The Seventy-Thousand-Dollar Outhouse

By Donald D. Yackel

This second book by Donald D. Yackel continues the format and organization of his first, The Idling Bulldozer and Other Paddling Adventures. However, unlike that offering, this one starts with a personal reflection on the author’s connection to boats and the water. Subsequent chapters describe paddling trips in Canada, Costa Rica, Florida, and Mexico. While each chapter provides a glimpse into part of the world most readers will never visit, the author’s vivid descriptions will take you there. As one reviewer put it: “I am an armchair adventurer. I loved the descriptions of the various areas in the U.S. and Canada…the terrain, the wildlife…places I will never see…places most people will never see or experience. The challenges of paddling in various places and conditions, the hardships, the challenges and the rewards make for a great and interesting read.” A second reviewer writes: “Even if you are not a paddling enthusiast, the stories are fun! Don writes in a conversational tone…it's like you’re sitting next to him while he tells his stories.” Each tale is a memoir of what the author experienced on the adventure: what he saw, what he did, how it felt, whom he traveled with, and the dangers and rewards experienced. Whether you are a veteran kayaker, a rank beginner, or have never been in a boat before, you can find something to relate to in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781645757092

Donald D. Yackel

Donald D. Yackel has spent 30 years paddling on extended wilderness trips, most of it in his 17-foot kayak. He has paddled well over 4,000 miles and has spent the equivalent of a year or more sleeping in small tents in all kinds of settings. The adventures in his third book differ from the first two (The Idling BulldozerandOther Paddling Adventures and The Seventy Thousand Outhouse). The stories in this book detail hiking and flying adventures, as well as paddling trips. And while they continue to chronicle positive adventures, for the first time, they tell about some that were not so good and one that ended tragically. Combining a life-long interest in writing with his natural ability as a storyteller, Don can take the reader to places they may never see or experience. He hopes you will enjoy these stories and find meaning in them.

Book preview

The Seventy-Thousand-

Dollar Outhouse

More Paddling Adventures from

the Author of

The Idling Bulldozer

Donald D. Yackel

Austin Macauley Publishers

The Seventy-Thousand-Dollar Outhouse

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

Acknowledgments

Foreword: Paddling: An Activity for All Ages

Introduction: Why I Like Extended Multi-Day Paddling Trips

Chapter One: Boats in My Blood

Boats in My Blood: A Personal History

Getting Down to Business

Sailing, Sailing…

Up Close and Personal

If Once You Have Slept on an Island

Chapter Two: Georgian Bay Odyssey

Georgian Bay—July 2004

Getting Started

Five Hours on the Road

Cairn Island

Picking Strawberries Again

The Rattlesnake Dance and a Personal Failure

Hurry Up and Go!

Paddling in the Rain

Bugs!

Chapter Three: Four Days in the Jungle

Prologue

The Adventure Begins

In the Jungle, the Lion Sleeps…

White Paws

Saying Goodbye

Chapter Four: Lulu Key Lullaby

Everglades City, February 2013

Getting Started

The Grand Tour

Finally, Fakahatchee

Return to Everglades City

Chapter Five: The Seventy-Thousand-Dollar Outhouse

Misty Isles, August 2008

Sugar Island

Grenadier Island

Staying Put!

The $70,000 Outhouse

The Bridge

Chapter Six: Return to the Saguenay Fjord

Return to the Saguenay Fjord, July 2013

Oh, What a Feeling—Check That Engine Light

The Long and Winding Road

Deflated

Detour

The Dues We Pay

Belugas!

The Granite GPS

Epilogue

Chapter Seven: Deja Vus on the Ochlockonee River

Prologue, March 2014

A Trailer Park Nestled in a Swamp

Deja Vus

Flood Stage

Drying Out

Paddling Through the Woods

A Side Trip

What a Difference a Year Makes

Last Year Revisited

This Year

Chapter Eight: On the Bartram History Trail

Palatka

On the Big Lake

The Bartram History Trail

The Best Day of the Trip

Back to Palatka

Chapter Nine: Loreto to La Paz by Kayak

Part I: The Gift, February 2, 2018

You Can’t Get There from Here

Every Adventure Begins with a First Step

The Endless Bus Ride

Finally, Loreto

On the Malecon

The Old Capital City

A First Meeting

Somewhere Between Shy and Anti-Social

Should It Stay, or Should It Go?

Part II: Along the Baja Peninsula, the Adventure Begins. We’re All Going to Die!

Disappointment

Finally, On the Water

Taking Care of Business

What’s for Dinner?

Breaking Camp

I Get to Paddle the Single

Finally, Out of the Wind

The Joys of a Layover Day

Our First Hike

Siesta

Getting Wet, Staying Clean

Will This Wind Ever Stop?

