My father was a practical man, shaped by the pressures of the Great Depression and the sudden death of his father that forced my own father to go to work during the late night shift at the cement plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. to keep him, his mother and sister from penury. Forty-five years later when my father sold the company he worked for all his adult life and the new owners hired him to do international mergers and acquisitions, he was thrilled that a new challenges were opening up for him. My mother, who had supported his ambitions their whole life, was distinctly not thrilled. It’s me or the job, she said, in so many words. And so in their early-to-mid-60s, they retired to Florida.
They moved to a wonderful spot in Naples, overlooking an inlet, with avocadoes and lemon trees in the back yard and children and grandchildren arriving regularly at Christmas and spring breaks. What could be better?
My father, however, was restless—but not for long. The first thing that attracted his attention was a local controversy over a massive marina and condominium plan submitted by Baron Collier for Naples Bay. The fact that this part of southwest Florida was first settled by Colliers, for whom a whole county was named, did not deter a few underfinanced local environmentalists who were up in arms about the many acres of mangrove wetlands that would be destroyed. It so happened that the Island Institute was in the midst of a six-year battle in Casco Bay over—you guessed it—a massive condominium and marina plan for Great Diamond Island and my father and I plotted strategy together for the first time in our lives.
My father was not an instinctive environmentalist; and, in fact, where he and my mother lived was land developed on filled mangroves. Nevertheless, he joined the small group and recruited his neighbors took to try to defeat the plan. When the local city council approved the plan, they ran their own candidates for the council and overturned the approval. When Mr. Collier went to court, they raised money to defend the city. When the case went all the way to the Florida Supreme Court, my father went every step of the way and their cause ultimately prevailed.
But wait, there is more!
Still restless, my father was startled one day to see a group of homeless men on the outskirts of town, living in makeshift shelters. He stopped and got to know them and thought it a travesty that in his wealthy new community there were homeless people. So he started raising money for a homeless shelter, which moved into an old firehouse.
After the numbers of homeless outgrew the renovated firehouse, he led a campaign to build a larger new shelter, St. Mathews House, with a work program to teach the homeless vocational skills. And when he discovered homeless women and children, he and his associates built a separate, adjoining shelter for them.
These projects consumed my father for 15 happy years, to which my mother seemed resigned. The joke in the family was, “The good news is that Papa,” as my father was called, “has lots of energy; the bad news is that Papa has lots of energy.”
When my mother died, Papa was at loose ends. He moved in with my sister temporarily, but never moved out. Although he was 85 at the time, we encouraged him to strike out in new directions, just as he had once encouraged all of his children. In desperation, he joined a local church group that was headed to Honduras to build houses for a small mission there. The group was reluctant to include him due to his age, but after he outworked all of them during his first two week stay, they invited him back and he spent the next five years in Honduras building a local school and church, and ultimately an orphanage, before retiring at 90.
The good news is that he had a lot of energy.
I remind myself of this story on the second day of the rest of my life. When you have been plowing the same familiar set of well-rounded furrows for 30 years and know your job well, what do you do when it is time to define a new life? I am not headed to Florida or Honduras, but other islands and archipelagoes across America beckon me.
I never said no to an opportunity to visit a new island and I never met an island I did not like.
Philip Conkling is the founder of the Island Institute. Additional writings are available at www.conklingassociates.com.