Eric made several starts on what he wanted to say for Jeff’s eulogy over the next few minutes, but he just wasn’t getting anywhere. Nothing quite fit what he wanted to say, but then, he wasn’t sure what to say anyway. Jeff had been a great friend for almost sixty years, after all; they had helped each other a lot, in the way friends do. Much of what Eric had been able to do over the course of his life had come as the result of having friends, after all, friends like Gary and Chip and Luke and Dr. Heerman. They had been great friends to him, and he’d tried to return that friendship as graciously and honestly as he could. But somehow, that wasn’t what he wanted to say about Jeff. Jeff and Eunice had been very special friends, after all, and talking about people like Gary and Luke wasn’t talking about him.

After fifteen or twenty minutes Eric had gone no farther than those and more beginnings he didn’t like; a blank page stared at him from the computer screen, the cursor blinking unrepentantly as if to mock him for his inability to write his feelings.

“Are you still struggling with that, Eric?” he heard Donna’s voice say.

“Yeah,” he said. “I just can’t find a way to get started. I think if I can manage a decent start, I can probably wing it from there. What are you doing here? I thought you went back to the motel.”

“I got to talking with Eunice in her room,” Donna told him. “I went through all of this with Trent, you know, and I thought I might be able to pass along a few words of wisdom. As crowded as this house has been, I didn’t know when I might get the opportunity again.”

“I’m glad you did,” he replied. “I haven’t even seen much of her today myself. She’s been wrapped up with her kids and grandkids all afternoon and evening. I guess that’s fine since she doesn’t get to see any of them very often.”

“I don’t see my kids or my grandkids often either,” she sighed. “I guess everybody scatters these days, and that’s the way life is now.”

“You’re probably right,” he conceded. “That makes occasions like this somehow overlook what people are getting together for in the first place.”

“That’s probably true for today, but tomorrow ought to be a little different,” she replied. “Tomorrow will be for Jeff, not for the relatives. Believe me, I went through the same thing with Trent. It seems like people can only take so much mourning. Anyway, can you run me back to the motel?”

“Sure, I might as well. Getting outside might even clear my head a little, because I really need to do this tonight before things get crazy tomorrow.”

“Eric, can I give you a piece of advice? Don’t sweat it that much. It doesn’t have to be perfect. All it needs to be is honest and from the heart. You’d probably be better off to wing it, because that way people will know it’s from the heart.”

“You might be right,” he conceded. “And if I don’t get something written tonight, that’s just what’s going to happen. But I at least ought to make an attempt to do it right. Let’s get you into town so I can come back here and wrestle with it some more.”

“I’ll go get my coat,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to ask this of you, but I thought it really was important to talk to Eunice one-on-one.”

A few minutes later they were in the minivan, heading toward Wychbold. “I stuck my nose out onto the front porch for a few minutes, but I don’t think you noticed me,” Donna said. “I did see that you were holding some of the kids rather spellbound with some of the stories of your adventures.”

“It’s good to be able to tell them to someone who hasn’t heard them over and over again,” he sighed. “I’m actually a little surprised that kids that age these days were interested.”

“I think kids get their adventures on the computer screen a little too much these days,” she replied. “It’s a little unusual to meet someone who actually has done all the things you’ve done. Even though it didn’t come out anything like the way I’d hoped it would, the summer I spent with you on the Hawksbill may have been the adventure of my lifetime, and I’ve often remembered it. Did you get as far as telling the kids that story?”

“I was getting close to it, but I never got that far. You’re right, it was a special summer, and I often remember it myself.”

Winter 1967 – Summer 1968

Eric’s hitchhike back from Seattle to Michigan went amazingly well, mostly because soon after he started he got picked up by a long-haul trucker who got him through two thirds of the trip in one ride. People would still pick up hitchhikers in those days; while Eric never did much of it himself there had been times he’d had to, and in those days he’d pick up hitchhikers if he had room in the car.

Within days of when he got back to Michigan he was driving the delivery truck again, thinking that while he had enjoyed his summer’s roaming, it was good to have a solid place to make a base as well.

In the first few weeks he didn’t think much about his plans for next summer as they seemed pretty well settled. He, Chip, and Luke would be going back up the Inside Passage, mostly doing more of the same. But that changed in late November when he got a call from Luke. “Things have really gone crazy around here since I got back,” he reported. “There’s not much that I can do about it, but there’s just no way in hell I’m going to be able to do that Inside Passage trip next summer like we talked about.”