Ramon’s Catastrophe

Publication Day

Our Longest Paddling Day

The Mission and the Ranch

San Evaristito

Nazanin

Taco Soup and a Full Moon

A Lazy Layover Day

San Evaristo

Lupe Sierra’s and Maggi Mae’s Restaurant

The Legend of El Mechudo

We Meet El Mechudo

Into the Water

El Portugues and Trip’s End

Goodbye and Going Home

Part III: Epilogue

About the Author

Donald D. Yackel has spent 24 years paddling his 17-foot kayak on extended wilderness trips, traveling over 3700 miles and spending 324 days sleeping in small tents in all kinds of settings. The stories in this second book, like his first, The Idling Bulldozer and Other Paddling Adventures, are drawn from his experiences on some of those travels. Combining his life-long interest in writing and his natural ability as a storyteller, he is able to take the reader to places they may never see or experience. Don has been drawn to water and boats since he was a child. It’s very unlikely that that will ever change.

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my children and grandchildren in the hope that by reading about these adventures, they will learn more about the values of their father and grandfather, and that they will be encouraged to seek the spiritual connection that water, wildlife, and wilderness can give.

Copyright Information ©

Donald D. Yackel (2021)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Yackel, Donald D.

The Seventy-Thousand-Dollar Outhouse

ISBN 9781645757078 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781645757085 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781645757092 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020923842

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

[phone]

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge the continued support and encouragement of my wife, Lisa, for my paddling and writing endeavors. Without her, these adventures and books would not have happened.

I’d also like to acknowledge the work of my editor, Rowena Cernan, of the Book Concierge for her invaluable help in cleaning up the writing of a punctuationally challenged author.

Finally, thank you to all the wonderful folks who people the tales presented here. You have enriched my life more than you will ever know.

Foreword

Paddling: An Activity for All Ages

I’m not young anymore. As a matter of fact, I haven’t been young for a long time. The adventures in my books began when I was in my early fifties. In the last one, I was 75. I’m not telling you this to say that sea kayaking is an old man’s pastime. Rather, I am saying that kayaking and its cousin, canoeing, are activities that can be engaged in by people of all ages and, like tennis, golf, and fishing, paddle sports can be enjoyed well into senior-hood. While I was often the oldest paddler on many of my trips, the paddlers’ ages ranged from the mid-twenties to more than 80.

This illustrates that you do not have to be young to start enjoying paddle sports. You can begin at any age. Whether you only want to paddle a simple recreational kayak around a small, familiar lake or, like me, want to go on multi-day trips in different and exciting places, it’s never too late to start. Find a local outfitter who offers day trips and get started. If you like it, you might someday find yourself sleeping in a Costa Rican Jungle, enjoying the Saguenay Fjord in Quebec, or padding on the Sea of Cortez along the Baja Mexican coast.

Introduction

Why I Like Extended Multi-Day Paddling Trips

Why do I favor extended paddling trips over day trips? First, I don’t enjoy day trips the way I used to because it takes almost as much preparation and clean-up work to paddle for three or four hours as it does to go away for several days. Multi-day trips allow me to spend many more hours in the outdoors, often in wilderness areas where the trappings of our modern, climate-controlled, high tech lives mean little, where we must accommodate the natural rhythms of dawn and dusk, hot and cold, calm and wind, sun and rain, on nature’s schedule, not our own.

Second, self-planned and self-supported multi-day trips require investigation and preparation. The planning becomes part of the adventure. These trips are exciting, requiring the paddler to cope with conditions as they are and make adjustments. In the end, there is a lot of satisfaction in successfully completing self-planned trips. Completing such a trip brings a level of satisfaction and pride I don’t get when I just show up for an adventure that someone else has planned and arranged.

However, as I’ve gotten older, and perhaps lazier, I’ve gravitated toward, supported, group trips. I have done many of these over the years from Georgian Bay to the Hudson and Potomac Rivers, Costa Rica, Mexico, and even the Colorado.¹ But since moving to Florida, I have paddled many supported trips with an organization called Paddle Florida.²

Paddle Florida sponsors one trip in each of the five water districts in the state every year. As a new resident, I have seen parts of Florida that many old-timers don’t even know about. A Paddle Florida trip includes all of your meals, preplanning for campsites, evening entertainment, and transportation to your car at the end of the event; it does this at about half the cost of a similar trip with a commercial outfitter. Two of the stories in this book are about Paddle Florida adventures.

Finally, and this is by no means least important, through kayaking I have met and become friends with other paddlers from around the state, the country, and the world. This was my experience on the several Great Hudson River Paddles I was on years ago, where I made friends I continue to paddle with to this day. This has been my experience on Paddle Florida trips, too. After many of these adventures, I feel that this, more than anything else, keeps me coming back.

