spent the last three years building would list to one side like an old barn.

As the trailer backed slowly into the river, the stern of the Red Dog slanted into the water.

“Right there’s good,” he yelled to the driver when the river steeped a portion of the boat.

The truck stopped. Dad and some helpers began to undo the ropes and straps that anchored the Red Dog in place. Most were undone when the eighteen-ton boat slipped on the trailer. A rope snapped, springing like a set trap as the boat lurched backwards.

“Look out!” Dad shouted.

The boat popped the remaining ropes, picking up speed as it slid on the trailer, the huge bulk of steel now out of anyone’s control. We watched helplessly as we heard the rudder of the Red Dog rasp against the river’s bottom. Then, as the stern began to float, the bow of the boat sloughed from the back of trailer, causing a large but soft wake to roll to shore. Men hurried to grab the ropes to keep the boat from drifting away. Once the men had the boat under control, the crowd cheered.





Launching the Red Dog on the Arkansas River, Fort Smith, Arkansas, 1971.



When the surface of the water calmed, the Red Dog rested easily in the water. Unruffled by its hasty entry, it floated on the river like a shiny white duck.

“You’re all welcome to have a look,” my father said, waving bystanders on board.

Despite his concerns, the painted waterline on the boat lined up evenly with the surface of the water, no tilt in any direction.

“How’d he know where to paint that line while it was sit’in in his yard?” Someone asked.

It was September 27, 1971. The Red Dog was launched.



. . .



In the 1800s, Fort Smith served as a gateway for folks migrating west. The town became a new gateway for migration when, weeks after the launch, my father eased the Red Dog from its dock on the south bank of the Arkansas River and began his long journey to Alaska.

Dad planned to navigate the Red Dog down the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, along the Caribbean coasts of Mexico and Central America, through the Panama Canal, then north along the Pacific coast to Ketchikan, Alaska, my folks’ final destination. Following this route meant that, before heading north, my father would first cruise the Red Dog more than 4,000 miles to the south.

With my three older brothers busy with their own jobs and families, I remained the only one of us kids still floating around and available to go on such a trip. After quitting college in early 1969, I spent two years working in Arkansas and Florida during the winters, and in Montana’s Glacier National Park during the summers. Fresh from Montana and with no steady boyfriend to fret about, I gladly joined my folks for a trip on the Red Dog.

Although Mom feared “rocky” waters, she looked forward to cruising aboard the Red Dog from Fort Smith to Galveston, Texas, a route that would take us down the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers, then west along the Intracoastal Canal—a relatively calm-water trip. She knew, though, that the trip from Galveston to the West Coast in the ocean would be a far cry from a float on a pond, and had already declined that portion of the journey. So once we reached Galveston, after wintering on the boat, Dad and I planned to leave for Alaska the following spring, while Mom returned to Arkansas to stay with my brother Gene, who lived in Fort Smith. When the Red Dog reached Bellingham, Washington, Mom would again board the boat for the final leg of its journey north along the Inside Passage between Bellingham and Ketchikan. A series of calmer, inland waterways that runs from Puget Sound through southeast Alaska, the Inside Passage would no longer require sailing on the open ocean.

The trip from Fort Smith to Galveston would take two to three weeks, depending on weather and sightseeing. After the flutter of hands by family and well-wishers waving from shore subsided, the excitement of the departure from Fort Smith had settled into a quiet calm by the time we encountered our first Arkansas River lock.

“I heard you were coming! I read it in the paper!”

The lockmaster yelled down to my father from a door of the J. W. Trimble Lock where he controlled the gates. He had apparently read the article written weeks ago by the reporter who attended the launch. Not wanting to carry on a conversation of shouting, Dad looked up and waved out the door of the pilothouse as he moved the Red Dog toward the lock chamber.

The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers had completed the Arkansas River lock and dam project, or the McClellan-Kerr Navigation System, only a year earlier. The four-hundred-forty-eight-mile waterway included seventeen locks and dams between the Mississippi River and the Tulsa, Oklahoma, port of Catoosa, allowing boats and barges to climb four-hundred-twenty feet east to west up the Arkansas River Valley. For the Red Dog, though, beginning at Fort Smith and traveling west to east, the trip down the Arkansas River to the Mississippi River amounted to a thirty-story drop through twelve locks over a distance of about three-hundred miles.

Maneuvering through the locks seemed like navigating through an egg carton as my father slid the boat into the first gray chamber. Filled to the upstream level, the massive concrete chamber, large enough to accommodate a towboat with eight barges, opened and closed with King Kong-sized, steel miter gates at each end. Dad shut off the engine and the Red Dog, the only boat in the lock, floated freely inside the chamber. The lockmaster then closed the upstream gate and allowed the water to drain from the lock through gravity-flow valves at the downstream end.

“Better hold us off the wall,” Dad warned when our boat drifted toward one.

“I’ll go to the front,” I said as I exited through the starboard pilothouse door and walked along the railing to the bow.

Dad remained in the pilothouse in case he needed to restart the engine, and Mom headed downstairs and through the main cabin to the stern.

When the boat drifted near the wall, I pushed at the concrete mass with my hand. I saw my mother at the stern holding off the wall with the broad end of a broom. Once the water level matched that of the lower outlet, the downstream gate opened and we continued downriver.

The second lockmaster appeared less congenial than the first. When the lockmaster waved his arm, Dad steered toward the entry gate.

“Get out of the way,” the lockmaster yelled with a sour face and a quick flip of his arm.

“Errrats.”

Realizing the lockmaster’s wave was not a directive to enter, but to clear the way for a tug and its barge coming downriver behind us, my father put the boat in reverse and backed out of the way until the vessel passed.





Cecil on the Red Dog inside an Arkansas River lock, 1971.



After learning to maneuver the locks, we cruised the Red Dog casually between the shores of the smooth river, severing the state as we moved toward Arkansas’ eastern border and the Mississippi River.

The Red Dog pleased my father. All systems worked well and the boat rode easily through the water.

“Runs real nice,” he told my mother.

“Not much noise at all,” she added, knowing the trouble he had taken to insulate around the engine for sound.

Dad spent hours standing in the pilothouse navigating the Red Dog downriver. Gripping the spokes of the steering wheel, his hands looked as wide as they were long and flecked with red where he cut, jabbed, or scraped himself while working on the boat. Whenever he tired of standing, he sat in his captain’s chair, sometimes pushing it backward against the double-wide bunk that spanned the rear of the pilothouse and propping each foot on a spoke of the wheel to steer with his feet. A cup of M&M candies sat within his reach.

Mom usually sat on the edge of the bunk and looked forward past my father’s shoulder. Although she didn’t share Dad’s love of boats, she did like the uniqueness of sailing down the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers and enjoyed seeing the country from this new perspective. But always anticipating disaster, she scanned the river ahead as far as she could stretch her vision for any possible danger such as shallows, outcrops, and other river traffic.

I, however, shuffled from place to place aboard the boat as we traveled. I would sit beside my folks in the pilothouse, or lie flat on the roof of the cabin and watch the sky as we cruised. Sometimes I leaned into the farthest point of the bow and let the wind whip the hair from my face. At other times I sat on the back deck and watched the wide furrow of water flowing from the stern as the boat plowed a deep path along the river.

In the evenings my father tied the Red Dog to abandoned riverside docks if he could find them; if not, we anchored in wide parts of the river to overnight. At Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where my brother Jerry lived, we docked at the Island Harbor Marina. Jerry had called the owner of the marina to let him know that his father would be piloting his homemade craft through Pine Bluff on the way to Alaska and would need a space for the boat. It apparently surprised the owner to see us arrive in what he considered a professionally constructed craft that appeared more than seaworthy.

“When I found out that somebody was bringing in a homemade job, and that he wanted to sail it around the coast through the Panama Canal to Alaska,” he admitted, “well, I was looking for something constructed from orange crates, or something.”



. . .



My father had turned the wheel over to me and gone downstairs to eat lunch with Mom after leaving Pine Bluff on a clear morning with no other boats in view.

Having decided not to disturb my parents and to steer the Red Dog between the two tugs and their barges coming upriver toward me, I centered the boat on the band of river between the tugs as they rumbled closer. Head to head, bow to bow, the Red Dog faced hundreds of feet of iron and steel; a ripple facing a crushing wave.

As the Red Dog moved closer to the channel between the barges, the murky water displaced by the barges as the huge vessels pushed it forward and outward began to boil around us.

The blare of fog horns surprised my father as he sat at the galley table, but the sight of the bow of a barge passing threateningly close by the port window of the main cabin, then a second one appearing almost simultaneously outside the starboard window, sent him scrambling to the pilothouse with Mom close behind.

“Where’d those come from?” he blurted.

“They came faster than I thought they would,” I said, keeping my eyes trained forward.

We could do nothing except continue on course. Dad stood motionless beside me. He watched to make sure I kept the boat centered between the menacing tugs, ready to take over if the Red Dog began to stray toward the hull of either. My mother stood wide-eyed but silent beside him.

The water frothed around us as the tugs’ propellers churned above the muddy riverbed. Powerful engines growled at their heavy loads. Fog horns blared from both tugs in a chaos of noise. The Red Dog wobbled its way between the tugs, the water grabbing and pulling at the boat from below as we pressed our way through roils of turbulence.

In minutes it was over. The tugs had passed, their horns had fallen silent, and the Red Dog was out of danger.

Dad raised his eyebrows. “Well, we made it through that one.”

“I was afraid to try to cut across them,” I said sheepishly as I relinquished the wheel.

My father’s face softened and he grinned in relief while quietly taking his place in his captain’s chair.

Mom put on her brave face. “I don’t think I’d care to do that again,” she said in her good-humored way, but still scared.

Dad adjusted the cap on his head. “Well…if that’s the worst of what’s ahead, we’re in pretty good shape.”

But a few hundred miles to the south, as the Red Dog hummed toward the broad waters of the Mighty Mississippi, worse waited.





False Start

Wilburton to Seabrook



THE RED DOG was not the first boat my father constructed with the intention of cruising to Alaska. Although his dream of living in Alaska began in a one-room schoolhouse in 1926, his initial idea of building a boat and sailing it there grabbed his thoughts during our family’s first vacation to Alaska in 1961. I was eleven that summer he placed the aluminum-clad, over-cab camper he built onto our green Chevrolet pickup, loaded it with food and family, turned it from our Oklahoma farm, and headed north like a silver snail. With my mother at his side as navigator, we drove every major Alaskan road available at the time—looping on all the loops, following roads to their dead ends, then backtracking to find the next, nosing into every corner of the state we could find to explore.





Camping in British Columbia on our way to Alaska, 1961.



After making our way to Dawson Creek, Canada, we followed the Alcan Highway through British Columbia and the Yukon Territory to Tok, Alaska. From Tok we wandered toward Circle, a community less than fifty miles south of the Arctic Circle and the farthest north we could drive, where we marveled at how late into the evening the sun cast our shadows across the ground. To the west we followed the Denali Highway, a long ribbon of gravel road cutting through the tundra across the belly of the state and the only drivable route to Mount McKinley National Park. Inside the park we camped at Wonder Lake where, as winds subsided, Mount McKinley turned upside down in the calmed water.

In Anchorage we explored downtown streets, watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at the Fourth Avenue Theater, and shopped. Outside of Anchorage we camped at McHugh Creek, a dirt and gravel roadside area above Turnagain Arm where my brothers and I squirreled up and down the terrain, excited by its boisterous waterfall, abrupt wooded trails, and rocky overlooks. At Portage Glacier my father chipped ice from a grounded iceberg and filled our red Coca-Cola ice chest that bore claw marks from a Colorado bear.





Cecil at the Alaska border, 1961.



Unskilled at fishing for much besides catfish, bass or perch, we managed to catch a few small flounder off of Seward’s spacious railroad dock that cradled the town. Below the dock we corralled the fish inside a small pool made by piling a semi-circle of rocks at the edge of the water, only to return later to find the incoming tide had lifted them all to freedom. From a bridge on the Kenai Peninsula, we watched the red spines of hundreds of salmon slice through the water below us, the fish paralleling into the current as they migrated upstream.

Near the end of our trip, we stopped along the road on a wide pullout near Haines, a community edged by an inland waterway in the southeast Alaska panhandle. I jumped out of the camper and stood beside my folks, slapping at mosquitoes that landed on my arms.

“This is a real pretty area,” Mom said.

“Yeah, and not many people,” Dad added.

He then pointed to a lone cabin across the inlet. The cabin sat at the end of an ocean cove with a boat anchored nearby. The water lay flat in the cove, separated from an expansive forest by a long curve of sand and gravel beach.

My father lifted his dark-green baseball-style cap off his head with one hand, and slicked back his hair with the other before replacing it. He wondered what it would be like to live in such an area, what it would be like to sit on his own boat in an isolated inlet, to watch for the splash and roll of sea life, or for the scurry, lurch, and lumber of wildlife on shore.

“Looks like a good way to live.”

And soon, as our truck rumbled back home to Oklahoma, thoughts of building a boat rumbled in his head.

Only weeks after our return home, my father began constructing a thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser he named the Nancy Ann. Working for an Oklahoma construction company building water and sewer treatment plants in Oklahoma and Arkansas, he began building the Nancy Ann at the site of a new water plant in Waldron, Arkansas. There he perched our single-wide trailer―our home whenever Mom and we kids joined him on his jobs―on the crest of a tree-shaded hill in the corner of the site. To the west of the site lay a fenced pasture of black-angus cattle, the cattle often nosing our way out of curiosity.

Before long the boat-in-progress became a novelty, the design engineer of the water plant sometimes gathering his contractor friends at the site and telling them, “The most spectacular thing about this project is this boat that Melvin is building.”

“It’d be great for beer parties,” someone invariably said.





Building the Nancy Ann in Waldron, Arkansas, 1961.



When my father completed the Waldron job, he hauled the unfinished Nancy Ann back to Oklahoma and propped it beside the peach trees on our farm. We referred to our Oklahoma home as our “farm” even though we did no farming for a living. Located along Oklahoma Highway 62 midway between Fort Gibson and Tahlequah, the 100-acre property my father purchased in 1945 for twenty-five-hundred dollars was part of the tiny community of Perkins. Perkins consisted of a dozen families, a combined grocery and gas station, and a one-room schoolhouse that educated kids from the first through the eighth grades. Our property’s rural setting and the few cows, horses, dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, and pig that, over time, lived there with us earned its farm label. Our family stayed on the Perkins farm whenever we weren’t living on job sites with Dad.





Cecil on the Nancy Ann, Wilburton, Oklahoma, 1961.



Dad worked on the Nancy Ann at our farm for a few weeks then moved the boat to a new job site at Wilburton, Oklahoma. There he completed the boat the summer of 1964. Painted robin’s egg blue, the Nancy Ann sat high on its wooden platform outside our trailer, bright in the sun like a flashy new car.



. . .



Because the Arkansas River dredging project that would cut a route to the sea remained unfinished, Dad asked a friend to truck the Nancy Ann from Wilburton to the Gulf of Mexico. They took the boat to Anahuac, Texas, a distance of more than 500 miles. Anahuac sat across Galveston Bay from Seabrook where Dad stored the boat in a marina, hoping to leave for Alaska after completing a couple more construction projects to give him and Mom some extra savings, and after I completed high school.

Originally, my father envisioned the whole family—him, Mom, my three brothers and me—sailing to Alaska. He imagined a long, family vacation, sightseeing and visiting foreign places on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. He pictured a leisurely trip, stopping to explore small villages along the coasts of Mexico and Central America wherever and whenever we wanted, taking time to relax and learn about new places. But by this time, only I lived with my folks, as my three brothers had gone elsewhere. The youngest, Jerry, had left for Camp Pendleton, California, after joining the Marines; the middle, Gene, attended an auto mechanics school in Kansas City; and the oldest, Donald, served as an Army medic stationed in Needles, California.

Although I took a passing interest in my father’s building of the Nancy Ann, to me it seemed pretty much just Dad working on another project. For as long as I could remember I had watched him working on one thing or another outside our house. One of my earliest memories stemmed from following him around as he built us a bigger house on our Perkins farm so my brothers and I could have our own rooms. I sometimes dragged along a hammer, sat somewhere near where he worked and thumped the heads of nails that Dad had already driven part way into the wood.





Nancy helping to build new home on

Perkins farm, Oklahoma, 1951.



Throughout the years, whenever we needed or wanted something, my father simply built it. Years before constructing the camper that we used on our trip to Alaska, he once put together a box-like extension that attached to the tailgate of our Chevrolet station wagon. The extension allowed us to sleep in the back of the car and have room for our legs to lay straight whenever we went camping. Painted blue to match the car, the contraption looked like the stern of a boat sticking from the back of the car, but it served its purpose.

So, having grown up seeing my father constantly building projects both on his job and at home, I didn’t see the building of the Nancy Ann as necessarily unusual. That indifference, though, combined with the generally scattered life of a teenager, fogged my understanding of how his building of boats would shape my life.



. . .



As the Nancy Ann sat in a stall in a Texas marina my father made occasional drives to Seabrook to maintain the boat in anticipation of its journey to Alaska. Sometimes my friend Janet and I rode down with him, enjoying upside-down banana splits from a burger shop near the Seabrook marina, and test cruises on Galveston Bay. But in 1966, as the Vietnam War raged and President Johnson promised to “bring our boys home by Christmas,” Jerry left for Vietnam with the Marines. Worried about my brother, my folks decided they would not leave for Alaska until he returned home.

That same year, my father received an offer for a new job that was “too good to pass up.” He also began to think he should have a larger boat for such a long trip in the ocean, one with more stability and an expanded fuel capacity. So with a son in the war, a new job, and thoughts of a bigger boat, Dad sold the Nancy Ann to a Texas fisherman in 1967. Less than a year later, a barge demolished the boat during a hurricane.





Warm Winter

Mississippi River to Galveston



LIKE A GUEST who arrives too early, the Mississippi River caught us unprepared. Cruising the Red Dog quietly along the eastern end of the Arkansas River, we suddenly felt the great river sucking us into its broad, sweeping valley of water. Where the two rivers merged, the muddy water whirlpooled and rolled as the two currents wrestled, clutching the Red Dog in a grip of swirls and flows. Dad kept the boat aligned downriver and maneuvered away from a scattering of tugs and barges coming upriver, working his way toward the Mississippi’s western bank. As we moved further downstream, the waters of the rivers melded into a flat, steady flow, and we once again settled into a peaceful ride.

The Mississippi River begins as a small stream of rainwater and snowmelt leaking out of Lake Itasca in northwest Minnesota. From Minnesota it flows south along the borders of ten states as it expands and works its way toward the Gulf of Mexico. An old river, the Mississippi meanders across the Midwestern and Southern United States, leaving oxbow and serpentine lakes to the east and west as it loops back and forth, taking more than three-thousand miles to cover the thirteen-hundred miles between its origin and destination. Though the waters start off clear, entry of the Illinois and Missouri Rivers above St. Louis give the Mississippi a muddy look. Further south, the Ohio River adds its water, doubling the Mississippi’s volume and becoming the dividing line between its upper and lower portions. Where the Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico, it deposits an estimated four-hundred-million tons of sediment each year, washed from other rivers and skimmed from the banks of bordering states to form its delta. At the delta, a massive spurt of land flaring from the coast of Louisiana and covering thirteen-thousand square miles, the river fingers its way across the slow glacier of sediment and washes into the ocean.

Our first night on the Mississippi, my father slid the Red Dog close to shore and dropped anchor.

“Is this where we’re going to spend the night?” I asked when he returned to the pilothouse.

“Yeah, we should be okay here.”

Mom eyed the tugs and barges moving up and down the main channel of the river to the east of us. “Shouldn’t we get closer to the bank?”

“I don’t trust the bottom,” Dad said. “There’s probably mud bars under there if we get any closer.”

“But the tugs will stop when it gets dark right?”

Dad glanced at me and then looked at mom. “Now don’t worry.”

“You mean they’re going to run all night?”

Carrying nearly sixty percent of all water freight in the United States, Mississippi River traffic consisted mostly of barges carrying huge, orderly stacks of cargo containers. Powerful snub-nosed tugs manhandled the barges upriver, pushing and pulling them against the stubborn current.

Afraid a barge might run over us, Mom got little sleep as she lay in the bed in the pilothouse where she and Dad slept, watching lights float up and down the river well into the night.

Anchored along the Mississippi River, we sat not far from where my mother lived two fearful years of her life as a child. Born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1922, she was only weeks old when her parents left the Pacific Northwest with her and her older brother. After a short stint in Texas and Kansas, they landed in Valles Mines, Missouri, in 1925, only twenty-five miles from the Mississippi’s western bank and her father Elmer’s old stomping grounds.

Elmer moved the family into one end of a log house tucked deep in the woods not far from the mines. A breezeway separated the two ends of the house, each end a single room with no glass in the windows and no electricity. Elmer’s wife, Viola, greased paper bags and tacked them over the windows to shed rain. The family carried their drinking and washing water from a nearby creek.





Elmer Snyder, circa 1915.



Elmer worked at the tiff mines, an open-pit operation where he worked as a wood cutter making railroad ties and carrying them on his shoulders to the mine site. But, the height of Prohibition, he soon took up bootlegging. Operating a still hidden in the woods, he and his buddies made, drank, and sold moonshine.

“Lowlifes,” Viola called them, “with a still in every hollow.”

Elmer belonged to a mean crowd. Trouble hounded him and his pals as they watched over their business, always fighting with other bootleggers and among themselves. With a scarcity of law enforcement, guns settled many arguments.

But even though rough friends and a tough, illegal business permeated Elmer’s life, Mom never doubted her father loved her and her brother.

“On Christmas Eve,” she once told me, “when Daddy realized there was nothing to give me and Robert the next morning, he walked all day to DeSoto and back, returning in the dark and falling snow with some apples, oranges, and a few small toys. I especially loved the fruit. We hardly ever got any fruit.”





Viola, Cecil and Robert, Missouri, circa 1925.



But my mother’s time in Missouri came to an abrupt end one night when Elmer got into a knife fight with another man behind their house. Just before Viola snatched her inside, my mother saw the flash of the blade when her father swung the knife at the man. Inside the house, she stood terrified as grunts and smacking sounds penetrated the door.

Viola never told the kids how the fight ended, but the next day authorities came to the cabin and took Elmer to jail in Jefferson City, nearly one-hundred-fifty miles away in the center of the state. Left to fend for themselves, only days later, Viola and the kids returned from the creek to find someone had set fire to their house. Standing side by side at the edge of the woods, they watched fire leap from the windows. Flames soon swallowed the structure, turning their shelter, their clothes, their food, and what precious little money they had left, into a dark, smoldering heap.

“Mama just stood there,” Mom told me, “wondering what to do next.”



. . .



At daybreak my mother rose from a restless night aboard the Red Dog and boiled a pot of coffee. Dad soon followed and, after eating a bowl of canned peaches, started the Red Dog’s engine and began pulling anchor. Similar to the effect of a dentist’s drill on one’s skull, the grinding of the winch reeling in the anchor vibrated through the steel hull of the boat, its magnified hum waking me in the below-deck quarters. By the time I arrived topside, we were moving downriver.

At Vicksburg, Mississippi, we took a break from travel. Dad tied the boat to a utility dock next to a nineteenth-century, steam-wheeler riverboat wedged in the mud near shore.

“Can you point us to the closest place to get some groceries?” he asked a fellow near the dock.

“Down that street a few blocks,” the man said, pointing to a street behind him.

When he saw that Mom and I planned to walk to the store without my father, he added, “You might want to avoid that area over there.” He pointed a new direction. “It isn’t a place for two women alone.”

My mother thanked the man and while Dad tinkered with the Red Dog, she and I headed toward the store. Before returning to the boat, we visited a Vicksburg cemetery and courthouse from Civil War days, and explored part of the town, careful to steer clear of the off-limits area the man warned us about. As we passed through one neighborhood, loud jazz music boomed from antebellum houses and resonated along the street.

After departing Vicksburg, the Mississippi River took us across the toe of Louisiana, edging by Baton Rouge on the way to New Orleans. Outside New Orleans, we waited two days for the lock gate to open that allowed us to enter the Intracoastal Waterway. A three-thousand-mile-long canal built for shipping and pleasure boats along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the Intracoastal Waterway stretched from Boston, Massachusetts, to Key West, Florida, along the Atlantic, and from Apalachee Bay on Florida’s west coast to Port Isabel, Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico.

Once we entered the canal, we turned west toward Galveston, leaving the Mississippi River and its birds-foot delta to the south and heading for Port Arthur, Texas, where Mom had arranged for our mail to be sent. Arriving on Saturday after the post office closed, we anchored alongside the canal until Monday. Throughout the weekend driving wakes rolled at us, rocking our boat relentlessly as tugs and other watercraft barreled through the busy waterway.

“I’ll be glad to move on out of here,” Dad said.

Mom agreed.

The day we crossed Galveston Bay, blue sky reigned. I stood at the prow and leaned against the front rail of the Red Dog, facing forward and down into the salt air like a figurehead. Rays of sun dove deep into the turquoise water below me. Waves of water peeled from the prow of the boat as the keel sliced through it. Ahead I saw Galveston Island where the city of Galveston lay against the island’s southeast shore, basking in the warm glow of the Gulf of Mexico.



. . .



The clear gulf water easily revealed Errol Flynn’s ornate, teak sailboat, which sat submerged and seemingly forgotten. Refraction kinked the mast where it pierced the surface and stood white in its surrender. Only a few feet outside of the concrete seawall protecting the Galveston marina where my father docked the Red Dog, the actor’s boat was, according to locals, the casualty of a storm.

The city of Galveston shields itself from seasonal storms sweeping off the Gulf of Mexico with a massive seawall constructed after a disastrous hurricane swiped mercilessly at the city in 1900. Recorded as the worst natural disaster in U. S. history, the one-hundred-plus-mph storm washed away a third of the city and killed more than six thousand of its thirty-eight thousand people. Today, the sheltering seawall arcs along the outer shore of Galveston Island for seven miles. Topped with a wide walkway, the seawall, in good weather, becomes a broad artery flowing with residents and tourists, connecting the town with the long beaches and warm waters of the gulf. In turbulent weather, however, the wall shuns the seas with seventeen-foot-high granite shoulders, deflecting storms that might again raze Galveston of buildings and life.





Cecil with Red Dog at Galveston, Texas, 1972.



Late November quickly slid into December as the three of us lived aboard the Red Dog. At that time of the year, although boats filled the marina, people were scarce. Folks passed through the marina to check on their boats and do occasional winter maintenance, but none actually lived aboard their boats, and few hung around on a regular basis.

Living in a Gulf of Mexico marina presented a strange environment to me. I sometimes explored the waters around the marina at night, shining a flashlight deep into the brine to capture in its beam nocturnal creatures wandering near the surface to feed. One night I aimed the light alongside a pier and found a pair of red eyes, two shiny red dots that zipped back down the piling each time the light hit them. Curious, I took a fishing net off the boat and held it low against the piling before turning on the light. The tiny reflectors again sped backwards down the piling, this time into my net. When I examined my catch, I discovered a single shrimp, apparently cruising the pier for a nighttime meal.

I became fascinated with the Gulf waters’ bioluminescence, a greenish glow caused by innumerable microscopic organisms emitting light. The glow from the crests of breaking waves, the wake of a ship, or any other mechanically agitated water could be, some said, intense enough to read by. After noticing this phenomenon, I held the net end of the fishing net and waved the long handle through the water, making a broad, luminous flag that flared, then quickly tattered and disappeared. Some jellyfish also gave off light as they pulsated through the warm seawater.

During the days, Mom and I explored nearby department stores as Dad prepared the boat for the trip ahead. He made test runs in the waterways around Galveston, making adjustments and inspections along the way, reassuring himself that the boat could handle the trip. He also prepared himself, reading Coast Pilot bulletins issued by the United States Coast Guard, studying nautical charts for the journey along the coasts of Mexico and Central America, and reviewing navigation techniques, such as sailing using only charts and compass.

My folks and I each possessed, to varying degrees, a simple-hearted innocence about what the journey ahead might entail. Because the endeavor itself was so foreign to us, so were the dangers.

Mom knew rough ocean water frightened her and that she didn’t want to go, but believed Dad and I would have fun cruising the boat along the coast and seeing so many different places. She never gave much thought to specific dangers, even though she would still worry simply because we were traveling so far for such a long time.

Still simmering in the self-absorption of youth, I, especially, was naive about the journey. I never considered the consequences of encountering turbulent seas, tropical storms, or situations arising from our lack of knowledge of traveling by boat and of foreign ports. Though I gladly went along on the boat and enjoyed its unique environment, the long-term significance of the fact that my folks had placed a once-in-a-lifetime adventure opportunity at my feet—namely, sailing thousands of miles along tropical coasts of the Caribbean and the Pacific Oceans, and up the entire Pacific coast of the United States with my father—escaped me.

And although my father, through his studying of nautical materials, reading Coast Guard bulletins, and talking with other boaters in Galveston, knew more of what to expect, none of us truly understood the depth of difficulty we could face. Like Scandinavian lemmings, we marched steadily and blindly toward the sea.

So, we wintered aboard the Red Dog and Christmas came and went as quietly as morning fog on Galveston Bay. After exchanging small gifts, Mom cooked a ham dinner. With no cold, no snow, no evergreens, and no skeletal deciduous trees bare of leaves, it hardly seemed like Christmas in Galveston’s climate. A red poinsettia on the galley table, which my oldest brother, Donald, had had delivered on Christmas day, provided the only semblance of holiday aboard the Red Dog. The poinsettia still flushed red in mid-January when time came for Mom to return to Arkansas and for Dad and I to begin our journey to Alaska.

On the day Mom left, I decided to stay on board the Red Dog while Dad walked her to the bus station, only a few blocks from the yacht basin.

“Bye, Mom. We’ll call after we get to Port Isabel.”

My mother and I hugged each other stiffly and briefly. Not because we didn’t love each other, or because of any friction between us. Our family simply operated that way—quiet, reserved, and displaying little outward emotion. As I think back, I suppose this attitude originated partly as a learned family hand-me-down from generations before, and partly as an innate character trait. As children my folks handled my brothers and I with loving care with the usual hugs, kisses, and “I love yous,” but as years passed, we seemed to outgrow such visible emotions. The last time I remembered my mother hugging me was the day she left me at the girls’ dormitory my first year of college in 1967. Even today, I can recall my inner surge of surprise.

“You and your dad have fun and see lots of pretty scenery,” Mom said.

She looked away like she always did when she felt close to crying.

“We’ll be okay.”

I knew Mom would be fine staying with Gene.

At the bus station my father again reassured her that we would not take unnecessary risks.

“Now, don’t make yourself sick bothering about us,” he told her. “I won’t do anything to put Nancy in harm’s way.”

“I won’t.”

Dad embraced Mom then held her arm as he helped her step up into the door of the bus. Her eyes welled below her creased brow. Only later would Dad discover that Mom’s face reflected more than concern about our journey.



. . .



Two days after Mom left for Arkansas, my father and I cruised the Red Dog out of the protection of the Galveston Yacht Basin and headed for Alaska. Three days later, trouble found us.





Troubled Waters

Galveston to Port Isabel



WHEN MY FATHER and I left Galveston, Dad felt confident in his ability to make a successful journey in the Red Dog, even after his call to the Coast Guard to ask about procedures for clearing Mexican and Central American ports. Possibly sensing Dad’s inexperience with foreign travel, the man he questioned chided him.

“Americans go down there, get in trouble, then expect us to bail them out,” he told my father sarcastically, “and we’re not going to do it.”

Dismissing the fellow’s comments as nutty, Dad remained self-assured.

Following the slot of the Intracoastal Waterway that had guided us from New Orleans to Galveston, we paralleled the Texas coastline.

“How long before we get to Port Isabel?” I asked.

“Four or five days I guess.”

The final port of call before leaving the United States, Port Isabel, Texas, would be our departure point for a straight run across the Gulf of Mexico to the tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

As we swung the long arc of the Texas coast, the canal widened and bled into other intersecting waterways. Many areas edging the canal were too shallow for the boat. The draft on the Red Dog measured five feet when carrying a full load of fuel, and as soon as we veered from the canal’s dredged channel, the boat wedged against the sandy bottom.

“Err…rats.”

We floundered only minutes before a passing tugboat stopped.

“Looks like you could use some help,” the tug captain shouted over the noise of his tug.

“Err…yeah, I guess I missed the channel,” Dad tossed back with a nervous laugh.

The tug captain flung my father one end of a rope to tie to the stern of the Red Dog, then eased us backward. Sand grated against the hull with a raspy hum.

“Better keep clear of those edges,” the tug captain warned.

Dad had barely thanked the man before the tug roared away, its wide stern paving a broad, smooth trail across the bluegreen water.

Two days out of Galveston, at mid-morning, Dad pulled the boat away from the main canal, put it in neutral, and dropped the anchor.

“Why are we stopping so early?” I asked.

“Something’s wrong with the engine. I can’t get it to run full speed.”

After we anchored I followed Dad into the main cabin where he removed a floor panel above the engine compartment.

“How fast is it supposed to run?”

“Oh, about nine knots. Right now it’s only going about four or so.”

Four knots amounted to less than five miles per hour. At a brisk walk, we could reach Alaska as fast.

Dad climbed down into the engine compartment and checked the throttle controls and engine, trying to identify the problem. He could not get the engine to go faster.

“Well, I’ll work on it again when we stop this evening.”

He climbed out of the hole and replaced the floor panel.

As we continued along the canal, though, a wisp of uneasiness washed across my father’s face. He began to worry that he couldn’t fix the speed problem and considered the implications of making the journey at the reduced speed.

At half speed, not only might the Red Dog lack the power to sail against the strong Gulf Stream currents, but it could take at least six months, and probably more, to get to the southern coast of California, rather than the three to four months he originally figured. He feared the slow pace would force us to travel along the coasts of Central America during the dangerous hurricane season, which spanned from June to November. In June, tropical depressions in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific begin cycling warm air from the surface of the oceans with cool air from above. As the air cycles over and over, wind pressures build until depressions evolve into tropical storms. Once winds reach seventy-four miles per hour, the storms take a cyclonic form and become hurricanes.

“We’ll get it running right again before we start out across the Gulf,” he assured me, and probably himself.

But as we moved toward Port Isabel, his brow often bunched into a thought-packed frown, similar to the worried look I saw on occasion throughout the years, especially when my brothers and I were younger. I saw it in the third grade when I brought home candy cigarettes from Boatwright’s corner grocery, when Jerry broke my arm playing “airplane,” when Gene accidentally shot himself in the knee on the farm, and when Donald fished our pond with a stick of dynamite. I saw it again years later the day Jerry left for Vietnam.

Past Corpus Christi Bay we slid along the inner shore of Padre Island into Laguna Madre, a large but shallow body of water separating Padre Island from the Texas mainland. A narrow strand of land known as the longest coastal barrier island in the world, Padre Island included the 80-mile-long sandy beach of the Padre Island National Seashore. With Laguna Madre’s natural depth averaging less than three feet, Dad kept the boat aligned with the slot of the canal that scored the bottom of the lagoon and paralleled the island.

