“Annnd?” he said expectantly, to which I responded that the news was not good—indeed, that I had found in Angela’s document folder a yellowed newspaper clipping from the Des Moines Expositor detailing her and Margaret’s escape from the Iowa State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. According to the story, they had formed a rowing team, mixed quads, had made their getaway at a local regatta, and were suspected of fleeing to the Moroccan port city of Agadir. What disturbed me most, I had to admit, was that in the photo of the rowing team, a gentleman seated directly behind Margaret looked suspiciously like one Stephen Roedde, M.D.
“Steve,” I said—but before I could address the issue of his mad collusion with Command, he barked, “It wasn’t me!”
And thus we entertained ourselves—fantasizing, kibitzing, swapping stories about our years as young dogs. And of course as old dogs too.
MEANWHILE, we rowed hard down the coast through that first official night of our bid to cross the Atlantic, sometimes hitting speeds of nearly six knots—all the while bucking and sledding and making the sort of progress that, had the wind continued, might have kept us in the race with Hallin and Sara G.
As always, we paid for our progress in bruises and soakings and exhaustion. By this time, I had worked out a crude system for rowing safely in a “following” sea, which is to say in swells that were moving in the same direction as the boat, as this night’s were. If the wave alongside me was rising, I stuck my oar in; if it was falling, I kept it out. In that way I could hold my stroke, rather than distorting it to chase a wave as it fell away, leaving me vulnerable to getting my blade caught.
All of this was academic on moonless nights such as this, when all waves were invisible, and the ability to keep your stroke under control was a matter largely of experience and, to a degree, dumb luck. At one point on the 2-to-4 a.m., despite my system, a breaker caught my oar, driving the handle so hard into my shoulder that it lifted me off my seat, right out of my shoes, which stayed tight in the stirrups, and slammed me yelping into the trench wall behind me.
7
ALL TOLD, DURING OUR first twenty-four hours out of Tarfaya we covered a respectable ninety miles, pushed by the persistent northeast wind that we had picked up out of the harbor. But by the second night, the wind had turned and was now coming daggers out of the south, forcing us to veer west, a direction that, had we maintained it, would eventually have taken us into the vicinity of the Canary Islands. Unfortunately, we didn’t want to go due west at this point, even though it put us on a direct path toward North America. In order to get into the trade winds—the “swoosh” as Sylvain called them—we had to go significantly farther down the coast toward the Cape Verde Islands.
By the middle of that second night out, Margaret, who had arrived without a proper seat cushion, had decided she liked my pathetic little ass pad and had commandeered it for use on the other watch. Thus, atop a few ounces of foam rubber and a few feet of duct tape, were our fannies wedded (minus the consummation, of course). However, she regularly gave me the goose over getting the thing back.
“Margaret,” I’d holler across the cabin to the other hull, where she’d be coming off watch as I was coming on, “where’s the cushion?” Sometimes I waited two or three minutes for the thing to appear atop the bridge while those around me stewed about my delayed start.
When I suggested to Margaret that we make her an identical cushion of her own so that I could get more promptly to rowing, Ryan, who was within earshot, informed me rather testily that I should just start rowing without the cushion, and it would appear in its own good time. Which sounded reasonable, except that once you got your feet bound up and strapped into the stirrups, your safety line hooked, and your oar working, you weren’t in the mood to get up, especially after six or seven minutes of grating your already tattered ass.
BY THE AFTERNOON of the third day out of Tarfaya, the wind had shifted again and was now coming sporadically out of the northeast, so that we were again headed in a more-or-less southerly direction down the coast. Twelve hours later it had turned again, this time almost 180 degrees, and was coming hard out of the south.
And twelve hours after that had turned again.
It was a pattern (or more precisely the absence of a pattern) that would persist through the first two and a half weeks of the voyage—as would the frustration of being knocked around by crosswinds and sometimes headwinds; being unable to get moving, unable to get into the trades and get properly out to sea. Margaret told me that on her 2009 doubles crossing in the Woodvale race, the seas had been a breeze compared to what we were seeing, the rowing far easier. Some boats in the race had seen no wind at all, sometimes for days in succession.
