Through all of this the wind was picking up and the rain falling more persistently. During a downpour a couple of days earlier I had been razzed for taking sanctuary in the cabin, so was determined this time to stay put and row. Besides, I was caked in salt from a dozen good dousings earlier in the day and saw it as an opportunity to clean up. Often the rain showers were so brief that it wasn’t worth taking your clothes off. And yet with a day of dried salt in your hair and on your back, you craved uncontaminated skin. Unfortunately, it could never quite be achieved, since the salt saturates the deepest levels of the dermal tissue. Eventually it pools into sub-surface pockets that create little red bumps, some as big as watermelon seeds. After a day or two, these begin to leak, forming salt sores that can get infected and itchy before they eventually start to dry out—or not dry out, as the case might be. More than anybody, Aleksa was suffering from them—hundreds of them, covering her thighs and ankles and wrists. Before every watch, she dutifully anointed and covered them, sometimes with tubes of fabric cut from leggings or stretch pants, and out she went to row. I’d see her in her bunk after a watch—sometimes, it seemed, on the edge of tears—and while she was occasionally cited for her tendency to disappear for a few minutes during a watch (the idea was that we were to use the head between watches), I thought it commendably tenacious that she was out there rowing at all, and rowing well.
Irrespective of the sores themselves, there is a kind of agony that derives from salt crystallizing and accumulating on the skin, an occasionally crazy-making torment that sometimes at night would set me twisting and scratching, practically delirious for a bucket of fresh water, or even a quart or a cup. For that reason, when the rainfall persisted, I stood up and removed my jacket and T-shirt, then my slush pants and everything else and, in the warmish rain, enjoyed perhaps the best cleansing I had had since Agadir.
10
WHILE WE DID NOT yet know it, the Cape Verde Islands would figure rather dramatically in the evolving shenanigans of the Little Big Blue Theater Company. For now, it is enough to consider that some of the worst tropical storms in the world develop in the area directly over that storied archipelago. Warmed by the tepid shallow water of the islands, rising columns of moist air can initiate immense atmospheric swirls, some of which eventually become hurricanes. Indeed, as many as fifteen times a year, such disturbances find their way into the trade winds and are pushed out onto the Atlantic, with hellish effects—or, in more severe cases, are driven fully across to the islands of the Caribbean and the shores of North America. Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed New Orleans, was just one of dozens of recent tempests that rocked out of the cradle off the westernmost coastline of Africa.
Understandably, even the largest and toughest-hulled vessels stay away from the seventy-foot waves and hundred-mile-an-hour winds that are often the result of these storms; and no captain or crew wants to be in the vicinity of the Cape Verde Islands, or on the tropical Atlantic at all, when such weather is on the loose. But it was exactly where we happened to be at that moment, and for that reason I was jittery in the hour before dawn of our eleventh day out of Tarfaya as Steve and I watched a succession of bluey-green bolts of lightning split the eastern sky perhaps fifteen miles away. Around us, the wind began to drop, as it is said to do in the minutes before coastal storms begin to spin themselves into the vortices that can become hurricanes.
What we couldn’t tell at that point was whether the evolving disturbance was receding or coming toward us, and I was reluctant to report my nervousness, for fear it would seem ridiculous or even cowardly when the others were clearly rather nonchalant about our circumstances. In theory it was not the right time of year for tropical storms; the meteorologists knew it, and so did we. The question was, did the lightning know it—and if it did, why was it pitching billion-volt teasers when it was supposed to be taking a few months off? We had carefully chosen our departure date so as to avoid storms and hurricanes, which in the northern hemisphere occur mostly between early summer and late fall. However, rogue storms have been known to blow well into December or even into the new year—more so these days than in the past, as the warming of the seas contributes to a more persistent rise of heated air and a less predictable season of gales.
