The Fantastic True Story of Mrs. Koppendrayer’s Spectacular Strawberry Jam (Part 1)

Dear Mattie, Nathaniel, and Jacob, 

A story saved my life. Soon after I met your mother, she and I visited Mrs. Patterson, an elderly woman with a house on Lake Chautauqua in New York. We cherish her memory. She made a practice of welcoming twenty-somethings to her lake home as much as possible. Your mom and I were working in campus ministry and we took students to her home several times. Your mother remembers her playing the album from Chariots of Fire, “over and over again”. I remember thinking she must buy her make-up in bulk. She drove an old cream colored Cadillac and told stories about her deceased husband who, while living, became a Presbyterian pastor and then became a Christian. 

Jacob on the Rum 48 years later

I can't remember why she told us the story about going sailing on her own. She had a little sailboat, a one-sail outfit, called a Sunfish that nearly fit in her Cadillac. She had two of them. Given the size of Lake Chautauqua, her age, and the simplicity of her sailboats, the mental picture of Mrs. Patterson sailing a Sunfish on Lake Chautauqua was only a little less astonishing than Jesus walking on the sea of Galilee, and more funny. 

I wanted to learn that Sunfish. I wanted to know how to sail it on my own. Your Papu, owned a 36-foot sailboat he named Kairos and as you know, your mom sailed with him a lot. I knew how to drive a tractor in front of a hay-baler around a field. Your mother knew how to sail a 36 foot yacht around Cape Cod. When we were dating we sailed together on the Kairos. It was hard to relax with my future father-in-law around, given that I knew nothing about sailing. But I was impressed with your mother. Young, beautiful, dark tan skin, said by many to look exactly like Jackie Kennedy Onasis, she knew what to do on the water and in it. She captained that massive sailboat and loved doing so. Therefore I liked sailing. 

Sometimes Boston Harbor, sometimes along the coast of Maine or down to Newport, Rhode Island, always on the Kairos, doing what humanity has done for thousands of years in a myriad of ways, navigating water. For my dad it was a big step forward when he bought a seven horsepower Evinrude boat motor to propel his rented rowboats over Mille Lacs Lake. Neither he nor his children who he took with him had to row anymore. When my father-in-law bought his yacht, my dad still owned his Evinrude.

It was 1972, when three of my friends and I paddled south on the Rum River to mark our graduation from 8th grade. The small Christian School we attended only had eight grades. Public high school was the only option after that. We talked about canoeing all the way from Mille Lacs Lake to Princeton, an enormous distance. There would be four of us and two canoes. None of us was more than 14 years old, I was 13. We would be entirely alone on a shallow but long, winding river that cut through the pastures, fields, brush, oak and maple trees of East Central Minnesota. Our dad’s were not happy with our idea. They discussed it after church one Sunday and agreed to let us go. Helicopter parents had not yet come to rural Minnesota. They warned us about the dam in Milaca and the brown water that foamed and boiled fast over the dam as if angry that humans had tried to control the river. Capsizing in a canoe was likely, everything and everyone would be sucked under water. We promised at church that we would avoid the dam but an early adolescent urge to be omnipotent drove us to revisit the idea when, days later, we paddled near it. Fear and swirling water forced us to shore where we carried our gear around it.

The second day on the river we became more curious. We paddled through little rivulets that flowed to the side of the river. Along the banks we frequently encountered little islands, patches of land around which the river’s current carved small channels. And because our duck-boat canoes had flat bottoms and did not sink deep into the water we could typically paddle around the patches of brush, dirt, and grass, we called islands. The shore would be on one side, a small island on the other, the main river beyond that. 

Dennis and I were paddling on the east side of the river when we entered a rivulet and saw that a farmer had strung barbed wire across the stream. Much of the area along the Rum, had once been pasture land. Dennis said “get down”. I laid back on the boat and impulsively lifted my feet to catch the wire, thinking I could stop our canoe and prevent it from going under the fence. 

My dad had a phrase he used to describe a decision or action by people who demonstrated an impulsive lack of good judgement. If a woman fell for a man to form a bad relationship, she went, in my dad’s phrase, “ass over tea-kettle” for him. The phrase had an elastic genius that allowed it to be applied to movements physical or emotional. With my feet against the barbed wire, momentum and river current combined to force me to perform the best “ass-over-tea-kettle” ever witnessed on the Rum River. My backward somersault into the water was arrested when my arm caught the side of the canoe enabling me to keep my head out of the river and cling to the boat. Behind me, dry and in the canoe, Dennis had just seen the funniest moment in his thirteen years of life. Laughing and yelling at me, he grabbed my collar and yanked me out of the Rum and back into the canoe. 

For three nights and four days, four boys and two vessels paddled through a sliver of east-central Minnesota on the Rum River. Through farmers’ pastures and passed their fields, we paddled our home-made canoes. The place we came ashore is now where our amish neighbor, Jacob Borntroegger pastures his huge draft horses. We never made it to Princeton.

A decade later when I ventured out on Lake Chautauqua on Mrs Patterson’s Sunfish I had some awareness of how to angle the sail to the wind to propel the boat along the water. Keeping the breeze to my side made me faster than having it behind me. Watching my girlfriend and her father had taught me a little. Near the middle of the lake I wanted to turn, to tack, I pulled the sail closer to me increasing its resistance to the wind. The combination of wind, speed, and momentum, surprised me. I lost my grip on the line, the sail swung out with force, the Sunfish overturned, I went in the water. 

When I raised my head above the surface the hull was directly in front of me. I think I prayed but I am not sure.I did remember Mrs. Patterson’s story about the time she was sailing alone and her Sunfish capsized. To bring her sailboat right side up, she said she put her body over the hull, gripped the far edge with her hands and planted her feet under the water against the mast. Her body in a kind of u-shape, all she had to do was throw her weight back and push her feet forward on the mast. I capsized twice that day but made it back to the shore of that large lake. That’s how a story saved my life.