It's Bill, 9/27/26: More Bill Reads

Oct 2

2 min read

Looking back, besides designing and building West Quoddy Station’s 15th lodging in 2024, I still found time to read and talk to folks. I guess some thought I was a good speaker.

Julia asked me to speak to the Iron Works Quilters when they stayed and quilted at West Quoddy Station, even giving me a handmade quilt. Julia is also President of the Lubec Woman’s Club. I spoke to both groups about the history of West Quoddy Station, always refining the story as I went along.

Reading Robert Service to the Ski Team

I had the Bates College ski team stay here during the fall of 2025 for a couple of days while they did conditioning by running and using rollerblades. On Saturday night, I read them Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and other poems. They sat there as if in a classroom.

Something different.

Patricia listened as I read Jack London, enjoying Jack together. We realized we liked adventure stories, always with a strong character, just like Jack. I had read many of London’s stories and had read his biography twice.

I went to the Lubec Library and took out The Sea-Wolf. More survival, strong characters, even a heroine! Later, still wanting more Jack, we read Jack London: A Life, an excellent biography. It was easy to see how art can imitate life.

Jack made a deal with publishers to write about his cruise circumnavigating the world and to telegraph his publishers segments of his trip. A real adventure, we read The Cruise of the Snark. Jack, weakened by illness while sailing from Hawaii, and his wife concluded their South Seas journey in Australia. An absolutely wonderful, true-life adventure. A must-read.

A man looks through a bookshelf filled with books beneath a decorative duck and pitcher at West Quoddy Station. — Looking through the shelves for the next adventure to read aloud.

Across the Pacific

While Patricia listened, we sailed the Pacific with Jack, both remembering reading Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl. We reread Heyerdahl and his five-man crew’s epic sail across the Pacific on a balsa wood raft.

While reading to Patricia, we both recalled that it took forever to organize the trip, find and fell the balsas, construct the raft and finally sail from Peru. We enjoyed reliving the colossal effort to sail on a balsa raft across the Pacific to prove the theory that people had sailed from South America to Polynesia.

Years ago, I had read Sir Ernest Shackleton’s South about his 1914–1917 expedition to cross Antarctica from sea to sea. His ship, Endurance, became trapped in the polar ice. They trekked and sledded forever, hauling small boats and sailing to islands in search of rescue.

It is an epic tale of survival; however, he wrote it from terse log entries. The text was repetitious and boring. Freezing in wet clothes, eating seal meat. Forever and ever!

We struggled, just as his crew did, but we quit. We couldn’t survive his writing.