The result was that despite my knowing better (despite my wanting to know better), it was storms—the possibility of storms—that more than any other threat to our well-being had galvanized my attention. During the earliest days of my participation I had meticulously assessed the increasing randomness of hurricanes on the Atlantic and had weighed the minuscule likelihood of their occurrence during the weeks we would be out there. I hasten to say that since childhood, storms at sea, or on any big water, had been one of the foremost of my images of dread, particularly where boats and sailors were concerned. For that reason, I did not like the movies Kidnapped or Mutiny on the Bounty. And when I read in my Grade 5 history book the story of Henry Hudson and his ten-year-old son being set adrift by mutineers, I took it personally, imagining myself as the boy and suffering an anxiety about it all that in a sense lingers today. I was haunted similarly by the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956, and still find myself in knots as I look out across Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior to where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in 1975.
I suspect that a portion of my anxiety about ocean storms is my lifelong (largely secret) paranoia about drowning or being lost at sea, both of which hearken intimately to my childhood. When I was nine, in Deep River, Ontario, one of my dad’s English students at the high school, Jack Foster, who was also a family friend, drowned in a duck-hunting accident. I knew him well; he played on my dad’s basketball and football teams. He had been hunting with an older man and had attempted to swim to shore after their canoe capsized in the icy November water. Halfway to land, he stopped swimming and called out, “I’m going down!”—words that echoed in my head for weeks after I was told what had happened, and that still have the power to rattle me.
I was troubled equally by the oft-repeated story of how my Uncle Edgar, a kid of eighteen on his way to war aboard an English merchant vessel in 1943, was torpedoed in the North Atlantic and, on his way home a year later, broken by stress, was hit again. While the details are sketchy, he is said to have spent days alone in a lifeboat (and spent much of the rest of his life in a psychiatric institution in London, Ontario).
My conflation of the family destiny with disaster at sea is perhaps deepest rooted, however, in the events surrounding my dad’s birth the day after the Titanic went down in April 1912. On the night of the disaster, my grandmother, Birdie Wilkins, wrote a letter to my great aunt, in which she expressed a wish that what had been for her an uncertain and agonizing pregnancy could please now just be over. Further down the page she lamented the loss of “all those lives aboard that big ship.”
Her own life ended the following day while she was giving birth to my dad. I was not told until I was nearly ten years old, at which point an aunt read me my grandmother’s letter. I was an impressionable kid, and from the moment I heard the words I equated my grandmother’s death and my dad’s birth—and in a sense still do—with the loss of “all those lives aboard that big ship.”
I had been aboard 700-foot bulk carriers on the Great Lakes during bad weather, had seen furniture in the cabins and heavy equipment on deck tossed around like toys (I am tempted to say like words). Ovide, the naval architect in Agadir, had been discreet in his assessment of Big Blue’s chances, but had volunteered at one point that a spidery craft like ours would do well to stay clear of storms. The catch was that on the night of January 26 we were going directly into the area where the severest of Atlantic storms are born and live out their wrathful and violent lives.
With all of this either awash or buried deep in my skull, I was intensely relieved (although did not say so) when, after an hour, the lightning retreated and the wind returned to normal, signs that the storm was moving east onto the Sahara or farther south down the coast, rather than west into my nightm
ares and neuroses.
Given such apprehensions, it is paradoxical that, like Moitessier, I continued to view the ocean largely as a sustainer rather than a denier of life. More importantly (and despite my skepticism about aspects of Big Blue’s construction), I have an intrinsic, almost loving faith in small boats—far more so than in ships. It is a confidence that goes back to my Uncle Clive, one of the finest boatbuilders in the world during the palmy days of inboard mahogany luxury craft. And to my Grandpa Scholey, who as a young man in Bracebridge, Ontario, worked with Clive and who if he had a mallet, a cross-cut, and a plane could, without plans, build a rowboat out of a pile of scrap pine and have it painted your favorite color by the next day. And to my Uncle Hunter, who taught me how to read the wind and sail.
I had considerably less faith in my anatomy, and during the previous couple of days had abandoned my rowing gloves in an attempt to strengthen my hands. The calluses that had formed on the pads of my fingers and palms during the first ten days were intact, but the interior of the hands, the tendons and muscles and joints, had begun to ache and cramp. Some watches left me with salt-shriveled claws that took me several minutes to straighten once I got to my bunk. However, there was little I could do for my feet, which in the past week, rather than toughening as I had hoped, had been scored into blisters and abrasions where my perpetually waterlogged shoes had scoured away the skin.
