Before we left Canada, Steve and I had agreed that we would work on the tramps together. However, in the end, it was Sylvain and Tom who were Steve’s ranking assistants, while I tootled around poking at oar handles and doing fussy work—and of course note-taking, preparing to write, which as the novelist Don Bailey once pointed out is largely a process of gazing out the window or down the beach, or peeking over the fence. At times, craving a little detachment, I simply slipped out the boatyard gate and enjoyed brief walks around the port. Anywhere there was a bit of spare ground, boatbuilders with mallets and four-inch-wide chisels banged away, hand-hewing bulgy little cypress-wood dories, or sixty-foot trawlers, gorgeous things that echoed the centuries and would, on completion, become part of the Moroccan sardine fleet, the biggest in the world.
The truth was that after the intense training of the fall and early winter—not to mention the travel, the jet lag, the abrupt change of diet and sleep—there were hours during that first week in Agadir when I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. My mood had not been improved by four days of stomach flu and now a mouthful of cankers, for me a sign that something is amiss that will only be righted by a little down time. One day Liz Koenig and I chanced a keelhauling by sneaking out of the yard for an hour to look for souvenirs that we could send home—I to my children, she to her parents and friends. And I was glad we did; it gave us a chance to get to know each other and exchange a story or two, which to my perhaps deluded mind was as important as busting ass all the time. But you couldn’t be gone long or you’d get a frosting when you got back—mostly (and justifiably) from Steve, who was working like a mule and had thereby established himself as the company yard master and conscience.
At the age of twenty-three, Liz was nonetheless among our most experienced and talented rowers, having taken up the sport when she entered St. Anthony’s High School on Long Island. She was eventually scouted by a number of universities, offered several scholarships, and ended up at the University of Rhode Island. There, during a four-year Division I career (2005–2008), she trained eight hours a day, six days a week, sufficient to put her on the podium a dozen or more times with different crews of eight at some of the sport’s premier regattas. “My one huge regret,” she said as we walked, “was that I never got to row in an NCAA final. It’s just so tough in that conference, with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Boston—all these rowing powerhouses. We came so close so many times, and just never quite got there.”
Liz has a glamorous side. Yet like Angela (and the rest of us), she has her insecurities. That day on the promenade, she said to me quietly, “Charlie, there was something I wanted to mention to you.”
After a few seconds of silence, I asked, “What is it, Liz?”
“I’m not quite sure how to put it,” she said staring out to sea, “except that I’ve been feeling a little... you know... bulky.”
I assured her she didn’t look bulky.
“No, but I feel it,” she protested. “I packed on an extra twenty pounds for the crossing, and most of it went... you know... exactly where I didn’t want it to go.” She smiled self-consciously. “I was just gonna say that if you’re going to put photos in your book, I’m wondering if you’d allow me to see what you’re going to put in that might have me in it?”
I assured her she could approve any photos that were used (the irony being that one of the two or three she eventually liked was a glorious shot of her taken from behind as she sat topless on the prow of the port hull, in a high wind, her hair flying, her arms thrown to the sun—a shot featuring the very portion of her anatomy that she had apparently been so reluctant to expose).
While they are not the least bit alike, I tended to think of Liz and Aleksa as a pair, a sort of matched Island set—in part because they are the same age and because Aleksa too attended St. Anthony’s High School, although she did not start rowing until she enrolled at Stony Brook University on Long Island. She eventually rowed for Dowling College, where she now coaches and from which she holds a post-grad degree in early childhood development. It is an unlikely complement to her full-time job as an emergency first-responder in North Babylon and her part-time career as a volunteer firefighter in Deer Park. Both are jobs in which she sees and must take in stride what she called “some of the most shocking violence” known to humanity. Meanwhile, there is a small-town innocence to Aleksa, epitomized in part by her admission that if she had to get off Long Island, driving on her own, she would be “totally unable” to find her way through the merciless bottleneck of freeways, underpasses, and bridges that connects the island to New York City and to the rest of the world beyond.
