| TRAVELS OF DURSMIRG VOLUME IV THE ROGUES OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND OTHER SOCIAL MISFITS Chapter 60 |
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YACHTERS, THE GOOD, BAD AND UGLY: WALTER AND CYNTHIA PERRY
WALTER AND CYNTHIA PERRY; Their boat was called “Zwalker” a one of a kind 30 foot grossly over engineered
and drowned in gadgetries steel sloop. Walter whimsically took exceedingly great pleasure in designing strangely
bazaar unconventional Rube Goldberg contraptions for his floating contrivance, Zwalker.
In volume 1 of Travels of Dursmirg you can meet Walter and Cynthia and read about how they became attracted to
St. Augustine.
In Walter’s engineer oriented mind a sailboat sailing was a ZWalker as it tacked up a channel. This was Walter’s
logical thought pattern of his spaced-out technical oriented mind that was on another plane of thought that had an
extra-terrestrial component eccentrically wired into his misfit mind.
Walter was a big raw-boned 6 foot 6 guy and his little mild mannered meek and easy going medium built wife
Cynthia a full foot shorter with a crippled leg the result of childhood polio.
Big burly brawny Walter was a retired research engineer from computer giant IBM. With his huge broad shouldered
size and powerful build you would easily envision him in a soot smudged blacksmith apron hammer in hand
pounding hot iron on an anvil and not the absent minded professor type, which he was.
Wanderlust struck Walter after retirement who dropped out of the mainstream to go sailing on his custom built
sailboat Zwalker that was really just a floating contrivance.
There was absolutely no question about Walter’s status as social misfit; he was bona fide, certified and specialized
in that department.
Walter was not your proverbial square peg in a round hole because there was no hole that matched his wrong side
up obtuse non-conforming individuality, but of course St. Augustine naturally found a place for him.
The fascinating magnetic alluring appeal of St. Augustine naturally drew them in with its affinity for radical rogues
and spaced-out social misfits.
Big Walter with his extraterrestrial thought patterns and his gullible unquestioning little Cynthia somehow survived
their conundrum filled voyage aboard their floating mechanical mechanism sailing the Z-Walker that ultimately led
them south.
From Poughkeepsie, New York up on the Hudson River their voyage seemed eternally long all the way to the
Sunshine State where we first met this unconventional couple.
Walter and Cynthia had their Zwalker docked and plugged into the world at the City Yacht Pier in October 1973.
That is when they signed our guest book aboard our Dursmirg anchored out in St. Augustine bay.
Besides the fact that we were all sailors and had basically gone over the horizon at the same time not looking back
we also shared one other similarity and that was the love of bicycling.
Jane and I had been avidly cycling for nearly five years mostly for pleasure but Jane had a special reason for
bicycling. Her doctor back in Wisconsin prescribed bicycling as treatment for a painful leg condition she had as a
result of spending excessive hours standing at a computer terminal.
(Bicycling has worked healthy wonders for us both and as I write this we have now enjoyed nearly forty years of this
fabulous sport together.)
For Jane and I back in the early 1970s bicycles were our only wheeled transportation ashore and it would be nine
more years before we actually broke down and acquired a motor vehicle.
Looking back now those ten years without a car proved to be the very finest years we have managed to share
together.
A number of coincidental events made this time in our lives the very best we have ever had. We realize that these
times do not come to all and that even the few that are lucky enough to have them don’t use them to the fullest or
even miss this opportunity completely.
Besides our simple new life style with no car we also had the finest home for the times imaginable. Our self
contained sailboat Dursmirg plus the know-how and abilities to obtain all our own free fresh food from the sea.
Above it all, the most magical thing was that we now had our own unhurried free time to enjoy this entire paranormal
moment to its utmost and even found willing and able like-minded accomplices like Walter and Cynthia that had a
lifetime of experiences to share and eagerly looked for people like Jane and I.
