Femke Young van Galen

Femke Young van Galen (and, briefly, Schoellkopf) was born on April 6, 1935, to Lennert and Johanna van Galen in Bandung, Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. She was a third-generation colonist; her mother and grandmother had been born there as well.

Femke and her older brother, Erik, enjoyed what seemed a colonial Garden of Eden until the Japanese invaded in 1942 and the family was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. From 1942 until 1945, she endured three years without schooling and with minimal rations. When the war ended, the family was reunited and promptly returned to the Netherlands. Despite having missed several years of education in the camp, Femke excelled in school. In the early 1950s, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to attend Connecticut College for Women.

She returned to the Netherlands to complete her education, but adventure soon beckoned. She headed to the Balearic Islands to teach sailing on the island of Formentera. One day, a yacht dropped anchor in the small bay. Femke met its skipper, Fred Schoellkopf, a Swiss sailor on a voyage around the world. When he invited her to join the crew, she needed little persuading. She fell in love with the idea of sailing around the world-and, before long, with the skipper himself. They married in Tangier, Morocco, in 1957.

Soon afterward, Femke, Fred, and another crew member set sail across the Atlantic. They spent the rest of the year and part of the next doing charter work in the Caribbean. Eventually, the routine began to pall, so Femke and Fred returned to Europe, bought a Volkswagen Beetle, and set off to drive all the way to Singapore. The overland adventure came to an abrupt halt in Istanbul when Femke discovered she was pregnant with their first child. It was time, perhaps, to take life a little more seriously.

The couple returned to the United States, bought a car, and drove across the country to California, where Fred took a job with Bank of America. Their son, Jacob was born in 1959, followed soon afterward by their second son, Alex.

When Fred accepted an overseas assignment with the bank, in the newly independent Congo, Femke found herself back in a life that echoed her colonial childhood. The marriage eventually ended, and she returned to the United States with her two boys. In time, she married her second husband, Kenneth Young.

By the late 1970s, with the boys grown and out of the house, Femke and Ken decided on another change of scenery: Zermatt, Switzerland, where they became ski bums. Waiting tables, washing dishes, and even driving a horse and buggy provided enough income to support a life of skiing, travel, and adventure. Eventually, they returned to California.

But adventure had not finished with Femke. Years later, she and Ken moved to Mallorca, where she had inherited her mother's apartment on the coast. They spent the next twenty years enjoying the island's culture, its beauty, and the friendships they made there, before health reasons brought them back to the United States.

Femke lived an extraordinary life, shaped by upheaval, curiosity, and an irrepressible appetite for adventure. She was gregarious, loved a good time, and made the most of her time on this earth. From a childhood in colonial Indonesia to a wartime internment camp, from sailing across the Atlantic to an overland journey toward Singapore, from the mountains of Switzerland to the shores of Mallorca, she rarely took the conventional route-and was all the richer for it.

She leaves behind her two sons, Jake and Alex; her daughter-in-law, Andrea; and Denise, Jake's partner. She adored her four grandchildren, Alexandra, Daniel (Jessica), Emily (John), and Anne-Lise.

Femke's life was a reminder that the world is a big place, that adventure is always waiting somewhere, and that there is much to be said for saying yes when it comes knocking.