The next morning, I spent fifteen minutes cleaning and taping them, and then fell deeply asleep. I wakened with a start at exactly ten o’clock and was three or four minutes late emerging from the cabin for the 10-to-noon watch. As I stepped down onto the tramp, I was surprised to find Liam sitting rather smugly in my seat, Steve in front of him as icy as a day in the Arctic. As usual, Ernst was toiling away with his iPod on, as impassive as ever to the politics of the watch.
I said to Liam, “What’s up?” thinking that he had perhaps needed a break from the rigors of the stroke seat, which demands of its occupant constant focus and a strong steady rhythm, capabilities that I manifestly did not possess. Indeed, I was constantly grateful that I was able to row from behind, tucked into the bow end of the rowing trench, and that the inconsistencies of my rowing affected no one but myself.
“You’re late,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry about that. I’ve been doing my best to get out promptly.”
He said, “Charlie, I’ve decided that every time you’re late from now on, I’m going to take your seat and you can row up front.”
I thought about this for a moment and said, “You’ve decided, have you?”
“Yes, I have,” he said, as if addressing a recalcitrant spaniel. “If you want your seat you can get out here on time.”
I considered taking an oar and cracking open his arrogant English head and, in as calm a voice as I could contrive atop my wrath, told him I didn’t think it was the responsibility of an obviously self-righteous, obviously callow crewman—mere crewman, I emphasized, and newcomer to the expedition—to be disciplining me personally or to be assuming disciplinary powers over the boat. I added that I believed there were other ways of dealing with such issues and that I’d be happy to subject myself to them (which was a bucket of rubbish, in that truly I had no idea what other measures there might be for spanking an aging delinquent, and would have been vilely unhappy to subject myself to them if I had known). I told him that if he needed a break from setting the stroke, which I knew was both difficult and draining, all he had to do was ask, and I’d change places with him anytime.
In the meantime, I said, if he felt it necessary to continue humiliating a fellow rower in front of the crew, I’d simply relax for a couple of hours, or until he got out of my seat, and let the rest of the watch row on its own.
At that point, I asked Steve and Ernst if either of them wanted the stroke seat, reminding them that they’d be far better occupants than I, since they were both much stronger rowers. I had rowed in the stroke seat only once prior, during maneuvers at Shelter Island, and had been awful—too fast, too slow, too jerky. And on that occasion the water had been sheltered and calm by comparison to the open sea. It was only Liz’s patient advice that I should raise my “top” elbow and push off methodically with my legs before getting my arms involved that saved me an hour of amateurish embarrassment. I knew Steve didn’t like the stroke seat any better than I did, probably for the same reasons; and Ernst, who was effectively setting the stroke as we haggled, had taken a turn or two in the seat but, as stated, had been harassed over his inability to establish a satisfactory pace. It was Liam’s seat, plain and simple: he had, like Harbo and Samuelsen, rowed in open dories in the rough seas off the south coast of England—was talented and durable, was in short the perfect pace-setter.
Meanwhile, as I withdrew along the tramp, it occurred to me that I couldn’t exactly retreat into the cabin, where Sylvain was in the bunk, and that I would be far too much in evidence if I simply hung around the bridge or on the far hull. Such was my hypocrisy that I did not particularly want Angela to see me screwing the pooch, much less behaving like an unruly school boy (one inks one’s own tiny resume on an endeavor such as this, and it can survive only so many smudges).
Instead, with the faint taste of crow on my tongue, I eased myself under the safety wire and into the stroke seat. Having spread sunscreen on my shoulders and chest and adjusted my oar, I began a protracted fuss of wrapping my right foot in bits of sheepskin that had been given to me by Margaret. I would row, I had decided, or would at least attempt to, but at a pace that was comfortable for me, however excruciating it might be for the rest of them. I would begin only when I was good and ready.
Still fuming within, I hollered over my shoulder at Liam, above the wind, that his disciplinary measures didn’t jibe with his usual ethic of squealing to the captain.
A little arpeggio of laughter (Ernst’s) erupted behind me, spurring me to wonder, at volume, if Sheriff Roedde approved of his young deputy’s tactics in punctuality enforcement.