So, here we were again with odd-ball social misfits that took to the sea for a new no frills unrushed realm totally away
from the regimented 9-to-5 lifestyle. We were all leaving behind the Madison Avenue upscale yuppie stereotypical
image of bigger, shinier, faster and above all more extravagant than anything your aspiring neighbors could possibly
acquire.
Here the boating life stripped away the fake façade of who’s who leaving just the naked life’s realities that can only
contribute to the ability to be your own man and self sustain yourself without exploiting your fellow beings.
Walter and Cynthia were another case. Big Walter could power along on his bicycle with immense strides but poor
little Cynthia with her one crippled leg had an enormous struggle just to get on the bicycle. Then she had the added
problem of not being able to lift her leg…she could push but not lift her leg. With practiced determination Cynthia
managed to bike with Walter who loved spirited long distance trips often times in heavy traffic.
Here is what poor little Cynthia had to do to ride her bicycle;
Balancing her bicycle she would reach down and pick up her bad leg with her hand and then place her foot on the
pedal. Then with an acrobatic effort she shoved off with the other foot. The start was crucial and if all went well she
was under way. If not it was a real mess because of her handicap.
Starting and stopping were real trials of mind control, acrobatics and coordination.
To this day I cannot understand how little Cynthia managed. She somehow found the courage to be there at Walters’
s side making 20 and 30 mile cross country trips.
These people had absolutely no compunction about riding in heavy traffic or down the interstate highway.
These two square pegs and social misfits also had a number of other attributes that separated them from the norm
and here is where Walter and Cynthia measured up with their practiced frugality carried to boundless extremes.
An example that comes to mind took place when they invited Jane and I out for a sail aboard their floating
contraption Zwalker.
Jane asked Cynthia if we could bring along something for lunch or snacks.
Cynthia told Jane, no, we were their guests. So, we came empty handed.
We had a lovely day with plenty of thought provoking conversation accompanied with lots of laughs peacefully
sailing along just the four of us serenely and silently wafted along by the sweet gentle fresh air briny breezes.
Well, our hunger finally drove us to near distraction as noon time came and went.
Finally in hunger driven desperation we approached the Perry’s with a blunt request for something to sustain us.
Our bodily functions were beginning to sputter along only running on fumes…our corporal tanks were empty.
Cheerfully Cynthia poured out her hospitality to us with their dining extravaganza; we each were handed a single
date topped with a stingy dab of peanut butter.
That was it!
We felt like drawn out zombies by days end. We had never been caught off guard like this.
Our trip became a forced fast that totally clashed with our active life metabolism rate that reduced us by days end to
a feeble shuffling lifeless state but taught us a very good lesson about being prepared with emergency rations.
Walter and Cynthia marched to a different drummer as we did and that is just one of the reasons we were drawn
together…this is what we appreciate in a person.
Well, here we were with a brilliant electronic engineer just retired from one of the world’s foremost electronics
companies, Hewlett Packard.
Misfit Walter by virtue of his lifetime searching for new untried solutions and paths to never before thought of
innovations saw the world through different eyes than the rest of us.
Walter was always armed with his state of the art Hewlett Packard scientific calculator. In the early 1970s it was the
most advanced, that had more buttons, functions and gismos than your average nerd could possibly have dreamed
of.
In a far off technical transcendental state of mind Walter was in his own realm. He was like a hyperactive inquisitive
child exploring a new world that kept his mind humming in complex statistical equations.
Occasionally I got the feeling that Walter had slipped away in some kind of day-dream only to see him punching in
numbers on his Hewlett Packard computer and then proclaim that his engine was idling at 864 RPMs.
In disbelief I had to ask; “How could you have possibly come up with that figure?”
Then Walter would explain with an almost incredulous reply like; “how could you ever possibly question my precision
computations. To Walter the solution was always so absurdly simple.
Then like he was explaining something to a small child for the tenth time he would give his abbreviated explanation.
“Just listen to the engine very carefully, you will easily observe a distinctive rhythm, one cylinder always makes a
little different noise than all of the rest. When you can hear that you can count that, it is so very simple with a four
cycle four cylinder engine, just multiply in the givens.”
