Sailing Vessel Karma

I’d like to regale you with stories of the SV Karma crew’s intrepidness, ingenious inventiveness, penchant for effectiveness, extraordinary hospitality, and… albeit, they can tell you that. In fact, I’ll go as far to say the rest of these lovely blog posts will show you precisely that. I’m here with the real investigative journalism. I am going to show you where Liam is today is not chance, but a destiny written in the stars from back in the time when we were sharing bubble baths. I am here to point an embarrassing spotlight in a way that no other can. I believe it is my turn, no, my duty (if I may), to give you, dear reader, an honest, unadulterated, unfiltered “Insiders scoop” of Liam Heinicke, otherwise (and absolutely most-definitely-not-unfortunately (for me at least)) known as my brother. 

In many ways, we were quite similar kiddos. The mutually coveted most favoritest bathtime toy was a plastic Titanic. It had an iceberg-puncture-sized sliding panel in the hull. When placed in water, it would fill slowly causing the ship to tilt up on one end before breaking in half, sending each half sinking to the tub-floor,  just like the real Titanic! No, not the movie, James Cameron utterly paled in comparison to our star-studded superhero: Robert Ballard (from the “Finding the Titanic” book (and complimentary Discovery Channel Specials (DUH!))). I can still feel that electrically regular face, scintillatingly banal name, and extraordinarily plain blue polo shirt clasped in a sharp coagulation of rusticles on my brainstem. Liam liked the front half of the wreck best, I liked the back half. Perhaps it’s like astrology for children. 

“Look! We MADE that small green baby!”

“Oh gee, I can’t wait to get blitzed on sedatives and RUIN 70 hours of travelling with my mummy”

We watched that movie Titanic – you’ve seen it? No, not the one with Kate Winslet. It’s on 10mm film in black and white and it’s the actual footage taken of the vessel as it departs Southampton.  Our dad borrowed the enormous reel-to-reel projector from the library, and as a family sat in the basement and watched the black and white images of the doomed passengers and a stoic Captain Edward Smith wave goodbye to the shore.

In retrospect, that’s terrifying. 

Okay, when we finally did watch Titanic (yes, that one), we certainly didn’t care for Jack or Rose’s presence on the screen, or the terror (our mom even covered our ears for the profanity in the opening dive sequence (among the other copious not-advisable-for-kids materials)). We didn’t care much for the film at all, frankly, as we grazed over the whole… plot… because: We came for the ship!!  The exterior shots: Liam liked those. The propellers lifting out of the water: I liked those (it gave you a sense of scale). Flares? Sinking string quartets? Desperation? Yawn. We closed our eyes for all that carnage, but wrenched them wide when the Carpathia came on screen. Not for the rescue, but for the beautiful paint job!

A biopic masterpiece by 5 year old Skipper Liam.

1. Notice: the printing of batch data bleeding through the page.

2. Notice: the 1916 UK flag waving in the wind, with all that change of perspective!

3. Notice: Liam is an abysmal speller, as you may see on the slide showing the depth of the Titanic, and yet he managed to spell Britannic correctly: a clear demonstration of priorities.

In many respects, however, we are very different. I mean, one of us is devilishly handsome, brilliantly charismatic, dashing, dapper, debonair, and the other one is Liam. But, he was the cool older brother. I gotta do the cool things the cool older brother is doing! I was in it for the ride, the tag-along, getting to hang out with the coolest 5 year old I knew. But Liam? He was on a mission. A singular mission.

As a child, Liam loved 2 things. Clocks. And Boats. 

