Boat: A Memoir of Friendship, Faith, Death, and Life Everlasing

By Michael Baughman

When ten-year-old Michael Baughman moves to Hawaii with his parents, he is troubled and confused. His father doesn’t provide the guidance Baughman needs and the boy doesn’t know who to turn to. When a larger-than-life Hawaiian beachboy” named Boat takes Baughman under his wing, the boy finds a teacher and mentor. Boat is 285 pounds of solid muscle but gentle spirituality, and he introduces the boy to the ways of Hawaiian mysticism, offering simple, profound wisdom that helps Baughman thrive in an otherwise lonely childhood. Even after Baughman leaves the islands seven years later, the unlikely friendship endures for the rest of Boat’s life, influencing and inspiring the author to this day. 
Baughman’s narrative begins with a distressed boy at a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game and ends more than six decades later with himself as a content old man experiencing a miracle in Mexico. With a photographic memory, Baughman recalls virtually verbatim every significant conversation he had with Boat. Boat spoke Hawaiian Pidgin English, and its unique lilt and rhythm grace this touching memoir. A testament to friendship and the revelations provoked by wisdom in unexpected places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcade
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611457773

Michael Baughman

Michael Baughman was born in Buffalo and raised in western Pennsylvania and Hawaii. After college, he served in the US Army in Germany, after which he returned to teach and write. He is the author of seven books. Baughman lives in Ashland, Oregon, with his wife of fifty years, children, and grandchildren.

Book preview

PART ONE

First Break

Look in at that beach, bruddah. In a hundred years everybody there be dead. Everybody walking the beach, everybody in the Outrigger Club, all those rich ones in the Royal and Moana. Don’t you forget, we be dead too. Dust and ashes. Ashes for us Hawaiians. Dust maybe for you. These dolphins out here going to be dead too. Everything, everybody, in a hundred years. Only two things stay here forever, the ocean and the sky up over it. But us Hawaiians, even when we ashes we be out here after we dead. We be out here with the fish and dolphins and the sharks and the morays forever in the ocean underneath the sky. Think about that, bruddah. Think how lucky us Hawaiians are. I’m one happy man!

Prologue

On a hot summer day, climbing a long, crowded ramp with my father to get to our upper-deck seats, I overheard the loud, gruff voices of nearby men:

The son of a bitch shouldn’t be here.

You mean the nigger shouldn’t be here.

Goddamn right he shouldn’t.

Branch Rickey, nigger-lover.

You can say that again.

Branch Rickey, nigger-lover.

This country ain’t what it used to be.

You can say that again.

Branch Rickey, nigger-lover.

When we reached our seats I asked my father what the men had been talking about, what they had meant.

There’s a Negro playing baseball for the Dodgers against the Pirates today. Jackie Robinson.

Those men are mad about it.

Yes they are.

Why?

Baseball should be a white man’s game.

Why?

It just should be.

Why though?

You’re too young to understand.

They were in the living room and hadn’t heard me come down the stairs from the bathroom to say goodnight.

Bitch! screamed my father.

I heard my mother crying.

Bitch! screamed my father again. From his voice I knew he’d been drinking. Goddamn bitch!

I heard my mother crying.

You’re disgusting, you stupid goddamn bitch! Why did I ever marry you? Stupid bitch!

I snuck back up the stairs and went into my bedroom and closed the door quietly behind me.

Lying in bed, I read the final chapters of Robinson Crusoe.

My father, a businessman, drank at his club, the Belvedere Literary Association. He often joked that no one had ever seen a book in the place and nobody ever would. Pennsylvania had blue laws that kept bars closed on Sundays, so private clubs had been created as a subterfuge. The Belvedere Literary Association consisted of a main room filled with wooden tables and upholstered chairs with a long dark-wood bar lined with padded stools at the back. Along the bottom of the bar were a brass rail and many shiny spittoons. My father, and most of the men who went there, drank shots of Old Overholt rye with beer chasers. In a smaller back room were green felt-covered poker tables and slot machines lining the walls. When my father took me there, beginning at age eight, I was allowed to drink draft beer and play the nickel slots.

My mother was a quiet woman who often had reason to cry. She had been born to an unmarried teenager named Willa Brant, a direct descendant of Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant, who, because the British offered the Mohawks a far better future than the settlers did, fought with the redcoats during the Revolutionary War. Willa died hours after childbirth, and the father, a man named Miller, abandoned the infant. My mother often took me to visit John Brant, Willa’s father, my great-grandfather, on his farm in the western Pennsylvania hills.

The night I finished Robinson Crusoe I had a remarkably vivid dream: a large dark man, a giant of a man, stood near the water on a lonely beach, shading his eyes with both hands as if looking intently at something, or for something, far away.

Fear

Barefoot in sand for the first time in my young life, I stood transfixed in unfamiliar early-morning winter warmth. To my left, a long beach curved away toward a dark mountain. Small waves broke a few yards in front of me, their foamy water ascending the glistening slope of sand and hissing back to softly collide with the next incoming breaker. Out beyond the shorebreak a vast sea stretched to a long line of hazy clouds piled across the distant horizon. This new world was utterly silent except for the pulse of the waves.