Or out sailing Walter would drop a ball of paper off the bow of the boat and record the number of seconds that it
took to pass the stern of the vessel. Next after some click-click-click of his Hewlett Packard, we would be informed of
our speed through the water in nautical miles, statute miles and kilometers. These types of calculations were
continuously on-going in Walter’s pre-programmed digital brain.
It was always amusing, entertaining and pleasurable for us to be around this societal square peg that was a born
and bred social misfit.
Good-natured, mild-mannered and long suffering Cynthia put up with it all.
Walter had gotten to retire two years before Cynthia and he spent most of those two years playing the piano stark
naked by himself at their ranch house home up in rural Poughkeepsie, New York.
Walter had some kind of obsession for being nude. He wouldn’t swim with us or any group because he would only
swim nude, so he went out to the harbor or bay to swim from his boat.
Cynthia confided with us that Walter refused to enter their swimming pool with a swimming suit on, and that was the
unshakeable rule at their house period.
This was their very own private nudist colony.
We too all have our certain preferences but eccentric Walter carried his to the point of obsession.
We also rendezvoused with this mismatched pair at Melbourne and Marathon.
The over engineered Zwalker among other things had these following remarkable Walter Perry innovations; a
gimbaled battery under the galley stove, propeller shaft coupled with plastic roller chain and deck hatches that
dogged down like bank vault doors…his design.
This following story took place down in the Florida Keys at Marathon where Walter and Cynthia had their boat
Zwalker docked at a marina for the winter season;
Jane and I stopped over to visit the Perry’s aboard Zwalker one day and I happened to notice that there was an
electric cord with bared wires and no insulation jammed into the shore power outlet on the dock with no plug
attached. I said to Walter; “You won’t believe this but I just saw the dumbest thing; a real Rube Goldberg wiring job.”
Well, well wouldn’t you just know it, the guilty party was none other than our research engineer from Hewlett-
Packard, Walter Perry himself!
next chapter
WALTER AND CYNTHIA PERRY; Their boat was called “Zwalker” a one of a kind 30 foot grossly over engineered
and drowned in gadgetries steel sloop. Walter whimsically took exceedingly great pleasure in designing strangely
bazaar unconventional Rube Goldberg contraptions for his floating contrivance, Zwalker.
In volume 1 of Travels of Dursmirg you can meet Walter and Cynthia and read about how they became attracted to
St. Augustine.
In Walter’s engineer oriented mind a sailboat sailing was a ZWalker as it tacked up a channel. This was Walter’s
logical thought pattern of his spaced-out technical oriented mind that was on another plane of thought that had an
extra-terrestrial component eccentrically wired into his misfit mind.
Walter was a big raw-boned 6 foot 6 guy and his little mild mannered meek and easy going medium built wife
Cynthia a full foot shorter with a crippled leg the result of childhood polio.
Big burly brawny Walter was a retired research engineer from computer giant IBM. With his huge broad shouldered
size and powerful build you would easily envision him in a soot smudged blacksmith apron hammer in hand
pounding hot iron on an anvil and not the absent minded professor type, which he was.
Wanderlust struck Walter after retirement who dropped out of the mainstream to go sailing on his custom built
sailboat Zwalker that was really just a floating contrivance.
There was absolutely no question about Walter’s status as social misfit; he was bona fide, certified and specialized
in that department.
Walter was not your proverbial square peg in a round hole because there was no hole that matched his wrong side
up obtuse non-conforming individuality, but of course St. Augustine naturally found a place for him.
The fascinating magnetic alluring appeal of St. Augustine naturally drew them in with its affinity for radical rogues
and spaced-out social misfits.
Big Walter with his extraterrestrial thought patterns and his gullible unquestioning little Cynthia somehow survived
their conundrum filled voyage aboard their floating mechanical mechanism sailing the Z-Walker that ultimately led
them south.
From Poughkeepsie, New York up on the Hudson River their voyage seemed eternally long all the way to the
Sunshine State where we first met this unconventional couple.
