Chapter 4 - Safford

Finding Destiner / By Ken Wilcox © Copyright 2023

The arc of visibility is an intriguing concept.

Commonly used in marine navigation, the term is straightforward. Think of a simple sailboat, anchored near a tropical island under the stars, with a light atop the mast. If you are strumming your guitar on another boat offshore, you might see that light from as far as five or ten miles away, depending on mast height, deck height, eyeball height, obstructions and what kind of rum you’re putting in your Mai Tai. You and everyone else who can see the masthead light is viewing from within that boat’s arc of visibility. And they, of course, are somewhere within yours. We hope. It’s especially important for big boats that are underway to see little boats, parked or otherwise. And vice versa.

Applied to the arc of one’s life, the notion can quickly become a heady metaphor for all the things we’ve seen and not seen, experienced or blissfully missed, horizons crossed and not crossed, or perhaps the paths taken and not taken over a course of time. Little did I know when I began to inquire about Destiner that her story, her arc, would become so important to my own.

I originally learned about Destiner in September 1971 when I first met Don and Clarice aside the orange groves of Fillmore, California. For me, the schooner was just another boat, some random thing they happened to build, sail and live on for a time. Whatever. I didn’t even go look at it. I didn’t sail. I didn’t boat. I was more interested in his 1960 Harley hog. Rumble, rumble.

Decades would pass before I realized the true significance of Destiner. While she began her own journey into the wide Pacific in the spring of 1964, she would not become a key protagonist for my own story until forty-four years later, in the fall of 2008. Thanksgiving Day, to be precise. My wife, Kris, and I had gone to visit Don and Clarice at their spartan brick home in Safford, Arizona, far from the rolling swell of any ocean.

Safford is a dusty, sunburnt town two hours east of Tucson, thirty miles from the nearest interstate, and hours from any rail or bus stop. Yet it’s the economic hub for much of southeastern Arizona, and home to around ten thousand affable Saffordians, and at least as many tumbleweeds. Lonely highways, dry river beds, white cotton fields, and a couple of state prisons are painted across the surrounding desert in a kind of post-Geronimo landscape mural. The scrub desert fills much of the broad basin of the Gila River and might qualify as nondescript, if it wasn’t so pleasingly embraced by ranges of dazzling mountains. The dramatic hulk of the Pinaleño Mountains, Mount Graham in particular, rises nearly eight thousand feet above Safford’s southwestern cuff. Don drove me up there once during a prior visit on a blistering summer day. He brought sandwiches for the only father-son picnic we’d ever shared. From a paved turnout way the hell up there, we marveled at the cool mountain air and infinite views.

I’d visited Don the Clarice in Safford many times since in the early 1990s, after discovering they were living there and running a small business at the local airport. He was servicing and restoring old airplanes and was on the verge of retirement. We’d been out of touch for seventeen years. I’d last seen them in California in 1974. I was barely twenty-one back then, living near Seattle and driving delivery trucks loaded with eggs. On a whim, I took a few days off work and drove a thousand miles to visit them in Grover City (later Grover Beach). They were building a fifty-foot sailboat for a friend, a two-masted, two-cabin ketch.

The construction was well along when I arrived. I remember the great size of the hull—monumental inside the massive shop building. She was built for the Taylors and would be the last of six boats my dad would build over a twenty-five year career crafting traditional wooden sailboats, not counting the dozens of other boats he worked on at W.F. Stone in Alameda. The Taylors named her Tiare o te Moana, Tahitian for “Flower of the Sea.” When I arrived, Clarice had just finished carving the name into the transom. Her work was meticulous and beautiful.

Don gave me the nickel tour of their twenty-two ton boat project. Sad to say, as a young adult with little direction in my own life, I wasn’t much interested in the obvious tedium and hard labor of boat building. Nevertheless, we climbed the ladder for a quick look around. At that point, I don’t think I’d even been on a sailboat before. He explained the process of building the keel, then the molds and ribbands and how they were replaced with oak frames and planking. He showed me the motor that was about to be installed, while Clarice emphasized the finer points of interior design and the parts she’d fashioned on her own.

Though I hardly knew the man, it was a good visit and I was glad I’d made the trip. For as strange as it seemed, he was, in fact, my dad. I remember Clarice feeding us juicy cheeseburgers before I abruptly excused myself and headed back up the interstate to Seattle, groovin’ not to the glory of sailing, but to the rockin’ rhythm of Benny and the Jets, Band on the Run, Midnight at the Oasis, and all the other fine hymns of the day.

I didn’t make it back to Grover City for another two years. My dad and I hadn’t bothered to exchange addresses or phone numbers so we had no contact in the interim. He was still just an odd stranger in my life. Although I would have liked to know him better, there was never much of a connection between us. By 1976, I’d grown up a little and purchased a few acres of forest land out in the sticks an hour north of Seattle. I pitched a tent under the moon and the trees and made it my temporary home while constructing my own wooden wonder, a cozy log cabin. Not bad for a 23-year-old kid, I thought.

I figured my dad had me pegged as an aimless slacker, and correctly so, but now I was doing something useful with my life and I was eager to tell him about it. I dashed down the interstate in my beat-up Chevy pickup with visions of cheeseburgers and a vague interest in getting better acquainted with “Dad.” Maybe we could even go for a sail. This time, I wanted to ask him about his life. Simple things, like How did you learn to build boats? What did you do in the Navy? How did you meet Clarice? I liked her. She was nice. I wondered how their boat was doing. Tiare was surely in the water by then, though I really had no idea.

