41 North, 91 West

41 North, 91 West

Cal Johnson was as normal as you, me, or the folks next door though you'd never guess it from what he did with his life. He was from a rural town in southeast Iowa, ten thousand souls in all, most dedicated to farming and related businesses. A granary, elevator, Farm Coop, 4-H, agi-this and agi-that. Spent his life on the family two-hundred acres equipped with Massy-Furgeson from cultivator to combine. Bailed hay the old fashioned way his first years: by hand with pitchfork and hay wagon, chaff in the eyes and all. Graduated to rectangular bales and scratched his forearms and tore the thighs off a pair of overalls each summer. He, like his neighbors, certainly learned to respect the protective power of cowhide work gloves. It wasn't until thirty-five that he switched to the big round bales one sees as he drives along the freeway. Cal Johnson was from the land so he stayed away from big-time machinery as long as he could. It was manual labor every summer in hundred-degree heat with the sun blazing down until his autumn years when he shocked everyone in Jefferson County.

One day, as if he was sight reading from a script, he contacted his neighbor and two nephews.

"Going to be gone a spell. Year, maybe more. Would you be kind enough to take care of the place till I get back? Profits are yours, oil the machinery, and God bless the lot of you." With that, Calvin Robinson walked off.

He went to Marblehead, Massachusetts because that was the home of the King Company, makers and outfitters of the world-famous Ulysses 4 Sail Boats. The folks from Jefferson County didn't know this, had never even heard of it. Even if they knew about King Company, they didn't know enough about boats to ask what the big deal was. Folks in southeastern Iowa embarrass easy when they can't explain why neighbors do unusual things.

Even Cal couldn't explain the King Thing. No more than why he hitchhiked with a duffel bag the size of Aunt Ethel's purse, two credit

cards, a Leatherman Super Tool 200, and five Swisher Sweet cigars. The Swishers really stumped him because he didn't even smoke.

When Mr. Johnson reached Marblehead he informed the proprietors he was interested in buying a boat. Anyone who knew Cal prior to that saw it was part and parcel of the strangeness of the whole affair. Because the entire Johnson family back five, six generations, were land folk, never knew a thing about boats save a twelve-foot Jon Boat used to catch catfish from the mud pond on their two-hundred acres. But here's this farm boy in the slickest yacht palace most of us'll never be able to fantasize about: marble floors, huge drapes run by electricity that could cover a whole wall the size of the Jefferson County High School Gymnasium, and all this just to show off the yachts and shut out the ocean when it looked dismal or mean outside.

The proprietors strutted around in all shapes and forms of boat shoes, fancy shorts, admiral hats, and boasting sun tans you'd have to lie in a tanning salon two years to get. And the dogs were just as exotic: they had names a farmer couldn't pronounce even if he was from the east. If Cal had a notion to ogle, he would have seen many people doing nothing but chit chatting in their tans putting down drink after drink like they were camels before crossing the Sahara, Sierra, and Gobi combined.

But Cal didn't look out of place since he looked a bit eccentric himself. He just followed that phantasmagoric script and meanders pretty as you please right up to this high-class fellow with the horn-rimmed glasses and British accent and says ,"Now, before I buy, I want to take some courses, if you please." The truth was that Cal didn't know a bow from a stern or a port from a starboard so he had a lot to learn. So before he hits the high seas, he signed up for Basic Sailing, Barefoot Charter, Cruising, Offshore Passage-making, one on Marine Radar, Marine Weather, Celestial Navigation, Coastal Navigation, Emergency Navigation, and topped it off with a Captain's Course.

"By the way," Cal said to the salesman, "where's a decent place I can winter? Do you take Federal Express? How long will it take King to outfit a rig to circumnavigate?" That certainly raised the eyebrow of Throckmorton!

The farm boy was full of surprises. No one from Jefferson County could tell where he came up with his wild notion any more than the names of all those courses. Even if he read a sailing magazine in the outhouse between cultivating, discing, fertilizing, sowing, haying, harvesting corn and

soybeans, and taking care of the hogs he wouldn't have had enough time to absorb all those nautical terms. It certainly was mysterious.

