Did we UNDERSTAND? she wanted to know.
If we did, we were apparently keeping it to ourselves, because as the sun bore witness to the weltering afternoon, the only sound around was the bristling nor’wester as it whistled through the tramp, blowing us in the wrong direction, and the waves as they crashed into the transoms and hulls.
“Okay, then,” Angela concluded, “from now on I don’t wanta hear any more NEGATIVITY! From now on I don’t wanta hear anymore BULLSHIT!”
In all, it was a strange little diatribe, a Bilko-like cartoon absurdly unsuited to Angela’s mostly gentle and motherly personality.
Predictably, Steve was outraged by the speech. While he has been known to use the occasional blunt instrument in achieving his goals, he is not an overall fan of the disciplinary bazooka, and felt Angela would have done far better simply to outline the issues at hand and to discuss them with her crew, as she had reasonably done in Tarfaya. Plus, to suggest that the crew could somehow overcome the weather with harder rowing was nuts. And Steve knew it—could see it more clearly, I suspected, when it was postulated by someone other than himself.
More specifically, in reconfirming Margaret as her second (albeit relieving her of watch command), Angela had failed to address her subaltern’s increasing redundancy on deck. We didn’t need an extra level of command. The absurdity was apparent later that day when Margaret, who was standing on the tramp beside where I was rowing, said to me, “Charlie, would you go and tell Angela that it looks like the wind is going to get better for rowing and that maybe we should scrape the barnacles while it’s not so good?”
My first and unspoken response was, Well, since I’m rowing and you’re not, why don’t you just stick your head in the cabin hatch and ask her yourself? But, rather than getting balky (as if we needed more of that), I quit rowing, unstrapped my stirrups, went into the cabin, spoke to Angela, and emerged to tell Margaret that Angela said it wasn’t necessary.
Barnacles, I should explain, are stiff little crustaceans that attach themselves to the hulls of ocean vessels and have to be scraped off so that they do not create drag. Left to accumulate, they can form masses as big as flowerpots or basketballs, although typically we got rid of them when they were no bigger than fingertips.
In this case, as it turned out, Margaret was right. By the next day, when scraping the barnacles was suddenly a priority for Angela, the wind and bounce made it considerably more difficult for the kids who went into the water to do the job.
One thing Margaret grasped intuitively was that despite our occasional disagreements, I harbored no lasting antipathy toward her. I didn’t care at all for her m.o. as an “officer” of the vessel, but certainly did not view her as some sort of narcissist intent on manipulating or wasting her perceived antagonists. Some did. I would eventually gain confidential awareness that at least one of her adversaries on board was as intensely antisocial about her as she was reputed to be about others. During the weeks after the voyage, that person (who shall go nameless, and who is not as obviously identifiable as one might assume) told me privately that mid-voyage, when the wind was up one night, he had been so outraged at Margaret’s attitude and arrogance that it had crossed his mind simply to bump her overboard when they passed on the bridge. I did not take the admission as seriously as I would have in mid-journey—indeed I suspect I passed it off a little too casually. I assume even now that it was a significant exaggeration. If nothing else, it was a reminder of how exceedingly raw our nerves had become aboard the boat, how primitive our responses had become—of how stress and exhaustion can impair, if not eliminate, one’s judgment and sense of proportion.
12
ACCORDING TO THE ADVENTURER Dervla Murphy, whose books are an all-but-howling subversion of common contemporary travel practices, the value and meaning of journeying are drastically eroded, if not destroyed, by our inability, even at the far edges of the planet and psyche, to rid ourselves of satellite phones, smart phones, dumb phones, laptops, iPads, iPods, and the like.