As with Liz, there were aspects of Aleksa’s person that she wanted neither exposed nor discussed in a book—she made it clear that any violations on my part would be treated with murderous severity. She was in other areas a kind of free-flowing WikiLeaks on everything from her occasionally heavy partying to her seditious pleasure in social media to the endearing intricacies of her life as the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. The family had escaped the old country when it was under the most dispiriting influences of the Soviet regime and, during thirty years on Long Island, had enacted a transcendent commitment to the preservation of Lithuanian culture, much of which had been kicked to the dogs under Muscovite imperialism. Aleksa spent her childhood and teenage summers at what she called “Lithuanian camp” in the mountains of upstate New York, putting on the costumes and learning the language, dances, music, and stories of her ancestry. Her affectionate, sometimes poignant descriptions of it all reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, in which those who love literature (most books having been burned) hide in the woods, passing memorized novels and poems on to their children.
ALONGSIDE WORK on the boat, Angela engineered a Herculean six-day bee of food sorting and packing, during which there were at times several thousand food items laid out on the concrete in sorted lots, as well as hundreds of Ziploc bags and hundreds more garbage bags, not to mention a dozen ten-pound logs of mauve-colored cling wrap.
The arrangement was this: we had all brought our own food, or had at least ordered it from the expedition supply houses, and had had it sent to Shelter Island, where it had been packed with the boat and shipped to Morocco. Most of us had brought additional food in our luggage and had picked up items from the market and stores in Agadir. The Great Sort divided it into days and, further, into lunches, dinners, and snacks. The plan was that Angela would supply some level of breakfast each day but that otherwise we would take turns cooking in pairs for the crew (which for the most part meant nothing more than heating water and adding it to envelopes of dehydrated rations).
All of this started well. However, on the fourth day rats got into the storage quarters where we kept the food at night. They ate and crapped selectively, mostly in Angela’s boxes, requiring her to pitch hundreds of dollars’ worth of meals. From that point forward the whole extravagant exercise began to seem somewhat oppressive. The harder truth was that, whereas some crew members had attempted to minimize their nutritional requirements in order to keep the weight of the boat down, others had brought what seemed a vast surfeit of entrees and desserts and snacks—and sub-snacks and pick-me-ups and treats.
Part of the disparity was that Angela had convinced some crew members they would need 10,000 calories a day—four meals, plus snacks. Roy had told us months back that no one needed or would eat more than 5,000 calories, that we simply wouldn’t feel like it, given the exertion and heat and exhaustion. He believed that when your daily ration of 5,000 calories was used up, your stored fat, if you had any, would see you through (and that when it was gone, you died).
At times I wondered what the Phoenicians or Vikings or, centuries later, the Spanish, French, and Dutch had eaten on their sea voyages. Certainly not foil packs of Bubba’s Kountry Kitchen Dehydrated Crab Gumbo (MSG-free). Or U.S. Challenger freeze-dried ice cream bars. The English, according to our British crew member Liam Flynn, ate hardtack and dried lard
—and “probably lots of other really dodgy and awful stuff.”
Steve, more than I, was appalled as all of this provender, pack after pack of it—in garbage bags, in duffel bags, in dry bags, dozens upon dozens of them—was shoe-horned into the holds and hulls and onto the galley shelves of a vessel that was already weighed down with perhaps a ton and a half of hardware and appurtenances that were not aboard when we feathered so delicately down the channel off Shelter Island.
Since then, David had added four monstrously weighty solar panels that lay atop the cabin; and a pair of wind generators whose whirligigs, half as big as airplane propellers, sat twelve feet above the bridge on steel stanchions; and a thick and complex wiring harness that carried power to heavy storage batteries in one of the holds and from there to the GPS and autopilot systems, and to deck lights and running lights, and to a pair of bulky desalinators in the front holds, as well as to a half-a-dozen wall sockets where camera batteries and iPods and the boat’s two SAT phones could be recharged. He had added cooking equipment and first-aid supplies and tools; and a spare rudder; and four spare oars; and a porcelain toilet; and sump pumps; and extra bracing; and a pair of inflatable life rafts; and survival suits.
And now of course food. And more food. And bedding. And clothing. And two more people than we had had aboard at Shelter Island.