Example: Liam’s first word was “Clock” (Although, it was most definitely “Cock,” as the alveolar lateral approximant is quite difficult for a baby)

Example: 18 month old Liam would demand, every day, to be taken down to the Morristown town square to look at the clocktower. (fascinating hobbies)

Example: When moving from Australia to the United States, what is it that would keep a 2 year old Liam entertained on a 16 hour flight? A manilla Envelope, absolutely brimming with pictures of clocks. Magazine cutouts. Posters. Rolex Advertisements. Movie posters that contained a watch. If it was round and had at least a number somewhere, it counted as top tier entertainment. (as a side note, mum told me later they had also gotten a sedative for Liam for the flight. The doctor had said “sometimes the sedative has the opposite effect, but that’s rare.” Unfortunately, Mother Frazer had mistaken her offspring as one who warrants a firmly centered, normal-distribution shaped hat on the “regular child” scatterplot, and figured there was no need to conduct an experiment before travelling to see if Liam was an exemplary case. ((hint hint: he was (and still is) an outlier) aka: he was jacked to the moon on this stuff (P.S. This excerpt is merely the tip of an iceberg of a tale of a toddler absolutely ameliorating a family’s smooth sailing across the pacific (Wait! An iceberg ruining a trans-oceanic voyage? You could make a movie about that, right?!))))

That it does

Mum would later recount: “It was early training for pickpocketing.” In a darkened plane, hours in the flight, in his toddlerian tirade, Liam spotted a dangling wrist of a sleeping passenger, which sent him into a “bull-sees-the-matador’s-red-cape” rage, causing him to crash through every curtain and yank on every watch attached to every bewildered businessmen, screeching at the sight of every “Cock!! Cock!!!” (did I mention the /L/ thing?)

How a 5 year old managed to know the insides of a sunken Royal English Navy Ship from 90 years ago, we may never know.

Some would like to lay claim towards the cheap platitude of “I’m an all or nothing kind of person;” however, that claim shall, for me, bear only a mere resemblance of a dissociated smattering of phonemes after witnessing the ultra-ultraviolet, billion-hertz-vibration of the single-cause, singularly-aimed focus known as: “Liam focus.” 

I’d bet my money that the sun would melt if he thought about it too hard. 

Exhibit A: As kids, we liked to draw. 

Liam, would draw boats.

Liam would draw lots of boats. 

The HMHS Britannic was the youngest sister ship of the HMS Titanic. Originally designed a White Star Line Olympic class ocean liner, it became a medical vessel during WWI. Here is the depiction of the morning of the 21st of November, 1916, as the Britannic impacts a mine planted by a German Submarine in the Kea Channel. If Liam was slightly more literate at this age, I’m sure that’s what the caption would say.

Liam. Liked. To draw boats. Penciled sailboats. Penned tugboats. Sloops. Schooners. Red marker for the Plimsoll line on the battleships. AirCraft carriers. Stacks and stacks and piles and piles of boat depictions accumulated. Boats. Drawings of them. 2D renderings. Isometric viewpoint. Head on perspective. Water? Negligible. Occasionally a squiggly line, but usually just on the edges so as not to disturb the hull. My pictures had a sun in the upper righthand corner. What child doesn’t draw the sun in the corner of his doodles? Liam. That’s who. Because his were pictures of Boats. Boats. Pictures of Boats. Focus. Singular. Focus

Yes, that is now the Titanic Sinking. Yes, the parallels between the two ships are absolutely critical to the telling of this story. Yes, that does say this is page 27 and 28, and yes, every page of this book is this detailed.

At the time, Dr. Grant Wayne Heinicke, half father, half Aussie, half prickly bearded scientist, was merely Grant Wayne Heinicke (dad, to us) working on his organic chemistry PhD, typing up his work on a computer running Windows 98 in the unheated brick basement office with a single hanging lightbulb and a scotch cabinet adjacent to a punching bag (trust me when I say he’s a badass and goober simultaneously). This enterprise produced masses of scratch paper. All the thousands of pages of single core summary batch datasets would get a ship drawn on the back. I am saying every piece of 8.5×11 paper in the house had some kind of vessel on it. Boats.

Boat, After boat. After boat. After boat. After boat. After Boat. After Boat. After boat. After boat.

