The Good, The Bad, and the Tragic: Not All Adventures End Well

By Donald D. Yackel

This is Don’s third book of adventure tales. But unlike his first two books, The Idling Bulldozer and The Seventy-Thousand Dollar Outhouse, which focused exclusively on kayaking, the tales in this volume go beyond kayaking to include adventures on the land and in the air, finally ending with a tragic story that gives the book its name. Through these stories, the author has shown that adventures are not vacations, that sometimes things can and do go wrong, and that they may even end in tragedy. This is a powerful and immersive collection of stories which take the reader on a journey through the excitement and tragedies of new adventures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886931884

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

About the Author

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.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of my best friend, Harry F. Pomeroy Jr., known to everyone as Fred. Though it’s been almost sixty years since the events recounted in this book and fifty years since his death, Fred is with me nearly every day.

I’m also very grateful for my association with all of the wonderful characters who populate the pages of my adventure stories, especially my paddling buddies, Bruce Romanchak and Alan Lovgren; my father-in-law, Carl Silfer; and my children, Sarah and Brian, who figure prominently in a story where I almost lost the love of my life, Lisa.

Copyright Information ©

Donald D. Yackel 2023

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 non-commercial 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 Good, the Bad, and the Tragic

ISBN 9798886931860 (Paperback)

ISBN 9798886931877 (Hardback)

ISBN 9798886931884 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023909584

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

[phone]

Acknowledgment

In telling many of these stories, some going back almost sixty years, I have relied on my notes, photographs, and a memory that seems to remember these events in great detail. I’m assuming that these memories are accurate, bolstered as they are by my notes and photos. But I guess that if the events reported here are not entirely correct, they still contribute to a good story, and no one, not even me, will know the difference.

Introduction

***

I never expected to write a third book.

But as I thought about all of the adventures I’ve had, it occurred to me that, unlike the stories I’ve told so far, they were not all good. Maybe I needed to include some of the not-so-good and the bad adventures along with the good ones to provide a little perspective, to let the reader know that there is difficulty, danger, and even tragedy out there too. That’s one of the reasons for this book.

In pulling together the stories presented here, I had to reach back almost sixty years for one chapter, while the newest story happened in 2021. This book is part biography, part memoir, and all adventure. It is written in three parts. Part I, The Good, chronicles adventures that are not without their challenges, but are mostly good, positive, happy experiences. Part II, The Bad, tells of some adventures that were difficult, even frightening, but that still ended safely. Part III, The Tragic, is the story of a friendship and an unexpected, life-altering event that has been with me for over fifty years. It did not end well.

I debated with myself for a long time before including this story. It is written partly as a catharsis for me and a warning that the happiest of times can go bad in an instant. So, it’s not strictly an adventure story. It is a highly personal account of the lasting effect that a tragic event can have on both the victim and the one who saved him.

As in my other books, most stories involve kayaks and kayaking. But this book is different in that it also includes the story of a hiking trip gone awry, a misadventure in the air, and a fateful afternoon in a powerboat on a quiet river.

I hope you enjoy my book and find something of value in it.

Part I

The Good: Most Adventures End Well

Chapter One

Picking Strawberries in the Maine Islands

In the Beginning

I met Lisa in 1993, just after my fiftieth birthday. I was living in Rochester, NY at the time. She and I, along with a dozen or so other divorced or widowed people, were in a discussion group. I joined because I had been feeling isolated and thought this might be a way to connect with some new folks. I wasn’t particularly interested in the topic, discussing a book entitled, If you’re so Wonderful, Why aren’t You Married? But several weeks into the activity, Lisa and I started to casually date.

Then I got a job in Albany, NY, several hours away. I started that new job on November 1st and figured that a long-distance relationship had no chance of going anywhere. Still, we did some back-and-forth, long-distance weekends throughout the fall. Then fate stepped in when in January of 1994, Lisa’s Rochester boss offered her a position heading a statewide organization based in Albany. The only catch: she had to be there in a week, just seven days! When she called to tell me, she was elated but also worried about the timeline. How would she find a place to live in that short time? I said, You can stay with me till you find a place. Lisa moved in on February 5th and never left. My life has only been good since she became a part of it.

A First Adventure Together

So, all of that is an explanation of how and why we got together in Albany, a preamble to the story about the adventure we had that summer.

We had never vacationed together and I’m not sure we knew what to expect from each other. We both liked being around the water, and because Albany is close to New England, I planned a trip through Massachusetts and Maine. We stopped in Provincetown, where we rented a sailboat and sailed around Provincetown Harbor and walked the town people watching and eating lobster. Then, after making a pilgrimage to the LL Bean store in Freeport, we moved on to Bar Harbor, Maine, where I had contacted a local outfitter about a three-day wilderness kayaking trip in the Maine Islands. It sounded really neat, even though neither of us had ever been in a kayak before.

We arrived early at the outfitter’s store in Bar Harbor, where we met our young guide and two other paddlers, Hal and Elizabeth. They appeared to be in their sixties, both college professors from the Toronto area in Canada. Unlike Lisa and me, they were experienced paddlers.

***

Novices on the Water

After some brief introductions, we all piled into a van that was towing two beautiful Wilderness Systems twenty-one-foot fiberglass double kayaks and a single cockpit kayak for our guide. All of our gear for three days unsupported in the Maine Islands was stowed in the back of the vehicle.

Our launch point was to be at a small beach just east of Castine, home of theMaine Maritime Academy. We were to paddle some 35 miles back to Bar Harbor over the next three days.