Along the three-hundred miles between Galveston and Port Isabel, we crossed a number of rough-water bays, experiencing a greater degree of turbulence than previously on our trip. The constant pounding of waves against the hull also pounded against my father’s thoughts. As the boat thumped and rocked across the water, concerns about the Red Dog’s ability to withstand the even greater turbulence we would soon face on the open ocean began to thump and rock his confidence. For the first time, he became acutely aware that the Red Dog was our lifeline, that our survival depended solely on a boat he alone had constructed—one that ran well in relatively calm inland waterways, but never tested in the powerful currents and unbridled forces of the ocean.





Melvin piloting the Red Dog, 1972.



With the unknown of traveling for the first time so far in the ocean, the speed problem, and apprehensions about the boat’s structural strength, my father began to worry about some unforeseen trouble that might leave me, his only daughter, stranded on the ocean or in a foreign place. Neither he nor I could read, speak, or understand Spanish. With the exception of passing through Canada on our vacation to Alaska, we had never been out of the United States.

I didn’t question my father about his fears, and the depth of his worries remained mostly hidden from me. As always, my father kept trouble to himself. In fact, neither of my folks ever discussed their burdens with my brothers and me. Although the desire to spare us kids some of the unpleasantness that comes with life probably perched somewhere on the branches of their reasoning, my parents’ unobtrusive approach reflected their personalities. They had always put forward a quiet example of life, guiding but not pushing, suggesting but not telling, seemingly careful not to rob us kids of who we might become.

But as the distance from Galveston increased, so did my father’s reservations about sailing to the west coast of the United States with only the two of us. He remembered his promise to Mom that he would not put me in danger. Then, only a day’s cruise from Port Isabel, those doubts that circled his thoughts like sharks, smelled blood, and poised ready to strike.

We had tied the Red Dog to a canal-side dock during heavy fog. While waiting for the fog to clear, Dad climbed the short set of steps into the pilothouse and blew the Red Dog’s fog horn to identify our position to other canal traffic. He then returned to the main cabin, removed the floor panel, and climbed into the engine compartment.

“Be careful you don’t step in the hole,” he warned as he disappeared below. “You might want to blow that horn every few minutes. It’s pretty thick out there.”

“I’ll watch.” I then busied myself cleaning up from breakfast.

An occasional fog horn from passing traffic droned through the dense, opaque air. Each time, I answered with our own.

It surprised me then, when I looked out the galley window and saw the bow of a barge coming toward us, moving steadily out of the fog.

“Dad,” I called down into the floor, “A barge looks like its going to try to dock here.”

My father climbed out of the hole in the floor and looked at the barge. Angled toward the Red Dog, it stalked a course that would sandwich our boat between barge and dock, bound to turn us and our boat into a crunch of steel, glass, and bone.



. . .



My father’s staunch independence, solitary nature, and love of building things had led him, and therefore me, into this place and this moment. And as with most people, his past had influenced those traits.

My father moved through childhood amid a slew of relatives in Capitol Hill, Oklahoma, in the 1920s and 1930s. Along with his parents and sister, his grandparents and a dozen or so aunts and uncles lived scattered around the area. They, along with their spouses and kids, provided an array of kin spanning the full spectrum of personalities from the most gentle, to the seldom-seen outlaw.

One of my father’s favorites was his Uncle Fred, a good man and a help to the family, but one who got tough when situations warranted. As a boy, my father watched from the corner of the grocery store one day when Fred clashed with the storekeeper. The storekeeper, a practical joker, had wired the store’s water bucket to shock anyone who touched the metal dipper. He then burst into laughter when Ruth Mae, Uncle Fred’s daughter, attempted to get a drink.

“Uncle Fred beat the man real bad,” my father reported to his parents afterwards.

Uncle Eddy and Uncle Radoe stood as the real troublemakers, though. Farmers and bootleggers, their primary missions in life seemed to get drunk or be on their way to getting there. And their sons offered little improvement, always picking fights with someone. My father’s first cousin, Waco, held the distinction as outlaw of the family, spending time in the El Reno Reformatory, California’s Folsom Prison and McAlester’s Oklahoma State Prison. Never quite sure what Waco did to put him in such places, Dad only knew that he showed up in Capitol Hill every so often. And whenever Waco left, authorities soon followed, knocking on doors looking for him.

But “one of God’s best” is how my father grew to refer to his Aunt Clara. When his shoes wore out, she bought him new ones. When he took her sugar and cocoa, she made him chocolate pies.

Never desiring to get in the middle of things or center attention on himself, my father became a studious observer of life among the Owens family. With his unassuming nature, he lived mostly as an unruffled spectator, quietly going about life, shuffling through the years like most other Capitol Hill boys. He saw his first movie, The Lost World, at age five; he owned a bicycle he had traded for a movie projector and five-foot length of Tom Mix film he won selling candy; he argued with his sister until his father threatened him with the chopped-off buggy whip; and he played with neighborhood boys along the streets and yards of Capitol Hill. Much of the time, though, he preferred to climb and slide down the neighbor’s straw stacks, dig for fishing worms, play in the creeks that cut through the area, and scratch for screws and small parts in the pasture near the airfield where a plane had once crashed.

At age eleven my father put together his first “boat” in his Capitol Hill yard. After gathering a pile of scrap wood from the neighborhood, he made pontoons by constructing two boxes, each large enough to hold two automobile inner tubes. He stuffed the crates with the tubes and connected the pontoons by nailing boards across the tops of the boxes, making a raft-like platform. Proud of his efforts, he carried it to a nearby creek with the help of a friend. Hoping to push it along Tom Sawyer-like with a pole, when he stepped onto the raft, it tipped and dumped him into the creek.

Having watched his father, George, work tirelessly as a carpenter and mason for most of his life, Dad grew to dislike those who sought only shortcuts, and to admire those who worked hard to get what they needed. And in 1930, the clash of Depression-era economics with the need to feed the family reinforced those thoughts. Out of work and with no jobs available, George traded the family car, their player piano, and their house in Capitol Hill for a truck and ten acres of land in Pilgrims Rest, Arkansas. There, the family hoped to farm for a living, uprooting from their Oklahoma home to begin a new, risky endeavor.

My father’s mother, Nellie, a tiny, dark-haired woman who barely topped five feet even when she dressed up in her high heels, had an uncle visiting who owned a claim in the Colorado Gold Fields. He gave Nellie and George enough money to buy a truckload of apples, which they would resell to help pay for the move. Before leaving Capitol Hill, the uncle took the entire family to the Oklahoma State Fair, handing each of the kids fifty cents to spend.

“Fifty cents!” my father blurted.

Fifty cents equaled a fortune. But after a magical day at the fair, my father was shocked and saddened to learn the man had returned to Colorado and shot himself to death.

After selling the apples, George and Nellie and the kids filled the truck with their belongings and headed for Pilgrim’s Rest. There, an accommodating neighbor let George store several pieces of furniture on his porch while they returned to Capitol Hill for the rest.

“A bad deal,” my father complained. “The guy took our large padded chair into his house and loaded it with a three-year supply of bed bugs.”

The depth of the Depression pressed hard upon the nation in 1931 and 1932. In more populated areas soup lines fed people and organizations handed out cheese, butter, flour, and other goods. But in rural areas like Pilgrim’s Rest, folks did whatever they could to feed their families.

After finishing the eighth grade, my father quit school to help work. While George and Nellie attempted to scratch a living from their ten acres, my father worked at neighboring farms picking beans for twenty-five cents a bushel and tomatoes for ten cents a crate. He hunted rabbits, squirrels, possums, and muskrats for the dinner table. During the winter months, he trapped and sold rabbit and muskrat furs to Sears and Roebuck agents. These activities not only provided extra money for sugar, flour, or whatever the family needed most, but also fostered my father’s independent nature.

But regardless of everyone’s hard work, farming efforts in Pilgrims Rest failed. With food scarce and money more scarce, like many others, they barely eked out a living. George’s brother, my father’s Uncle Budge, urged George to leave Arkansas and move the family to Clear Creek, Oklahoma, where Budge lived with his and George’s mother. Budge wanted them to raise hogs and corn together.

“We can sell five freight cars of hogs a year and all get rich,” he told George.

So in 1933, after three years in Pilgrims Rest, George sold their place and the family returned to Oklahoma. But Budge’s get-rich-quick idea of raising hogs quickly faded. Lack of rain hardened and cracked the land Budge and George needed to raise the corn to feed the hogs. Drought shrunk the lands across the state. In the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, two hundred miles to the west, dust storms buried roads and homes, and more than half of the population migrated to California and other areas west. In Clear Creek, crops burned up in the heat and the hogs weren’t worth hauling to market. George and Budge butchered the hogs they had and cured the meat themselves.

Relief finally came, though, in the form of President Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” which created the Public Works Administration and set aside billions of dollars for public improvement projects to put the unemployed to work. Budge and George got jobs building roads and a stone armory building. With a paycheck coming in, George bought a new tractor which my father used to plow fields around Clear Creek, Grand River, Lost City, and Hulbert, for $1.25 an acre.





George, Nellie, Melvin and Marguerite,

Clear Creek, Oklahoma, 1934.



My father still lived at Clear Creek when he met my mother, who then lived at Lost City with her family, and attended Hulbert High School with Dad’s sister, Marguerite. They married in 1940 and, except for the time they spent in Seattle during the war, remained in the Arkansas and Oklahoma area until leaving aboard the Red Dog.

And now, as his own father had left their longtime home to try out a new life in Arkansas, my father had left his longtime home to try out a new life in Alaska. But although Dad left out of desire rather than necessity, his was also a risky venture.



. . .



“Get off the boat,” Dad said flatly as the barge rumbled blindly toward us. With a lowered brow, he hurried to the pilothouse to again sound the fog horn.

The barge gave no sign of turning or stopping, so I scrambled over the bulkhead onto the dock. Dad followed then pulled me to the far side of the dock where we watched the barge grow from the fog. The mass of dark steel slid across the water with the heavy, unstoppable momentum of a whale, gliding with the slow motion of a bad dream.

Then, from the foggy blur, a deckhand appeared, walking toward the bow of the barge.

“Hey!” Dad yelled, waving both arms.

As soon as the man saw us, he turned and ran toward the tug at the barge’s stern, which finally moved into view. Seconds later we heard the reverse thrusters of the tug engage and saw the barge begin to slow. The barge pulled back, but not before pinching the Red Dog against the dock. The tug captain never gave any indication he knew he had hit us, but simply backed into the fog with his charge and disappeared.

A visual inspection of the boat revealed a crimped railing, gouged paint, and a door to the below-deck sleeping quarters that no longer closed properly. But although the surface damage appeared minimal, my father feared that the pressure of the barge against the boat could have bent the drive shaft or caused other internal damage we were yet to discover. And although the run into Port Isabel the next day revealed no immediate problems, Dad remained skeptical.

We arrived at Port Isabel near dark, and because we were unfamiliar with the area, the lights of the town and harbor appeared as merely a long, luminous strand separating the flat, reflecting water and the evening sky.

“I can’t tell what’s what,” I said.

“Errr…yeaahh…it’s pretty hard to spot where we’re headed alright.”

Neither Dad nor I could distinguish the lights of the canal and buoy markers from those lighting streets, signs, boat basins, and buildings on shore. My father slowed the Red Dog and nosed carefully across the black water. Feeling our way as we looked for a place to dock for the night, it wasn’t long before we ran aground. For the second time, a tug came to our rescue.

“Don’t run the engine or it’ll draw mud into her,” the tug pilot shouted over the engine noise. He then hooked his tug to the stern and pulled the Red Dog off the sand bar.

“Well thank you,” Dad told him, then, just as we started off and only feet away, the keel of our boat again sliced into the shallow bottom.

“I’ll show you a place you can dock,” the tug pilot yelled after pulling us off again.

We followed the tug for more than a mile to what the pilot called the Banana Dock, an abandoned wharf where we gratefully tied up the Red Dog and settled in for the night.

“That tug captain knew he’d found a couple of greenhorns when he found us,” Dad joked after the tug left.

As we talked, I built us a couple of ham sandwiches and opened a bag of potato chips.

“I’d just as soon not get stuck again,” Dad said as he sat down at the table. “Hard to tell about those sandbars though.”

“Well, at least we’ve had good luck with people helping us get unstuck. So far anyway.”

I cleaned up the table and Dad left to check the Red Dog’s oil level and fuel filter. When he finished, he and I walked the length of the wharf, which ran alongside an abandoned warehouse. Across the black, reflecting water, the lights of the coast reached toward us.

When we returned to the boat we sat on the back deck for a few minutes before Dad headed to the wheelhouse to study the chart for tomorrow’s route.

“Make sure you lock the cabin door when you go to bed,” he said as he left.

As I sat on the deck with my feet propped against the bulkhead, I wondered what the rest of our family was doing, and what might lie ahead. A warm, soft breeze rolled across the deck as I watched lights and listened to the coastal sounds of distant boat motors, an occasional car horn, and a faraway siren. Nightfall had tempered the coast, but daylight would soon rev it up again.



. . .



My father labored for several days in Port Isabel, but had little experience repairing diesel engines and could not get the boat to run more than half speed. I saw his frustration as he climbed in and out of the engine compartment.

“Well, I might be able to find someone here to try to get it working again,” he told me hesitantly.

My father had always exuded independence and seldom asked for help on any task. The idea that he no longer believed he could fix it himself surprised me.

“There’s probably lots of mechanics around,” I said.

But the combination of his worry over the speed of the boat, the embarrassing fact that we had run aground three times, his concerns about the Red Dog’s structural strength, and the frightening barge-squeeze incident, all weighed heavily on him. The minute distance we had traveled between Galveston and Port Isabel hardly compared to the thousands of miles that lay ahead. The unknown seldom deterred my father, but the worries of this seafaring journey shadowed him with uncertainty. Increasingly fretful of placing me in danger, the risk eventually seemed too great. It was a risk, he finally decided, he would not take.

“I guess we’d better head back to Galveston for a while,” he finally said.

This was a first for Dad, a lifelong problem solver.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I need to get the boat working good again and think this out a little more.”

“How long will we be in Galveston?”

“Hard to tell. We’ll call your mother in the morning.”

So, feeling disheartened and ill prepared, ten days after leaving Galveston, we turned the sluggish Red Dog north from Port Isabel and headed back the way we had come. For my father, the desire for a vacation-like, worry-free cruise to Alaska had dissolved into a tough, raw reality. For me, however, a more immediate opportunity soon presented itself.





The Train from Tampico

Galveston to Tampico



“HERE KITTY, KITTY.”

Although the bony cat with filthy, matted fur cried with wide-mouth urgency, the sound of the nearby surf dampened the power of its screeches. The abandoned tabby lived outside the Galveston boat basin along the seawall and beach where my mother scooped a can of cat food onto a scrap of cardboard. She watched the pitiful creature gobble it gone without stopping.

Mom had bought the cat food at Perry’s Variety Store where she found work as a cashier upon her return to Galveston, after Dad and I arrived back from Port Isabel. With my father not working since before completing the Red Dog several months earlier, she took the job to help defer expenses while they rethought their plans for getting the boat to Alaska.

As the Red Dog once again sat placidly in a Galveston Yacht Basin slip, weeks passed with the trip also at a standstill. And after nearly three months of shuffling around the docks of Galveston since our initial arrival in November, I grew restless. I called a girlfriend in Oklahoma and discovered she planned to move to Chicago where her boyfriend lived.

“Come with me,” she pleaded. “We’ll get an apartment together.”

Because I had never lived in, or even visited, such a large city, the idea intrigued me. And with the journey in the Red Dog in question and the time my folks and I would remain in Galveston unclear, the opportunity to move on appealed to me.

“I’ll have tons of jobs to pick from in Chicago,” I assured my folks.

So before long, my friend’s green, Volkswagen van buzzed and whined its way north with me aboard in the passenger seat, leaving my parents alone aboard the Red Dog.

But even though my departure from Galveston voided my father’s worries about putting me in harm’s way, doubts about cruising the open ocean to Alaska still clung to his confidence like barnacles. Adding to his concerns about the speed, power, and structural integrity of the Red Dog, new Coast Guard warnings cautioned mariners about traveling along the coasts of Central America, alerting Americans to be especially vigilant near Nicaragua and Guatemala. Political unrest rippled across some Central American countries in 1972, and the phrase “Yankee Go Home” often bannered and blared from nightly newscasts. Stories floated around the marina about highjackings and robberies of American boaters.

As each day passed, Dad’s enthusiasm for making the trip to the West Coast in the Red Dog dimmed. He and Mom continued to weigh their situation and, eventually, my father’s focus took a major turn. He decided that rather than making the several-thousand-mile ocean journey himself, he would concentrate on achieving his more ultimate goal—getting the Red Dog safely to Alaska by whatever means possible. With this in mind, he looked into having the boat shipped cross-country.

“Even on a flatbed car it’ll sit too high for urban overpasses,” railroad freight personnel told him when he called them about shipping the boat by train.

Trucking the boat would also encounter a myriad of overpasses and hard-to-overcome obstacles over such a long distance. Then, while scanning the newspaper, Dad’s attention locked onto an advertisement for a boat delivery service: “Will deliver boats anywhere,” it boasted.

Mom called the phone number listed. Two days later, John Delling and his partner drove to Galveston from Houston to meet my father and to see the Red Dog.

In his mid-forties with a medium build and short, dark hair capping a bronze face, Delling claimed fifteen years of experience running fishing boats up and down the Caribbean and Pacific coasts and through the Panama Canal. He talked extensively about Central American ports and the powerful currents around the Yucatán Peninsula. Both Delling and his taller, slimmer partner were licensed boat captains.

“He’s a good mechanic capable of coping with any problems that might arise on a boat of this size,” Delling said of his partner when told about the Red Dog’s speed problem.

Delling assured my father he could get the Red Dog to the west coast of California without difficulty. From California, Dad would sail the boat along the Pacific coast to Alaska himself.

Delling and my father discussed terms, reached an agreement, and put together a contract. Delling would deliver the boat to Moss Landing in Monterey Bay, California, for a fee of five-thousand dollars plus the cost of fuel—two-thousand dollars paid in advance with the balance due on arrival in California. The departure date from Galveston would be on or about March 3 and the arrival in Monterey Bay on or about April 21. With both Delling and his partner capable of navigating and handling the boat, they planned to run day and night to get it to the West Coast as quickly as possible.

My father and Delling signed their contract on February 26. The next day, Delling took possession of the Red Dog, and Mom and Dad took a bus to Arkansas where they would spend a few days before driving the truck and camper they had left with my brother to Carmel, California. Carmel not only sat near Monterey where Delling would deliver the Red Dog, but where Mom’s mother, my grandmother Viola, now lived. Elmer had died of a stroke at their home in Carmel in 1969, and my grandmother planned to move back to Bellingham, Washington, where she lived her childhood years and still had relatives.

Before my folks left Arkansas, Delling called to say he had hired a mechanic to repair the Red Dog’s engine.

“It runs perfectly. We measured the speed at more than nine knots.”

“Err..that’s good news.”

“We’ll be leaving here as soon as the weather clears.”

With the Red Dog safely in Delling’s care, Mom and Dad headed for Carmel to help Viola box her belongings while waiting for Delling to deliver the Red Dog.

Although boxing Viola’s things would prove easy, waiting for Delling’s arrival would prove excruciating.



. . .



Elmer and Viola, had moved to California on the flip of a coin in 1946.

“Heads to Washington, tails to California,” Elmer told Viola.

After serving three years in Missouri’s Jefferson City jail, Elmer caught up with his family in Bellingham where Viola and the kids eventually ended up after their cabin burned to the ground in the woods near Valles Mines. Not long after their reunion, in 1932, the family returned to Oklahoma where Elmer’s father owned a hog farm, and where Elmer and Viola remained until moving to California.

Elmer and Viola went to Carmel after spending a short time in Salinas where they picked fruit for a living. Elmer, who had left his drinking and bootlegging days far behind, always dressed smartly and made favorable first impressions. Wearing a hat and jacket with the hem of his shirt tucked neatly into the waist of his trousers and his shoes dusted, he hired himself out as a gardener to a wealthy Carmel widow. Eventually, he and Viola worked as a team, he as gardener and she as cook and housekeeper, living in their employer’s servant’s quarters until they purchased their own home in the early 1950s near downtown Carmel.





Elmer and Viola at home in

Carmel, California, 1960.



I knew my Grandfather Elmer best as a young girl. I was seven when I first met him after our family drove to California from Oklahoma in 1956. He had a solid jawbone, cleft chin, and dimples in his cheeks so deep when he grinned that they cast tiny shadows on themselves. He combed his hair straight back and one eyebrow always rose a bit higher than the other.

I followed my grandfather around his yard and watched him tend his gardens. On the brick patio wall that spanned between their house and garage, sprays of bright flowers flowed from the top of the wall and draped to the bottom in a curtain of color.

My grandfather loved to tease me.

“Guess what’s in here,” he often asked me, pointing to the chest pocket on his shirt or jacket.

“I don’t know,” I’d say, yet expecting the usual piece of candy.

One day, though, to my delight, he pulled out a baby squirrel. He had befriended many of the squirrels in his yard and hand fed some of them.



. . .



As my folks drove to California, they overnighted at campgrounds, as they had done many times over the years when we kids were young. Sometimes those early camping trips took us only as far as Colorado for an extended weekend; other times we traveled cross-country. Always preferring to explore the back roads into our destinations, Dad also routed through national parks. By exposing my brothers and I to such wonders, my folks hoped we would eventually take notice of the beauty and spectacle of nature, and relinquish our unending interest in whatever food lay hidden in the camp box, or in fussing with each other across a picnic table.

Seeing each mountain as if she had never seen one before and ever ready to discover what lay around the next corner, my mother stood happily at the center of those family camping treks. Before Dad built our camper in 1960, Mom cooked huge meals over campfires—bacon, eggs, pancakes, pork chops, chicken, biscuits and gravy—leaning over a crackling skillet, a scarf tied gypsy-style at the back of her head to keep her dark hair from falling forward. We kids teased her about the gallon jugs of apple cider she often brought along, trying to get her to sling the jug over the back of her forearm like a jug of moonshine, making her laugh until she couldn’t drink at all.

Now, as my folks made their way toward California alone, the exhilaration of the outdoors still filtered into their campsites, but the whoops, yelps, and echoes of four kids that once percolated through the woods, had dissipated into the past.

Not long after Mom and Dad arrived in Carmel, Delling called.

“We’re in Veracruz,” he told my father.

“You should be near Panama by now,” Dad responded, a bit irritated that three weeks had passed since Delling and his partner left Galveston on the Red Dog. Veracruz put them only six-hundred miles south of the United States-Mexico border.

“It’s the bad weather and the paperwork with authorities,” Delling explained. “I need to send some money ahead to Colón to cover expenses on our arrival at Panama. If you can give me another advance on my contract, wire the money to my wife, and I’ll report as soon as we reach the Canal.”

My father disliked the idea of sending funds ahead, but Delling had taken boats through the Canal many times before; Delling should know the best way to proceed. Since the agreed contract amount covered the money requested, Dad wired one-thousand dollars to Delling’s wife, who would deposit the money for transfer to a Colón bank.

As my parents waited for the Red Dog they sorted and packed box after box of Viola’s belongings for her move to Bellingham. On April 21, the day the contract stated Delling was to arrive in Monterey with the boat, Delling again made contact. Dad expected Delling to have transited the Panama Canal and headed north along the Pacific Coast. Those expectations, though, quickly collapsed.

“I’m back home in Texas.”

My father could hardly comprehend as Delling explained how he had sailed the Red Dog from Veracruz back up the coast to Tampico, then returned home to Texas. It made no sense. Only three hundred miles south of the Mexican border, Tampico lay three hundred miles north of where they had called from a month earlier.

“It’s too late in the year, too close to hurricane season,” Delling said. “I can’t take the boat around as agreed.”

Flushed with anger, my father still barely believed what he heard.

“Then return the boat to Galveston and return my money.”

“We’ve already made plans to ship it on the train,” Delling added quickly.

In Tampico, Mexico, Delling had contracted with an agent, Pedro Orozco Soto, to ship the Red Dog from Tampico to Ensenada on the Pacific coast of Mexico by rail for four-thousand-five-hundred dollars. The fee included insurance to cover the boat and equipment, the tools my father had stored on board the boat, and an armed security guard to stay with the boat until delivery in Ensenada harbor and release of insurance. The Mexican National Railway needed full payment before loading the boat.

“If you can’t send the money,” Delling told Dad, “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave the Red Dog where it is and get back to work on a job here at home.”

My folks considered their shrinking bank account. Dad hadn’t worked for fourteen months, not since completing his last construction project and “retiring” to finish building the Red Dog. And as Mom pointed out, with Delling and the process of getting the boat around to the West Coast, along with their day-to-day waiting in Carmel, money seeped from their savings like a slow leak.

“We’re going to spend all the profit we made on our house on Delling,” she anguished.

But my father saw little alternative. On board the boat, underneath the decks to help serve as ballast, he had stored most of the tools he collected and worked with over the years. My father spent his lifetime as a builder and those tools not only provided his livelihood, but built every house our family ever lived in. Not knowing what he and my mother might need in Alaska, the tools and the boat represented security to my father.

The single fact was that my father was in California, and the boat was in Mexico. Delling took the boat into Mexico, and Delling needed to get it out of Mexico. Not knowing what else to do, Dad agreed to cover the Soto contract plus air fare to Tampico and Ensenada for Delling. That way he would at least get his boat back, even if it cost him more than he planned.

“Be sure to check with the railway company about bridge and tunnel clearances,” he warned Delling.

“Thirteen-hundred dollars of the fee is for special handling because of the boat’s size,” Delling assured him. He would send copies of the documents when they received the Temporary Import Permit and railroad car number.

“Make sure you’re there when the boat is loaded and unloaded,” my father added. “I don’t want the boat damaged, and the mast and rigging have to be put back in place at Ensenada.”

Delling promised.

By May, Mom and Dad had waited in Carmel for two months. And for a second time, as she did in Galveston, my mother decided to work to offset their dwindling savings. Knowing friends and family had always considered her an excellent cook, she confidently hired on as a cook for the Carmel Inn, a retirement home with twenty-some residents. She loved the job. She attacked her work with enthusiasm, happy to feel useful and doing something she enjoyed that helped take her mind off the problems with Delling. Although her contract did not require her to make desserts, she walked to work in predawn hours to bake pies for the residents. She shuffled fruit pies in and out of the oven, enjoying the praise from inn residents who complimented her heavily for the baked goodies. It felt good to be in a social setting for a change.

In the middle of May, a letter arrived from Delling apologizing for his delay in reporting on the Red Dog’s progress. After citing fund transfer problems with the check my father had sent, Tampico flight schedule mix-ups, delays due to Mexico’s national holidays, and trouble getting permission from customs for temporary importation, he added:



What I am getting at is that it will be at least in the first two weeks of June before we arrive in Monterey Bay. I will keep you informed so you can make what arrangements you have in mind. Like you said, I will put the boat at Moss Landing and contact you at your mother-in-law’s.





The evening before I left Tampico, Soto and I drove ninety-two miles west to a town called Valles, which is the first mountain range the boat will pass. I personally climbed the side of the mountain and measured the tunnel. Width 18’ and 30’ high. The tunnel was carved through solid rock. Soto said this is the standard dimensions for railroad tunnels. Railroad bridges are something else. Some of the routing I understand will have to be changed, but I don’t know exactly how much. When I find out, I will let you know.





By the way, if you have a weak heart, do not ride on any highways in Mexico after dark.





Mid-June came and went with no further word from Delling until a June 26 telegram stating that he and Soto were “PROCEEDING TOGETHER TO VESSEL. PARTICULARS ASAP. EVERYTHING OKAY.” Then in late July, Delling’s wife called my father from Texas with word from her husband.

“John said the Red Dog is too wide for a tunnel at Villa Victoria. It’ll have to be loaded onto a truck and hauled around it.”

Troubled by this news, Dad told Mrs. Delling to call again as soon as she heard that the boat had made it safely around the tunnel and back onto the train.

“They got the boat through the tunnel after all,” she explained a few days later. “It should be delivered in three weeks.”

“It’s good to have good news for a change,” Dad told her, relieved that progress, rather than delay, had greeted him.

When my father talked with Delling two weeks later, Delling confirmed the boat cleared the tunnel and now rumbled toward Ensenada aboard the train. Dad again asked for paperwork documenting the contract with Soto, copies of the insurance, way bills, the import permit for shipment of the boat on the railroad, and for proof of payment to Soto.

“I’ll contact Soto again,” Delling said.

But by mid-September, five months after the original contract delivery date, Dad had not received the promised documentation. Though Delling and his wife told him everything was all right, my father’s gut told him otherwise.

“I wouldn’t trust that Delling fellow if he were locked in an outhouse with a muzzle on,” Viola offered.

For seven months, my father had waited for Delling to complete his obligation to deliver the Red Dog to the California coast. Though Delling promised in every phone call and in every letter to get him documented proof, Delling never acted on his promises and consistently blamed Soto. My mother became increasingly distressed.

“Melvin, what are we going to do? We need to get mother moved out of here soon, and we can’t wait forever on Delling. This boat is causing us nothing but problems. I’m sick of worrying about it. We have to do something,” she told Dad.

“I know. I’m just not sure what we can do.”

With money going out and little coming in, my father knew he needed to get back to work soon. Frustrated and desperate, he wrote Delling a letter, addressing it to Delling’s home in Texas.



September 16, 1972





John:





You mentioned the boat be unloaded somewhere other than Ensenada. I paid for the boat to be hauled under bond and insured to Ensenada harbor, launched and rigged ready to run the same as when you left with it. Do not under any circumstances release contract or insurance until boat is safe and ready to run with all tools and equipment aboard in Ensenada harbor. Get a signed statement from Soto certifying boat free of any charges or fees—Important!





If impossible to railway to Ensenada and must launch somewhere else, it may be towed or barged. If run to Ensenada under own power, I must be refunded difference in railroad mileage. In any case insurance must be maintained to Ensenada! Do not release before!





John, I do not wish or intend to become involved with anyone in Mexico. I have no deal with Mr. Soto—he is your agent and your responsibility. You put the boat into Mexico—you will have to get it out. You signed contract to deliver boat for $5000, $2000 in advance. I have advanced about $8000 to you, plus about $80 in phone bills and lost five months work while waiting, and have received nothing—not even proof of shipment, or whereabouts of boat, which I requested some months back. There have been times since that I have wondered if the boat isn’t still setting at Tampico. Rest assured, if you quit trying and abandon my boat or fail to deliver as agreed and paid for, I will have no choice except to charge you, your partner, and all who have received part of the money advanced, with fraud for the amount advanced, plus price of boat and tools.





John, I have tried to be your friend and have done everything you asked—far more than anyone else would have done. If you have lied to me about the deal with Soto, you have defrauded me. If you have told me the exact truth, I don’t see how he can help but deliver the boat to Ensenada or pay the insurance.





Please get me proof copies of Soto deal. Keep pressure on Soto. Write U.S. Consul at Tampico and Mexico City and Guadalajara for a check on Soto and location of boat. Call Mexican Consul at Houston. Call Houston or Galveston Coast Guard. Since it is a documented vessel, I think they will inquire about it with the Mexican government. Keep trying and let me know. All this waiting is trying me physically, mentally, and financially. Don’t get the impression that I think it’s a bed of roses for you—I know it’s just as bad for you as it is for me. Everyone has troubles—maybe Soto is having a few too. Things have got to get better—they can’t get any worse.





Good Luck,



Melvin





After posting the letter, Dad wrote a second one to the Consulate General in Guadalajara, Mexico. He explained the situation with Soto and Delling, adding:



I am not positive of anything except that I have paid $8,000 and the boat has not been delivered. I cannot believe the R.R. would leave a load on one of their cars for four months and not deliver it. Something is bad wrong. I do not speak Spanish and so cannot communicate with the officials in Mexico. I am very concerned and worried about the safety of my boat. It and the tools and equipment aboard are all I own in this world. It is my home as well as my means of making a living. Please help me if you can. I need to know if the boat has been shipped from Tampico. The R.R. should know. The Harbor Master should know. The Mayor of Tampico had a boat docked next to the RED DOG. He should know.





Mom cooked at the Carmel Inn until October when my folks needed to get Viola moved and resettled in Washington. After the movers loaded Viola’s belongings into the moving van, Dad and Mom restocked their camper and left for Bellingham. Viola would follow a few days later with a friend who offered to drive her.

My father had received no response to his letters to Delling or the Consulate General and planned to contact them again from Bellingham. Before Viola left Carmel, though, a letter arrived from Mexico. The Consulate General in Guadalajara had forwarded Dad’s letter to the American Embassy in Mexico City, who had forwarded his letter to the Consulate General in Monterrey, Mexico. Viola called my father in Bellingham and read the letter over the telephone:



In response to your inquiry as to the location and safety of the U.S. documented vessel Red Dog, a member of our staff has telephoned Mr. Pedro H. Orozco Soto in Tampico and learned from him that your vessel is still safely tied up at a private dock in Tampico. However, there seems to be some misunderstanding as to how to proceed with shipping the vessel across Mexico, and how payment will be made for this shipment. In your letter you stated that you had contracted Mr. John Delling of Texas to move the boat from Galveston, Texas to Monterey Bay, California, paying him about $8,000 for this service. You also said that Mr. Delling had contracted Mr. Soto to transport the vessel across Mexico, and paid him $4,500 for this, including insurance charges and a security guard. Mr. Soto, however, states that Mr. Delling only paid him $1,700 on May 4, 1972, and that $200 of this was immediately spent to pay off the crew and to buy back essential items of the boat’s equipment, which had been pawned by the crew after they had been abandoned without pay by Mr. Delling. Mr. Soto also states that he has heard nothing from Mr. Delling since July, and that he has been unable to proceed with its shipment because of lack of funds. He has, however, been able to obtain the Temporary Import Permit required and one of the two needed special permits from the National Railway.





The Consulate’s letter also stated that Soto spoke fluent English and told my father how to contact him. Before Dad could contact Soto, Viola called again to relay a telegram received from Soto.



UNITED STATES MONTERREY’S MEXICO EMBASSY CALL ME ABOUT YOUR YACHT. PLEASE. VERY URGENT. CALL ME FROM TEN TO ONE THIRTY IN THE MORNING. VERY URGENT. REPEAT.





PEDRO OROZCO SOTO





When my father reached Soto, Soto’s words fractured Dad’s thoughts like a firecracker.

“The Mexican government is preparing to confiscate your boat,” Soto said.

According to Soto, the Red Dog had never moved from Tampico. Delling signed a deal with Soto in April, but he then returned to Texas, abandoning the boat and the agreement with Soto, and pocketing most of the money my father sent to ship the boat on the train. The unpaid moorage fees continued to accumulate and the government was ready to consider it abandoned.

“You must come right away,” Soto told my father.

Immediately after his conversation with Soto ended, my father called Delling in Texas, who refused call after call. Dad heard him in the background telling his kids who answered the phone to say he wasn’t there. But Dad persisted and Delling finally took his call.

“I’m not going back to Mexico to get your boat,” Delling blurted. He admitted not seeing the boat since April. “If I go back down there, they’ll put me in jail.”

“I’ll sue for fraud,” my father told him.