True to his promise, Cal took a couple of courses. But he felt like a fish out of water. He figured he'd signed up for them just to be following his script. But down deep he, like every red-blooded South East Iowa farm boy, couldn't learn from taking a class. What he was expected to know before stepping foot on his million-dollar vessel amazed him:

hull helm to hoist

lee boards fore sand bar

keel bow halyard

gunwale prow rigging

mainsail aft propeller

top sails stern fenders

jib transom mast lift

Genoa midship solar power

spinnaker port cockpit

mizzen starboard Captain

anchoring sail bulkhead First Mate

gang plank deck circumnavigate

tiller reefer pirate

rudder salon cup races

head dingy moor

galley stateroom visibility

davit berth fathom

lines draft launch

to store poop deck to beach

hold fantail bilge

ballast freeboard centerboard

caulking mast water pump

block & tackle boom offshore

sound life boat destination

storm tactics flags sow-wester

sea anchor trolling becalmed

knots cleat howling

nautical chumming adrift

hatch semaphore trough

handrail SOS wake

lighthouse Mayday league

yacht squall crow's nest

skipper typhoon capsize

boat crew displacement

ship headwind LOA

tug breakwater LOD

trawler shakedown cruise LWL

cutter abandon ship GP

schooner wharf CPQ

frigate dock GPS

catamaran tide autopilot

ketch whitecap shoal

sloop winch ship to shore

charter buoy Moby-Dick

salt port hole Kon-Tiki

landlubber nose jellyfish

This was justpartof what he was expected to know. And to think that all he knew when he left Iowa was Jon Boat and oars!

The folks at King didn't know what to make of this fellow, but they did understand the cashier's check he put on the marble counter, in-advance total payment for a fully rigged forty-four footer. And before it's sowing time in Jefferson County, Calvin Robinson Johnson sits comfortably in the cockpit of his new boat, barking out hands on, heave to, cast off. with that, he heads due east.

The startled onlookers watched the broad mainsail hoisted followed by a smart jib. They stare at the transom withWunginellpretty as a calendar picture heading off God-only-knows where. A few hands made bets where they would find the floating body and how long before they spotted the boat keel-up.

The foregoing is no more unusual than what you might read in a book or see in a movie. But few could even dream of the real weirdness of the Cal Johnson story, because no sooner had our furrow-following friend lost sight of the North American coast than he faded out. Not only in the visual sense because he went beyond the horizon, but faded out in his head as well. That is, his brain lost contact with his conscious mind. The man spaced out, which means that everything he did was akin to a brain-dead state. Later he explained it by saying he felt he didn't do a thing, only his

body acted. In fact, on the second day he distinctly sensed that his deeper consciousness was about a foot and a half above his body watching the physical form do all the work. Something strange certainly was going on.

WhenWunginellreached Iceland over a month later the miracle continued. Without knowing why or how, this one-time farm boy blurted outin Danishenough details the dock hands were convinced that this salty seaman was one of them. Then Cal strutted into the wharf tavern and challenged all hands who had sailed across the Atlantic solo.

"You mean I must buy my own drinks sit alone? Come, lads, what I'm saying is that the drinks are on me!"

With that, the house bursts alive like a scene from an old-time movie and all in Danish, too.

Just how did this fellow from southeast Iowa metamorphose so completely? What drove him to Marblehead leaving the season's work to neighbors and nephews? Launching a King's yacht and setting sail to God-only-knows-where? And a full month of all this soul-witnessing business while making his poor physical self do all the work! And then all this bar-talk in a language completely foreign to the farm boy, and that's not the end of it, either. Because after a brief rest in Iceland, he headed to Scotland and duplicated his dock-side antics. Only in Gaelic. Then to Ireland and Copenhagen and Sweden and Spain and Portugal, all the time conversing like he was a native in each. Having frolicked sufficiently, the man heads back to Marblehead, his physical form again doing all the work while his soul just grins a foot and a half above it all. A mystery, indeed.

Now, if your imagination has been piqued, you can guess where the phantasmagoric script led Captain Johnson once he docked theWunginellright in front of King Company. He sold the yacht as nonchalantly as he'd purchased it, too. And would you believe that our unassuming hero got the full purchase price, even though it was well used? That done, he threw his duffel bag the size of Aunt Ethel's purse, pocketed his credit cards, Leatherman Super Tool 200, and the five Swisher Sweetsunused, and hitchhiked back to Jefferson County, Iowa.

Once there he gathers his neighbor and nephews. "I thank for taking care of the place while I was gone. Now I'll resume managing and God be with you."

And there you have it. One of the strangest tales I've ever heard. And all unexplained. The phantasmagorical script that led the farm boy across the North Atlantic and back, the fluency in foreign tongues, the

unfathomable soul-witnessing, surely it couldn't have come out of the sailing magazine in his rickety outhouse at Latitude 41 degrees North, Longitude 91 degrees West!