I have been asked many times why it was so difficult to locate the trade winds, the assumption seeming to be that they are a fixed entity with precise spatial dimensions, like islands or a coastline or a highway. But they are infinitely variable from season to season, day to day, hour to hour. Like all winds they are mere air masses, arising and moving as a response to warmth, to cold, to rain, to high and low air pressure. They can be pushed hundreds of miles north or south by heavy crosswinds, or can be absorbed entirely into such winds. At times they may simply disappear. And no one from land, say at a map or computer, can tell you how to find them. What is constant about them, and has been over the centuries, is that sooner or later they resume their westward push, with great if unpredictable velocity, outward from the coast of Africa, somewhere north of the equator.
Not that my desire to get going meant that I had cast in with those “fast past the mast,” as I had heard one of the women refer to any resolute souls still fixated on the discipline and self-denial that with a whale’s helping of luck might once have carried us to an earlier arrival in Barbados. In spirit, I had become a walking Irish prayer—a plea, Loving Father, for just a wee bit of wind at our backs (an entreaty, Holy Mother, for just a wee puffa-weewee along our cracks). I don’t think Dylan White and I were greatly exaggerating in our agreement that rowing at night in the crosswinds was the most difficult physical challenge we had ever faced—going hard all the time, on inadequate food and even less adequate sleep.
A day earlier we had received news from Margaret’s parents in northern Australia that as far as they could tell we were somehow just thirty nautical miles off Sara G’s pace during our first sixteen or seventeen days. As it turned out, the math was off (never the mathematicians), and by the next morning we had word that we were actually a full five days off, which at Sara G’s hundred-mile-a-day average meant 500 miles. Our own average through Days 11 and 12 out of Tarfaya had been a mere fifty miles a day, most of it southerly—in other words still not in the direction of Barbados. Meanwhile, our weather reports suggested that our mileage (like our confidence) was about to collapse entirely.
Angela brooded. Steve chafed. Margaret pushed—particularly at Steve. I think sometimes it was her tone that grated more than her actual directives. The night before, when we were being bounced by forty-knot crosswinds, she had asked Steve (in a voice straight out of officer’s training) to put on a life vest as he came out of the cabin for the 10-to-midnight watch. A day earlier, Steve had instructed Angela to call Margaret off, to have her desist from any attempts at managing or administering him. But apparently Angela’s memo had not reached her, or had reached her and had been ignored. Whatever the case, Steve now invited Margaret (in precisely these words) to “fuck off” and pushed past her out onto the bridge.
The sequence and timing of what followed is difficult to know exactly. But it would appear that at some point later that night, or early the next morning, Margaret phoned in a report to her press agent and “bloggist” in the United Kingdom mentioning that the boat’s “token alpha male” had told her etc. etc.
Such is the power of the Internet that no sooner was the post up than Steve’s wife, Janet, had read it on the other side of the moral universe and, within hours, had spoken to Steve by phone, inquiring as to who the boat’s “token alpha male” might be (just possibly suspecting it was someone to whom she had been married for twenty-five years). In no time, Steve had a sign on his bunk identifying himself as Big Blue’s “Token Alpha Male.” And thus by the miracle of contemporary technology did one day’s vituperation circle the globe and, with no loss of ill will, return to the vessel as the next day’s hilarity.
Later that day, one of the instruments of these eloquent and cosmic exchanges, Angela’s SAT phone, inexplicably quit working. For some, it was a significant blow. Sylvain perhaps felt it most, deprived as he now was of cherished daily contact with his family. For Steve, it meant the loss of communication with Janet and thus the daily weather information on which he and a few of the rest of us had come to rely. On principle, he could not ask to use Margaret’s phone. And she did not offer it. A day or two earlier a warning had been issued that both phones were running low on minutes, even though thousands had been pre-purchased before our departure. Sylvain had offered to buy several thousand more, for the good of the boat, if there was any way to accomplish it.