“There’s nothing you can get from me, and there’s nothing you can do,” Delling bragged, explaining that with the way the courts were, he could do just about whatever he pleased because in Texas they can’t go after a man’s wages.

From the first time Delling called my father from Texas in April, he had told a series of lies. Even Delling’s wife sent fake telegrams and blatantly fabricated details about tunnel clearances and the boat’s transport to Ensenada.

My father knew he lacked the contract savvy needed to tie Delling up like he should have. He hadn’t worried too much about the legalities, still holding the notion that people were generally trustworthy, that one’s word should be as good as any stack of legal papers. But Delling taught a cruel lesson, leaving my parents angry and heartsick.

“All we have worked for is slipping away at the hands of this stranger,” Mom told Dad.

“I knew he was lying to me. Things just didn’t seem right,” Dad said. “I should have done something earlier.”

My father flew to Tampico from Bellingham the next day, leaving Mom with relatives while she waited for Viola to arrive. Because Dad didn’t know Spanish, he hoped the people he had to deal with knew English.

“If not, I’ll try to get by with hand signals,” he told my mother.

When I talked with my mother on the telephone from Chicago and she told me what had happened, I knew how my father must have despised what Delling had done. I knew he would see it as a cowardly act by someone who refused to earn his own way in the world, who took from anyone if the opportunity presented itself. More than once I heard my father talk about his first cousin, Waco.

“Waco once bragged about robbing an old man and a young girl he had befriended,” Dad said. “After getting the girl to find out where the man kept his money, he sneaked into his house and took the shoe box in the old man’s attic. The box had seventy one-hundred-dollar bills in it.”

“Waco was real proud,” he continued with disgust. “He thought he was a great hero. He had stole the old man’s life savings.”



. . .



In Tampico my father immediately contacted Soto, who agreed to take him to where Delling had docked the Red Dog and where it sat for the past several months. Soto drove fast through a series of poor, rundown neighborhoods, blaring the horn without slowing down as kids, dogs and chickens scattered in all directions. Dad braced himself as they sped along the streets, worried that one of the kids would stumble and fall into the car’s path.

At the dock my father and Soto quickly encountered Mariscos, the owner of the marina. According to Soto, Mariscos was uptight because the Red Dog had run up a bill of several hundred dollars and he hadn’t been paid his moorage fees.

“Be very, very careful with this man,” Soto told my father when he saw Mariscos coming toward them. As they approached each other, Soto again whispered, “I’m very serious. be very careful with this man.”

When Mariscos came near, Soto stepped ahead of my father and told Mariscos something in Spanish. Mariscos relaxed a bit, then stepped to the side as Soto and my father continued toward the Red Dog.

“People Mariscos doesn’t like have a way of disappearing,” Soto confided.

When Dad saw the Red Dog, the boat appeared unharmed, but he immediately noticed items were missing. The Mayor of Tampico, whose boat was moored next to the Red Dog, had taken my father’s new skiff and put it on his own yacht, leaving a beat-up junker in its place.

“It would not be smart to try to get your skiff back if you want to get out of Tampico without trouble,” Soto said.

The new outboard motor Dad had put on the skiff was also missing.

“Delling sold or traded it for something.” Soto then added with a grin, “I think our local Mexican girls interested Mr. Delling much more than taking care of your boat.”

Soto helped my father retrieve the Red Dog’s radio from the Port Captain, who had been using it.

“He asked lots of questions about Guatemala,” Soto said of Delling. “He said he thought he was going to have to hide out from you. He said you told him you didn’t go anywhere without your gun.”

“That’s right.”

As long as I can remember, my father had kept a pistol nearby for safety. At our home he hid one under his mattress. Whenever we traveled in our camper, he kept it in a storage hole. On board the Red Dog, he kept one inside a doubled-up pair of socks beneath his mattress in the pilothouse. I don’t know if he kept the pistol loaded, but I always knew it was there.

Dad spent five harried days in Tampico. While Soto shepherded him through the paperwork to clear out of port, helped him get copies of receipts and bills, and assisted him in settling the moorage bill with Mariscos, my father hired a business next to the marina to scrape and paint the bottom of the Red Dog. With a seemingly archaic system, the workers placed the boat in a cradle on a wooden track then pulled the cradle from the water using a clunky, single-cylinder steam engine that looked as if it had come straight off of Humphrey Bogart’s African Queen.

As Soto and my father worked to clear the Red Dog out of port, my father signed a fistful of papers, all written in Spanish and of which he had no idea of their content. It seemed that every official imaginable needed to sign the paperwork, each with their hand out for extra cash. It cost him seventeen-hundred dollars to get his boat out of Tampico.

“That’s the only way to get anything done,” Soto told him.

Dad left Tampico on October 10. Turning the Red Dog north to follow the Texas coastline back to Galveston, he discovered yet another deception of Delling’s. The boat still ran at only half speed. Delling never repaired the engine as he claimed only days after taking possession of the boat. He intended deceit from the beginning.

All in all, the Delling incident cost my father at least twelve-thousand dollars and nearly a year of lost time. If the Red Dog hadn’t been a U.S. documented vessel and if Dad hadn’t involved the U.S. Counsul, he may have never gotten the boat out of Mexico.

After returning to Galveston, my father contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hoping to charge Delling with interstate fraud. FBI agents came to the boat and indicated they would begin paperwork against Delling, then followed up a week later with a letter saying they wouldn’t. They agreed Delling could be charged with fraud, but the case held too low of a priority with the Juan Corona mass murder case then under heavy investigation.

Undeterred, my father contacted two Galveston attorneys. The first attorney agreed he had a good case, but in Texas the courts couldn’t garnish wages and Delling had nothing else of value to get.

“Even if we were to win your case,” he told my father, “you won’t get your money back.”

The second attorney said he would look over the case and contact him later with his decision.



. . .



Mom returned to Galveston in early November of 1972. There, she and Dad, once again, wintered aboard the Red Dog.

The following spring, they met Irving.





A New Crew

Galveston



SHARP CRIES OF SEAGULLS penetrated the calm as rays of February sun bored steadily through Galveston’s dense, morning fog. A warm breeze pushed new smells of the ocean into the cabin of the Red Dog to duel with the aroma of boiled coffee still hovering. Mom and Dad sat at the galley table sipping their second cups.

“I could have things ready in a couple weeks,” Dad said.

“I don’t want you cutting it too close.”

“Err…well…even if I don’t leave ‘til the middle of March, I ought to reach the coast before the storm season.”

A year and a half had passed since my father launched the Red Dog on the Arkansas River, a time clobbered by disappointment, delay, and a betrayal that stung him deeply and left him wondering, What next? But as weeks passed, after so many months of getting nowhere, he reconsidered sailing the boat to the West Coast himself, as he originally intended.

“You’re not worried about being alone?” Mom asked.

To Dad, Mom seemed distant. He knew the past several months, replete with problems and frustrations, weighed heavily on her. It was no fun for him, and certainly no fun for her.

“Come with me then,” he said with a grin and knowing her answer.

Mom ignored his tease and began clearing the table of coffee cups and spoons.

Through his dealings with the vague paperwork and brazen Mexican authorities in Tampico after Delling abandoned the Red Dog, my father had learned first hand the difficulties he faced with his inability to speak or understand Spanish. And the knowledge that many port agents and other officials expected payoffs to get cleared in and out of port, irked and irritated him. But by working on the engine controls over the winter, he had finally solved the Red Dog’s speed problem. The boat once again cruised at its normal rate of nine knots, bolstering his confidence.

So, Dad began preparing for his solo trip, checking his supplies for maintaining the boat and restocking his food supply. One morning near departure day, while Mom gave the lower quarters of the boat a final “good clean” and Dad carried a case of canned chili over the bulkhead, Dad heard someone behind him.

“How about me coming with you?”

Irving, a sixty-something, graying retiree from the lumber business, lived alone in Houston but spent much of his time on his thirty-foot, wood-hull boat he kept in the Galveston boat basin near the Red Dog. He had seen my father around the marina throughout the winter and stopped to talk on occasion. Dad referred to Irving as “a nice, friendly old guy,” but could never remember his last name. He had told Irving a few days earlier that he planned to sail to the West Coast alone.

“Well…ah,” Dad mumbled as he sat down the box, then lifted his cap and raked his hair back from his forehead before replacing it.

“I’ve got a daughter in Santa Barbara, and I could get off there,” Irving said quickly. “I can help with cleaning and running the boat.”

Dad glanced at Irving then shifted the case of chili with his foot.

“Well, I’ll give it some thought….talk it over with the wife…see what she thinks.”

“I need to do something besides sit around and play bridge,” Irving added with a short, nervous chuckle.

Normally a lone wolf, Dad wondered about the workability of two older gentlemen, virtual strangers, taking off for months on a long trip in the confined space of a boat. Though they each possessed an interest in boats, their backgrounds and lifestyles differed as greatly as the city mouse and the country mouse—one, a white-panted, deck-shoed, yacht-clubbing, extroverted, city dweller; the other, a construction-booted, hammer-wielding, blueprint-reading, introverted, rural dweller.

Mom favored the idea.

“At least you won’t be alone,” she told Dad.

Dad sensed a meaning in her words other than the obvious. “I don’t know…it’s just another thing I’ll have to worry about.”

Though my father expressed reservations, he knew that with Irving on board, not only could they trade off navigating to make better progress, but he would have help with the logistics of maneuvering and docking the Red Dog as they entered and exited unfamiliar ports. The added security of having one person to stay with the boat while the other went for supplies while in port, also appealed to him.

So, my father agreed to let Irving go. He made it clear to him, though, that the journey would not be a leisurely vacation, but strictly a means to get the Red Dog to California and eventually Alaska.

“We’ll make the trip as fast as possible,” he told Irving, “stopping only when we need fuel or groceries.”

Irving agreed but, hoping to fish in the warm Gulf Stream waters, excitedly gathered a load of fishing gear as he prepared for the trip, unaware that only a few days after departing Galveston, his excitement would turn into fear.



. . .



The third week of March, Dad and Mom walked to the Galveston bus station for a third time. Mom would again return to Fort Smith to stay with Gene.

Dad helped her with her suitcase, promised he would be careful, and hugged her as she readied to board the bus.

Before stepping onto the bus, Mom looked back and said with pooling eyes and a cracking voice, “I just don’t know if I can live like this anymore.”





SECTION TWO

Galveston to Belize





A Luminous Crossing

Galveston to Progreso



ON MARCH 19, 1973, the day after my mother caught a bus to return to Fort Smith, the Red Dog pulled from the Galveston Yacht Basin with my father and Irving on board.

Following the Intracoastal Waterway that connects bays, inlets, and sounds along the long curve of the Texas coast, they crossed Matagorda Bay where gusting winds thrashed at the water, giving my father a taste of how the Red Dog behaved in such conditions since running at full power. He pressed the bow into the waves, then later that evening, noted in the red, wide-ruled, spiral notebook he had purchased to use as his ship’s log:



Boat handles and runs good.



On Corpus Christi Bay a light wind scrubbed the water into the surface of a washboard, making the broad field of water choppy, but easy going. The end of the third day put the Red Dog at the entrance to Baffin Bay on the north end of Laguna Madre. Recalling how he ran aground when he and I passed through the lagoon a year earlier, he kept a careful eye on channel markers as he navigated south.

For the most part, Irving and my father got along. They took turns cooking, occasionally fixing pancakes or eggs and bacon for breakfast. Much of the time, though, they scraped together meals from a variety of canned goods such as soups, fruit, pasta, or chili. Dad knew how to fry a skillet of potatoes and onions and make hamburgers, but beyond that, had little experience in the kitchen.

“I can build a house on less instructions than it takes you to cook a chicken,” Mom once joked.

My father and Irving didn’t, however, always agree on how to run the Red Dog. Anxious to keep moving, Irving tried to convince Dad to travel at night, but my father would sail only during daylight hours along the coast.

“Too difficult to pick out navigational lights from coastal city lights,” he told Irving.

After arriving and getting the Red Dog situated in Port Isabel, Dad looked for a telephone to call Mom, her parting words at the Galveston bus station still stinging his thoughts.

“Err…hi. We made it to Port Isabel.” Dad’s voice sounded halting and cautious.

“Oh. Everything go okay?”

“Yeah, not too bad I guess.”

After a long pause Dad asked, “You feeling any better?”

A wall of hesitancy obstructed their conversation, each of them afraid to broach the subject of their parting directly.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Err…well once we get done with all of this, things’ll be better.”

Mom didn’t answer.

“How’s everyone up there?” Dad asked.

Mom told him about Gene’s work and how tired she was from riding the bus for two days.

“Well…I’ll call when we get to the other side of the Gulf,” Dad finally said.

“Okay.” Mom paused. “Be careful.”

For both Mom and Dad, any rupture in their relationship proved too difficult to address long distance. Although it hovered over their thoughts, they focused on the more immediate task at hand—getting my father and the Red Dog safely to the West Coast.



. . .



More than thirty years would pass before I learned what Mom had said to Dad at the Galveston bus station. Across those years, from the time my brothers and I were children, my folks maintained the image of a near perfect marriage—never arguing in front of us kids, never showing unkindness toward each other, never allowing anyone to disparage the other, always appearing as a united front.

As I looked back for hints of discord between my parents, they were difficult to find. Even though getting married the day after she turned eighteen, immediately followed by the addition of four kids, pretty much solidified Mom’s life as mother and caretaker for the next thirty some-odd years, I knew she loved her family dearly. But I also knew she had dreams of her own: to see the world (but not by boat), to paint, and to write.





Cecil Marie Owens, age 20.



Even though I don’t recall my mother specifically ever saying she wanted to become a writer, I realized her desire when, in my early teens, I found a copy of The Writer on her nightstand. When I flipped through the magazine, a typed letter slipped from between the pages. Apparently Mom had submitted a short story to a publication and received a rejection letter. With a fragile ego and a sometimes overly concern about other people’s perceptions of her, she would take such a rejection hard. In later years I found a notebook with evidence of writing classes she attended, and bits and pieces of stories she wrote about our family’s camping trips. Mom loved literature, words, and poetry. She read the famous poets and recited a line or two on occasion. She also enjoyed less serious poetry and once wrote a poem about her favorite baseball team, the Atlanta Braves. One day while watching a ballgame, the announcer thrilled her when he read her poem on air. And when I once told her I had enrolled in writing classes, she got a faraway look in her eyes and said, “I used to do that.”

After the rejection letter, I doubt my mother ever submitted more writing for publication. And over the years, few clues about such hopes escaped her. Like the writing magazine she kept on her nightstand, she seemed to want to keep that dream to herself.





Melvin and Cecil with Gene, Donald and Jerry, 1946.



Considering the earlier child-rearing boundaries of her life, the timing of Mom’s comment to my father at the bus station seemed to fit. After I left my parents on the Red Dog in Galveston in 1971 to go to Chicago, Mom and Dad found themselves on their own again for the first time since the birth of their first child in 1941. All of us kids now led our own lives elsewhere. If my mother felt she needed an adjustment in her life, 1973 was the likely time she would begin addressing it. I believe that, at age fifty, my mother may have finally started feeling her way to becoming the person she always wanted to become.



. . .



My father and Irving remained docked at Port Isabel for three days to refuel, perform routine maintenance, and keep an eye on the weather. Situated just north of the Mexican border, Port Isabel would serve as their departure point for a direct, five-day run across the Gulf of Mexico to the tip of the Yucatán Peninsula. Dad cleaned fuel filters and checked the gear box, engine, and injectors, finding them all in good order. On the evening of March 24, he clicked on the boat’s radio. The weather forecast sounded mostly fair for the next several days.

“We’ll get going pretty early,” he said.

Irving had just returned from the head.

“Sounds okay.” Irving then patted his stomach and added, “must have been something I ate. Should be fine in a day or so.”

Navigating with charts and compass, my father set a course at one-hundred-thirteen degrees toward Campeche Bank, and he and Irving cruised the Red Dog away from the breakwater of Port Isabel at daybreak the next morning. After three hours of travel, the land in their wake had disappeared.

Dad planned to cross the Gulf, then round the tip of the Yucatán Peninsula and head south to Belize City, their first port of call after leaving the United States. Because they now sailed on open water and away from the coastal dangers of underwater reefs, confusing city lights, and heavy boat traffic, my father expected to run the boat day and night across the Gulf.

Irving and my father found their first day out of Port Isabel a spectacular one as they traveled in a turquoise world with clear sky and four- to six-foot seas with long, gentle, rolling swells that the Red Dog glided over smoothly and easily. The white marine paint that coated the boat from its waterline to its roof, gleamed like a beacon in the bright sun. As evening fell, the beacon dimmed and the wind calmed to near zero. Night soon took over, and my father and Irving cruised in dark silence across the broad waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Dad wrote in his March 25 log entry:



Fluorescence in water like running in a sea of fire.



As he steered the Red Dog into the night, bioluminescence glowed around the boat as it stirred through the water. Thousands of jellyfish, of all sizes, floated across the ocean’s surface. Drifting with the current in the bioluminescence, their ghostly globes made the Gulf into an undulating sea of moons.

Later that night, mild winds brushed at the face of the water. My father sat in the captain’s chair with his feet propped on the control panel, then on the spokes of the steering wheel. When dark turned to daylight, he stopped to clean the fuel filter. After unbolting the cover, he removed the fine mesh filter and found it caked with grime. The fuel he had purchased at Port Isabel appeared substantially dirtier than the fuel from Galveston. He scraped off the grime then wrapped the outside of the metal filter with paper towels as an added layer to catch more debris. It became an efficient technique he would use for the remainder of the trip.

The next morning, the Red Dog came upon schools of flying fish. My father and Irving watched the fish skitter on the water’s surface, skimming then gliding maybe twenty feet across the air with their fan-like fins outspread.

Dad had read about mariners encountering flying fish. To escape predators, the fish build speed underwater as they swim toward the surface with their fins folded tight against their sides, launching themselves like a salvo of tiny torpedoes. When the front parts of their bodies break the surface of the water, they spread their wing-fins then give themselves an extra boost by rapidly beating their still-submerged forked tails to gain enough speed to lift them clear of the water. When the fish drift back down to the surface, their tails again propel them into the air, allowing them to make several consecutive glides. And now, like grasshoppers leaping from footfalls in a summer pasture, the fish leapt from the path of the Red Dog as it moved steadily across the Gulf water.

Winds increased on the afternoon of the second day out of Port Isabel and the weather quickly abandoned its original forecast. By evening the winds grew into a cloudless storm with waves building and cresting between twelve and twenty feet high.

The only weather instrument aboard the Red Dog was an Outdoor Life Sportsman’s Pocket Weather Forecaster, a four-inch by nine-inch card that, on one side, told why birds perch more before storms and, on the other, told why the leaves of trees show their backs before rain. Without a wind gauge, Dad judged the speed of the wind by the appearance of the waves.

“Winds around thirty miles an hour make white caps,” he would say, “and at sixty it blows the tops off.”

The winds began blasting across the crests of the waves, spawning a hard, stinging rain. The Beaufort Wind Scale rated sixty miles per hour as a range eleven wind speed. Considered storm force winds, range eleven loomed one step below hurricane force.

The Red Dog bucked against walls of waves. Dad held the bow perpendicular to them, charging into the face of each one, his hands welded to the spokes of the wheel. Anything previously loose in the pilothouse and cabin now lay on the floor, rolling and banging against the bulkheads.

My father was nervous. He had never faced conditions so turbulent, and this was only the second day on the open ocean aboard a boat that, five years earlier, consisted of nothing more than a set of blueprints and a pile of steel in his yard.

He leaned down from the steering wheel and glanced through the stairwell into the main cabin. Irving, still not recovered from his bout of illness in Port Isabel, had wobbled back and forth to the head most of the day and now took refuge on the couch where he braced himself against the violent motion of the boat. It appeared that the storm was taking a physical toll on Irving, adding an intense seasickness on top of whatever had already invaded his system.

My father slowed the boat to keep the hull from pounding so hard against the waves. By dark the wind whistled and raked the water sideways into a horizontal rain. Holding the boat against the storm for hours exhausted him.

“Irving!” he yelled down into the main cabin.

Irving looked up at Dad with a pale face, peeled himself off the couch, and climbed the steps into the pilothouse.

“Take over and keep the boat headed into the waves for a few minutes.”

With Irving in control of the boat, Dad hurried to the back deck and tied two tires onto a rope with one of his smaller anchors and tossed the contraption overboard. With the makeshift sea anchor in place, he returned to the pilothouse and turned off the engine. The sea anchor dragged in the water and held the bow forty-five degrees to the wind, enough to keep the boat from turning parallel to the waves and swamping.

Irving melted back to the couch.



Log - March 27, 1973: Very rough going—Irving sick and scared witless—Laying on couch and looking like a corpse—Thinks he is going to die—Thinks we are lost and over by Cuba and thinks they might start shooting any minute—Wants to turn around and run before the storm—8:00 p.m. hang out anchor and tires for sea anchor and wait for morning; winds must be 60 mph and waves 20 feet—Still no clouds—Very rough night.





After completing the ship’s log as best he could, my father went downstairs to check on Irving who had undergone bouts of diarrhea and nausea. With a consistent loss of water and sodium from his body, he was in danger of dehydration.

“Better keep some water in you,” he told Irving.

“I’m going to try to sleep.”

My father worried about Irving, wondering if he should call someone or if Irving would feel better after the storm settled down. As always, seeking medical help went against my father’s grain.

Raised in rural Oklahoma and Arkansas, Dad grew accustomed to seeing people take care of most medical problems themselves. When he was a boy, home remedies were the norm with babies born at home, broken bones set and splinted with whatever was handy, fevers left to break on their own, and aching teeth yanked out with stout fishing line and a flat iron. Even his Grandmother Abigail, a strong, hard woman, once pried her own aching tooth out with a nail.

Dad’s mother, Nellie, once become so ill that her body shrunk to little more than skin and bones. He watched as she set up crocks in their house and prepared a medicinal concoction of goat’s milk and home brew. A religious woman who never drank alcohol normally, Nellie not only got well on the mixture, but the potion became so popular that neighbors and relatives showed up at their house each evening to help her drink it.

My father never visited a doctor himself until the age of twenty. Working with his father to construct a walkway in Hulbert, Oklahoma, the hand crank on the concrete mixer slipped off its gear and spun and hit him on top of the head, knocking him out and leaving a gaping cut. With a doctor’s office on the next block, his father took him there to get the wound stitched and bandaged. Usually, though, with doctors in short supply and money for paying them even more scarce, folks sought them out for only extreme emergencies.

Dad had never experienced seasickness, but he never knew it to become serious. He guessed Irving would feel better as soon as the weather calmed.

After returning to the pilothouse, my father lay on his bed in his own attempt to rest, but with the continuous banging and thrusts of the boat, sleep proved impossible. Bobbing in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, Dad and Irving braced themselves on their respective beds as they watched, waited, and rode out the storm. And Dad thought about Mom.



. . .



By dawn the wind and waves on the Gulf eased, but the water still bounced the boat around. Dad located a Progreso, Mexico, station on the direction finder and recorded their bearings—about ten degrees east of south. The storm had blown the Red Dog thirty miles off course.

My father exited the pilothouse onto the bow deck and walked along the railing to the rear of the boat to pull in the sea anchor he had tossed overboard the night before. Still barely daylight, when he stepped onto the aft deck, he found himself in the midst of an eerie, silvery carpet where hundreds of flying fish had landed overnight during the storm. He picked up one of the small, shiny, cigar-shaped bodies and examined it, unfurling one of its odd-looking wing-fins. Like plastic wrap, the thin, transparent fin made the fish appear fragile and delicate. After tossing the tiny carcass overboard, he used a broom to sweep the mass of others off the deck and back into the water through the scuppers, the pale, flimsy bodies streaming and plopping into the water like clabbered milk.

When Dad entered the main cabin, Irving lifted his head from the couch.

“Melvin, I need to get to a doctor.”

Irving looked worse than ever. My father went to the pilothouse and turned the Red Dog south toward Progreso, the nearest town large enough to have a hospital. It would take at least two days to get there.



. . .



As the Red Dog cruised south across the Gulf, a school of forty to fifty bottlenose dolphins surfaced and played in the thrust of water before its bow. Dad watched with admiration as the dolphins swam with the boat for nearly three hours, the arcs of their backs stitching across the water in a continuous, effortless motion.

The evening before reaching Progreso, Dad anchored near Alacran Reef. Not far away, the steam boiler of a large ship protruded from the ocean surface, a likely casualty of the reef.

Dad noted in his journal:



Irving still lying like a dead man.





Log, March 30: Went into port about 7:30 a.m.—Officials came to boat with doctor then Irving was taken to the hospital—The expression “Scared to Death” was very nearly true in this case.





No natural harbor fronted Progreso, but a man-made breakwater stretched for nearly a mile into the Gulf. Though many boats anchored inside the breakwater, it offered little protection from the wind. Because of Irving’s medical emergency, port agents allowed my father to moor the Red Dog at a city dock. That night, with Irving under professional medical care and the Red Dog safely in port, he slept long and hard, a rest much needed after the stress of the storm and an ill passenger.

Though a small city, Progreso remained the major port on the Yucatán Peninsula. The town edged the coast near the bullseye of the Chicxulub Impact Crater, a one-hundred-fifty-mile-wide crater that lay thirty-six-hundred feet below the surface of the earth. According to some scientists, the impact from a giant asteroid or comet formed the crater sixty-five-million years ago, resulting, some suggest, in the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

As my father waited for word from the customs agent and the hospital about Irving the next morning, he watched fishing boats coming and going in the harbor, some unloading huge catches of fish. A talkative, English-speaking port agent stood at his shoulder and rattled about life in Progreso and his work as an agent. Dad listened politely but, enjoying the harbor activity, his eyes tracked the fishing boats, yachts, and skiffs maneuvering around the waterfront, his thoughts zigzagging between the agent and the goings on in the harbor.

The agent told him about the stealing and other crimes he encountered as an agent then added, “But, I’m from New York City, and it isn’t any worse than there.”

In the late afternoon, an immigration officer brought Irving to the boat to get his things. Irving left to catch the next flight back home to Texas.

Though Dad felt sorry about the trauma Irving experienced, he also felt relieved. Irving’s leaving freed him from what had become an added stress and skimmed a layer of strain from his pool of concerns.

“Where can I call the States from?” Dad asked the agent after Irving had gone.

“I just live down the street. You can use my phone.”

Dad followed the agent to his house and called Mom. He told her about the storm and about Irving.

“But I’m going to go on by myself,” he said.

Their conversation went a bit smoother than the one from Port Isabel.

“What if there’s another storm? Won’t you need some help?”

“I’ll keep close to the coastline.”

“Well, call me when you can,” she told him. “Otherwise I’ll think something happened.”

“I’ll call again from Belize.”

After the call the agent led my father to another official who the agent said would give him a tourist card. Dad didn't want or need a tourist card, but didn’t want to be rude to the hospitable agent who had allowed him to use his home telephone. When they met the other man, Dad just stood by and watched while the official “took great pains” to explain something to the agent in Spanish.

“The card is free,” the agent eventually reported to my father, “but you can give him a tip for his services.”

Dad pulled out his wallet and handed the official a twenty-Peso bill, which amounted to about two dollars and fifty cents in U.S. currency. The man eyed the bill with a sour look and held it out like he had picked it out of the sewer. The official showed it to the agent and spread his hands in dismay before walking away.

“I guess he just couldn't understand how I could be so stupid,” Dad laughed later. “I'm sure he expected at least a twenty dollar bill.”

The fact that my father no longer had the responsibility of a passenger, that he had successfully navigated the harsh storm on the Gulf of Mexico, and that the Red Dog had withstood the crashing ocean and winds with ease, awakened a new level of confidence in my father. With that experience firmly in his pocket, the journey ahead didn’t seem quite so menacing.

Dad knew, though, that the storm badly frightened Irving, and he noted in his log that evening:



Wouldn’t be surprised if he goes back to the Galveston yacht basin and sets fire to his own boat.





. . .



The explanations and paperwork required by port agents to clear out of port made my father weary. The immigration officer who sat at the Red Dog’s galley table with a bored expression and ate half a package of Dad’s cookies without a may I or a thank you, especially irked him. Finally, on April 3, four days after arriving in Progreso, with Irving safely home, with all forms signed, and with all charges settled, my father prepared to leave.

Now manning the boat alone, he planned his dockings carefully. He made sure he neatly coiled the ropes at the bow and stern, making them easily accessible and easy to grab and hurriedly loop around dock cleats. He placed the long aluminum pole with a hook on the end between the cabin and the railing where he could reach it quickly whenever he stopped short of a dock or drifted in the wind. And he cleared any obstacles that might hinder his rush from the pilothouse to secure the boat to a dock.

Dad pulled the Red Dog alongside a Progreso fuel dock. In addition to the cost of the fuel, the charge against the boat just for stopping at the fuel dock was one-hundred-three dollars, plus eighty dollars to the agent. Rankled by these extra but necessary costs, he grudgingly paid the bill, started the engine, and untied the Red Dog to leave.

Moored at the edge of a yacht basin near the fuel dock sat an elegant Chinese junk, only twenty feet or so away. The junk sat in front and to the right of the Red Dog. With its bright-colored sails and polished, intricately carved woodwork and ornamental railings, Dad figured it to be extremely expensive.

A stiff wind blew across the fuel dock toward the junk. With the wind steadily pushing the Red Dog in the direction of the junk, the space between the boats would not allow my father to move forward and steer past the junk without the risk of hitting it. Instead, he needed to back into the wind to give him space to maneuver safely past the junk before the wind blew him into it.

After pushing the Red Dog’s stern away from the fuel dock, he hurried to the pilothouse to reverse the engine. But when he looked behind him to begin moving backwards he saw, to his disbelief, that someone had come out of nowhere and tied a smaller cabin boat across the back of the Red Dog. A man, apparently the owner, had boarded the Red Dog and was now coming through the main cabin door toward him. Outside the cabin, two women clambered along the railing, apparently planning to climb over the Red Dog’s bow onto the fuel dock.

“How many nights were you coming across the Gulf?” asked the man, now at Dad’s side and oblivious to the danger at hand.

With a boat tied across the back of the Red Dog, my father could not back up, and the wind now carried both boats toward the junk.

“Get your boat off!” Dad blurted as they moved nearer the junk.

Outside, the fuel agent saw the women climbing over the railing at the bow.

“Stop, stop! Parar, Parar!” the agent yelled, waving his arms wildly.

At the end of the fuel dock, a solitary piling stood three to four feet from the face of the dock. As the wind pushed the two boats along, my father jammed the prow of the Red Dog between the end of the fuel dock and the piling, curbing the boats from hitting the side of the junk, now only a few feet away. While Dad kept the Red Dog wedged against its hold, the agent helped the women climb onto the fuel dock. With the women safe, Dad turned his attention to the stern. As quickly as the man and his boat had appeared, they had disappeared.

Dad backed away from the fuel dock and the junk, and headed out of the Progreso breakwater to continue his journey.

“I think he was from the States and wanted to talk to me about the trip. He must have thought I was an unfriendly cuss,” Dad said later about the man and the incident. “The junk probably belonged to a big shot in Progreso. If I’d of hit it, I’d still be in jail.”

After leaving Progreso, my father turned the Red Dog east along the northern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. The wind angled such that as the boat met the waves, the wind threw water high into the air and drenched the pilothouse, leaking in the windows and doors with each burst. Dad traveled for several miles before anchoring off the coast of Telchac, a small village east of Progreso where he warmed a can of Beefaroni and made a thermos of coffee for morning. After dinner he changed the oil, fixed the bilge pump, and put a new neon bulb in the depth sounder before turning in for the evening.

Lying on his bed in the pilothouse, Dad listened to the water clap against the steel hull below. Only six-hundred miles south of the Texas border, he had barely begun his ocean journey. He thought about how far he still had to go, about Mom and what the future might hold. So far from home with months of travel before him, with Irving back in Houston, with my brothers and I scattered around the States, and with Mom waiting in Arkansas, he was, indeed, alone.



. . .



The wind paused during the night and the Red Dog settled in the calming water. Outside the boat the Gulf current flowed steadily across the taut anchor rope, strumming it and stirring the water to form a deep, straight line of bioluminescence.

Sleep eventually took over, but had my father known whom he would encounter at his next port of call, he wouldn’t have rested nearly so peacefully.





Reefs and Roller Coasters

Progreso to Belize City



IT IS EASY to feel insignificant when facing the elegant mechanics and vastness of the ocean—a watery glaze that fills the crannies of the earth and covers nearly seventy percent of our world. The effect of the eighteen tons of water displaced by the Red Dog on the mass of currents moving beneath it along the Gulf coast, amounted to no more than a bird’s breath on a hurricane. The boat, a welded cup of steel in equilibrium with the ocean, was only a tiny particle sandwiched between water and air. Held against the water’s surface by a thin strand of gravity, it pivoted around the center of the earth like a balloon on a string as it made its way from Arkansas to Alaska.

Winds and rough water continued the first two days out of Progreso as my father skimmed the northern edge of the Yucatán Peninsula, a seventy-thousand-square-mile bulb of land thumbing from Mexico towards Cuba. The shores of the peninsula were washed by the Gulf of Mexico on the north and west, and by the Caribbean Sea on the east, with the outer edge rimmed in white sand beaches and clear ocean waters that sheltered giant coral reefs. A platform of limestone honeycombed with karst formations and famous for its Mayan ruins, the peninsula splayed a landscape of flat jungle terrain.

Fish flourished in the warm Gulf Stream waters around the Yucatán, many species of which my father had seen only in books or the saltwater tanks of pet stores. Below the surface, the water bloomed with fish of extraordinary colors, such as the iridescent blue and yellow Queen Angelfish, and the luminous Golden Coney. Schools of Horse-eyed Jacks with brilliant metallic bodies and green scissor-like tails traveled in shiny clouds that drifted and darted around reefs. Though my father only caught glimpses of some of these fish from the deck of the Red Dog, beneath the water they kaleidoscoped against the blues and greens of coral ridges where the reds and oranges of sponges splashed against reef walls and shelves.

The scenery appeared unique and exceptionally beautiful to my father as he rounded the Yucatán. He had never seen such a place and took pleasure in the turquoise water and tropical environment surrounding the peninsula. When he reached Belize City, however, that pleasure quickly dissipated.



. . .



My father had traveled for six days between Progreso and Belize City, British Honduras. By the second day, he could no longer depend on his radio for weather forecasts. The channels he received were all Spanish-speaking and, to him, meaningless.

Winds finally weakened and the morning of the third day dawned on calm seas. Only an occasional catspaw of wind scratched patches of ripples on the surface of the long, easy swells, making travel so smooth that my father could barely stay awake. As he approached the Isle of Contoy, a sliver of land on the outermost point of the peninsula, a line of clouds formed in the south and a new wind pushed from the north.

With the expansive waters of the Gulf behind him, Dad again cruised only during daylight hours, always on the lookout for hidden shallows and reefs. Seeking shelter for the night, he anchored behind the point of an island where four Mexican fishing boats joined him. The island, though, provided little protection from increasing swells that rocked and bounced the boats throughout the night.



