As I approached the Cortez Motel in the afternoon
sun, the beach glowed like the inside of a brass drum.
A hundred sand fleas leapt in tiny arcs over my insteps
as I moved toward a group of people who were gathering
around a raft. The raft looked like a lemonade stand molesting
a poll booth. Yet this floating angular island of wood
and Styrofoam was rumored to be sea-worthy and harbored
the resolve (in a way that almost seemed premeditated)
to buoy two people down the entire length of the Sea of
Cortez. Several local seasoned sailors had expressed their
doubts about the project, pointing out unpredictable squalls,
vicious midriff rip-tides and the possibility of being
left high and dry for weeks after a dramatic ebb tide.
But none of these warnings appeared to worry David Perlman,
better known as Poppa Neutrino to his many counter-cultural
fans. He had been in tough situations before. Like the
North
Atlantic crossing in '92 or the 1800 miles down the Mississippi
River in '97. Both of these accomplishments were achieved
on homemade rafts, clapped together from found and donated
materials. So why should this trip be any different?
Well for one thing, the raft this time was awfully small
--an eight by eight foot cube with a second box half the
size nailed to it. There wasn't enough room to unroll
a beach towel on the foredeck and the afterdeck promised
to be underwater when the thing finally put to sea. The
sail was a hank of cloth enjoying the close attentions
of a retired fishing net. Together they called themselves
a storm jib, a square sail with more cross-trees than
a Roman political purge, lashed to an aluminum mast that
was in turn fixed to the back of the larger cabin with
long drywall screws. There was a 9 horsepower Johnson
outboard motor on the plywood transom and a jury-rigged
tiller that was coaxed back and forth by two braided nylon
lines festooned from either side of the raft's "flying
bridge", which is to say the roof of the eight-foot
box. All in all, it appeared to be yet another attempt
to escape Gilligan's Island. I looked around for the Professor
and Mary Ann.
Poppa Neutrino emerged from behind the raft, a cam-corder
screwed to his right eye, his tatty straw hat trying its
best to relieve the squint in his other eye. He was assembling
a record of the afternoon for posterity. The camera slowly
panned the hand-painted sign on the port side of the contraption:
WWW.FLOATINGNEUTRINOS.COM
It was the web presence of his previous raft journeys
and his own ruminations about life and our proper approach
to it.
David progressed slowly to the starboard side of the
raft, carefully combing it with the camera. A kind of
docking davit, two fingers of plywood traversed by several
lengths of braided cord, offered itself unashamedly for
filming. This was presumably the station where a small
Zodiac boat, purchased for emergencies, would wait at
the ready. And finally, just before finishing his circumnavigation
of the vessel, David focused on a sign remnant that read:
E HATHA. I wondered about the reference. The Hatha was
a song from the Upanishads, not an especially joyful one.
It tells of a man who gives away all his worldly possessions,
hoping to accrue spiritual credit so that his next birth
would be more rewarding. His son recognizes the hypocrisy
and asks his father, "You have given almost all you
own away. And now to whom will you give me?" The
old man studied the boy and replied, "I will give
you to Death." Did Papa Neutrino identify with the
father or the son? Or was he even aware of the source
of his raft's name?
While Poppa Neutrino was converting the afternoon into
a series of memory-card binaries, a tractor with a corrugated
tin awning arrived and plowed through the soft sand until
it maneuvered itself between the surf and the raft. The
driver jumped down, stared at the stern of David's creation
and scratched his head. This was going to be a challenge.
While volunteers schlepped equipment off the raft to
lighten it, Poppa Neutrino removed the outboard motor
and the plywood rudder. Meanwhile, the tractor driver
was busy hafting a 2x12 to the hydraulic lifts on the
back of the tractor. A handful of people shouldered the
raft off its blocks and onto the beach as the tractor
finessed it toward the Sea of Cortez. A dozen or
more coiled legs behind the raft scrambled to find a purchase
in the loose sand to assist the launch.
When the tractor's front tires were sipping salt water,
it disengaged, backed around to the other side of the
raft and pushed it the rest of the way. Finally the raft
was in the sea and riding the lazy surf. The damn thing
actually floated. But keeping it in the Cortez
was beginning to look like a full time job. Until a local
panga owner offered to tow it out to deeper water.
David scheduled the official launch of his Argo
for the following morning at sun-up. We watched from the
deck at Baja Java as his little bark motored out of the
marina toward the point at El Faro. It was slow-going
and for a time it looked as if the raft had beached itself
short of rounding the point. But finally it began to grow
smaller again until, just before it disappeared behind
the spit, it looked no bigger than, well, a floating neutrino.
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