More than anyone, incidentally, it was Tom who was exercised about the lack of a proper light in the cabin. He had pointed out several times that the place was elaborately wired so that iPods and cameras could be charged at every bunk but that not a single reliable light had been set into the circuitry. If we capsized or wrecked in the dark, there would be chaos (and of course water) in the lightless cabin and nobody would get out alive. It was a harrowing thought, although at this point no harsher, really, than the thought of another night without sleep or another meal of semi-reconstituted macaroni. Or for that matter another rough watch in the trenches. During our last brief stretch with a tailwind, a wave had come through that for perhaps fifteen seconds engulfed both hulls, floating everything out of the trenches, including a couple of the rowers, who luckily landed squarely back on their seats. Such waves were felt almost as acutely in the cabin, where the roar left you holding your breath, unsure whether your bunk would be attached to the hulls, or to anything, when it was over. A few hours later Louise had said to me, half sincerely, that we probably needed life preservers as much in the cabin as on deck. Which was no joke. The problem, as I understood it, was that by that time at least one of the life jackets had gone overboard and a couple more were irreversibly inflated, so were impossible to row in, meaning there were no longer enough to go around.
Sometime after dawn, Sylvain gave me the bunk, and Dylan and I lay across the alleyway from one another discussing what the long-term lessons of an experience such as ours might be. It was unclear to either of us at that point whether the lasting effects would be invigorating or despairing, or whether our memories of it would in any way approximate our perceptions of the voyage as it happened. I had grown to like Dylan well, to enjoy his intellect and humor as well as the wildly erratic syllabus that constituted his interests and ambitions. At the moment, his creative and intellectual pursuits ranged from filmmaking to creative writing to music, from marine and mammalian biology to philosophy, ethics, and rhetoric.
But he was above all an artist—played stand-up bass in a little jazz combo in Guelph and was the boat’s designated videographer, working with equipment supplied to him by Kelly Saxberg, who had seen us off in Agadir. Dylan’s role as videographer went back to Roy’s days, when Dylan had been offered half off his fare to take boat footage for what an independent television producer in New York, a woman in cahoots with Roy, hoped might eventually become a lurid reality TV serial (Would Steve and Margaret find true happiness? Would Charles curl up and die?).
Dylan’s most persistent and intuitive art, I might add, was that he could, as my grandfather used to say, talk the leg off a table. Tell a story. Construct an argument. Convince anybody of anything. Which endeared him to me, in that I too am of course in a profession whose most imaginative branches exist in the name of convincing anybody of anything. Or at least somebody of something.
Dylan had spent the past couple of summers in the Yukon, near Dawson City, by himself, climbing trees, plucking baby squirrels from their nests and making notes on their size, sex, and survival rates. In this connection, he told me one of the most twisted nature stories I have ever heard: that male adult squirrels will kill their own offspring if they get the chance, the sole purpose being to get as much sex as possible via the mother’s desire to replace her brood.
Dylan spoke so often of his girlfriend, Zoe, an environmental activist and stage performer, that I felt I knew her almost as well as I knew him. During that very week, Zoe had embarked with Nigel Roedde’s girlfriend, Kim, on a snowshoeing and winter camping expedition across eastern Ontario. Which I’m sure was no picnic. However, from the perspective of the boat, with its hectoring and dissatisfactions and exhaustion, it presented as a kind of Christmas card, the loveliest little romp that anyone could imagine. Zoe had written Dylan a series of thirty-three sealed letters, one to be opened on each of the days that it was anticipated we’d be at sea. In the end, he worked his way through them almost twice and was always the picture of ardor as he sat with his daily epistle, sometimes mulling its contents for fifteen minutes or more and then again later in the day. The crew’s heartless and recurring joke was that the last letter would be a Dear John: Goodbye. Fare thee well. Be good. Boohoo.