“Well, shit,” Eric said. “There goes that great idea. I was already looking forward to it. Do you think you could pack up the gear I left on the Hawksbill and ship it to me, so I’ll have it if Chip and I can work out something else to do next summer?”

“I could,” Luke told him. “But I had another idea. There’s no reason you and Chip couldn’t do the trip without me.”

“Yeah, but it’s your boat. That’s bound to cause a bunch of problems.”

“Not as I see it. Look, let’s say I sell you the Hawksbill for a hundred bucks, just to get it in your name. Then it’s your boat, right?”

“Right,” Eric replied, beginning to see his friend’s logic. “We could have a handshake agreement to sell it back to you when the summer is over with for the same price.”

“I figured something like that. Look, I don’t want to go into it as it’s a family hassle, but there are some people who are getting crabby about the fact that I’m sailing around on what they think is an expensive yacht when I could be doing things that they think are important. So, if I don’t have the boat any longer, at least it won’t be there for them to bitch about.”

“Now I think we’re getting down to the real reason you want to do this,” Eric grinned. “All right, at that price I suppose Chip and I can go mess around up in the Inside Passage by ourselves this summer.”

“That sounds more like it,” Luke agreed. “I’m going to mail you some paperwork you’ll have to sign and return, along with a check for a hundred. I may not even cash the check, but it’ll be your boat. That’ll mean you have to have insurance and stuff on it, but you would anyway.”

In the end they worked out the deal. Eric wrote Chip a letter to inform him of the changes in plans, but didn’t get a reply back for several days. When he did, it was a shocker: Luke tried to make the same arrangement with me, he wrote. I had to turn him down. It’s not that I think that there’s anything wrong with the deal or that he has anything up his sleeve, because I don’t think he does. The simple fact of the matter is that I’m getting a lot of heat from my family about pumping gas in the winter and taking off in the summer. You’ve heard me talk about that before, but I think maybe it’s time that I at least looked like I’m looking for a real job. On top of that, with Luke out of the picture this summer it’s probably a good time to do it. I’ll try to help out anyway if you can’t find someone else to go with you, but if you can I’d better stay home.

That came as a shocker. Eric and Chip had spent at least part of every summer out messing around on mountains or whatnot ever since they’d been in the Army in Germany, and that was now a while back. Eric wrote back that he’d try to find someone else to go with him, but he didn’t have a lot of hope.

Part of the problem was that the Hawksbill was a ketch. While it was a good and honest boat, it just didn’t single-hand very well; most of the time they tried to have two people do the sailing, and there had been times it had been just barely enough. Besides, Eric wasn’t sure he wanted to go up the Inside Passage by himself, just on general principles. It was the same problem he’d seen others have – a good trip in mind, and the wherewithal to do it, but inability to find anyone competent to go along with them made the trip impossible.

It was not that Eric didn’t try to find someone. He approached Gary, who was interested, even though he knew nothing about sailboats, but there was no way in hell his wife was about to turn him loose for something that long and that far away. Warren Hanneman, his old Shawangunks and Himalayan climbing companion was also interested, but he was deep in his doctoral work and there was no way he could get away, either.

By the time Christmas was getting close the prospects for the summer were starting to look pretty bleak. By then, Eric had come to believe he had only two options: head out to Seattle in the spring and see if anyone hanging around the docks would like to ride to Alaska. That wasn’t impossible since it was in the height of the hippie days and it was usually possible to find someone, although their competence could easily be open to question. The alternative was to write to Luke and tell him to put the boat into storage. The only thing that kept Eric from doing the second was the thought that things had been known to happen when least expected, so there was no point in closing the door on the opportunity too soon.

For several years the highlight of Eric’s holiday season had been the visit of Donna to Jeff and Eunice’s. The visit usually went on for several days; usually Donna didn’t like to go to her home any more than necessary since her mother was still trying to shove Jerry Peters down her throat at every opportunity. While she had never particularly liked Jerry, her mother’s actions made her like him even less.

Eric and Donna never made a point of telling Jeff and Eunice what they were up to in their long, quiet evenings alone in the guest cottage. It was pretty well understood what they were doing, it was just that no one talked about it.

By this time both he and Donna were over thirty, and Eric could see that Donna was getting even stronger nesting instincts than she’d had in the past; her biological clock was ticking so hard he could hear it himself. She still wanted him to settle down with her, get a job, and have a normal life, but after the last few years the idea appealed to him less and less. “Look,” Donna said one evening, “we could at least give it a try. It can’t work out any worse than it did between Frank and me.”

