by Paul Theroux
The Awkward Question
WHEN MY French publisher, Robert Laffont, asked me who in the whole of France I wished to meet, I said d'Aboville, whose book Seul (Alone) had just appeared. The next day, in the shadow of Saint-Sulpice, I said to d'Aboville's wife, Cornelia, "He is my hero." She replied softly, with feeling, "Mine too."
Almost anyone can go to the moon: you pass a physical and NASA puts you in a rocket and shoots you there. I once met Buzz Aldrin. He said to me, "Your grandmother could go to the moon"—a bewitching thought: Granny's handbag, Granny's space suit, Granny's "Oh, dear." It is perhaps invidious to compare an oarsman with an astronaut, but rowing across the Pacific Ocean alone in a small boat, as the Frenchman Gerard d'Aboville did in 1993, shows old-fashioned bravery. Even those of us who go on journeys in eccentric circles simpler and far less challenging than d'Aboville's seldom understand what propels us. In 1988 an American named Ed Gillet paddled a kayak from the harbor at Monterey, California, across twenty-two hundred miles of the blue Pacific to Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands, the world's longest open-ocean crossing. He almost died—he was without food and water for the last three days of this sixty-three-day trip. He was without radio contact. And afterward all he ever wrote about his epic ordeal was a modest and somewhat self-mocking two-page piece for a New Zealand kayaking newsletter. He cursed himself much of the way for not knowing why he was making such a reckless crossing. Astronauts have a clear, scientific motive, but adventurers tend to evade the awkward question why.
The forty-eight-year-old d'Aboville single-handedly rowed a twenty-five-foot boat of his own design from Japan to Oregon. He had previously (in 1980) rowed across the Atlantic, also from west to east, Cape Cod to Brittany. But the Atlantic was a piece of cake compared to his Pacific crossing, one of the most difficult and dangerous in the world. No one had ever done it before. For various reasons d'Aboville set out very late in the season and was caught first by heavy weather and finally by tumultuous storms—gale force winds and forty- to forty-six-foot waves. Many times he was terrified, and halfway through the trip, which had no stops (no islands at all in that part of the Pacific), a Russian freighter offered to rescue him. "I was not even tempted." He turned his back on the ship and rowed on. The entire crossing, averaging seventeen strokes a minute, took him 134 days. I wanted to ask him why he had taken this enormous personal risk.
Short, compactly built, d'Aboville is no more physically prepossessing than another fairly obscure and just as brave long-distance navigator, the paddler Paul Caffyn of New Zealand. Over the past decade or so, Caffyn, in his seventeen-foot kayak, has circumnavigated Australia, Japan, Great Britain, and his own New Zealand through the low-pressure systems of Tasman Sea.
In a memorable passage in Caffyn's The Dark Side of the Wave, he is battling a horrible chop off the North Island and sees a fishing boat up ahead. He deliberately paddles away from the boat, fearing that someone on board will see his flimsy craft and ask him where he is going. "I knew they would ask me why I was doing it, and I did not have an answer."
I hesitated to spring the question on d'Aboville. I asked him first about his preparations for the trip. A native of Brittany, he had always rowed, he said. "We never used outboard motors—we rowed boats the way other children pedaled bicycles." Long ocean crossings interested him too, because he loved to design highly specialized boats. His Pacific craft was streamlined: it had the long, seaworthy lines of a kayak and a high-tech cockpit with a roll-up canopy that sealed in the occupant in rough weather. A pumping system using seawater as ballast easily righted the boat in the event of a capsize. The boat had few creature comforts but all necessities: a stove, a sleeping place, roomy hatches for dehydrated meals and drinking water. D'Aboville also had a video camera, and he filmed himself rowing, in the middle of nowhere, humming the Alan Jackson country-and-western song "Here in the Real World." D'Aboville sang it and hummed it for months but did not know any of the words, or indeed the title, until I recognized it on his video.