As for our discussion, Dylan believed there were long-term lessons to be taken from experiences such as ours but for now was at a loss to articulate them. I believed so too but have tended as I get older to take experience for what it is and not demand of it some protracted instructional consequence or moral paddywacks. Picking up the theme, Dylan said it seemed typical of Western thought to want to measure today’s endeavors by the value of their currency tomorrow. At the same time, one does not often get the opportunity to view oneself—to conduct or reconstruct oneself—in the context of such immense and eloquent forces as are present around a small boat at sea. Or, conversely, among a quorum of adults reduced to the social standards of Ralph, Jack, and Piggy in the fictional Lord of the Flies. Given the stage, it seemed entirely possible that one’s inner compass just might be permanently reset, or even rebuilt, by an endeavor such as ours. For now, such a prospect only added to the weariness within me, as well as to an ever-evolving sense that if anything was ever going to mean anything, we were going to have to get moving, somehow to escape this awful trap of ill wind and ennui.
That night as we settled to our bunks and floor space, Sylvain organized a little restorative, an MP3 concert to which we each contributed one song off our iPods. These were broadcast through a pair of teensy, ineffectual speakers, hissy little things, owned by, I believe, Liz or Aleksa. But they were nonetheless a welcome lullaby as we drifted off to sleep, or into the torturous half-sleep that was the best some of us could manage under the circumstances.
Both Dylan’s and Sylvain’s contributions were gently abstract jazz pieces by musicians whose names I did not catch. When I suggested a few items off my own limited playlist, including a Sonny Rollins number and one by Van Morrison, Louise, who was beside me in the alley on the floor, said quietly, “I’d like to hear ‘Tupelo Honey’ by Van Morrison.” I mention this if for no other reason than to make clear that when Louise Graff wants to hear “Tupelo Honey,” or any other piece by any other musician, that is what Louise gets to hear. If Steve was the crew’s disciplinary conscience and Angela its Victoria Regina, the unsinkable Louise Graff—“Louisville Louise,” as I liked to think of her—was its heart and equilibrium. It is a description she would laugh at and reject, but this cultured forty-eight-year-old Kentuckian, with her mild southern drawl, all but breathed goodwill and empathy—and sensitivity and humor and durability. Even when conditions were at their worst and few of us had anything left with which to comfort either our crewmates or ourselves, she would invariably have a little joke or offer a word of encouragement, or would dispense a ten-second back rub or hug.
Louise’s life back in Charleston was a bit of a mystery to me. She had grown up on a horse farm in the Bluegrass State, and I believe now owned and managed several properties that supplied her with a living. One thing she did make clear was that the best of her energies went into volunteer work bringing breast-cancer survivors to dragonboat racing, which provided social and recreational therapy as it raised research money.
Two afternoons earlier, with the Atlantic in chaos, the boat groaning, rain soaking what parts of us the sea hadn’t reached, she had staggered into the cabin, ashen after two hours of dangerous and difficult rowing, but with a mischievous smirk on her face. It was during a week when twenty-five-cent packages of ramen noodles, which were in short supply and were popular because you could soften them in cold water, had assumed a boat value of perhaps a hundred times retail.
“Anybody with noodles need a blowjob?” she had said solemnly, throwing the surly caboodle of us into a gut laugh of the sort that helped keep us from going nuts.
Moreover, she had that rarest of gifts, the ability, under stress, to keep her pain and problems to herself. I never once heard her complain
, for example, about her salt sores, some of which had eaten clear through the skin on her ankles or toes; or about the bruises she’d picked up when the breakers knocked her from her rowing seat, or when an unruly wave caught her oar, sending its handle like a baseball bat into her shins or midsection. She had crashed off her seat so many times that on Day 9 or 10 she had fastened a mat of sponge rubber against the steel stirrups of the seat behind her to save her back, which at one point looked as if a shark had taken a run at it.
It was Louise who taught the girls how to pee without getting out of the rowing trench; Louise who provided sunscreen and soap and duct tape when the rest of us had run out; Louise who when her wet wipes (which is to say her toilet wipes) were gone, rather than begging from the rest of us, as most of us had begged from her, simply ripped her cotton jacket into squares and carried on.
For the past couple of nights, in the mercilessly crowded cabin, Louise had given up her bunk to Tom, as she had done while he was sick. She was thus sleeping on the floor, her head banked against a five-inch plywood ridge—a kind of low dam that separated Angela’s pint-sized quarters from the main cabin in order to prevent water from flowing around should it find its way in.
