The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose

from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
Conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didnt matter
which way was home;
as if he didnt know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.
S ta n l e y Kun i t z

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ands built his casket, dug his grave, held his body.
Hands paddled him home.
Halfway across the bay those hands, having worked
hard to fulfill his last wishes, paused in the chop and
swell of the ocean. Six sets of hands in two twenty-foot canoes lashed
together with a coffin between them. No one of us orchestrated the
pause, and the cold December weather with its wind and threats should
have kept us going. But our cold hands on our paddles did pause, as if
he were asking us to wait. Stop right here, he might have said. I want
to remember this. I want to know that Im truly going home.
Our hands paused three times as we crossed the bay. First as we
rounded the point, having finished the most dangerous, open-water
part of the journey, when the canoes were facing north toward his
homestead. It was then that the sun broke through the clouds and a

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wind came on our backs, pushing him closer to his resting spot. We
had timed the journey to arrive at his tide rip on the slack tide, the
easiest, safest time to pass through the narrow opening with such
important cargo. Our hands paused again at the mouth of the rip,
rocking gently on the swells. We paused a third and final time about
a hundred feet from the shore of his homestead, where fires were
burning in the early morning light, where his closest friends stood
facing us, ready to take him from us. Somehow we knew to pause there
in the tidal pond, to let the silence be felt, to let him know his journey
was almost over, before our hands took up the paddles again and
gently landed him on shore.
***
This is the story of our relationship to a man whose unusual life and
fierce ideals helped us to examine and better understand our own, and
this is also an account of the tensions and complexities of mentorship:
the opening of ones life to someone else to learn together. This is the
story of how we came to be in those two canoes, and it is a story of one
mans fifty-year experiment in living on a remote stretch of Maine coast.
William Coperthwaite was a homesteader and social thinker, an
architect and designer, decades older than we were, who challenged
and encouraged us to do some of the most important things we
have done with our lives. He let us down and encouraged us to pick
ourselves up again. We loved one another, and we disappointed one
another. There are those who knew his influence better and his friendship far longer; we make no claim other than that our relationship
to him changed us, so this story is one we are moved to share. And
because he made a deep impression on each of us separately, our memoir is in two distinct voices. We tell the story through our different yet
interwoven perspectives as two people, standing shoulder to shoulder
and looking at this man who occupied the center of our life together.
We alternate chapters, beginning and ending with his death. Peters
chapters span this mans lifetime, and Helens chart an experience of
forty days on Bills wild coastline, accessible only by boat, where we

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camped and built a home with him, what would turn out to be his last
concentric yurt after a lifetime of designing and building that form for
which he was well known.
It was building that last concentric yurt, then mourning his
unexpected death that became the real work of understanding this
generous, radical, brilliant, and complex man. When we set out
to write a book, with Bills help, about his remarkable life and a
friendship that spanned a quarter century, we did not expect that we
would begin it by lashing his casket across two canoes and paddling
him home across the cold December waves. This bookwhich was
conceived as a way of spending more time with Bill as our friendship
deepened in his old age, continuing our long apprenticeship to his
philosophies of social change and simple living, and honoring all the
ways he had influenced and changed usturned into a journey of
writing through our grief. For both of us it became a labor of sadness
and love, of searching and revelation. We sought to write a book that
reveals the fullness of our understanding, which we could only get to if
we were willing to try to see the whole person, the whole relationship,
and the whole of ourselves.
Pe t e r a n d He le n

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