“Donna,” he replied, “I’m not sure how badly I want to louse up a good friendship by getting married. My problem now is the same as it was ten years ago: I don’t really want to get married, because I can’t promise you that I could be the man you want me to be.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” she replied. “How do you know what I want?”

“Donna, I don’t think you’d be very happy with me taking off every summer and going climbing or sailing or canoeing or whatever else I find I like to do. And I doubt that you’d want to go with me. You’re a teacher and you get three months off in the summer, so that allows some flexibility, but I don’t think you’re the kind of person who would like to go with me on many of the things I like to do in the summer.”

“How do you know?” she frowned. “You’ve never asked me.”

“All right,” he said, feeling like he might be making a mistake but wanting to make his point. “You get off school right after Memorial Day, right?”

“Right. I’d have to look up the exact date, but that will end it for the summer.”

“All right,” he said. “After school gets out, get your butt on a plane and fly out to Seattle. I’ll get out there early and make sure the Hawksbill is ready to go. We can spend the summer in the Inside Passage, and it’s incredibly beautiful up there. Maybe we can climb a few easy mountains. You’ll have to learn to sail and help me handle the boat, but there probably won’t be any long days. It’s not going to be easy, Donna. The Hawksbill is a little primitive, and there’s no place to stand up in the cabin. If you want a shower, it’ll mostly be in your swimsuit out on the deck, and in cold water at that. The cooking is simple, but we can live on it. I guarantee you that you’ll have a summer you’ll never forget.”

“But there has to be a fish hook there somewhere,” she frowned.

“None that I can think of,” he told her. “Now, if you get through the summer and decide you’d like to do something like that again, then maybe we can talk about making things a little more permanent. If you don’t like it, then that will be that. But there’ll never be a better way to find out if you’re cut out for that kind of life.”

“Let me think about it,” she said. “I’ve always kind of wondered what drew you to the way you live, and maybe this is a way I could find out.”

They left it at that and found other things to do for the next couple hours before she had to get dressed and go back into Jeff and Eunice’s house to preserve at least a sense of propriety. However, the next morning she got Eric off to the side and told him, “All right, you talked me into it. At least when I get back to school in the fall I can tell my friends how I spent my summer on my boyfriend’s yacht.”

“Hawksbill is hardly a yacht, but it’s a good solid boat and you may come to like it.”

Eric spent several hours over the next couple days telling Donna what to bring, and what’s more, what not to bring: an excessive amount of stuff, mostly. It would probably not get excessively cold but would be a lot cooler than the summers she was used to in Michigan. Space on the boat was limited, and there wouldn’t be too much room for things. “This is going to pretty much be a sweatshirt and blue-jeans trip,” he told her. “We may get some days when you’ll want to wear shorts, but not very many of them.”

He also gave her some basic books on sailing from his collection from the winter before, and told her to go through them until she had them memorized backwards and forwards. “Some of it probably won’t be applicable,” he told her. “But there are things that will make sense when you actually have to do them. You’re not going to be a passenger on Hawksbill. You’re going to be part of the crew.” Eric really had his doubts about how well a trip like this with her would go. By then he knew Donna pretty well, and knew she wasn’t the kind of woman who would enjoy primitive things like a summer on the boat. He could think of other women he’d known who would have been thrilled to do something like they were planning, and now that he’d made the commitment to Donna he wondered why he hadn’t asked one or another of them. Possibly, he rationalized, because he knew they would like it and he was pretty sure Donna wouldn’t. After all, while he was out to have a good time with Donna, he was also trying to make a point.

Finally heating season drew to an end. He still had the VW and it was still adequate for the little that he used it, but he wasn’t any more willing to risk it on a drive to the West Coast than he’d been the summer before. So in the middle of April Jeff again dropped him off at the South Shore station in South Bend, and he took the interurban into Chicago, and then a bus on to Seattle.

When he got to Seattle, the first thing he did was to look up Luke so he could coordinate plans with him. “Just in the last few days I think I’ve gotten things ironed out in the family,” he said. “I suppose I could go to Alaska with you and your girl, but there are things I could be doing here instead while you’re gone, and they’d help to smooth things over with my family.”

“If you wanted to, you could come along,” Eric said. “I’m actually a little doubtful about doing anything very risky up there with a greenhorn like her for a crew.”

“Naw, it might cut into your fun and games,” Luke told him. “I had some of them over the winter, and it helped me get out of the mess with my family, but that’s neither here nor there. What I am looking at is a new boat, a thirty-six footer. How would you like to go to Hawaii with me on it this fall?”