MEANWHILE, the evolving script around Margaret had taken a turn. At a point when I was off watch the previous afternoon, she had somehow slighted Sylvain, apparently demeaning his rowing or sense of teamwork while showing a preferential endorsement of Ryan Worth, a terrific rower and occasional loose cannon who had recently missed a watch or two because of some mysterious inner malady.
Sylvain was in a sense our Captain Trueheart, and Margaret’s criticisms of him infuriated Dylan, who as I understand it backed Margaret off with a word or two, and then reported his displeasure to Angela, urging her to remove Margaret from her job as watch commander and allow each watch to elect a commander of its own. Which is exactly what Angela did, sanctioning a quick vote that saw Sylvain promoted on one watch (a job he held for mere days before realizing he did not have the attention of Margaret or Ryan, at which point the ever-equanimous Nigel took over). At the same time, Dylan began a judicious and chatty watch command with our own half of the crew.
I will say for Ryan that he had scored points with me a couple of days earlier when during the late afternoon at watch change I had fumbled my thermal mug, my one remaining food container, and had watched paralyzed as it bounced through the gap at the stern end of the tramp into the sea. Almost simultaneously, the blurred likeness of a human being (Ryan as it turned out) exploded from behind me, in full horizontal extension as if in the last instant of flight, and landed hard against the bridge at my feet. Almost before I realized what was happening, my quick-acting benefactor had hooked the mug with his finger and was back on his feet, smiling, as if to present me with an award.
That same night, I spent two hours on the bridge with Ryan, on watch, largely unaware until then that he was a talker on the order of Dylan White (who not surprisingly possessed almost reverential admiration for Ryan’s lively, crowded, occasionally angelic brain). At one point, mid-watch, for twenty minutes straight, Ryan poured out a Vesuvial song of himself, details atop details: his ancestral home in rural Michigan (he could drive a tractor when he was six); his high school football career in Chattanooga (at the urging of his coach he had once ballooned to nearly 300 pounds), his rowing triumphs (including a first in Freshman Eights at the Head of the Hooch Regatta in Chattanooga, in front of 300,000 spectators); his Christianity, his conservatism, his liberalism; his fishing, his hunting, his year of art school; his self-acknowledged attention deficit. He loves beer (during a one-night stopover in Dublin on his way to Agadir, he had fitted in a two-hour tour of the Guinness factory—had in fact chosen his hostel nearby because it offered a free pint at the pub next door).
Toward the end of this mini-autobiography, Ryan addressed the successes and failures of his university career, pausing at a point to describe how what he called “the Hiroshima” had been deployed as a kind of ultimate collegiate infliction among his friends at the University of Tennessee. The gist of the punishment was that some gas-bloated undergrad would lower his naked hindquarters onto the face of a sleeping buddy so that a fart could be blown at powder-burn range directly into the sleeper’s nostrils. The sting was that just as the fart was about to be applied, the sleeper would be roused from his or her slumber. Ryan reported all this quite lovingly—and then later to Tom, who wondered aloud if the gassy punishment might not be the perfect reprimand for those late out of the cabin to row.
Because of the watch system and because each hull had its own sub-watch of rowers, I had gotten to know some of those aboard far better than others. At this point, for example, I had barely spoken to Liz or Aleksa since Agadir. And I had little ongoing contact with Nigel, Zach, or Ryan—or even my dear pal Louise. On the other hand, Tom, Ernst, Dylan, and I had bunks within breathing distance of one another in the rear-cabin and thus ate together, snored in one another’s ears, and yattered away constantly when we weren’t out on deck. While I was rowing, my conversation was pretty much restricted to the rower directly in front of me—usually Steve, but occasionally Dylan or Ernst, both of whom tended to wear their iPods. Often, someone from the other watch would be out on the tramp during the day, particularly in nice weather, and you could chatter a bit with them, mostly about home or food or other travels, or salt sores or bruises, or sometimes the little fish that had just that second landed at their feet.