Dervla would not have been happy aboard Big Blue, or even among its crew, where the agenda from the start was a kind of post-vaudevillian absurdity of electronic devices and communication. Long before we’d even met one another, we were cluttering cyberspace with torrents of emails and retorts, proliferating muddles of information, much of it sciencey and argoty, addressing everything from nutritional chemistry to meteorology, to suitable sea clothing, to media coverage, to the evolving state of the boat, to commercial sponsorship, to the mathematics of navigation, to how the food would be packed for stowage, to dispatches from the training gym (where the contemporary vernacular is a battle-ready shorthand of “targets” and “loads” and “zones,” of “setups” and “rips” and “reps”). The lot of it came with admonishments from fellow crew members urging us to “communicate,” intensify our training, de-intensify our training, update our logs, identify our requirements, be more sensitive, be less sensitive. Or came with dispatches from Roy, demanding (sometimes after weeks of silence) that we look alive, smarten up, start acting like ocean beaters, prove our mettle, get our money in (the implied salutation invariably being you dumb swabs). There were attached essays and charts, links to more links, the great incorporeal bulk of it exploding from our inboxes with, at best, occasional human touches: bits of drama or humor, such as when Angela and Steve would get sparring (prophetically, as it turned out) over their sense of, say, how many calories constituted an adequate daily supply for the average rower, or whether Steve’s insistence on “liquid” calories (protein and electrolyte supplements, necessary as a concession to his digestive difficulties) was a fitting approach to nutrition. “What would happen,” Angela asked him at one point, “if the desalination equipment broke down, and we had to go on maintenance rations of fresh water?”
“I’d fix the equipment,” responded Steve.
Angela is an intelligent woman, quick with a retort, and yet her emails as often as not read like alphabet soup or the random output of a bingo tumbler. A month before departure, in response to a dozen of Angela’s food emails, each intended to clarify the last, Nigel wrote, “Ok. Shit. I’m sorry. I’ve re-read the emails a bunch of times. I still have a question, perhaps because what I THINK the process is just doesn’t make sense to me.” And so it went.
Our lives in Agadir had been similarly permeated by this bristling electro-profusion. Deb, for example, sat by the hour at her laptop in the women’s apartment, writing emails, sorting data, fussing with photos—and I think even keeping up with her day job back in Bakersfield, California. In her off-hours, she gave up the computer to those of us needing to do our own emailing and Internet searches and photo organization.
So we were all part of the syndrome—especially Margaret, who from the moment she arrived stared into the screen of her laptop with the avidity of a bank hacker. Even at the boatyard and docks, amidst the dust and clutter, she walked around with the thing open in front of her, balanced on her forearm, tapping in the secrets of the admiralty, rustling up “to do” lists in an attempt to alleviate the chaos that was believed (if arguably) to be dragging us all down. On the night Margaret reached Agadir, she and her friend Tony, a British adventure tour leader (Dervla reserves her most withering broadsides for profit-inspired “adventures”), huddled in the shadows of Angela and Deb’s apartment with their laptops and phones, absorbed to the point of ignoring not only the crew but a trio of amicable Moroccans—a Paralympic rower and his friends—who knew Angela and had dropped round to meet us and to wish us well. There the Moroccans sat, like lepers at the feast, attempting to be sociable, speaking French to one another and to Tom, who, with Angela (and briefly with Dylan and Louise), had separated himself from the reluctant Facebook addicts with whom he would soon be rowing the ocean. In the corners of the room, a quartet of laptops splashed their aptly kryptonic light onto the faces of those for whom e-gossip from the capitals of the universe trumped the measly matter of courtesy back here on earth.
I had left my cell phone at home rather than adding programming that would have enabled me to use it overseas. And I decidedly did not want an EPIRB that would, I became convinced, do little more than make my drowned corpse findable if after several days at sea it hadn’t been eaten by sharks.
When Steve accidentally dropped his iPhone into the ocean during our last days in Agadir, I was secretly relieved, as I suspect he was, that another electronic tether had been snapped.