IF STEVE WAS aghast over the weight of food, he was dismayed tenfold by the arrival on January 6th, just five days before departure, of Margaret Bowling, the young Tasmanian woman who had rowed the Atlantic a couple of years earlier and to whom Angela had given first mate’s status specifically for the experience she would bring in the areas of navigation, weather awareness, charting, and so on. She would also, it was assumed, bring moral support to Angela in her attempts to direct a crew not one of whose members had rowed an ocean or rowed even a hundred miles out on one.
Unfortunately, Margaret did not have commensurate experience in handling human beings—at least those of the sort that had signed on with Big Blue. While I had my differences with her, especially over her damnable habit of telling people what to do when no telling was necessary, I eventually came to an understanding of sorts with her and found her variously exasperating, vulnerable, somewhat lonely, and perhaps a trifle nuts, although no more so than a few others aboard the boat, including myself.
If I remember correctly, it took about ten minutes on the morning of Margaret’s first working day at the boatyard for her to run afoul of Steve, from whom she demanded a “complete list” of all the medications on board.
“There’s really no need for that,” Steve told her. “Sylvain and I know what’s on board, and either he or I will be prescribing, so we’ll just leave it as is. Plus, I’m very busy right now, as you can see.”
“Well, I’d like that list,” she insisted. “I’d like it by sometime tomorrow.”
Others balked at Margaret’s adamant vetting of our kit based on stringent new limits for weight and bulk—this after we had accumulated such kit according to different, although still quite disciplined, standards. My own response, largely unspoken, was that it was a little late to begin compensating for our massive burden of food and hardware with an enforced jettisoning of light little kit items such as T-shirts and flip-flops and other bits of clothing and footwear.
Margaret’s vetting of Tom’s rather arcane paraphernalia came down to an absurd head-butting that might well have been lifted from the scripts of Harold Pinter:
MARGARET: But, Tom, don’t you see it’s not fair to the rest of the crew for you to take extra weight?
TOM: Yes, I’m sure that’s true, Margaret, and I sympathize with them; I’m all for fairness—but I’m not leaving my favorite blue jeans behind to save the weight of a few ounces of denim.
MARGARET: But, Tom, we all have to make sacrifices!
TOM: Yes, I know that’s true, Margaret, and I’m very happy to make sacrifices—name one, I’ll make it. Meanwhile, I am not leaving my jeans behind.
MARGARET: Tom, do you know what sacrifices the others are making?
TOM: No, they haven’t told me. But I’m sure it’s all very difficult for them and I’d like to know so I have a better idea what I’m up against in not leaving my blue jeans behind.
A week later, at sea, Steve was infuriated to discover that Margaret had allowed at least one of the young women on the crew to bring aboard substantial bottles of hair care products, while some of the men had been cited over significantly lighter, smaller items.
In some cases, Margaret was indisputably right in her decisions, insisting for example that Ernst Fiby, he of the Viennese wit and shaved head, leave behind a pair of clunky, high rubber Wellingtons—for the sheer space they would command, as well as the weight. She was outraged to realize later that he had snuck them aboard, although he did finally toss them in the sea, where they may yet be doing thousand-mile circles in the currents of the mid-Atlantic.
EVERY EVENING at about seven o’clock, we’d slump out of the boatyard in the winter darkness, one of us pushing Angela in her wheelchair, up the mile-long hill outside the port walls to where the city proper began and we could organize our taxi-sharing for the long ride back across Agadir to the apartment. And from there on to a restaurant for a blessed hour of nourishment and relaxation. Restaurants are an adventure in Agadir, and our search for a decent tagine or couscous led us variably to little family bistros such as Daffy’s on the back side of the city’s tourist area and into the visceral horrors of the restaurant at the Riad Hotel, where, had the tagine I ordered been 50 percent better, I’d have suspected it of coming out of a can. At the same place, Tom’s much-anticipated sixteen-ounce “Entrecote USA”—“premier slice beefsteak, fired out on our uniquely charcoaling grille”—turned out to be a slab of unidentifiable zoological matter so thoroughly ridden with fat, bone, and gristle as to be entirely inedible (it would have been funny had some poor goat or donkey not died in the service of this reprehensible restaurant).
