He had no fixed abode but had spent the last two years in Burlington, Vt., building and testing a new raft on Lake Champlain that he planned to sail around the globe.
The cause of death was congestive heart failure, his daughter Jessica Terrell said.
Mr. Pearlman, whose improbable life was chronicled by the
New Yorker writer
Alec Wilkinson in “The Happiest Man in the World” (
Random House, 2007), became Poppa Neutrino when he was 50.
He had just recovered from a near-mortal illness brought on by a dog bite in Mexico and, considering himself reborn, decided to choose a new name. Neutrino, a nearly undetectable particle with a capacity for constant movement, came immediately to mind.
A lifelong wanderer, he developed a philosophy that emphasized freedom, joy, creativity and antimaterialism, a creed expressed in the rafts he built from discarded materials. The rafts, he wrote on his
Floating Neutrinos Web site, “were merely foils for our inner work: an ongoing experiment in human psychology, searching for answers to what makes us function and malfunction, and how to increase our own and others’ abilities to create meaningful and fulfilling lives.”
William David Pearlman was born on Oct. 15, 1933, in Fresno, Calif., and spent his turbulent childhood in San Francisco. His father, Louis Pearlman, shipped out with the Navy before he was born, and David took his stepfather’s last name, Maloney. He later discovered who his real father was and changed his last name to Pearlman.
His mother was a heavy gambler, and the family lived from week to week in cheap hotels, while David attended, fitfully, anywhere from 40 to 50 schools, by his reckoning.
Two months after lying his way into the Army at 15, he admitted that he was under age and tried to secure a discharge, a plan that was foiled when his mother insisted to his commanding officer that he was really 18. After the Korean War began, she relented.
Freed from the military, he hitchhiked along Route 66, studied briefly at a Baptist seminary in Texas and became a preacher, spent time with the Beats in San Francisco, founded the First Church of Fulfillment while living in New York, sold life insurance in New Mexico, reported from Vietnam for a small San Francisco newspaper and organized a group of itinerant sign painters he called the Salvation Navy.
In the 1980s he and his fourth wife, Betsy Terrell, formed
the Flying Neutrinos, a jazz and rhythm-and-blues band drawn from family members and their many fellow travelers. It is now led by his daughter Ingrid Lucia Marshall, who uses the stage name Ingrid Lucia, and Todd Londagin, a musician he raised as his son.
In addition to his wife; his daughters, Jessica, of Long Beach, Calif., and Ingrid, of New Orleans; and his son Todd, of Peekskill, N.Y., he is survived by another son, Cahill Maloney of San Francisco; a stepdaughter, Marisa Freeman of Damariscotta, Me.; an adopted daughter, Esther Armstrong of Eastham, Mass.; and five grandchildren.
In 1988 Mr. Pearlman converted an abandoned barge into a paddle-wheel houseboat, Town Hall, that tied up at Pier 25 on the Hudson River off TriBeCa for several years.
It was then that he began scavenging the material for Son of Town Hall, a 40-foot raft made of discarded timber, foam bricks and plastic bottles lashed together, basketlike, with 3,000 feet of rope abandoned by Con Edison.
“Where did I get this notion?” he said to Mr. Wilkinson. “I have no idea. From the cornucopia of my mind. Somebody put it in there a long time ago, and it came out in this way.”
In this, it resembled the Neutrino Clock Offense, a system of secret hand signals, based on the face of a clock, designed to let passer and receiver communicate while a play is in progress. Despite his best efforts, Mr. Pearlman was unable to persuade any college football teams to adopt it.
In June 1998 Mr. Pearlman set sail from Newfoundland, aiming for France, with his wife, two crew members, three dogs and a piano. After 60 days, the raft reached Ireland, having survived a Force 9 gale that gave him pause.
“I’ve lived through levels of fear I never thought I had,” he told The Evening Standard of London. “The waves were so big and so steep, spitting foam across our raft, that I found the coward in myself.”
Nevertheless, he formed plans to circumnavigate the globe on a new raft, the Sea Owl. He abandoned the effort in November when a storm on Lake Champlain drove the raft onto a rocky cliff, where rescue workers hoisted him, his two inexperienced crew members and two dogs to safety.
“The vessel was everything I wanted it to be,” he told The Burlington Free Press. “I told the Coast Guard people it was unsinkable. They said, ‘Never say that.’ They were right. Anything will break up if it’s been smashing into a wall for two and a half hours.”