Walter and Cynthia had their Zwalker docked and plugged into the world at the City Yacht Pier in October 1973.
That is when they signed our guest book aboard our Dursmirg anchored out in St. Augustine bay.
Besides the fact that we were all sailors and had basically gone over the horizon at the same time not looking back
we also shared one other similarity and that was the love of bicycling.
Jane and I had been avidly cycling for nearly five years mostly for pleasure but Jane had a special reason for
bicycling. Her doctor back in Wisconsin prescribed bicycling as treatment for a painful leg condition she had as a
result of spending excessive hours standing at a computer terminal.
(Bicycling has worked healthy wonders for us both and as I write this we have now enjoyed nearly forty years of this
fabulous sport together.)
For Jane and I back in the early 1970s bicycles were our only wheeled transportation ashore and it would be nine
more years before we actually broke down and acquired a motor vehicle.
Looking back now those ten years without a car proved to be the very finest years we have managed to share
together.
A number of coincidental events made this time in our lives the very best we have ever had. We realize that these
times do not come to all and that even the few that are lucky enough to have them don’t use them to the fullest or
even miss this opportunity completely.
Besides our simple new life style with no car we also had the finest home for the times imaginable. Our self
contained sailboat Dursmirg plus the know-how and abilities to obtain all our own free fresh food from the sea.
Above it all, the most magical thing was that we now had our own unhurried free time to enjoy this entire paranormal
moment to its utmost and even found willing and able like-minded accomplices like Walter and Cynthia that had a
lifetime of experiences to share and eagerly looked for people like Jane and I.
So, here we were again with odd-ball social misfits that took to the sea for a new no frills unrushed realm totally away
from the regimented 9-to-5 lifestyle. We were all leaving behind the Madison Avenue upscale yuppie stereotypical
image of bigger, shinier, faster and above all more extravagant than anything your aspiring neighbors could possibly
acquire.
Here the boating life stripped away the fake façade of who’s who leaving just the naked life’s realities that can only
contribute to the ability to be your own man and self sustain yourself without exploiting your fellow beings.
Walter and Cynthia were another case. Big Walter could power along on his bicycle with immense strides but poor
little Cynthia with her one crippled leg had an enormous struggle just to get on the bicycle. Then she had the added
problem of not being able to lift her leg…she could push but not lift her leg. With practiced determination Cynthia
managed to bike with Walter who loved spirited long distance trips often times in heavy traffic.
Here is what poor little Cynthia had to do to ride her bicycle;
Balancing her bicycle she would reach down and pick up her bad leg with her hand and then place her foot on the
pedal. Then with an acrobatic effort she shoved off with the other foot. The start was crucial and if all went well she
was under way. If not it was a real mess because of her handicap.
Starting and stopping were real trials of mind control, acrobatics and coordination.
To this day I cannot understand how little Cynthia managed. She somehow found the courage to be there at Walters’
s side making 20 and 30 mile cross country trips.
These people had absolutely no compunction about riding in heavy traffic or down the interstate highway.
These two square pegs and social misfits also had a number of other attributes that separated them from the norm
and here is where Walter and Cynthia measured up with their practiced frugality carried to boundless extremes.
An example that comes to mind took place when they invited Jane and I out for a sail aboard their floating
contraption Zwalker.
Jane asked Cynthia if we could bring along something for lunch or snacks.
Cynthia told Jane, no, we were their guests. So, we came empty handed.
We had a lovely day with plenty of thought provoking conversation accompanied with lots of laughs peacefully
sailing along just the four of us serenely and silently wafted along by the sweet gentle fresh air briny breezes.
Well, our hunger finally drove us to near distraction as noon time came and went.
Finally in hunger driven desperation we approached the Perry’s with a blunt request for something to sustain us.
Our bodily functions were beginning to sputter along only running on fumes…our corporal tanks were empty.
Cheerfully Cynthia poured out her hospitality to us with their dining extravaganza; we each were handed a single
date topped with a stingy dab of peanut butter.
That was it!
We felt like drawn out zombies by days end. We had never been caught off guard like this.
