An Irresponsible Adult

Chapter Five


I just saw the first patch of blue sky in two days offshsore. It is 10 a.m. Monday. I’ve been staying inside Robin’s cabin since last night, when a mist was blowing into the cockpit and soaking everything. The wind shifted in the middle of the night, coming from the north – to Robin’s stern. As I napped in the cockpit under the dodger, the mainsail gybed. The main sheet, stretched out because we were running, caught under the outboard motor mounted outside the stern pulpit, and yanked it into the cockpit. This happened twice. The second time, I lashed the motor to the deck.
I am sailing conservatively, with just the reefed mainsail up. Still I’m doing over six knots. There is a following sea with rollers that seem to be 7 or 8 feet high. The ride is not uncomfortable. Just have to stay off your feet.
I haven’t had radio contact with anyone in the race since some time yesterday afternoon. I suspect that doesn’t mean they are way behind me. I am a few miles east of the rhumb line and a bit over 200 miles out of Newport, or one third of the way to St. George’s. At this rate, I’ll get to Bermuda on Friday. Monica arrives Saturday, so I’ll be cutting it close. Whatever it takes, I’ll be there for that reunion. I love you, Monica.


If the end of this blog entry seems a bit wistful, it is. Finally, I am sailing under sunlight, and that is a help. Last night was the lowest I’ve felt in a very long time. In the dark, with Robin banging from side to side with the following wind and seas throwing her stern first one way and then the other, I was almost afraid. Certainly fatigue had something to do with the feeling. At best, I have been getting 90 minutes of sleep once a night. The rest of the time, I’m struggling to check the horizon every 20 minutes. If I wasn’t thoroughly frightened, I was however asking myself what I had thought would be fun about this race. Until I finally retreated inside the cabin for my naps, I had memories of being comforted as a child by my mother. The notion that this was an entirely stupid enterprise came to me. I could just as easily be in my soft bed at home with Monica and, perhaps, our beautiful mutt, Thelma, sharing the king-sized sheets. Instead, a mist coated my face even under the dodger, and with each rock of the boat, either my feet against the Honda generator or my shoulders against the life raft took up the shock. I admonished myself to remember this scene when the race was over. What possessed me to place myself out here, I asked?

