My Father the Captain
Peter Willcox
Peter Willcox, born in Vermont in 1953 and raised in Connecticut, is a sea captain best known for his work with Greenpeace. In more than thirty-five years with the environmental organization, he participated in some of its most notable campaigns: He was the captain of the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed in New Zealand in 1985, and in 2013, he—along with twenty-nine others, together called the Arctic Thirty—was arrested by Russian authorities while sailing in the Pechora Sea; he was held for two months. He has two daughters, Natasha and Anita, from his first marriage and a stepson, Skylar Purdy, with his second wife, Maggy Aston.
i was born in spain, but when I was six, my parents separated, and my dad moved back to the United States. My sister and I would spend the summers with him. Then, when I was ten, we moved to the States to live with my dad full-time. I was very excited and curious about what that would be like.
Papa, as we call him, worked at Greenpeace, but beyond knowing that it was a really cool organization that did wonderful things for the environment and for our planet, I don’t think I fully understood what that meant. I realized that my father’s work came with risks, but also that he was extremely dedicated to it. I remember hearing my dad tell the story of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship that was bombed by French intelligence and sank off the coast of New Zealand. Dad was on board and narrowly escaped drowning. (One photojournalist was killed.) But that hadn’t dissuaded my father from his mission.
Everyone at Greenpeace calls my dad Pete. At home, his friends call him Peter. Pete Willcox and Peter Willcox are two different people. At work, my father is in his element. He’s an amazing sailor and a great captain. He’s passionate about the environment and the work he does. He’s most comfortable when he’s aboard a ship.
He’s different as a dad. A lot of the qualities that make someone a stellar ship captain do not necessarily make them the best parent. On a ship, in order to remain calm and collected under immense pressure, the captain has to be emotionally removed. For my father, raising two daughters on his own was probably hard enough, but it was made doubly difficult by the fact that his way of dealing with his feelings was to keep them locked up. By the time my sister and I moved to the United States, we were entering that age at which, naturally, we had a lot of questions and a lot of struggles. Being a teenage girl is confusing. Papa was not particularly equipped to have those difficult conversations, not just factually but, more important, emotionally. There were no answers he could give, no easy solutions to our problems. He had to just listen and be present. It was new and challenging for him.
When we first arrived, Papa was really trying to be with us full-time. He was teaching sailing classes and coaching my softball and soccer teams. But by the time I got to high school and my sister, Anita, was starting college, he was shouldering a much greater financial burden and needed a job that offered more hours and would bring in a steady income. That’s when he rejoined Greenpeace. There were months-long stretches when he would be gone and I would stay with my aunt and uncle. I remember a lot of people looking down on him for that. A big part of me was upset about it, too. He was not the best at communicating when he was on the ship, so I would sometimes go a little too long without hearing from him. But looking back on it now, I understand his decision to leave.
I was in my first semester of college, in 2013, when my dad was detained by the Russian government. I coped by burying myself in my studies as much as I could. I also kept telling myself: It’s Greenpeace! They get arrested all the time! It’s no big deal! That’s what kept me afloat. But in October, when the Russian government charged my dad and the rest of the Arctic Thirty with piracy, I realized that things were much more serious. It occurred to me that I might never see my dad again. When I learned that the Russian authorities were talking about a sentence of many, many years, I thought, He’s not going to see me graduate from college. He’s not going to see me get married. He’s not going to see any of this. All of that hit me at once. It was incredibly hard.
But our family has a really strong support system, and all the work my dad did for the public good came back to us. Anyone I had ever met from Greenpeace reached out on Facebook and said things like “I hope you are doing okay. We’re all standing behind your dad and the Arctic Thirty. Please tell me if you need anything.” People I had never met before offered to help, too. That warmed my heart so much. It felt like all these people were putting their hands on my shoulder, comforting me. I tear up every time I think about those messages.
Natasha (one year old) and Peter, 1995
The day the Russian government dropped the piracy charge in favor of the much less serious “hooliganism,” I was sitting in the dining hall after crew practice. One of my friends walked in, and from across the room, I heard, “Natasha! What the heck is hooliganism?!” I just burst out laughing.
What else is there to know about my dad? His favorite ice cream flavor is chocolate. He snores in a really funny way; it’s less like snoring and more like little puffs of air. He loves the show The West Wing. (He got me and my sister into it. I owe him for that.) He loves Bruce Springsteen. He read the whole Harry Potter series to me and Anita out loud, multiple times. When I watch the movies, I hear a lot of the lines in the voices my dad did instead of how the actors are saying them.
I have a great memory from when I was quite young. My dad and I were hiking somewhere in Spain. I remember him sitting against a pine tree, and it being kind of windy. He said, “I love that sound.”
“What sound?” I asked.
“The sound of the wind blowing through pine needles. It sounds just like the ocean,” he replied.
It really does. Every time I hear the wind blowing through pine needles, I hear his voice in my head saying that.