|
|
Books & Boats Blog
by Clyde W. Ford  Now Geo-Enabled! Click to learn more. |
|
|
to the Heart of a Dream |
|
ISBN: 978-1-930076-06-8 $15.95 |
What is it about the indomitability of the human spirit that propels some in pursuit of
their dreams despite all odds? I don’t have a ready answer to that question but I do know
that upon reading South to Alaska: From the Heartland of America to the Heart of a
Dream by Nancy Owens Barnes I was touched and deeply moved by the spirit of one
such man; and by his daughter’s telling of his story.
Melvin Owens dreamed of cruising to Alaska aboard his own boat—today, a dream
realized every year by thousands of boaters. But Melvin’s dreams, which began after
reading a book as a boy in the years before the Great Depression, came to realization only
through building his own 47-foot steel boat in the backyard of his Hartford, Arkansas
home in 1971. Now, unlike the options available to us boaters today, Melvin didn't weld together
his boat from a kit of pre-cut steel. His daughter Nancy writes,
“Fabricating much of the equipment and the workings of the boat himself, Dad made his
own steering wheel and pieced together the entire steering assembly from wheel to
rudder. He cut the control console from steel plating and did his own wiring using surplus
airplane switches for the pumps, alarms, fans, lights, temperature gauges, and other
controls. Purchasing a surplus 6-71 Patton tank engine from a mechanical trade school in
Okmulgee, Oklahoma, he gave the owner five hundred dollars for the engine, heat
exchanger, manifold, fuel filters, gearbox, clutch, and anything else they found that
would help him put the boat together.”
Employed as a construction supervisor, Melvin Owens worked on the construction of Red
Dog during the late 1960’s in his spare hours. His only training in boatbuilding was a
two-year stint at Barbee Marine in Seattle during World War II building wooden
tugboats. Red Dog was launched in 1971. Though she fell off of a truck like an ungainly
duckling on land, once in her element Red Dog sat true at her waterline leaving one wag
to ask, “How’d he know where to paint that line while it was sit’in in his yard?”
Launching Red Dog on the Arkansas River and heading south on the Mississippi is just
the beginning of an epic journey for Melvin, his wife, Cecil, and his daughter, which Ms.
Barnes ably fills with suspenseful accounts of groundings, mechanical failures and
harrowing close-calls with other vessels. When engine trouble keeps Red Dog in
Galveston, Texas one-by-one Melvin’s wife, then his daughter jump ship. Finally, he
decides to entrust his boat and his dream to a delivery captain and head to the west coast to wait. But Red Dog never arrives.
As I read South to Alaska my thoughts turned to legendary Pony Express rider, Frank T.
Hopkins, immortalized in the 2004 film Hidalgo. Hopkins’s journey from the heartland
of America to a race across the Arabian sands on his mount Hidalgo captured an essence
quite like Melvin Owens’s 10,000-mile journey from that same heartland across the seas
to Alaska aboard his steel mount Red Dog. Injury, sickness, treachery, and loneliness
beset both men and yet both survived to realize their dreams.
When I finally arrived in Ketchikan with Melvin and Cecil aboard Red Dog, I felt as
though I had been on a long, arduous though ultimately satisfying journey even though at
186 pages the read was short. You can finish this book in several hours but the story will
linger in your thoughts and your heart for much, much longer. Melvin Owens died in
2006. I’m sorry I never got to meet him. I am, however, thankful that his daughter chose
to share his life story with us. Recalling Melvin’s courage to follow his dreams reminds
me to summon up the courage to follow my own. And I’m pretty certain something
similar will happen for you, too, upon reading this book.
| Clyde W. Ford is an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, who has written articles for PassageMaker Magazine. His Charlie Noble Novels, Red Herring and Precious Cargo are nautical thrillers set along the Inside Passage. And his latest nonfiction book is on environmental boating, Boat Green: 50 Steps Boaters Can Take to Help Save Our Waters. For the past decade he’s cruised the Inside Passage in his 30-foot, 1977 Willard trawler, Mystic Voyager. |
|