As we rapidly jump back to the Britannic, pictured here with the fatal starboard rupture in her hull, instead of correcting historical inaccuracies or critiquing the narrative form, I’d rather bask in the redefining of “childlike fascination” as “terrifying obsession.”

Our Mum is one to most definitely proclaim the preciousness of her children, the kind where even our haphazard, handmade Christmas ornaments still adorn the tree every year. She is overflowing with extra strength Infinite Patience of Parenthood^TM, replete with effervescent love and kindness and, for the love of God, she was literally incapable of keeping even MOST of those drawings. Let. Alone. Every. Single. One. 

So, there she is, some November afternoon, at the recycling plant in suburban New Jersey, holding a bag containing a dismembered library’s worth of pages. Mum, from the now infinite sprawling mass of boat drawings in the house, had to do the job of disposing of at least some iota of the ever-expanding volume of artworks, knowing myriads more would rain down. For every one she would soon toss away, 10 more would take their place.

That it did

But, thought mum, these drawings can’t just be thrown away. Liam made these. These are the drawings done by her child, and in some metaphorical way, they are her child (as they are both precious and unmistakably annoying). Feeling overwhelmed by the physical mountains and emotional weight of the collection, she had seated herself in the middle of the floor and pulled to her a large stack, representing only a small portion of this crop of the Domestic-Vessel-Product.

“I will honor them by looking at each one before I discard it,” she says. “For these are your boats,  I will do this in remembrance of thee.”

And there she sat. and looked. At each of them. One by one. 

One. Thousand. 

One. THOUSAND drawings. 

Of boats. 

Just. 

Boats. 

THAT’s what was in the bag, destined for disintegration, 1000 drawings of boats. What five year old do you know of, who you’ve even heard of, has done one thousand of anything?! One thousand drawings of just ships, just boats. What five year old has the mindset to do one thousand drawings of boats in a row?! ONE THOUSAND.

I’ll tell you who. Skipper Liam. 

So when I was camping somewhere in Wyoming and Liam sent me a picture of a 12 foot dinghy in Green Lake? Excellent. Another hobby at which he can excel. When I was looking for the cheapest possible one pot meal in a general store in Colorado, and receive a picture of a keeling over San Juan 23-foot sloop majestically splashing through the surf? What did I expect? Of course this was on a trajectory. The path. This was in the cards all along. So when we are sitting on our aunt’s patio, and I ask how the San Juan is doing, and he glances around so as to not attract suspicion (holding his white wine by the base of the stem, as he knows that’s how you keep it chilled), leans to Heather and says, “Should we tell him?” It felt I’d been let into the inevitable plot twist of a glorious paperback adventure when he showed me a gorgeous picture of Karma, only to nonchalantly say “We got a bigger boat.” Because this was the plan. This has been the through line, since day one. It’s like, in some strange long form composition, he’s managed to improvise his way to a prearranged crescendo. 

Now Heather and Liam are making the amazing machinations of their lives work in incredible synchronicity, much like how ants seem to always know to complete an unspoken task, or babies giggle at the same jokes. Fastening carbon chain plates. Overhauling electronics. Rebuilding fiberglass. Refitting a mast. Living on an anchor out in the San Juans? Perfect. All in a day’s work.

I have afflicted myself a malproportioned stint of rudderless wanderings, convinced one morning I’d be a street magician, some other that I’d be a museum curator, potentially I’ll do unapplied mathematics for the illustrious fame and wealth I’m certain it will bring me, no-no, perhaps, a musician, or even a dreamy semi-insufferable short stint as a sailor. Heck, I can’t sit here long enough to write in a straight line, but Liam’s single-cause, singularly-aimed, single focus, seabound quest has been the undercurrent his whole life. 

I’m glad you’re happy Liam. I think you’ve found your place as a watch-bearing boat owner. You never grew out of it, you just grew into it, unlike your head.