My father was called home from graduate school at the University of Michigan when the family engineering and surveying firm took off.
Begun in a garage, the business eventually grew to more than 50 employees, working in a flat-roofed office that Dad designed, across the road from our house. At one point, as the oldest child, I was expected to join Wendel Engineers, maybe even be in line to take it over one day. But I could never get the necessary math right in my head, especially algebra.
For my father, the wind has always been a magical, mysterious force. It’s never the same in terms of direction or velocity.
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Math was never my forte. Instead I loved stories about pirates and knights, action heroes and cowboys. Perhaps that’s why of the two major pursuits my father tried to teach me, engineering and sailing, we were able to make only half of the equation stick. Thank goodness it was our time on the waters of Lake Ontario that I will always remember.
For my father, the wind has always been a magical, mysterious force. It’s never the same in terms of direction or velocity. On the surface, Dad didn’t appear to be the most religious guy in the world. No lessons from Scripture or prayers at the dinner table. But he was enthralled with the natural world, especially the wind and the water.
That’s why we Wendel kids, all six of us, learned to look to the treetops when we came down to the dock in Olcott, New York, where the family boat was kept. Out on the water, we soon became as excited as our father when the wind gusted, roughing the water’s surface. The new scallops and divots, appearing as a darker hue — sometimes called cat’s paws — were sure signs that more wind, at least a momentary gust, was heading our way.
It wasn’t until decades later that I realized that we started to sail as a family only months after my younger brother Eric was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The disease was a death sentence back in the 1960s. Today, it has a 90 percent survival rate, thanks to a resilient, close-knit group of doctors, many of whom treated my brother.
“You taught us all how to sail as a pushback against having a son with leukemia,” I told him.
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My father never articulated his personal connection between cancer and sailing. It wasn’t until I was finishing Cancer Cowboys: A Brother, His Doctors, and the Quest for a Cure to Childhood Leukemia that I phoned him, realizing the forces he had put in motion.
“You taught us all how to sail as a pushback against having a son with leukemia,” I told him.
After a long pause on the other end of the line, he replied, “Of course I did.”
That’s why the waters of Lake Ontario and the shapeshifter of disease that eventually took my brother remain forever intertwined for me. Decades later, after my own children were nearly adults, I came across Wade Davis’ book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest. It details the initial British attempts to summit Mount Everest, another inhospitable part of the world.
The British came to Tibet in the 1920s gung-ho and driven to reach the top of the world’s highest peak. It was a mindset that completely flummoxed the locals. Yet when you consider the bigger picture, the Everest campaigns were inevitable. The British, along with most of Europe, had just fought World War I. Trench warfare, rapid-fire machine guns, barbed wire and mustard gas were a nightmare for an entire continent, a whole generation. The British climbers were drawn to try and rise above it all, to attempt to climb the highest peak in the world, to move into the silence.
In our way, my family found a way to temporarily move away from the clamor and discord, too. Though we weren’t climbing Mount Everest, a wide horizon of water has always calmed my father. And even though Dad never came out and said it, he had to believe that it would help the rest of us, too.
Our first days on the water, in 24-foot sloop, Dad tied pieces of yarn to the metal shrouds leading down from the mast. We were told to watch the telltales, or “who-whos,” closely. They would show us the next change in the winds and the weather. So began lessons about life that we would never forget.
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