At that point, David went to work with an old-world fixer’s sense of wires and widgets. Over a period of twenty-four hours, with help from Deb in California (who fed him vital technological information via Margaret’s phone), he succeeded in restoring the phone to use. Meanwhile, Deb was able to purchase several thousand more minutes, so that nobody needed to feel isolated as the sea pounded us, and our tiny vessel groaned and heaved, now nearly 500 watery miles down the coast.
13
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, A rumor crept round that there were crew members pondering the possibility of a landing at the Cape Verde Islands, which were just to the south and from which it might be possible to fly home and thereby call it a day and save face. I do not believe Nigel would have participated in such an action—he was too solid—but at one point I did hear him say to someone in the fore-cabin, “Is there even an airport on the islands?” Later I heard Angela refer to “this one last chance” to abandon the expedition. Such a move would have taken us several hundred miles out of our way in already unfavorable seas and would thus have ended the voyage both for the deserters and the loyalists. It would also have put us in danger along coastlines for which we had no charts, and might well have left the boat to be ravaged or destroyed.
To this point on the voyage nothing had truly outraged me. My disagreements with Steve and Liam had been yappy and confrontational, at least on my part, and born of very specific differences of attitude. But this was different. This was constitutional. No person or group had the right to terminate the expedition for everyone, to assume that their own selfish ends were somehow in everybody’s interests. Even the thought of it, the discussion of it, struck me as a heresy—indeed, reminded me of why in the brutal armies of old even talk of desertion was often rewarded with a bullet to the head.
That day at noon in the cabin, I told Steve I’d overheard comments about going ashore at the islands, and wondered if he knew anything about it. He paused and said abruptly, “They’re just joking,” to which I responded that it was a piss-poor joke, and that if it was not a joke and they meant it, whoever they were, I believed they should get in a lifeboat right now, pack some food and water, and get lost. That was my opinion. I told him that those of us who did not believe quitting was a good legacy were still of a mind to complete this infernal crossing.
I do not know to this day what Steve’s real thoughts were on it all. Over the previous few days, he had swung wildly from the position that we must get moving, must work harder, must apply ourselves diligently, to what in my view was a reckless announcement to several crew members that the only reason he was “bothering to row at all anymore” was so Liam could get back to take his medical exams. Some crewmate you are, I thought to myself (which was precisely what I imagine he’d thought about me on a number of occasions). However, I did not say it to his face, partly out of a reluctance to create enmity but also of an awareness that I could only raise so many hackles without beginning to cast myself as a mulish old fart.
Unknown to me at the time, Margaret, more pointedly than anyone, had considered cutting her losses and heading for Cape Verde—had in fact talked with Angela about attempting to contact a sailing vessel by phone, getting it to pick her up and take her to the islands, from which she would make her way home, or perhaps carry on as crew on a new boat. The plan would certainly have suited Steve and some of the others—but was a mere pipe dream, given the unlikelihood of Margaret persuading a sailboat to pick her up and transport her.
Perhaps Steve was right and the talk I had heard was just chatter—a “joke.” I hoped so.
For now, Steve’s c
oncern for Liam went beyond just getting him home. Often on watch, to help him prepare for his exams, he would present him with a hypothetical sick person—liver failure, heart failure, kidney failure. As the rest of us listened, Liam would explain how he would respond to such a patient, what symptoms he would look for, what tests he would apply, what treatments and drugs.
“Okay,” I overheard one of the kids say to another one morning, sending up the process, “you find a guy on an isolated roadside. He’s unconscious, his vital signs are faint, he’s a guy who stole your girlfriend and murdered your dog. He has a million dollars cash in his pocket. There’s just the two of you. What treatment do you apply?”
It was an unexpected perk of the trip that by the time it ended, three or four of us on the watch were ready for the British medical exams.
