The Admiral's folly became clear and at last the Battle of the Atlantic was joined—everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome, said Winston Churchill. The Allies killed three quarters of the forty thousand U-boat sailors—the worst toll of any force in the war. The morale of the U-boat force did not break.
Men like these deserved a nobler mission. Over the horizon, forty miles away, appeared the top of the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building.
THAT IS WHERE MY HUSBAND GOT TREED BY AN alligator, on the roof of his car, said our taxi driver on the causeway from Titusville.
In the wide grassy drain by the road a pair of eyes and a couple of nostrils turned with us as we passed. He had a flat tyre, said our driver, and got out of the car. If he hadn't heard the splashing the alligator would have got him. He jumped on to the trunk and then on to the roof and there was the alligator waiting for him to come down. He waved and someone stopped and the gator went away. You watch your dog—you can just be walking by a little lake and grab, and he's gone.
We drew up outside the Kennedy Space Center.
I expected a frontage at least as grand as a shopping mall. Inside I expected high ceilings, and light to see where you were going, and food better than a bad UK motorway station. I guessed there would be pompous music, but did not expect it to follow me around quite as much. The Kennedy Space Center comes on like a failing theme park, and those who reach for the stars had not painted their front door.
Robot Scouts, said a sign. We sat down with half a dozen others and behind a glass wall a little display appeared with lights and a videotape presentation, about some robots that went to the moon and didn't do much when they got there and some other robots that went to Mars and crawled around a bit.
But the rocket garden was great—rockets standing on end and a big one lying down, and then we got on a bus and went by the Vehicle Assembly Building. From Mosquito Lagoon we had seen it get bigger and bigger and take on a shape and move round to our left and wait for us and here we were. We saw the crawler track to the launch sites, and went into a big building and there was the back end of a Saturn V rocket.
Bloody 'ell, I said. Bloody ‘ell.
The Saturn V rocket is three hundred and sixty feet long and weighs three thousand tons and the thrust cone of each of the five motors is as big as a squash court. One titanic rocket stage, then another, then another, then the tiny Apollo spacecraft with its little bow thrusters to land you on the moon like a butterfly. How did they feel when they went along the walkway into the capsule? asked Monica.
We went along that walkway too. And we saw how small the Space Shuttle is, and that it glides in to land, and we won't forget the picture of John Glenn on his last trip in space when he was seventy-seven.
We waited for the taxi. Look at the NASA mission statement in this booklet, I said—
To understand and protect our home planet
To explore the Universe and search for life
To inspire the next generation of
explorers … as only
NASA can
That's all a bit general for me, I said. Kennedy had a mission you could understand—to get to the moon by 1969. But why keep on shooting rockets into space—because the science will result in a better baking foil for chickens? The chances of life within our reach are too small. The numbers are wrong—it's too big out there. And there is no warp drive, and Lieutenant Uhura is not going to tuck us into bed when we beam up from another world where the air is so very like our own. Our home planet is the only one we are likely to get and maybe we should give it all our attention before it melts away beneath our feet.
YOU DON'T SEE THEM RIGHT AFTER THEY GET back, said our taxi driver, because they are sick. My husband is a fireman and a paramedic who goes into the shuttles to carry them out. None of them can walk—it's the space—their muscles have all gone weak. And before they go he hides in a bunker buried in the ground right up by the rocket and if it starts to go wrong he goes up there on the gantry as quick as he can and he has his one astronaut to get. He gets that one and they jump out together and whizz down a wire. If the rocket actually launches and then goes wrong they can abort the mission up to a certain point and the capsule comes down off Morocco. He has been out there training to pick them up.
He must be a brave man, I said. But he thought it best not to take on the alligator.
You bet, said our taxi driver. Look down there.
Down there was a twelve-foot alligator. Its head was hidden under the grass by the bank, a bit like an ostrich. I thought they were supposed to hide under the water, I said, not bury their heads in the bank and leave all their bodies out.
