THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506170278
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
TEN YEARS AGO a father and a son took a small boat 17,000 miles around the bottom of the world.
Passages.
``Let's do the big one, Dan,'' David Hays said to his offspring before they embarked. ``The Horn.''
Replied the lad, typical of his time: ``Where's that, Dad?''
Herman Melville once wrote that, sailor or landsman, there is some sort of a Cape Horn for us all. It's an endurance test, a tough pell-mell milepost in life. David and Daniel Hays turned the corner together.
One journey, two trips.
``Dan wanted another year to find a direction for his life,'' reports David. ``I wanted to strip away a few veneers and become fresh again, like him. He wanted to become decisive, committed to a career, more like me.''
My Old Man and the Sea: A Father and Son Sail Around Cape Horn (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 288 pp., $19.95), an inspired story for Dad's Day, is the account of how they both succeeded.
Told in tandem, the title cuts two ways. From Daniel's point of view, the book is indeed an account of his ``old man'' and the ocean. From David's, it is a story of his own personal, stubborn, senior encounter with the elements and their meaning, much in the manner of Santiago, the salty protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's famous novel.
Writes David, ``As we set out, we wondered: if we could overcome the forces of the sea, could we also endure our closeness - and our distance - as father and son, in a tiny cabin? This too would be a rite of passage.''
David, now 65, founded the National Theatre of the Deaf and remains its artistic director. Daniel, now 35, worked as an instructor at a therapeutic wilderness program for troubled teenagers in Idaho. They are the first Americans to sail around Cape Horn in a boat less than 30 feet in length.
Actually, the boat, aptly dubbed the Sparrow, was 25 feet, 712 inches long.
Cape Horn is way down there, the southernmost tip of South America, 1,300 miles below the underside of Africa. The weather is rugged. The water is treacherous.
And empty.
Daniel: ``The high point of today was poking a hole in Dad's can of cola so it dribbled down his chest when he drank it. The low point was he didn't notice. Well, he finally did and we laughed hysterically for a half-hour.
``I suppose this proves there isn't much entertainment out here.''
Sometimes there is.
David: ``At 8:30 at night I was below making tea and lighting the evening lamp when Sparrow went down hard to starboard. Then bam! down to port. Without a horizon below, hanging on and standing not upright but with the angle of the boat, I only knew that we were down because the water covering the porthole was not wave froth but solid green - I was looking straight down into the ocean.''
Confidences were exchanged, and jests, and rages. David didn't like being treated as an old man. Daniel didn't like being treated as a child.
They bonded.
Daniel: ``Tonight's the first night of Chanukah. The ocean is calm - too calm really. We're sort of drifting. Dad yells at the sails, then takes them down.
``Things clank and we roll. The menorah slides back and forth on the cabin table. We tape it down.
``We light two candles tonight.
``The cat walks across and briefly catches fire.''
On passing the Horn, David made Daniel captain. They had survived the sea and each other. A year after the voyage was over, Leonora Hays, David's wife and Daniel's mother, asked her husband in casual conversation who his ideal person was.
``You know,'' she said, ``a hero, growing up.''
And, at first, David flashed on the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Lou Gehrig and his father.
But he answered: ``My son.''
- MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
WILLIAM BURROWS
David, left, and Daniel Hays tell their story of sailing around Cape
Horn in a small boat in ``My Old Man and the Sea.''
by CNB