Poppa Neutrino

The first thing you should know about Poppa Neutrino is that he once sailed from Newfoundland to Ireland on a raft he built out of trash.

This is, by itself, a remarkable achievement. At the time he completed the voyage, in 1998, only one other person had sailed a raft across the North Atlantic — Henri Beaudout, a Canadian, who did it in 1956. But Neutrino was the first to do it on a raft made entirely from refuse. “It seems to me we have broken the scrap barrier,” he reportedly told amused journalists upon arriving in Ireland. We’ll get back to this in a bit.

That voyage was not necessarily Neutrino’s most significant accomplishment. Or, at least, significant in this case is relative. Maybe even more impressive, to certain bohemian, footloose points of view, was the man’s commitment to living life on his own terms, wherever his whims, or, occasionally, winds and currents, took him.

Poppa Neutrino, you see, was a man accustomed to living on busted-up