Sixty-Something: Every Day on the Water is an Endless Dream

I was just sailing in Gardiner’s Bay this last week. The sun was setting in the west over Shelter Island with its always pleasing brilliant colors. The breeze was refreshingly pleasant and just strong enough to propel the sailboat gently through the bay. If this almost sounds like a dream, it is. A dream that comes true for all sailors whenever they can get out on their rigs.

For decades I toiled, aiming at being a success. I did whatever it took to get ahead. I was gently social climbing as if a prime example of Vance Packard’s “The Status Seekers.” Then a fellow journalist once wrote and published that I “was running around like a chicken who just had his head cut off!” His words. I mentally hit the pause bottom.

The battles of surviving the zoo that life can be does eventually take a toll on one’s heart and soul. Then comes the epiphany. Everything that exists was once someone’s dream. It’s dubious not to aim at your own dream before your chance is gone. I wondered if my dream of success was actually becoming my nightmare. So I took up sailing.

When sailing in Gardiner’s Bay outside Three Mile Harbor you eventually pass the red bell buoy that also lights up at night. Its bell tone is both biblical and eerie sounding. On the rarest of occasions Richard Ivan would sail with me. His vintage 36’ Egg Harbor power boat was docked next to mine until he passed on.

One day while sailing with me and chomping on a huge lit “Royal Jamaican” cigar he said this: “Ragman (his nickname for me being a sailboat guy) you’ve got it right. It’s just the sound of the wind going through your sails and that bell buoy. Every day on the water is like an endless dream!”

Richard Ivan collected old Lincolns, with the doors that open backwards. He had 22 of them in a warehouse in New Jersey. He had a cat that he drove to NYC nightly to care for. He claims in his youth he sold tons of pot, yet he did not partake in smoking weed. He was even once in business owning a huge Trimaran with Billy Hayes, who became the centerpiece for the 1978 prison drama movie “Midnight Express.”

Richard Ivan claimed he took his young daughter across the Atlantic Ocean in that huge trimaran. He had long hair and wore native Indian jewelry made near his winter “homes” in Arizona. He always wore denim until he died due to an infection after a hip replacement surgery. I spoke with him a week or so before the surgery over the phone. He was excited about a new third home he and his wife were building in Arizona. Then he was gone.

A few months later many from the boatyard were summoned to Sag Harbor by his widow. I had heard so much about her from Richard but I had never met her until that day. Over a lunch at the Dockside Bar and Grill, we all told her our Richard Ivan stories. When it was over his widowed wife asked me to remain behind. I walked her to her car. There she handed me a box with Richard’s ashes and asked me to spread them around the “red bell buoy just outside Three Mile Harbor in Gardiner’s Bay.” I never asked how she knew about the bell buoy. The very next day I did just that and videotaped it on my phone and sent her the video. She thanked me.

It is said that those who live in the Maidstone Park section of Springs can hear that bell buoy on certain nights when the wind is blowing in. Now when I hear the bell, I also hear Richard’s voice saying, “Ragman how the hell are you, every day out on the water is an endless dream.”