Tribute

Barrett Wyles Raymond 1981 - 2012

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life.

- Kerouac

This is one of the hardest things I've ever had to write.   I’m not sure I even know how to do it.   So much to get out, but there will never be enough space or words to communicate it all.

I’ve lost one of my oldest and best friends in the world.   His name is Barrett Wyles Raymond and he was 31 years old.   He went missing doing what we did a million times as kids; canoeing on the Hudson River.  

I learned that he was missing as I sat in an airport 8000 miles away. I came home as soon as I could, it is the only place that felt right to be.  

What makes it harder is that his earthen vessel is still missing.  We all just want him, even if we can’t have him back. 

Some of you knew him as a student, a friend, a pirate, a pain in the ass, a nephew, a cousin, a son and a brother.  Some of you only know of him from stories I told or are meeting him here for the first time.  But how does one sum up 18+ years of friendship and do it justice? 

I am lucky that his travels brought him to New York a few weeks before I left.  It had been a few months, one of the shorter spans we’d gone without seeing each other over the last few years, but I got to tell him about my trip and see how excited he was for me.  

As always, it was as if I had seen him the day before.  And, as always, we said goodbye as if it may be the last time.

I would always let out a sigh of relief when he would call to tell me he was home safely.  I know all of us did.  Sometimes it took weeks, others months.  But he always called...  usually making some unidentifiable sound before breaking into the next chapter in his outrageous story.  It was never something that I took for granted, because I knew this was the call that I could be getting.

Barrett's Pirate Ship -  Bequia Schooner "At Last"

He was a sailor, an artist, a friend, a charmer, a lover and a pirate.  He was fearless, brave and a rebel.  He did things his way.  He was the king of spitballs and killing frogs, goats and pigs.  He would break his hand and then saw off the cast because it was annoying to hoist a sail with it on.  He was the only sea-faring person I’ve ever met who didn’t like fish.  He was puckish; the instigator, the difficult one. He was often misunderstood for all these things, because he also had the biggest heart and he was the best friend a guy could ask for and so much more. He was the ringleader of our crew; a true pirate captain.

He was one of the most intelligent and talented people I have ever met.  While the conventions of both never suited him, they bore great fruit.  He achieved more in 31 years than many do in a lifetime.  An amazing artist, he would turn his creative mind and talent into working with artists like Kermit Love and James Childs.  Eventually, his attentions turned to the sea, as they always would.  He willed himself to become a sailor and went on to win world-class races and captain his own boat.

Every turn was the opposite of what one would expect.  Sometimes the route was longer, and sometimes it annoyed people, but it almost always made sense in the end.  

There is no doubt there was magic in this boy.   He is as much responsible for who I am today as anyone.  He taught me to be bold, to be generous and to be free.  His penchant for mischief, adventure and his fearlessness made me a better, more interesting person than I am.  

We became fast friends in the 7^th grade Social Studies class of Mr. Vinck and Mr. Latvis, where we’d get in trouble for talking or, more often, for Barrett drawing something on my backpack or notebook with me egging him on.   

I can still remember it like it was yesterday. 

I can still remember the day we skipped out of the first few periods of school to wander through the woods to a friend’s place who was home sick, only to be too chicken to actually go up to the house.  It was one of the first of many adventures together. And I still remember a teacher figuring out what we’d been up to and threatening to tell our mothers if we ever did it again.  That teacher probably should of; but the message came across loud and clear.  Well, for a little while at least.  But that was Barrett.  Give him one half of one millimeter and you were done for.

The friendship continued over the next 18 or so years.  And despite our lives diverging on two different trajectories, we shared our heartbreaks and triumphs; foolishness and sanity; amazing adventures and head-splitting hangovers. (Of course, his were always worse.  The kid just couldn’t handle them.)  It was made up of all the appropriate ingredients of a great friendship, so many of each that I could write for weeks.   But I'm sure I'll keep telling them in the coming weeks, months and years.

And while I’ll have all of those memories forever; they are now my only ones and I won’t have him.  He was taken too soon and he simply cannot be replaced. 

I'm in disbelief that this is real.  None of it makes sense.  

I’m sad my future wife and kids will never get to meet him.  Will never get to let him regale them with his tales of the high sea.   

I’m scared when I think of his last hours and not being able to be there for my friend. 

I’m sad for and with all of our friends and heartbroken with and for his family.

If there is a single blessing, and that’s a tough word here, it is that he was taken by the water.  The thing that taught him so much and gave him life now holds his spirit forever.   While the circumstances are certainly beyond what he, or anyone, would have wished for, it is where he would want to be. 

But if he were here today, I’d tell him he picked a shitty time to be angel.

It is legend that if a sailor drowns, the Swallows will carry their soul to heaven. Barrett had a Swallow on his forearm; now we all have a piece of him.   And he will continue to shine on us all. 

Barrett's Flock of Swallows

We love you.  I love you.  

I’ll see you on the other side, Brother.  

Sail on.

I am standing on the seashore, a ship sails in the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her till at last she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says: “She is gone.” Gone! Where? Gone from my sight—that is all. She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination. The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone” there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout: “There she comes!”

- Bishop Brent

Tree House - Fall 2011

Antigua Classics Week with Nick - 2009

Sailing on Free Verse in Wickford, RI - Summer 2006

Barrett's Room -- Somewhere around 1998

When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.

When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.

We breathe, briefly.

Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.

Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us.

Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened.

Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away.

We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.

And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly.

Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”

- Angelou