THE BIG MORNING arrived, and in a pilgrimage more spirited than our parade to the launch ramp at Shelter Island, we grouped up around the boat as a smallish tractor hauled it at an emperor’s pace out the boatyard’s wide front gates. Each of us had a job, mine being to carry a sheet of bendy galvanized steel that could be thrown down over a rough patch in the road to allow any of the four dollies beneath the hulls to pass smoothly overtop.
As we heaved through the potholed streets, the tires on the casters, frightful little things on stamped rims and hubs, began to disintegrate. Meanwhile, a crowd of chatty and inquisitive rubberneckers fell in around us—kids with soccer balls, men in work clothes or business suits, women in Muslim head coverings, yapping dogs, gulls, gannets, the lot of them making a carnival of it, the centerpiece of which, our space-age rowboat, was a clearly irresistible piper to those who were seeing her for the first time. Left and right we went, this way and that, eventually down to the port’s monstrous boat ramp. There, the broad concrete aprons were a dry-dock for trawlers and dories and tugboats, dozens of them, beyond which, in the inky waters off the docks, floated an armada of sardine trawlers and rusting freighters, some of which gave the impression of having been there for decades. It was all quite a contrast to Big Blue, which by the time she sledded into the shallows, to a modest cheer, had made dump waste of her dolly wheels, an appropriate symbol, I thought, of her being free at last of the land.
Not quite free, as it turned out.
For as six or eight of our crew leapt aboard to row the boat over to the marina, it was clear that a bit too much of the land had been launched with her. The hulls were sitting perhaps six inches deeper in the water than at Shelter Island, a signal that the boat was now several tons heavier than it had been. To my eye, she seemed to wallow slightly as the rowers pulled away from the ramp.
Fortunately, we had a 250-mile shake-down run ahead of us on the way down the coast to Tarfaya, where we would stop briefly before heading properly to sea. If necessary, we could offload weight. We would also be consuming fifty pounds of food a day—and shedding body weight, a process at which I, to quote the television program, would eventually be the biggest loser.
My chief concern of the moment was that the interior of my mouth was still a nasty little nettle patch of cankers—a dozen or more of them, including one beneath my lower lip that was pretty much as big as a dime.
I have Margaret to thank for my timely recovery. As the lot of us fussed around the marina on the morning of Sunday, January 10, addressing last-minute adjustments to the boat, stowing kit, gathering fresh fruit and snacks for the run down to Tarfaya, she said to me, “Charlie, I have a job for you.”
My truest ambition for the next few hours had been to curl up in my bunk aboard the boat and there to log three or four hours of much-needed sleep. I had slept very little the night before and had been up early that morning to help empty and clean the apartment. I raised my eyebrows, feigning receptivity to whatever was coming, and she said quite gaily, “I want you to take a taxi to Marjane and get us eight or ten more packages of prepared cereal for the boat.”
Marjane is a cavernous supermarket at the far end of the city, near the men’s apartment, where I had already been that morning on behalf of the boat and to which I had no intention of returning—especially in one of Agadir’s sooty little orange taxis. Not that I didn’t enjoy Marjane. I did. It was an entertainment unto itself: aisles heaped with groceries and Moroccan clothing, kids in little djellabas, women gliding mysteriously past the bully beef display in their floor-length wraps and head scarves. Scruffy little sparrows that had undoubtedly lived their entire lives in the store darted around, chirping and shitting among the bulk nuts and fruit.
I agreed reluctantly to go, and was on my way down the promenade to catch a cab when I ran into our crewmate Louise Graff, who asked me with her customary affability if there was anything I needed at Marjane; she and her friends Noreen and Julie, who had their own apartment nearby, were on their way there now to get sandwich foods and oranges for the boat.
I had liked Louise immediately when we met at JFK on the way up to Shelter Island. From the start, we conversed easily and could always find something to laugh about. On the first night of training, after a couple of exhausting watches, she had endeared herself to me by reaching across from her bunk and holding my mittened hand for a minute, a gesture of graciously affectionate solidarity, which, for me, cemented our friendship. It would come as a laugher of a surprise to me when a few days hence, at sea, Louise revealed to me that Noreen, whom I had taken for a mere pal, was actually her husband, her lover, when all along I had joked with and related to her—indeed to both of them—as if they were single gals for whom I should best be on my toes as a (just slightly diminished) representative of the testicle-bearing class.