BY MIDNIGHT or so of that second night on sea anchor, the wind had begun to shift, and by 3:30 a.m. was raging down out of the northeast, giving us reason to hope we were at last coming into the trades. If we were, at the beginning of our seventeenth day at sea, our thirteenth out of Tarfaya, it meant that we were precisely where we had hoped to be ten days ago. And by 4 a.m., we were back on the oars.
By noon, alas, it was clear that we had not found the trades. The wind had swung erratically into the northwest, so that we were taking it against our starboard flank, making rowing as difficult as ever.
At about 1 p.m., Angela appeared on the bridge and, for a minute or more, above the wind, screamed her appreciation of her crew—WE WERE UNBELIEVABLE, WE WERE AMAZING, WE WERE THE REAL DEAL! Naturally, I read myself into this billowing flattery, particularly as Angela noted that she had not expected some of us to hold up under the battering. My unwarranted pride was of course tempered by the awareness that at my current age I was no longer the sort of person who people expected to “hold up” when things got tough.
BUT WE HAD! WE WERE AMAZING! WE WERE UNBELIEVABLE!
Late in the afternoon Angela appeared again, this time pushing her upper body out of the front cabin hatch, shouting to us that she was convening a meeting immediately, so to listen up, both from the bunks and from the rowing seats. First, she announced matter-of-factly that Margaret had been taken off watch command, which by this time we all knew anyway. For a couple of hours after the demotion Margaret had more or less quarantined herself in her bunk, hidden by a big Australian flag that she had draped across its open side. What we did not know was the degree to which revisionism had laid siege to the log and that the reason for the change was that Margaret “needed more time” to deal with what Angela referred to as “her duties as second-in-command.”
In my opinion, what Margaret needed was to forget entirely about her duties as second-in-command, to be allowed to forget entirely; to be decommissioned, decaffeinated, gently encouraged simply to settle in as crew and get some rowing done. I believe that at this stage everyone but Steve could have accepted Margaret fully as one of them, as one of us, as just another stiff on the oars—albeit a good stiff. After years of rowing in the Australian surf, Margaret could row like an Olympian; even Steve conceded it. For her part, Angela had been well intentioned in engaging her—had never dreamed of the hassles that would ensue. That said, it is doubtful that even a saint with a background in diplomacy could have come in at the last second, with no investment in the project or t
he boat, no awareness of the complex history of the expedition, and have successfully assumed the role of the ship’s jimmy. Perhaps if Angela herself had had a longer association with the endeavor, there would have been more respect for her choice of Margaret. However, she too had but a pixelated awareness of how the core of the crew had hung in, clinging to the wreckage, first through Roy’s travails, then through the reconstruction of the boat, the near-bankruptcy of the project and, with David’s perseverance, the eventual revival of it all in this glorious little voyage of the damned.
What might have surprised Margaret was the degree to which her nemesis Steve had, in his sometimes elliptical way, applied himself passionately to keeping the expedition alive. Louise’s contribution too might have come as a surprise to Margaret. I myself would not discover till weeks after the fact that when the expedition was at its lowest ebb financially, Louise had quietly given David another ten grand to keep things moving forward. Nor could Margaret have understood the sacrifices that David and his friends had made in getting the boat ready, or the contributions of David’s parents, who had provided tens of thousands of dollars of their life’s savings so that their son could honor his commitment to the crew. For Margaret, it was in many ways just a gig, a lark, a line on her resume, made possible by Angela’s last-minute ambition to have another rower aboard who had successfully crossed the Atlantic.
The second part of Angela’s message that afternoon was more sobering than its prelude. Besides being ten days behind our own schedule, she reported, we were now a full seven days behind the pace of Sara G and were falling farther behind by the minute.
Whereas just hours ago we had been “amazing,” we were apparently mere rowers again and were going to have to “PUT SOME EFFORT INTO THINGS,” going to have to “TIGHTEN IT UP,” going to have to “GET THE LEAD OUT AND PULL UP OUR SOCKS.” Angela was “aware of some NEGATIVITY” aboard Big Blue—aware of “some TALKING BEHIND PEOPLE’S BACKS!” The time had come to “CUT IT OUT!” she now hollered. It was time “to REALLY GET POSITIVE around here!”
Little Ship of Fools Page 15