However, if I believed life aboard would be simpler, less “connected,” I was (to utter a monumental understatement) mistaken. From the start, Big Blue was a veritable space garden of blinking lights and hourly recharges and digitized messages—of iPods and EPIRBs and satellite phones. Both Angela and Margaret owned phones and had purchased thousands of minutes of communication time. When they themselves weren’t using such quota to gather weather reports or deliver “content” to their blogs, or to communicate with their associates or family, the minutes were enthusiastically gobbled by the crew, some of whom were apparently under compulsion, if not actual orders, to stay in touch with those at home. Aleksa, for example, made regular calls to Long Island, offering her folks a version of life aboard sufficiently sanitized not to horrify them, as well as explanations to her employer as to why she would be later in returning to work than anticipated.
Tom planned his calls across the time zones so that they reached the family kitchen on Toronto Island every Sunday morning, early enough that he would catch his wife, Luisa, before she left for other activities.
Steve, a reluctant user at first, began regular calls to Janet once he realized that with the help of a family friend, she could provide weather information as reliably as could the meteorologist who was supplying Margaret with her sometimes elastic forecasts. From the beginning, Steve had been appalled that Margaret was receiving $5,000 in reduced fare for bringing aboard weather reports that he now proved, via Janet, could be taken off the web and phoned in by any intelligent amateur. It drove him almost to wall-pounding that the other half of Margaret’s fare had been written off as payment for her by now discredited contribution to the command.
Like Aleksa, Sylvain was in touch with his employers about the number of work days he was likely to miss by being so long at sea. As was Ernst, who made increasingly abject calls to the international shipping company in Vienna that had hired him just days before his departure, on the understanding that he would be at his desk by mid-February to take up his responsibilities. With each distressed call, he added another few days to his projected return date, and as we neared the end of January was all but certain he’d be fired for his unintended delinquency. Beyond this, he had a new girlfriend who worked at the same company and whom he suspected would also deep-six him if he didn’t get back to her and pronto. By the end of the third week, he had evolved a comic fantasy in which he eventually arrived at company headquarters, months late, limping into his boss’s office, unrecognizable with his wooden leg, his eye patch, his missing teeth, har har, matey.
Liam, as much as any of them, was in trouble, having begged six weeks of grace before his final medical exams, which were to begin on March 12, so that he could row the ocean. On I think Day 18 he got a call from his mother explaining (in a mother’s voice I can only imagine) that the dean of the medical school, with whom the family had been in touch over our delays, had called and was threatening to keep Liam from taking his finals if he was not back by such-and-such a date.
So the pressure was on, and the phone pulsed and beeped. Sylvain, I should say, quite quickly received word that his colleagues were happy to cover for him and that he should quit worrying and enjoy his time at sea. It was a vast relief to him—and to me as well. I had shared some of the stress that had crept into our bunk, and now shared in the unburdening.
Sylvain’s more impassioned use of the phone, I might add, lay in his near-daily contact with his wife, Suzanne, and their school-aged boys. On the day mid-trip when he learned that the three of them would be coming to Barbados to meet the boat, he frolicked around the bridge, proclaiming the news with war-whoops and victory gestures, while the rest of us made dumb, or grinned dispassionately, attempting to celebrate Sylvain’s moment as we swallowed our doubts over whether we ourselves would be met upon landing. Some of the crew—Ernst, Liam, Dylan, Margaret, Ryan—knew already that they would have no one there to greet them.
ON THE NIGHT of January 28th, as we rowed through a persistent cross-chop, Steve and I had an intense exchange about our relationships to our families and loved ones back home. If, as Janet said, there was a selfishness to extreme endeavors such as ours and that we were not aware of it, I would argue that based on the evidence, both Steve and I were very much aware of the imposition of our endeavors on everybody and everything around us. As were several other senior crew members. My personal problem was that I did not know quite what to do about it. Except perhaps to compensate those who were affected—or attempt to compensate them. When Steve asked what I thought he should do about his debt to Janet, the only thing I could think to tell him was, “Pay it! Tell her it’s her turn now; back her in anything she wants to do.”
