Unmoored on kand, an adventurer at sea

Stephen Miller - 

In 1998, Poppa Neutrino floated across the Atlantic on a raft made of junk.

He floated on another to Cuba in 2004, and last November he was shipwrecked on New York's Lake Champlain at the start of what was to be a trip circumnavigating the globe.

Mr. Neutrino, who was born William David Pearlman and died Sunday of heart failure at age 77, led a life nearly as free as the subatomic particle for which he named himself.

In a lifetime of traveling, Mr. Neutrino scrounged the little money he needed from a half-dozen occupations. He slept in the streets more than a few times, and avoided paying rent as if it were a plague.

"If you are not doing what you love at work, and you are under the rent thing, life is a trap," he told the New York Daily News in 1997. "This is a way out of the trap," he added, gesturing at his floating shack named Town Hall, moored free of charge in lower Manhattan.

It was in another jerry-built craft, the 51-foot, three-mast Son of Town Hall, that Mr. Neutrino succeeded in crossing the Atlantic, casting off from Newfoundland with his wife, two companions and three dogs.

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