South to Alaska

SANDPOINT — This journey starts in Arkansas, heads south for thousands of miles, slips through the Panama Canal and then makes a hard right turn toward the frozen wilderness of the 49th state.

There is no big “X” marked on the map. Instead, that marker was emblazoned in the mind of a young boy named Melvin Owens as he sat, back in 1926, in an Oklahoma schoolhouse, ready to start a geography lesson. Most times, these lectures drove his imagination outside and into the kinds of adventure no classroom could offer.

This day was different. The teacher cleared her throat, instructed the students to turn to the appointed page and spoke one word: “Alaska.”

By then, young Melvin was already gone, catapulted from the schoolhouse, launched into the photograph that sat before him on the desk. Smoke spiraled from the chimney of tiny log cabin. Stacks of firewood and a collection of fur traps that hung outside made the place look like an island in the snow.

From that day on, Melvin Owens was on a single-minded mission to make Alaska his home.

Landlocked and waterbound

It took nearly 50 years for the journey get under way, but Melvin had compiled the skills and mapped out the course that would take him north. By this time, he had moved to Arkansas, married his dream girl, Cecil, and begun to raise four children — three boys and their baby sister, Nancy.

A family camping trip took the Owens brood all the way into Alaska, where the dream, if anything, gained strength. It wasn’t until Melvin spotted the sturdy fishing boats in the harbors there, however, that his plan took shape. He would use the experience he got from building tugboats during World War II to craft a boat of his own. It would be plenty big to house a family and, if times were tough, he could use it as a fishing vessel.

His first boat, dubbed the “Nancy Ann” after his daughter, was to be his ticket to the new frontier. And though it made it as far as Galveston, Texas, where Melvin took the boat on a few test-drives in the Gulf of Mexico, he eventually sold the vessel when work interfered with real life. Within a few years, he was back into his welding gear, turning the Owens property into a temporary shipyard as he pieced together the 47-foot, 18-ton, “Red Dog” — named after a legendary saloon in Juneau.

“It took him three years to build the Red Dog in our back yard,” said Nancy Owens Barnes, now a local author who, along with her husband, Tom, has restored the last boat her father built and moored it at Garfield Bay. We’ll get to that part of the story in a few minutes.

Melvin put in at Fort Smith on the Arkansas River in 1971, bound for the Mississippi, on to the Gulf and then due south toward the Panama Canal.

“He had to travel more than 4,000 miles south before he could turn north for Alaska,” his daughter explained. The adventurous course gave the author both the content and the title for her book, “South to Alaska.”

Crooks and rough waters

On board with the boat builder were the two women in his life — his wife and daughter. Cecil, who was deathly afraid of anything but perfectly calm waters, only planned to make the voyage as far as Galveston. Nancy, 22 at the time, was committed to taking the entire trip with her father.

Trouble stalked this first attempt almost from the beginning, as the Red Dog developed engine problems and had to turn back to port before crossing the gulf into Mexico. As days passed and Melvin tried to arrange for repairs, a friend of Nancy’s pulled up in her Volkswagen bus and convinced her to jump ship and move to Chicago instead.

“I wish now that I had gone with him,” Nancy said.

In some ways, she did make the journey with her father as, decades later, she pored over his logs and interviewed him at length for her book. Within those pages she chronicles the false starts that nearly cleaned out the family bank account and tested her parents’ marriage.

More dangerous than anything the open sea could throw at him were the waves caused when a fast-talking charlatan out of Houston named John Delling promised to repair the Red Dog and see her safely to the coast of California, where the owner would reclaim the boat and take it up the Pacific Coast to Alaska. Delling turned out to be a crook of the worst sort, working with his wife to fabricate ornate lies about how the vessel was traveling by train across Mexico. In truth, it never made it farther than Tampico, where Delling spent the money he bilked from Owens on prostitutes as his unknowing wife continued to ask for one advance after another to cover “unexpected shipping fees” for a trip that never took place.

Eventually, the boat’s owner learned that the Red Dog was abandoned in Tampico and went to retrieve it. After more than 18 months and many thousands of dollars down the drain, Melvin Owens finally left port to follow his dream.

“It took two years for him to get from the Arkansas River to Alaska,” his daughter said. “But it only took five months to make the real journey, when he wasn’t running into all those problems.”

South to Alaska

The Red Dog dodged sand bars and reefs, high seas and government red tape as it made its way southward to the Panama Canal. The captain overcame the fact that he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish by using hand signals to purchase fuel and buy groceries when the opportunity arose. Meanwhile, Cecil fretted at home when days stretched into weeks without a phone call, and imagined that the worst had happened.

From the wheelhouse, Melvin often had similar worries as the boat was pounded and wrenched by waves that towered over the decks. Between storms, he motored blissfully along as dolphins swam alongside and the coasts of Central America and Mexico slipped by on the northward part of his journey.

A phone call home — the first in weeks — let Cecil know her husband had made it into Manzanillo for repairs. The next call came from San Diego, where they made plans to meet in Bellingham, Wash., a month or so later, and finish the 10,000-mile trip together through the inside passage on to a new life in Ketchikan, Alaska.

Enter the Pretty Lady

Now 57 years old and in the land of his dreams, Melvin took a job at a local mill where he quickly gained a reputation as “the best welder in Alaska.” He bought a piece of land, built a new home for Cecil and himself and sold the Red Dog.

It wasn’t long, though, before he set to work on a smaller skiff, followed in short order by his third and final large boat, this one a 41-foot cabin cruiser called the “Pretty Lady” after a nickname he used for his wife. And that’s where this story comes full circle.

The Pretty Lady was a fixture on the waters around Ketchikan before it was at last beached. Cecil already had passed away in 2005, with Melvin joining her almost exactly a year later. Before they died, Nancy had amassed hours of interview time with her parents. Those sessions, it turned out, led to a dream of her own. After completing “South to Alaska” and knowing that the Pretty Lady was in danger of falling apart in the rough Alaskan weather, she and Tom decided to ship the boat south to their home in North Idaho.

“You could look at it as a continuation of ‘South to Alaska’ — I kind of thought of it that way,” the author said. “But I couldn’t bear the thought of the Pretty Lady being sold for scrap. And Lake Pend Oreille is the perfect lake for that boat.”

Virtually everything inside the marine-grade aluminum hull her father built has been upgraded or replaced, except for key elements that call out his handiwork. The original wheel and electrical switch plate still act as the centerpiece of the wheelhouse, bearing witness to how far one person will go when held fast by a dream.

“My father had never been on the open water — he was a country boy and he knew what he wanted to do,” his daughter said. “He just wanted to get that boat up to Alaska and start a new life up there. From the time he was a little boy, he aimed his whole life that way.”

Full circle home

It’s a grey day in Garfield Bay and the Green Monarchs wear a cap of early snow. The yachts and showroom fishing boats in the nearby marina look somewhat out of place as the season turns and the water takes on the color of slate. But there is one vessel that seems perfectly at home here, her sharp prow and gleaming lines pointing toward the deepest and longest stretch of the big lake.

“It’s just great to see her floating again after sitting for so many years on the beach in Ketchikan,” Nancy Owens Barnes said. “My folks would be happy.”

“South to Alaska” is available locally at Vanderford’s in Sandpoint and Bonner Books in Bonners Ferry, as well as in print and e-book formats through Amazon.com.