---

¹ Several of these trips are detailed in my first book, The Idling Bulldozer and Other Paddling Adventures.↩︎

² Go to www.paddleflorida.org for more information↩︎

Chapter One

Boats in My Blood

Boats in My Blood: A Personal History

I was born under Aquarius, the water sign. Maybe that explains my life long attraction to the water and boats. Or maybe it has to do with genetics. It turns out that my maternal grandmother’s grandfather, John Vermilyea, my great, great grandfather, was a boat builder who, among other things, built barges for the Erie Canal. I’ve built boats too, including a small sailboat and a kayak. He had a place on Oneida Lake, the same lake where I spent my summers until I left home. My grandfathers and uncles all had boats and cottages on lakes and rivers, and for a short time, my dad owned a retail boat business and marina.

Some of my earliest memories are of messing around in boats. I had toy boats from an early age and when I didn’t, I made pretend boats. I remember (or perhaps I was told) about piling all my toys in our kitchen where my mom was trying to work. I sat in the middle of the pile and said I was in my boat. Mom told me to pick up the mess, and I, of course, refused to destroy my creation. So she packed it all up in a basket and put it in the attic. Those toys were still there when I was in my teens. It wasn’t a good idea to get Mom angry.

My first real boat was a German Air Force inflatable rubber life raft that Dad sent back after the war. First, we filled it with water and used it as a play pool in the backyard of my grandfather Ash’s grocery store, where we lived in the apartment above. I think this was before play pools had even been invented. Then it became my floating toy at my grandpa Yackel’s camp on Oneida Lake.

Grandpa Yackel had a succession of boats, mostly Lymans, each one bigger than the last. His next-door neighbors at the lake were the Montagues, a British family. They had this wonderful big boathouse full of craft that seldom saw the water. I loved the smells of wood, varnish, and motor oil in that old place. Inside, cradled on a marine railway, was a big wooden inboard runabout. The railway would send it, infrequently, through big swinging doors at the end of the boathouse into the water below. At one side of the boathouse was a wooden, canvas-covered canoe, a Klepper folding kayak, and a sailboat. Or maybe the Klepper also served as the sailboat, too. I’m not sure anymore. The Klepper was the only one of those boats I ever got to ride in. On the other side was a small collection of outboard motors that I only see in museums now. All in all, that boathouse was a wonderful place for a kid to explore until discovered and sent home.

When I was seven, Grandpa’s camp burned down. So he, my dad, and uncles built a new one on Daken Bay. Grandpa would pick me up at home and take me to the new camp where I’d stay for a few days. I spent my time helping him work at the lakeshore and would swim while he kept watch. Sometimes he’d take me fishing in the small aluminum boat he acquired after the fire. Grandpa taught me how to row in that boat. He would place the boat’s anchor in shallow water as a tether and let me row till I was worn out, while he worked on the shore nearby. Sometimes he, Grandma, and I would take sightseeing boat rides along the shore.

When I was about ten, Dad built a family cottage just down the road from Grandpa’s place. Actually, Dad built two cottages. They were to be rental property, an investment by my grandfather. In reality, they were a gift from my grandfather to his son and family. We lived in one cottage every summer and rented the other to help pay expenses. We didn’t have a boat at that time, and I was hungry to have one. Early one summer, Dad took me out of school and the two of us drove to the Montgomery-Ward Store in Fulton, New York. (What ever happened to Montgomery-Ward?) There we bought a five horsepower Buccaneer outboard motor, some life vests, seat cushions, and several pieces of fishing equipment. All of this was to go with the second-hand wooden boat Dad had purchased from a guy he worked with.

I don’t think I had any idea of the financial stretch it was for Mom and Dad to buy that boat, motor, and equipment. All I knew was how excited I was when Dad put me in the boat, showed me how to start the motor, and then turned me loose on the lake. I was pleased with his confidence in my ability to handle this responsibility. But there was another side to it as well. On several occasions, Dad provided me with the tools I needed to follow an interest. But just as with the boat, he would turn me loose to learn on my own or from somebody else. He didn’t really spend a lot of time with me, showing me how to do some of these things.

In 1955, when I was 12 years old, Dad lost his job with Wholesale Service Supply Company, a supplier of wholesale building materials to lumberyards and hardware stores. Dad had been the manager and chief salesperson in the Syracuse office of this three-location (Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany) family business. The owner sent his nephew to be second in command of the Syracuse office and, after Dad had trained him, the nephew was moved into the manager’s spot and Dad was out. Given Dad’s later problems with alcohol, I’m not sure that’s the whole story.

#

Getting Down to Business

Dad’s brothers, father, and father-in-law were all entrepreneurs with their own businesses. I guess Dad felt he wanted to be his own boss, too. So he spent a few months casting about for a business to buy. He finally narrowed it down to either a lumberyard or a marine store, a retailer of boats, motors, and equipment. Mom begged him to take the lumberyard because he knew something about that business. But instead, he bought the marine store with loans from one brother and his father. Dad’s loans totaled $100,000, which doesn’t seem like so much today, but back then, you could buy a nice house for $10,000. My mom was not pleased to be in that kind of debt. I don’t know if Dad thought the boat business would be more profitable and more glamorous than the lumberyard or if he thought a boat business might be something he could leave to me. In any case, I loved the choice.