When he responded rather weakly that he didn’t know, another domino went down, and I hollered over my shoulder that I didn’t think much of his abandonment and that since it was he who had started all this cowboy jingoism I thought he should at least figure out where he stood on it. Besides, I told him, I thought it was ironic that someone who had been touting discipline all along was now backing some two-bit species of anarchy.
At this point Liam’s somewhat emasculated voice, as English as Her Majesty’s, sounded from the rumble seat. “Charlie, how old are you?” he chirped.
“None’a your fucking business,” I told him.
“Well, grow up!” he said, a joke so lame in the absence of its setup line that I felt I really ought to give him my age, so that he could start over and perhaps salvage the put-down, not to mention his pride as a wag.
When I had come out at the beginning of the watch, I had hoped to row with just one foot in the stirrups, bound in sheepskin, while the other foot, with the worst sores, rested to the side. All of which I could have managed in the rear seat, where the demands of the rowing were less persistent. But in the stroke seat I needed all the support I could get from my legs. So I stuck both feet in the stirrups, the left one unwrapped and thus unprotected from the Velcro’d harness that had helped create the sores in the first place. It was uncomfortable, to say the least, and within minutes had reversed every bit of healing that had taken place during the past day or two. At that point, however, I thought it best not to address the fact that the cause of this new aggravation was the moral officiousness of a pair of medical doctors for whom behavioral curatives obviously fell outside the Hippocratic Oath.
The curious thing was that even in my discomfort and ineptitude, I soon found myself enjoying the more demanding rowing, in effect controlling the rowers who had forced me to be where I was and who I imagined were now chafing under my rather inept leadership.
At watch’s end, as I lay in my bunk nibbling a freeze-dried ice cream ba
r (think vanilla sponge toffee between chocolate cookies), I forgave myself utterly for the morning’s theatrics. And forgave Liam and Steve, although not to their faces.
Since Liam was not yet in his seat when I appeared on deck for the 2-to-4 p.m., I claimed the stroke position for the second time and took a perverse pleasure in the bewildered looks of the others as they came on deck and rather distractedly took their seats. But none of them said a word, and we embarked on another two hours of haphazard stroking (made more comfortable for me by a thick layer of diaper rash cream beneath sheepskin atop both my feet).
For the 6-to-dusk, Liam was on deck and in his regular seat by the time I cleared the cabin. “You sure you wanta sit there?” I asked him as I passed on my way down the tramp, “I’m more than happy to set the stroke.” To punctuate the farce, I told Steve it was great to know that under Liam’s new disciplinary strictures all I had to do to gain command was show up a minute past the hour, a comment that probably had him resisting an urge toward homicide.
On the 10-to-midnight, Liam himself was late appearing on deck, giving me the opportunity to remind him of his responsibilities as a yobbish and insufferable young prig.
And that was that.
Later in the watch, when he came up to the bow to pee (where we all peed, to avoid having to go off the bridge into the wind), he gave me a peace offering of acidic candies (Frooties) and we had a laugh at the absurdities of the afternoon and never again got in one another’s way—in fact were friends from that point forward.
The conclusion, I guess, was that his little gambit had worked, and I was a more experienced, if not a better, rower for it. And was probably a better person. I was certainly a more punctual person and, more importantly from my point of view, a less vulnerable person aboard the boat. The whole ridiculous exercise had given me to remember that, at age sixty-three, I had reserves not only for physical effort but for psycho-emotional preservation, and that anybody who pushed me around could count on my pushing back. While the culture on board was at least nominally that of a “team,” dependent on intimate and constant cooperation, it was, like marriage, not a culture in which you could go without defenses. I had recently read a book called Maximum City, about Mumbai, where the population density, the highest on earth, is a cause both of trauma and indignity, and of immense chaos and squalor. It is a place where people need endless initiative and inner resources to survive. I had already calculated that Big Blue—Minimum City—had more than eight times the population density of Mumbai, and a proportionate measure of squalor. Independent of the broader stresses produced by a tiny boat’s endurance on the Atlantic, it was no wonder we had, each of us, to hold our ground and occasionally to extend our claws in order to survive.
Little Ship of Fools Page 13