Log - April 5: Northerly still blowing about 25 mph—Left anchor 6:45 a.m., turning south around end of island and had wind at my back all day, about 20 mph—Water choppy and full of swirls and boils because of fast gulf stream currents—Hard to steer; not bad, just work—Coast from Cozumel Island south is beautiful—White sand beaches with clear green water—Green coconut palms with thatched huts where native fishermen live—Looks like a picture of paradise—See lots of fish since hitting the Gulf Stream—Anchored in small bay 5:15—Small native village on shore—not much wind or waves.





When my father rounded the Isle of Contoy and the tip of the Yucatán, he entered the Yucatán Channel, a one-hundred-thirty-five-mile long strait between Mexico and Cuba where the Equatorial Currents enter the channel from the southeast and form the beginnings of the Gulf Stream in the Gulf of Mexico. From the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf Stream travels in a northeasterly direction along the Atlantic coast of the United States, encountering the Arctic Polar Current near the coast of Maine. The icy waters of the Polar Current sink below the Gulf Stream and move south towards the equator in a slow drift near the ocean floor. The Gulf Stream cuts across the Atlantic from Maine and branches towards Europe and the western coast of Africa, returning to its origin in the Gulf of Mexico after advancing more than twenty-thousand miles. The ocean has many of these rivers of current, all snaking around the land forms of earth, occasionally writhing against one another as they travel the globe, each with a source and a course as distinct as the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers.



Log - April 6: Left anchor 5:30 a.m.; nice morning, no wind—Following the Yucatán coast with all its history and dreams of adventure only a few hundred feet away—Wind up afternoon, water choppy—Reefs nearly continuous; have to stay well off shore and watch close—Water and wind rough by night; no sheltered place to anchor—Hard wind, waves and swells all night.





In the small bay south of Punta Herrero where Dad anchored, fifteen-foot swells heaved the boat throughout the night and into the next day. He gauged the height of waves between his line of sight and the horizon. Eye level in the pilothouse to the waterline on the Red Dog measured ten feet; so when a wave came between his eye and the horizon, he knew the wave rose at least ten feet or higher. And though the waves made comfort aboard the boat hopeless, he proudly noted in his log:



Red Dog raises over them real nice, like a wild roller coaster ride. Can do nothing but hold on.





The large thrusts of the boat made it impossible for my father to raise the anchor the next morning, forcing him to remain at his anchorage a second night. The high winds swept toward shore and vibrated the taut anchor rope. The rope sang like a string on a fiddle as he tried to sleep.

The wind calmed by the second morning at Punta Herrero and Dad flipped the winch switch to pull anchor at 6:00 a.m.

The winch reeled in the anchor rope, drawing the boat forward until the Red Dog floated directly above the anchor site. As the winch continued winding the rope, the tension began pulling the bow of the boat downward into the water.

“Rats.”

Apparently snagged on something, the anchor—one of the two large mud anchors Dad had made from one-half-inch steel plates—refused to lift from the ocean floor. A Danforth-style anchor, the shank hinged at the crown, allowing the crown to tilt and the flukes to dig into the mud or sand when the shank lay flat on the ocean floor.

My father put the engine in gear and forced the boat forward. The boat strained against the rope until the anchor finally broke loose from its hold on the bottom. When he got the anchor to the surface, he found one of the flukes bent and badly twisted. He tried to straighten the fluke with his tools, but had no success with the thick steel. With only two large and two medium-sized anchors on board, he decided to keep the damaged anchor in case he lost the second large one.

South of Ambergris Cay and the Mexico-British Honduras border emerged the northernmost end of the Belizean Barrier Reef. An array of shallow coral gardens and deep channels, the nearly continuous reef stretched for more than one-hundred-fifty miles along the Yucatán coast into the Gulf of Honduras. The largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere and the second largest in the world, the reef revealed its position with sporadic islets of coconut palms and white sand beaches. In some places, only nubs of coral broke the ocean surface. In others, the reef lay quietly and dangerously beneath the water. My father kept the Red Dog well away from the area, watching closely to avoid hitting any of the reef’s many ridges.

At mid-morning on April 9, with the Turneffe Islands to the east, he reached the Eastern Channel. The Eastern Channel snaked through the Belizean Cays and surrounding shallows, allowing passage into Belize Harbor. Dad saw poles sticking out of the water marking the edges of the winding channel, but could not decipher their pattern and path. He radioed a pilot station on English Cay near the entry to the channel, and an English-speaking agent directed him on how to navigate into the harbor.

The town of Belize City, built around the mouth of the Belize River, was still righting itself from the impact of Hurricane Hattie, which blasted across the city twelve years earlier in 1961. With gusting winds up to two-hundred miles per hour, the hurricane killed nearly three-hundred residents, wiped away half of the buildings in the city, and induced the government to relocate inland to the city of Belmopan.

Dad anchored a half mile from the Belize City port shortly after noon, wanting to bathe and shave before going to shore to clear customs. But before he could do so, the Port Captain and two customs agents motored out to the Red Dog.

The Port Captain appeared angry, especially after Dad explained why he had stopped before going into port.

“Ohhh, a bath!” the Port Captain mimicked, then turned and said loudly and sing-songy to the other men, “He was going to take a baaaath!”

The men snickered. The Port Captain turned back to my father with a hard look.

“Do you have a gun on board?”

“No,” my father said firmly, his mind’s eye flashing on the pistol stuffed inside a pair of doubled-up socks beneath the mattress in the pilothouse.

“We are going into town,” the Port Captain proclaimed in stilted English. “When we come back, we will search your boat. If we find a gun, I will lock up your boat.”

Dad couldn’t imagine why he would be in such trouble, but did as told and quietly gathered his paperwork, careful not to show his anger or challenge the Port Captain as the man probably hoped he would do. One of the agents then told him to get into their boat and they took him to the Customs House.

At the Customs House, the Port Captain stomped back and forth in the room as one of the agents interrogated my father for more than an hour.

“Where are you from?”

“Where are you going?”

“Why are you going there?”

“Why are you traveling alone?”

Though the agent spoke English, his heavy accent and rapid-fire delivery confused my father and added to his nervousness. He understood only part of what the agent said.

“Beg pardon?” Dad asked every so often, straining to understand.

Dad didn’t have a passport and, luckily, the agent never asked for one, seemingly only interested in documents concerning the boat.

“Americans think they can go anywhere and do anything they want!” the Port Captain blurted from a corner of the room as he pounded across the floor.

My father had little respect for officials who misused their authority.

“Little people in high places,” he called them.

He had seen his share of such people, especially while growing up in Oklahoma when telling the outlaws from the lawmen often proved difficult. He once knew of a small-town night watchman who came across two teenage boys throwing rocks at a gas station sign. The watchman yelled at the boys and when they started to run away, he shot them both dead.

He had also never forgotten the town sheriff in Tahlequah who staked out a cabin on the Illinois River occupied by two suspected law breakers. The sheriff hid in the woods behind the cabin then, without a word, ambushed and shot them with a thirty-thirty rifle when the men walked out the front door at daylight. After tossing the bodies into the back of his car, the sheriff hauled them to town and displayed them on the street. The town’s residents and relatives of the men didn’t like it, but feared the sheriff too much to do anything about it.

Now, with the Belize Port Captain stomping and yelling about the room of the Customs House, my father wondered if he himself were about to be ambushed.

But the questioning abruptly ended and three agents, the Harbor Master, and the Port Captain took my father back to the Red Dog to search it. Two of the agents searched while the others stood in the cabin and held a lively, animated conversation in Spanish.

Afraid it was only a matter of time before they discovered his gun and tossed him into jail, Dad sat quietly at the galley table, feeling angry, upset, and entirely helpless. He thought of Mom and of us kids. He wondered how in the world he would get out of this.



. . .



While my mother waited in Arkansas for Dad and the Red Dog to reach the West Coast, she lived with Gene in his Fort Smith apartment. Although I still lived far away in Chicago, Donald and his family lived nearby in Greenwood, and Jerry and his family in Pine Bluff.

With Gene gone during the days working at his job as an auto mechanic, Mom busied herself with household chores, crossword puzzles, and reading. Even though her frustrations had boiled over with Dad as she left Galveston, she had loved him for many years, and tried not to let her imagination run wild with the risks he might face as he cruised south. She hadn’t worried too much until after Dad called her from Progreso and told her about the storm on the Gulf of Mexico. But now, with his call from Belize about his trouble with the port officials, her realization of the wide range of dangers my father could encounter broke wide open. Wanting to protect us kids from worry, she expressed her worst fears to only her mother, who became her long-distance sounding board.

“He could just disappear somewhere in the ocean,” she told Viola with an edge to her voice, “and I won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

My folks had been married for more than thirty years. In Oklahoma in the mid 1930s, they never “met” in the traditional sense, but belonged to communities close enough together that everyone knew of everyone else. Mom lived with her family at Lost City on Fourteen Mile Creek, a tiny place consisting of three or four houses and a grocery store. Lost City sat about five miles north of Hulbert, and ten miles from Clear Creek where my father lived with his family.

Mom moved to Lost City with her family in 1934. In 1927, after authorities took Elmer to jail in Missouri, and after the house burned down in Valles Mines, Viola took my mother and her brother, Robert, to live with Elmer’s father on his Illinois River farm in Oklahoma. A smallish man who “saucered and blowed” his coffee before drinking it, Andy Snyder lived alone on the farm where he spent his life raising corn and pigs. His wife Caroline had died years earlier. Caroline had been a descendant of the Mosby family, which included John Singleton Mosby—the dashing leader of the notorious Mosby’s Raiders, a guerrilla unit of the Confederacy who instilled fear in their Union foes.

Viola kept the family at the Snyder farm for a year before returning to Bellingham, Washington. After Elmer’s release from jail, he joined them in Washington, where they lived for two years in Kelso before returning to Oklahoma, and eventually Lost City.





Cecil raising rabbits to sell for food,

Kelso, Washington, circa 1932.



And although my parents knew “of” each other, they were never officially acquainted until after Mom and my father’s sister, Marguerite, became classmates at Hulbert High School. Even then, Mom’s interest focused elsewhere, and they took little notice of each other at first.

When they eventually began dating, Dad often took her to Hulbert for ice cream in the beat-up, GMC pickup that he and his father used for work. They also attended weeknight singings at the church, pie suppers at the school, and “brush arbor” meetings where men constructed a large, room-like shelter using poles, leafy limbs, and brush in someone’s pasture. Much like tent revivals, brush arbor meetings became major social events. Organizers posted flyers advertising the week-long meeting across the countryside weeks in advance, and people traveled from miles around to attend. Intended as a religious event, brush arbor meetings more often provided a place where young men met young women, where relatives caught up on family gossip, and where liquor bottles passed between men in the shadows outside the arbor, occasionally erupting into a fist fight or cuss match.

Mom also liked to attend dances, which took place either in a barn or a house cleared of furniture. A fiddle player usually provided music and, besides an occasional Saturday night spent listening to the Grand Ole Opry with the only person Mom knew who owned a radio, the music at the dances was often the only music she heard.

“When everyone began square dancing, stomping, and kicking up their heels, the dust just flew,” Mom recalled. “I’d blow dust out of my nose for a week, then it’d be time for another dance.”

But even though she loved the dances, Dad seldom took her, and she more often attended with friends or her brother.

“Mel is too shy,” she would explain.





Melvin, Clear Creek, Oklahoma, 1940.



My folks dated each other through Mom’s graduation from Hulbert High School in May of 1940. Drawn by my father’s quiet ways and gentle spirit, my mother shared his adventurous dreams of Alaska. Having lived a portion of her childhood in the Pacific Northwest, it sounded like home to her. And like her father, she had an itchy foot and longed to travel and explore.

My father saw a uniqueness in Mom, a willingness to look beyond Oklahoma, to consider the wonders that existed beyond her own fence. She talked longingly of mountains and coastal ruggedness.

The summer following my mother’s graduation, my mother and father married at the Hulbert Church of Christ on July 10. Dad was twenty-three on their wedding day, and Mom had turned eighteen the day before.

As they envisioned exploring their dream of moving to the north country together, neither guessed that, so many years later, this would be the path that would lead them there.



. . .



The searchers opened drawers, checked inside cubby holes, and lifted the engine cover and deck hatches to check their interiors. The agent who searched the pilothouse found a bag of candy on the console and stood popping M&Ms into his mouth. After breezing over the console, he turned to the back wall of the pilothouse to the bed where my father slept. The agent lifted the mattress where Dad kept his gun. He saw only what he believed to be a wad of dirty socks, and dropped the mattress back into place.



. . .



Told by the Port Captain to remain on board overnight, my father pulled the Red Dog alongside the Custom’s dock at 8:30 the next morning, the time one of the agents had told him to check in. Without the Port Captain around, the attending agent suddenly became friendly.

“So Alaska is it? Have you been there before?”

“Err…yeah…a couple of times,” Dad said.

“My family’s British and most of us have worked in this area in the lumber business for years. We’ll probably never leave.”

“We’ve wanted to live in Alaska for a long time. It’s taken a while to get this far.”

“By the way…our Port Captain…well, U. S. shrimp boats and their crews come in and cause him trouble.”

“Err…yeah…I’d guess they might.”

After Dad refueled, the agent took care of the customs paperwork, having my father sign each one where he indicated.



BRITISH HONDURAS

PORT OF BELIZE CITY



These are to certify to all whom it may concern, that Melvin G. Owens, Master of the Yacht - “Red Dog” - American Registry, burthen 18 tons, navigated with 0 men, steel built, and having on board ballast has entered and cleared his vessel according to law, bound for Panama, Canal Zone. Given under my hand and seal of the Custom House, at the Port of Belize City in the Colony of British Honduras, this 10th day of April, 1973.





All of the papers were written in English except one, on which my father signed above the line that read MASTER, the only word on the page he could read. The paperwork also included a Ship Stores List, which the agent handed my father to sign.

“I don’t have all of this stuff on board,” Dad told him.

The agent mumbled something and flipped a quick, backhand wave at Dad’s concern as if brushing a bug off a shoulder.

So with the paperwork complete, Dad motored the Red Dog to the fuel dock. The water near the dock was not very deep and he heard the bottom of the boat rub against the sandy bottom as he approached. He worried that with a full tank, he might become grounded.

Filling the Red Dog with diesel in Belize City would give him enough fuel to reach the Panama Canal without stopping at any other ports. While waiting for his turn to refuel, he walked down the street a short distance and placed a call to Mom on an outdoor telephone. An operator said she would call him back after she got a line through to the states.

Belize City looked interesting to my father with its stilted, tin-roofed, wooden shacks and clapboard bungalows. He contemplated staying an extra day to rest and explore. But put off by the treatment he received from port officials, he figured the sooner he left town the better.

Still waiting an hour later for his turn to refuel, Dad saw an agent running down the dock toward him.

“Phone! Phone!” he shouted.

Dad hurried back to the telephone and grabbed the receiver which the agent left dangling. The phone was situated beneath a tin roof and just as he began talking with my mother, a sudden hard rain began thumping the metal, making it difficult to hear or talk. He loudly filled Mom in on his time in Belize City and told her he would call again when he reached the Canal.

When he returned to the boat, having left the windows open, he found parts of the interior soaked by the unexpected downpour.

“Well…rats.”

Dad finished refueling the Red Dog and left Belize City in the late afternoon. Keeping to the Inner Channel between the coast and the barrier reef, he anchored south of the Manatee River for the night.

After pulling out a skillet to fix himself supper, he decided he was not hungry and returned it to the cabinet. He went to the pilothouse and sat on his bed. His clothes no longer felt snug and hung loosely on his body. He laid back, worn out from the stress of his encounter with the Belize City Port Captain and other events since leaving Galveston. Even though he admired the beauty of this new and unfamiliar world of the Caribbean, he began to anticipate the journey ahead with dread.



. . .



In the distance, the slim sandy profiles of the barrier cays interrupted the straight line of the horizon. Chops of water banged against the hull of the boat. The city of Colón, situated at the Atlantic terminus of the Panama Canal, would be my father’s next port of call, more than a thousand miles, and many restless nights, away.





SECTION THREE

Belize to Puntarenas





Shades of Green

Belize City to Colón



SHAFTS OF SUNLIGHT shouldered their way between dark rain clouds to checkerboard the mountains of the British Honduras coastline with light and dark shades of green. Moving south away from Belize City, my father kept the Red Dog in the Inner Channel behind the barrier reef.



Log - April 11: Left anchor 6:00 a.m.—Rain clouds and sun shining on the mountains—Real pretty—Wind out of the north and current flowing south behind the reefs—Both helping me along instead of holding me back—Nice—Anchored 1:30 p.m. by some beautiful tropical islands—One has a lighthouse and people on it—Had to work on bilge pump, anchor rope, and several other things—Will cross Gulf of Honduras tomorrow if weather good—Fried potatoes for supper—Three good meals in three days—Clothes getting too big for me—Feeling good—Hard and tough like when working.





Dad had anchored near the Sapodilla Cays. The Sapodilla Cays dotted the southernmost tip of the barrier reef, the point where he would cross the Gulf of Honduras and parallel the northeastern coastline of Guatemala to the northern shores of Honduras.

After taking care of the bilge pump and anchor rope, he performed his usual routine of checking the oil level and fuel filter. Then, with work done and dinner over, he perched himself in the wheelhouse, sipped a glass of water, and watched daylight dim over the gulf. Even though he had faced many problems getting here, the beautiful, foreign terrain he encountered during his journey thrilled him. But with his entire family elsewhere, his enjoyment came with a dose of guilt.

For the past twelve years he had centered his life largely on a boat, beginning with building the Nancy Ann in 1961. He knew Mom’s fear of water, but he hoped once they settled in Ketchikan in the protected, inside waters of southeast Alaska, she would take pleasure in exploring the bays and inlets. If they could just get to their destination, he planned to build her a nice house and try to make up for recent hardships.

Dad knew how my mother appreciated a nice place to live, recalling the time he worked for Neptune-Microfloc shortly after he completed the Nancy Ann. His first project took him to Memphis to oversee construction of a water treatment plant. The idea of moving to the city for a few months excited Mom, and Dad rented them a modern apartment thirty floors above downtown Memphis. Mom felt elegant living in the apartment and my father loved seeing her enjoy her new-felt status.

Even though Mom disliked being on the water, she certainly appreciated its beauty. And Dad knew that if she were now sitting with him quietly watching darkness fall across the tropical islands and Gulf of Honduras, she would again feel elegant.



. . .



Churning across the Gulf of Honduras, the Red Dog clashed head-on with winds that gained speed along the rolling, five-hundred-mile-long Honduras coastline. The most mountainous country in Central America, a majority of Honduras held its landscape of isolated valleys and high plateaus more than a thousand feet above sea level. Winds blew all day and harder by evening. After anchoring the Red Dog west of the town of La Ceiba, my father prepared for yet another miserable night as he wrote:



Everything seems to be clutching and grabbing, trying to drag us down.





The next day’s travel took him south of the Hog Islands and Honduras’ Bay Islands, peaks of an undersea range extending from the mainland’s Omoa ridge. Surrounded by living reefs and cays, the Bay Islands formed a slim line of islets that bent into the Atlantic as an eastern extension of the Belize barrier reef. Winds continued for two more days past the town of Trujillo to Punta Patuca where the coast turned to the southeast and the mountains pulled back from the water to expose coastal lowland. Lakes and lagoons saturated the area, separated from the ocean by long spits and broad sashes of land. This marked the beginning of the Mosquito Coast, a stretch of jungle hundreds of miles wide that reached as far south as Costa Rica, an area alive with undisturbed wildlife, specked with remote villages, and penetrated by almost no roads.

That evening my father stood at the galley stove and heated a can of ravioli for supper. His pants bagged and his shirt gathered and bunched behind his belt. Scraping the sides of the pan, he missed Mom’s cooking terribly—her Sunday dinners of pot roast that collapsed under the pressure of a knife, her meals of chicken fried steak with creamed gravy, of ham with pinto beans and corn bread, and of tender chicken and dumplings.

Dad had plenty of food on board. Even though he hadn’t restocked groceries in Belize City, the small refrigerator-freezer unit below the galley cabinet held cheese, eggs he boiled to make them last longer, and milk he mixed from a powder. Canned meat, canned fruit, bags of potatoes, and heat-and-eat meals such as chili and Beefaroni, filled the storage cabinets.

But during the time since leaving Galveston, Dad’s appetite had shriveled like a summer leaf from the first frost. Though his body felt hard and lean, he was tired mentally and physically. Twenty days ago, when he left the breakwater of Port Isabel, Texas, he entered a world entirely foreign to what he had known in his life. Unlike the relatively calm-water waterways he navigated between Arkansas and Texas, in the open ocean the boat rocked and hobby-horsed nearly continuously, allowing him few breaks for solid rest and the easing of his anxiety. This, combined with encountering the storm on the Gulf of Mexico, enduring the tyrannical port officials in Belize City, the stress that came with making such a trip alone, and the unexpected discord with Mom created a circling despondency that pushed to the forefront of his thoughts. But, unwilling to give in, he beat back those feelings with his busyness on the boat and images of a new home in Alaska.

Dad left the boat’s radio turned off after leaving Belize City, its Spanish-speaking-only channels a distraction. But along the northeast shore of the Mosquito Coast of Honduras, as he passed west of English-speaking Jamaica, he switched on the radio and, for a short time, received news and weather forecasts.

Along the Mosquito Coast, the wind slowed to twenty miles an hour. The calming water made my father feel somewhat better until he anchored that evening, when the boat again rolled and pitched. He held onto a cabinet with one hand and his cooking pot with the other, as he prepared his supper.



Log - April 14: Left anchor 5:20 a.m.—Wind stopped in the night—Fair sleep—Mountains gone from coast—Flat, nothing to see—Nice day until 11:00 a.m. then wind and waves head on until dark—Rest of green beans and can spaghetti and meatballs—Too tired and exhausted to even wash but must eat enough to keep going.





On the morning of April 16, after doing some routine maintenance, Dad rounded Cabo Gracias a Dios, the cape at the boundary between Honduras and Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan Mosquito Coast lay low, flat, and green, tilting down from highlands of pine forests in the northern portion, and dense rain forest in the southern portion. With the Red Dog now headed due south, the waves and current came at the boat from the side or behind rather than head-on, allowing for smoother sailing. Dad anchored early, south of Punta Gorda and the Miskitos Cays, hoping to get a night of quality rest, even though the torrid heat left him sticky and sweaty.



Log - April 17: Left 5:30 a.m.—Smooth along Nicaragua Coast—All very low and flat—Depth Sounder quit working yesterday—Left me feeling very low and blue—Feeling better today—Cooked some bacon and eggs for supper—Water not so rough tonight—The moon came up full as soon as the sun went down—Seems like an old friend in a lonely world—Many things need doing but nothing seems so important right now as sleep and rest.





The depth sounder detected water depth, bottom conditions, and intervening objects between the boat and the ocean floor. When turned on, the unit transmitted bursts of high-frequency electrical pulses to the transducer Dad had installed in the bottom of the boat, which converted them to mechanical vibrations. Those vibrations radiated from the transducer to the ocean bottom at forty-eight-hundred feet a second, then reflected back to the transducer. The transducer then converted them into electrical pulses again and displayed them across a small screen on the face of the unit. The results formed a two-color profile graph: red strobes for strong echoes, such as the ocean bottom, and green strobes for weaker returns, such as fish and bottom debris. The depth sounder sounded an alarm whenever the boat approached the shallow water depth preset by my father—most important for keeping underwater reefs and other dangers at bay.

The loss of the depth sounder landed a blow to my father’s ability to navigate safely. He now relied solely on his charts and needed to be extremely vigilant of hidden reefs and shallows. He dreaded going up the Pacific coast without the depth sounder. Unless he could get it repaired, trouble certainly awaited him.



. . .



My father’s health continued to deteriorate as he cruised south along the coast of Nicaragua. With the combination of stress, a change in eating habits, and the introduction of unfamiliar bacteria into his system brought on by the change from a temperate climate to a torrid one, his resistance to infection faltered. His teeth ached, and a painful boil-like infection on his right thumb refused to heal in the hot, humid air. His thumb blazed bright orange from doctoring it with methiolate, always a staple of the family medicine cabinet.

When my father looked at his orange thumb, he sometimes saw the hand of a boy. He had been eleven when a sliver off a block of wood that his father threw into a wood pile impaled his wrist. The sliver went into the flesh across the tops of the bones, sticking out three or four inches on each side of his wrist like someone had shoved a pencil through it.

“Let me see,” George said.

George laid my father’s arm flat, told him to look the other way, then cut through the thin layer of skin and flesh across the top of the wood with his straight razor. He then saturated the cut with the orange methiolate.

The wind calmed for a couple of days, allowing my father quiet nights with restful sleep. He felt better as he traveled between the Caribbean port of Bluefields—the eye of life in the Mosquito Coast region—and the Corn Islands toward Costa Rica. Once a base for pirates capturing Spanish ships, the Islas del Maiz now provided a base for fishermen capturing lobster. The islands shined with miles of white beaches.

Thirty miles south of the Costa Rica border, Dad passed Tortuguero. Along the eighteen-mile black-sand beach that stretched from Tortuguero to Parismina, giant female sea turtles laid their eggs between July and October.

In the open ocean, the sea turtles could only raise their heads a few inches out of the water. With good vision beneath the water, they became nearsighted out of the water.

THUMP bump-bump.

Something struck hard against the hull of the boat. Afraid he had hit one of the huge turtles, Dad watched the water behind the boat for several minutes. But he saw no turtle, or any other creature, emerge from the wake.

Most of the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica hunkered beneath a jungle-covered lowland edged by a coastline of white- and black-sand beaches. Thatched houses dotted the clearings. Near Puerto Limón, the lowlands ended with undulating ridges of mountains rising high in the background and smaller, lush, forested hills rolling to the water. In the distance, more than eleven-thousand feet above sea level, stood Irazu, the highest volcanic peak in Costa Rica’s Cordillera Central. Located near the center of the Costa Rican isthmus, one could see both the Pacific and Caribbean Oceans from its summit.



Log - April 19: Left 5:30—Good day, little wind, easy going—Anchor 5:30 near Limón, Costa Rica—Very pretty—Mountains in back and hills coming down to the water—Rain showers and clouds hanging on the valleys like Alaska.





More than a month had passed since Mom gave Dad his last haircut. His black hair climbed over the tops of his ears and shirt collar. He stood at the mirror in the Red Dog’s head and, as best he could, clipped at his hair with scissors, leaving an uneven but shorter line across the back of his neck. After trimming his hair, shaving, and bathing, he pulled anchor and continued south. He crossed the southern border of Costa Rica, then turned east along the Coast of Panama and headed into four days without wind.

A link between North and South America, the Isthmus of Panama bulged with mountainous terrain. Lush vegetation quilted the land with shades of green.



Nice like Costa Rica.





After passing the Archipelago de Bocas del Toro, a series of islands providing natural harbors and an extensive coastal shield for the banana port of Almirante, Dad anchored that evening east of Laguna de Chiriquí near Punta Icaca. From there he would cross the Gulfo de los Mosquitos the next morning, turning northeast again toward the twin towns of Colón and Cristobal, the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal Zone.



. . .



In Arkansas, as my father continued toward Colón, my mother received a letter from the second Galveston attorney who considered my folks’ case against John Delling. In the letter the attorney declined to take the case, based on the inability to recover any funds from Delling, stating:



We both know you cannot squeeze blood out of a turnip and Delling is the biggest turnip I’ve seen in a long time.





My parents’ final hope of getting help with the Delling matter had slipped away. It now looked as if Delling would get away with what he had done. Feeling helpless and with no means of contacting my father, Mom responded to the letter herself:



I received your letter today, with our papers enclosed regarding our case against John Delling. Needless to say, I was very disappointed, but I do see your side of it. But now, I do not know where to turn.





My husband is, hopefully, still afloat somewhere. I do not know where. He called me from Belize, British Honduras nearly two weeks ago and I have heard nothing since. His friend who was making the trip with him got sick and flew back to Texas from Progreso, Mexico. So, Melvin is alone. Sometimes it seems like our world is falling to pieces.





Sincerely,



Cecil Marie Owens





Mom posted the letter and waited, hoping to hear from Dad soon.



. . .



The town of Colón first sprang up as the Atlantic end of the Panamanian railroad, which, prior to construction of the canal, ran between there and Panama City. Originally named Aspinwall by United States citizens after a Panama Railroad Company founder, Panamanians renamed the town Colón. The Panamanians named both Cristobal and Colón in honor of Christopher Columbus.



Log - April 22: Reached Panama Canal and anchored in Limón Bay about 1:00 pm—Rowed small boat ashore and called Pretty Lady—Walked around the streets of Colón a little—Fried spuds and onions and iced tea for supper.





When my father arrived in Limón Bay, he displayed his yellow quarantine flag as required. Soon afterward, a doctor from the Canal Zone Government Health Bureau in Cristobal motored his small boat over to and boarded the Red Dog.

“Do you have a record of vaccinations?”

“No, I didn’t bring anything like that with me.”

The doctor gave him a smallpox shot.

Dad’s orange thumb throbbed, and he felt weak and generally lousy, but the doctor didn’t notice and my father didn’t tell him.

After the doctor left, Dad took down the yellow flag and rowed his skiff to a Colón dock, passing a large seine boat from Seattle waiting to transit the Canal. He felt somewhat better after he walked on solid ground and shed his sea legs, regaining his full equilibrium strained by the continuous thump, surge, and roll of the Red Dog since leaving Belize City two weeks earlier.

After locating the phone office, he handed a man at the phone desk a slip of paper with Mom’s phone number on it.

“Err…yeah, I need to call this number in the States,” he told him.

He then sat on a bench for an hour and a half until the man got an open line.

“I’m here in Colón,” he told my mother.

Mom knew he wasn’t well as soon as he spoke. The voice she heard was not the deep, smooth one she knew.

“How are things going? I thought you’d have been there before now,” she said.

The connection sizzled and popped. Like in Belize City, Dad had difficulty hearing my mother at the other end.

“Oh, I’m all stoved up,” he said. “I haven’t been eating too good and I’ve lost so much weight that my shins feel like the edge of a coffee table.”

His voice strained through the phone. It sounded weak and shaky.

“My depth sounder broke and I’m a little afraid about going on without it,” he confessed.

“Can’t someone there fix it?”

“I’m going to check here pretty soon.”

“There’s a boat here from Seattle,” Dad added, knowing that detail would excite Mom.

“Really?”

“I’m thinking about talking to them about getting a tow. I’m thinking they can go faster and travel in rougher weather than I can.”

My father then told her about the beautiful, green, mountainous landscape of Panama. Mom told Dad about the letter from the Galveston attorney.

“Well, I guess there’s not much more we can do. We can’t spend our life chasing after a crook,” Dad said.

Mom seemed more talkative than in their past telephone conversations. She explained how she had just returned from visiting Jerry and his wife Kathy at Pine Bluff.

“I broke my toe on a piece of furniture and had to wear a house slipper on the bus back to Fort Smith. Then to make matters worse, I used a lipstick sample Kathy gave me and my lips swelled up and cracked open.”

Dad chuckled at the image, knowing her concern about her appearance.

“I couldn’t eat for a few days, except through a straw,” she said.

“I bet you looked real pretty.”

“Yeah, I’m sure the other people on the bus thought so too.”

As long as my father had known her, Mom insisted on looking her best, always tugging at her dress to make sure it hung straight and pulling the wisp of hair down across the hairline at her forehead, making sure her scar didn’t show.

The scar resulted from an incident when Mom lived on her grandfather Snyder’s farm on the Illinois River. Only five years old at the time, she ran and played with a colt in the barnyard when the young horse playfully charged around the corral, kicked up its heels, and punched her in the head with a rear hoof. Her brother found her lying unconscious inside the corral.

She regained consciousness inside the house as a neighbor woman trimmed the hair away from the cut. After cleaning the wound with a wet cloth, the woman dragged a toothpick along the bloody gap. She felt a small crack on the skull. The neighbor then poured something into the wound and wrapped my mother’s head with a clean cloth.

Her head throbbed for days, especially at night when she wanted to sleep. Unable to lay down, she slept sitting up in a wooden rocking chair with a blanket around her. During the day she played checkers with her brother, who let her win as long as her head remained bandaged.

But even though it had happened so many years ago and the scar had nearly disappeared, Mom remained self-conscious and kept it hidden with her hair.

Before hanging up, Dad promised to call again from Puntarenas, Costa Rica, his next planned port of call after leaving Panama at the other end of the Canal.

“Unless I get a tow with the Seattle boat, I should be in Puntarenas in less than two weeks.”

“Well, be careful, and try to take better care of yourself.”

Unsuccessful at disguising how rundown he felt, Dad knew Mom would worry even more after the phone call. After spending more than half of their lives together, they knew each other well.



. . .



The following morning, my father rowed across Limón Bay to the transit office to pay his fee for transiting the canal. Hoping he wouldn’t have to deal with another pushy authoritarian like he encountered in Belize City, he felt relieved to find the lady at the Panama Canal business office helpful and pleasant.

“How’d you get to the dock from your boat?”

“Err..I rowed my skiff.”

“Good,” she said with a smile, “You saved yourself a twenty-dollar fine.”

She explained that operating an outboard motor in the bay required a city permit. Of course, my father’s outboard motor had disappeared in Mexico when Delling abandoned the boat there.

“What kind of boat do you have?”

“Just a fishing boat.”

“Oh, that will be very expensive,” she said, thinking Dad meant a commercial vessel. Commercial craft, such as oil tankers or cruise ships, could cost thousands of dollars to transit the canal. But when she saw that his paperwork documented the Red Dog as a yacht, she charged a minimal amount.

According to the Panama Canal Commission, the highest canal toll ever charged amounted to more than one-hundred-forty-thousand dollars paid by the Crown Princess. Richard Halliburton, who once swam the Canal, paid the lowest toll of thirty-six cents based on his weight of one-hundred-forty pounds.

The transit lady handed my father the invoice to review.



INVOICE

PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

Balboa Heights, Canal Zone



Deckhands Handling Lines:

2 at $29.00 each, 58.00



Admeasurement Service Charge:

35pc Gross, 20.00



24 tons(ballast), Panama Canal:

Net wt 72c. per ton, 17.28



Dad paid the $95.28 fee.

“Be ready to transit the canal sometime tomorrow,” the transit agent told him.

“Anywhere here I can get my depth sounder fixed?”

“You’ll have more luck at the Balboa end.”

Dad made arrangements to dock at the Balboa Yacht Club on the Pacific end of the canal then rowed his skiff to the Seattle seiner. He guessed the heavy steel boat stretched more than seventy feet from bow to stern and would do well in heavy seas.

After trading greetings with the seiner’s Captain, Dad asked, “Are you on your way back to Seattle?”

“Yeah, we’re going through the Canal tomorrow then north in a few days.”

“I’m off the Red Dog over there,” Dad said pointing across the water. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars for a tow to Seattle.”

“Why do you want a tow?”

Dad explained how he felt exhausted and weak from the trip down, and about his depth sounder no longer working.

“And I can get where I’m going faster,” he added.

“How much does your boat weigh?”

“Eighteen tons.”

“Well, I’ve got to talk it over with my crew,” the Captain said as he studied the Red Dog in the distance. “I’ll let you know at the other end.”

