Chapter 5 - The Painting

Finding Destiner / By Ken Wilcox © Copyright 2023

By the fall of 2008, where my Destiner story more properly begins, the Wilcoxes’ days of boat-building and airplane-tinkering were mostly in the past. Yet the stories remained. The photo albums bulged; the memories were still crisp. Dad was 80 now, Clarice 83. They’d recently downsized, sold the last airplane, the Great Lakes, and purchased a simple brick house with a dirt yard, ten blocks from the center of town. The only notable green thing out front was a large bush near the door that offered a marginal aesthetic balance to the swamp cooler on the roof. A few pavers and a narrow sidewalk led from the tall plastic mailbox at the curb to the raised-slab doorstep, and the way in.

Inside, four yards of worn, gray-blue carpet direct the occasional visitor, such as myself, to a modest bookcase fixed to the wall dead ahead. Above it hangs a large and beauteous painting of a sailboat. It’s the first thing I notice whenever I visit.

“Your grandmother painted that,” he tells me. I know, but he doesn’t want me to forget.

The painting depicts a forty-foot traditional schooner, four of her six sails hoisted and trimmed. Only the fisherman and main topsail have not been raised. The two masts, starboard shrouds, and ratlines are silhouetted against billowing white clouds rising into the Pacific blue. The schooner seems to be beating to windward on a lively sea. The sails are tight and she’s heeled over at a good pitch, maybe twenty-five degrees, with my intrepid dad at the helm. Her round, raked transom is fully out of the water. Across the stern is the name Destiner. Surrounding the painting is a thick, carved, wooden picture frame, made as if to capture a scene from a storybook.

Dad designed the boat himself. She was his second schooner and the pride of the Wilcox fleet. After three years building Destiner on the cattle ranch near Cayucos, he and Clarice did, in fact, sail to magical places and live the dream. They sailed on a shoestring budget, often to Mexico, and a few times beyond. They loved to share their stories and seemed to light up whenever I came knocking, which lately hadn’t been often enough. On this visit, he offered a couple of vignettes I hadn't heard before.

“We were in Tahiti in ‘65,” he said, “tied up at the dock next to our friends. We were just sitting on our boats talking when Art Linkletter—Art Linkletter—you know who Art Linkletter is?" he asked with a tentative grin. I nodded. "Art Linkletter and his wife came walking by and stopped to check out our boats. He looked at our boat and at our friends’ boat, then he sat down on ours! He said, ‘This one’s prettier.’” In 1965, Art Linkletter was one of the most popular celebrities on American television. Planting his dapper derrière on Destiner’s deck would have been quite a tribute.

Another story followed, also in Tahiti.

“When we motored into the dock at Papeetē and were tying up the boat, the French customs officer came down and asked if we had anything to declare. I said ‘Well, I have a rifle. Should I declare it?’” The man nodded and motioned for Don to bring it along.

“So I followed him up the ramp with the rifle crosswise in my hands. I guess the local people saw me walking behind the officer armed with the rifle. They thought I was taking him in!” He later brought out a box full of documents, one of them scribbled on by the customs officer. The notation read 1 fusil Springfield.

This, of course, led to another story.

“There was a couple anchored in the cove who would row their dinghy to shore. They’d bring their cat along, and when they got close to the beach, that darned cat would jump out of the boat and swim to shore. They’d be twenty feet from the beach and the cat would jump out and swim! Every time! It was the darnedest thing.”

We chuckled in front of my grandmother’s painting, while Clarice and Kris chatted in the kitchen. My dad pointed to the carved Tiki figures, wooden knives, and other Polynesian trinkets that lined the shelf below the painting, briefly recalling where each item was from. The simplest of mementos, a tidy collage gathered by a pair of young seafarers more interested in collecting memories than things.

Next to the trinkets was a half-finished, scale model of Destiner. She was just under two feet long, excluding the bowsprit. He’d barely completed the hull.