I guess he got a dog or something, said our taxi driver, so he's not hunting for a while, and he reckons he is big enough to lie any way he wants.
We were nearly back at the marina, where the condominiums frowned over the Waterway. Is Titusville being developed like the rest of the coast? I asked.
Yes, it's awful. Always pressure to sell our land and houses to the developers. When I came here it was not like that. At the time of the Challenger disaster in 1986 fourteen thousand worked here, and they all lived in Titusville, and ten thousand were laid off. Titusville was a ghost town. But now here come the condos.
INDIAN RIVER! WE ARE ON INDIAN RIVER! HOW often I had looked at the pictures of Indian River in books back home and been fearful because it is so wide. Now here it is and it's three miles wide but though there is a bit of a chop there is not much tide or current this far south.
Indian River isn't our destination—our goal is the Gulf of Mexico. Indian River takes us down the east of Florida to mile 988 on the Intracoastal and then at Stuart we turn right on to the St Lucie Canal and across the peninsula for 150 miles, crossing the killer Lake Okeechobee, the Big O, the mother of the Everglades, the great wet heart of Florida. If we make it over the lake we head for Fort Myers and then we sail out into the Gulf of Mexico with Captain Rob and then we can go home.
But turning to more immediate matters we have to get out of this marina entrance with dignity and we appear to have met some nostrils. Is Jim safe inside?
The nostrils were the front part of a fat leathery face which sank into the river, and then there were a few square yards of smooth water, as something colossal moved just under the surface, then a flipper; then a blunt tail swilled out, and the creature turned on its side. A manatee—the sea cow, that all the posters and ceramics and carvings try to show as cute, when the poor thing looks as if a drunk had started to mould an elephant seal out of clay and gave up before he reached the face. Manatees are peaceful creatures, which is as well because they can weigh three thousand pounds. I turned to bring the propeller away from the great beast and headed out on to the Indian River.
Under the central arch of the bridge and along the magenta line on the GPS into the chop coming on the south wind. Nothing happening out here today—Oh, what's that? A pelican had thrown himself into the water alongside us and come up gulping, and now there are pelicans in all directions, sailing along and diving.
A pelican does not dare the clouds, but he flies wittily. He has broad wings and most of the time he is inches above the water, smiling quietly, his head back on his shoulders, gliding the way you glide in gliding dreams. The wave effect keeps him airborne, but his flight goes slower and slower until finally he sits down, because you might as well—or he heads upwards, clutches his wings to his chest and dives as if he has had a heart attack in mid-air.
Over the shore the buzzards wheel, and here in the river on each daymark a cormorant holds out wings to dry.
Snakebirds peer out of the water, and the seagulls cry, and there is the rolling adagio of a pair of dolphins, and cormorants like arrows from the bow, and the pelicans gliding and diving and gobbling, or sitting with one yellow eye on the Phyllis May.
Nothing happening out here today.
INDIAN HARBOUR WAS A HOLIDAY PLACE. Through a fence be
tween houses and condominiums and we were on the Atlantic shore—it was evening, and the ocean was calm, and the sky was grey, and we were alone.
We ran Jim on the narrow sand and then he stood with us panting and we watched the day fade on the Atlantic.
In the cloudy grey, in the timeless quietness
One explores deeper than the nerves of heart
or nature, the womb or soul
To the bone, the careless white bone, the
excellence.
For nine hundred miles the ocean had been over our shoulder: filling the air with light, replenishing the lagoons, releasing the rivers. Now our prodigious companion was leaving us and we would miss his company. A few days of easy cuts and sheltered rivers and we would be heading inland.
We turned and walked back to the marina. I'm worried about that Lake Okeechobee, I said. It says in the books it's rough and it's nasty. It says if we are used to the waters of the Intracoastal we are in for a shock.
The Intracoastal was enough of a shock for me, said Monica.
It develops a short high chop that is a killer, I said. It's not an estuary or a sound like Albemarle or Pamlico—it's a sea—seven hundred and fifty square miles. It's half as wide again as the English Channel and it's flat on the edges—no white cliffs, no Cap Gris Nez—just water. Okeechobee is Seminole Indian for Big Water.
