logo  PAIR O' HERMITS - Nancy L. Mills and David M. Perkins

Lessons from Summer School


The act of writing requires a constant plunging back
into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Ralph Ellison
photo of book cover
From the front cover:

          "I was alone at the age of fifty, trying to comprehend how my life had become so bleak and why it was to be so short."
             A boat and a dream. A true story of finding life after tragedy.

From the back cover:

How do you rebuild a shattered life after enduring personal tragedy followed by the onset of terminal cancer? What is it like to cruise the entire Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway from Chesapeake Bay to the Florida Keys and the Bahama Islands? How does it feel to embark on a new adventure with a loving partner who shares your every enthusiasm and experience?

These totally different questions are all addressed in Lessons from Summer School as Dave Perkins tells how learning to live and cruise on a small boat helped him recover from the cumulative disasters of a brain injury to his wife, the divorce that followed, the inexplicable death of his oldest son, and a diagnosis of leukemia. It is a superb story, an upbeat and positive tale of two people, partners in a quest, overcoming sickness and the wounds of the past, learning about themselves and life as they travel aboard a boat affectionately named Summer School.



Now available for purchase in paperback ($17.95 ISBN 1-58385-053-9) from Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, Books-A-Million.com, and by order from most retail stores.


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Read short excerpts from the text taken from Chapter 5 (Of Dreams and Despair), Chapter 8 (Marshes, Sounds and Rivers) and Chapter 10 (The Bahamas).



For some discussion on why the book was written read the Preface.
 Summer School at anchor

Summer School on the Chesapeake at Worton Creek

Some comments on how the book was written:

If you have read the Preface you will know that I first conceived the book late in 1995, after we had moved to Easton, Pennsylvania. In May of 1996 Nancy left her position at Lafayette and we began our life of full-time cruising and living aboard Summer School, determined to last as long as health and funds would allow. I wrote at every opportunity, mainly while at anchor or in a marina, using a laptop computer in the forward cabin, which we had converted to an office. In late winter of 1997, while staying at the city marina in Beaufort, North Carolina, I discarded everything I had written to seek a fresh approach. So I started over and continued to write as we followed the seasons along the Intracoastal Waterway. November of 1998 found us on the west coast of Florida, still in sufficiently good health, still writing but short of funds. We took a long-term slip at the Madeira Beach Marina near St. Petersburg and both of us found jobs. And I continued to write. In late spring of 1999 sickness struck. First Nancy was diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo surgery. Later in the summer I became ill as my leukemia came out of remission, which resulted in two hospitalizations, the last one nearly fatal and lasting five weeks. During the first half of 2000, as we tried to recover our health, we decided it was time to leave our life on the boat, but first we set out one more time to have a last cruise up the Intracoastal and a magnificent fall cruise of Chesapeake Bay. And I continued to write during this time. We sold our boat in Oriental, North Carolina in January of 2001, and by a process too convoluted to describe here we found a new home in West Virginia in a log house on top of Muddy Creek Mountain near Lewisburg. We call this wonderful place Our Hermitage, and while living here I completed the last half of the book by December of 2002, about seven years after the book was first conceived, having used in the writing three different computers, three different operating systems and three different word processors. I spent the subsequent year and a half editing and rewriting this first draft, trying to make it clearer and without errors, trying to give it more focus. Eventually I cut over 60,000 words from the original text before sending it to my publisher in May, 2004.


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