However, for the most part we ate in a breezy little outdoor barbecue in a non-tourist neighborhood near our apartment. We referred to this decidedly unregulated kitchen as “the meat place” because it served meat, bread, and pop only, the meat purchased by the customer on skewers at the fly-ridden butcher shop next door and carried a few feet to the restaurant, where it was thrown on the grill.
One night as Steve and I and a few others sat there in the company of sparrows and cats and one or two rib-thin mutts, a guy in his early twenties came along banging his palm on the metal table tops, demanding money. I reached into my pocket, realizing when I pulled my hand out that my only cash was a pair of 200-dirham notes, worth about forty bucks each, and some Canadian coins worth perhaps a dollar. So I gave him the coins and felt anguished five minutes later when he came raging up to the table and threw the money clattering down in front of me, accompanied by a blast of indecipherable scorn.
It had been stupid of me, no doubt—lazy both culturally and morally, in that I knew the coins were of limited or no value to him. But it served as a chastening, as one’s experiences on the road, particularly the embarrassments, tend to do. Happily, a couple of nights later I saw the same guy at the same place, and was able to give him a twenty-dirham note that he pushed into his pocket without a peep as he brushed past me.
THAT THESE PRECIOUS, nervous days in Agadir were winding down was impressed upon me on the 8th of January, when David did not show up at the boatyard until nearly noon—and eventually did so in tourist clothes, subdued, having taken Lali to the airport and seen her off to Tbilisi.
Late that afternoon, with our chores done, our spirits high (and about to get higher), Steve and I left the boatyard half an hour early to get our hair chopped short at Coiffure Paris, a tidy little barbering salon that we had passed numerous times within a few blocks of the apartment.
There was only one chair, and as Steve sat down, the barber, an amiable Arab of perhaps thirty-five, asked in rough, gentle English if we’d like a shot of �
�Moroccan whisky.” We would, and immediately he dispatched his young friend, who returned minutes later with a pair of juice tumblers full of a steamy amber-colored fluid.
It was not until I had drained this earthy potion and Steve and I were exchanging seats so that my own shearing could begin that Steve, wearing a broadening and relaxed grin—indeed, showing a state of relaxation that I had not seen in him since our arrival—wondered aloud if I realized we had been drinking marijuana tea, quite strong marijuana tea as it turned out. As a matter of fact I had not (there was a hint of peppermint to it, perhaps masking the main ingredient). But given the new tingling in my extremities and the fact that the modest barbershop, with its antique television and shelf of bright pomades, had just now begun to seem like the funniest entertainment on earth, I did not question the news.
Having been at first somewhat nervous about the threat of hepatitis, which can be contracted through a barber’s nick, I was soon sensitized to the point where I was enjoying with a kind of dreaminess the buzzing of the clippers over my skull, then the sound of the straight razor rasping down the skin of my neck and behind my ears, emitting what for me at that point was a quite euphonious pop with the snapping of each individual hair.
But the sense of well-being was short-lived. As we emerged from the barbershop into the crowded and noisy street, a kind of cloud descended around me, a sense of vulnerability, and I was reminded with considerable force that I was at that moment sixty-three years gone, an old man, without language, in the backstreets of a Muslim city, stoned on an illegal drug, as defenseless as a baby—beyond which, of course, I was facing a challenge in the weeks to come that would either kill me ingloriously or fortify me for life’s home stretch.
At the meat place, we ingested skewer after skewer of chicken and pepper sausage and steak. And floated home. To the whorehouse. Where that night I had a staggering dream, a kind of fin du monde, in which a bloody and beheaded man appeared at the door of the apartment asking for me, attempting to push his way in, determined that he should find me. As Nigel and the others forced him from the room, he hollered over their shoulders that he knew I was in there, knew my name, knew everything about me, said he would track me down, would not rest until he had found me. And then he was gone, and in the hallucinogenic logic of the dream world, I was left pondering who he was, whether he would be able to pursue me with no head, and perhaps most significantly in this twisted Jungian conundrum, why he had been wearing my shoes.
Little Ship of Fools Page 6