Poppa Neutrino

David Pearlman, widely known as Papa Neutrino, died last month at 77 of congestive heart failure in New Orleans.   His remarkable life was summarized in an obituary in the Telegraph:

“Poppa Neutrino, who died on January 23 aged 77, was an itinerant American whose singular life story featured episodes as a card sharp, a soldier, a prisoner and a pastor; he never lived in any permanent structure for more than a year, and owned almost nothing, but in 1998 he became the first man to sail across the Atlantic on a raft made of junk.”

From his obituary in the New York Times:

A lifelong wanderer, he developed a philosophy that emphasized freedom, joy, creativity and antimaterialism, a creed expressed in the rafts he built from discarded materials. The rafts, he wrote on his Floating Neutrinos Web site, “were merely foils for our inner work: an ongoing experiment in human psychology, searching for answers to what makes us function and malfunction, and how to increase our own and others’ abilities to create meaningful and fulfilling lives.”

In 1988 Mr. Pearlman converted an abandoned barge into a paddle-wheel houseboat, Town Hall, that tied up at Pier 25 on the Hudson River off TriBeCa for several years.

Son of Town Hall at Sea

It was then that he began scavenging the material for Son of Town Hall, a 40-foot raft made of discarded timber, foam bricks and plastic bottles lashed together, basketlike, with 3,000 feet of rope abandoned by Con Edison.

In June 1998 Mr. Pearlman set sail from Newfoundland, aiming for France, with his wife, two crew members, three dogs and a piano. After 60 days, the raft reached Ireland, having survived a Force 9 gale that gave him pause.

“I’ve lived through levels of fear I never thought I had,” he told The Evening Standard of London. “The waves were so big and so steep, spitting foam across our raft, that I found the coward in myself.”

Nevertheless, he formed plans to circumnavigate the globe on a new raft, the Sea Owl. He abandoned the effort in November when a storm on Lake Champlain drove the raft onto a rocky cliff, where rescue workers hoisted him, his two inexperienced crew members and two dogs to safety.

“The vessel was everything I wanted it to be,” he told The Burlington Free Press. “I told the Coast Guard people it was unsinkable. They said, ‘Never say that.’ They were right.

Poppa Neutrino was the subject of a 2007 book by Alec Wilkinson, The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino.

Thanks to Alaric Bond for passing along the news.