Having come late to the expedition, Margaret hadn’t a clue about the nature of some of the relationships aboard, in particular the ties between Steve and David, who at several points during the past year had worked with great determination and mutual respect to salvage the voyage when it had been about to tank. Margaret might better have invoked Angela. In citing David, she had played directly into the hands of Steve, who went immediately to David’s bunk and got him to acknowledge that the new setting was fine, could stay where it was—which it did, to Margaret’s annoyance and humiliation.
But the incident marked a change in Steve’s gradual insinuation back into the running of the boat.
AS THE DAWN watch began atop a now-rolling sea, Steve, still in a mood to talk, initiated a memoirist’s assessment of his complex marriage to Janet, who like him is a physician and, by his assessment, “the only person on earth” who understands him. In recent years they have taken different paths, Janet’s into clinical practice in the little northern railway town of Bruce Mines, Ontario, Steve’s into more-or-less full retirement from medicine.
Nigel’s participation aside, Janet’s quarrel with the voyage was that like many such schemes, it consumed the energy and time not just of its participants but of others, if not everybody, around them. “For over a year, Steve and I have both been totally sucked into this Big Blue vortex,” she told me in December of 2009. “There’s a real selfishness to these extreme commitments that I doubt many of you guys have thought much about.”
She is no flannelmouth, and as expenses mounted, she told Steve at one point to “quit spending my money on this thing.” But she was a collaborator too—had, for example, bought herself a rowing machine so that she could share in the experience. And thus they rowed together in the basement rec room of their rural home, in front of a television monitor, often watching reruns of the show House, which is about (wait for it) the private and professional lives of strong-willed physicians.
“It was a challenge,” Steve told me over his shoulder, allowing that his marriage itself had been a challenge—more for Janet, he acknowledged, than for himself. Which is hardly surprising, given Steve’s hard-driving ways—ways complicated, albeit, by nuance and doubt and perhaps more so by his sometimes disarming vulnerability.
As the watch deepened, Steve’s voice dropped. Or maybe my ears were getting deafer, a result of the salt water that on some watches sloshed into them three or four times an hour. For a day or more they had been itchy and scabby, and I had noticed a reddish-brown discharge seeping from them. Initially, I had assumed it was a species of wax, a protection of some sort, and not the persistent and ugly bacterial infection that it turned out to be. (Sea water, while a purifier, is also a contaminant bristling with bacteria that tend to fester in warm, damp conditions, such as in an ear canal.)
About halfway through the watch I told Steve I couldn’t hear him properly unless I quit rowing and leaned in toward him. I assumed, with regret, that it would end our conversation, and took it as a measure of his desire to unburden that he immediately urged me to go ahead. Which I did—and was rewarded. For during the last forty minutes of the watch, in the half-light of the coming dawn, Steve offered up a jeweler’s portion of bright revelations about himself that I was still sifting several hours later as I went to my notes. He said, for example, that one of his frustrations in life was that he had never figured out what to do with the several great truths that had been revealed to him thus far: among them that he was alone (as both Buddhism and experience made clear); that he was not going to get the world he wanted (as experience had also made clear); and that he was thereby never going to get what he wanted from the world. He told me with a straight face (although with perhaps a twist of irony) that, much like his ambition on the Atlantic, his life’s ambition was to get as “quickly and constructively as possible to the finish line and to check out, to have it done with, neatly tied off.” My own ambition, I told him (also much like my ambition on the Atlantic), was to imbed as deeply as possible in the ride, to give to it what I could, and to deal with the messes as they came. “And to try not to be too big an asshole,” I told him.
“Which must be difficult for you,” he brightened, giving me a chastened laugh, not to mention a dose of perspective, as I returned to my oar.
Of the night watches, the 6-to-dawn was invariably the toughest. Not only did it explode any vestiges of the circadian rhythms to which we might have been clinging but brought with it an almost anguished anticipation of daylight—so painfully slow to arrive as the clock ticked to 7:30 then 7:45, and the sky along the eastern horizon turned from charcoal to gray to cobalt, sometimes to lilac or diluted blood.