“I'm building the model just like the original,” he said.

“Looks like work!” I replied. The model was new since my last visit, very impressive work for an old guy.

“I hope I can finish it. My hands aren’t too good anymore,” he said, rubbing his fingers through his palms. “It’s the same wood as the original. Seven varieties.”

He’d saved scraps of wood from Destiner’s construction nearly a half century before, so that someday he could build the model. In 2008, “someday” had finally arrived. 

He had cast the model's keel from a slug of lead—the original was cast iron, but that wouldn’t be practical for the model. He screwed the lead to the deadwood that formed the backbone of the hull. It was made of Douglas-fir and a scrap of apitong, the same durable Malaysian hardwood he’d used in 1961.

He’d built the transom and a dozen miniature molds and strung them together with ribbands, just as he’d done with the original at Cayucos.

“See the planking?” He pointed to the model’s hull. “Port Orford cedar from Oregon, same as Destiner. Same number of planks too.”

“Seriously?”

“Twenty-three on each side. And white oak frames. I boiled and bent each one.”

The model was scaled at a half-inch to the foot. Destiner was forty feet long at the deck. The model was twenty inches. He’d kept the original plans for Destiner and painstakingly redrew them to scale so he could accurately loft and fabricate each piece of the model.

“How’d you attach the planking?”

“Glue,” he said. “I cheated.”

The original had been built with galvanized fasteners—not as good as bronze, but more affordable. It took thousands of them just to assemble the hull. The planking was installed one long board at a time, from the bottom up and from the top down. The last one to be fitted, the whiskey plank (aka shutter plank), would be meticulously hewn to fit the remaining space. When the whiskey planks were glued and screwed into place, Don shared a cold lager with Sammy the cat, since Clarice didn’t drink. Second mate Mai Tai, of course, was now long gone, though not forgotten, as a small framed photo on the shelf affirmed.

With some leftover lead, he molded a little three-cylinder engine and set the gray blob into place above the tiny floor timbers. He drilled through the stern to insert a long, bronze drive shaft, but was still puzzling over how to fabricate a miniature propeller. He’d look for one in a hobby shop, he said, though it had to be just like the original. He was also beginning to install some of the cabinetry and furnishings inside the two cabins, woodwork that was largely composed of fir, cedar, and mahogany. The teak deck, cabin tops, and Sitka spruce masts and spars would come later.

Until he started on the model, Don hadn’t actually applied his expert boat-building skills for over three decades, yet the entire assembly process was still just as clear in his mind as it was in Cayucos, when pigs oinked their suspicions at the hull of Destiner taking shape in the barnyard.

He’d learned his craft in the 1950s at the W.F. Stone and Son boatyard in Alameda after leaving the Navy. He built his first schooner, Destardi, a 30-footer, at the Alameda airport. She was built in a shed next to an airplane hangar. Working evenings and weekends, Don took four years to build her. The boat was completed and launched in 1959, not long before Don got up the nerve to ask a petite Alameda bank teller named Clarice if she might want to go for a sail.

I asked him about the names of his boats, none of which I’d ever seen. Destardi, he said, was for an Apache woman, an alluring character in a Louis L’Amour story about the fearless gunslinger Hondo. L’Amour called her Destarte. Don liked the way John Wayne spoke her name in the movie version, which contrary to the norm, preceded the novel. He changed the spelling a little to capture the Wayne-esque intonation. Many years later and perhaps by coincidence, the Wilcoxes chose to retire in Apache country, the realm of the Gila River and Chief Geronimo.

And Destiner?

“She was going to determine my destiny,” he said with a grin.

One could still sense a sprig of regret in his voice that he’d let the best one get away. It was certainly too bad about Destardi, and he would share the details of her story with me later, but of all the sailboats Don built way back when, Destiner was the one that mattered most. And she still mattered forty-four years after her christening, even out here in the Arizona desert, five hundred miles from the deep blue sea.