“Aloha Aldo”
by Jeanne Christoferson
Photos by Tom Mitchell
We’ve all had the dream one time or another in our lives to just get away from it all, buy a boat (or make one for that matter) and sail away to our own little South Pacific Island. Usually it is just a dream, and we continue on our normal jobs in the city or wherever we have set up for ourselves. But there is a man in Topanga Canyon, Aldo Vidali. that is making this dream a reality.
In 1930, Aldo was born to an Italian family in Ixelles, Belgium. As a child he went to Italy and from there he began his life of traveling. His travels have taken him to almost every continent in the world. He has studied at the University of Bologna, the University of Rome in Italy, and studied Mining and Engineering in the Colorado School of Mines. He broke into the film business and as a director, traveled to Africa, Italy, and the Naussa Space Center in Texas, “where I made commercials for Standard Oil Company,” says Aldo. In 1968, Aldo landed in Topanga Canyon, California. “It’s the longest time I’ve spent in one place,” he remarks.
The place Aldo now calls home, is nestled behind a row of trees approximately 200 yards from the ocean on Topanga Canyon Boulevard. On his grounds, Aldo has surrounded himself with signs of his interests and beliefs. He and his Swiss-born wife, Nuri, have built an original Sioux Indian teepee. "We had the materials shipped to us from Montana,” says Aldo. “Nuri sewed the covering material, and we each painted our symbols on the door. Her symbol, a buffalo, on the outside, and mine, a peyote bird, on the inside.”
I can see that the teepee is a place where Aldo can go to get away from it all and as he says, “understand the rhythms of my physical surroundings.” My eyes drift around Aldo’s home and working environment and onto the biggest and most exciting of Aldo Vidali’s endeavors, the fifty-foot concrete and iron sailboat that he has been building since 1971.
“The boat,” Aldo admits “is a symbol. You project yourself when you start making something so big. It's been happening by itself. I don’t remember why I started to do it. It just started out as an idea with no specific plan behind it. First, I got a book on how to build it (the design is by an Englishman named Peter Noble). Then I bought the wood and began to build the-frame and in the second month, I looked up and found myself doing it.”
Seven years have gone by since the purchase of the wood and he says “It’s almost ready.” The boat is a fifty-foot ketch, weighs twenty tons, has a seven-foot draft, and Aldo says, “It will go eight knots, nine if I’m lucky.”
“Do you really want to sail away forever?”
“The process of building the boat has created its own future,” he answers. “Through this experience, I have met people who are interested in building a small community in the South Pacific. We have an island picked out, very fertile (where, he won’t tell us), with access within a few days' sail to communications with the rest of the world. We will be going there in time, one boat first, carrying about eight people and possibly another boat later.”
The boat is almost ready, but Aldo Vidali is not quite ready
yet. He is now in the process of writing a screenplay. “I will continue to do
so until that phases out and I am ready.”
Aldo is definitely in the process of preparing himself for
the voyage. He has held garage sales on the weekends which he calls his “Sail
away Sale” and is selling most of his personal belongings in preparation for
the voyage. “Some people buy junk and sell antiques,” he laughs. “It’s just
junk, things that you collect through the years and then suddenly have no place
for. It ends up outside and then you realize, where could it have all come
from?
“Putting on the Sail away Sale has attracted a number of
people who amazingly enough are in the process of doing the exact same thing
that I am doing. I can think of about twenty people offhand that have the same
plan that I have.
“The boat symbolizes a point of view,” Aldo goes on. “It is
an exodus type of feeling. I was not aware of what I was doing when I decided
to build the boat. The Indians built teepees which were places in time and in
rhythm with the natural surroundings. I have, although unintentionally, built a
boat which will, hopefully, take me to that place for myself. I'm not running
away, you understand. We must deal with the social order of things. But we all
have the drive to gravitate to our own place of perfect peacefulness. To be
there is a question of one's own search, the search for a place of
correspondence.”
During his ten years in Topanga, Aldo was involved in the
Topanga way of life. From 1969 to 1972, he owned and operated the recently
closed Old Post Office Cafe in the center of town. The Old P.O. in the mid
sixties was a Topanga tradition in itself, “a place where the Topanga artists
and vagabonds would gather and get a feeling for what was going on,” says Aldo.
“It was a crossroads. Very colorful clientele.”
Aldo’s wife, Nuri, and their two children, Sabra, 13, and
Ari, 12. are now living on the island of Kawaii in the Hawaiian Islands. Kawaii
is the first stop on the way to our island," Aldo informs me. “We plan to
live there for a couple of years to prepare ourselves for the new life on the
island.
“An island such as Kawaii tends to reject people. It's
quiet, and if you are too agitated and cannot handle the quiet and rains of the
South Pacific, it will filter you out. It will be a sort of test for the people
involved. Man finds out in extremes that he has no choice but to feel. Water
has power. It is the last place where there are no borders. The only borders
are natural ones between land and sea.
“The place I am living in now, eventually the State will buy
and make a State Park. The only hassles I face are getting this boat out of
here. We will have to cut down about three trees and slide a truck under it to
get it out. The other problem is a slip—a place to put the boat in the
harbor—and we need a mooring, a place to do the rigging. It is too crowded in
the L.A. area, maybe we will go to Morro Bay or Ventura. The boat has a genoa,
two jibs, a mizzenmast and a main.”
So when you are driving down Topanga Canyon Boulevard some
day, just before you get to the ocean, look to your right and you will be able
to see Aldo Vidali's seven-year project. But you had better hurry because this
boat is his transportation into what he calls his “place of perfect
peacefulness” and he and it may not be around Topanga much longer.