"That is a very hard question," he said when I asked him why he had set out on this seemingly suicidal trip, one of the longest ocean crossings possible, at the worst time of the year. He denied that he had any death wish. "And it is not like going over a waterfall in a barrel." He had prepared himself well. His boat was seaworthy. He is an excellent navigator. "Yes, I think I have courage," he said when I asked him pointblank whether he felt he was brave.
It was the equivalent, he said, of scaling the north face of a mountain, the most difficult ascent. But this lonely four-and-a-half-month ordeal almost ended in his death by drowning, when a severe storm lashed the coast of Oregon as d'Aboville approached it, upside down, in a furious sea. The video of his last few days at sea, taken by a rescue vessel, is so frightening that d'Aboville wiped tears from his eyes while watching it with me. "At this time last year I was in the middle of it." He quietly ignored my questions about the forty-foot waves. Clearly upset by the memory, he said, "I do not like to talk about it."
"Only an animal does useful things," he said at last, after a long silence. "An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful, not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do."
The art of it, he was saying—such an effort was as much aesthetic as athletic. And that the greatest travel always contains within it the seeds of a spiritual quest, or else what's the point? The English explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard would have agreed with this. He went with Robert Falcon Scott on the ship Terra Nova and made a six-week crossing of a stretch of Antarctica in 1912, on foot, in the winter, when that polar region is dark all day and night, with a whipping wind and temperatures of minus 80 degrees.
On his trek, which gave him the title for his book, The Worst Journey in the World, Cherry-Garrard wrote, "Why do some human beings desire with such urgency to do such things: regardless of the consequences, voluntarily, conscripted by no one but themselves? No one knows. There is a strong urge to conquer the dreadful forces of nature, and perhaps to get consciousness of ourselves, of life, and of the shadowy workings of our human minds. Physical capacity is the only limit. I have tried to tell how, and when, and where. But why? That is a mystery."
In any event, there is no conquering. "Je n'aipas vainçu le Pacifique. Il m'a laissé passer,"d'Aboville said after his ordeal. I did not conquer the Pacific. It let me go across.
The Moving Target
A COURAGEOUS but obscure traveler named Nathaniel Bishop, from my hometown of Medford, Massachusetts, rowed a small boat called a sneakbox twenty-six hundred miles, from upper New York State to New Orleans, around 1877. When he arrived at New Orleans, exhausted, and tied his boat to a jetty, a group of young drunks congregated near his boat and mocked him, threatened him, and swore at him. This, I have come to think, is a very American reaction, rewarding eccentric effort with scorn and violence.
In the 1920s, the long-distance horseman A. F. Tschiffely saddled up in Buenos Aires and rode ten thousand miles northward, heading for New York City. He crossed deserts, mountain ranges, jungles, swamps; he labored over the Andes, toiled through Central America, trotted across Mexico. But the worst was to come. His most dispiriting days on this two-and-a-half-year journey were those he spent traversing various American states. "I had a great deal of trouble with 'road hogs,'" he wrote in Southern Cross to Pole Star, and he told how American motorists would deliberately swerve in order to scare him.
"Off and on different objects were thrown at us, and once even an empty bottle, whilst shouting, 'Ride 'em cowboy!'" On a back road in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a man calculatedly sideswiped him, injuring his horse's leg (the driver then honked and waved in triumph). After two more serious incidents of this kind, Tschiffely abandoned his epic trip in Washington, D.C., and took the train to New York.
At this point, the reader who is a jogger or similar sort of outdoor exerciser will shudder with recognition. Practically every jogger I know has been heck
led or threatened in this way. Anyone who runs by the roadside, it seems, is subjected to catcalls, honks, verbal abuse, unwelcome invitations, and guffaws. Objects are flung from cars—coins, food, beer cans. People spit. It is remarkable how forcefully people can spit when there is someone either to impress or to intimidate. Women joggers occupy a special category of potential victim, and wherever they exercise, they can accurately be described as running a gauntlet.
In London, such behavior is less common in my experience—bystanders are more used to eccentricity. They have to be, because people live at such close quarters. Henry James remarked on this one hundred years ago in English Hours: "We seem loosely hung together at home as compared with the English, every man of whom is a tight fit in his place." He goes on to say, "It is not an inferential but a palpable fact that England is a crowded country."
