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Last Time Around (cont.)

OVER THE YEARS I'VE WONDERED how many other adventurers and explorers were manic-depressive—if the condition's highs and lows don't somehow lend themselves to grandiose geographical schemes like chasing halfway around the world for an improbable berth on a windjammer. Meriwether Lewis set out across a continent with William Clark, then apparently committed suicide three years after the return of the Corps of Discovery.

And life aboard a windjammer provided its own highs and lows. The second day out from Port Victoria, May 29, 1949, my father was walking aft on the midship deck when the big English bosun—the ship's enforcer of authority—called out "Yank!" and pointed to the top of the mainmast, ordering my father to clear the fouled windsock that hung from the ship's uttermost pinnacle. My father, who had never been aloft, remained rooted to the deck. "You aren't on your daddy's yacht now!" the bosun shouted, giving him an abrupt shove in the back. "This is what you signed on for! Get aloft!"

For long minutes my father clambered up the ratlines past sails as large as tennis courts, then clung with one hand to the slender spar, nearly 200 feet above the sea, while untangling the windsock with the other, and finally returned to deck, where the bosun had been watching him.

"That's the way she should fly," he said. "Good on ya, Yank!"

"I was as elated as I'd ever been in my life," my father wrote in his memoir.

What began as a lighthearted adventure, however, turned into a hellish trip. As the ship entered the Roaring Forties and then the Furious Fifties on the 6,000-mile run across the Southern Ocean, storm after winter storm slammed the Pamir. Sails were blown to shreds. Icy green walls of water staved in skylights. Despite her big steel hull, the Pamir hardly differed in living conditions from a 17th-century square-rigger: She carried no engine or working radio, there was no heat but the galley stove, and the sailors worked the traditional and exhausting "four hours on, four hours off" watches. Even the brief rests were shattered by "three-whistle" emergencies summoning all hands, when the sailors would tumble from their sodden bunks and a few minutes later be clinging to a yardarm far above the black sea.

"I would have done anything to get off that ship," my father wrote in his memoir. "But there was nothing I could do, short of jumping overboard and swimming for the coast of Patagonia, several thousand miles away."

Were these second thoughts the inevitable downside of a manic upsurge? Or maybe it wasn't just mania that inspired these journeys. More than anything, my father loved the sheer exhilaration of it all. I remember one sultry August evening during my twenties, quietly sitting with my father and my brother at the dinner table on my parents' screened porch, overlooking the same Wisconsin lake where Dad had spent his summers sailing as a youth. We were finishing dessert and a bottle of red wine when a violent thunderstorm rolled in. "Boys," my father said, looking out at the chaos of whitecaps, sheets of rain, and bolts of lightning thrashing the lake, "what do you say we get in the canoe and go surf those waves?"

And so we did, wildly, laughingly, in the rain and wind, thunder and lightning.

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