Within twenty minutes I was sacked out on the couch at their apartment, where I slept soundly for four hours and awoke as they came yoo-hooing up to the door to get me. The plan, if you had not guessed, was that I would parade over to the women’s apartment with them, hauling the cereal I had so responsibly acquired at the supermarket.
As we arrived, Margaret emerged from one of the bedrooms, looked at me quizzically and said, “That was quite a shopping trip, Charlie!”
Unsure whether she was on to me, but not about to concede, I said, “It was!” and neither of us said another word.
In the meantime, I felt infinitely better for the sleep. By evening my cankers and digestion had improved to the point where I was able to eat a walloping chicken tagine and drink a pint of beer at one of the restaurants along the seawall—a restaurant, as it turned out, that would come perilously close to killing poor Tom.
WE SLEPT the night on the boat, and awoke in a cool pre-dawn mist with no wind to speak of. At about 6:30, in the darkness, Steve and I walked to a restaurant along the seashore for a bite of breakfast and a last cup of decent French coffee. By the time we returned, Ryan had popped a bottle of champagne, and the countdown had begun. Behind us to the east a band of cloud-rippled azure was broadening above the mountains. A brigade of noisy gannets was aloft in the motionless air.
There were no heroics or theatrics as we pulled away from the dock at 8 a.m. sharp. Angela gave the “easy out,” eight blue blades made their first tentative strokes, and we cruised out into the harbor. And from there around the breakwater. David’s Moroccan adjutant, Hassan, and a few faithfuls from the boatyard had gathered to see us off. As had Deb, Noreen, and Julie. There were a few tears, probably of relief that we were finally leaving. Meanwhile, our Canadian friends, Damien Gilbert and Kelly Saxberg, climbed into an outboard Zodiac and banged out past us on the swells, shooting footage for the film they were making of the expedition.
A couple of days earlier Ernst and I had gone with Kelly and Damien up to the kasbah on the mountain behind the city to get some footage. From the thousand-foot elevation, the Atlantic had looked unspeakably vast. By comparison our little boat—our Tinkertoy experiment, just visible in the harbor below—had looked ridiculously small and fragile.
“Vare za motore on zis sing?” I had been asked the previous day by a German tourist who had wandered down the pier from Central Casting.
I tightened my bicep and patted it, and he said in dismay, “Vee are pawddling zis sing?”
“Rowing,” I said, at which point his chin began to tremble, and he howled, “Izz too zmall! Vee are dying in zis sing maybe!”
And yet as we rowed away that morning, put our backs at last to work, the boat seemed bigger, solider, heavier again. It was no cinch to move. At the same time, paradoxically, it seemed smaller than ever, compared not just to the ocean with its wide and glassy undulations but to the mountains behind the city, the rocky jawline of the continent, running as far to the south as we could see and then disappearing into the desert dust and mists. Of the four rowers on my side of the catamaran, Liam rowed lead, in the stroke seat, closest to the rear hold, while Ernst rowed second and Stev
e third. I sat in the bow, the back and least consequential seat, where if you blew a stroke or fell out of sync it made little difference to the other rowers.
All day, we seemed barely to move relative to the great solid wall of northwest Africa. Then at dusk the lights came on, a million of them running for miles south of Agadir, a kind of earthbound Milky Way that threw a mile-high glow and blotted out the light of the stars.
While I will not relive the ignominy, I had by this time lost my seat cushion, and because of it was in a colliery of despondency. I have wondered since what enabled me to get past the loss of something so indispensably crucial to my survival on the voyage and have come to believe that some deeply intuitive, deeply innocent part of me was able to interpret this private calamity—“repurpose” it, shall we say—as a kind of spiritual means assessment, some cosmically applied test of my durability and will. At the time I was desperate enough and detached enough from normality to accept almost any lifeline that appeared.
