Ashore, people ask us "What do you do?" Though they may not put it so directly, most cruisers want to know, "What are your dreams?" And, more importantly, "What are you doing to make your dreams come true?" A very few people we have met cruising answer that final question by living their dreams every single moment of their lives. Ken Murray was one of those.
We first met Ken and his then-wife Helen in April of 2002 in a remote anchorage called Anihue in the northern part of the Chilean channels. But Evans and I had been hearing about them ever since we arrived in the Beagle Channel four months earlier. A stock fiberglass powerboat cruising the most challenging coastline in the world would have been enough to make Pelagic stand out from among the dozen or so mostly custom and mostly metal cruising sailboats. But in addition, while most boats passed through the 1,000 nautical miles of coastline in one short summer season, Pelagic had been in Chile for more than two years, and Ken's penchant for gunkholing in uncharted fjords meant that he had a wealth of valuable information which he shared freely on the high-frequency radio net. At age 73, Helen was by far the oldest person anyone had ever heard of living aboard a cruising boat in the channels and nearly 20 years older than Ken. The age disparity between Ken and Helen offered even more grist for the rumor mill, as did Pelagic's name because it was the same as a steel charter sailboat used for Antarctic climbing expeditions owned by Skip Novak, a well-known sailboat racer, climber, writer and adventurer. During one of the first evenings we got together Ken told us with an impish smile, "Skip was incensed that a powerboat should have the same name as his boat and told me to change it when we arrived in Chile in 2000."
Ken was thin and rangy, his face sun creased, his brown eyes always smiling, his sharp mind easily engaged. With his engineer's logic and skilled mechanic's hands, he could fix almost anything, and he had somehow held the aging Pelagic together on her 15,000-mile voyage. When telling us about his repairing something on board, Helen said, "Ken got it to work with his usual method - magic!" In their eight years aboard Pelagic, Ken had spent almost as much time off the boat as on it, using his mechanical skills to help others with their boats, traveling around South America on his lovingly restored 1952 Matchless motorcycle, working on a ship doing underwater salvage in the Rio de la Plata, and contributing to whatever shoreside community lay beyond Pelagic's decks at any given time.
Fifteen years before, Ken and Helen had both been with other partners, and both had dreamed of sailing to distant shores. Both had fit out sailboats with their spouses and headed down the west coast only to discover that their partners suffered from debilitating seasickness. Both had been unwilling to give up their dreams; for that and a variety of other reasons both ended up divorced. Ken was cruising Baja alone aboard his 42-foot steel boat, La Cuna. Helen had done everything she could to hitch a ride on a cruising boat, but no one would take her once they discovered that she was almost sixty years old and had some health problems. Undaunted, she had purchased a Toyota Minivan, loaded it with camping supplies, and headed south for the Baja peninsula and the shores of the Sea of Cortez. When Ken rowed ashore from La Cuna and landed at Helen's campsite on a sandy beach in Baja, he asked her what she was doing there. "I'm waiting for someone to take me sailing," she replied.
There were a dozen reasons why Ken and Helen should not have been where they were doing what they were. By almost any standard, they had no money and an entirely unsuitable boat. Helen had a plethora of health problems, and they had no health insurance. But they weren't interested in excuses. The life they lived was tough, demanding and, at times, scary. But it was everything they wanted.
We sailed in company with Ken and Helen for much of our southbound trip through the channels from September to December of 2002. When we left Chile bound for Australia in January of 2003, we sailed away believing we would see them both again on a return trip to Chile at some indeterminate time in the future. But that was not to be.
In May of 2005 Helen suffered a stroke. Rather than leaving her in a nursing home in Argentina after she was released from the hospital, Ken brought her home to Pelagic and cared for her himself for five months. At the end of October, a second stroke put her back in the hospital and eventually she lapsed into a coma. On November 4, 2005, she came out of the coma long enough to spend a last hour with Ken. She told him she loved him and "the times we spent together were the best years of my life." She had lived her dreams beyond her wildest imaginings, she said, but now it was time for her to move on.
When we returned to Chile in October of 2007 Ken was still cruising the channels in Pelagic, but much had changed in his life. Ken had fallen in love with and married Eef Willems, a merchant marine captain and charter boat skipper. I have told the remarkable story of their relationship in an article in the August Cruising World. Suffice to say that they had found true love, and seeing them together the most jaded person would not be able to deny that such a thing does exist. But less than a year after Helen had died and just six months after he and Eef had found each other, Ken was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had already metastasized into his bones and his lymph system and given a 20% chance of surviving the next five years. The first thing he did was to ask Eef to marry him.
Ken and Eef made the decision that quality of life mattered far more than length of life; that whatever treatment Ken pursued, it had to allow them to live aboard their boat and be together in Patagonia. Ken's doctors at the VA hospital worked hard to give Ken all the time they could while allowing him to spend periods of many months 7,000 miles away from the hospital and the treatment facilities. They took advantage of every minute. When we were with them in the Beagle Channel in March of 2008, Ken and Eef went off for a month's cruise, hiking and kayaking miles into the large islands at the bottom of South America, charting anchorages that, as far as anyone knows, no one had ever visited. They cruised the way that most people dream of and few achieve, as at home camping on a mountain along the edge of a glacier or kayaking up a stream as enjoying their boat's snug cabin in a 50-knot blow.
Last year at this time, they had the choice of sitting around in hospitals "waiting to die," as Ken put it, or having one last grand adventure. No one who knew Ken and Eef would have been surprised at their decision. He and Eef set off on Eef's steel boat, Tooluka, and sailed 12,000 nautical miles to Greenland. For all of Ken's sea miles and experiences, he had never taken a sailboat across an ocean, and he had never visited Greenland, another remote area of icebergs and glaciers where whales dance in steely gray waters. Against all the odds, and thanks to Eef's strength and abilities, Ken made it to Greenland and spent two months cruising there under the midnight sun. He passed away with Eef at his side at 23:50 in Aasiaat, Greenland on August 25th in the local hospital. Our friends Clive and Laila were with him and helped Eef in every way they could in the last days of Ken's life. Laila told me that the Greenlanders have a tradition of an "outsinging" for the dying, singing a hymn about sailing new waters and hunting new fields to carry them over the threshold of death. Most of the hospital staff joined the family of the man in the bed next to Ken's to sing Ken out of this life and into the next.
Ken seemed to dance and laugh his way through life no matter the heartaches he encountered. When you lose a person like that, you cannot mourn for him, because you just know that he is still dancing and laughing somewhere. Instead you mourn for yourself and others like you, left bereft on a cold and empty shore watching a sparkling bright light pass out of your life forever.
| 2009 |
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