Editor, Sir;My name is Shaun Donnelly. I first came to live with Pat Hennigan at the age of two, in 1972, when he spirited my mom out of an unhappy marriage in Seattle and off to a Swiss Family Robinson fantasy in the Queen Charlotte islands.Pat and I would go for walks and not come home for days, weeks or months with only the clothes on our back. We would go out in his little sail boat and not come back for years, exploring the hundreds of small islands on BC's coast. What Pat lacked in responsibility he made up for with a Peter Pan sense for adventure. I feel honoured to have grown up with Pat Hennigan and to have experienced a rich life of adventure with him. Pat had a charisma that brought light and hope into dark places with a magical transforming grace and with the same power he had the opposite effect. He left a wake behind him which is quite impressive for a man who walked around in bare feet.Pat taught me how to jump out of bed, clean up, eat breakfast and leave the house in less than five minutes. "Get your s--t together and go or I'll give you a boot in your snoot," he used to yell every morning. God help you if you ever lied, cheated or stole around him. Every night if he didn't tell us an amazing story of adventure, Judy would read to us out loud for hours and hours. Sometimes when it rained we would all lie in bed and read all day. We lived on whole foods, adventure and paperback novels.Thirty years later I'm a journeyman carpenter, married and if not always experiencing it, at least pursuing happiness. Some of us grow up with a mixed bag to either validate our success or rationalize our incompetence. Pat taught me that all that stuff that went down is irrelevant compared to enjoying the fruit of your own labour, because if you don't carry the wood up to the house there won't be a warm fire to sit next to. Go figure?Rest in peace? Probably not. I'm seeing an afterlife for Pat Hennigan with adventure written all over it.It's not feasible for me to leave Seattle right now but I hope you folks there at the Observer will recognize Pat Hennigan for the iconic figure and yoga guru hero that he is to so many of us who struggled to maintain our own trip.Shaun DonnellySeattleP.S. It's been a long time since I was in QCI, but if any of my old friends want to get in touch with me I'm on facebook, Shaun Donnelly, white hard hat, 60 feet up in a tree.