On our fourth day out of Tarfaya we covered sixty miles, which as the crow flies brought us just twenty-five closer to Barbados. On our fifth day we logged eighty miles, ending up closer to Barbados by forty-five. It was progress of a sort, although nowhere near the 105-mile daily average that would be required to get us to our destination in just over a month.
Steve was in a funk about it all—disappointed over what he called “the reality of things” (a reality of which I was probably about as grating and “real” a part as it was possible to be). Despite the all-but-absurd effort of getting out on watch on time in the middle of the night after perhaps eighty minutes of sleep—of having to waken out of something pretty close to a coma, pull on soaked clothing and shoes, and, in a sleep-deprived daze, negotiate a screaming wind on a heaving bridge in order to get to one’s seat—I had, since Liam outed me in Tarfaya, been trying hard to be punctual. And had been succeeding, if at times resentfully. During the past couple of days I had shown up as much as five minutes before the actual watch change.
However, on this fourth day out of Tarfaya, cored by exhaustion, I had fallen into profound unconsciousness coming off watch at eight in the morning. I had entirely missed wake-up for the 10-to-noon, and by the time Angela shook me to life was already two or three minutes late. Steve was, of course, rowing as I took my seat and got my oar into the water. After a few seconds, he said quietly, “I note that able-bodied seaman Wilkins is losing his military discipline,” to which I replied that able-bodied seaman Wilkins (not to mention his alter ego unable-bodied seaman Wilkins) had never had any military discipline to lose and that furthermore able-bodied seaman Wilkins considered military-type discipline to be a brainless derivative of the authoritarian priesthoods of antiquity—“Gimme ten push-ups!” I shouted in his ear. “Gimme ten Hail Marys!” We pretended we found this amusing, and I was five minutes early for the 2-to-4.
By now I had realized that both Steve and Angela were perfectly capable of applying their private obsessions to whatever ailed or affected the voyage. Indeed, in some surreal way it seemed to me that Angela’s food fixations, which were weighing down the boat, had become a kind of gravy for Steve’s disciplinary fixations, which were weighing down the zeitgeist. As far as I could see, what ailed us at that point had more to do with weather than with human lassitude or the possibility of malnutrition. What ailed me personally lay in their presumption that things were the other way around. Frankly, I was already fed up with being told, if indirectly, that I was a slacker (the whole Pharisee fandango) and could see that if I was going to keep my balance, going to cope in this environment and under these pressures, I was going to have to tune out some of the low-level coercion and anxiety and tune in to the sea.
Having arrived at this simple coping strategy, I was able immediately to expand my valences for the wind and water and, on that very afternoon watch (perhaps not coincidentally), experienced what I might presume to call my first “transcendent moments” aboard. The wind had dropped, and by three o’clock a run of gentle mountainous rollers, separated by vast sinking plains, had settled in behind us. At times, when you looked out from the boat, you were looking down a steep hundred-yard slope of water, a vision simultaneously of terror and vertigo and bliss. The sea was the color of Vicks VapoRub bottles, and th
e sun’s rays, flaring off the surface, laid a silvery filigree along the long lower edges of the clouds. Taking his cue from the rollers, Liam settled into a measured, relaxed stroke, perhaps thirteen or fourteen to the minute—a dreamer’s pace.
