The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  In the morning I found that we had passed Frankfurt and were now some fifty-three kilometres up the Main approaching Mul-heim Lock. Here Albert and Albert bade me farewell, wished me luck, refused to take any payment and set me adrift. It was an overcast morning but there was a gentle breeze blowing from astern, so I re-rigged the mast, set sail and was soon on my way upstream to Hanau. It was here that I intended to stop voyaging for a while. My sister Maggie had just completed her Ph.D. in Edinburgh and the graduation ceremony was coming up soon. To this end my parents had flown all the way from Australia to Scotland, and it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Besides, I was tired. Tired of rowing, tired of Keats, tired of feeling foreign, and most of all, tired of my own company.

  At Hanau there was a waterways maintenance yard. It was without the slightest feeling of surprise that I found there three cheerful workmen who had apparently been waiting for me to turn up so that they could have the pleasure of hauling my boat out of the water on a little crane, emptying her, storing the rigging in a dry shed, turning her upside down under a tarpaulin and promising to keep her safely for whenever – if ever – I returned.

  I did what Odysseus could never do, what no great traveller ever permits himself. I caught a bus to Frankfurt, a train to Holland, a plane to Birmingham and I hitched to Ellesmere. Within thirty hours I was back to where the whole voyage had begun ten months before. I was ready for a break.

  End of Part Two

  Part Three

  Into the East

  Contrary Currents and Kindness

  Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

  Yes, to the very end.

  Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

  From morn to night, my friend.

  —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, Up-Hill

  Over the three weeks away I made some firm decisions. I had been appalled to note how much money I was getting through as I travelled, but when I stopped to consider, it was hardly surprising. Too many nights I had tied up, looked at the awning and the planks lying ready to be put into place, then said to myself, ‘Not tonight, Josephine,’ and gone off guiltily to find a Gasthaus or auberge for the night.

  All that, I said to myself, was about to change. I vowed that from now on I would sleep aboard Jack every night, no matter what the weather or how much the thought of hot showers and clean sheets appealed. Likewise, I would shun cafés and restaurants and discover the delights of a bread roll and a hunk of cheese eaten in the open air, with a bottle of beer as an occasional treat. As for money, the use of my Visa card would be strictly rationed. From now, I was on a budget.

  It was a pity, therefore, that I arrived at the start of a stretch of grey rainy days and cold dripping nights. For three days I slogged up a river whose contrary current was far stronger than I had anticipated, sluggishly hauling between endless banks of silver-grey osiers and dreary willows that hemmed me in and blocked the view on either side. It rained most of the time, a thin wetting rain that soaked through my cagoule and trickled down my face. When the rain cleared, it did so only to make way for strong contrary winds that had me hauling the sail up in hope, but taking it down again ten minutes later as I realised the impossibility of tacking into the wind against the current and without a jib. I was hard pressed to travel more than fifteen kilometres a day, as compared to the fifty or so I had been making on the Moselle.

  Still, I kept doggedly to my new regime and my new budget, forcing myself to sleep aboard each night, although the rain seeped in under the awning and dampened my sleeping bag and pillow. I stuck to one meal a day, usually a bread roll and some salami that I bought from villages along the way. In a perverse way I enjoyed my Spartan life. I didn’t sing as I rowed, I didn’t recite poetry, I didn’t think thoughts or talk to myself, or do anything. I became grim and morose and silent and dour, like an elderly badger with toothache. I went to bed, woke up, rowed, ate a bread roll, rowed some more and went to bed again. I don’t think I spoke or exchanged glances with anyone for three or four days – a bit of a record for me.

  And then, just as I was settling into my role as curmudgeonly hermit, the world glanced around, noticed me and said, ‘Oh, stop moping, Sandy!’ and handed me about three hundred nice things on a plate to snap me out of it. Things like a red squirrel scampering along the bank, a spiral maze painted outside a village church, an elder hedge to dry my clothes on, a skinny-dip from a little secluded beach of red sand, a daff y girl called Meg with broken teeth who proposed marriage to me as she pursued me along the bank (unconnected, I think with the skinny-dipping), an ice cream bought as a special reward to myself for persevering with the stoicism and a whole host of other things. Those days … and in particular that ice cream … did teach me just how often we indulge ourselves purely out of habit before any real need or desire has arisen. We do this so often that, like the citizens of Huxley’s Brave New World, we forget what it is even to feel a need, let alone the pleasure of satisfying it. We eat before we are hungry, we drink before we are thirsty, we amuse ourselves before we ever feel boredom … and slowly go numb inside. Our insides turn into the spiritual equivalent of pâté de foie gras.