I knew the answers – and there are several – to that question. The decision, at age 65, to race singlehanded across 600 miles of ocean is the product of no simple whim. The architecture of that choice involves numerous and varied building blocks. I will now describe one of those stones, for this is a story not just about a sailboat race but about the forces that shape us and how, specifically, they created – for better and worse – the personality with which I address the world. This analysis requires a little – maybe a lot – of seat-of-the-pants psychology, one of the most definitive pastimes of our era, I suppose. But it begins with a story of a day when I was about 10 years old.
It was a day not unlike the first couple of this voyage, gray and dreary. I am in Hudson, Massachusetts, the town where my father, John Archibald “Archie” Campbell, works. He is employed as the superintendent of a local heating company. The job involves everything from selling household heating systems to installing them, from cleaning furnaces to collecting bill payments to making emergency house calls in the middle of the frozen winter night. His is often a filthy and at times a dangerous employment. Many nights he comes home covered in coal dust, soot and fuel oil. Some times, he arrives in time for dinner with a bandaged, crushed finger. His back is frequently thrown out of kilter because he has tried to lift some heavy, cast-iron object or has been required to squeeze his wiry, 50-year-old frame into the bowels of a boiler.
Archie – everyone calls him that – is a buoyant fellow. He is one of those people who, instinctively, knows there is always a solution to a problem. He seems content in the assumption that he can find the solution. Lurking at the corner of is mouth is a persistent smirk. There are times when, fighting it with all his strength, he cannot contain the smirk. It dances to the center of his lips, which break into an infectious smile. Archie has a great sense of humor, although he is unable to complete the telling of a joke or funny story without breaking down in laughter.
Archie also has a sense of decorum. He loves the military. He was too young for World War I and too old for World War II. But he joined one military outfit after another as soon as he was able. The first was a cavalry unit in New York State when he was 18, the year after the first world war ended. During World War II, he joined the State Guard and patrolled sensitive properties as a guard. He loves not just the uniformity of the military but also the benefits that he sees in a disciplined approach to life. Politically, he is a libertarian, although such a label may not yet exist. He is pro-choice well before that is popular. He is anti-gun-control and owns many firearms. He believes that he should be responsible for is own actions, and he expects the same of his neighbors. He accepts the foibles of others, except in those he considers blowhards. In a few years, he will insist that I have a right to wear the beard I grew during summer vacation when I return to high school. He will urge me to demand that right, despite the accepted wisdom of 1958 that probably will dictate my expulsion.
Practically, he believes in a chain of command and the righteousness of being able to take orders and to give them with authority. He is an ossified patriot. The United States is his country, right or wrong.
On this particular day, little of these qualities is in play. He is at work, and I am with him. It is a weekday, I am certain, because on Saturdays he makes his rounds visiting the homes of folks who might not pay their heating bills if he didn’t appear at their doors. If it is a weekday, it must be summer or I would be in school. We are but a couple of blocks if that from the heating company yard, over at Larkin Lumber, a customer that I am certain pays its bills. I don’t recall why we are here, but we are standing in the sales room of the lumber yard when a fellow – a stranger to me – walks up and greets my father, addressing him as Archie.
What follows will affect the rest of my life. But you need some context, and for that you need to know a little more about Archie. Here’s where the psychology comes in. My father was the oldest child in a family of eight, if you count the boy who didn’t survive infancy. All the others lived well into what then was considered old age. His parents were, physically, an odd couple. His mother, whom I never met, was the daughter of a commercial shipping captain who, among other posts, was skipper of a tug boat in Boston Harbor and of a barge on the Erie Canal. Family lore has it that Grandmother was born on the barge. I suppose someone witnessed the birth and so could confirm that she was not the offspring of a Boston Bull Terrier, for in every photo I have seen of her, she certainly bears a resemblance to that breed, although she was insufficiently cute to win the dog show.
Grandfather, whom I also never met, appears in photos to have been tall and dapper. He was born in the rocky highlands of Scotland and, as a young man, went to work for the Bank of England. Archie says that his father emigrated to the United States because his next assignment for the bank would take him to India, where, he feared, he might contract malaria and die.
For a while, dashing Grandpa seemed to have struck a pretty good deal when he asked for Grandma’s hand in marriage. Her father had assembled quite the pot of wealth, and having someone who would take his homely daughter off his hands may well have been worth a great deal for all concerned.
Then the good skipper invested nearly all his wealth in a bogus silver mine, or so the story goes. By the time Archie had kids, the family boasted a rich vein of wit and a lot of pride but no gold. This unfortunate investment happened apparently around the time Archie entered high school, and by that time I am certain other factors had created the man whose achievements I will describe in a bit. One of these factors was his standing as the eldest child. My guess is that with each new sibling – three brothers and three sisters followed – Archie got less and less attention. An active boy, he probably looked for a solution to this distasteful circumstance. He certainly developed a habit of engaging in activities that could not be overlooked. A scrawny lad, he got into boxing to develop his physique. In early adulthood, he was a player in a rough and tumble basketball league. The games were played inside a chicken-wire cage, in part for the protection of the players from the spectators. He had stories of how a smaller player like he could even the scales with one of the backwoods giants on an opposing team. The techniques were physical and harsh and certainly not within the rules of the game but, as he saw it, within the laws of survival. So they worked. He approved not of expediency but of worthy results. In this case, he could back down a bully. He took a similar approach toward blowhards. People loved him for it.