My father returned to the Red Dog and rested as much as he could. The arm where the doctor gave him the Smallpox shot had swollen and turned sore. When he wasn’t sleeping, Dad sat on the back deck or in the pilothouse and watched huge international cargo and cruise ships lumber through the Port of Cristobal as they moved in and out of the canal. He enjoyed seeing the immense mechanical ships in the beauty of their own movement, a fascination that clung to him no differently than to a child watching bulldozers leave wakes of soil across construction sites.



Log, April 24: 7:30 a.m.—Still waiting for pilot—Said they would come out and let me know if couldn’t go—Beautiful still morning—Lots of big ships going through—Came and told me to stand ready to go at 2:00 p.m.—Very tired and exhausted from nervous strain.





Transiting the canal required a canal pilot on every boat. My father would operate the Red Dog, but the pilot would tell him when to go and help line up the boat with other vessels in the canal. Two handlers would accompany them separately in an open skiff.

In mid-afternoon, with the sun still blasting its sweltering heat, the canal pilot boarded the boat with my father and, followed by the handlers, instructed him to move the Red Dog into the Panama Canal.





10





Dollar on a Dime

The Panama Canal



THE PANAMA CANAL, an engineering feat that cost thousands of lives and cut apart a continent to shorten the journey between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by more than seven-thousand miles, opened to the world in 1914.

Approximately fifty miles long, deep water to deep water, the general layout of the canal follows a northwesterly to southeasterly direction across the Isthmus of Panama from Cristobal and Colón on the Atlantic side, to Balboa and Panama City on the Pacific side. Even though the Atlantic Ocean lies east of Central America and the Pacific Ocean lies west of Central America, the canal’s orientation makes its Atlantic entrance, oddly, twenty-seven miles west of its Pacific entrance.



. . .



As the Red Dog moved into the Panama Canal, the afternoon sun pressed hard against the mountains, valleys, and waterway, driving heavy shadows from trees and structures onto the ground, and from boats and ships into the water. The temperature hovered near ninety, with humidity to match. Sweat bled through my father’s shirt as he stood in the pilothouse with the canal pilot beside him.

Dad used all of the ice from his freezer earlier that morning and he and the canal pilot had nothing on board to drink but stale, warm water.

“Get us water up here,” the pilot yelled down to his helpers in the skiff who had a cooler on board.

With no extra bucket, my father gave his plastic dish pan to the canal pilot, who passed it to the handlers to fill with ice and water. Dad and the pilot then dipped and drank from the dish pan.

After leaving Limón Bay, the Red Dog followed the canal route for seven miles, remaining at sea level until reaching the Gatún Locks. The locks then lifted the boat eighty-five feet in three lockages or "steps" to Gatún Lake. Gatún Lake reigned as the largest artificial body of water in the world before construction of Hoover Dam formed Lake Mead in Nevada. Inside the locks the two handlers tied the boat to the sides of the one-thousand-foot-long chambers. On one occasion they tied the stern of the Red Dog before tying the bow, frustrating my father by making it difficult for him to swing the front of the boat around so it could be secured.

“Rats.” Dad was nervous not only because of the canal goings on, but also because the pilot stood beside him watching everything he did.

Through Gatún Lake, Dad snaked the boat around islands and across the wide waters of the lake until the canal channel again narrowed near Gaillard Cut. At Gaillard Cut, the canal severed the spine of the Continental Divide and the Cordillera de San Blas, leaving massive upheavals of terrain on each side.

The construction of Gaillard Cut had required carving through huge slopes of rock and shale, resulting in the principal excavation site for the canal. Approximately eight miles long, the cut begins near where the Chagres River flows into the canal at Gamboa and ends northwest of the Pedro Miguel Locks. Devastating slides wreaked havoc on the site during construction and continued after the canal opened. One slide closed canal traffic for seven months.

As the pilot told Dad about a disastrous ship accident that once happened in the cut, Dad looked at the scenery around Gaillard Cut and wondered about the hundreds of men who died in the huge undertaking, and of families left behind. Rainforests and low vegetation now covered the rock and shale ridges of the Cordillera de San Blas, creating a dark green swath that straddled the canal as far as Dad could see. The year following his navigation of the area, a new slide would dump an estimated one-million cubic yards of material into the Canal in 1974, enough soil to fill more than ten Houston Astrodomes.

A single lockage at Pedro Miguel lowered the Red Dog thirty-one feet to Miraflores Lake. A mile further south in Miraflores Locks, which contained the tallest lock gates of any in the system due to the extreme tidal variation of the Pacific Ocean, the boat dropped an additional fifty-four feet over two chambers to the level of the Pacific. The drops in Pedro Miguel and Miraflores totaled eighty-five feet, the same distance the Red Dog had climbed to Gatún Lake at the Atlantic end of the canal.

“You can pull around that one.” The canal pilot pointed to a cargo ship as they prepared to exit the final lock.

My father had entered the canal at Limón Bay before the ship, but because the ship cruised faster, it had gone into the final lock before the Red Dog. Canal procedures required vessels to exit the canal in the same order they entered, and when the last gates opened, Dad went around the huge ship and out of the lock ahead of it, forcing it to wait.

“Dollar wait’n on a dime!” a crew member from the ship yelled at my father as the Red Dog passed.

Dad glanced up at the man on the deck of the ship. Dad’s father used to say “Dollar waiting on a dime” to hired hands who helped him with masonry work in Oklahoma.

“Dad’s smart remarks chased off our best workers,” he once told me.



. . .



It took my father eight hours to transit the Panama Canal, reaching the Balboa Yacht Club after ten o’clock in the evening. The next morning he checked in with customs and got clearance to leave in case the Seattle boat captain agreed to tow him. He spent the remainder of the day resting aboard the Red Dog.

Originally called La Boca, the city of Balboa had been the largest of the material dumps during excavation of the canal. The twenty-two million cubic yards of material deposited there created more than six hundred acres of new land and a site for the town.

The Seattle seiner had moored a few slips away from the Red Dog in the Balboa basin. On the second day after transiting the canal, Dad went to see the captain about the tow they discussed in Colón.

“Err…Given any more thought to a tow?” he asked.

The captain folded his arms across his chest and stood straight on the deck of his boat.

“There’s the liability,” he said, “and the crew’s afraid it’ll slow us down too much.”

Dad stood with his hands in his pockets and watched a cargo ship cross the harbor as the captain talked.

“I use twenty gallons of fuel an hour running my seiner. It’ll probably use thirty towing your boat,” the captain continued. “We’ll be running in rougher weather than you’ll care to travel in, but I might consider towing you to San Diego for two thousand dollars rather than one.”

“All right,” Dad said. “I could probably do that.”

“I’ll think about it some more and let you know tomorrow,” the captain added.

That afternoon, after discovering only military personnel and Canal Zone employees could purchase goods in Balboa, my father took a cab to Panama City to buy groceries. One of the country’s largest urban centers, Panama City sat at the edge of the Canal Zone on the Bay of Panama, its white high rises stacked tall against the lush tropical backdrop. Along some of its narrow streets, arched windows and doorways softened the lines of the stark white buildings; on other streets dwelled a jumble of contrast where modern construction collided with the canal-era shanty. Though Spanish was the official language, most folks spoke English in Panama City and Dad easily communicated his needs for groceries and supplies. Panama’s currency, the Balboa, was used interchangeably with the U.S. dollar.

My father waited on board the Red Dog all the next day, not wanting to leave in case the Seattle boat captain contacted him. The owner of the marina stopped by and recommended a couple of people who could repair the depth sounder and help get parts Dad needed for the boat. While Dad waited, he repaired the bilge pump and replaced a broken rocker arm on the engine.



Log - April 28: Seattle boat left last night—Without me—Went ashore and tried to contact someone to fix depth sounder—No answer—Fried eggs, bacon, and iced tea—Feeling much better with rest and eating better—Moored next to ship channel—Many ships from places I never heard of.





Dad had moved the Red Dog from the Balboa boat basin to anchor near the ship channel where he could see more of the harbor activity. In the evenings he watched the Fiesta, a party boat garnished with brightly colored banners and flapping flags, which pounded with music as it cruised each evening before sunset. The boat left Balboa Harbor and crossed under the bridge into Panama Bay where it made a large loop. Lit up like the entrance to an amusement park, necklaces of white lights swept from its center mast to its bow and stern. The luminous ship returned to Balboa Harbor each evening after dark, still thumping the air with sound. He wished Mom could see it.

A United States military base occupied the far shore of the harbor. During daylight hours my father saw soldiers going through maneuvers, reminding him of Donald’s and Jerry’s days in the military. Gene, who accidentally shot himself in the knee when he was a teenager on our Oklahoma farm, had not served.

Jerry’s time in the Vietnam War had cast a silent shadow over our family, most apparent over Mom who lived each day in trepidation after he left. She anguished at the nightly television news accounts of the distant war, and the newly tabulated body counts. Sometimes she recoiled from the news reports, turning and heading to another part of the house; sometimes Dad clicked off the television before she could hear. Even looking out the front window of our house held devils for her, fearing the sight of a marine chaplain pulling into the driveway.





Jerry in Vietnam, 1967.



Wounded and hospitalized three times during his two-year tour of duty, Jerry returned home safely in the spring of 1968. His physical wounds—the shrapnel wounds across his face, chest, and arms, and the terrible mouth infection he carried home from the jungle—eventually healed. But Dad remembered seeing a deeper wound wash across Jerry’s face each time he received a letter from a fellow marine containing news of yet another friend killed in the war.



. . .



On April 30, my father made contact with a man in Panama City who agreed to repair the depth sounder. The man came to the Red Dog, picked up the depth sounder, fixed it, and delivered it back to the boat the same day. With the depth sounder again in good working order, Dad prepared to leave Balboa the following day.

After mailing a letter to Mom, Dad cooked himself a meal of bacon and eggs, then motored the Red Dog to the fuel dock. Although he found that the further he traveled from the United States the dirtier the fuel, at Balboa it looked noticeably cleaner.

“We run it through a centrifuge,” the fuel attendant told him.

Clarity, though, would soon become the least of my father’s fuel problems.

Finally leaving Balboa at four-thirty in the afternoon, Dad sailed beneath the mile-long, delicate webbing of the Ferry Thatcher Bridge, later known as the Bridge of the Americas, which reunited the land divided by the canal. As he passed from the canal zone, he moved into the Bay of Panama and the Pacific Ocean, anchoring early on the lee side of Taboga Island. He penciled into his log that evening:



Be fairly comfortable if the wind don’t change.





Then later,



Wind changed—Bumpy night.





My father felt better than he had felt in Colón. The throbbing in his thumb eased, the soreness in his arm lessened, and he had gotten quality rest while in Balboa.

He also achieved a milestone in his journey by reaching the Pacific end of the Panama Canal. Even though having transited the canal and entered the Pacific Ocean represented only a third of his total journey from Arkansas to Alaska, it, more importantly, allowed him a long-awaited turn from south to north. Turning from south to north meant a turn toward his own country, his own family, and a new home.





11





A Pacific Primer

Balboa to Puntarenas



Log - May 2: Left 6:00 a.m.—Crossing Golfo de Parita—Wind and current with me most of day—Can’t keep bilge pump working—Quit trying and use fuel pump—Hole in exhaust leaking salt water—Must fix before starting in morning—Anchored 6:30 p.m. off Peninsula de Azuero—Too tired to fix anything to eat—Milk and crackers—Milk spoiled—Tried with condensed milk—Not good.





“RATS.”

The corrosive saltwater had eaten a small hole through the elbow of the engine exhaust pipe and leaked into the engine compartment. My father crimped a metal strap and a chunk of rubber belting over the hole, hoping the fix would hold until he could manage a more permanent repair.

The southwest coast of Panama surged with lush mountains honeycombed with large caves near the water line. Huts flecked the occasional beaches. Crossing the Gulf of Panama and rounding Punta Mariato on the Peninsula de Azuero put Dad at the southernmost point of his journey to Alaska, only seven degrees north of the equator.

Toward the Isla de Coiba the crystalline waters held a nearly continuous display of sea life. Eight-foot-long hammerhead sharks slid through the water alongside the Red Dog. Marlin jumped high out of the water in the distance. Huge sea turtles sunned themselves at the top of the water as they drew in new air, their backs bobbing in the brine like ice cubes floating in a cool drink.

Dad slowed the boat and leaned out of the pilothouse door to watch the turtles. He thought of Lucy, the turtle his mother, Nellie, once kept in her garden.

“We made a deal,” she would explain. “Lucy eats the bugs on my plants, and I give her vegetable scraps.”

A box turtle, Lucy’s stumpy terrapin feet and legs shuttled her along the ground and pushed her clumsily beneath the low garden growth. Whenever anyone picked her up, her feet, legs, and head pulled inside her hinged bottom shell, which clamped tight as a storm cellar door. Her back always needed dusting.

Near the boat my father saw the dark round of a sea turtle rising from beneath the water until its curved back bubbled from the surface. Water drained from its shell in a glistening glaze. He heard the raspy spew of its exhale as it spurted bursts of fine mist from its nostrils. The streamlined body slid smoothly and quietly past the boat before slipping again deep into the water and out of sight.

My father cruised the Red Dog toward Bahia Damas, a small bay on the eastern coast of Isla de Coiba. Perched on the island high above the bay was a building complex. Dad moved close to shore to anchor for the night.

“Wheeeeeep! Wheeeeeep! Wheeeeeep!”

From the distance, a boat sped toward my father blowing a loud whistle. As it moved closer, he saw uniformed officers waving him away from the shore of the island. Dad restarted the Red Dog and motored further up the island’s coast until reaching a protected bay at its north end between Isla Coiba and Isla Rancheria. There, he anchored the boat and enjoyed a quiet night’s rest. He learned later that the officers chased him away from his first anchor site because the structures on the island made up the Coiba Penal Colony, one of Panama’s most severe prisons.



Log - May 4: Left 7:50 a.m.—All day crossing open water between Isla de Coiba and Burica Point, the boundary between Panama and Costa Rica—Run square over the largest turtle I’ve seen—Hope it didn’t hurt him—Stopped early because water ahead too deep to anchor—Tomato soup with evaporated milk—Not very good.





My father had crossed the Golfo de Chiriquí to Punta Burica. At the north end of the gulf sat Puerto Armuelles, the place which, ten years later, would become the Pacific terminal of the trans-isthmian oil pipeline where oil tankers would unload their cargo of Alaskan North Slope oil. After flowing through the pipeline to the Atlantic end at Chiriquí Grande, tankers would transport the oil to refineries around the Gulf of Mexico and the east coast of the United States.

Leaving Punta Burica the next morning, Dad headed for the outer point of Peninsula de Osa where virgin rainforests drank in more than one-hundred-fifty inches of rain each year, a rainfall tally rivaling that of Ketchikan. He spent most of the day crossing the bay then anchored north of the peninsula in the lee of Isla de Cano to escape afternoon winds. To the east and north, the southern Pacific coast of Costa Rica skirted the Cordillera de Talamanca, a range of mountains that stretched into Panama. The mountains seemed to rise straight from the waters of Bahia de Coronado, giving the coastline a dramatic look.

My father sat in the pilothouse and watched a dark bulge of thunder clouds rumble and roll like a black bear over the mountains. When light sprinkles of rain moved over the Red Dog ahead of the thunder storms, he stripped, grabbed a bar of soap, and headed for the back deck. After lathering up in the drizzle, he stood and waited for the squall to rinse him off.

The gully washer never came. He instead stepped beneath a trickle at the corner of the boat’s roof to rinse the soap suds off his body. The white bubbles of foam slid down his shoulders, back, legs, and off his feet onto the steel deck where the raindrops urged them toward the scuppers. As soon as he finished drying himself with a towel, the tropical deluge burst above the Red Dog.

That evening the sky cleared. Dad lay back on his bed in the pilothouse and watched the stars the way he did as a boy on his Uncle Budge’s hog farm in Clear Creek, Oklahoma.

Budge and his mother, Abigail, lived in a log house Budge had built, consisting of a single room with a shed-roofed kitchen attached on the side. When my father’s family moved there from Pilgrim’s Rest, Arkansas, in 1933, they moved in with Abigail and Budge, the six of them residing in one big, open room. At night, Dad saw stars through the cracks between the boards that covered the roof. During the winter months he sometimes woke to find a dusting of snow on his bed.

A fight between Abigail and Nellie, though, cut short the time they lived in the house with Budge and Abigail.

Abigail, a rough, hard-nosed woman, had started in on Nellie right away, talking mean and sharp to her about everything Nellie did or didn’t do. She flew into a rage one morning, claiming Nellie hadn’t filled the teakettle. After months of Abigail’s ridicule, Nellie had had enough. She grabbed a butcher knife from the table and waved it at Abigail.

“I’m goin’ to cut your damned old head off!” she warned.

Abigail yelled back and the scene exploded into a wild shouting match.

George jumped in and broke up the match, then arranged for his family to move into one room of a nearby house occupied by renters.

“Anything is better than living in that hell hole with Abigail and Budge,” he said.

Abigail became seriously ill and, in 1936, died of cancer. My father borrowed a pair of shoes from a neighbor to wear to her funeral. Though he had never been around his Grandma Abigail much during her lifetime, he did have fond memories of her. When he was nine, she gave him an adventure book, and she once sewed him a shirt. She had sewn the buttons on the wrong side like a girl’s blouse, but he wore it anyway.



. . .



Near Puntarenas the blue-green water contrasted sharply with the white sand beaches. The breeze made the wide, waving leaves of the tall palm trees flag in the air like windmills.



Log - May 7 (Partial): Anchored Puntarenas 10:00 a.m.—Port Captain very nice—No charges for entering port or bribes to officials—Didn’t even board boat to search (pilfer)—Good agent except he couldn’t speak English much better than I can Spanish.





Puntarenas stretched along a thin finger of land pushing into the Gulf of Nicoya and pointing toward the Nicoya Peninsula. Once Costa Rica’s main shipping port for exporting coffee beans to various parts of the world, Puntarenas had since become the center of the country’s fishing industry.

A port agent motored his skiff to where my father anchored the Red Dog in the harbor and took him to shore to check in with the Puntarenas Port Captain.

The Port Captain asked Dad something in Spanish. When he saw that my father could not understand, he repeated the question in heavily accented English.

“Destination…What is your destination?”

“I’m on my way back to the United States. I’m going as far as Alaska.”

The Port Captain shuffled, stamped, and signed off on Dad’s paperwork.

“You could hire my agent as translator while you are in port,” the Port Captain suggested, seeing that my father had a great deal of difficulty understanding and communicating.

Dad agreed.

My father and the agent first went to a fuel dock where he filled the Red Dog’s tanks with four-hundred-forty-five gallons of diesel before the fuel attendant stopped the pumps.

“No more.”

Neither the agent nor my father could talk the fellow into selling more fuel so they left for another fuel dock. There, the attendant wouldn’t let Dad have any fuel at all.

“No diesel. Maybe tomorrow.”

My father planned Manzanillo, Mexico, as his next port of call, almost seventeen-hundred miles north, and he needed plenty of fuel to get there. Agitated, he and the agent agreed to walk back to the Port Captain’s office to see if he could help.

Near the Red Dog at the fuel dock sat a small rowboat. In the bottom of the boat lay the long, flat, toothy snout of a sawfish. A group of young men hung around the boat with, seemingly, little to do.

“Watch boat, five dollars,” one of the boys said, glancing at the agent and my father when he saw them leaving.

But the way the boy said it and the look on the other boys’ faces caused Dad to wonder who they would watch the boat for. The offer felt more like a threat, and he suddenly became hesitant to leave at all.

“He’ll do the same job for the same money,” the agent told my father as he pointed to an old fellow further down the dock.

Dad hired the old man.

At the Port Captain’s office my father explained, as best he could, why he needed more fuel. The captain then called a friend, who called a friend, who seemed to control the diesel market in Costa Rica.

“You get eight-hundred more,” he told Dad when he got off the telephone, “but very expensive...twenty-five cents.”

Dad had paid thirteen cents per gallon at Port Isabel and twenty-five cents at Balboa. It was 1973, the year of the Arab oil embargo. Dad didn’t know it then, but before long, diesel would jump to seventy-five cents a gallon.

My father agreed to the price, then before leaving asked, “Where can I call the States from?”

Both the captain and the agent looked at him with expressionless faces. The captain said nothing. The agent tried explaining something, but talked so rapidly with a mixture of Spanish and English that my father didn’t understand.

Dad left for the Red Dog alone and, on his way back, found a public phone along a walkway. He stood at the booth for more than an hour trying to call my mother, but could not even get an operator. He guessed that was probably what the agent had tried to tell him, that the phones were only for local calls.

When my father had called Mom from Colón, he told her he would call her from Puntarenas in about two weeks. Sixteen days had passed, his call already two days overdue, and it upset him knowing she would be counting the days. It worried him that he couldn’t let her know he had arrived safely, that he had traveled another notch closer in the long measure of his trip, and that he hadn’t disappeared somewhere in the wide, blue waters of the Pacific.

The fuel dock the Port Captain sent Dad to for the promised fuel turned out to be the first dock he had tried to get fuel. Now, the fuel attendant apparently had his signals crossed and told my father he could have one-thousand-fifty gallons rather than the eight-hundred gallons the Port Captain had indicated, and that he would charge eighteen cents per gallon rather than twenty-five cents. Dad filled the tanks with another one-thousand-sixty-five gallons, making a total of about eighteen-hundred gallons in the boat’s tanks, only two-hundred gallons short of a full load.



Log - May 7 (Partial): Have enough to get to Manzanillo, Mexico, where one more fillup will get to San Diego—Anchored in bay ready to go in morning—Such a troubled day didn’t feel like eating and couldn’t sleep—Few pork and beans and ice tea—Troubled because didn’t get to call home.





Dad had planned to restock some of his groceries in Puntarenas, but after the hours of frustration and runarounds he experienced getting fuel, along with the deflating disappointment of the telephones, he didn’t even try.



. . .



The water in the bay lapped at the side of the Red Dog, and the sun eased behind the darkening mountains of the Nicoya Peninsula. My father visualized Mom waiting patiently in Arkansas, wondering why he hadn’t called. He took a little solace in the fact that he had mailed her a letter from Balboa eight days earlier. He had no way of knowing, though, that somewhere between Panama and Arkansas, the letter disappeared.





SECTION FOUR

Puntarenas to San Diego





12





Phones and Feathered Friends

Puntarenas to Manzanillo



“WELL…RATS.”

Waking early and ready to leave Puntarenas, Dad discovered the anchor rope had snagged on the rudder, then wrapped around it when the tide swung the boat around during the night. Still running strong, the tide pulled the rope tight between the Red Dog and the anchor the way wind pulls a string tight between a kite and its pilot. Dad waited until slack tide, delaying his departure from Puntarenas for two hours. When the tide allowed, he walked the anchor line along the side of the boat to see which direction it had wrapped then tugged the rope free.

Still bothered that he had not called Mom, my father crossed the Gulf of Nicoya in choppy water then edged the southern shore of the Peninsula de Nicoya. A chunky leg of land bending from the Guanacaste Province of Costa Rica, the peninsula harbored rocky coves, waterfalls, and wildlife reserves.

Rounding the southernmost tip of the peninsula, my father turned northwest at Cabo Blanco to parallel the ridge of the Cerros de la Habana, a range of mountains running the length of the peninsula. He passed an abandoned ship stranded on a beach north of Cabo Blanco, then anchored early because of a rain storm and rocky waters ahead, settling near Bahia Carrillo, where he expected a rough and bumpy night.

Dad carried his dinner up to the pilothouse and sat quietly eating in his captain’s chair when a bulky, brown bird with a long, red beak landed on the front railing. The bird gripped the rail with its feet and spread its wings out to dry, preening its feathers and making itself at home on the Red Dog—the first of many birds to join my father along the immeasurable coast of the Pacific.



Log - May 9: Left 6:20 a.m.—Weather good—Wind up and water choppy afternoon but mostly behind me—Coast becoming dry and barren looking—Rest corn beef hash and can of okra and tomatoes—Don’t matter if you like it or not—You eat what you have—Anchored 4:30 p.m.—Crossing deep water bays, have to stop where anchor will reach—Very big volcano type mountains back from coast—Anchored at Cape Elena—Very near border of Nicaragua.





A wind and rain storm swept down from the mountains and scrubbed at Salinas Bay, making the water rough as he crossed into Nicaraguan waters. The coast turned low and hilly with high inland mountains which he saw only sporadically due to haze and shifting clouds. The Nicaraguan plain stretched the entire length of the coast from the border of Honduras on the north, to the border of Costa Rica on the south, dissected by a chain of volcanic cones that ratcheted across the landscape. The cones made giant stepping-stone islands across the more than three-thousand square miles of Lake Nicaragua. A low, narrow slash of land separated Lake Nicaragua from the ocean.

Cruising along the coastal plain, the path of the Red Dog echoed the line of distant volcanoes. The volcanoes made up a portion of the “rim of fire,” an extensive belt of volcanoes bordering the Pacific Ocean caused by the shifting and collision of continental plates on the ocean floor. In the western Pacific, the rim of fire edged Japan and the East Indies; in the eastern Pacific, the rim extended from Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, followed the coasts of Central America, Mexico, and the United States, ending in Alaska at the Aleutian Islands where it curved south and west toward the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia.

A large volcanic cone peaked high and stark in the distance from where my father anchored that evening west of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Only five months earlier, an earthquake had flattened the city, killing thousands of its residents.

My father had never experienced an earthquake himself, but remembered the day he, Mom and I stood in the living room of our Perkins farmhouse and stared in disbelief at the televised images of Alaska’s 1964 Good Friday earthquake. Our family had made our first trip to Alaska only three summers before the earthquake rumbled across the state. And as the earthquake rattled Alaska, it also rattled our memories.



. . .



Dad changed the oil in the engine before continuing up the Nicaraguan coast, now angling in a more northwesterly direction. Beneath broken clouds and in mild breezes, he crossed the Gulf of Fonseca to the coast of El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America. In the distance, the southern tip of the Sierra Madre mountain chain filled the highlands of El Salvador. High valleys and volcanic slopes held most of El Salvador’s major cities and many coffee plantations. A narrow coastal plain skirted the country.

Schools of porpoise followed my father across the Gulf of Fonseca. He scribbled in the ship’s log:



Must be ten acres of them.





The porpoise boiled the water as hundreds of them jumped and rolled in the brine. When Dad pulled near the coast to anchor that evening, the swarm of porpoise churned past him and continued north.



Log - May 12: Left 6:50 (coast of El Salvador) very large steep swells—Wind behind me; not bad—Top of swells high as pilothouse and porpoise jump out of the top of them—Light gray and white bird with black crown and beak about size of pigeon sat on front rail for an hour and ten minutes scratching all his bites, preening his feathers, stretching his wings and legs, enjoying his ride and role as figurehead, nearly falling off several times; one time clear off but caught his beak and neck around rail and climbed back up—Don’t know what about the flock he was with, they may have been riding on top where I couldn’t see—Not seeing any more turtles—Warmed ravioli for supper; still more; big can—Mountains on coast last four hours; very sharp and rugged; very beautiful.





The next three days brought fair weather with very little wind and long, smooth swells. The calm seas made cruising so easy going that Dad put the Red Dog on “auto pilot.” Taking a leather binocular strap from a drawer he hooked one end over the spoke of the wheel and attached the other end to a knob on the bulkhead. With the wheel secured, he left the helm for several minutes at a time without going off course, taking breaks to watch the porpoise, dolphins, and other sea life, and to rest. From the aft deck, he watched a nine- to ten-foot-long hammerhead shark swim alongside the boat, then careen away.

Near the Port of San Jose, a major Guatemalan cargo port, my father encountered the largest dolphin yet,



…weighing as much as a good-sized horse.





Some of the dolphins moved close under the bow of the boat, set their fins and tails just so, and stole rides in the pressure wave. As the thrust of water carried them along, they rolled on their sides and watched my father watching them.

Along the coast of Guatemala, a haze masked the chain of great volcanoes and high mountains that rose in the background. Among them stood the seven-thousand-foot high volcano, Agua, known not for its eruptions of fiery ash, but for destroying the original capital of Guatemala, Cuidad Vieja, with a flood of mud and water in 1541. Next to Agua sat Fuego, the most active volcano in the country rising more than twelve-thousand feet to its peak. The land bordering the ocean appeared low and flat where a green terrain of coffee fincas, banana plantations, sugarcane fields, and tropical fruit orchards sloped toward the Pacific. Small villages of thatched huts and houses edged black sand beaches.

On May 15 my father crossed the border from Guatemala into Mexico, placing him at the beginning of nearly twenty-three-hundred miles of Mexican coastline that flexed, stretched, and angled toward the southern border of the United States. The low stretch of coast turned northwest along the plain of the Sierra Madre and the Mexican state of Chiapas. Dense forests, sugar cane fields, and occasional stock farms shadowed the undeveloped land.

No morning wind pushed at the Red Dog, but steep swells coming close together met the boat head on. The wind increased from the southwest in the afternoon, and by evening came from the north, only much harder. After anchoring for the night along the unsheltered coast, my father tossed a second anchor overboard to help stabilize the boat. Winds battered the boat throughout the night, dragging the Red Dog and both anchors for five miles.

Heading west of Mar Muerto, winds blasted water against the pilothouse windows. Dad could hardly see. Water streamed heavily off the roof and deck as if the boat itself were rising from the sea. High winds drove the water into a hard, horizontal torrent. Birds refused to fly and, instead, sat on the water like weather vanes pointing into the wind. Fishing boats quit fishing and motored west toward Salina Cruz. Crews from two of the fishing boats saw the Red Dog hobbyhorsing in the wild wind and water and stopped to see if my father needed help.

“I’m okay,” he yelled to each one across the water, signaling with a wave of his hand when his words swept away in the wind.

Anchoring off the coast of Mar Muerto, Dad hoped winds would settle before the next day’s run across the Gulf of Tehuantepec. At the Gulf of Tehuantepec, the Mexican coast arched to the northeast to form the narrow Ithmus of Mexico, a hot, humid area known for treacherous winds that rasp across the land between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

Dad had anchored just south of the narrowest point of the isthmus, less than one-hundred-fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico—the same water where his ocean journey began nearly two months and four-thousand miles earlier.



Log - May 17: Left 6:15; wind lay by 9:00; getting ready to change directions; up again by 10:00—Not too bad; not good—Cut across end of Gulfo de Tehuantepec 1:30—Wind 20-30 choppy to very rough by the time I got across and anchored in a cove at 6:30—Wind lay at sundown—Looks like a quiet night if things don’t change—Large hammerhead shark about 12 feet foraging near boat for 1/2 hour or longer, waiting for me to fall overboard—Bacon and eggs and ice tea—Such a beautiful night after such a nasty day—Full moon just up and shining across the water and the mountains right behind the cove.





Crossing the Gulf of Tehuantepec took my father into the Mexican state of Oaxaca and past the Port of Salina Cruz and the town of Tehuantepec, a town unique in that the women ran the businesses, banking, and commerce, while the men planted and harvested the fields. This social arrangement had made Tehuantepec the subject of heated controversy in much of the country where machismo saturated the ruling norm.

Dad hoped his run along the coast of Oaxaca would get him out of the influence of the gulf and its vicious winds. The rough current running toward the gulf contained rips where eddies on the ocean floor caused the current to make abrupt changes in direction. The snarling water took nearly two knots off his speed. That evening, he tucked the Red Dog into a small cove west of Puerto Angel near the southernmost tip of Oaxaca.

After dropping anchor, he walked to the back deck where he caught sight of a sea snake swimming away from the side of the boat. The snake startled him and made him wonder if it had been on the boat—possibly coiled somewhere like a rope—and had just left through one of the scuppers.

My father never liked snakes. Although living in rural areas most of his life gave him plenty of contact with them over the years, he didn’t necessarily fear them, but he hated when they surprised him.

His father, George, often warned him and his sister about snakes during their childhood years. George’s warnings stemmed from his own writhing memories of a diamond back rattlesnake bite at the age of six when he reached to get something underneath a house.

“It nearly killed me,” he told my father. “For a while I lost all my memory, my ABC’s, and how to walk.”

During Dad’s childhood, folks in Arkansas and Oklahoma cautioned kids to look out for hoop snakes. Supposedly, when anyone startled a hoop snake, it took hold of its tail and rolled after them like a wagon wheel. The snake then stabbed them with a poison spike on the end of its tail. Though no one my father knew had ever seen such a creature, the myth spooked rural children from one generation to the next.

A snake bit my father only once during his lifetime when he experimented with raising muskrats in Oklahoma. Muskrats had dug holes in the banks of our pond. When Dad reached into one of the holes trying to grab a muskrat, he caught hold of a snake instead, which grabbed him in return. The non-poisonous water snake left bloody marks across the back of his hand.

With bright, yellow-green coloring and dark markings on its back and tail, the snake my father saw swimming away from the Red Dog was likely a Yellow Bellied Sea Snake, one of two species of front-fanged, venomous sea snakes that lived along the coasts of the Americas. With laterally compressed bodies, oar-like tails, and valves over their nostrils that allowed them to stay submerged for hours at a time, the snakes were sometimes seen by fishermen and other boaters basking by the thousands on the ocean surface. Feeding mainly on fish and eels, the snakes killed with powerful venom, the most toxic of any snake. Fortunately, the docile snakes rarely bit humans unless provoked. Like most sea snakes, which have difficulty crawling on land, the Yellow Bellied would not have gotten on board the Red Dog unless washed there by a wave. And if a wave had washed it onto the boat, it would have trouble getting off of the boat on its own.

Winds continued into the next day, and even at half speed, the Red Dog took a beating as my father navigated along the coast of the state of Guerrero past miles of uninhabited terrain south of Acapulco. He anchored in the waves early in the afternoon north of the mouth of the Rio Verde, too exhausted to go any longer after hours of wrestling the boat against a defiant ocean.

Dad turned on his radio and found an English-speaking station. As he settled in for the night, the radio buzzed with the news that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had arrived in Acapulco, still sixty miles up the coast.



. . .



The “less than two weeks” my father had promised to call my mother within, had turned into a month. Though Mom kept herself busy in Fort Smith, as each day passed it grew harder and harder to believe she hadn’t heard from Dad due to merely a miscalculation of his arrival time in Puntarenas. The last time she talked with him, when he called from Colón on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal, he sounded ill. She wondered if he had even made it through the Canal.

Her mind churned the possibilities: he could have fallen overboard in rough seas, someone could have hijacked the boat, he could be injured or ill, the Red Dog could have crashed or sunk, or, recalling my father’s encounter with Belize City port officials, authorities may have seized the boat and left him sitting in jail somewhere. Though she told herself he remained alive and well and would eventually call, that notion wrangled fiercely with the fear that he had simply disappeared in the huge, boundless ocean, and that she had no way of going out and finding him.

In desperation, she called the U. S. Coast Guard.

“We have no indication your husband has crossed the Mexican border into the United States,” a man at the San Diego Coast Guard station told her.

He then gave her the telephone number of the U. S. Ambassador in Mexico, who put her in touch with an agent at the Panama Canal.

“Yes, a Melvin Owens transited the canal in the motor vessel Red Dog on April 24,” the agent said.

Because of the canal’s slight north-south orientation, when a ship transited the canal from the Pacific to the Atlantic, agents termed the ship as northbound. And when a ship passed from the Atlantic to the Pacific, as my father did, they termed the ship as southbound.