Our trip became a forced fast that totally clashed with our active life metabolism rate that reduced us by days end to
a feeble shuffling lifeless state but taught us a very good lesson about being prepared with emergency rations.
Walter and Cynthia marched to a different drummer as we did and that is just one of the reasons we were drawn
together…this is what we appreciate in a person.
Well, here we were with a brilliant electronic engineer just retired from one of the world’s foremost electronics
companies, Hewlett Packard.
Misfit Walter by virtue of his lifetime searching for new untried solutions and paths to never before thought of
innovations saw the world through different eyes than the rest of us.
Walter was always armed with his state of the art Hewlett Packard scientific calculator. In the early 1970s it was the
most advanced, that had more buttons, functions and gismos than your average nerd could possibly have dreamed
of.
In a far off technical transcendental state of mind Walter was in his own realm. He was like a hyperactive inquisitive
child exploring a new world that kept his mind humming in complex statistical equations.
Occasionally I got the feeling that Walter had slipped away in some kind of day-dream only to see him punching in
numbers on his Hewlett Packard computer and then proclaim that his engine was idling at 864 RPMs.
In disbelief I had to ask; “How could you have possibly come up with that figure?”
Then Walter would explain with an almost incredulous reply like; “how could you ever possibly question my precision
computations. To Walter the solution was always so absurdly simple.
Then like he was explaining something to a small child for the tenth time he would give his abbreviated explanation.
“Just listen to the engine very carefully, you will easily observe a distinctive rhythm, one cylinder always makes a
little different noise than all of the rest. When you can hear that you can count that, it is so very simple with a four
cycle four cylinder engine, just multiply in the givens.”
Or out sailing Walter would drop a ball of paper off the bow of the boat and record the number of seconds that it
took to pass the stern of the vessel. Next after some click-click-click of his Hewlett Packard, we would be informed of
our speed through the water in nautical miles, statute miles and kilometers. These types of calculations were
continuously on-going in Walter’s pre-programmed digital brain.
It was always amusing, entertaining and pleasurable for us to be around this societal square peg that was a born
and bred social misfit.
Good-natured, mild-mannered and long suffering Cynthia put up with it all.
Walter had gotten to retire two years before Cynthia and he spent most of those two years playing the piano stark
naked by himself at their ranch house home up in rural Poughkeepsie, New York.
Walter had some kind of obsession for being nude. He wouldn’t swim with us or any group because he would only
swim nude, so he went out to the harbor or bay to swim from his boat.
Cynthia confided with us that Walter refused to enter their swimming pool with a swimming suit on, and that was the
unshakeable rule at their house period.
This was their very own private nudist colony.
We too all have our certain preferences but eccentric Walter carried his to the point of obsession.
We also rendezvoused with this mismatched pair at Melbourne and Marathon.
The over engineered Zwalker among other things had these following remarkable Walter Perry innovations; a
gimbaled battery under the galley stove, propeller shaft coupled with plastic roller chain and deck hatches that
dogged down like bank vault doors…his design.
This following story took place down in the Florida Keys at Marathon where Walter and Cynthia had their boat
Zwalker docked at a marina for the winter season;
Jane and I stopped over to visit the Perry’s aboard Zwalker one day and I happened to notice that there was an
electric cord with bared wires and no insulation jammed into the shore power outlet on the dock with no plug
attached. I said to Walter; “You won’t believe this but I just saw the dumbest thing; a real Rube Goldberg wiring job.”
Well, well wouldn’t you just know it, the guilty party was none other than our research engineer from Hewlett-
Packard, Walter Perry himself!
next chapter
Anchored in St. Augustine
harbor aboard Dursmirg
we are having a cockpit
party. I am in the center
wearing my Robinson
Caruso style basket
sponge hat recovered
from diving trips in the
Keys of south Florida.
harbor aboard Dursmirg
we are having a cockpit
party. I am in the center
wearing my Robinson
Caruso style basket
sponge hat recovered
from diving trips in the
Keys of south Florida.