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Outside Magazine 2003

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Last Time Around
The author's father traveled the world, shipped out on the last commercial sailing voyage around Cape Horn, and handed down a legacy of adventure. But his risk-taking spirit had a dark side—and its shadow fell across a final winter rendezvous in Aspen.

By Peter Stark


	DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS: Bill Stark, far right, and his watch mates on the foredeck of the Pamir after rounding Cape Horn, July 1949 (Courtesy of the Stark Family)

AT 9:45 A.M. LAST JANUARY 25, my father slipped out of the Aspen hotel suite he was sharing with my mother, went to the concierge desk, and asked for one of the hotel's complimentary vans to give him a lift to Castle Creek, at the edge of town. He told the driver he wanted to take photographs from the footbridge, some 70 feet above the gorge. The driver didn't know my father wasn't carrying a camera.

My mother, Judy, still a strong and graceful skier even in her early seventies, was up on 11,000-foot Aspen Mountain at the time. She planned to meet my father for lunch and go for a walk with him in the afternoon, as she had done for the past few days. Normally my father, Bill, would have been skiing Ajax, too, as Aspen locals call the beloved mountain my family had spent vacations skiing for decades, but he was limping due to a nerve condition in his foot. Dad was about to turn 76, and this winter was the first of his adult life that he couldn't ski. Besides this physical deterioration—or perhaps because of it—he had recently been hospitalized for depression. I didn't hear him go out. I was sitting in the adjoining room at my laptop. We'd planned to meet at 10 a.m. to add finishing touches to his memoir, The Last Time Around Cape Horn. In a lifetime of adventures, this one stood out: In 1949 he'd served as an ordinary seaman on the four-masted Finnish barque Pamir. My father and the rest of the 33-man crew were the last sailors ever to round Cape Horn on a commercial sailing vessel. The voyage of the Pamir ended the Great Age of Sail.

"I want this to be good," he'd said to me at the outset of our work together on the book. "This is my swan song."

The manuscript had already been purchased by the New York publisher Carroll & Graf, as well as by publishers abroad. It would be released in November, and to promote it, he and I planned to travel together to St.-Malo, France, in May, for the last reunion of a society of old sailors who'd rounded Cape Horn on commercial sailing vessels. Despite his depression, he was pleased with the manuscript, and so was I. Now I simply hoped to keep him busy with minor editorial details, the excuse for the three of us to rendezvous in Aspen. In reality, my mother and I thought the mountains and sunshine might cheer him, maybe even inspire him to try to ski again. The alternative was another hospitalization, which he'd hated, or another change of medications, which hadn't helped, or the looming prospect of electroshock therapy, which he dreaded.

When I met him in Aspen after flying down from Montana, he looked paler and thinner than when I'd seen him last, six months earlier, at our family home in Wisconsin. Though he was now touched by the first papery brittleness of old age, his shoulders were still broad, his biceps showed bulges, his posture was mostly erect, and he seemed relaxed. But I quickly discovered that he didn't want to be kept busy "nitpicking the manuscript." He'd said what he wanted to say. It was finished. His had been a life of physical action, of bold spontaneous gestures, of drama, of fun, of decisiveness. Far more frightening to him than dangling from an ice-glazed yardarm 150 feet over the Southern Ocean was being unable to choose his own destiny. And he feared that incapacity was creeping closer each day.

At 10 a.m. I stepped into his room. He wasn't there. I checked the dressing room, the bathroom.

"Dad?"

No answer.

I'd spoken with him in my room only half an hour earlier, asking him if he minded whether I worked a bit more on my own manuscript, a book about a first descent of a river in Africa.

"That's fine," he'd said as I handed him a history of Cape Horn to keep him busy researching some nautical details.

I looked around the empty room. Maybe he's reading down in the lobby, I thought. Then I saw the Cape Horn book, placed neatly on the floor beside his briefcase.

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