Even with the cushion, my rear carriage had quickly become bruised and strained. I had toughened it on the rowing machine over the months, but with the pounding of the waves and the constant drenching in salt water, it was absorbing several times the punishment it was accustomed to.
Lifeline or not, at about 8:15, as I sat on my damp bunk, I was possessed suddenly by a sense of hopelessness. What on earth, I thought, had I gotten myself into? I can’t do it, I thought, unaware in my evolving isolation and uncertainty that others were undoubtedly feeling much the same way. Across the aisle, above me, Tom was moaning with dysentery, while beside me Dylan was all but paralyzed with cramps. Out on deck, Nigel, who alone had fallen seasick, was retching up what little he had been able to consume in the way of solid food.
Ninety minutes earlier, as I rowed, I had coughed up a kind of hairball, an alarming thing that I had half expected to get up and walk down the trench and out the scupper. I had figured all along that if I had a ghost’s chance of keeping myself together it would be fueled by minimally a hundred minutes of sleep between the night watches, plus regular napping during daylight. But it wasn’t happening—indeed would never happen in the weeks we were aboard. The tension of cramped and twitching muscles, the exhaustion, the trauma of the boat being smacked around simply did not lend themselves to transport into the dreamtime. At the end of each watch, I would lie in my bunk buzzed and twitchy and wide awake, and though I had promised myself that I would hold off writing even a note, a jot, until I had properly established sleep, in sleep’s absence I had (you guessed it) time.
To write. So had embarked like a mad scrivener in getting it all down: my lacerated hindquarters, the incessant cramping, the pallor on Louise’s face as she came off the afternoon watch, the sight of fishing trawlers and container ships and of ships’ lights now that it was dark—all of it witnessed in some curious transposition, as in a dream or a movie, or through somebody else’s eyes.
Back at the docks, Sylvain had given us “patches” for seasickness that we stuck behind our ears. And they apparently worked; I had no inclination to vomit. At the same time, I had the feeling that somebody had pushed a tennis ball well down into my esophagus, or at other times had dropped in a lit match. There was talk of “acid reflux,” which until then I had associated largely with Pepto-Bismol ads or with life under the Golden Arches. However, another twenty-four hours would pass before I’d realize when my patch fell off that it was the medication, not the sea or the effort, that was making me sick.
In the meantime, the lovely little down sleeping bag I had borrowed from my daughter Eden had gotten drenched by a wave that had breached the cabin door at some point during the afternoon. Immediately, I had hung it outdoors in the sun, where it seemed to be drying nicely. However, at dusk, as I rowed, Angela, thinking to get the bedding out of the weather before nightfall, asked if I wanted her to take it in. “Yes! Thank you!” I called above the wind. “Put it on my bunk if you will.” I did not realize till the watch ended and I entered the cabin that she had simply tossed it in the door, onto the floor, where it had been doused by another wave and people had walked on it, their feet kneading the sea water into every feather and inch of fabric.
If there was a grace note amidst the turmoil it was that just before sunset we caught a glimpse of our first dolphin, which had stirred me—and then a whale, a fin whale of all things, the fastest and one of the biggest of the cetaceans. And, sadly, one of the most endangered. Just 100,000 of these magnificent beasts remain, a number barely above the survival line for breeding, while the Icelanders and Japanese continue to hunt them into extinction.
Now, on the 10-to-midnight, Steve was pushing a no-nonsense agenda, as if our relatively slow pace was the fault of the rowing, of the commitment, a storyline into which I was already reading pretenders such as myself. To protect what remained of my rear end, I had fashioned a seat pad of an old sweatshirt that, lumpy side down, afforded roughly the cushioning that might have been provided by a sheet or two of folded newspaper. The result was that when I came off watch, my hindquarters had gone numb—were in effect anesthetized from the small of my back to the middle of my thighs.
I told Dylan I believed my ass was in shock, to which he responded weakly that at least it was still healthy enough to go into shock. I couldn’t see him in the darkness. However, at sunset, the rings around his eyes had been the color of old asphalt and as big around as hockey pucks.
“I dunno if I can do this,” he said after a silence. “I can’t eat, I can’t sit, I can’t sleep.”