We saw a sea turtle, a yellow-finned tuna, a team of acrobatic dolphins—synchronized swimmers, five of which came out of a wave in perfect formation toward the end of the watch and kipped onto their tails in a kind of chorus line. I could swear they were wearing top hats and swinging canes, but I was perhaps dreaming or hallucinating by then—must have been, inasmuch as the objectification of nature was one of the tendencies I had persuaded myself I would try to put behind me out there on the Atlantic. As much as possible I wanted to renew a fundamental sense of the planet: clouds as clouds, water as water, wind as wind—dolphins and sea turtles and sharks for what they are, free of the fearful or fanciful identities we have ascribed to them and from which we are reluctant to allow them to escape. In this, as in other areas, I wanted to be able to see the journey as something more than was promised, whereas the pressure, already, was to see it as something less. And yet on such an afternoon, on such a watch, it was easy to believe that everything would be fine, that Aquarius would rise, peace descend, and that our eccentric little boat, with its unruly crew, would continue to get us from where we’d been to where we were, and perhaps eventually to where we wanted to be.
AS WE CAME off watch on that blissful afternoon, Angela brought me quickly to reality with news that there was no dinner for me, that nothing with my name on it had come out of the day’s dinner pack. She said (a bit too matter-of-factly for my liking) that she had put together a “bowl of soup” for me, which turned out to be a half pack or so of curly little ramen noodles, which supplied maybe a tenth of the calories I craved.
Having by now strained her back and been reduced to rowing just an hour or two a day, Angela had compensated by taking on full-time responsibility for preparing meals. It was the second time in four days that there’d been no meal for me in the evening, and I was not happy about it, especially as I watched others sink their sporks, then their chompers, into lumpy but alluring rehydrations of beef stroganoff, Bulgarian goulash, and Etruscan lasagne. It was ironic, to say the least, that after the hours upon hours of obsessing over food—of buying and shipping and chop-licking, of provisioning the boat as if for the hundred-year run to Sirius—the crew’s skinniest citizen (a groveling Oliver Twist to Angela’s Mr. Bumble) was being told that he must do without his supper. I believed the problem went back to the boatyard in Agadir, where Louise’s partner, Noreen, and I got working at cross purposes in an attempt to get my meals into the proper stowage bags. Obviously, we had missed putting a dinner into each day’s pack—an easy mistake to have made with hundreds of coded meals and meal packs lying around in rather eccentrically organized chaos. (I must make clear that I do not for a moment blame Noreen, who was innocently helping me out—and who, besides, is not the sort of person you blame for things but whom you credit for good things happening.)
As it turned out, Ernst had drawn rice and beans for the sixth day in a row and, declaring that his “azz” was “all rize and beantz,” handed me a full packet of Taste of the Islands Caribbean-style black beans and rice. But it was not the salty, lardy, peppery rice and beans—the yummy, disease-inducing version—that I remembered from my days in Nassau during the 1970s and now craved, but rather a “healthy” California concoction, low on sodium and other poisons and laced with agave nectar of all things, so that after six or seven bites its oppressive sweetness got the better of me, and I passed the container on to Dylan. Even at this point in the journey, Dylan was perpetually starved and hoovered up the leftovers, as one might with actual food, before digging into the remains of some vitamin-burdened gruel that Ryan Worth had slurried up and abandoned. Meanwhile, Ernst had passed me the leftovers of a container of Mary’s Own Butter-Mashed Potatoes with Chicken Breast and Rib Meat. The dish, he informed me, was “a bit dry”—was so dry in fact that, had it been a wee bit less so, a wee bit more digestible-looking, it might have been mistaken for Poly Filla. It didn’t help that I had attempted to soften it with a squirt from my water bottle, forgetting that an hour earlier I had loaded the bottle with a greenish potassium/sodium rehydration compound intended to replace salts during what the directions called “perspiratory activity.” Nevertheless, I scarfed it all down, fell asleep for an hour, and was back on my oar at 6 p.m.
NINETY MINUTES later, at sunset, as we fought robust crosswinds, Steve turned and lamented above the howl that whatever weight reduction we’d achieved at Tarfaya “wasn’t doing us one gawdam bit of good.” Our real weight problem, he believed, was that there were simply too many people aboard, each of whom represented not just body weight but an additional two or three hundred pounds in food and kit, plus the requirement for an oar, a survival suit, a life vest, bigger life rafts, heavier solar panels, and so on. The original agenda had called for fourteen people, not sixteen, and had been altered only out of a need for more money to fund the voyage. Steve, suspecting that a number of crew members could do with considerably less food than they were carrying, felt another 500 pounds should be jettisoned. He also believed that all sixteen survival suits should be donated to the mermaids. Together, the suits, hideous red Teletubby costumes, weighed 300 pounds and were so deep in the storage holds that should the boat have broken up it would have been extremely difficult even to get to them, let alone get them on in time to make a difference.