You've got to give it to those Seminoles, said Monica—they get to the heart of the matter. But don't worry, I am taking us round the rim. It's longer but much more safe. We're going round the rim. I am more worried about finding moorings on the way down—so many marinas were destroyed by Wilma last year.
HALF OUR WINDOWS LOOKED OUT OVER THE basin at the yachts and the pelicans and the other half looked over the blue Indian River, and the weather was June in February. Monica was working on the route and I decided to go for a walk around Historic Downtown Fort Pierce.
I clipped Jim into his life jacket and swung him up on to the dock. The hurricane damage had been repaired and the new boardwalks smelled sweet and woody.
Like other historic downtowns, Fort Pierce had been reclaiming itself for some years, though there were still vacant lots and shutters. It was late afternoon but the wide grid of streets was empty. A hallucinatory townscape of white walls, on one the Chirico shadow of a figure walking out of view. Inside the buildings I imagined Edward Hopper people—a man facing away over a desk, a woman in a slip sitting by a bed waiting for a lover who would never come.
I was looking for a newsagent and a bookshop and have you seen the muffin man? But as usual all the real shops were out of town, on the highway. Here there was a wig shop, a nail bar, a restaurant supplies store, a copy shop, a cigar shop, a day spa, a karate studio. There was a little café with a neon sign which said Open and tables outside so I could sit with Jim, but it was shut.
A railway line crossed the street and a train came through. As the last wagon went by the engine sounded its siren, with an hysterical and ominous plangency, two miles down the track.
Back at the harbour a gift shop—perhaps there would be a stuffed manatee for a grandchild, or a T-shirt with a coloured sailfish. We went into the shop and Jim snatched at his lead and I looked down and in his mouth there was a little brown dog of plush. I am so sorry, I said to the lady—I don't think he has dribbled on it.
The lady took it rather well though it was not easy to get the little dog from Jim's mouth. I wiped it on my shorts when the lady wasn't looking and put it back on the shelf. I bought a couple of postcards and the lady smiled as we went out and said Have a nice day.
On the pontoon I looked down and Jim had the dog in his mouth.
He's a shoplifter as well as a scrounger and a scavenger and a general thief, I said to Monica. It was really embarrassing—I went back but she wouldn't let me buy it and he had chewed the bloody thing. And it's probably me, but Fort Pierce is a loony place, deserted, surrealistic, hyper-realistic.
Things were going on round corners that I could not see and I kept feeling that something unbelievable could happen at any moment.
In the sky to the north a silver rocket flung upwards and curved overhead, and the winds took its white wake and turned it to a scribble and it climbed and climbed and the setting sun caught it and it shone like a star.
Maybe it's our good luck star, said Monica, for the Okeechobee.
LOOK FOR ME
THERE
Florida
We Go Tomorrow — The Sound of Fear — Did You Make It Yourself? — Night of White Satin — You Put Your Left Hand In — Green Cheeks and Thin Black Legs — Cole Slaw Wrestling — The Dancing Dick — The Twelve — Foot Alligator — The Whiskered Death — Fat Man Come in Red Boat — Look for Me There — The Red Tide — The Long Pink Tongue for the Salty Bits in the Corners
AT STUART WE TURNED RIGHT AND LOCKED UP on to the St Lucie Canal, which sets out across the Florida peninsula towards the Gulf of Mexico. In the way is Lake Okeechobee, and before the lake the last refuge is little Indiantown Marina.
You look upset, I said to Monica. Something has gone wrong. Has Jim thrown up, or the gas run out, or your laptop stiffed? Share your problem with old Tel, and he will wrestle it to the floor and stamp on its fingers. For we are doing well, my little darling—we are poised, poised I say; quivering to throw ourselves like Caesar's legions across the lake—around the lake I mean.
I just rang the Corps of Engineers and the rim route is shut, said Monica—there isn't enough water so we have got to go across the middle.