Americans, who boast of living in a place with plenty of room for everyone, tend to object to any sort of proximity, and at the slightest hint of a loss of elbow room say, "You're in my space" or "Get out of my face." At the same time, the pressure of crowds and the uncertainties of class have made Britain a more tolerant and gentler place. Anglers can be awful to canoeists, but that is strictly territorial in a country where fishing rights are sold by the yard on rural rivers. Few people are bothered by joggers, horse riders, or athletes in outlandish clothes. The British cyclist causes the least comment of all—it might be anyone, a policeman, a schoolchild, a commuter, a racer, or your elderly father-in-law. The British jogger is allowed his or her share of the road.
American joggers are frequently harassed by people in moving cars, and these antagonists are their single greatest risk, far greater than bone spurs, gut aches, hammered knee joints, or hot flashes. I have found no literature on the subject of anti-social behavior toward people who make themselves visible through solitary exercise. What might be perceived as harmless heckling seems to me to express an intention that is related to assault, obstruction, even rape and murder.
I don't jog—too tough on my muscles and bones, it makes me feel unwell. But I value solitary aerobic exercise of other kinds, such as pedaling a bike, paddling a kayak, and rowing a boat. I happened to be cycling when I realized that my presence aroused a sort of hysteria in bystanders or people passing in cars. They shouted abuse, they laughed. What's so funny? They threw things. It was actually worse in bad weather, as though there were something in the very nature of adverse conditions that made people gloatingly more abusive, because I was more vulnerable. Rain or cold days brought out brutishness in them. I endured it for a while, and then I asked around. I was not alone. Most cyclists have stories of this kind, and joggers had much worse ones, and women joggers told the worst persecution stories.
Fleeing to the ocean doesn't help. Rowing my boat off Cape Cod, I am constantly harassed by speedboats. What is it about recreational motorboaters (as opposed to fishermen in motorboats) that makes them such a callow, aggressive breed? Something to do, perhaps, with the fact that boozing and boating often go together, and so many of the boaters are teenagers, not old enough to drive a car. A rowboat is no match for one of these foaming monsters that goes slapping past. I have lost count of the number of times such boats have almost swamped me. I can only believe that it is deliberate. Is it possible the boaters don't know they throw up a five-foot wall of water in their wake?
The smaller and frailer-seeming the boat, the greater the threat. In my kayak I am frequently yelled at, barracked, hectored, and mocked. Kids on Jet Skis are unspeakable. They sideswipe, they strafe, and they leave you in no doubt that these machines ("personal watercraft") are just the latest in a long line of technological atrocities unleashed on a peaceable world by Japanese manufacturers.
Anecdotal evidence overwhelmingly indicates that anyone who jogs or rows or cycles in the open, in this free country, is asking for some kind of trouble. As I've said, it ranges from an obscene gesture to an attempt at murder. This is worth examining as a social phenomenon, partly because we take for granted that it will happen, but also because it is a specifically American occurrence. I have cycled and rowed in other countries, and I have been stared at, but not harassed. The aggression in the American reaction often has a comic veneer, the bullying, joshing sort which characterizes a certain variety of our humor and which makes it indistinguishable from sadism. The origin of this kind of heckling might be summed up in the old-time shriek "Get a horse!" but it is much more serious than it seems, and I believe it constitutes an actual threat.
In the most common situation, the threat comes from more than one person—rarely is it one-on-one. The group of people in the car or speedboat, the phalanx of jet skiers, are nearly always male. Their response appears to be a reflex of violent envy directed against an isolated and vulnerable person—the skimpily clothed jogger, the madly balancing paddler, the panting cyclist. It is like an objection to the assertive freedom and health implicit in these pastimes, and it might be bound up with the suspicion—in a minority of cases a well-founded suspicion—that someone who exercises this way so publicly is showing off.