“He was traveling southbound,” the agent added.

“Southbound?” Mom repeated.

The word dropped into her thoughts and rattled against her understanding. Hearing from the agent that my father had gone through the canal was good news, but hearing that he was southbound, which to Mom meant Dad had gone the wrong direction, caused her greater concern.



. . .



A thick haze hid the green mountains rising behind the beaches and plunging rock cliffs of Acapulco Bay as my father passed the resort town shortly before noon. A broad, scallop-shaped basin scooped out of Mexico’s coastline, Acapulco Bay once provided the main seaport for Spain’s China trade after the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors in the 1530’s. Protected from the swells of the Pacific by Isla la Roqueta and the sheltering Peninsula de las Playas that coathooks to the east, the area had since become a luxury resort. Dad anchored fifty miles to the northwest of Acapulco. As the resort town pounded with nightlife, he enjoyed another silent sunset over the Pacific, then sunrise over the Sierra Madre.

The next day’s travel took him to the southeast end of the Bahia de Petacalco where he anchored behind Isla Grande. Across the bay, next to the mouth of the Rio Balsas, a crowd of people from several fishing boats gathered on the beach for a feast. Dad watched a large manta ray circle in the water near the Red Dog. Five-or-six-feet wide, it swam just below the surface with the tips of its wings occasionally rising above the water. The tips appeared as black and shiny from the wet as the black widow spiders that spun their webs in the corners of the barns and outbuildings of Oklahoma.



Log - May 23: Left 6:00 a.m.—Crossing Bay of Petacalco—Water rough—Engine missing—Anchored in waves 1:00 pm to work on engine—Valves burnt on 2 cylinder—Won’t fire—A blue, miserable day and night—Ate rest of rice.





Ten miles from Manzanillo my father stopped to get cleaned up and ready to enter port the next morning. A fishing boat with a boy cleaning a large sea turtle on the back deck came by and idled a safe distance away from the Red Dog. Like horses on a carousel, both boats rose and fell in the large swells.

The boat captain came onto his deck and yelled at my father.

“Need help?”

“No thanks,” Dad said with a wave. “Just taking a break.”

The captain waved back and took off again.

In addition to refueling at Manzanillo, Dad desperately wanted to call home. He also figured he needed to repair the engine, which now ran on only five cylinders.

The water calmed some in the late afternoon as Dad relaxed on the boat. He watched what looked like a pair of turtle hunters in the distance who slid across the swells in a canoe-style boat with an outboard motor. One man handled the boat while the other, naked, crouched like a cat at the front, ready to jump into the water at sight of a turtle. The hunters eventually disappeared up the coast.

With the water continuing to settle, my father fried a skillet of potatoes and onions for supper. The smell of cooking onions filled the boat deliciously. But before he finished cooking, the water got turbulent again and Dad braced himself against the counter. When he sat down to enjoy his meal, the potatoes slid and flopped around the plate as he chased them with his fork. It promised to be a bumpy night.



Log - May 26: Went to Manzanillo about 9:00 a.m. —Waited for the officials to come to boat to clear me in—No one came—Rowed ashore to look them up about 11:30—Found no one—Back at 2:30—No one—Back at 4:30—Found Chief Pilot—Said couldn’t do anything till Monday morning—Told me where to find groceries and long distance telephone—Lady taking care of phone service couldn’t speak English—Showed her the number I wanted to call—Said tomorrow maybe?—Back to boat—Pork and beans and iced tea—Maybe a good night’s sleep for a change—So tired and worn out can’t think straight.





Log - May 27: Tried twice to call home—9:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.—Wait 1-1/2 to 2 hours each time before they say they can’t get an international circuit—Everything goes through Mexico City—One great big mess—Eating and resting.





The Manzanillo phone center consisted of a woman sitting next to a telephone in the corner of a grocery store. Dad handed the lady Mom’s name and number, then waited while she attempted to get the call through. As he waited, he watched the largest cockroach he had ever seen run across a block of cheese that a woman behind the counter was slicing. The woman swatted at the cockroach, knocking it to the floor where she stamped at it repeatedly with her foot. She then went back to slicing the cheese.

My father tried for two days to get a call through to my mother, always unsuccessful and always spending several hours waiting at the phone center.

On Monday morning, he checked in with customs, spending more than five hours with officials signing papers and answering questions to clear both in and out of port.

“Where can I call the states from?” he asked before leaving.

“Here,” the port agent said.

The agent attempted to call Arkansas for him on the customs office phone. Dad waited an additional hour and a half before the agent told him no circuit was available. He returned to the agent’s office that evening and, after being cut off twice, finally got through to my mother around 11:00 p.m. Arkansas time.



. . .



The ring of the phone on the nightstand where my mother slept splintered the quiet in Gene’s apartment. With Gene not home, Mom, always wary of late night calls, picked up the receiver hesitantly.

“Hello?” she asked weakly.

“Err..Hi..I’m in Manzanillo.”

Five weeks had crawled by since Dad’s last call. When Mom heard his voice on the line, relief washed away the fear that only seconds earlier clouded her thoughts.

“Melvin! Well it’s about time! I was afraid you’d been swallowed up by the ocean!”

“No…it’s just that I couldn’t call when I wanted to. I sent you that letter from Balboa.”

“I never got one.”

“Oh..well..who knows where it ended up.”

They talked at length, filling in each other on the goings on of the past weeks. He explained his problems and frustrations with trying to call her from Puntarenas and she told him about how the canal agent had told her the Red Dog had turned south. She filled him in on the news about us kids and he told her about the multitude of sea life he had seen.

“I’ll call you again when I get to San Diego,” Dad told her.

For the first time in weeks, Mom slept through the night.



. . .



Log - May 29: Found small machine shop who will do valve job on engine head—Delayed departure—Removed engine head p.m.





Log - May 30: Head to shop early a.m.—Replaced two valves and four seats—Head back to boat 8 p.m.—Wore out and nervous wreck.





Dad spent all day at the machine shop, unwilling to leave the engine head totally in the hands of a stranger. Besides having the engine worked on, he also took the corroded, ninety-degree elbow from the exhaust line in for repair. The man in the machine shop removed the rubber belting Dad had put on it in Puntarenas and welded a metal plate over the hole.



Log - May 31: All day putting engine back together—Weak—Lay down and rest several times.





Log - June 1: Finished engine—Went to see agent—Will load fuel and leave Monday 8:00 a.m.—Very sore and wore out from working and worrying with engine—Dizzy and stomach upset—Engine runs good—Take it easy Saturday and Sunday.





After a week in Manzanillo, my father planned to rest during the weekend and leave on Monday morning.

Anchored in one of Manzanillo’s scallop-like bays, he was close enough to shore to watch the daily activity of the town’s waterfront. Near the beach, local fishermen unloaded hammerhead sharks, dragging them to the side of the street where they sliced them up and sold fresh shark steaks from instant fish markets.

Between naps, Dad fiddled with anchor ropes and repaired the heat gauge. Late Saturday afternoon, he watched a man trying to get a donkey loaded with packs to go up one of several trails running between the houses that covered the hillside. The man shooed, pulled, and pushed at the donkey, but the animal planted its front feet and refused to move. Every so often someone stopped and offered help, only to continue on their way after failing to get the donkey to budge. Dad watched the effort continue into the evening. The man and the donkey eventually became merely dark objects in the failing light, disappearing altogether as dark closed around them.

Before leaving Manzanillo, my father went into town to restock his food supply, but could not read the labels on the cans, jars, and packages in the grocery store. Wanting a jar of peanut butter and having no luck spotting it on the shelves, he tried asking the store clerk. His efforts failed miserably until another customer entered the store and translated for him.

He encountered the same difficulty at a hardware store when he wanted to purchase a pair of needle-nosed pliers.

“PLIERS,” he said loudly, trying hard to explain what he needed with over-pronounced words and exaggerated hand signals. The clerk stared at him. After more attempts, he glanced up in exasperation and discovered a row of pliers hanging on a wire above his head.

At another store he wanted to buy eight quarts of milk. He held up eight fingers then pointed to the milk that sat behind the counter. The clerk looked at my father, then at his fingers and counted in English, “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.” Dad and the woman laughed as she gathered the milk.



Log - June 3: Rowed ashore—Bought eggs, peanut butter, buns, onions, and eight quarts milk—Came back and cooked bacon and eggs, ate, took nap, washed dishes—Depth sounder trying to stop working; couldn’t find anything wrong or make it do any better—Went under boat and cleaned face of transducer; works good—Ready to go in the morning—I hope.





To scrape the scum off the transducer, Dad put on a face mask, which he had brought for that purpose, and, armed with a putty knife, entered the water over the stern of the boat. Holding onto a length of rope that he had looped and tied around the side of the boat to keep him from drifting with the current, he found his way to the small glass eye in the bottom of the boat and scraped the transducer clean.

Up to this point, Dad had not gone overboard the Red Dog on the entire trip. Though he knew the water would have felt refreshing, especially further south in the suffocating humidity and heat of the Panama Canal Zone, he had little interest in swimming in the ocean. Not only did his nearly daily sightings of sharks, sting rays, and sea snakes deter him, the raw sewage outfall he had seen emptying into the bay at Manzanillo also concerned him.

Though my father hadn’t swam in years, he once considered himself a good swimmer. As a boy he could bundle his shoes and clothes above his head in one hand, then swim two-hundred yards across the Grand River in Oklahoma with the other. Whenever the river flooded and backed up into Clear Creek, he liked to swim in the high water among the trees. That practice ended, though, when he came down with blackwater fever. The illness put him in bed for two months.



Log - June 4: Went to fuel dock—Agent wasn’t there—After many frustrations loaded fuel, oil and water and left Manzanillo at 1:15 p.m.—Wind and waves head on but not too bad—Engine running good—Anchored 7:30 p.m. in a cove—Bread, milk, boiled eggs.





My father had stayed in Manzanillo for ten days, much longer than he intended. Before leaving, he spent the remainder of the pesos he had exchanged for U. S. dollars in Progreso. Able to use American dollars nearly every place he had traveled, he needed the pesos only in the ports of Progreso and Manzanillo.

The engine ran smoothly from Manzanillo to where he stopped for the evening behind Punta Farallon. If all went well, his next port of call would be San Diego, California.

As Dad watched the sun sink into the Pacific, Mom slept peacefully in Arkansas.





13





The Wind and the Wild

Manzanillo to San Diego



SCREECHING AND SHRIEKING fractured the still morning air as hundreds of sea birds hovered, dove, and fed on schools of small fish chased to the surface by larger fish striking from below. The twenty-five-mile long Bay of Banderas glistened when the first sunlight skipped across it. As the sun’s rays struck the red tile roofs of Puerto Vallarta, the roofs bloomed like roses against their lush mountain backdrop.

On his first morning after leaving Manzanillo on June 5, the picture-perfect scenery and good weather stoked the fire of my father’s enthusiasm as he moved toward the United States border. He had traveled alone in an unfamiliar world of oceans and foreign countries since March. Within a matter of days, he hoped to be back in his home country.

But a stretch of blustery weather soon dampened his fire. Fierce winds forced the Red Dog into day after day of high, head-on seas along the Pacific coast of Mexico. Ducking into San Hipólito Bay for refuge one evening, exhausted from hours of fighting the weather, he noted:



Can’t take many like this one.





. . .



All had gone well enough the first few days out of Manzanillo. After leaving his anchorage on the picturesque Bay of Banderas near Punta de Mita, he continued north between the coast and Islas Tres Marias. He kept the Red Dog’s speed under eight knots, hesitant to run the engine wide open so far from help, careful not to crowd his luck after the repairs in Manzanillo.

Between Tuxpan and Mazatlán, Dad found himself cruising into a bloody area in the water,



…as large as a house.





He thought maybe sharks had attacked a dolphin. But nothing in the area gave him a hint of what had taken place, only a huge, fading remnant of blood.

On June 7, he stopped early in the afternoon just south of Mazatlán. A stiff breeze marbleized the green water. He took naps and rested, planning to cross the two-hundred-mile stretch of open water across the mouth of the Gulf of California to the tip of the Baja Peninsula later that day. Also known as the Sea of Cortez, the seven-hundred-mile-long Gulf of California separated the eastern coast of the peninsula and Mexico’s mainland. Its plankton-rich, emerald waters supported an immense variety of fish and bird life, and served as a wintering ground for several species of whale.

Avoiding high afternoon winds, my father began crossing the gulf that evening, running for eight hours until four o’clock in the morning. He then stopped and let the Red Dog drift for two hours while he slept and waited for daylight.



Log - June 8: Left 6:15 a.m.—Very large steep swells—Tide rips—Rough—Wind down and water smoothed about noon—Easy going rest of day, anchored 8:40 p.m. on Baja about 8 miles north of where I aimed—Very tired—Water pretty still—Good night’s rest.





After sleeping late on the eastern coast of the Baja Peninsula the next day, my father cruised past Cabo San Lucas and rounded the tip of the eight-hundred-mile-long peninsula. The peninsula points south from the United States border of California then crooks like a witch’s digit to the southeast to run parallel with the mainland. Mostly desert and semi-desert terrain, the Baja coast and mountains appeared,



…dry and scrubby.





Dad expected that once he rounded the tip of Baja he would leave the worst weather behind him. Instead, the farther around the point he got, the harder the weather hit him. Winds increased and the temperature plunged twenty degrees, remaining that way until late in the afternoon when winds began to ease.



Much better.





A dozen or so monster dolphin streaked ahead of the boat, startling my father with loud splashes beneath the bow.

A small leak developed near the rudder the next day as he headed toward Isla Santa Margarita where he planned to find shelter for the night. He held the boat’s speed to seven knots to reduce vibration.



Log - June 11: Left 7:10 a.m.—Cloudy and cold—Wind still head on 10-15 mph—Barren mountains along coast—Anchored 2:00 p.m. in small bay—Very tired—Back and legs give out—Last pump burning out—Took apart and work on it—Afraid it won’t last to San Diego—Rested, shaved, cooked some rice, bacon and eggs.





When my father left the protected cove in Bahia Santa Maria near Cabo San Lazaro the next morning, clouds, cold, and wind stayed with him for nearly a hundred miles as he aimed for the next bay where he hoped to find protection from the rough water. Determined to make it by dark, he pressed on, arriving at Bahia San Jaunico after nine that evening.



Sure good to get out of the waves.





For the first time in several days, the wind stopped during the night, giving him a break from the constant rocking and pounding, but only a short one. Winds churned up again before noon the next day, were rough by early afternoon, and fierce by four. Ten-foot-high, head-on waves drove him into San Hipólito Bay where he remained at anchor for two days, resting and hoping for a lull in the harsh conditions.



Log - June 16: Left 5:05 a.m.—Pretty good going till noon—Wind and waves getting rough by 2:00—Anchored 2:10 in small bay—Wind blowing hard all evening—Close enough to hear U.S. radio stations pretty good—Ballgames—Rice—San Diego boat pulled in and anchored about 5:00.





The small bay where Dad anchored lay just south of Punta Eugenia. He listened to a Dodgers baseball game, even though he had little interest in them. Mom, however, loved baseball, and my father felt certain that while he listened to the game on the Red Dog’s radio, Mom would be watching it on television. While he listened to the ballgame, a boat from San Diego pulled into the bay and anchored near him. Like seeing an old friend in a new place, familiarity felt good.

Along the east coast of Cedros Island the wild weather subsided enough for Dad to stand on the bow of the Red Dog and watch the dolphins. He anchored about noon in a sheltered cove on the north end of the island, planning to leave before daylight the next morning, hoping to cross the eighty miles of open water of the Bahia Sebastian Vizcaino before afternoon winds. In the distance, in the southern portion of the bay, lay Scammon’s Lagoon where California Gray whales mated and calved each winter.

Two sail boats from San Francisco moved into the cove and anchored near the Red Dog. A cat wandered the deck of the one closest.

Although cats weren’t my father’s favorite animal, he learned to tolerate the long line of felines I had taken in over the years. Cats, and all sorts of animals, had always been an ingredient in the makeup of our family.

In the 1950s our Perkins farm beat continually with the presence of animals. Besides the usual barn cats and dogs, we kept horses, cattle, chickens, rabbits, a goat, a pig, and the two white ducks that Jerry traded for his bicycle. Jerry had claimed he would bring home “baby” ducks, but we could hear the blaring quacks of adult ducks half a mile away as he toted them home in a burlap bag. And as my brother Donald got older and roamed the countryside hunting arrowheads and rattlesnakes, he often came home with animals, including baby raccoons and a baby skunk. The skunk played like a kitten until it got older and wandered off on its own.

But rising above all of the animal riffraff that surrounded us through the years were the dogs. Mom, a dog lover, usually ushered in whatever dog we had as a family. She loved animals and whenever she did something extra kind for an animal she would say, “Do you think I’ll get an extra jewel in my crown in the afterlife for doing this?”

Dad had owned two dogs as a boy. He never knew where the first dog came from, but the mongrel yellow dog followed him home from school one afternoon, then bit him after he fed it. He tried running the animal off, but gave up when it turned and followed him home each time. He named the dog Pal, and Pal brought trouble to anyone who got crossways with him. The dog habitually chased cars.

“By God I can stop that!” Dad’s Uncle Fred told him.

Fred got in his car and drove past my father’s house. When Pal ran after the car and began snarling and barking at the wheels, Fred jumped out with a handful of rocks and threw them at the dog. Pal attacked Fred and bit him on the leg. Eventually, the dog disappeared.





Melvin and Pal, Capitol Hill, Oklahoma, circa 1926.



Uncle Eddie gave my father his second dog when my father turned fourteen. Uncle Eddie referred to the dog as “a great coon dog.” He had gotten the dog by tying a female dog to the back of his horse and wagon, then driving past farms he figured had good hunting dogs. After leading the collection home, he picked the one he wanted and ran the rest off.

My father never bagged a raccoon with the dog. After many nights and miles of walking with the animal, he eventually discovered that, rather than running ahead and searching for raccoons, the dog ran ahead then looped around and followed my father along the trail, staying just beyond the range of the lantern light so my father couldn’t see him.



. . .



On Cedros Island, a sanctuary for California sea lions and northern elephant seals, hundreds of the animals swayed and bellowed their presence on the beach near where my father anchored. Around the cove, high rugged mountains climbed from the green water. An occasional cloud spilled over the tops from the other side. Seals swam near the boat and barked as Dad sat in the pilothouse in his chair and sipped coffee, his feet propped on the edge of the chart table as he watched their smooth, bullet bodies shoot and slide effortlessly through the water around the boat.

The seals, the cove, the water, and the mountains combined to make a striking image of nature’s wild beauty. Like the pristine tropical cays of the Belize barrier reef, and the surging, mountainous coasts of Panama and Honduras, it became one of many spectacular scenes he experienced during his journey―the kind of scene that coats one’s life in memory and stirs them, if alone, to want someone to share it with.

As nature’s theater played in front of him, my father noted in his log:



Wish all my loved ones could be here this evening.





Log - June 18: Got up 2:00 a.m. to go but wind gusting over the mountains—Went back to bed—Wind down by morning—Very light all day—Beautiful day—Fried last of eggs and bacon.





My father left Cedros Island at one-thirty the next morning with no wind and only light fog to cross the open waters of the Bahia Sebastian Vizcaino. He arrived at the San Carlos Anchorage twelve hours later, just as the winds came up and blew the fog away. The two sail boats from San Francisco that had anchored next to him at Cedros Island followed a short time later.



Log - June 20: Left 7:00 a.m.—Heavy fog—Passed Sacramento Reef about 10:00 a.m. but couldn’t see for the fog—Running with compass and depth sounder—News says two ships ran together in the fog this morning about 50 miles from here; one sunk—Also fishing boat hit a trimaran yacht and the Coast Guard looking for it—Anchored in lee of San Martin Island; nearly ran into it in the fog—Three men came out from a little fishing village wanting drinking water; gave them eight gallon jugs—Fog so thick I can’t see the island—Hope its better tomorrow—Boiled eggs, canned pears, can Beefaroni.





A Gray whale surfaced directly in front of the boat as my father headed toward Punta Santo Tomas. In the afternoon the fog lifted, uncovering great fields of kelp south of Ensenada. Ensenada was where, a year earlier, John Delling claimed the Red Dog would arrive on the train.

Dad anchored near Ensenada for his final night along the Mexican coast before reaching the United States border. Depending on weather, it could take another month before reaching Washington’s Cape Flattery and the Strait of Juan de Fuca where he would finally enter inland waters and escape the roll, pound, and jar of the seemingly endless ocean.

But even though nearly fifteen-hundred miles of open Pacific coastline stretched ahead of him, when he anchored that night, only eighty miles lay between him and his home country.



. . .



Planning to go into port the next morning, my father anchored off a San Diego beach on June 22. Three months had passed since he had crossed the southern border of the United States near Port Isabel, Texas, where he and Irving entered the Gulf of Mexico.

His approach and arrival at the southern border on the West Coast near San Diego provided a sunset of relief on the long day of his journey. No longer would he have problems communicating. No longer would his body resist the torrid climate. The comfort that comes with the familiarity of home, allowed him to shed layers of anxiety that had wrapped around him so tightly. But the comfort he experienced was a chameleon, and before long, its color would change to fear.



. . .



My father noted in the log that evening:



Good to be back in the USA. Air off the land smells hot. Lights of the city very beautiful in the night.





SECTION FIVE

San Diego to Bellingham





14





Danger and a Baby Duck

San Diego to Monterey



THE MORNING AFTER crossing the Mexico-United States border, my father cruised the Red Dog into San Diego Bay, sailing between Point Loma and North Island to the south end of Shelter Island where he cleared Customs and settled at a dock shared by the Harbor Police. Point Loma, a steep, wind-swept promontory which curved west of the city, protected downtown San Diego from the waves of the Pacific. Tucked inside the point sat North Island, the bulbous end of the sweeping Coronado Peninsula that curved from the south and paralleled the mainland to capture San Diego Bay on three sides and create one of the world’s great natural harbors.



Log - June 23: Went into the harbor about 10:00 after fog lifted—Harbor police let me tie up at their dock for three days—No charge—Nice—Called Pretty Lady—Went to grocery store—Must be at least 2000 yachts in this basin—Many of them very big and expensive.





The clearing fog revealed San Diego’s cityscape to the east. After getting the Red Dog situated, my father immediately called my mother.

“Well..I made it to San Diego.”

“Oh thank goodness…How’s it feel to be back in the good ole’ USA?”

“Real good, feels real good.”

“You’re a little ahead of yourself aren’t you?”

“A couple days I ran till nearly dark, longer than usual.”

Dad then told her about some of the wildlife and scenery he had encountered along the Pacific coast.

“When will you get to Bellingham?” Mom asked.

“I’ll be here for two or three days I guess, then it’ll probably be four or five weeks to Bellingham. I’ll call somewhere along the way.”

“I’ll call Mother and tell her I heard from you. I’m going up there early to visit for a while before you get there.”

Viola had lived in Bellingham for nine months since Mom and Dad helped her move there from California during the Delling fiasco in October of 1972.

Dad and Mom talked more about his plans for going up the Pacific Coast, then ended their conversation with Dad adding, “See you in Bellingham.”

After asking the harbor police where he could buy groceries, my father left the harbor and took off down the street. Walking on solid ground felt great on his feet and legs. With no need to counterbalance his body with the motion of the sea, or to hold onto anything for support, he enjoyed walking the streets after nearly twenty days of hobby horsing in the ocean since leaving Manzanillo. He returned to the Red Dog with two bags of groceries, one in each arm, filled with fresh milk, fruit, bread, and doughnuts.



Log - June 24: Sail boat with lone man next to me just arrived from Chile—Three months alone—Says he’s had it with sailing—Got his papers to stay in the U.S.A.





Having arrived in San Diego, Dad figured he had left the worst of the trip behind him. Even though hundreds of miles of open-ocean coastline lay ahead, having successfully sailed around Central America and Mexico gave him renewed confidence in the Red Dog and in his ability to navigate rough seas. He guessed that sailing north along the Pacific Coast of the United States would present no problems greater than those he had already faced, especially with the language barrier now gone.

Although relieved to be back in the States, my father had not felt a hundred percent himself since leaving Belize City. After some improvement between Panama and Puntarenas, he had worn himself down again at Manzanillo. So he spent his time in San Diego washing clothes, listening to baseball games, and taking naps. Each morning after the fog cleared, he watched the sun move above the tall buildings of the city, then each evening, watched it drop from sight over Point Loma, pulling a broad veil of pink and red behind it.

The day before he planned to leave San Diego, he walked to town to purchase nautical charts for the trip up the coast to Washington. The next morning he felt weak and dizzy. He returned to bed and waited another day.



Log - June 28 (Partial): Feeling O.K.—Left for fuel dock 7:00 a.m.—Man had said I could buy 1000 gallons—When I got there they said head office said no new accounts—No fuel—Went to another dock—Bought 950 gallons—Got out of harbor about 9:30.





As my father left San Diego’s harbor and headed north, my mother left Arkansas and headed to Bellingham.



. . .



Sharks sliced through the water around the Red Dog as my father crossed the Gulf of Santa Catalina and sailed east of Catalina Island to where he anchored north of Newport Beach. He traveled all the next day in fog, navigating past Los Angeles toward Santa Barbara.

Fog occurred daily along the southern California coast in late June as northwesterly winds brushed across the temperate offshore waters. The winds accumulated moisture as they skimmed thousands of square miles of the Pacific’s surface. The moisture-saturated air then moved eastward to collide with the cooler air above the California Current, condensing into massive swells of fog.

The fog thinned some as Dad passed through an occasional fogdog, thickening again between the Channel Islands and Santa Barbara. An oily film kaleidoscoped on the surface of the water for twenty miles, likely from one of the natural oil seeps in the area. As the Red Dog moved north, the fog became so dense that Dad could barely make out land forms. He slowed the boat and periodically sounded the fog horn.

Having studied the nautical charts before leaving San Diego, he felt confident of his location. Refusing to let the weather completely fogbound him, he kept a close eye on the compass and depth sounder, watching for near-shore shoals and reefs, as well as offshore hazards, especially other vessels.

“Rats.”

My father strained his eyes for hours trying to see through the fog’s leaden wall of mist and eek out shadowy silhouettes of boats or oil platforms that might suddenly appear. Though the fog made navigating difficult, the water stayed moderately calm until mid-afternoon. Then, shortly before reaching Point Conception, a hard, cold wind began blasting the Red Dog.



. . .



Point Conception—The Devil’s Jaw, Cape Horn of the Pacific, Graveyard of Ships—claimed a deadly reputation.

From the distant eye of a seagull, Point Conception looked like paradise. Deep shades of blue washed around the windswept headland where the coast curved south from Point Arguello to Point Conception and then cut abruptly eastward. The blue then paled as the California current swept from the point through the Santa Barbara Channel between the Channel Islands and the western coast of southern California. The rugged brown and green promontory cast sharp shadows on itself. The white tower of the lighthouse rose high above the water. The Channel Islands stood from the coast like backs of breaching whales.

But up close, for the mariner, Point Conception had become a watery burial site where a harbor of ships littered its waters with their skeletons. The dramatic eastern surge of the coastline from the point resulted in a submerged borderland pocked with deep holes in the ocean floor. Prevailing winds and currents slid easily along the Pacific coast from the north until they collided with the protruding wall of Point Conception. There, the water piled up on itself then wrenched around the point to continue south, resulting in snarling tide rips. When the southbound California current curled around the point and flowed across the rise and fall of the ocean floor, turbulent eddies churned above the borderland. Northwest winds jammed against the headland then shot fiercely around it, creating a fearful combination of blustering wind and savage waves.

About sailing past Point Conception in 1834, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. wrote in Two Years Before the Mast:



The breeze died away at night, and we were becalmed all day on Sunday, about half way between Santa Barbara and Point Conception. Sunday night we had a light, fair wind, which set us up again; and having a fine sea-breeze on the first part of Monday, we had the prospect of passing, without any trouble, Point Conception, Cape Horn of California, where it begins to blow the first of January, and blows all the year round. Toward the latter part of the afternoon, however, the regular north-west wind, as usual, set in, which brought in our studding-sails, and gave us the chance of bearing round the point, which we were now just abreast of, and which stretched off into the Pacific, high, rocky and barren, forming the central point of the coast for hundreds of miles north and south. A cap-full of wind will be a bag-full here, and before night our royals were furled, and the ship was laboring hard under her top-gallant sails. At eight bells our watch went below, leaving her with as much sail as she could stagger under, the water flying over the forecastle at every plunge. It was evidently blowing harder, but then there was not a cloud in the sky, and the sun had gone down bright.





Area mariners knew the hazards of Point Conception well. Local Harbormasters held many stories of boaters who tried several times to travel around the point, only to return to Santa Barbara—some so frustrated that they loaded their boat on a trailer for the trip home, or actually sold the boat there. Even a marriage or two had dissolved because of terrifying encounters with the point.

As my father moved the Red Dog around the end of Point Conception the afternoon of June 30, only minutes passed before he encountered his own trouble. Strong rip currents yanked at the boat. The wind grated against the tide and currents, making the waves, which rapidly appeared higher than the boat, steep and dangerously close together. Dad knew if he tried to turn around, the boat would swamp as soon as it became parallel to the waves, giving him no choice but to continue on course. As far as he could tell, no other boats were around; he was alone in an instantly violent sea.

Their narrow troughs left little room between the steep waves, and the nose of the Red Dog charged into each wall of water, carving its way from one to the next. The steel hull banged against the water as it dropped from the back of one wave into the face of the next. Anything loose in the pilothouse and cabin now lay or rolled on the floor, bumping and knocking against walls and bulkheads. Mercilessly, the water wrenched the boat back and forth.

Dad suddenly felt fortunate he had used double-pane safety glass in the boat’s windows when breaking waves began pounding against the pilothouse and cabin. The hull of the Red Dog shuddered with each wall of water that crashed across the bow. One of the aft cabin doors came open in the violent thrusts and drops of the boat, but he did not dare leave the wheel to secure it. The top hinge of the door tore loose from the frame and the door twisted and flopped against the deck on its remaining hinge like a caught fish. A loose barrel on the back deck rolled and banged against the steel bulkheads like a firing cannon.

The storm my father endured months earlier on the Gulf of Mexico worried him, but nothing like he now experienced near Point Conception. As the Red Dog took the worst beating so far on the trip, his thoughts raced to the four bolts he had used to mount the two-thousand-pound engine and gearbox to the steel frame of the boat. Believing them substantial when he constructed the boat in his yard four years earlier, the bolts now seemed depressingly inadequate as the Red Dog bounced and bucked across the water.

For the first time since beginning his journey from Arkansas to Alaska, my father feared for his life, afraid the Red Dog could not withstand the brute force of Point Conception seas much longer. Even if the boat held together, the crushing waves placed him in immediate danger of swamping and sinking. He could not turn loose of the steering wheel, not even to radio for help.

Dad’s thoughts flashed to us kids and to Mom waiting for him in Bellingham. After so much time and effort, after so many years and dreams, he feared his long journey had neared a brutal, watery end.



. . .



My father feared losing his life once before. In the late 1940s, Morrison-Knudson paid him a dollar-twenty-five an hour to work as a carpenter on construction of the Fort Gibson Dam in Oklahoma. When completed, the dam would harness the Grand River and form the twenty-thousand-acre Fort Gibson Lake, stretching nearly three-thousand feet across the Grand River and standing one-hundred-ten feet above the streambed.

Dad built draft tubes for power house spillways and constructed forms for the concrete that shaped the huge wall of the dam. Working on forms one afternoon, he and a coworker stood high on the face of the dam when he felt the plank beneath him shift. Dad instinctively grabbed hold of a rope that, fastened from above, hung near his side. Then, before either he or his coworker could call for help, the plank gave way and the scaffolding that held them collapsed into a jumble of wood and steel below.

Holding onto the rope, my father pushed his feet against the concrete forms and swung himself to a temporary utility pole, on which he slid down to safety. Besides the trauma of the accident, his only injury consisted of a wide sliver of wood from the electric pole that drove itself deep into the palm of his hand. His coworker, however, had tumbled several feet to the ground and became tragically and permanently paralyzed.

At Point Conception, my father once again felt the scaffolding shift beneath him. He expected his world was about to collapse.



. . .



The winds and waters of Point Conception pounded the Red Dog for more than an hour—an eternity to my father as he held the boat against the storm. His arms ached from fighting the steering wheel. His eyes and face muscles tired from the tension. His legs weakened from the hard drops of the boat.

Finally, though, as the Red Dog moved north of the point, the water began to release the boat from its turbulent clutches. And at the first opportunity, Dad ducked into an open bay between Point Conception and Point Arguello, moving to the north end of the bay for better protection from the blasting wind as it continued its assault on the coast.

My father surveyed the boat for damage. The aft cabin door had come completely unhinged and lay cockeyed in its opening. Other than the door, tipped over barrels, and odds and ends strewn over the floor and deck, everything seemed to be in working order.

“Still a lot of white stuff out there,” the radio crackled and hissed as fishing boat captains talked back and forth about gales to the north.

Over the next two days, while my father waited out the storm, a tiny duck about the size of his fist began hanging around the boat. The duck eyed Dad part of the time and dove the rest, probably going to the bottom and catching bugs, Dad guessed. He noted:



A fish is liable to get him as small as he is.





Though the winds remained a relentless enemy, my father felt fortunate to have made it past Point Conception, and the pendulum of his emotions swung from fearing for his life to the high spirits of having survived. His relief revealed itself in the ship’s log as he teased about the duck, knowing Mom would read it later.



Log - July 2: Water still rough outside—Stay put—Saw a feather floating by the boat—Thought maybe that was all that was left of my little duck but he bobbed up a while ago like a cork—If I can tow him close to the boat I might fry him for supper—Weather seems to be getting better—Heard the fishing boats talking about how rough it is—If it’s rough for them, I’m better off here—My little duck is drifting closer—I think he’s asleep—I just as well eat him, he seems to be all alone and no one will miss him—I’ll get my dip net ready—5:00 pm, time for Dodgers ball game—They said it was on TV—Tonight I’ll listen while Pretty Lady watches—Make me feel a little closer—Fried duck and gravy—Wind blowing hard from the north again—Mouth sore—Wish I had some Peppermint Schnapps—Maybe get some at Monterey if the wind ever stops blowing.





Log - July 3: 6:00 a.m., wind blowing hard from north—Think maybe just blowing down from mountains—Water doesn’t look so bad—Left 7:30 a.m.—A mistake—Wind blowing hard and water still rough—Make 40 miles north and anchor in San Luis Obispo Bay 1:50 p.m.—Wish I hadn’t eaten my little duck—He was nice—Didn’t taste very good either—He thought the boat was his mama—Heard a fisherman talking about how long the water is staying rough—Won’t be able to walk on the dock when he gets in unless its rocking—Just heard the Monterey Coast Guard give a warning for high winds and rough seas north of here—Chili, boiled eggs.





The next day the Coast Guard issued more small craft warnings from Point St. George, Oregon, south to Point Conception. Dad stayed put another day and wrote in his log:



I didn’t really eat him; he got away.





. . .