Steve, Sylvain, and Tom were the only crew members in traditional marriages, although Louise and Angela were in long-term same-sex partnerships. And half a dozen others aboard had romantic connections on one level or another. At the same time, it is not just the hours and domestic support provided by those close to us that must be compensated; it is their concern, their indulgence, their fear for our safety—the fear, for example, experienced by my children that I was going to be lost out there, or otherwise destroyed by the demands or privations of the voyage.
Meanwhile, if I so much as mention the intrinsic tortures of rowing the Atlantic—the salt sores and sleep deprivation and various mortal dangers—I am generally reminded pronto that I “chose to participate” and would be well advised to suck it up and keep my complaints to myself. Which brings me to a modest deliberation on the nature of choice, in particular on the Emersonian notion that we choose, say, careers and friends and recreational pursuits, but that we are compelled to endeavors more purely of the spirit and imagination—let us say to art and “belief” and quest. By these standards, my participation in the Big Blue expedition was a compulsion pure and without thought. Not going would have required a choice.
Certainly, when my engineer or teacher friends (all of whom have made career choices) tell me their professional lives suck, the last thing I do is remind them that since they chose their pickle they have forfeited their right to complain. My prescription for unhappy careerists is not that they shut up and quit wallowing but that they talk on and quit working, and quit posthaste, and go traveling, take up surfing, read the Complete Works, walk the Dead Diamond River, build a boat, climb the Matterhorn as Geoffrey Wolff famously attempted to do in, I think, his sixtieth year. Read Geoffrey Wolff.
If you are really restless and nuts, go row an ocean—although I would not have been so pitiless as to drop any of my unhappy career friends onto the deck of Big Blue on the afternoon of our eighteenth day out of Agadir. For one thing, the sea toilet was plugged—at least until David succeeded in clearing out a wad of biodegradable baby wipes that had clumped in its innards. From now on, it was announced, we were to dispose of such wipes directly into the Atlantic, the “optics” of which are so at odds with the Homeric nature of our journey that I shall immediately declare them Too Much Information and proceed into details on why the sea toilet was a disgusting anathema to begin with: it stank, it was awkward, its seat was loose, its compartment in the rear hold was filthy; the floor around it was invariably aslop with brine (or worse); the hatch cover above it was inclined to fall on one’s head. On perhaps my fifteenth descent into the aptly described “shit hole,” I had finished up and was congratulating myself on having survived another evacuation—was attempting to yank up my skivvies (no easy drill while doubled over with one’s elbows pinned to one’s flanks), when a breaker came over
the port transom, first drenching then humiliating me as I poked my dripping head above deck to the delight of my crewmates. From that point forward, when I settled onto the Tecma Hand-Pump EasyFit I snuggled in tight and closed the hatch over my head (indeed, from then on those in the rowing seats began issuing warnings to whoever was on the pot if they were about to be dealt an unscheduled bath).
But I must praise the loo, too. For I am sure there would have been casualties had we been required in its absence to suspend our collective recta above twenty-five-foot waves amid fifty-knot winds, in rain, at night, addled by sleep deficits that in fiscal equivalency would have bankrupted Bill Gates. It is a deservedly obscure fact that the majority of sailors lost at sea are claimed while urinating or defecating off the stern rail—a stern tale. As for rowers on the high seas, I have heard speculation that of the seven who lost their lives on the Atlantic in recent years, as many as three may have gone overboard taking a leak, which they would perhaps not have been doing at such risk had Cap’n Angela been along with her nasty little pump-action biffy.
None of which, I must say, was of any great concern to us as we settled to the 2 p.m. watch. What had us by the throats on that overcast afternoon was, rather, our ongoing and agonizing inability to attract some favorable weather, to get going, to get surfing, to get into the trades, those elusive easterlies that we knew were out there and that had pretty much defined our ambitions through two weeks at sea, not to mention the sixteen to twenty months during which our voyage was in the making. What we got instead were headwinds, crosswinds, ill winds, chill winds, l’il winds, no winds at all, the last of which made for calm water and exquisite rowing but slow progress.
Little Ship of Fools Page 16