The compelling dreams of aging sailors

Midwinter 2010

By David Roper

On Dec. 15, 2009, Kenneth Ketchum, age 80, decided to sail alone to Mexico from Houston on his Downeast 32 sailboat. He had been living in his recreational vehicle, which he sold to buy the boat. One hundred and fifteen miles southeast of Houston, he was plucked from his boat by the Coast Guard 10 days after leaving. The next night he spent in a homeless shelter. “I tried; I was just unable to fend for myself out there,” said Mr. Ketchum, a Purple Heart recipient from the Korean War. At age 80, it seems, he was still making valiant efforts.

When I read this story recently, I thought back 30 years to a boat delivery of a 50-foot yawl from Duluth, Minn., to Stuart, Fla. My crew and I were locking down in a little town called Brockport in western New York along the Erie Canal. I was leaning against the bow pulpit, handling the forward line of the yawl while the water drained from the lock chamber. There was a small sailboat, perhaps 23 feet long, just ahead of me. An old man sat on the side of the cuddy cabin and handled his two guiding lines, which hung down from the lock high above. In hand-lettered script on his boat’s transom were the words “Homeward Bound, Auckland.”

“Where you from?” I asked.

“Auckland,” came the reply.

“No, where are you coming from?”

“Town of Erie, Pennsylvania. Used to live there. Lived there for 60-plus years.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Auckland.”

“As in Auckland, New Zealand.”

“That would be the one.”

There was a long pause on my end of the conversation, as you might expect.

“Soooo, how you are getting there?” I asked finally.

“I’m headed there on this boat,” he said proudly. “I don’t know if I’m getting there.”

I think he could sense me wavering about my next comment. He continued.

“You see, I’d been sitting alone on this paint-chipped, rotting porch in this rental house for I don’t know how long since retirement, and all I’d been thinking about most of those days was returning to Auckland, where I was raised. It’s home, really. It’s still where my heart is.”

I cocked my head at the tiny, far-from-seaworthy sloop and its six-horsepower outboard.

“You think you’ll make it?” I said finally.

For the first time he smiled, his face lightened by a broad, knowing look.

“Don’t have the slightest idea,” he said, adjusting one of the lock lines. “But I figure I have two choices, given my time and financial circumstances. Plan A is to sit on that crummy porch, think that I’m stuck there, and just think about Auckland until I die in that chair. Plan B is to get there or die trying to get there. You’re now witnessing me on the sixth day of Plan B. And you’re witnessing a happy man with a mission.”

How many of us will have a Plan B? How many of us will opt for it?

John Steinbeck suffered a stroke in December 1959. Those close to him begged him to slow down and take better care of himself, yet he felt the very opposite: “I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly slow reluctance to leave the stage. It’s bad theater as well as bad living,” Steinbeck wrote. In contrast, Steinbeck fitted out his truck with a camper, named the rig Rocinante, took his poodle Charley as crew, and prepared to cross the United States just after Labor Day in 1960.

Because of that journey, Steinbeck gave us “Travels with Charley” in 1962, which was published the same year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech, he spoke of man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat and for courage.

Westin Martyr wrote his “The £200 Millionaire” in 1932. He tells of the time he and his wife were anchored in a harbor of refuge along the waterways of Zeeland in the Netherlands during a westerly gale when “a little green sloop…manned solely by one elderly gentleman” sailed in, rounded up, and eased alongside. Down below in his tiny cabin that afternoon, over a cup of tea, this old man, a widower, regaled the author and his wife with his tales of his solo exploration through the waterways of Europe on his tiny vessel.

He talked of “gentle rivers wandering through valleys of everlasting peace; of a quiet canal, lost amongst scented reeds and covered with a pink and white carpet of water lilies; of a string of tiny lakes, their blue waters ringed with the green of forest pines; of a narrow canal, built by old Romans, but navigable still, that climbs up through the clouds into the high mountains; of aqueducts spanning bottomless ravines and a view from the yacht’s deck of southern Germany.”

And he talked of the charm of this old earth and the fun of living on it, if “only you understand the proper way to live.”

“The secret?” he was asked.

“The secret,” the old man replied, “seems to be, to do everything you can yourself….Take travel. Allow yourself to be carried about the world in deluxe cabins, and what do you get out of it? You get bored to death. Everything is done for you and you don’t even have to think. You’re carried about with the greatest care and wrapped up and fed and insulated from…from everything. But sail all day in the wet and cold, then bring up in some quiet harbor and go below and toast your feet before the galley fire, and you’ll realize what bliss means. But travel in a steam-heated Pullman and then put up at the Ritz…see if you find true bliss there!”

The next day the aged wanderer was off early, catching the first of the flood tide, which would carry him into the Rhine and Germany. “Good-bye, you two,” he said to the author and his wife, who gazed at him with the same awe and admiration they had the night before. He surely sensed their envy. “I don’t want to influence you unduly,” he said as he drifted away, “but, remember: One step does it and you’re out of the rut for good.”

So, to all you aging boaters out there: What will your one step be? What will be your Plan B for those years?

I’ll volunteer to get the ball rolling; I’ll tell you mine:

If my precious wife leaves this earth before me, and my usefulness to others has dwindled, then I’m going to buy a small cabin sailboat on a trailer. I will fill her with good wine and cheeses, with my favorite books and those I never had the time to read, and with pictures and scrapbooks to relive my old memories. But I will not dwell on these too much. I will visit them carefully the way one visits relatives: I will absorb the richness but will not linger too long. I will not linger because I will be off to make new memories each day and each season.

I will travel by land to a launching ramp in Key West in the winter, watch the green flash at sunset, and then depart for the Dry Tortugas. In the late spring, I’ll trailer my little vessel to Lake Powell in Utah, with its majestic 2,000-mile shoreline and its alluring tiny ports of Rainbow Bridge, Wahweap, Hite and Bullfrog. I’ll sail into remote 50-mile-long canyons and gaze up at the sandstone cliffs that house ancient Anasazi Indian dwellings.

In the summer, I will sail east to Maine and Nova Scotia and revisit the harbors I have always loved. And perhaps one year I’ll take an ambitious, international overland journey to Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territory. I’ll catch lake trout and watch the Northern Lights while sailing on the fifth largest lake in North America.

But, rest assured, wherever I am headed will have purpose, regardless of whether I ever get there. And, ultimately, when I am done in this world, it will be in the middle, rather than the end, of one of these journeys.

Dave Roper will be sailing Elsa, a Bruce King-designed Independence 31, out of Marblehead, Mass., for a long, long time before turning to Plan B. This is Elsa’s 30th year, he says, “and still, despite her age, she’s quite lovely, and she never lets me down.”