  The world also clearly decided that I was no longer to be left on my own. I found myself adopted by a German family aboard a cruiser called Carpe Diem whose two boys, Mario and Florian, persuaded their parents that I might add some interest to their river cruise, if only for the alarmed expression on my face as I coped once more with being towed at high speeds in an unstable dinghy. I also found myself mooring up one night next to Barbara and I was able to buy a bottle of wine to take to Big Albert and Little Albert as an overdue thank-you present for the tow up the Rhine. They offered me supper – the smell of blackening fat was already in the air – but I beat a hasty retreat to the company of my new friends on Carpe Diem and joined them for their nightly custom. This was to drink one kirsch liqueur for every lock they had been through that day, calling out ‘schleuse! ’ (‘lock!’) each time they downed a drink. After my self-imposed abstinence from both drink and talk, my tongue was loosened as never before, and before long we were old friends … or so I assumed as they all politely listened in to a fascinating, if somewhat slurry, explanation about Fermat’s Theorem and my bottom.

  As I went further and further up the Main, this kindness of strangers reached almost bizarre proportions. Take the village of Himmelstadt. After watching me moor for the night at the lock, the fat lock-keeper came down from his concrete tower to urge me to take myself along to a nearby bistro, the ancient and renowned Himmelkeller. I had finished the last of my somewhat dry bread, so off I trotted, thinking that perhaps I might treat myself to a bowl of soup. The place was quite crowded, but no sooner was I in the door than the Kellermeister welcomed me warmly and started to introduce me to the guests sitting at the long oak tables, proudly proclaiming me a ‘famous globetrotter.’ It appeared that the fat lock-keeper had rung ahead to warn the host of my arrival. As I sat and ate my humble bread and soup, I was bombarded with questions, which I tried to answer as best I could. The soup finished, I was rising to go when the host appeared with a huge plate of sausages swimming in leeks, carrots and white wine. Alarmed, I tried to explain that I did not order this and that there must be some mistake. ‘No, no,’ piped up a quiet couple sitting at a corner table a little distance away. ‘We did. We ordered it for you, and of course we will pay for it. It is a speciality of this region. Do you like it?’

  Well, yes, I did, thank you very much, how kind. And much later, when I went to pay the bill for the soup and the several beers I had drunk, the host said, ‘No, no. This is paid for.’

  ‘The sausages, yes, but surely not …’

  ‘Yes, all of it,’ explained the couple in the corner. ‘You are our guest tonight. Perhaps if you reach the Black Sea, you will write us a letter.’ His name was Engelbert, which means ‘bright angel,’ and as the village of Himmelstadt means ‘heavenly place,’ I suppose I should have expected no less.

 
; To top the evening off, the host presented me with a complimentary bottle of the local wine to take with me, a pale greeny-gold wine to remind me, as he said, of the good folk of Himmelstadt. I staggered back to the lock reeling with bemusement at all this unsolicited kindness.

  The following day, several locks up the river, I was told firmly by the keeper there that I must stop and wait. For what? But the keeper’s English was not up to explaining the reason for my enforced wait. As I sat in my dinghy, a cold host of thoughts crept over me. Could it be that I had misunderstood the business with the bill last night? Had I walked away from the Weinkeller wrongly assuming that the bottle of wine was a gift and now half of Himmelstadt was after me as a thieving opportunist? Had the German Waterways Authorities finally caught up with the fact that I was traversing their country without a licence? Did I actually need one?

