Shelly Randall - Story Services

First published in The Gam (the alumni magazine for Williams-Mystic, the maritime studies program of Williams
College & Mystic Seaport), Spring 2007

By Shelly Randall S97

In January 2006, on the 10-year anniversary of the
start of my Williams-Mystic semester, I packed up
my husband, a camera and a laptop, enough
clothes for all seasons within 20 degrees of latitude,
and set out from Port Townsend, Wash., on a
10-month voyage around America.

This was a land cruise, me hearties, and our “land
yacht” was a 1989 Volkwagen Westfalia camper-van
with a cabin slightly smaller than the one on my fam-
ily’s 20-foot sailboat. Like all good ships, she had a
name: Matilda.

“Waltzing Matilda” thus became the title (and theme song) for a road trip that really was a year-
long sabbatical for me and my husband Jeff, an attorney and land-use planner. Scheduled as a
needed break between career transitions, we resigned our jobs, rented out our house, and
followed a desire to really see America and meet our fellow Americans. (We really hoped to meet
some who could explain to us why “W” was re-elected in 2004…)

We started with a “shakedown cruise” north to Vancouver, B.C., that worked some bugs out of
Matilda’s new engine. I started a daily “log” that eventually filled eight spiral-bound notebooks,
and we pored over our atlas of “charts” as we plotted a rough course that would take us 26,000
miles counter-clockwise around the continent we call home.

Having exhausted these nautical metaphors, we drove Highway 101 straight down the west coast,
turning left when we reached L.A. We spent the majority of our travel time between the Pacific
and Atlantic oceans, yet the great waterways of our continent irrevocably shaped our route.

Finding Our Watery Way

Upon reaching Memphis in April, we followed the Mississippi River south to New Orleans—arriving
nine months after Katrina’s blow—and spent time volunteering in Mississippi. To our eyes, the
Gulf coast was more devastated than New Orleans, with waterfront buildings and infrastructure
not just flooded, but entirely washed away. We empathized with residents living in FEMA trailers
not a whole lot bigger than our camper-van, on house lots where only a concrete slab remained,
and with no money to rebuild. Seeing Matilda parked in front of our host’s damaged home, a
passerby commented, “So FEMA’s giving out Volkswagen vans now? I’ll take one!”

Except for visiting Savannah, Charleston, and D.C., we stuck to the higher, cooler elevations of
the Appalachians as we drove up the east coast in June and July. Anxious to explore eastern
Canada, we crossed the border at Niagara Falls and set an easterly course along the northern
shore of Lake Ontario and the southern shore of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Six weeks and five
provinces later, we re-entered the U.S. along the Maine-New Brunswick border, but not before
the Canadian Maritimes had completely charmed us.

We made a scheduled stop in Connecticut for the annual Williams-Mystic Alumni Weekend, then
embarked in late September on the final leg home, a meandering line across the upper Midwest
drawn to connect the locations of friends and relatives, but which happened to loosely follow the
remarkable attempt of William Least Heat-Moon to cross the continent via its rivers. I read his
1999 book, River-Horse, describing this boat ride as we worked our way west, and appreciated
his many references to the Lewis and Clark journals we all studied at Williams-Mystic.

Stories Sought and Published

As a budding freelance maritime writer, I took the unique opportunity offered by this trip to make
a connection with an editor at WoodenBoat magazine, which led to an open assignment to write
dispatches from boat yards and maritime museums around the country.

Crusty male boatbuilders and volunteer retirees usually don’t expect to be interviewed by a
young woman, so my introduction always included my Williams-Mystic credentials (and schooner
sailing experience), which seemed to soften them up. I sought out story ideas when we had spare
time and I had spare energy, which resulted in the publication of eight briefs in the Currents
department of WoodenBoat.

My most memorable story was the Katrina saga of Bill Holland’s boatyard in D’Iberville, Miss.
Where Holland’s house had sat next to the ways, only the slab, patterned with stubborn linoleum,
remained. Most of his equipment and lumber were washed away, too, yet the demand for vessel
repair was so great after the hurricane that the boatyard was hurriedly brought back on line.
Amazingly, a shipping container full of his tools was found intact a quarter-mile away. At a time
when the 60-year-old Holland might have been thinking of retirement, he instead was working
harder than ever to rebuild his business, with a dedication to his longtime customers that was
truly inspiring.

I also treasured a “small-world” encounter with a boatbuilder on rural Wolfe Island in Lake
Ontario. Jeff and I had taken the ferry from Kingston, Ont., for a bicycle outing, and happened to
pass a farmstead with a sign advertising wooden boat repair. Although it was after 5 p.m., I could
hear hammering coming from the big red barn, so I approached with the universal shout of
“Ahoy!” Michael Corrigan was a little skeptical of my unannounced visit until he heard where we
were traveling from. It turned out he had lived in my hometown in 1994 as a student of the
Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding! From then on, the interview went swimmingly.

Many other adventures have not yet made it into print,
but one that I think would make a great children’s book is
“Dusty’s First Day on a Lobster Boat.” It was our first day,
too, to go a-lobstering, and with typical trip serendipity,
the skipper was a friend of a fellow we met on a whale-
watching cruise in Nova Scotia. The skipper decided if he
was going to have visitors aboard, his 8-year-old brother
Dusty could come along, too.

The 10-hour day we spent checking traps in Northumber-
land Strait I count as quite possibly the most interesting
of our trip, and the series of photos I took that day ranks
among my favorites. (Our travel blog contains a special
entry on this day: click here to view it.)

W-M Was the Glue

Reflecting from the safe harbor of home—where we returned in December—I can see that my
maritime knowledge and experience was the glue that made our coast-to-coast experiences stick
together. Had a Williams-Mystic education and my subsequent career choices not instilled in me
a working knowledge of waterfronts, boats, and ocean ecology, the bigger picture of a nation knit
by ports, rivers, canals, and wetlands would have been lost on me. As I had hoped, the trip was a
time of continued learning in my field.

Does this help explain why a maritime buff with a year off was perfectly satisfied to go “Waltzing
Matilda” across a continent rather than an ocean? If you still need convincing, may I remind you:
there’s no night watch on a long road trip!