Chapter 1 – New Beginnings and False Starts
How many times have I asked myself, knowing what came to pass, if we would have done anything, or even everything, differently? Our actions seemed almost straightforward at the time, yet the course of events that was set in motion would completely and unexpectedly overturn our lives within the coming year. When we moved from Colorado we thought that we were beginning a new but not very unconventional phase of our professional and personal lives. I had taken early retirement from my position as professor of electronic engineering technology at the University of Southern Colorado (USC - now part of the Colorado State University system), which I had held for 17 years. We had come to the conclusion that, in my continuing battle with leukemia and other health problems, it was necessary for me to cease regular full-time employment, to avoid its inevitable pressures and demands, to lead a simpler and more focused life as we had learned to do during our long cruise on our boat the previous year. For her part, though she was a widely recognized leader in the USC academic community with a tenured position as associate professor of industrial engineering, Nancy had been at USC for seven years and she felt that she needed new opportunities and fresh challenges. But undoubtedly another significant motivational factor that influenced our decisions stemmed from our feelings for our boat. We had owned Summer School, our 34-foot single engine trawler, for almost three years, and in that brief time we had spent a total of more than a year living on it, cruising the east coast, the Florida Keys and the islands of the Bahamas. We had come to love our lives as they were centered around this boat and we were determined to move somewhere near coastal waters where boating on Summer School could occupy a regular part of our lives and not be merely something we did during our summer vacations.
So we were delighted when Nancy was offered a position at Lafayette College, a small but prestigious ivy-league college in Easton, Pennsylvania, where we could find a new home for ourselves as well as a permanent mooring for our boat in nearby waters. It was an easy matter for us to decide to give up our joint six-figure income and the security of established positions in order to achieve the goals we had set in our lives. But the actual process of moving was a complicated and costly affair. We had to hire a moving company that would put our furniture in storage in Pueblo until we found a residence in Easton where it could be shipped. We had to get our two cars, sensitive computer equipment and other valuable possessions that we did not want to trust to the moving company, from Colorado to Pennsylvania. And, in the most involved part of this relocation procedure, we had to bring our boat, which we had left nine months previously at a marina in Marathon, which is deep in the Florida Keys only about forty miles from Key West, all the way up the east coast to somewhere on the Delaware River, the Delaware Bay, the Chesapeake Bay or perhaps the New Jersey coastal waters, where we hoped to find a marina that would become its permanent home. Had we known that our stay in Easton would be so short, not even a year, that Nancy would quit this position that she had so gladly found, that we would sell almost all of our possessions and move onboard Summer School as our only home and eventually cruise back south, we may well have done things differently. But I think in retrospect that the stay in Easton was a necessary interlude during which we developed the frame of mind that enabled us to make such drastic changes in our lives. And without a doubt that cruise we made up the coast in the summer of 1995 was pivotal in making those final decisions, because we learned more useful skills and valuable information, and because it greatly deepened our love for living and cruising on our boat.
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