Our little foursome rowed solemnly through the last quarter hour, until eventually the first tracer of fire came boiling across the water, and the sun popped out of the sea, as it does in the equatorial latitudes. Backlit by the sunrise, Sylvain appeared on deck, then the others, straggling out of the cabin. And thus the watch ended, and I tossed my cushion to Margaret, and in a somber mood went inside and attempted to get some sleep.
9
FROM THE BEGINNING I had been warned that of the daily torments at sea, the sun would be the most insidious. It could roast you, dehydrate you, give you skin cancer, cause strokes, destroy your vision. When Angela had vetted my kit, which contained three tubes of 45 SPF sunblock, she had virtually demanded that I go to Marjane for at least three more.
So I was surprised after two weeks on the water that I was one of just a handful of people aboard who seemed to have any real apprehension about the sun. Steve and Ryan were already “black” from it, and Angela was “toasting up good,” as I heard her describe her evolving tan when she was on the SAT phone with Deb one night. Meanwhile, Zach and Margaret, and to a lesser degree David and Aleksa, had endured angry sunburns and seemed a trifle casual in their lack of concern over the damage the sun can inflict at latitudes so close to the equator. Indeed, that afternoon, four of the women initiated a nude row on the noon-to-2, claiming the starboard hull for themselves and exchanging their already infinitesimal skimpies for inflatable Mae Wests—worn commando, as Mae would have worn one.
It was not my watch, so I spent most of it inside, nibbling and note-taking, then catching a brief nap. When I stuck my head out at about 1:45 I was impressed to see the girls, full starkers, tugging away at a nice ocean pace of about eighteen a minute. I was more impressed yet to see that the third seat, where Angela had rowed briefly before succumbing to back pain, was now occupied by my Austrian watchmate, Ernst Fiby, even nakeder than the women in that he had no life preserver on and was shaved entirely of both head and body hair. He was wearing his iPod, reminding me of the old story about Marilyn Monroe, who when asked if she had anything on during one of her bathtub scenes, replied, “I had the radio on.”
Ernst’s compulsive attention to his anatomy was “very Austrian,” I had been assured by Tom, who in his own steady exactitude was “very Swiss,” according to Ernst. The two would eventually row with Steve, who referred to the three of them as the Squarehead Watch, although Tom was quick to remind anybody that Roedde was “the only true Kraut” and that a significant part of the Swiss and Austrian identity was that they were “not blockheads,” as Tom put it, but “just the more regular kind of excessive fanatic.” Ernst’s flawless hygiene included a more or less daily shave, top to bottom, and a freshwater mini-shower after every watch, followed by a squirt of Givenchy cologne. He was not merely our sweetest-smelling crew member but was arguably our most talented athlete, having been both a competitive cyclist and a member of Austria’s national junior soccer team, a feeder program for the country’s highest-level professional club. In reality, he was from the old Czechoslovakia, but had left that country as a boy during the most oppressive days of Eastern Bloc communism and had fled to Vienna with his Czech mother, a bookstore manager, and his Austrian dad, now a Viennese railway administrator.
Like Steve, Nigel, Ryan, Liz, and David, Ernst�
�s association with Big Blue went back to the original tryouts in March 2009—to which he had been attracted, he told me, by “an alwayz big interest in cracy adventure.” Ernst was a far tougher rower than I but could be a trifle loose in his focus, especially with his iPod on. So, particularly in the early days of the crossing, he would occasionally clatter his oar off Liam’s or Steve’s, sending Liam in particular into exaggerated histrionics: Fer krissakes, Ernst, what is the problem? Is this going to go on all the way to Barbados? If you can’t stay in sync with me, you get up here and set the stroke! Sometimes Ernst would do that, leading to new levels of rasping and gasping, as well as pleas from Steve that he speed it up or slow it down or even it out.
