My father has loved wooden sailboats his entire life. When he was sixty-five, he bought a dilapidated thirty-foot boat from a private owner in Chicago and set out to sail it, via rivers and inland waterways, to the Gulf Coast.
His companion and only crew was a lady friend, fifty-eight at the time, who could neither swim nor sail.
He had paid something like $3,500 for the boat, which tells you what kind of shape it was in. He had to rely on engine power for most of the trip, but the engine failed five miles out of Chicago and never worked properly again. The head, the onboard toilet, was installed backwards. There was no shower and only one burner in the tiny galley. In addition to those mechanical problems, my father had several medical conditions that made him a less-than-ideal candidate for this particular adventure.
The rest of the family was more than a little alarmed, but we all knew that this was my father's dream and that he had to try to accomplish it. I wasn't yet a churchgoer; my father was, and remains, furiously anti-religious. I think it's safe to say, though, that my sister and I spent a lot of time praying, even if we didn't know to call it that.
Dad had planned to spend three months reaching the Gulf; instead, the trip took nine. The boat wound up stuck in mud, stuck in ice, and frequently stranded because of its unreliable engine. For several weeks around Christmas, stuck somewhere in Missouri, my father and his friend were sneaking ashore to take showers at a local campsite. On Christmas Day, the manager caught them.
He let them take their showers because it was Christmas, but didn't offer them so much as a cup of hot tea in addition.
I was indignant when I heard the story. "It was Christmas! He couldn't give you something to eat?" My father, who considered his predicament a fine lark, laughed and brushed my complaint aside. Instead, he focused on the positives of the trip. Months later, when I read his trip journal, I was struck by how carefully he had noted the kindness of strangers: the fellow boater who gave him a bag of ice on a hot day, the tugboat captain who pulled him off a sandbar without charge, the cheerful fellow traveler who gave him a free haircut. At one of the marinas where he had stopped to try, once again, to get the engine fixed, another boat owner walked up to him, said, "I hear you've been having some trouble" and handed him a hundred dollar bill. During his long, frequently frustrating journey, my father felt himself blessed by grace, although he would never have called it that.
He's eighty-five now, living in Philadelphia after years on the Gulf. His health has deteriorated: he's legally blind from macular degeneration, almost always exhausted from congestive heart failure and unable to walk more than a few steps at a time. My sister takes him shopping once a week, but because of his vision problems, he's very cautious about venturing out on his own.
He's kept his spirit, though. When I visited a few months ago, he wanted to charge up his motorized scooter and have an adventure.
We planned a 1.2 mile voyage from his apartment, near the University of Pennsylvania, to Rittenhouse Square, where my sister had suggested a nice place to have lunch. We set out with maps and water. My father immediately gunned the scooter and sped ahead of me, as I jogged after him to keep up. "Dad, keep right or you'll fall off the curb! Dad, watch out for the dog! Dad, slow down! There's a curb ahead, and the light's red! Stop, Dad! STOP!"
Luckily, we had no mishaps. We got to lunch and back home safely, although - true to my father's history with engine trouble - the scooter kept threatening to quit on us during the trip back. For Dad, the suspense was just part of the fun. He adored the outing. He loved the sunshine, the wind on his face, the trees and people we passed. When we crossed the Schuylkill River, he beamed and gestured down at the water. "Look at that, Suz! Isn't that beautiful? It's so great to see water again! What's that down there? Is that a boat? Do you think we could take a ride sometime?"
My father will tell anyone who asks that he doesn't believe in God. But to me, his delight in even the smallest of pleasures indicates tremendous faith in the universe and in its abundance, and I have no doubt that this faith has helped him cope with years of increasing physical debilitation. He traveled many thousands of miles in his sailboat, a tottering vessel, but found joys along the way. Now, piloting his own body has become nearly as much of a challenge as the longer voyage was, but the joy remains.
Editors' Note: Susan Palwick's father died recently, at the age of 86, after a final journey to Reno.