Got to go across the middle? Got to go across the middle? Who are the Corps of Engineers to tell me what to do? How dare these brutish soldiers boss around a sophisticated mariner from a more advanced society on the brink of his greatest success? To hell with the Corps of Engineers—they don't understand—this is the Phyllis May that can sail across a wet football field. We draw only two feet—we'll go round the rim regardless. There you are—problem solved—the industrial-strength mind of Tits Magee has smashed its way through.
The marinas on the rim were destroyed by the last hurricane, said Monica.
We'll anchor out, I said, on the rim route.
You must be mad—we have no dinghy and anyway as soon as we set foot on shore the alligators will eat Jim.
Jim can stay on board, and use the New York Times.
He won't, he'll burst, or die. He's a very clean dog.
I understand, you have had a lot of disappointment. Poor Mon, you carry all the weight of management while I sit in the corner at my laptop on the log-box, with my feet on Jim, writing my little book. But fortunately due to the soundness of my overarching project design we have plenty of time. We will do the direct route but we will wait for a really calm day. We can wait for a month if we need to—relaxing in little Indiantown Marina, being welcomed and loved by the good ole locals, with our finger on the pulse of the weather. And when we set out who cares we will be out of sight of land—who cares when the water is like a mirror, stirring only at the lazy splash of the pelicans and the slow dolphins passing with a smile and a sucking noise like a kiss.
They are throwing us out of this marina tomorrow, said Monica, because they are full and they need our space to lift boats out, and there isn't another marina. We are going tomorrow, and the weather forecast is wind ten to fifteen miles an hour and there will be a killer chop and rain and thunderstorms and we could be struck by lightning and it's too far to ask any of our friends to come down. We're on our own, and we go tomorrow.
Don't worry Mon dear—there will be an answer, trust me.
There is an answer already—we go tomorrow, and we go across the middle.
ALTHOUGH TOMORROW WAS COOL, AT FIVE o'clock in the morning it was 100 per cent humidity, so before we got the boat untied we were both wet through. Jim knew what was happening and was sitting in his kennel sulking, and Monica and I were trying not to quarrel. You have to try hard not to quarrel when you are frightened and sometimes we do not try hard enough.
&
nbsp; Since I had accepted that we were crossing the middle of the lake there had been a sound in my head like a single note from a distant soprano saxophone, steady in pitch, but slightly ragged—the sound of fear. And my brain had fogged and it was not easy to remember all the jobs to do, or how to untie the knots in the mooring ropes, even though I had tied them myself. I sat on the rough concrete wharf, sweat running down my face and chest, trying to shuffle my bum across to the only point where I could stretch my foot down and touch the gunwale and get aboard without pitching into the basin, and I was thinking Once I was nineteen and full of promise, and this was what it was all leading to—this is how the Golden Welshman finishes up—a fat old man rolling round on a quay in the darkness, scared stiff, and ahead of him the limitless waters and the winds and waves and a desperate struggle that could cause him deadly fear and great physical pain and worse.
Monica came down the gunwale. Her face was strained-Look at the fog—that's all we want.
I switched on the tunnel light and it lit up the fog. But I could see enough to manoeuvre and got out of the marina rather smoothly for a man with a bad attack of the shrieking willies.
We headed west along the St Lucie Canal, black and smooth, an occasional car passing along the highway above us to our left, and the tunnel light wandering ahead into cotton wool. Daylight crept up behind in dark grey and white.
And so the Phyllis May and its little crew headed towards the terrible Okeechobee. The fog deadened the sound of the engine and my sweat dripped on to the engine-room hatch. The fog seemed to be getting thicker and I thought I could smell smoke.
A tree oozed by, full of vultures with black heads—strange fruit. The heads turned to watch us as we passed.
You could be in for a shock, Terence my son.
IN STONE I HAD SEEN THE ENTRANCE TO LAKE Okeechobee from the air by way of the Google Earth website. All very simple—a canal, and a tiny lock leading out of flat country on to a great water.
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