  At last the mystery was solved. A very sweet young woman with clear grey eyes turned up with a microphone and a tape recorder, explained that she was from Radio Bavaria and asked if I would mind giving an interview. She had been pursuing me all morning up the river but had kept missing me, until she had managed to get hold of the lock-keeper and arrange for me to be stopped. And how did she know of my existence? My jolly fat lock-keeper of the night before had been busy on the telephone proclaiming my exploits to the world.

  That evening I found myself tying up at the pontoon of the Wur-zburg Marina. There is a beautiful old bridge here with fourteen statues of various warrior bishops and florid princes perched along each balustrade as though about to leap off the bridge and end it all in the deep green waters below. Carpe Diem was moored just up the river and I joined them for a last ‘schleusen-schnapps’ session. As we had each been through a different number of locks that day, we resolved the question of how many shots to down by the simple method of adding together the number of locks we’d both been through that day – and so finished off the bottle. The local marina staff had heard the Radio Bavaria interview that afternoon and given me free run of the clubhouse, so I slept on the floor there on my mattress after a welcome hot shower. The good fortune was holding, it seemed.

  On the following day I set off as the hot afternoon was dimming off to a cooler gold, and five or six miles up the river came to a backwater set in the left-hand bank. The sun was setting and Jack and I were nowhere near a town or village. This suited my mood; despite revelling in the good company and generosity of the last few days, I felt that I wanted to re-capture the illusion at least of the wandering solitary life.

  The place where I stopped was pleasant enough, a sandy bay backed by a lonely field and a little promontory with a scattering of ash trees between the backwater and the main river. For an hour I had the place to myself, but after that a family arrived to camp. I was not sorry. My need for solitude had evaporated about ten minutes after landing. Helmut, the skinny, dark-haired father, lit a campfire on the promontory while his three or four children played in and out of the firelit shadows. There were three boys and a girl, a little pale thing quite unlike the sturdy boys. Helmut invited me to join them around the fire and I did so gladly, sharing between us some sausages and cheese on toasted bread, chatting about hang-gliding and mountain-climbing. While we spoke, some small creature, a water rat or vole, crept right in about our boots and stole crumbs from the very edges of the embers. At some point I asked the name of the children and Helmut told me the three boys’ names.

  ‘And the girl?’ I asked.

  ‘The girl?’ replied Helmut in some surprise. ‘But she is not mine. I thought she was your little girl.’

  When we called the children over out of the shadows, the girl had vanished. The boys have been playing with her but no, they do not know where she has come from or where she has gone to. Perhaps she is a wood-child or a river-daughter … Later that night, after the others had gone off to their tents, I sat for a while by the glowing embers of the fire looking out over the river. The moon was full and made little bright stabs of silver on the satin-black water with every fish-rise. The night was warm and the air full of white moths, and the dark night-river world seemed full of enchantment.

  I went out to the hazel wood,

  Because a fire was in my head,

  And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

  And hooked a berry to a thread;

  And when white moths were on the wing,

  And moth-like stars were flickering out,

  I dropped the berry in a stream

  And caught a little silver trout.

  When I had laid it on the floor

  I went to blow the fire a-flame,

  But something rustled on the floor,

  And someone called me by my name:

  It had become a glimmering girl

  With apple blossom in her hair

  Who called me by my name and ran

  And faded in the brightening air.

  The stars, the white moths, the fading fire, the waif girl who belonged to nobody; all these were the elements of Yeats’ poem. Despite the warmth of the summer night, the hair on the back of my neck stood up and my heart pounded as I waited for the magic to manifest itself.

  But no. The moon rose and set, the water vole rustled once or twice more in his foraging, and the embers faded to nothing. I slept.

  I woke early to clamorous birdsong to find that my boat had vanished. Perhaps the glimmering girl had set it adrift in the night. It did not take long to find; it had drifted across the backwater and caught in a tangle of black hazels beneath a steep bank. I had to swim for it, and when I hauled myself in, dripping wet and naked, I found it full of white moths’ wings, thick as apple-blossom.