“I could be talked into it,” Eric said. “But it would screw up my winter job. Jeff would be willing to let me go with no hard feelings, but it might get a little iffy when I come back in the future. But assuming I decided to go with you, would there be room for this girl of mine to go along?”

“Plenty of room, this is a lot bigger boat than the Hawksbill, and it’s fiberglass, not wood, so there’s more room inside. The problem is that it’s not built yet, and probably won’t be unless I sit on the neck of the guy who’s building it.”

“Oh, one of those deals, huh?”

“You’ll never know. This fell out of family politics and it’s a pain in the ass all around. Let’s just say that I’m getting the boat for a very good number on account of it.”

“Look, because of this girl and my job, I can’t make a commitment on this until fall. Maybe you’d better ask Chip to go with you.”

“I already did. Chip fucked up over the winter, he’s got himself involved with a girl and it looks serious. We may be able to get him out for a big trip now and then, but I don’t think there’s going to be any more summers of just screwing around. I just hope you don’t get yourself in the same trouble.”

“Actually, bringing this girl along is an attempt to keep me from getting into that sort of trouble with her. However, I don’t have any idea how that’s going to work out.”

“Well, keep in touch,” Luke said. “I can see there are still some bugs that are going to have to be stomped on.”

With a little help from Luke, Eric had the Hawksbill ready to go before Donna showed up in early June. He even had time to get out and do a little climbing with Luke, just to keep in practice, but both of them knew they had other things on their mind for the summer.

Donna showed up right on schedule, wearing a flannel shirt and blue jeans off the plane as if to signify that she was ready for her adventure. It wasn’t a bad day, so Luke took the two of them right to the boat, where they spent a couple days giving her the drill on how to sail it. Then, not a week after her school was out for the summer, they pulled in the lines and started north, with Luke standing on the dock watching them sail away.

All in all, they had a pretty good summer, and even made it up as far as Glacier Bay, the far end of the Inside Passage. They did a little climbing – actually more rock scrambling, nothing even remotely like technical climbing – but the climbs were always to nice views, and nothing too hard. They saw whales, they saw seals and otters, and they saw lots of trees and mountains and glaciers. And yes, they saw storms and bad days, but if a bad one hit they managed to ride it out at anchor in a safe place. It seemed a little like being a tourist to him, and although it was primitive for Donna, he rarely heard her complain, and then it was over some little thing. All in all, she seemed to have a good time.

The only real constraint was that they had to be back in Seattle in time for her to catch a plane back to Michigan so she could be ready to set up her classroom for the following year. As the summer went on, Eric could tell she was looking forward to getting back to that normality in her life more than she would admit.

Finally, one night at anchor a couple days out of Seattle, Eric decided it was time to fish or cut bait. “Have you had as good a summer as you expected?” he asked her.

“It wasn’t quite what I thought it would be like,” she said. “But it wasn’t as bad as I expected, either. In fact, it was fun in a way.”

“All right, I guess I was wrong on that,” he told her. “But here’s the big question. I’m pretty sure when we get back Luke will have his new boat ready to go. His plan is to go to Hawaii, probably not long after we get back. After that, he’s not sure, maybe Tahiti, maybe Samoa, maybe somewhere else like Fiji. We’d probably wind up in Australia or New Zealand for the next Austral winter. That starts in like May and runs into October, the same as summer here. After that, his plans are kind of loose, or at least they were last spring. It may be to go to the Western Pacific, or maybe to go on around the world. I don’t know, and I don’t think he knows.”

“It sounds interesting,” she said. “But what has that got to do with me?”

“I asked him that if this summer went all right, if you could come with us. He said if it was all right with me, it was all right with him. Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand,” he said. “You may never get a chance to do that again, and essentially for free.”

“Shit,” she said. “I finally got tenure this spring. That means I have a job at Lansing Southwestern for as long as I want to teach. Eric, I just can’t throw that away, and I’m not in a position where I can take a sabbatical, not on this short a notice. Are you going to be coming back for the winter?”

“Probably not,” he replied. “After I found out about this trip this spring, I called Jeff and asked if he’d be willing to let me go for the winter this year. He said it was all right with him.”

“Shit,” she said again. “I’d been making plans for you to move in with me this winter.”

“I couldn’t very well do that and do deliveries,” he said. “And I sure can’t do it if I’m on my way to Hawaii.”

For the next couple days she tried to rationalize her way out of the mess, but there was no middle ground – it had to be one way or the other. In the end, Luke and Eric took her to the airport, where she got onto the plane alone.

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