The store was called ACE Boat Works for no apparent reason. ACE was its original name and Dad kept it when he bought the place. I guess ACE put it first in the phone book. This was before the advent of personal computers and the internet, so your position in the yellow pages, organized alphabetically, mattered.

The store was in a large building on a small piece of land in Mattydale, New York. By the time I was 13, I was going to the store most Saturdays to help out. I’m not sure how helpful I was, but I could operate a cash register and I did learn a lot. Being relatively small, I could squeeze under the decks of runabouts to assist with the wiring of lights and steering controls. And I began to read, something I really hadn’t done before.

Dad had a subscription to a magazine called The Boating Industry. I devoured that monthly publication. I read the articles and reviews of new boats. And, I scanned all of the ads until I became an expert on every outboard motor being made and most boats. It’s because of this exposure that I became a reader, especially a reader of non-fiction.

The purchase of the business in Mattydale included an undeveloped piece of land on the Oneida River near a place called Three Rivers. Dad felt he needed a place on the water where customers could test drive a boat before buying it, so he began to develop the property naming it Holiday Harbor. He did this on a shoestring without the capital he needed to really do it right.

Because of the business and associated marina, I had access to many different boats over the years. I remember the day a truck pulling an ungainly boat called Boston Whaler stopped in front of the store. Dad thought it was ugly, but I thought it was beautiful, mostly because its form was so functional. Dad got a Whaler franchise and sold a bunch of them.

At our camp on the lake, I had moved up from my wooden boat to a 14-foot MFG (Molded Fiberglass) runabout. It was decked, had a windshield and steering wheel, and best of all, it had what seemed at the time like a really powerful engine—a 25-horsepower Scott-Atwater outboard. I learned to water ski behind that boat and for the two summers before I started college, my lake friends and I would water ski five days a week.

#

Sailing, Sailing…

I went to college in 1961, enrolled in Syracuse University’s School of Business Administration, thinking that I’d work with my dad in the family enterprise. But an economic downturn and my dad’s increasing issues with alcohol doomed the business to failure. I went through a dry period with boating and being on the water. The tragic water-skiing accident of my best friend, Fred Pomeroy, with me at the controls of the towboat, contributed to my distancing myself from things aquatic for some years. A vacation ride on a Cape Cod schooner in 1967 changed all that. I was hooked on sailing.

I went through a series of sailboats as I learned the skills needed to make a sailboat go where I wanted. I even built one from plans by the naval architect Phillip C. Bolger. But my favorite was Odyssey, a Herreshoff designed 19-foot sloop. I sailed it on the big water of Lake Ontario for many years before my growing family required a different plan. I won’t go into all the details here, but I will say that I continued to sail on the big lake in one way or another until 1993 when I moved to Albany for work. The Adirondack Mountain lakes are lousy for sailing but great for canoeing. So I made my next big switch from big boat, big water sailing to small boat, small water paddling.

#

Up Close and Personal

My wife, Lisa, and I spent several summers canoe camping on our favorite Adirondack Mountain Lake, Indian Lake. We could camp on islands there. This really fired up my imagination. It still does. There’s something special about being on an island. A poem I read in junior high kept coming into my head, If Once You Have Slept on an Island. The poem, by Rachel Lyman Field, seemed to say what I felt sleeping on those islands in Indian Lake.

#

If Once You Have Slept on an Island

If once you have slept on an island

You’ll never be quite the same;

You may look as you looked the day before

And go by the same old name,

You may bustle about in street and shop

You may sit at home and sew,

But you’ll see blue water and wheeling gulls

Wherever your feet may go.

You may chat with the neighbors of this and that

And close to your fire keep,

But you’ll hear ship whistle and lighthouse bell

And tides beat through your sleep.

Oh! You won’t know why and you can’t say how

Such a change upon you came,

But once you have slept on an island,

You’ll never be quite the same.

But the big Grumman canoes we paddled were like pushing barges around. The remote camping was great; the canoeing, not so much.

In 1995, Lisa and I took a chance and enrolled in a wilderness kayaking trip off the coast of Maine. Neither of us had ever paddled a kayak before, but the experience hooked us on kayaking. Kayaking is close to the water and all the things in and around it. Kayaks glide smoothly and quietly, with so much less effort than the canoes we were used to. I can paddle 15 or 20 miles in my kayak with the same effort it took to paddle five in a canoe.

I’ve been paddling some 24 years now. I only occasionally look back at my sailing and powerboating days, but never