  I set off early before Helmut and his family were up, and rowed on through the morning, stopping briefly in Ochsenfurt to stock up on groceries and write postcards. My diet had settled down to the following: a couple of bread rolls, one with salami and mayonnaise, one with tomato and mayonnaise. The tomato roll was always sprinkled liberally with black pepper and salt from a little cruet set. After the main course I usually finished up with an apple and downed the whole lot with a glass of wine or a small bottle of beer. All this was prepared by placing the broad centreboard across my knees as a table, digging out the tupperware box and my knife from the fore-locker, chopping and cutting and spreading as necessary, and then – ah! this was the best bit! – simply scraping the crumbs and scraps over the side and wiping the centreboard down with the big sponge that lived in the bilges. In the next few months, this was to be almost my exclusive diet and I never tired of it. Even today the making of a tomato sandwich can conjure up the lap-lap of water, the hot sunshine and the sheer happiness of that period of my life.

  Later that afternoon I had cause to be grateful to an unsmiling grandfather and his two grandchildren who chugged by in a rubber Zodiac dinghy and offered me a tow. With their aid I reached the outskirts of the village of Schwarzach. Here there was a wide field flowering with yarrow and tansy and I found a corner to lay out my tarpaulin and sleeping bag for the night. After a cooling swim in the river I made myself a salami roll, devoured it hungrily and prepared to go to sleep in the last fading light of the hot day.

  But I could not. I sat up five minutes later with an overwhelming craving for milk. Not nicotine, not gin, not sex – just milk, but I must have some. I tried water from my water bottle but this had nothing to do with thirst and the craving persisted. It was ridiculous. I had never had a craving in my life. I tried to turn over and go to sleep again, but my thoughts were filled entirely with the smooth creaminess of cold milk in a tall glass. I got up, got dressed and wandered off into the blue dusk in search of milk. I found that the village of Schwarzach was a more interesting place than I had first supposed. A mile down the road there was a huge Benedictine monastery with grand gates and a gatehouse, but all was silent and barred. I wandered on. Opposite the gatehouse was a restaurant, all heavy stone and coach lamps and vine leaves and diamond-paned windows. I waltzed in, trying to ignore the fact that I was the
only person not dressed in evening wear. I breezily ordered a glass of milk. I was told firmly that they did not serve drinks only; I must purchase an entrée at the very least. My funds and my patience would not tolerate this, so I wandered out again and found my way round to the kitchen door. In vain I tried to appeal to the sweating chef on the other side of a fly screen door; he made it quite clear with a wave of his cleaver that milk-begging mendicants would find no satisfaction here.

  The craving had now reached fever pitch. I remembered with a fierce yearning long, hot days spent up Brownhill Creek as a boy and coming home in the evening smelling of sweat and grass and mint and downing a long, cool glass of milk in the kitchen. I remembered further back to when I was very little, guzzling milk out of half-pint bottles amid the crayons and plasticine of primary school. I couldn’t remember the last time I had drunk a glass of milk, but I knew I needed one now. Wandering back disconsolately to my flowery meadow and resigning myself to a night of cold turkey, I passed a house where a middle-aged man was digging onions in his front garden at twilight. I was so desperate that I found myself blurting out some incoherent pseudo-German in which the words ‘milch’ and ‘tod’ were predominant. Whether or not he thought he was being threatened with death, I didn’t care. The important thing was that he retreated to the house and emerged with two pints of blessed milk, cold from the fridge, and I downed the lot. Politely he asked whether he could fetch me a third pint, but no, the craving was gone and I was sane again. After a short chat about onions, I walked back contentedly to my field and fell asleep watching a weave of gnats above me against the deep blue sky.

  I woke the next morning to a curious swish-swishing noise and something flashing regularly past my slumbering head. I sat up blurrily rubbing sleep and slug-dew from my eyes to make out an alarming figure looming over me. It was tall, dark and wielded the unmistakable silhouette of a scythe. For a few seconds I wondered if the odd craving of the night before for the things of infancy had presaged my death and here was the Reaper himself to gather me in. Then my eyes cleared and I saw that it was simply an old German farmer in dark overalls cutting the meadow. He had clearly been up since dawn. The whole meadow was mown and the old fellow had courteously and carefully mown all around me. In another five minutes’ time perhaps he would have had to prod me awake to finish off this last little square, but as it was I packed and dressed and beat a hasty retreat to the dinghy before I lost an ear.