Wayfarer (A Memoir)

In this vividly wrought memoir, author James S. Rockefeller Jr. recalls the moments and milestones in his long, adventurous life. From his old-fashioned childhood—filled with characters and wildlife—as a grandson of William G. Rockefeller and Sarah "Elsie" Stillman, to expeditions as a young man on his Indian motorcycle and his sailboat, Mandalay, to the fateful evening on Cumberland Island, Georgia, when his heart was stolen by the luminous author Margaret Wise Brown, Rockefeller recounts his youth with wit and clarity. As he matures, his adventurous spirit takes him from Maine to Tahiti to Norway and back again. Throughout his travels, he embraces deep loss and wondrous turns of fortune, including danger, love, death, marriage, fatherhood, and—always—an enduring passion for planes, boats, and engines—a passion that leads him to establish the Owls Head Transportation Museum.

A brilliant storyteller, Rockefeller writes the remembrance of a time gone by with the perspective of a 20th-century wayfarer; a voyager on the seas of time. His memoir stands as a moment "between the old and what was to come" and reveals with perspicacity and humor what he calls "this slender crack of time."