Fifty years ago today, Nancy Pirsig announced to the world that the Pirsigs had caught “the sailing bug.” In “Booked for Passage- Couple Floating $60,000 Home” published in their hometown St. Paul Pioneer Press on Aug 17, 1975, Nancy gave an interview using PR skills honed by working as a publicist for the University of Minnesota, and described how she and Robert Pirsig had learned to sail on three day weekends in June and July of 1975, and decided to plunk down $60,000 on a Westsail 32 sailboat instead of a second vacation home.
Indeed, only a few days earlier on August 11, 1975, Robert Pirsig had departed on that Norwegian double-ended, cutter-rigger Westsail 32 sailboat … a model nicknamed the “Wetsnail” for its slow, stolid sailing … from Bayfield, WI near where he had retreated on the Lake Superior shoreline in a Ford camper a few years earlier to write the last few chapters of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig planned a three week transit of the Great Lakes followed by traveling down the Erie Canal to the Hudson River then, in October that year, to New York City and the Atlantic coast (as described in his second novel Lila: An Inquiry into Morals), and finally down to Florida to realize his dream of blue water sailing.
His life-long passion for the ocean was sparked by traveling on passenger liners between the US and England with his parents as a small child when his father studied law in London, and further stoked with the Christmas present of a globe showing the expanses of the world ocean as well as a treasured copy of Henry Culver’s 1924 The Book of Old Ships illustrated by Gordon Grant which he pored over as a child.
Aboard their sailboat dubbed Aretê, the Greek word for excellence or virtue, Pirsig hoped to find refuge from the celebrity he was fleeing and a place to write his second book. Nancy’s interview in the Pioneer Press captures that moment with the Pirsigs looking forward to a nomadic, blue water cruising life style. Sadly, the cruising lifestyle would not last long for Bob and Nancy. The Pirsigs’ marriage that had survived the bathos of Robert’s institutionalization would sour aboard the sailboat with Nancy leaving the following year and then divorce. The gloom of the separation and divorce would give way to both Bob and Nancy finding the loves of their lives. Wendy Kimball, a freelance journalist interviewing Bob, would board the Aretê moored near Miami and never leave.
Newly married, Bob and Wendy set sail for England in August of 1979, making a “fast but rough crossing” of the Atlantic on Aretê. They departed from St. Pierre near Newfoundland charting a course for the Scilly Islands off Cornwall, England and finding their way by celestial navigation using a C. Plath sextant, a watch and a Texas Instruments TI-59 programmable calculator.
A few days from landfall, the Pirsigs sailed into the heart of the deadly Fastnet Race storm that peaked August 13 and 14th, a harrowing experience. While the Pirsigs survived with little sleep aboard their sturdy Norwegian double ender, the devastating storm struck in the middle of the annual Fastnet Race and claimed the lives of 15 sailors and 4 spectators. As Paul F. Johnston describes in “”If the Boat Goes Down” Bikes, Boats and Robert Pirsig”, “Of the 303 starters in that year’s race, only 86 finished. Twenty-four yachts were abandoned, 193 retired, approximately 75 capsized, and five sank.”
The Pirsigs lived as expatriates in Europe… England, Holland, Sweden.. aboard the boat for the next five years while Pirsig continued work on his second novel Lila. When the Pirsigs noticed their young daughter Nell was being “left out” living in another culture, they decided to return to the U.S in 1984. Wendy and Nell, carrying with them the Lila manuscript and Robert M. Pirsig’s Apple II computer, flew home while Robert sailed the Aretê back across the North Atlantic with two Swedes as crew.
In Pirsig’s last interview in 2006 with Tim Adams in The Guardian, he talks about sailing…
“We sailed this summer up into the islands of Maine. Very rocky and a lot of fog. It’s the same old boat I describe in Lila – 32 years old now and in better shape than when I bought it. I modified a few things. It’s a Norwegian boat, a double-ender. It is famous for its ability to survive storms. We survived the Fastnet storm in 1979, when 15 people died. We got through without any trouble, though we were scared to death. I look after it well. I figure if you are going to write a book on maintenance, you better do something!”
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This year marks 50 years since the sailboat voyage described in Robert M. Pirsig’s second novel Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991). Look for an upcoming Online Chautauqua on Pirsig the Sailor coming soon from the Robert Pirsig Association among events planned to mark this anniversary.
Read the St. Paul Pioneer Press article here…”Booked for Passage- Couple Floating $60,000 Home” Special thanks to Ian Glendinning for archiving this article on his Pirsig Timeline, an essential resource for Pirsig fans and scholars. (RPA Editorial note – these archive copies are heavily annotated from earlier research. We need to make clean copies for our resources.)
Smithsonian curator Paul F. Johnston article below chronicles Robert M. Pirsig the sailor. Includes several previously unreleased photos of Pirsig.
Photo of Robert M. Pirsig aboard the sailboat Aretê, Miami, 1977, from this article.
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Comment from Tom Clarke:
“I remember the Fastnet storm disaster well 46 years ago this August. As I live on the South coast of Ireland and the Cork coastline, Fastnet rock and lighthouse are part of my world. Robert Pirsig did well to survive that devastating storm that struck the famous annual race and one could say that Lila is a survivor too!”