December at Waikiki Beach.

Until a few days before, I had lived all ten years of my life near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an area, I would later learn, that had once been described by H. L. Mencken as the ugliest place on Earth. After I saw more of the world I knew that Mencken’s assertion, applied to the time I lived there, was probably true. December in Pittsburgh meant foul air spewed from mills and morning blankets of new snow turned filthy-gray with soot by lunchtime.

But, thanks to Granddad Brant, I had learned about birds and animals, quiet forests and clean streams, about forty miles away from the city, at his farm. He had taught me to love the trout in spring and summer, pheasants in fall, the hemlocks, maples, and red oaks in their brilliant mid-October foliage, animal tracks in fresh snow—and now I’d lost all that was good.

My father, determined to move west for more money, as so many Americans did in the years after the war, told my mother and me he had found work he wanted in Hawaii. My imagination had little more to go on than if he had named another planet, and I feared leaving the only place I knew.

The final leg of our westward journey was a ten-hour DC-6 United Airlines flight from San Francisco. Despite extreme turbulence a lavish duck dinner was served, and ten or fifteen minutes after eating I vomited into a paper sack.

A rattletrap taxi carried us from the airport along dark streets to the Edgewater Hotel, where, exhausted, I fell asleep at once.

I awakened at dawn before my parents, pulled on my pants, snuck out the door, and walked thirty or forty yards toward the strange yet identifiable sound of waves.

My mouth tasted foul, my throat was sore, my head ached, my queasy stomach remembered the duck, and never in my life had I felt so lonely. Then, at the end of a paved walkway, I saw the beach and the sea. My physical symptoms vanished, replaced by a peculiar blend of exhilaration and fear.

I stood rooted there on the beach for a quarter hour or more, until my worried mother finally found me and took me back to our room.

Half an hour later we ate breakfast on the seaside lanai at the Halekulani Hotel, a short walk from the Edgewater. My appetite hadn’t returned and I barely touched my hotcakes. Our table looked out to sea and I watched some surfers riding waves far offshore. Occasional low clouds floated seaward in warm wind and the air smelled of flowers. Close to us, in shallow water, dark patches of coral and channels of white sand were visible through the iridescent blue-green surface.

Outdoors at night at Granddad Brant’s I had looked into the starry sky and wondered at the mystery there. The sea, so close at hand, seemed an even greater and more fearful mystery to me.

Not far from our table, a brown old man wearing khaki pants and a white T-shirt and carrying a burlap sack walked slowly along the hard sand collecting fragments and strands of seaweed. Soon after the old man passed a brown-backed boy about my age waded across the bottom through waist-deep water in front of the hotel. As I watched, he pulled on goggles and began to swim toward deeper water. My father explained that the boy was swimming out to spearfish, and he asked me if I thought I might like to learn to do that, but I didn’t answer.

We were barely back in our room before I had to vomit again.

Boat

We moved into a rented house in Manoa Valley, about a mile up the road from Punahou School, where I would begin attending sixth grade in January.

My father enrolled me as a junior member at the Outrigger Canoe Club, located at the heart of Waikiki, and a few days after we had settled into the Manoa house he dropped me off at the club to spend the day.

I went there nearly every day through the rest of December, but the boys my age ignored me and I made no friends. In the mornings I swam in the safe, shallow water, then sat on the beach and watched the distant surfers ride their waves toward shore.

After lunch at the snack bar I sat in the shade of the surfboard lockers and watched the doubles volleyball games on the rope-lined sand courts.

On the beach one morning after about a week of this I was startled by a loud, deep voice close behind me.

Hey, kid!

When I turned, there he was, a Hawaiian, the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life, walking straight toward me, a wide smile on his broad face. Everything about him— arms, legs, abdomen, chest—was abnormally thick, yet with very pronounced muscular definition. This man exuded tremendous physical power. I was both frightened and glad to see he was smiling.

He stopped a few feet away and smiled down. I see you out here every day, he said. You new here on the beach?

Yes, I said.

What’s your name?

Mike.

I’m Boat. Everybody calls me Boat. Where you from, Mike?

Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania! Plenty far away! You like it in Hawaii?

I haven’t been here long.

I can tell. You like it on the beach?

I guess so.

Listen, bruddah. You come with me. We’ll pick you out a surfboard. You want to learn to surf, right?

I could try.

Sure you can try! Sure you can surf! Why not? Come.

He turned and walked away, and I got to my feet and followed him to the rows of surfboard lockers behind the canoe shed.

This here is a good board, he said as he slid it out of a locker. This one got strips of balsa and redwood all covered up tight with fiberglass. This one is yours. I got plenty boards. Back in small kid time I learned to surf on my mama’s ironing board. But I work here at the club and I got plenty boards now, so this one here is yours. Just your size. Okay?

Are you sure?

Sure. Okay?

Thanks, sir.

Call me Boat.

Thanks, Boat.

Take it, he said. Get the feel. Lift it up. Not so heavy with the balsa. You like it?

I don’t know much about surfboards. But I do.

Put the board on your shoulder, Mike. Hold it with your right arm. That’s it. You got it, bruddah. Come.

The board on my shoulder, I followed Boat