Brandon Nelson

Dale McKinnon

This month, we read about grandma/writer/rowing adventurer/race organizer Dale McKinnon…

How did I get “outside the box?” I don’t think of living in those terms. My metaphors have always been “off-piste” because I have always kept moving. (Only recently have I begun to slow down, and that is a direct result of living with my partner, Berns, and of wanting to watch my granddaughter, Bella, and grandson, Sam, grow up.) I traveled as a teenager in competitive swimming and saw some success in that with a few American records and competing at the 1964 Olympic Swimming Trials. The years immediately after that were a big transition in life and not just for me, but for the social fabric of this country. The Beatles, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimmy Hendrix, Flower Power, Haight-Ashbury, LSD, Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon… it all started washing over our heads and I found myself swimming once again, only this time in a cultural tide that I couldn’t fathom. Friends died from overdoses, from Vietnam, from motorcycle accidents… this was a huge spring tide with a very fast current, indeed. 

From my current vantage point, it seems that the current roared me through too many places, and way too many people. I pulled “geographics” all over the US until I met Hugh McCoy, and the gifts he gave me. Along with falling in love with Hugh, I fell in love with the life on the water that he was so adept at. He taught me how to sail, scuba dive, rig, skydive… and how to think critically. He never stopped dreaming of adventures. Our lives have since traveled parallel paths and I grieved very hard when he died last winter. As a very close friend said, “I’ve lost one of the legs on the barstool of Life.” 

My adventuring didn’t really begin to open up for me until after I met my partner, Berns Portervint. We’ve been together for 18 years, and have found that it’s like a long bicycle trip. Along with the adventuring life, I’ve also grown into Buddhism… more specifically, Vipassana meditation. It’s the art and awareness of seeing things as they are. It is a gift to be able to accept the world as it is, to accept people as they are, to accept the fact that half of this country voted for George Bush, TWICE… the ability to see clearly keeps my sanity. And the gift of Vipassana allows me to hear, feel and sense what is really there when I’m out on the water. The separation between self and other tends to soften, and sometimes dissolve. I quiet myself completely when I am soloing in my boat and am thoroughly absorbed by my environment. The rhythm of sliding-seat rowing is conducive to meditative awareness. 

We moved here in 1997. It was my godson that convinced me I should check out Bellingham while he was attending WWU. During Easter vacation of ’97, Berns and I came up and endured six days of rain while in Glacier, until the day we were going to leave… and then there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I was stunned. Everything I wanted geographically was here. That’s all it took. Had it rained that last day, I wouldn’t be here. 

I was up from SF the following month, looking for an agent in Seattle. Within two weeks I signed a contract in software, and found my house in Happy Valley/Fairhaven. That fall, Berns and I kayaked from Orcas to Sucia and I discovered that my back couldn’t endure kayaking. My legs would become useless. I had injured my back in a skydiving accident, and a subsequent sailing accident. 

To keep active, though, I cycled and skied and made extensive use of the Interurban Trail… until Thanksgiving weekend of ’99. I shattered the tibial plateau of my left leg while tele-skiing. I was 55 years old. Now at least one leg really was useless and I greeted the Millenium on crutches. My orthopedist was going to leave the nine pieces of metal in my knee for the rest of my life until I convinced him that was not a good idea by showing him a photo of me six months after surgery on Heliotrope Ridge, at the end of a climbing rope, a pack on my back, ice axe in one hand and ski pole in another with Skagit Valley fogged in below. Removal of the metal was the fifth surgery on my left knee and I’ve never looked back. 

To rehab the knee I rode the Alaska AIDS Vaccine Ride from Fairbanks to Anchorage in 2001, came home and a few weeks later 9/11 happened. It had been a very difficult weekend before that Tuesday, and I can’t accurately trace what happened inside of me after that day. But a few weeks later, I stopped by my friend James’ house and he had plans for a dory spread out on his kitchen table. He showed me a photo of the boat’s designer rowing in a sliding seat rig in the boat, and for some reason lights and bells went off in my head. I had to build this boat, and I knew that rowing it would take me into old age with a relatively healthy body.  No jarring, but a lot of exercise for the major muscle groups. And… I’d be on the water… 

Without connecting all the dots, suffice it to say that I wound up rowing a longer dory I built from Ketchikan to Bellingham. Putting the boat and the trip together happened so fast that a lot of it is a blur. Granted, I rowed to benefit an organization here in Bellingham, but the compelling reasons were much deeper than that. I’m still working on how to articulate why I felt compelled.

To answer your question about what I would say to someone who would like to do what I do, I say quiet your mind. Shut up. Just sit and listen to yourself breathe. Don’t be afraid of what you see, because then you are only seeing Fear. If you quiet yourself, you can always hear and sense what’s coming and what’s going. But you have to get really, really, really quiet. And Bellingham Bay gives me that. The bay is a wonderful place to get quiet and just sit to be a part of the magnificence. Rowing will take me into a very happy old age where I can watch the grandkids grow up, introduce them to the water and the stunning environment we live in… until I almost can’t row anymore and then I’ll take that one last trip out through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and head West. Between now and then, there’s a lot of good beer to taste, new places to row, lies to tell and friends to love. That’s not  something you want to rush.

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