Personally I hated the suits, found them smelly and claustrophobic, even deathly. This was in part because, years ago, while on assignment aboard the MV Paterson, a Great Lakes bulk carrier, I had tried one on in my cabin, had gotten trapped in it, and (embarrassing though it is to report) had been unable to free myself for more than an hour. During survival maneuvers at Shelter Island, we had put on the suits and jumped off a high jetty into the frigid North Atlantic, where we were sprayed with fire hoses to simulate rough weather. On that occasion, the cold of the late November day combined with the existing stress of the maneuver had caused my asthma to flare, so that when I hit the icy water I was working as hard as a guy in his early sixties can work but on about a third of my normal lung capacity. At the same time, the suit’s neck, which fastens high across the lower face, made mouth-breathing impossible at a time when I needed drastically to increase my air intake. In all, it was the worst experience I’d had since joining the expedition and left me thinking of the suits as some rough coefficient of waterboard torture or burial alive.
Our inflatable life rafts, both of which were attached to the outer front slope of the cabin, represented the more obvious and efficient emergency survival plan. This was in large part because of their accessibility, but also because, with luck and one of the two portable desalinators we had aboard, as many as eight people could survive in each of them for four or five days or more.
At any rate, it was unlikely the survival suits would be ditched. For one thing they were borrowed and were worth $400 each, and David, who was already a hundred thousand in debt on the expedition, would be reluctant to burden himself with another six thousand in liabilities. Moreover, in a sport and on a boat at least nominally devoted to the ecological health of the oceans, it would have been profoundly hypocritical to be stowing our garbage in the holds (as we were), carting it all the way to North America in the name of environmental integrity, only to toss 300 pounds of polychloroprene into the water to be chewed up by the elements and eaten by sea turtles and whales. Such creatures, it should be said, are well known if inadvertent consumers of the megatons of trash that float in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In April 2011, the stomach of a gray whale autopsied on the U.S. coast was found to contain significant quantities of duct tape and electrical tape, a pair of sweat pants, a bath towel, a rubber boot, a golf ball, a tennis ball, a deflated beach ball, hundreds of yards of monofilament and woven fishing line, a length of hemp rope, a plastic flower, a juice box, twen
ty-six garbage bags, a quarter-mile of rubberized string, and a surgical glove.
Every day, from our own boat, we saw floating drink cartons, old fishing tackle, loose net markers, chunks of Styrofoam and plastic, lengths of synthetic rope, clothing, food packaging, dozens of grocery and garbage bags. One morning, a half-dozen corn cobs, newly husked and ready for the pot, drifted past; on another, perhaps fifty rotten muskmelons interspersed with dozens of chunks of plastic crating. On yet another morning, at sunrise, 500 miles offshore, I spotted a white plastic chair bobbing along about twenty yards off our port hull. All of which is to say nothing of the more insidious contaminants, the heavy metals, the barrels of PCBs and jettisoned atomic wastes that are known to rest on the sea floor in parts of the North Atlantic.
And we chipped in our share. Pharmaceuticals and lotions and bits of food packaging were constantly getting washed out the scuppers. In addition to my gel seat cushion, I had already lost, among other items, my water bottle, my gray sweatshirt, one of my rubber Crocs, my food bowl, a container of sunscreen, and one of my baseball hats.
Late one evening, just a week out of Tarfaya, in plain view, one of the ostensibly committed environmentalists on the crew laughingly tossed a dysfunctional headlamp and battery overboard, with an exaggerated “oops!”
Little Ship of Fools Page 9