I imagine Lawrence Schuster as a child in 1950s Pennsylvania being asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and answering, with steely blue eyes and a steady voice, “I want to be exactly who I am.”
Lawrence, who died last month at age 79, spent all his years being exactly who he was. (An obituary will appear in the Independent next week.) A very incomplete sample of Lawrence’s occupations: crewman on a merchant ship hauling blood oranges from Africa to Spain; bosun’s mate on a three-masted tall ship, the Regina Maris, on a voyage to Greenland to study whales; third mate on another sailing vessel, the Rambler, around Cape Horn all the way to Tahiti; deckhand on fishing boats out of New Bedford (the Beira Mar) and Provincetown (the Little Infant and the Ancora Praia); naturalist on whale watch boats out of Provincetown (the Ranger and the Portuguese Princess); and Army Corps of Engineers-certified inspector on tugboats hauling dredge barges in New York Harbor.
A mariner, to be sure. He had all these jobs and quite a few more, but what he never had was a career. He never wanted one. He had far too many passions to channel them into one definable pursuit.
Music: making and enjoying it. He was enrolled as a boy in St. Peter’s Choir School in Philadelphia, and he never stopped singing. With a few drinks in him and Joe Bones playing the guitar, he would tilt his head back and his tobacco-husky, gruff voice became a lovely baritone. He prized the piano (as a child, he slept under one for a time) and composed on his electronic keyboard.
Languages: he was fluent, or close to it, in at least four including French and Italian, and he had a fair handle on Latin and Greek. He loved words — their meanings and derivations. He did the New York Times crossword in ink and called it “child’s play.”
Philosophy, global affairs, and history: “He should have gone on Jeopardy,” his shipmates Mark DaLomba and Eric Joranson said. His knowledge was encyclopedic. He gravitated to the J-1 students who came here to work because of his interest in European history and a desire to learn more from those young people. “He spent half his paycheck on books,” said Mark.
In Tuning the Rig (1990), an account of that expedition to Greenland, Harvey Oxenhorn describes Lawrence’s bookshelf on the cramped ship: “I find Masting and Rigging, Refrigeration, Yeats’s and Neruda’s poems, Mycology, A Field Guide to Agaricus Bisporus, Teach Yourself Greenlandic, The Folklore of the Sea, and O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun.”
Food and wine: Sal Del Deo introduced Lawrence to the art of making wine and grappa. He appreciated the good stuff but was at the same time inclined to a glass of beer and was a devotee of the Old Colony. He was a gourmet cook, insisting on the finest ingredients, and even in his humble dune shack he had a well-equipped kitchen. He prepared huge feasts and invited many friends. Mickey Maguire, another shipmate, remembers Lawrence’s Grand Marnier orange zest French toast.
Lawrence was also a true student of nature, especially when it came to foraging cranberries and his first love, mushrooms. He is said to have a species of mushroom named after him that he discovered on some uninhabited South Pacific island. Lawrence was a consummate botanist; I still have his plant press. And he quickly became a student of whales and whale biology.
He bought his first Apple computer early in the game and studied the user manual like the Bible; he loved gadgets and kits and was a whiz at all things technological.
He was widely known as “Lawrence of the Dunes” and his real distinction was his life there. His was the shack with a blue chair firmly nestled on its roof. No one can beat his record: 28 years, virtually all of them year-round and most without a vehicle. He plodded through the snowdrifts — back when we had them — to get to his shack. “He must have looked like Shackleton,” said Mark DaLomba.
He lived there with his books, his music, his computer (part of his email address was “digitaldunes”), and his gadgets. Eventually, he equipped the shack with wind and solar power. Once when he was laid up, he sent an SOS and I brought him the essentials he requested: a carton of Camels, a bottle of Jim Beam, and a dozen eggs.
Lawrence lived in the dunes because it suited him: being surrounded by nature, the isolation, the freedom to be who he was. As his ex-wife and close friend Genevieve said: “He would not do what he did not want to do.”
Was Lawrence a latter-day Thoreau? He certainly heard a different drummer. But Lawrence was far more of a sensualist and far less of a moralist than the author of Walden. Like Thoreau, he was “not everybody’s cup of tea” — sure of himself to the point of arrogance — and he had a gift for friendship, although discerning in its delivery. But unlike Thoreau, he was a doting father: he brought his 10-year-old daughter Talilla on the 11-month journey on the Rambler to Tahiti, and he rejoiced in his grandchildren in Pennsylvania when he discovered that he had them.
He lived life “on his own terms” and with gusto, said Eric Joranson, and his ready laugh was “like a siren.” Lawrence Schuster and Henry David Thoreau might have enjoyed each other’s company if they happened to meet while picking huckleberries on the way to the dunes.
