6/13/2023 0 Comments When you bust a neutrino![]() ![]() It would take anything the ocean could throw at it. I've worked all this time to come out here and I'm going to kill everybody in this raft. There was a moment when that first 20-foot wave, I was in the helm and it passed under me and it looked like we're going straight down, you know, on a vertical angle. MONTAGNE: How dangerous was it? I mean, you're out in the middle of the Atlantic on a raft? We had to sneak out of the country in Maine on a foggy morning. He gave me permission to leave the port of New York. He never gave me permission to cross the North Atlantic. PEARLMAN: They sent letters to the Coast Guard stations up the East Coast not to be alarmed when they saw it, but that we knew what we were doing and it was not manifestly unsafe.Ĭommander Carr(ph) was a great person. And when the Coast Guard, with Commander Carr(ph) went through the inspection - it took him three and a half hours with two assistants - they found that the raft was a mighty fortress. And he gave me everything I needed to build the raft and sail to Ireland. PEARLMAN: They made me stop at Pier 25, which was a nightclub run by an Israeli named Shamon Bacoswel(ph). MONTAGNE: You're building a raft, but you're also in touch regularly with the Coast Guard, who has rules. ![]() MONTAGNE: The take-off point for crossing the Atlantic. So we took the engine and put it on the raft, and then took off for parts unknown from Provincetown. And the town manager, he gave us the diesel engine from the basement of town hall that was the auxiliary motor for when the electricity blew out. We performed every afternoon in front of town hall. ![]() The people in Provincetown were really generous to us. WILKINSON: Wherever David goes, he looks for a raft to build to live on, and David built a raft from some things that had been - that they were throwing out on the harbor there. Let's talk, then, about that raft that made it across the Atlantic. Even getting underway became a kind of quest which drew people to him as if by magic, starting when he began piecing the raft together on a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In his seventh decade, Neutrino assembled a raft out of junk and embarked with a small crew on a daring journey across the Atlantic. Poppa Neutrino's own story might have continued as a collection of colorful moments lived with a certain brio until he did something both ridiculous and heroic. MONTAGNE: The young David Pearlman was a street kid, and he raised his own kids to be working nomads, a family of buskers who came to call themselves The Flying Neutrinos - a band that, by the way for his grown-up kids, now has a hip following. While my mother would go broke, I would hand her some chips. I could remember many nights sleeping under the poker table and finding chips on the floor that I would pocket. PEARLMAN: An actual - I was just about breast-fed at a poker table. MONTAGNE: You described her as a gambler, an actual gambler. PEARLMAN: She was the most effervescent, optimistic person I've ever met in my life. She was living a boom and bust lifestyle in San Francisco. In 1933, he was born to a gal by the name of Velma McDaniel(ph). MONTAGNE: Poppa Neutrino joined Alec Wilkinson in our studio to tell a bit of his story, which started, as such stories do, when he entered the world. I love movement I love change and the unexpected. WILKINSON: I have always thought that the key to understanding David's life is that each day for him is the opportunity to invent a new identity, a new feeling, a new - to embrace a new pursuit, to be open or receptive to an intuition. MONTAGNE: So, Alec Wilkinson, as you describe Poppa Neutrino, who - this is a person who could have walked right out of a Jack Kerouac novel. WILLIAM DAVID PEARLMAN (Adventurer): Absolutely. MONTAGNE: Poppa Neutrino, do you recognize yourself in these words? There must have been many more like him in earlier times: chasers after stakes and claims, odds players, followers of the reckless and wild hope, especially among the citizens of the Western territories where his ancestors came from. He also has a flinty pioneer side, a prospector on a tare sensibility. ALEC WILKINSON (Author, "The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa"): (Reading) Neutrino is a wanderer, an exile, an outcast, a Bedouin in the wilderness of the republic. ![]() And more recently, he acquired a biographer - New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson, here reading from "The Happiest Man in the World." Along the way, he gave up the name David Pearlman and took the moniker of that tiny itinerate particle, the neutrino. Once, his two-front teeth were punched out in a brawl he jammed them back in, where they stayed crooked for 15 years, which is longer than Neutrino ever stayed anywhere. He has the long, white beard of a prophet, but he's not. Poppa Neutrino is not the likeliest candidate for a biography. ![]()
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