Yet the response is so lacking in tolerance that I cannot help but think that at its source is a wild anger, a fear and frustration, at being faced by a free spirit, someone who cannot be controlled. And the instance where the foolish person plows by in a speedboat and lets loose a loud and stupid remark might be explained by his sudden realization that for once in his life he is stronger and faster and apparently superior. Such a person would deny he is a criminal, and yet his reaction is the impulse behind most crime: the eagerness to commit an act of violence because the victim seems weak, ludicrous, exposed, and naked—victims nearly always seem that way. Crime is a monstrous sort of unfairness, and so it is always in the criminal's interest to pick on an especially weak or supine target.
Why does this, as far as I know, mostly happen in America? What is it that rouses us and incites us against people pursuing innocent and healthful objectives? Perhaps that is part of the answer: the very innocence and robustness implicit in jogging or cycling might themselves be a kind of provocation. As for the shouting, well, Americans tend to think out loud—you get perfect strangers yapping at each other all over. In our strenuously verbal and competitive culture, great stress is placed on self-assertion. The irony is that people jogging, paddling, or cycling are exhibiting in a non-aggressive way those same demonstrative characteristics. And as I mentioned, it is more than likely, too, that joggers and other fresh air fiends are motivated to a certain extent by impure enthusiasm. There are many who could be described as hotshots, seeming to invite comment. It is hard to see a person cantering on a horse without imagining that person thinking, I am on a horse and you're not.
Even so, that is no reason for the person to be violently harassed. We are described as a nation that respects the rights of individuals, but I have seldom found this to be the rule. Eccentricity—even the healthy eccentricity in these one-person pastimes—is commonly perceived as a threat. I suspect that we are more deeply conservative and threatened by novelty than we imagine. Generally, we don't want to believe that we are, and we cling to a mythical notion of ourselves as tolerant and liberal-minded. I think our tolerance is mostly posturing. It is unpleasant to contemplate, but this swift impulse to harry the jogger or to swamp the small boater seems like a specifically American trait, one of our worst, arising from the pack mentality of our competitiveness, our vocal masculinity, our contempt for eccentricity, and our self-justifying humor in which the butt of the joke is always a weak victim.
I wonder whether it is possible to widen this argument and make it political. So much in American foreign policy is related to implied threat or the wish to control. I think our irrational reaction to any number of countries that have chosen an unconventional path to political or economic fulfillment is an example of this envious bullying. We are always talking about freedom as though we valued it. If we truly valued it and practiced it, we would probably talk about it less often inst
ead of treating it like a mantra in the hope of overcoming our baser instincts.
Dead Reckoning to Nantucket
I SET OUT one morning in my kayak, facing the open sea, intending to paddle thirty-five miles or so from Falmouth on Cape Cod to the island of Nantucket, stopping at Martha's Vineyard on the way. I felt waterproof, buoyant, and portable, with a sleeping bag and food for four days. It was a lovely morning, but I was already in a sunny frame of mind knowing that in order to paddle to Nantucket and camp on the way I would have to trespass and break the law.
For me the best sort of travel always involves a degree of trespass. The risk is both a challenge and an invitation. Selling adventure seems to be a theme in the travel industry, and trips have becomes trophies. Wealthy people pay big money to be dragged up Everest on ropes, or go whitewater rafting down the Ganges, or risk death for photo opportunities with gorillas in war-ravaged Rwanda. The element of hardship in this sort of travel has been either downplayed or eliminated—still, the risk factor is so great that these ambitious tourists are often injured or even die on such trips.
Adventure travel seems to imply a far-off destination, but a nearby destination can be scarier, for no place is more frightening than one near home that everyone has warned you against. You can dismiss ignorant opinion—"Africa's dangerous!" or "India's dirty!" or "China's crowded!"—but when someone you know well, speaking of somewhere near home, says, "Don't go there," it sounds like the voice of experience. This does not usually deter me, however. The idea is to devise a way of going, as when in 1853 Sir Richard Burton learned colloquial Arabic, grew a beard, darkened his skin, and gave his name as Mirza Abdullah and his occupation as "dervish," in order to take the haj as a born Muslim to the holy city of Mecca, closed to infidels. When the Chinese told me a place was forbidden—a word they love and use often—I merely smiled and thought of ways to disobey.