The only thing I could think to say to him by way of encouragement was that it would take time to adjust.
“If I can do it, you can,” I said.
By this point, I had more or less decided that if I could do it anybody could.
6
BY DAWN OF THE second day out of Agadir, the mountains were smaller, reduced not from the top, as mountains are reduced by the ages, but from below, by the curvature of the earth, as the sea dissolved their foundation.
Throughout the pre-dawn watch, I tried desperately to find some inner equilibrium. At perhaps 9 a.m. it occurred to me with a scintilla of optimism that rather than wallowing on, suffering with makeshift or with other people’s seat cushions, I must make a new one, a decent pad being vital not just to my functionality but to my sanity. And must do so immediately. To that end, I scoured the holds and came up with a couple of book-sized slabs of cheap foam, one thin and dense, the other thick and porous. I believe they were leftovers from Angela’s determined attempts to make her bunk more comfortable, but I did not ask and no one told me not to use them. I bound them together with duct tape and celebrated on the 10-to-noon as the new appurtenance, while far from ideal, assured me more or less that it was now only the rest of my body and soul that would have to be rescued out of hell.
Throughout that second afternoon, the breakers came hard onto our starboard hull, with the result that by sundown even Steve, whose Crohn’s disease had been acting up, admitted that it was all he could do to get through a shift. “What time is it?” we’d plead from the rowing seats as each watch deepened, attempting to sound casual, as our thighs cramped and twitched. However, anyone who had a timepiece and was in a position to respond knew it wasn’t the time of day we wanted but the time remaining in the watch. A response of anything less than twenty minutes seemed to come directly from the angels, whereas a report of, say, half an hour carried an implied knife in the gut, a despondency that sometimes I could manage only by starting literally to count seconds, to count to sixty and start over, thus reassuring myself that minutes were passing, that we would get through, that at some measurable point before we perished we would rise from the rowing trench, stagger inside, and collapse into our dear mommies’ arms.
Night-time was the worst. Imagine someone heaving a five-gallon pail of cold sea water into your face in the dark, four or five times an hour, without your knowing when or from where the next violent soaking might arrive. No matter how c
arefully I fastened my jacket around my throat, the water forced its way in, or up from underneath, ran gradually down my back and abdomen and eventually into the ass of my pants. There, it puddled on the seat until either it drained or I shipped my oar and stood up and let it run down my legs into my shoes. The whole awful progression, Steve and I agreed, resembled some perverse strategy of the CIA—something marginally less than pure torture but, like torture, bound to weaken and demoralize and desensitize, to leave the nerves not so much raw as plain gone, with no memory of, or discernment for, what was normal or sane or livable.
When ten minutes remained, whoever had a watch would deliver the sweetest news any of us was likely to hear in this life or the next: that there were ten minutes to go, a cry offered partly for our watch’s benefit, partly as an alarm for those who now had to wrench themselves from their bunks.
Five minutes later, as we rowed down the minutes on deck, Sylvain, who was always first out of the cabin, would appear on the bridge, serious and groggy but a step ahead of the werewolf, and would stagger down the tramp to relieve whoever was rowing in the third seat. A few minutes later Margaret and Ryan and David would appear, generally with the werewolf still on their backs.
IT WAS NOT until dawn of the third day that the sun rose directly out of the sea, and we were at last out of sight of the land. By that time Tom was all but a corpse from his intestinal infection. Steve and Sylvain had him cranked up on antibiotics, but so far the medication had not reduced his symptoms. Meanwhile, Angela, in her wisdom, had decided he should be rowing, or trying to, declaring more or less openly that there was no place aboard for anyone who couldn’t pull an oar. And so the following day, our fourth out of Agadir, Tom rowed, if weakly, with Steve sitting behind him for moral support, while Dylan, whose health had improved, moved into Steve’s seat in front of me. Big Blue was a society, I hardly need add, in which irony went largely unacknowledged—as, for example, when Angela herself fell out of the rotation a few days later and stayed out for weeks because of her sore back, taking not a sidling glance back at her declaration regarding Tom.
Little Ship of Fools Page 7