As a young man, he found jobs in New England shoe factories, where his intelligence and drive were noticed and rewarded with management positions. In the military, he was promoted to higher rank.
By the time Archie and my mother, Eleanore, moved to rural Berlin, Massachusetts, in order to provide a home for their first child, Janet, Archie had a mantra for leadership. “If you want to do something, don’t wait for others to join you. They will follow once they see your success.”
By the time I arrived, Archie, guided by his own rules, had immersed himself in the life of the community, a small town of less than 2,000 farmers and factory workers, among whom his employment as a shoe factory foreman probably gave him some standing. He joined the volunteer fire company, was among the members who organized fund-raising whist parties at the town hall and, in time, became one of the department officers. At one point, he took a part in a play being given by some civic group. His role was brief and may have resulted from the fact that my mother, who had hunted with him, owned a big Colt pistol. In the final scene of the play, Archie burst through the stage door, dressed in a suit, wearing a fedora, the .38 special drawn as he made an arrest. I do not believe he had any lines.
As are all New England towns, Berlin was run as a pure democracy. Business was conducted at the annual town meeting, where each resident had a vote. I was not there to witness, but I am certain from events that followed that, early on, Archie was a vocal proponent in issues he felt were important. There was never a shortage of vocal citizens, but one who could present a coherent, reasoned idea would certainly have stood out. And Archie, who had on his own read classic literature and could, although he seldom did, buttress his arguments with quotes from the antiquities, no doubt got a rapt audience when he rose during a town meeting from his folding chair in the musty, 19th century clapboard town hall with the creaking stairs and worn maple floors.
My first memory that bears on Archie’s involvement in the community is of a Sunday afternoon when we visited old Miss Rice, a retired teacher and producer of the local theatrical efforts. She was delighted to have our company and served us plums in syrup. The treat was a reward for Archie’s work on a particular project in town.
Janet, who is 19 months older than I, was ready to enter school in September, 1946, and our parents took her to the Central School, where the first grade classroom shared the building with the second, seventh and eighth grades. All of the children sat at desks made of cast iron with wooden seats. There was no running water, only an old iron pump in the gravel front yard, it’s handle worn smooth by the grip of hundreds of little hands over many scores of years. Behind the school were two whitewashed wooden outhouses, one for boys, the other for girls, both occupied by large communities of houseflies. My parents were horrified, and Archie dove into the work of getting the town a new schoolhouse. In time, he was elected chairman of the school committee. It took until 1951 to get the school built, and he was in up to his shoulders for the entire project. Thus was the whole family rewarded with sweet plums.
About a year before the school was opened, I came of age to join the Cub Scouts. Soon, Archie was a member of the local Boy Scout Committee. He remained in the background as I advanced through Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. He would finally step from the shadows to replace the Explorer Scouts leader after I turned 14. This fellow’s idea of an appropriate scout meeting was to hold poker games. Archie set things right when he seized control, leading his band of teenaged boys in elaborate rescue exercises that included lowering stretchers off of 30-foot-high cliffs – with one of us strapped inside the stretcher. He got the boys out in the woods camping and out on the road giving first aid to crash victims. In time, he was responsible through the Explorers for starting the town’s first rescue squad.
The Boy Scout work followed by several years the morning encounter at Larkin Lumber. After greeting my father, the strange man turned to me, looked down and declared: “This must be Archie’s boy!”
There is little doubt that neither he nor my father saw the flash of anger that lit my eyes. My interpretation of this meaningless statement, however, suggests that I had heard the same remark before. The man clearly held Archie in esteem. Everyone in Berlin and Hudson seemed to know him and admire him. I was aware of this, and at age 10, I was proud of the respect shown to him. But I also felt that his reputation towered above me, depriving me of light that should shine directly on me. I was not just Archie’s boy! I was me, and I wanted to be recognized.
I don’t remember how long it was after this incident that I distilled into words what my soul was screaming. But I remember the words. I will do something that no one else can take responsibility for, that is all mine.

There is not a soul alive or dead who can take responsibility for my solitary presence aboard Robin, out on the Atlantic Ocean. Whether I am happy here or not, I demanded and seized the opportunity to sail alone offshore. While the impulse had brewed for many years inside me, I had always allowed other considerations – responsibilities that I accepted gladly – to keep this particular intoxicant from filling my cup. Back at Wegman’s supermarket not quite ten months ago, I opened the tap and took a full draught. I got a bit drunk on the idea of a singlehanded adventure. The Atlantic has made me sober, but now I can’t undo the choice that brought me here. Robin and I must persist.