I knew that if it had been me in the number two seat (which it would never have been, given that the number two rower is a kind of sub-lieutenant who must be steady enough to hold the stroke and occasionally to set it), there would have been a good deal more rattling and prattling than there was. To his great credit, Ernst held both his tongue and his ground, never fired back, answering them rather with the unspoken message that he was doing what he could and that if it was not good enough for them they could (as I heard him say in private one day) “put it up thare arzzes.” Which eventually they did, metaphorically, perhaps having come to an appreciation of Ernst’s persistence and durability, not to mention his reluctance to spill, to sound off, to fall into the pessimism and nattering that too often characterized life aboard.
Ernst was not alone in elevating shaving to an extreme sport—or at least a twisted one, considering the contortions that must be required to shave one’s upper back or, say, bottom end. Ryan too shaved his back and torso at one point, or had it shaved for him. And Margaret cut his hair—“Aussie style,” she said, although I can think of other adjectives that might describe a cut whose chief feature was a three-inch-wide possum’s back running from the middle of his forehead to the nape of his neck. The rest of his skull was a kind of goat pasture of tumbleweed and stubble, some of it half-an-inch long, some chipped hard to the scalp.
Unbeknownst to the happy hairdressers, Angela had, during Ryan’s haircut, been in her bivouac stewing about the disappearance of her prized kit scissors (surgical steel, officially approved)—where could they be? She has a vulgar streak, bless her heart, and when she was informed that Margaret was cutting Ryan’s hair with the cherished implements—repeat: was cutting Ryan’s hair, including perhaps his body hair, with her personal and beloved kit scissors—it was too much for her, and she declared sarcastically that it might have been nice if they’d asked permission because just maybe she’d wanted to cut her own hair, if anybody cared, and that just maybe she’d wanted to cut her pubic hair, if anybody cared (the lot of these absurdist theatrics captured for the ages because Dylan just happened, at that point, to have his video camera rolling).
Meanwhile, Ernst and I were the only crew members who bothered shaving our faces—he for aesthetics, I because I didn’t like the feel of the dried salt in even a quarter inch of stubble. Every second day or so, in the absence of a mirror and warm water, I would rub a little lubricant onto my face and go to work with razors that in the salty air were quickly rusty, corroded, and stubble-clogged. During the course of the voyage, invariably working blind, I experimented with a variety of “shaving creams,” including sea water, Vaseline, sunscreen, argan oil, and “creamy” Vietnamese coffee (which, curiously, worked as well as anything). One night when sleep was difficult I sat up and shaved in the dark, dry, feeling rather proud of myself for this rare if modest accomplishment (especially under conditions in which I was at one moment tipping into the aisle, the next bouncing headfirst off the bunk ceiling).
Once finished I would solicit an assessment from Nigel, who more than some was sympathetic to the boat’s resident Boswell—or perhaps more accurately because I trusted his judgment and tolerance not just in pointing out stray whiskers but in all the boat’s business. Nigel had been a track star at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and until recently had worked as a personal trainer at the GoodLife gym in Guelph. He shared his dad’s sense of fairness and integrity but was “probably a better team guy,” as he put it. He was certainly lighter of spirit—due in part, I suspect, to a contented and confident childhood, some of which was spent with his brother Zack on couches in the emergency wards of northern Ontario, when his parents were called to work and were unable to arrange care for their boys. It was Nigel and Steve’s shared fixation with “excellence,” as Steve called it, that the previous autumn had led the pair to Toronto, where they settled onto rowing machines at the Toronto Island Rowing Club and did not get off for more than twenty-four hours. By that time their backsides were pulp but they had set new world records for a day’s distance on a stationary rowing machine (good preparation, joked Steve, for the effort they were now making on an all-but-stationary boat).
LATE ON THE night of the women’s naked row, amid the usual high crosswinds and a light but persistent rain, I spotted a ship’s lights perhaps half a mile away and clearly coming toward us. During daylight, you could see what you were up against with passing or approaching vessels—a tanker, a container ship, a bulk carrier. But at night, because you could not judge the distance, you could not tell how big a vessel was. A sardine trawler at close range made more or less the same impression as a major freighter a mile or two away. Admittedly, most of the really big vessels, the tankers or container ships, were floodlit and stood out. Not so every deteriorating little breadfruit or scrap carrier from Angola or Namibia.
