An 86-year-old man and his one-eyed dog spent two months battered by the Pacific Ocean because he refused to die with his dreams still on the list — and the safety-first crowd thinks he's the problem.
Harry Blodgett sailed out of Astoria, Oregon, in August, bound for American Samoa, 5,000 miles southwest. He gave up his home, sold his belongings, and moved aboard his sailboat, the Willow Wind. Friends begged him not to go, the New York Post reported. He went anyway. That's not foolishness. That's freedom — the kind this country was built on before bureaucrats decided risk itself was the enemy.
Things went sideways fast. Blodgett lost his sails two weeks in and nearly ran out of fuel. He was, in his own words, "just like a rag doll inside the hull of the boat getting banged against all the furniture and the roof of the inside of the cabin." He survived on freeze-dried food and what he called "stinky" water. And still he held off activating his emergency beacon for weeks.
"I wasn't afraid at all," Blodgett told the New York Times from his San Diego hospital bed. "The boat was doing a great job."
The Coast Guard launched the search October 24 after friends hadn't heard from him in over 60 days. Three days later, a beacon alert from the Willow Wind finally broke the silence. A motor vessel, the Grand Orion, reached him early the next morning. Coast Guard Cmdr. Jason Nguyen said Blodgett and his dog, Sasha, were alive on deck and appeared to be "holding up surprisingly well." Nearly 500 miles off San Diego, more than 1,000 nautical miles into his ordeal, an old man and a one-eyed dog were still standing.
The Oregonian, meanwhile, reported on Karl Bushby — a former British soldier who just walked home to Hull, England, from Chile. Twenty-eight years. Thirty-one thousand miles. Four continents. His rules: never ride anything forward, and don't go home until your feet get you there. He swam across the Caspian Sea and the English Channel. He spent 18 days in a Panama jail, faced a polar bear on the Bering Strait, and got stuck in Russia for nearly a decade over visa problems. His son was 8 when he left, 36 when he returned. He met his 12-year-old granddaughter for the first time this month.
The cost for both men was enormous. The risk was extreme. The point is that a free man gets to choose.
Somewhere along the way, the consensus became that anyone who chases a dream past the guardrails needs to be talked down, regulated, or rescued from the consequences of their own liberty. Blodgett's friends tried. He sailed anyway. The Coast Guard spent resources finding him. He's grateful, and he's alive — and he'd do it again.
"That trip across the Pacific was the last item on my bucket list," Blodgett said. "You shouldn't give up on your dreams or your goals."
The founders didn't cross an ocean in a wooden ship because someone ran a cost-benefit analysis. They went because free men go. Blodgett and Bushby understand something the regulatory state never will: the frontier doesn't ask permission.