On July 5 he left his anchorage early in no wind, which switched to a hard blow by ten that morning, forcing him to anchor only an hour later near a public park and beach in a small bay at San Simeon. Above him, Hearst Castle sat high on La Cuesta Encantada—The Enchanted Hill. He waited on the boat until the late afternoon then took the skiff to shore. The park had closed but he found a working telephone and called Mom.

The bay, empty when he arrived, quickly filled with other boaters who, like my father, wanted to escape the bullish wind and waves. Since the time Dad had rowed to shore, the waves at the beach had grown into crashing breakers. After finishing his telephone call, he stood by his skiff and watched a man from a sail boat put his dingy in the water and row with his two dogs to the beach. The man had a tough time, but eventually made it through the breakers and into shore. Three fellows from another boat who tried to bring their rubber raft ashore, however, flipped completely over.

“Excuse me, are you going back to your boat now?”

My father turned to find a man and his dog approaching him.

“Yeah, pretty quick.”

The man pointed to a boat anchored in the bay.

“My friends dropped me off and I need to get back. Do you think you could give me a ride?”

“Yeah…sure, hop in.”

The man jumped into the skiff with his dog scrambling after him. My father then pushed the skiff away from shore and stepped into the boat himself. As soon as they got near the breakers, a wave burst over them, swamping the boat and washing the three of them back to shore like flotsam.

Soaking wet, Dad said, “Let me try it alone, then I’ll go let your people know.”

He moved up the beach and made it through the breakers. When he went to the man’s boat and told the people on board about their friend, they left to rescue him from the beach.

My father remained at anchor another day due to outside wind warnings. He pulled as close as he could to the beach at the sheltered end of the bay, leaving only enough room for the Red Dog to swing around with the tide. A large yacht soon came into the bay and squeezed between the Red Dog and the shore. After giving Dad a series of scowls, the captain of the yacht decided my father wasn’t going to move and left.

With the Santa Lucia Mountain Range behind him, Dad waited out the weather and fed crackers to the seagulls.



A mistake.





The gulls sat on the boat railing and refused to fly when he waved or yelled at them. He had to get close to them to get them to move. When they did move, they simply flew to the other end of the boat.



Log - July 7: Left San Simeon Bay 6:00 a.m.—Wind up and rough by 8:00—Anchored 11:30 in what the chart called a landing; a little protection, but very bumpy all night.





My father had anchored along the coast of Big Sur where the western slopes of the Santa Lucia Range dropped abruptly into the Pacific to form rugged headlands and deep coves with occasional sheltered beaches.

Continuing north, he passed Carmel Beach where a large ocean sunfish, a Mola mola, lay on the surface of the water, seeming to pay no attention to the boat. Approximately eight feet long and six feet wide, its huge head occupied most of its body. Also known as a headfish, such sunfish can grow up to one thousand pounds and thirteen feet long. A poor swimmer, the Mola mola got its name from its practice of floating on its side and sunning itself.

Boats sitting out the weather filled Monterey Bay when Dad moved the Red Dog in on July 8 and dropped anchor. He rowed his skiff to shore to call Mom, now at Viola’s house in Bellingham. After buying groceries, he returned and watched fishermen unloading hauls of salmon. An otter floated on its back and scratched its belly, then dove and played around the Red Dog. Passengers on board a trimaran that anchored next to Dad included a bright-colored parrot.

Monterey, a town that brings John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row to mind, brought conflicted memories to my father. Though trouble permeated his last visit to the area when he and Mom waited in Carmel for Delling to deliver the Red Dog, fond memories of earlier years when our family traveled from Oklahoma to Carmel to visit Elmer and Viola, soon pushed to the surface. Sipping his coffee in the wheelhouse, Dad recalled the time Elmer drove our family along the Seventeen-Mile Drive, stopping often so we could listen to the rush and surge of the ocean, smell the salt air up close, feel the mist of the breakers, and search tide pools for colorful creatures. He fondly remembered the trip to Fisherman’s Wharf with us kids where seals barked and swayed from one flipper to the other on the docks, and bobbed like buoys in the water.



. . .



For three days my father wanted to leave Monterey Bay, but each day the Coast Guard raised the small craft warning flag. With reported gales and rough seas, several more boats dodged into the bay to escape the worst of the weather.

Again, the morning of July 12, Dad woke up to see the warning flag still flapping.

“Rats,” he said and went back to bed.



Log - July 12: Sleep late—Stay on boat all day—Windy and cold—Coast Guard removed warning flag about noon—7:00 p.m. Coast Guard warns gales to the north 25 to 45 knots and 15’ seas—No warning for this area—Hope it’s not too foggy in the morning.





The weather finally settled enough and Dad prepared to leave Monterey Bay the morning of July 13. As he refueled the Red Dog, the radio broadcast the news that a thirty-eight-foot boat had sunk near Point Conception.





15





Fools Rush Inland

Monterey to Bellingham



Log - July 13: Left Monterey Fuel Dock 8:35—Water still lumpy but wind from south and behind me—Good going—Anchored in Half Moon Bay 4:45—Saw a very large ocean sun fish laying on the surface about 3 ½ feet long and 2 feet wide—they seem to pay no attention to the boat—Anchored inside breakwater—Still water—Good for sleeping—Fried hamburger.





WINDS BLEW HARD early the next morning and my father remained at anchor for a second day.



Log - July 15: Left Half Moon Bay 6:15—Wind light from south—Fog and overcast—Good going—Passed Golden Gate about 15 miles offshore to avoid winds and currents—Just crossed wake, but can’t see the boat for the fog—Fog lifted 3:00, water very smooth, see the coast for the first time today—Anchor in Haven Anchorage 7:30—Two trollers came in just ahead of me and seven after—Ran all day without any spray!—Chili and iced tea.





Paralleling the King Mountain Range and rounding Punta Gorda and Cape Mendocino, rough water calmed again by the time Dad anchored at Trinidad Head the next evening. A beautiful harbor, Trinidad Bay lay surrounded by a high coastline with rugged rock formations. When night closed on the bay, lights glimmered from the community of Trinidad nested on a bluff above the water.

North of Trinidad he cruised past the Redwood National Park, home to thousands of acres of some of the tallest redwood trees in the world. Our family once visited the park after a trip to Carmel. There, Dad boosted me up so I could climb onto the top of one of the tree’s huge stumps where I walked, stomped, jumped, and sat on the great table of wood. The deep grooves in the bark swallowed the length of my hand.

Calm weather stayed with my father as he crossed the California-Oregon border. He settled into Mack Arch Cove for the evening, about ten miles north of Brookings. The ocean crashed around Mach Arch rock, surging in and out of the rock’s open doorway, bursting into fine sprays and fingers of foam that clawed at its base.



Log - July 19: Left Arch Cove 6:10 a.m.—Weather still fog and overcast—No wind—Anchored Port Orford 10:25; rowed ashore—Called Pretty Lady—Bought groceries and water pump grease for rudder—Built hamburger—8:00 p.m. a large Gray whale just made a U-Turn around the boat, surfacing several times between the boat and the rocks of the cove—So close I could smell his bad breath.





Port Orford, Oregon’s oldest coastal town and the rainiest place on the Oregon coast, was a natural deep-water port located on a bulge of land hooking into the deep waters of the Pacific. Pacific Gray whales often inhabited its quiet, protected coves, most evident in spring and summer. Some whales remained along the Pacific coast and never continued north to feeding areas in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska. In winter the whales returned to calving grounds in the lagoons of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, such as Scammon’s Lagoon near Cedros Island where Dad anchored nearly a month earlier.

My father left Port Orford in light fog. He swung the Red Dog to the west to avoid Orford Reef before turning north again to pass Cape Blanco. Unusually calm seas greeted him, along with a pair of whales that spouted and rolled off Cape Arago at mid-morning. Off the coast of Coos Bay and further north, he encountered two more pods of whales spouting, breaching, splashing flukes and fins, and churning their way north.

A green and rugged Oregon coast with steep bluffs dropped into the rolling Pacific. Evergreens covered long stretches of the coast and capped grass-covered headlands and steep precipices. Huge rocks stood alone off the beaches like sentinels.

Taking advantage of smooth seas and good weather, my father traveled for sixteen hours—about one-hundred-twenty miles—before pulling into Yaquina Bay at Newport at ten in the evening. Unfamiliar with the bay and unsure where to anchor, he called the Coast Guard who met and escorted him under the historic Yaquina Bay bridge which carries Highway 101, to a place he could anchor overnight. After filling out the ship’s log, he climbed into bed at eleven-thirty, very tired after such a long, nonstop day.



Don’t know if I can make myself get up and go in the morning or not.





My father moved the Red Dog to a wharf near town the next morning, hoping to find a grocery store within walking distance. Though the wharf was not a floating structure, Dad figured he would be gone only a short time and secured the boat to the understructure of the wharf, then climbed the attached ladder to the top of the dock. By the time he returned, however, the tide had risen dramatically. The bow rope he had tied to the piling brace stubbornly held the boat in place in the rising tide, and water now steeped much of the Red Dog’s bow. Dad climbed down the wharf ladder, took out his pocket knife, and reaching down as far as he could into the water, cut the rope. The boat buoyed back to the surface of the water.

Out of Yaquina Bay, Dad saw another monster Mola mola,



As big as a sheet of plywood.





At noon he passed Haystack Rock off of Cape Kiwanda, a monolithic giant standing off shore. Like a skyscraper sitting in a pasture, the rock defied visual logic as it surged tall and massive from the flat beach.

Two days later, after passing Tillamook Head, my father neared the mouth of the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border. Like Point Conception, local mariners knew the potential danger posed by the merging waters where the Columbia River emptied into the Pacific Ocean. The sediment that washes down the river fills in the area around the mouth as it spills and spreads into the ocean, making the water shallow. As ocean swells move east and break against the coast, the sea water rides upon the shallow sediment and collides with the river water flowing west. Where the two meet, the waters can, depending on tides and wind conditions, become riotous.

When my father approached the mouth of the river, winds eased and only a light rain fell. He angled the Red Dog far out and around the mouth of the river then turned north again near Cape Disappointment, slipping by any trouble the Columbia might have presented him.

As he passed the mouth of the river, though, he encountered several boats trolling for salmon. The boats had ganged up, making it difficult to get through. Not wanting to maneuver around the group, Dad stayed on course and cut between them. One of the trollers turned his boat angrily across and in front of the Red Dog, irritated that Dad had apparently crossed their troll lines.

With almost no wind in the afternoon, my father continued up the coast of Washington and past Long Beach Peninsula, a long strand of land that forms the west coast of Willapa Bay. Further north he passed Gray’s Harbor, then, after an exhausting day of traveling one-hundred-thirty miles, anchored off the Washington coast near Destruction Island. There he rested and watched the sun dip into the Pacific in the west, darkening Mount Olympus to the east.

My father carefully navigated through masses of kelp early the next day, hoping to avoid the kelp from entangling the boat’s rudder. High clouds leveled the upper peaks of the Olympic Mountains. By noon he had sailed the remainder of the western coast of the Olympic Peninsula and approached Cape Flattery and Tatoosh Island.

A lighthouse sat above the high rock bluffs of windswept Tatoosh Island, a pivot point around which he rounded Cape Flattery and headed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. An eighty-mile-long channel, the Strait of Juan de Fuca separated Washington’s Olympic Peninsula from the southern end of British Columbia’s Vancouver Island.

By entering the Strait of Juan de Fuca, my father reached another milestone in his journey. After more than four months of sailing in open ocean waters, he had finally entered inland waters.

Though the open-ocean travel between Texas and Washington had provided a source of beauty and discovery, it also held a thunderhead of anxiety that hovered relentlessly above my father’s journey. Now, he no longer had to face the jarring vulnerability of cruising long distances in unprotected waters, giving him a sense of safety he had not experienced since leaving Texas. In turning from the open ocean to inland waterways he had turned from a dangerous freeway onto a country road, from a raging river into a meadow stream, from the bluster of Point Conception to the calm of the baby duck.

After entering the strait, Dad sailed another six hours before anchoring along the northern shore of the Olympic Peninsula near Observatory Point, west of Port Angeles. To the northeast, Bellingham lay less than a day’s run away. He ate his dinner then rested in his chair in the pilothouse, watching other boats move up and down the waterway. The beam from a Vancouver Island lighthouse flashed across the strait.

My father leaned back and propped up his feet. It was great to be done with the open ocean.



. . .



Log - July 24: Left 7:15 a.m. after trouble with kelp—Snowy Olympics shining in back of me—Mount Baker ahead.





My father cruised east along the Strait of Juan De Fuca toward Bellingham. Slats of sunshine angled between broken clouds. A light gauze of gray draped the distant mountains. To the south he passed Admiralty Inlet which led to Puget Sound and the Seattle area where he and Mom lived for two years near the end of World War II.

Two events had caused my folks to leave Oklahoma and move to Seattle in 1943. The first was the death of their second child, Wayne. Born on July 10, 1942, on my parents’ second wedding anniversary and one day after Mom’s 20th birthday, Wayne was born one month premature, with underdeveloped lungs. And like the tiny flash of a firefly on a summer night, his brief life shone for only a single day.

The death of Wayne shook my mother deeply. Her worst nightmare, the loss of a child, had come true. Extremely fragile when it came to the well-being of her children, she once told a door-to-door life insurance salesman, “If something happens to one of my kids, I sure don’t want you handing me any money for it.”

Shortly after the death of the baby, they received a second blow when the Grand River overflowed its banks and floated their barn from its foundation, washing it against the house and destroying both structures. When the water receded, it took the crops, washing away the fields as deep as my father and grandfather had plowed them, stripping from the land the fertile topsoil they tilled, planted, and sweated over the previous year.

In the wake of the flood and the death, my folks decided to move to the Pacific Northwest. Mom missed the Northwest where she lived part of her childhood, and several of her relatives still resided in and around Bellingham and Seattle. And my father, who had never traveled outside of the Arkansas-Oklahoma area, relished the thought of seeing “big” water and the mountains he dreamed about. So, with my mother’s desire to return “home” and my father’s desire to venture beyond familiar boundaries, they made preparations to move.

With the United States having entered World War II, the government needed workers on the West Coast for war-related construction and manufacturing. Dad hoped to get hired as a carpenter in Seattle, but worried that his sparse tool collection would prevent him from appearing as a serious carpenter to a prospective employer. Not only could he not afford new tools, but new ones glistened with inexperience. So, he looked for used ones.

“An old fellow that worked here died a while back and left these.” The lumberyard employee pointed to a bundle of tools on the floor.

“How about five dollars for the bunch?”

With a nod from the man, Dad carried off a leather tool belt and a wooden carrier filled with good, used carpenter’s tools.

Possessing a few war bonds and money saved from Dad’s job at the Oklahoma powder plant, my folks paid four-hundred dollars for a gray, 1936 Ford to drive to Seattle. In addition, the doctor who had taken care of Mom when the baby died gave them a note allowing them to receive rationed gas for the trip.

The government issued A, B, C, T, and X stickers during America’s gas rationing period, which began in 1942: ‘A’ for nonessential use of one’s automobile, ‘B’ for driving considered essential to the war effort and for health, ‘C’ for those with occupations such as physicians, ministers, etc., ‘T’ for trucks, farm equipment, and other vehicles and deemed essential, and ‘X’ for VIPs.

Mom and Dad took the doctor’s note to the nearest OPA (Office of Price Administration) and, because Dad planned to work in a war-related industry and Mom had the note for health reasons, the OPA gave Dad a ‘B’ sticker for his windshield and a coupon book of ration stamps allowing him to purchase eight gallons of gasoline per week.

So, with two-year-old Donald in the back seat of their new car and a ration book in my mother’s purse, my parents left for Seattle in June of 1943.

Having never left the Arkansas-Oklahoma area the first twenty-seven years of his life, the evergreen-covered terrain and cool, misty climate enthralled my father. He delighted in seeing the large ferries, ships, and boats cruising across Puget Sound. He marveled at the huge wharfs and piers that lined the Seattle waterfront. The Northwest presented him with a landscape unlike any he had ever experienced.

Mom and Dad moved in with relatives and, the day after arriving, Dad headed for the Seattle employment office. There he found a line of government contractor representatives waiting at tiny desks. The first man he talked with, hired him on the spot.

“If you could see and walk, they hired you,” he told Mom.

Dad became a shipwright in Barbee Marine’s Kennydale shipyard. As shipwright he received a military deferment and government housing in the Renton Highlands. He and Mom lived in the Renton Highlands for three months before Gene, a lively baby with the eyes of my father and the affable nature of my mother, was born in a Tacoma hospital in November of 1943.

In 1944 the building frenzy of the war slowed and Barbee Marine began cutting personnel. My father preferred to keep his job at the shipyards where he had worked for the past year and a half, but with a wife and two toddler sons depending on him, he took a new job with the Boeing aircraft company. Boeing offered him work as a guard on a crash boat patrolling Lake Washington. Though he missed the carpentry work of the shipyards, working on board a boat also sat well with him.





Melvin on Boeing crash boat (second from left), Seattle, Washington, 1944.



The runway for testing Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress bombers, the type of planes that eventually dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rested at the south end of Lake Washington with the flight path centered over the lake. The crash boat was a fast, twenty-eight-foot rig equipped with rescue and survival equipment. Whenever a B-29 came off the runway on a test flight, the crew of the crash boat ran the boat full speed parallel to the flight path in case the plane had trouble. None of the planes crashed in Lake Washington while Dad worked aboard the crash boat, but he and his fellow crew members “had some great boat rides.”

Occasionally, my father’s duties required him to patrol the Boeing plant complex on a motorcycle—a task that soon ended his work with the company altogether. One afternoon he jumped on the starter and, when the ratchet failed, slammed his foot against the concrete. The accident cracked his kneecap. Unable to work with his injury, he received orders to report for enlistment. He reported on crutches.

“Return in sixty days after your knee has healed,” the recruiter told him.

Before sixty days passed, the war ended.





Donald and Gene wearing Melvin’s

security guard gear, Renton,

Washington, 1944.



After the war, the government canceled its orders for bombers and Boeing began a massive layoff that would leave thirty-thousand workers without jobs. Shipyards auctioned surplus barges for next to nothing to salvage businesses. The salvage companies beached the barges, waited for low tide, then burned them and took the iron.

“They had the pick of the forest for material to build those barges,” Dad once told me. “It was great wood. It was a huge waste.”

With the Boeing layoffs, my father knew he would have difficulty finding work after his knee healed, and he and Mom considered a move to Alaska. They loved living in the Pacific Northwest. The closeness of the mountains and water, and the area’s cool climate suited them well. Feeling as if they resided on Alaska’s doorstep, the lure of what might lay further north stirred their imaginations. Dad had not forgotten the photograph of the cabin in his fourth grade geography book, and now, so near to the place of his dreams, the desire to see Alaska took hold of him like never before.

He discussed the possible move with his father.

“What would you want to go some place like that for?” George responded.

George argued that construction of a new Oldsmobile dealership showroom would soon begin in Wagoner, Oklahoma, and my father had a job there if he wanted it.

“Why would you want to take off to Alaska when you have a good job waiting for you at home?” he kept asking.

Still a territory, Alaska remained thirteen years from statehood and, my father admitted, a world of unknowns for a couple with two small sons, a third child on the way, and no knowledge of what job or housing, if any, might lay ahead. So, with the influence of Dad’s parents and a guarantee of work pulling them, my folks left the Pacific Northwest and returned to Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma, where Jerry and I were born, my folks bought one-hundred acres, built a home, and put together a farm where our family lived on and off for the next twenty years. My parents’ dream of living in the North did not die, however. On the large wallpapered wall, hanging above the dining-room table where most families we knew hung a painting of the Last Supper, they hung a large map of Alaska.



. . .



From the Strait of Juan De Fuca to Ketchikan, Alaska, Dad would encounter only two areas along the Inside Passage to Alaska that opened directly to the Pacific, at the southern end of Queen Charlotte Sound and at Dixon Entrance. These did not concern him though, as they amounted to relatively small gaps in the seven-hundred-mile run along the inland waterway to Ketchikan. And considering what he had already experienced on his journey, especially at Point Conception, they seemed insignificant. They might, however, concern Mom, who would join him aboard the Red Dog from Bellingham to Ketchikan. He hoped, for her sake, the crossings would go smoothly.

Because the exceptionally mild weather along the Oregon and Washington coasts had allowed him to travel extra long days, Dad arrived in Bellingham earlier than expected. After moving into Bellingham Bay in the middle of the afternoon and docking the Red Dog in a Bellingham yacht basin, he decided not to call Mom, but instead walk to Viola’s house and surprise her.

A town of less than sixty thousand, twenty-five miles south of the Canadian border, Bellingham was crowned with Victorian and early-day architecture. Viola lived on Grant Street in a sparse, two-bedroom, gray house with white trim, only a few blocks from downtown Bellingham and Bellingham Bay. A straight concrete walkway dissected the small green yard in front of her house, stopping abruptly short of the street. A planter box hung below each window of the little house. Because age had eroded Viola’s ability to do her own gardening, she had filled each box with a line of plastic flowers. The once brilliant reds, blues, and yellows of the fake flowers had faded into an array of pastels.

Viola and my mother were sitting in the front room watching a baseball game when they heard the knock. Mom opened the front door to find Dad standing on the porch. He looked thinner and worn out.

“Well look who’s here!” she said as her look of surprise softened into a smile.

“Fools rush in...” Dad said as they embraced.





SECTION SIX

Inside Passage

Bellingham to Ketchikan





16





A Bath and a Bottle of Pop

Bellingham to Ketchikan



AUGUST 14, TWELVE days after departing Bellingham, Mom was terrified. She sat on the couch in the main cabin and braced herself with her legs locked straight and feet pressed tight against the base of the cast-iron wood stove. As her body rocked with the movement of the boat, she tried not to look at the waves rising and falling outside the windows of the cabin, but like a schoolyard fight, couldn’t help but watch. With the heaving and dipping of the boat, the waves seemed giant to her as she watched sky then water, sky then water, appear and disappear in the windows. Thoughts of turning the boat around thumped inside her head.

Holding onto anything within reach, she got up and made her way up to the pilothouse where my father stood at the wheel, his feet spread beneath him to steady himself as he held the boat perpendicular to the waves.

They were crossing Dixon Entrance, known for its rough waters and one of only two places along the Inside Passage which, without barrier islands, lay exposed to a wide swath of the open Pacific. Because Dad had navigated the Red Dog in blasting winds and high seas so many times between Galveston and Bellingham, the conditions at Dixon Entrance caused him little concern. But for my mother, who had only traveled on the Red Dog along the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers and the Intracoastal Canal when we cruised from Fort Smith to Galveston two years earlier, water conditions had become a serious source of worry.

“Maybe we should turn back?” Her words held part question and part plea.



. . .



Dad and Mom had left for Alaska aboard the Red Dog a little more than a week after Dad arrived in Bellingham. With my mother now on board to help, she took over the task of making daily entries into the ship’s log.



Log - August 2, ‘73: Pulled away from the fuel dock at 7:30 a.m.—On our way. Long-range visibility hampered by fog. 8:45 a.m. Anchored near island to wait for fog to lift so we can identify our islands that we need to go between. Ate breakfast—fresh peaches and toast. 12:00 noon—Pulled anchor—Some fog but can make out islands. Water smooth. 7:05 p.m.—Dropped anchor in Whole Boat Passage. Water and wind calm. Beautiful. Mashed potatoes, meat balls, and gravy for dinner.





By the end of the first day they had crossed the southern end of the Strait of Georgia and headed north along the eastern coast of Vancouver Island. More than three-hundred miles long, Vancouver Island rose as the largest island off the Pacific Coast of North America. A popular destination for whale-watching, the island served as home to the Cathedral Grove where Douglas firs stood two-hundred feet above the rain-soaked forest floor. The West Coast Trail, a nearly fifty-mile-long hiking trail stretching between Bamfield and Port Renfrew along the Pacific’s open waters, lined the southwest coast of the island. British Columbia’s capital, Victoria, sat on the island’s southeastern tip.

My parents, for the most part, planned to follow the Inside Passage from Bellingham to Ketchikan. A waterway route that snaked along a series of narrow straits and channels separating the islands that dominated the northwest coastal waters of the United States and Canada, the Inside Passage ran between Puget Sound in Washington, and Skagway, Alaska.

Thousands of islands laced the edge of the northern Pacific, paralleling the western slopes of the Kitimat and Pacific Ranges of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains. The Coast Mountains extended into southeast Alaska, a defining mountain barrier to the islands of the Alexander Archipelago. A nine-hundred-fifty-mile-long route, the Inside Passage’s deep waterways allowed large ocean liners to cruise through the channels and island wilderness. Mostly undeveloped, the area’s rocky shores edged mountainous islands wild with fern and moss-matted forest floors, shaded by dense canopies of hemlock, cedar, spruce, and fir. Farther off shore from the thicket of islands that shielded the Inside Passage sat Vancouver Island and the one-hundred-seventy-five-mile-long Queen Charlotte Islands. These islands lay parallel to the inner islands and bore the brunt of the rougher outside waters of the North Pacific. For my father, the lush-forested, fiord-steeped Inside Passage represented the final summit of his life-long expedition to Alaska.

Mom had stood in the pilothouse beside Dad and watched the water closely as they moved north, her hands gripping the edge of the chart table, her eyes casting her vision far beyond the boat.

“It looks like whitecaps way up there,” she said, pointing to the waters ahead.

“Oh, it might be a little washboardy. It doesn’t look bad.”

“Well if I can see them from here, they might be pretty big.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t think they’ll amount to much.”

With vigilance my mother scanned for rough water, the slim profiles of nearly-submerged reefs and jutting rocks, and the bobbing darkness of deadheads—water-logged timber that had escaped from logging booms and floated just beneath the surface of the water, ready to wreak havoc on unsuspecting craft.

Dad found no need to tell her beforehand about other unpleasant situations they could encounter. Even though hundreds of islands sheltered most of the Inside Passage from the swells of the Pacific, afternoon winds sometimes ripped between the mountainous islands and along the narrow passageways. The channels also funneled and forced the dramatic tide fluctuations through their narrow passages, exaggerating the water into fast-moving, boiling currents. Mom penned in the ship’s log on August 3, the second day out of Bellingham:



A little swirly through the Narrows.





On Dodd Narrows increasing winds whisked and lifted short, thumping waves from the surface of the water, getting rougher as they passed Nanaimo and Departure Bay. My father pulled the Red Dog into Hammonds Bay to wait out the blow. While there, Mom baked a ham.

After the wind eased, they cruised to Tribune Bay on Hornby Island where they would overnight. With the boat settled into its anchorage, Mom put together sandwiches for dinner since it seemed too late in the evening to cook. After dinner she and Dad sat in the pilot house and watched the sunset.

Mom broke the silence.

“Mother is liking living in Bellingham again.”

“Good. That little house suits her real good.”

“She’s going to need help soon.”

Dad hesitated a moment then added, “How about you? You still think you’ll like Ketchikan?”

“Oh, yeah…it’s just been so hard getting this far.”

Mom watched Hornby Island turning darker as the sun lowered behind it. “Sometimes, though, I wonder why and how one ends up where one ends up. How I might be different if I were someone else, somewhere else in life.”

Dad shifted in his chair. “Well, I’m glad you’re you.”

“I mean,” Mom continued, “it seems sometimes like a person goes straight from caring for children to caring for elderly parents.”

“We’ll bring your mother up here to live with us if that will make things easier. I’ll build her an apartment onto the house I’m going to build you.”

The idea of building a new house excited Mom. She loved the planning and would sketch out floor plans on pads of tracing paper, erasing and moving walls over and over again until the room layout and traffic patterns looked and flowed the way she liked them. Remembering a house she once visited where one could see the toilet in the bathroom from the front entry door, she always made sure her plans had the bathrooms tucked out of sight.

“Yes, and maybe I’ll have a small library, and maybe a place to paint,” she said.

“Yes.” Dad grinned and patted her on the knee.

“Remember that little cabin we stayed in near Ely?”

“Yeah…”

And as they sat, remembering the moments of their lives, knowing that ups and downs are as natural a consequence of a marriage as waves are of an ocean, the clock on the chart table inched past ten. Even still, the calm water of Tribune Bay held the tangerine afterglow of sunset.



. . .



At the north end of the Strait of Georgia, Vancouver Island elbowed close to the mainland, the two separated by the long waterways of Discovery Passage and Johnstone Strait. Midway up Discovery Passage the two shores squeezed toward each other like the center of an hourglass, creating the two-mile-long Seymour Narrows. The tide ebbed and flowed between the steep cliffs of the pinched channel, forcing the seawater into fifteen-knot currents that churned and roiled in resistance.

After departing Hornby Island, my folks waited outside Seymour Narrows for slack tide. Dad penciled on the edge of the chart:



Waiting for good time to go through Narrows—No good time, so we went anyhow—Very rough and tide rips.





Log - August 4: Seymour Narrows was rough! 4:00 p.m. anchored in Elk Bay. Strong wind down the canyon too. We’ve had it for today. Light rain. We rowed ashore and gathered some wood; also took some jugs and got water from a little stream—came back to boat and blew all of it on a bath.





My father made small fires in the boat’s wood stove from driftwood he and Mom collected from shore to stave off the chill of the early August mornings and evenings. They also refilled their milk jugs with fresh stream water at every opportunity as they traveled the Inside Passage, preferring it over stale water from the boat’s holding tanks.

Near Kelsey Bay along Johnstone Strait, a pod of killer whales passed in front of the Red Dog and moved toward Nigei Island at the north end of Queen Charlotte Strait. Mountains with a little of last winter’s snow still on their peaks stood to one side. From Nigei Island my folks would cross Queen Charlotte Sound, a thirty-five-mile gap beginning at the north end of Vancouver Island where the Pacific pounded across the sound at the coast. Until they reached the southern end of Fitz Hugh Sound, which ran along the eastern side of Calvert Island, they would be exposed to the open ocean.

Dad knew Queen Charlotte Sound had a reputation for rough water. And with my mother now on board, he hoped conditions would not get too wild.

“We might get a little bumpy ahead,” he said, trying to ease her into the idea.

“Really? How bumpy? Shouldn’t we wait until it gets calm?”

“We’ll see when we get closer.”

Dad’s mere mention of possible rough water as they moved closer to the Sound put Mom on edge and ratcheted her anxiety level up several notches. The line of her mouth flattened and she began traveling around the boat putting away cups, saucers, and anything that lay loose on the counters, returning now and then to look out the front window of the pilothouse, straining to see something not yet visible.

Her concern, though, proved unnecessary. The water lay fairly calm on Queen Charlotte Sound with long, rolling swells that the Red Dog glided over gracefully.

“Look at that guy,” Dad chuckled as he pointed to a solitary man in a skiff they saw coming from the other side of the Sound. “Here we are in our big steel boat and he’s just in that tiny, open skiff.”

“I guess he wasn’t too worried,” Mom said, still a little too afraid to smile.



Log - August 7: Water smooth this morning. Left our anchorage at 6:45 a.m., 12:30 p.m. across Charlotte Sound and anchored in Safety Cove on Calvert Island. Charlotte Sound was very full of swells but no waves to speak of. A family of otters live here in the cove and were very curious about us when we went ashore after water. We saw numerous star fish along the banks in the clear water—purple, beige and brown ones everywhere. Came back to the boat and used some of our water to wash my hair and wash out a few things. Defrosted the ice box. The weather is nice, very little wind.





After crossing Queen Charlotte Sound, my parents spent the next couple of days traveling the length of Fitz Hugh Sound then winding through channels and passages that zigzagged around islands. They turned west from Fisher Channel into Lama Passage, then north between Campbell and Denny Islands, then northwest along Seaforth Channel, then west across the south end of Roderick Island to Mathieson Channel which etched far into the Canada’s mainland toward the Kitimat Mountains. They followed Mathieson Channel nearly to its end then cut west along Sheep Passage to connect with the long, slim, Princess Royal Channel.



Log - August 9: Left our anchorage at 7:15 a.m. A beautiful still morning in Princess Channel. Coming around the Milbanke Sound—Seaforth Channel area wasn’t bad—just swells. The water north of Lake Island was fantastic! So smooth. Saw some whales in Mathieson Channel, but they got away before we could get close. A beautiful waterfall where Kynock Inlet goes off. Took some pictures—me and then Mel on the front of the boat—at the upper end of Mathieson Channel. Snow on the highest mountain peaks around us. Never saw one boat! At 6:15 p.m. anchored in Swanson Bay in Princess Royal Channel. Nice anchorage. Went ashore and got water.





With the tide running against them the next morning, they waited until later than usual before continuing north. While waiting, they watched porpoise stitch along the channel and saw several deer on Kingcome Point nose and pace near the edge of the water, acting as if they wanted to swim across.

Near slack tide, they left Princess Royal Channel and navigated the Red Dog along McKay Reach then across Whale Channel to enter Grenville Channel, a fifty-mile-long straightaway that separated Pitt Island from Canada’s mainland. In the afternoon they pulled the boat into Lowe Inlet, a finger-shaped notch gouged out of the mainland along the southern half of Grenville Channel. By evening, several other boats had moved into the inlet to overnight.



Log - August 11: Got a Ketchikan radio station this morning. Mel cleaned fuel pump, worked on bilge pump. Left our anchorage about 9:15 a.m. Stopped for the day at 2:45 p.m., south of Elliott Island. A good day, very little wind. A lot of fishing boats going south. Mel is fixing winch switch which has gone out. Went ashore and got wood. Cloudy. Saw five or six otters swimming by.





Melvin on bow of the Red Dog, Wilkinson Channel,

Inside Passage, British Columbia, 1973.



With clouds, light rain, and wind the next morning, Mom and Dad stayed at Elliott Island a second day. Near the northeast end of Porcher Island, Elliott Island sat across from a passage from where Canada’s Skeena River emptied into ocean waters at the southern end of Chatham Sound. Less than twenty miles to the north, on Kaien Island, sat the British Columbia town of Prince Rupert. Sometimes referred to as the “Gateway to Alaska,” Prince Rupert served as Canada’s only port of call for Alaska’s state ferries.

The rain and wind increased in the afternoon. My mother used the time to sweep out the main cabin, put a brown rinse on her hair, and help Dad gather more wood from shore. She noted in the log that afternoon:



A bald eagle lives here.





They left Elliott Island early the next morning in thin fog and light rain. The water lay calm. They could see the entrance to Prince Rupert Harbor across Chatham Sound as they made their way toward Holliday Island, a small island off the northeast coast of the much larger Dundas Island.

“Err…rats.”

My father had barely gotten the Red Dog out of its anchorage when a red warning light came on at the pilothouse console.

“The engine needs water,” he told Mom as he stopped the boat and took care of the problem.

My folks arrived at Holliday Island shortly after noon. Low clouds frayed and tangled in the treetops. Mom wrote:



Three otters are playing in the cove here. Rain all night. And the boat rocked.





Clouds with patchy fog and an easy wind surrounded the Red Dog as they left their anchorage the next morning. With heavy clouds masking the sky and the tops of the mountains, and fog veiling the islands and shores across the water, the day appeared as shades of gray. Mom and Dad became dark columns behind the pilothouse windows.

North of Holliday Island they began crossing Dixon Entrance. As soon as they left the shelter of the island, winds stiffened and brushed whitecaps from the surface of the water. Before long, the Red Dog bucked against eight-foot breaking waves.