When I arrived at their boat-building shop at the edge of downtown Grover City, things weren’t the same. I knocked. A stranger answered the door. Boat? What boat? The ketch and the Wilcoxes had moved away long ago. There was no forwarding address. They were just gone.

I remember the feeling, like a puff of cool breeze that rustles the leaves and chills your bones. I’d driven my truck a thousand miles to see them, for naught. Climbing back in, I turned the key, turned around and headed home, feeling like the butt end of a joke, perhaps one of my own making. Needless to say, the overnight drive north was a long and lonely one. Praise the gods of rock-and-roll for AM radio.

After that nickel tour in 1974, seventeen years would pass before I found Don and Clarice way down south in Safford, Arizona. An odd train of events had led to the reunion.

On New Year’s Day 1989, my eighty-one-year-old maternal grandmother crashed her VW Beetle into a tree in Santa Barbara, rupturing her aorta. The surgery to repair it was a fifty-fifty proposition. She didn’t make it. My mother, my siblings, and I had grown up with her grandmotherly cheerfulness in our lives, so hers was a great loss to all.

My mother, Beth, contacted an old friend, my long lost Aunt Marion, Don’s older sister, to share the dreadful news. They hadn’t talked in years. Mom was living in Phoenix then with my stepdad, Bud. They hadn’t been there long when the accident happened. As Mom and Marion were catching up on things, Marion mentioned that Mom’s Ex, wouldn’t you know it, was also living in Arizona. He worked at the airport in Safford. For Heaven’s sake!, Mom would have replied, or something to that effect. Beth and Don hadn’t talked for thirty-five years. It seemed mildly serendipitous that he was in Safford. At is happened, Mom and Bud had parked their home-built motorhome at an RV park in Safford and settled there for a time before moving on to Phoenix. Somehow she and Don never crossed paths. I can only imagine the awkwardness among the two remarried couples had their shopping carts collided at the local Walmart.

Much later, during one of my own visits with Mom, she passed that tidbit of information on to me as a kind of Oh, by the way... I called the Safford Airport and, sure enough, he was there. I drove over to Safford the next day and found Don and Clarice at home in a little subdivision close to the airport. It was a happy reunion, and they recapped the years for me. After twenty-five years of boat-building, Don had had enough of sailboats and was now fixing and flying airplanes. The proceeds from the Taylor’s ketch at Grover City had enabled the purchase of a 1942 Boeing Stearman biplane, which he began to restore as soon as Tiare had cut her first wake.

I learned that airplanes, in fact, were his first love. He’d come to know a great deal about them while serving as an aviation mechanic in the U.S. Navy in the 1940s and early 1950s. In the Navy, he loved to fly, though he often dreamed of sailing, the career path he would ultimately choose. But after two-plus decades of sailing and boat-building, his creaking knees and the lure of the skies drew him back to airplanes.

As the old Stearman attained a resurrection, Don also completed work on an open-cockpit, aerobatic biplane, a replica of a 1929 Great Lakes Trainer, built from scratch. He’d started the Great Lakes before he’d even laid the keel for the Taylors’ boat, so he was especially anxious to get her done. The Great Lakes would provide many years of joyous flying above the Arizona desert and beyond. When he finished with the Stearman, he flew it for just twelve hours, he said, testing and tuning the critical components, before selling it at a nice profit for eighteen thousand dollars. It was the sale of the Stearman, he said, that provided their ticket to the desert skies of Safford.

He and Clarice bought a little house near the airport and built a hangar, a corrugated-metal quonset hut, next to the tarmac. Don established an airplane business there that would carry him into retirement. He called it Don’s Flying Machines. To save some bucks, he proposed a deal to the city: lease him a site for his hangar for fifteen years at a dollar a year, and the city could keep the building when he was done with it. The city agreed and the hangar was built. The hardest part of the construction, he said, was installing the outdoor light fixture above the giant sliding doors while balanced atop a shaky ladder.

Over those next fifteen years, Don serviced airplanes for local enthusiasts and restored more old classics, among them two World War II Fairchild PT-19 Navy trainers, one of which had been partially eaten by rats, and a 1947 Fairchild 24 bush plane that now had the plush interior of a Cadillac. He’d restored Clarice’s old Cadillac too, which occurred sometime between a redo of a 1964 Chevy El Camino and the 1960 Harley-Davidson Duo-Glide police bike. In his spare time, he assembled dozens of model airplanes, flew a few of them radio-controlled, and tinkered with his train set. A quarter-century of boat building had been hard on his knees, he said, so he followed it up with a quarter-century of planes, trains, and automobiles.

Having grown up a little by the 1990s, I had a better appreciation for his love of boats and airplanes. At that first Safford reunion, I enjoyed hearing their stories and shared a few of my own. I’d recently returned from several months of travel in Chile and they seemed genuinely interested in my adventures. We were still strangers, more or less, but he and Clarice were now well within my arc of visibility. From that point on, we stayed in touch.

I stopped in to see them on occasion, in Safford, then Bowie, forty-some miles to the south, after he retired. They’d scored a place next to an unused airstrip that was handy as hell once they cleared out the tumbleweeds. When Don decided he was getting too old to fly, they sold their last two airplanes and the house, and moved back to Safford. Scaling down and simplifying their lives was an enormous change for such an ambitious couple, but they adjusted to it well.

When Kris and I came to visit on Thanksgiving Day, 2008, something else also changed. We began to hear a lot of boat stories. Schooner stories. Stories of Mexico and the Pacific islands. With a sneaky, unexpected grace, the schooner Destiner eased herself into the arc.