On our arrival at the beach, we set about unloading the boats. They were heavy, the doubles weighing about 88 pounds each, and they were awkward because of their length.

Soon, all of the gear was removed from the van and stacked near the boats. Next, we began the arduous task of packing all of the material into the boats for our adventure. The kayaks had cavernous watertight storage compartments for gear, front, center, and rear. Still, we had so much stuff that it was being crammed in everywhere. There were tents, sleeping bags and pads, cooking gear, food and water for three days, and more. We managed to push Lisa’s sleeping bag into the center hatch, but I found that my car camping bag was just too big to jam in there and have any room left for other necessary gear. So, I wrapped it in several large plastic bags and tied it on deck on top of the center hatch cover between the bow and stern cockpits, and hoped it would stay dry.

When all the gear was packed, I still had one item to carry, so in a final burst of desperation, I placed a sizable zippered case containing propane cylinders between my knees inside the cramped cockpit. Every inch was being used for something. This raised the 88-pound weight of the boats to around 125 pounds without us in them. As a result, they were a bear to get off the beach.

Next came the obligatory tutorial that assumed you didn’t know anything about what you were about to do, which in our case was true, or that if you did think you knew something, it was probably wrong. We were schooled on how to put on our spray skirts and PFDs. Then, we were shown how to get in the boats and fasten the spray skirts to the rim around the cockpit. This would keep water from splashing into the boat, which sounded like a good idea. Next, without actually doing it, we were shown how to release the spray skirt and exit the boat in the unlikely event of a capsize.

Finally, we were shown how to paddle the boat. Hal and Elizabeth already knew how to paddle, so this part of the lesson was really for Lisa and me. We watched the demonstrations of paddle strokes and rudder control and tried to internalize what we were being shown. But time on the water would show us how little we knew and how much we had yet to learn.

We launched our boats and headed out for our first five or six-mile jaunt to an island beach for lunch. Sitting in the kayak, holding the long double-bladed paddles felt very awkward. We were able to make the boat move, but only with great effort. The kayak was big, wide, and heavily loaded. Our paddle strokes were out of sync, and like all new paddlers, we were only using our arm and chest muscles to propel the large boat and its load of gear toward our lunch destination.

Sitting in the stern cockpit, I struggled with the rudder control until I finally learned not to push the peddles too hard unless I wanted to make a sharp turn. We eventually made it to our lunch stop where we experienced how to release our spray skirts, exit the boats, and haul them up the beach to safety for the first time.

Elizabeth had been complaining of cold water hitting her leg as she paddled. A short search of her cockpit showed that a bolt had loosened and fallen out, nowhere to be found. With every wave, a small jet of cold water would shoot through, often hitting Elizabeth in the leg. Duct tape over the hole inside and out solved the problem.

While sitting on the beach eating lunch and rubbing our sore arm and chest muscles, we learned that we had covered less than half of the distance we needed to travel before our day would end and we could set up camp. This was not happy news.

Back on the water for another six-mile push, we watched Hal and Elizabeth paddle. They seemed to move so easily compared to us, and with much less effort. By the time we reached our first camp, our muscles burned.

***

Picking Strawberries

Being in camp brought new challenges. I’d been a car camper for years and had done some canoe camping as well. But a car carries a lot of gear, big gear, comfortable gear. And a canoe is a pick-up truck when compared with a kayak’s compact size. So, we had no big walk-in tent, just a cozy two-person Timberline. No cot to keep us off the ground, just a one-inch foam pad, spread out on the tent floor, sleeping bags on top. No big comfortable folding lounge chairs, just the guide’s Crazy Creek Chairs, sitting on the ground. And the beach on this island was mostly rock. This made setting up a tent in a comfortable spot difficult. So, on this first night, we pushed up into a stand of pine trees where we found some fairly level ground cushioned with fallen pine needles where we could set up our tents. It was near dusk by the time we were done, and back on the beach where our kitchen was set up, the flies were biting any part of us that was exposed. So, we pulled on socks, heavy shirts, and long pants, and relaxed sitting on the ground in the Crazy Creek chairs while we watched our guide cook dinner.

Camp also brought another new challenge—using a cat hole. There are no restrooms, outhouses, or porta-johns on the Maine Islands. So, when nature called, we were to grab the communal bathroom bag and head out somewhere to be alone. The bag contained a small shovel and some biodegradable toilet paper. We were told to find a spot below the high-tide line to relieve ourselves. There’s not much privacy below the high-tide line.

You were to find your spot, dig your cat hole (the term is descriptive), and squat like your pre-historic ancestors did, hoping nothing human or animal found you in your compromised position and that you didn’t accidentally soil yourself in the process. Usually, the only things that found us were gnats and mosquitoes.

Elizabeth had her own way of letting us know she was answering nature’s call. She would take the bathroom bag and waving it over her head announce in a high British accented voice, I’m going off to pick strawberries, as she headed away from camp. We all began to use this as our code announcing that we were headed off and wanted our privacy, thank you!

***

A Sea Bath in the Sun

The next day was wonderful. It was unusually warm and sunny for Maine, with enough wind and waves to make things exciting. At one point, the seas threw up a big splash of ice-cold spray as we paddled into the wind. The spray doused Lisa who let out a yelp, raising her paddle over her head, as if that would keep some part of her from getting wet again. Without Lisa paddling, the wind and waves slowed the heavy boat to a stop. I yelled, PADDLE, as I struggled to get the big boat moving again.

We covered some 15 miles that day and were very sore by the time we arrived at our second camp for the night. This island had a sandy beach, so we were able to set camp in the sand above the high-tide line.

After the long paddle and