This particular vessel seemed to be heading east, probably toward Nouakchott or Dakar, but so far had given us no indication of whether it would pass behind us or go across our bow—or perhaps come directly down on top of us, which for the past ten days, in the shipping lanes off the coast, had been one of my sporadic neuroses. Small boats had been hit in the past by freighters coming out of fog or darkness too late to avoid them, and I had only to think for a microsecond about an eight-storey-high freighter bearing down on us at close range to set me glancing around nervously in search of something as insubstantial as a sixty-watt running light on the fo’c’sle of some moldering Mauritanian scrap-bucket. I recalled from my days on the MV Paterson that small boats did not always show up very clearly on even a well-equipped vessel’s radar or scanning system and did not show up at all (or at least to anybody) if the boat was on autopilot and the mate and wheelsman were plastered or asleep.
It was at night, too, that the specter of piracy tended to slither out of the darkness into one’s skull. If we were to be taken, it would most likely be here off the coast of Mauritania or Senegal, two of the poorest and most desperate countries on earth.
“What have we got that pirates would want?” somebody had laughed in the cabin a couple of days earlier.
“Us!” blurted Ernst, who works in the shipping industry and can cite chapter, verse, and line on any number of contemporary high-seas crimes. One of piracy’s commonest forms these days—a form that eliminates having to sell a tanker-load of oil or a couple of million pounds of ore on the black market—is to take a boatload of hostages and demand a ransom for their freedom. Which was Ernst’s point. Americans are a preferred target. We had six of them on board—and the Stars and Stripes flying from the bridge. All of which gave me to wonder whether David, a guy who once routinely carried a revolver, had stashed any sort of weapon on the boat. I will say that he had both the wiles and the guts to take what measures might have been necessary to protect himself and the crew. Not only had he encountered his share of pirates in Tbilisi after the Georgian civil war, he had spent his early years in the U.S. playing and winning a high-stakes mind game with American immigration authorities. David entered the country legally via a farm exchange program in 1995, at the age of twenty, was given a one-year working visa, and went to work on a fruit farm in Hawaii. Unhappy with his prospects, he left the program voluntarily after a few weeks and took a job in a building supply store on Maui. Six months lat
er, thirsty for adventure, he flew to California and from there, sometimes hitchhiking, made his way to Long Island to be with friends who had also come from Georgia on the farm exchange program.
Today, happily, David lives and works legally on Long Island. However, for several years after his arrival on the east coast he tiptoed around the authorities, working in marinas in Florida and New York, quietly learning the trade that would eventually make it possible for him to run Shelter Island Boats and to put our own audacious vessel on the Atlantic.
The ship that had originally set me guessing passed behind us—but too close, it seemed, for a ship that had properly seen us on its radar. An hour later, a mysterious red light came bobbing into view at some indeterminable distance off the port hull. It occurred to me that it might be an illicit vessel, although we ultimately decided it was the mast light on a sailboat whose hull was below the horizon line. As it blinked from sight, I heard a disturbance in the water about fifty feet away. Steve had been having trouble with his Crohn’s and was up from his seat. I mentioned it to Ernst, and as we squinted into the rain we heard a lengthy whistling exhalation that I am certain was a very large whale, undoubtedly more aware of us, with its delicate sensors, than we were of it. Sure enough, a few seconds later, the musk of its immense breath, smelling more like a barnyard than the sea, was briefly in the air around us.
While I harbor no specific wariness of sea creatures, it spooked me to consider that intelligent mammals a hundred times the mass of our boat, some of them shepherding babies ten times our size, were cruising the surface waters within a stone’s throw of us, or perhaps passing directly underneath, just a few feet beneath our rudders. If they had surfaced from there, either in curiosity or perceived self-defense, as whales have occasionally been known to do, we would have been immediately in the sea and swimming for our lives.
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