Boat: A Memoir of Friendship, Faith, Death, and Life Everlasing

Description

When ten-year-old Michael Baughman moves to Hawaii with his parents, he is troubled and confused. His father doesn't provide the guidance Baughman needs and the boy doesn't know who to turn to. When a larger-than-life Hawaiian "beachboy" named Boat takes Baughman under his wing, the boy finds a teacher and mentor. Boat is 285 pounds of solid muscle but gentle spirituality, and he introduces the boy to the ways of Hawaiian mysticism, offering simple, profound wisdom that helps Baughman thrive in an otherwise lonely childhood. Even after Baughman leaves the islands seven years later, the unlikely friendship endures for the rest of Boat's life, influencing and inspiring the author to this day. Baughman's narrative begins with a distressed boy at a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game and ends more than six decades later with himself as a content old man experiencing a miracle in Mexico. With a photographic memory, Baughman recalls virtually verbatim every significant conversation he had with Boat. Boat spoke Hawaiian Pidgin English, and its unique lilt and rhythm grace this touching memoir. A testament to friendship and the revelations provoked by wisdom in unexpected places.

Michael Baughman was born in Buffalo and raised in western Pennsylvania and Hawaii. After college, he served in the US Army in Germany, after which he returned to teach and write. He is the author of seven books. Baughman lives in Ashland, Oregon, with his wife of fifty years, children, and grandchildren.

A gem of a book. It makes you want to be there with Mike, sharing his gutsy journey to manhood; and Boat's guiding wisdom speaks to all of us. Bravo, bruddah! --Harvey Meyerson, author of Nature's Army This memoir provides access to what lies beyond assumption and illusion. Every setting has heart, life. --Lawson Fusao Inada, Oregon Poet Laureate Those of us who were raised there understand that Hawaii was a place like no other in the decade following World War II, a remote island territory soon to become our most unique state. Michael Baughman captures that time, the place and its people just as they were. His kinship with the native beachboy known as Boat develops in unexpected ways and also covers unique territory, ranging from street-fights to spirituality and revealing life as a gaudy anuenue (rainbow) of fellowship and high adventure. --Ron Jacobs, author of Obamaland: Who Is Barack Obama? Growing up in an age starkly defined by war, violence, greed, alienation, depression and loneliness, Baughman deftly lays out the terms of his own salvation, as he learned them from an unassuming native Hawaiian surfer, spear-fisher, and beach keeper named Boat. Listen to heart, soul and body as well as mind. Find your place, care deeply for and know intimately the land and water there. Grow deep roots amongst family and friends. Fight like hell when you have to. Have faith in love. Believe that miracles are possible. Other people write about these things. But no one writes about them like Mike Baughman. His prose reads like a rich stretch of secluded ocean beach: quiet, clean and clear, a salty sparseness on initial encounter that belies an embarrassment of riches just below the surface of things. Boat pays high tribute to the miraculous good luck of a simple good life. --Steven Hawley, author of Recovering a Lost River The memoir is as brawny, lyrical, and clean as the waves and the vision it celebrates. Baughman's journey to manhood leads through breakers and blood, friendship and love, to an ending that compels respect. --Robin B. Carey, author of Upstream and North Bank This book is a treasure: vivid, humble, smart. There's nothing fashionably enigmatic about "Boat," the adult Hawaiian who works on Waikiki beach and befriends the athletic young haole schoolboy, Mike, who is equally straightforward. What Boat has to offer helps Mike, even as he leaves the Islands, to seek his own "place" in any often lethally angry world, and to find the near mystical moments of pure joy. --William Wiegand