The rough water of Dixon Entrance upset my mother. In the main cabin cleaning up after breakfast, she had felt the water get rough—and it got worse fast. She had never ridden on the boat in such conditions, and the rocking and banging of the steel hull against the waves frightened her.

“Melvin!” she yelled up to the pilothouse.

“Hold on. We’re going to bounce around quite a bit!” Dad yelled back.

To keep the violent action of the boat from tossing her onto the floor of the cabin or into the bulkheads, she had sat on the couch and braced herself against the wood stove, but soon made her way up to the pilothouse and now stood beside my father, asking him to turn the boat around.

“We’re nearly half way across,” he answered. “It’d be just as far to go back as to go on.”

Far ahead Mom saw fishing boats bobbing in the water moving to the north, but the seiners, though much bigger and heavier than the Red Dog, provided little consolation.

“How about pulling over there,” she asked, pointing to a cove east of Tree Point.

Dad looked at the cove and at the chart which identified several rocks outside of the cove.

“Too many outcrops and rocks around. We’re bouncing around too much.”

A Coast Guard small craft advisory crackled from the radio.

As my father thumped across Dixon Entrance in the Red Dog, he also crossed the border into Alaska. Yet, unlike two years earlier when he launched the Red Dog on the Arkansas River, no fanfare awaited him—no friends or relatives greeting him, waving flags, pounding his back with slaps of congratulations; no casual onlookers wondering at the excitement.

Only the watery wilderness of Dixon Entrance awaited my father, the broad swath of northern Pacific engulfing the borderline separating the United States and Canada as ocean waters washed toward the mainland. Only a gray ceiling of clouds greeted him, shadowing the islands, clipping the tops of the evergreens and stealing the mountains. Only breaking seas pounded the steel hull as he stood in the pilothouse and held the boat perpendicular to the waves while my mother, his wife of thirty-three years, braced herself beside him.

No “Welcome to Alaska” sign pricked the remote shore that misty August morning in 1973. Only a rush of wind and waves welcomed my father, along with the slow realization of his dream that had minnowed its way through the last forty-seven years—a dream that escaped so many times the gaping dangers that could swallow it whole with a single gulp.



. . .



After four hours of rough travel across Dixon Entrance, my father anchored the Red Dog in a calm-water bight on the back side of Mary Island. Located off the northeast point of Duke Island in Revillagigedo Channel, Mary Island lay less than thirty miles from Ketchikan. Both relieved to be out of the waves, Mom and Dad rested in the cove the remainder of the day, planning to continue into Ketchikan the next morning.

Having entered Alaskan waters, Dad knew he had made it, that the seed planted deep inside him so long ago had at last broken through the surface of his dream. Dixon Entrance stood as his final resistance, and now, only a short distance from Ketchikan, the joy of change and the satisfaction of completion seeped into his thoughts.

For Mom, the feeling of excitement of having reached Alaska took longer to creep out from under the relief she felt having survived Dixon Entrance. By the end of the day, though, the worst of the waves had distanced themselves from her mind, and the realization that she and my father neared the end of their long journey pushed past the fear.

“Whew, I could certainly do without a ride like that again in my lifetime,” she said.

“Err..well..it’ll be easy sailing from here on in.”

“My legs are aching.”

After such a rough day, they cleaned up with the last of the stream water they had collected and relaxed with a soft drink on the back deck.

“Should be good weather to go in the morning,” Dad said.

“We should call the kids as soon as we get a chance.”

“Err..all..right.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to find a place to dock with all the fishing boats in town?”

“We’ll find a place.”

“I wondered if we’d ever get here in one piece.”

“Yeah, it looks like we made it.”

They spent the remainder of the day relaxing, enjoying the calm, and listening to the soft clap of water against the curve of the island. As always, they celebrated their arrival in Alaska in their own quiet way. Mom wrote in the log that evening:

We celebrated with a bath and a coke.

By late afternoon at Mary Island, clouds cleared and the sun brought color back to the landscape. That evening the setting sun torched the soft peaks of Revillagigedo Island before dropping behind Annette Island and turning the sky pink as sliced salmon. After dark, the moon hovered above the black mountains as big as a washtub, spilling its lighted path across the water.



. . .



Dad and Mom left their Mary Island anchorage at seven-thirty the next morning and turned north up Revillagigedo Channel at the southern end of the Alexander Archipelago—a group of rugged, rain-forested islands strung along southeast Alaska’s panhandle, extending from the Canadian border to Skagway.

Daylight had revealed a clear sky. The air stood still, and the water lay calm as the Red Dog moved along the waterway, the landscape looking probably no different than when John Muir traveled through on the steamer Dakota in 1879, about which he wrote:



Tracing shining ways through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed.





On the west side of the channel rose Annette Island where the native community of Metlakatla tucked against the other side of the island. To the west lay the southernmost tip of Alaska’s mainland. The area would later be designated Misty Fiords National Monument where the walls of high, glacier-carved peaks and fiords plunged deeply and dramatically into the saltwater inlets below. Behm Canal, which loops around Ketchikan’s Revillagigedo Island and reconnects with Tongass Narrows north of Ketchikan, dissected the area.

Only the shriek of seagulls broke the silence as the Red Dog moved past the entrances of Thorne Arm and George and Carroll Inlets on Revillagigedo Island. The low mountains of the smaller, surrounding islands lay heavy above the surface of the water like backs of whales, or the softly rounded bellies of otters.

Near the entrance to Nichols Passage, which flows between the north end of Annette Island and the south ends of Gravina and Pennock Islands, the Red Dog entered the Tongass Narrows. Only minutes later, with Pennock Island on their left and Revillagigedo Island on their right, Dad and Mom arrived in Ketchikan.

The sun fell heavily across the town, glancing off the shining water, and flashing back at them from the high windows of the Tongass Towers apartment building as they moved along the waterfront. The waterfront buzzed with skiffs and fishing boats. A line of float planes tied nose to tail, bobbed from wakes along a dock. Another plane lifted from the water behind the Red Dog and roared overhead heading north, its white fuselage gleaming in the sun as it rose against the blue.

My folks scouted for a place to dock the Red Dog. They checked at Thomas Basin where the owners of seiners and gill netters had tied their boats one to another, side-stacked three deep at some docks, with no room to spare. With no luck at Thomas Basin or City Dock, they eventually found a spot in Bar Harbor Basin at the north end of town.

My father nosed the Red Dog easily into the vacant slip on August 15, 1973: twenty-three months since launching the Red Dog at Fort Smith, five months since leaving Galveston, and nearly fifty years since his dream began.

After shutting off the engine, he and my mother stepped firmly onto the Ketchikan dock—as if they had always lived there, as if they had simply arrived home.





17





Red Dog to Pretty Lady

Ketchikan



A LINEAR CITY tucked against the southwest edge of Revillagigedo Island in southeast Alaska, Ketchikan clung to its waterfront, displaying an array of multi-colored, wood-framed houses against the lower mountainside behind it. A web of wooden stairs ratcheted from house to house. Though less than ten-thousand residents, the town’s waterfront washed the air with sounds—the drone of float planes shuttling tourists, loggers, and fishermen; the buzz of skiffs running across and along the channel; the rumble and hum of commercial fishing boats bound for their next catch with the white oval floats of fishing nets piled on back decks like scoops of rice.

The vigorous waterfront activity would continue until October. Then, the seasonal fishing fleets would drain from the boat basins and flow south, the salmon would be spent and gone, the planes would resume their leisurely winter schedule, and the town would settle from the vibrations of summer in preparation for winter rains.

Apprehensive about finding work after he and Mom arrived in Ketchikan aboard the Red Dog in 1973, Dad figured his chances at fifty-seven years old would be slim if a younger man sought the same job. Not only had he sold their house and property in Arkansas and left family and the area where he had been born and raised behind, he had also left a good job with good pay to take a chance on a new life thousands of miles away. He hadn’t worked since completing the Red Dog in 1968, and he needed money coming in again. And although he hoped to use the Red Dog for commercial fishing at some point, he needed something more immediate.

But Dad’s worries proved futile. On his second day in town, he saw a notice on the employment office bulletin board advertising for a millwright at the Ketchikan Spruce Mill. The spruce mill sat next to Thomas Basin, a small harbor near the mouth of Ketchikan Creek. Dad went straight to the mill and the superintendent hired him on the spot over two younger fellows who had applied before him.





Looking across Thomas Basin toward the Ketchikan Spruce Mill

and downtown Ketchikan, 1974.



Dad quickly gained a reputation at the mill for ingenuity when, the second night on the job, his boss asked him to build a new steel dump door to replace one that had broken on a bark truck. The door needed replacing by seven the next morning or the truck would sit idle and out of service for the next day. Dad and the driver of the truck worked throughout the night, and by 5:00 a.m. the next morning, had mounted a door stronger than the original onto the truck.

Extremely pleased, the mill boss told my father that, rather than a millwright, he wanted him to be a shop welder—a job that, according to Dad, was “right down my alley.”

My father’s work at the mill ran smoothly until the superintendent began telling anyone who would listen that, “Melvin Owens is the best welder in Alaska who can build anything out of nothing.”

Such comments didn’t sit well with some of the other workers, who began to complain that it made them look bad. Dad ignored the snide remarks made to him, and after a while, things settled down and he kept working the way he always had.

“The other guys were tired of hearing the boss talk about it I guess,” he later recalled. “I don’t know what they expected me to do about it. Do shoddy work I guess.”

As soon as Dad had gotten his job at the mill, he rented a slip in Thomas Basin for the Red Dog and the harbor became my parents’ home for the next three years while they lived on board the boat. Dad worked the graveyard shift at the mill so he could build Mom and him a house during the day.





Red Dog at Thomas Basin, Ketchikan, 1974.



In 1974 my father bought a forested lot on a hillside above downtown Ketchikan at the upper end of Grant Street. Shortly thereafter, he began building their house. Wanting to get the best view of the waterfront possible without cutting trees, he constructed the house three stories tall, the lower level becoming a guest apartment. Dad and Mom moved into the house in 1976.

After three or four years of living in the Grant Street house, though, they decided to move closer to the water where they could have a better view of the comings and goings of the boats and airplanes along the waterfront. By the late 1970s several cruise ships had included Ketchikan as a port of call, and Mom, especially, loved to watch them gliding up and down the channel. So in 1980, my folks purchased property on Pennock Island across from Ketchikan’s waterfront. The following year, after working eight years for the spruce mill, Dad retired at age 65 and began building a new home on Pennock Island.

Pennock Island lay across the deep-water channel of Tongass Narrows from Ketchikan. The Narrows was a northern extension of one of the many waterways that braided between the hundreds of islands along the Inside Passage of southeast Alaska. A three-mile long sliver of land, Pennock Island lay wedged between Gravina and Revillagigedo Islands. Once a local burial ground, a site for early entrepreneurs, and a storage area for dynamite during construction of Ketchikan roads, the island now held a sparse settlement of cabins and houses scattered along its eastern shore.

As with most of southeast Alaska, only planes or boats could access the islands. No bridges connected Revillagigedo Island with Pennock Island or Gravina Island, where the airport lay along its eastern edge. Ketchikan’s main road system extended less than twenty miles north of town, and less than fifteen miles south. Airline passengers rode a ferry across the Narrows between the airport and town. Those who lived on Pennock Island needed a boat to get around.

It took a multitude of trips in his skiff over a two-year period for my father to shuttle building materials from Ketchikan’s Madison Hardware to the lot on Pennock Island. To get the supplies across the Narrows, he chained the framing lumber into bundles and towed it through the water behind the skiff, and hauled materials he wanted to keep dry on a log float. He constructed the house on pilings as close as he could to the water, placing the floor of the house above the extreme high tide level near the gravel beach. There, the highest tides would pool below the front deck overhang.

When Dad began building their Pennock Island house, he and Mom referred to it as their cabin. But Dad continued to build and the cabin turned into a two-story house with a mother-in-law apartment, a separate workshop, and a two-room guest cabin, all connected by boardwalks. From the cabin, he built an additional walkway extending more than a hundred feet into the woods. Angling between spruce and hemlock, the walkway traced an easy incline toward the center rise of the island. At the end of the boardwalk Dad made a wooden bench where he and Mom sometimes sat in the cool buffer of green, where only spears of sunlight penetrated the dense growth and the tangled lace of “old man’s beard” dangled from tree limbs. On the damp forest floor, splintered stumps from past wind storms stood jagged among their fallen trunks which lay tilted and fuzzed with spongy patches of moss. Between the trees, fiddlehead ferns, skunk cabbage, and devil’s club grew from a fibrous mat of soil which quickly absorbed Ketchikan’s abundant rainfall.

In front of the Pennock Island house Dad built an L-shaped, floating dock from planks and orphaned logs of logging operations that he scavenged from beaches. To the south of the dock he scrapped together a breakwater by chaining together huge logs. The breakwater angled across the water from the beach and reached as far out as the end of the dock, creating a small, protected cove in front of the house. A gap between the ends of the dock and breakwater served as the cove’s entrance and exit.





Melvin and Cecil’s Pennock Island home, 1995.



Besides harboring boats, the dock and breakwater became a favorite wayside for an array of wild neighbors throughout the year. Occasionally, a bald eagle used the dock as its dining table, standing on the decking and holding prey with its talons as it shredded its meal into bite-size pieces with its curved, yellow, knife-like beak. Harbor seals, sea lions, and otters often stopped at the dock to bask and bark at each other. Many types of ducks, at times, collected inside the cove: mergansers, harlequins, and Barrow goldeneyes. A Blue Heron my folks called Harry sometimes stood on the breakwater and pecked tiny sea creatures off the logs. Seagulls also used the dock as a place to rest from the wind, or as a place to wait for a fishing boat to pass that looked worth following. With a pair of binoculars and a copy of North American Birds kept by the window, Mom became proficient at spotting and identifying several species of birds.

In many ways, my mother’s life bloomed after moving to Pennock Island. She joined a travel club her mother had belonged to for many years in Bellingham. With the club she traveled to Greece and took several short tours from Bellingham into Canada and to various sites around Washington state. Then, in 1993, knowing she had always wanted to visit the British Isles, I went with her to tour England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland―places she had dreamed about and talked about over the years.

My mother also began painting. Dad had built her a small art studio on the side of the Pennock Island house with large windows where natural light flooded her canvas. Mom joined the local art group and took art classes at the senior center. She painted cabins in isolated valleys with winding rivers and mountain backdrops, and seascapes where waves crashed raggedly against terrible rocks at the base of a rugged promontory or lighthouse. Enjoying the social interaction and praise of her paintings, she became confident enough to display her work in local art shows. She won many ribbons and much praise, got requests for her paintings from others, and made greeting cards from them which she sold locally. At Christmas, she even painted individual cards for many people.

After years of struggle, Mom seemed to finally open her life and begin to become the person she had always envisioned.

As for my father, because of his job with the Spruce Mill, he never fished commercially with the Red Dog as he once intended. Instead he and Mom used the boat strictly for pleasure and filled their own freezer and shelves with their catches. Both raised on meat and potatoes, they had never eaten much seafood in the past, but with the ease of catching huge halibut, Pacific cod, and salmon in the waters around Ketchikan, they eagerly accepted the richness of Alaska and their new lifestyle. They loved taking the Red Dog into nearby inlets and waterways where they fished until they hooked a tub full. Mom cooked and canned the fish in the galley as Dad cleaned them on the back deck: chopping for the canner, filleting for the freezer. As years passed, however, they quit fishing for their own use and, instead, took visitors and family on fishing excursions.





Cecil fishing for Pacific Cod in Carroll

Inlet near Ketchikan, 1980.



Tempered by time, my father’s early visions of trapping and living off the land also never materialized. He had grown to enjoy and appreciate seeing animals in their natural habitat, especially after experiencing the fascinating and abundant sea life on his journey along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. In Ketchikan, he and Mom sometimes took the Red Dog out early in the morning and spent the day anchored in a bay or inlet to watch the shores for wildlife. They delighted at the sight of a bear crossing a gravel beach, of an eagle diving and snatching its prey out of the water, or of a deer nosing from the edge of the woods. For my father, hunting and trapping no longer interested him.

“By the time we got up here to where I could do something like that,” he later admitted, “I got chicken-hearted and couldn’t kill the animals.”

My father eventually sold the Red Dog to a Wrangell fisherman, tired of the drudgery of scraping and painting required by its steel hull. Since that time he had seen the boat only once, perched on a dry dock in Wrangell, Alaska, being sandblasted for a new coat of paint.

After selling the Red Dog, Dad built two more boats. One, a twenty-two-foot skiff he and Mom used to shuttle between town and Pennock Island, which maneuvered easily in and out of busy Ketchikan docks. Wanting to make the boat comfortable for Mom, he constructed a small cabin on it to shelter them in bad weather, and made the skiff with a flatter-than-usual bottom for more stability.

Dad built the second boat with the help of his neighbor, who did much of the welding. A forty-one-foot cabin cruiser constructed of low-maintenance marine aluminum, Dad and Mom used the boat as they had the Red Dog, to explore the shores and coves of the islands in their surrounding wilderness.

Dad named the boat Pretty Lady.





Pretty Lady





18





The Tide of Time

Pennock Island



LAST NIGHT’S WIND storm made a mess of the dock. High winds and wrenching wave action split some of the corner timbers, and twisted others from their connections to the log floats and surface decking. As my eighty-one-year-old father surveyed the damage, his foot skidded on a log still wet from rain. Stumbling, he fell sideways into fifteen feet of water, a depth that changed four times a day with the channel’s tides fluctuating as much as twenty feet in a six-hour period.

Cold washed over my father like fear, swallowing him whole as the black seawater engulfed the length of his body, filling his shoes and saturating every article of clothing. It rushed into his ear canals with an icy crackle, raced into his nostrils like a frigid stream, penetrated every wrinkle and crease of his skin with numbing speed. Below the water, he grabbed at a cross member beneath the dock. Unable to hold onto the slippery, algae-coated timber, he sank deeper into the dark water of the Tongass Narrows.

Disoriented, he bumped his arm against what he believed to be the floor of the channel. Through the ebbing current he pushed himself toward the light and surfaced beneath the dock. He scratched his hands and fingers, numb from the cold, grabbing at the understructure as he worked his way toward the edge. When he pulled his head and shoulders out of the water, the strong current tugged at his feet and legs, sucking them underneath the dock. Holding onto a mooring cleat, with all his strength he hoisted himself out of the water, over the gunnel, and back onto the dock.



. . .



No one saw my father fall. Still late morning, Mom busied herself in the kitchen of their Pennock Island house while I sipped coffee on my parents’ couch. I had arrived in Ketchikan a few days earlier, where I would spend the week visiting before returning home to Anchorage.

It was 1998, twenty-five years after my folks cruised into Ketchikan aboard the Red Dog. Ketchikan had grown from ten thousand residents to fourteen thousand, and I had lived in various parts of Alaska since 1974. After leaving my folks and the Red Dog in Galveston in 1972, I lived in Chicago for two years before joining them in Ketchikan. After two years in Ketchikan, I moved further north, living in Juneau, Barrow, and Anchorage.

The temperature gauge nailed to a spruce tree outside my folks’ house read sixty-two degrees. The sun had wrestled its way through the clouds for the first time in several days. Across the half-mile-wide channel, cars rolled along Front Street like beads of water. A scattering of people walked on the long wharf temporarily empty of cruise ships. A skiff followed the waterfront across the face of town, past the old spruce mill site, and turned silently into Thomas Basin.

Owners of the Ketchikan Spruce Mill where Dad worked until he retired, shut down the mill in 1985 and demolished it two years later after a decline in the lumber industry. Afterwards, developers expanded the site, which now supported a wharf with restaurants, tourist shops, and a museum. The mill and its loud whistle, which once pierced the noon sky each day, had been a major landmark in downtown Ketchikan since 1904.

Now June, it felt good to be back in southeast Alaska as Ketchikan stirred from its winter rest. As I sat and watched the surface of the channel quake from serving as taxiway, runway, and thoroughfare, a genuineness seeped from the town not apparent from the glossed-over distance seen from an airplane window, or the commercially embellished closeness one saw while side-stepping the puddles of its narrow streets. From the water one became its equal, eye level to eye level, face to face. The view revealed a town at work, a town at play, a town gushing with life. With its lively waterfront, its extreme tidal range, and its one-hundred-sixty inches of annual rainfall, the pulse of Ketchikan was water.





Ketchikan waterfront viewed from Pennock Island, 1993.



. . .



“Well…rats.”

Outside the door of the house, a puddle of seawater grew at my father’s feet. His clothes sagged with water that continued to seep down his entire body, collecting and dripping from the hems of his pant legs and from the tips of his fingers onto the floor of the porch. He turned the doorknob and leaned his head inside.

“Cecil?”

Like the whispering flap of a seagull’s wings, my mother’s stockinged feet tamped softly across the carpet as she moved to the door. Without a word between them, she knew at a glance that Dad had fallen off the dock and into the channel again.

“Oh, Melvin,” she fretted, then rushed upstairs for towels and a dry set of clothes.

At the door my father didn’t stand quite as tall as when he and Mom first arrived in Ketchikan. His once raven-black hair, still not entirely gray, looked like the gray and white mottled plumage of a young eagle. His ice blue eyes contained a bit of glacial silt. His hands, which had built not only boats and docks, but every house he and my mother had ever owned, every flower box Mom had ever seeded, and every tree swing for us kids in our lifetime of backyards, hung thick and burly as wood. Like the dock, time had slowly worn him down.

After changing into dry clothes, Dad moved to his living-room recliner near the prow of the house where sliding glass doors and glass side panels allowed a panoramic view of the Ketchikan waterfront a half mile away.

“You all right?” I asked.

From where I sat on the couch, the afternoon light behind my father melded his dark, olive-colored, work pants and shirt to the dark-brown chair, making a short, wide silhouette.

“Yeah,” he said softly and a little embarrassed. “Those boards down there get pretty slick sometimes.”

Mom clanged something in the kitchen.

Dad shifted in his chair to watch the activity on the channel outside. He rested one bare foot against Meg, their Golden Retriever-Labrador mix who lay on a green scrap of carpet at the base of his chair, her muzzle flattened on the floor between her front paws. Her closed eyes popped open only briefly with each new noise from the kitchen.

Recent years had allowed the slow tide of frailty to move in on my parents. The slick dock and walkway had caused my father, not as quick on his feet as in his younger years, a number of falls, sometimes into the channel as he maneuvered boats and logs and made repairs. He once twisted his ankle on the walkway outside the house that resulted in a spiral break to his foot. Not wanting to go to a doctor and hoping it was just a sprain and would heal on its own, he hobbled around the house for days.

“Oh, it’ll be all right,” he told anyone who asked about it, until it swelled to the size of a football.

Gene, who had also moved to Ketchikan, finally had had enough and he and a neighbor carried my father to the skiff and took him to a doctor. At age seventy-six, Dad spent his first night ever in a hospital. While there, the doctor discovered my father had had two heart attacks.

“Yeah I knew I’d had one once, but I never told anybody,” Dad told him.





Melvin on Pennock Island, 1995.



The Coast Guard had collected both of my folks from Pennock Island at various times. Dad became the first when trouble with double pneumonia, then his prostrate, caused him to be shuttled off the island on Coast Guard stretchers.

Mom, more recently, collapsed with a wild white blood cell count and the same “nice young men who scratched Meg on the head as they went by” twice loaded her on a stretcher and carried her down the boat ramp on her way to the hospital. Having developed Minera’s disease, she also experienced periodic bouts of vertigo.

Dad went into the kitchen and returned with a few slices of dried bread. He slid open one of the glass doors and walked onto the deck that edged the front of the house. Breaking off small pieces, he dropped the bread onto the gravel beach below for the ravens, then crumbled some along the top of the deck railing for the smaller birds. He had built several bird feeders and placed them around the house, and had nailed one to the railing. Across the largest opening of the feeder, wooden slats divided the space like jail bars.

“What are those slats for?” I asked when he returned to his recliner.

“To keep the blue jays out and let the little ones in. The jays hoard the food and huddle around the feeder and won’t let the smaller birds eat.”

We watched two dark-eyed juncos eating the crumbs. The adult junco bobbed its brown, velvety head as it inched herky-jerky along the railing and picked at the food. The adolescent that followed lacked the slick profile of its parent with its immature coloring and feathers still puffed with chick down. The down caused some of the young bird’s feathers to stick out at odd angles from the others, giving it a disheveled look and making it appear larger than its mother.

“The baby bird gets fed by ‘mamma’ until she turns her back, then the baby feeds itself,” Dad joked.





Boardwalk and bird feeder between house and workshop.



Pleasant aromas drifted from the kitchen.

“Melvin, you can fix the ice now,” Mom called from around the corner.

“Errallright.” Dad started his words like an engine on a cold morning. He pushed himself from his chair and moved toward the kitchen to fill glasses with ice for the sweetened iced tea Mom always made for dinner, his job for as long as anyone could recall.

After dinner we wandered back to the living room where Mom pinched bits of Meg’s yellow hair from her mother’s Persian rug that lay in front of the couch. She walked to the front window and eyed the dark clouds that moved across Deer Mountain and draped the slopes behind Ketchikan.

“Aren’t they pretty?” she said as much to herself as to anyone in particular. “Laying across the sky, changing the shapes of the mountains, ready to drop rain or not.”

Having always liked the cool, misty climate of the Northwest, my mother loved rain, and Ketchikan’s wet climate suited her well.

“A clear sky is boring,” she said. “There is nothing more beautiful than a sky covered with clouds—all those ‘animals and faces’ peeking out all over, running across the sky.”

As Mom stood at the glass doors in her black slacks and white terry house shoes, the hem of her off-white blouse hung limp below her waist around her slim body. Her once chocolate hair, now heather gray, curved against her neck and temples. Where she had pushed the hair back from her forehead and away from her doe-dark eyes, her skin had not caught up with her seventy-six years, her prize for a lifelong vigil against excess exposure to sunlight.

I looked out the window. The lower edges of the clouds raked along the sides of the mountains, leaving soft fingers of gray between the trees. The last cruise ship of the day sounded a final warning for its passengers to board, and the drone of float planes lessened as the day moved toward evening. At the end of nearly eighteen hours of daylight, the planes would sit silent, grounded by darkness until the sun again lifted from behind the island.

“Looks stormy,” I said.

With Meg close at her heels, Mom returned to the kitchen to whip meringue for a lemon pie. Along the Narrows a sturdy breeze lifted white peaks on the surface of the water.



. . .



Like the final vestiges of spring runoff in a forest stream, my folks moved slowly about their Pennock Island house but seldom sat idle. On Tuesdays they motored the skiff to town to stock up on groceries, a chore that claimed a huge chunk of their day and left them exhausted as they hauled, loaded, and unloaded boxes of goods from the store to the boat to the house.





Melvin and Cecil at their Pennock Island home, 1995.



The rest of the week my father spent much of his time outdoors. He fussed with odds and ends in his workshop, took the skiff across the Narrows to pick up mail, snagged stray logs that floated inside the breakwater during high tide, collected floats lost from fishing boats, gathered lengths of rope and chain attached to orphan logs, or replaced boards on the dock that broke loose during the most recent storm.

Mom did housework, baked pies, pampered her pots of flowering sweet peas, scanned her travel brochures, fed the birds and squirrels, watched baseball games, and painted landscapes.

Once a day, though, they pooled in their side-by-side recliners for an afternoon nap.



. . .



At the end of the week, my two suitcases sat near the front door. Due to fly home to Anchorage in a few hours, I waited in my folks’ living room, watching a line of mergansers pick at barnacles and other saltwater goodies as they inspected the breakwater in front of the house. Mixed in the ranks of the mergansers, in stark contrast, swam a domestic-looking white duck. A runaway. A rebel.

Dad had wandered outside and Mom worked in the kitchen. Meg slept on the landing at the top of the stairs. I headed outdoors to see what Dad was up to. Before leaving the house, I pulled on a pair of “Ketchikan tennis shoes,” knee-high, slip-on, black rubber boots, which sat on the porch.

Past the salmon berry bushes, I stopped at my father’s workshop and poked my head inside the door. Along the walls tiers of shelves bulged with boxes of nails, a number of jars containing nuts, bolts, washers, and screws, tubes of caulking, bottles of glue, cans of paint, and hundreds of other odds and ends my father had bundled, looped, rolled, folded, or tossed into cardboard boxes. In the center of the room, standing over an anthill of sawdust, sat the Sears table saw my father used to build our Perkins farmhouse in the early fifties. Dad was not there.

Around the corner of the building, I jumped three feet from the boardwalk onto the gravel beach. Near low tide, purple and orange starfish clung to the bottom of the cove near the dock. Along the far side of the dock, the receding water exposed a jutting slice of bedrock. Baby, thumbnail-size crabs sidled between rocks near the water’s edge.

I found my father up the beach, north of the house. With his long wooden pole that had a hooked spike in the end, he adjusted a rope as big around as his upper arm. He had tied the rope across two huge logs angled between the far corner of the dock and the beach. His constant outdoor companion, the spiked pole served as a tool, as well as a cane and a grip on the slippery logs and dock.





Melvin on Pennock Island beach, 1995.



“What’s the rope for?” I asked when I got close enough for him to hear.

“To keep the logs in place,” he said. “The logs block all the little stuff from washing up on the beach. Helps keep things clean.”

Dad wore his dark green work clothes with a faded blue and black quilted flannel shirt over them as a jacket. A navy blue baseball cap covered his head. He had rolled up his right pant leg to the bottom of his calf because of medication for a rash on his ankle. He had slipped on his tan Velcro-closing shoes without socks, which he never bothered with unless he was going to town for mail or groceries. Like the adolescent junco, he looked somewhat disheveled.

Near shore, inside the log boundary, swam a school of minnows. Hundreds—thousands—arrowed back and forth through the water in unison like sea grass in a shifting current. I tossed a stone into the water. The dark cloud of tiny fish burst apart like shrapnel, then quickly formed again.

I followed Dad back to the house the way I followed him and Mom to Alaska, minnowing behind them through life, sometimes darting away to return another time. As with many families where the course of the parents rippled through the lives of their sons and daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters, so had it been with ours.

Whether near or from a distance, each of us kids tended to swirl about the family, and our folks’ venture north affected each of us in some way. Three out of the four, at one time or another, made our homes in Alaska. Donald, Gene, and I had all lived in Ketchikan. Donald spent five years in Ketchikan before returning to Arkansas. Gene still lived in Ketchikan where he and his wife, Winona, also built a house on Pennock Island. Jerry had never moved to Alaska, but visited often and, like the rest of us, admired the unique beauty of the area. When my folks passed through the doors of their Alaska dream, they never pushed or pulled us through them, but had always left them open.

As year rippled into year after year, my parent’s life prior to their arrival in Alaska distanced itself like a one-time visit to a foreign country. They had resided in Ketchikan long enough to see another round of the cycle of life, with the birth of grandchildren and the natural deaths of their own remaining parents: Dad’s mother, Nellie, and Mom’s mother, Viola. And long enough to see us kids settled deep into our own lives—all married with kids of our own and busy chasing our own dreams.

But the many years that passed hampered the day-to-day lives of Mom and Dad only by degrees. Mom continued to paint coastal and wilderness scenes and one often found her with her long fingers poised with a paint brush against canvas, dabbing colors. Her hands, like those of so many women, have always been those of an artist—stirring, stitching, stuffing, knotting, ironing, washing, holding, patting, and worrying all of their life for the love of their family.





Melvin fishing and napping on board the Pretty Lady, 1983.



And my father, with hammer in hand, continued as he always had, repairing the dock, mending the boardwalks, or building something new onto the house. Always working alone and never calling attention to himself or his accomplishments, he was no different than the fiddlehead fern that grew in the damp woods behind their house—flourishing best when out of direct sunlight, unfurling a zeal for life silently and consistently.



. . .



An hour and a half before flight time, Dad and I loaded my bags and ourselves into the skiff. Only a few minutes ride up Tongass Narrows from Pennock Island to the airport, he would take me to a dock on Gravina Island, leaving a short walk up the hill to the terminal.

Dad started the engine and circled the skiff in the cove before entering the Narrows. With Meg sitting at her feet wagging her tail like a metronome, Mom waved to us from the front balcony of the house. My father and I motored past the dock and outside the breakwater, then turned north up the channel.

As I looked back at my folks’ home, it brought to mind the photo of a cabin in Alaska my father had seen in his fourth grade geography book in Oklahoma in 1926. Dad had never forgotten that image. And now, I could see that the manifestation of the life that photo represented—the mountains, the water, the wild, the independence—had come to rest on the eastern shore of Pennock Island.



. . .



Across Revillagigedo Channel, the snow field on Deer Mountain continued to shrink in the June sun. It would melt by July. Evergreen mountain tops framed the Ketchikan sky. Today, it could not be more blue.





EPILOGUE

A Dream Done



BY THE YEAR 2000, when my father turned eighty-four and my mother turned seventy-eight, the logistics of day-to-day living on Pennock Island and the endless maintenance needed on the dock and breakwater had become too taxing for them. Spurred by another episode of Mom falling seriously ill and whisked off the island by the Coast Guard, my folks sold their Pennock Island home after living in Ketchikan for twenty-seven years and moved near family in northern Idaho.

My mother never fully recovered from her health problems and in November of 2005, passed away at home at the age of eighty-three. My father sat or lay by her side almost continuously the last few days of her life, even through her unconsciousness, fearful she would wake up and find him gone. They had been married sixty-five years.

One year and four days later, my father passed away in his sleep. He was eighty-nine.





Melvin and Meg on skiff on Tongass Narrows, Alaska.



. . .



My parents left their spirits woven into those of their children, grandchildren, and many other people they encountered over their lives. And like the faint lines still visible on the drawings my father used to build the Red Dog, traces of their presence on Pennock Island, on Ketchikan, and on Alaska will remain for years to come.





Melvin and Cecil’s Pennock Island home.





THE END





Dear Reader,



Thank you for downloading and reading South to Alaska. I love sharing my father’s story, which I hope inspires others to follow their dream.



If you enjoyed the story, I would appreciate it if you would consider taking a few moments to add your “Customer Review” comments on the book’s Amazon page. Even a sentence or two will help inform others about the South to Alaska stor.



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…ALSO…





If you are interested in “the rest of the story,” please visit my blog titled, South to Alaska Boat Blog. On the blog I write about how, after my parent’s passing, we brought the last boat my father built, the Pretty Lady, to Idaho. The boat has undergone mechanical repairs and we are now renovating the interior. We hope to launch the Pretty Lady on Lake Pend Oreille in North Idaho sometime in 2012.



Come visit South to Alaska Boat Blog and watch our progress.





Hope to see you there!





ABOUT THE AUTHOR





Award-winning author and freelance writer Nancy Owens Barnes' is the author of three books. Her first book, a biographical travel memoir titled South to Alaska was published as a trade paperback in October 2007, with a second edition published in 2009. Barnes' writing has appeared in a variety of magazines and literary journals such as We Alaskans, Idaho Magazine, Northern Reach Magazine, and in a number of literary journals such as The Ledge, The Lyric, and Snowy Egret, the oldest independent journal of nature writing in the United States. In 2008 she received the Zola Award when her poetry won first place the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest. Barnes received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Vermont College of Norwich University where she studied creative writing.