Later on the day of the Cape Verde turmoil, Steve hit the low ebb of his journey to date when his beloved and splendid rowing cushion—an eight-inch-high parfait of hand-assembled foam layers—got kicked accidentally into the sea. By Ernst. I will say for Steve that in the ensuing despair and tension he never once fingered our sweet Austrian crewmate as the culprit. He fidgeted effectively through the afternoon watch atop Nigel’s pad, a lesser piece of gear. However, that night, on the 2-to-4, his lower back gave out on him, with the result that for an hour or more he alternated a few minutes of agonized rowing with three or four minutes of writhing around, wincing, and groaning on the tramp. Back and forth it went—from anguish on the rowing seat to anguish on the tramp. I won’t say it panicked me, but it unsettled me. Steve is a tough guy. But with back issues. Janet once told me that at their home he had built the doors on their screened porch extra-wide to accommodate the wheelchair he expected to be in some day. With each new bout of tortured gyrations I begged him to please tell me what I could do to help him. Did he need painkillers? Could I get him the back support (an admittedly crummy little item) that I had bought at Shoppers Drug Mart in Thunder Bay for my own occasionally tricky lower vertebrae?
Blessedly, after an hour or so the groaning and writhing slowed, and twenty minutes later he was rowing pretty much normally. But just as I had recently glimpsed his emotional vulnerabilities, I had now witnessed his physical weaknesses. And I didn’t like it, knowing well that if we lost Steve things could disintegrate more quickly than we might have imagined. The loss of his rowing was one thing; the thought of him aboard and not rowing, his energy festering, was quite another.
Beyond any of this, Steve’s mere example was important to the boat. And he knew it. And in some ways it was a lot to live up to. I occasionally suffered pangs of regret that, at least on our watch, he was pretty much alone on the moral battlefield. One of his worst moments aboard had occurred a week out of Agadir, when he was a few minutes later than normal waking up for the 10 p.m. With a few seconds to spare, he exploded out of his bunk, haranguing the rest of us for not waking him when he slept through the ten-minute warning. He took it as a betrayal, and as he left the cabin made us promise we’d never let him sleep like that again. Or else!
“If I’m late even once out here,” he scolded when I joined him on deck, “I’ve lost my authority.” I told him I believed the respect for him aboard was far deeper than a minor breach of the timetable. But it was like attempting to convince a deaf man to listen.
I was relieved when Steve, using Nigel’s seat pad, a decidedly lesser saddle, took a normal shift on the 6-to-8 a.m. As we talked in the hour before sunrise, the question arose as to why Angela’s rules for stopping the boat—or not stopping it—were so absurdly inflexible. It was well understood that she couldn’t be stopping every time somebody dropped something overboard, but surely some discretion was possible. On the night my own cushion went in, I had wanted to run to her, to dive at her feet, beg her for mercy, plead with her to stop the boat, just this once, to restore my hope, to give me a life. But like a craven sissy, I held my tongue, acceding to the sort of orthodoxies against whose senselessness I was now in outright revolt.
Since then Ernst too had lost his cushion, while others had lost jackets, shoes, sheepskin—forfeitures that brought with them not only discomfort but possible injury and, at very least, a diminished capacity to row. For obvious benefits down the line, it seemed a small price to pay to stop the boat for ten minutes and pick up what was lost, at least when the weather allowed it. But in this Steve was aloft on his own blown petard. As much as anybody, he had been a proponent of the view that we should drive ourselves to the limit—which is to say nonstop. That in torment lay the refinement of the soul. To stop the boat would not only cost us minutes but would deprive of us of the chastening opportunity to have our asses shredded, our spinal nerves crushed, our tailbones restored from Darwinian uselessness to scream-inducing torture mechanisms.
Whatever the case, nothing in the protocol for stopping or not stopping seemed to hinge on the fact that by this time, three weeks into our journey, we were already a mere footnote to the three-boat assault on the record. Ocean rowing doesn’t deal in such subtleties. While its contemporary form is graced by electronics and computers and space-age materials, it is run at oar-level by a jumble of pre-Galilean stupidities. If there was an answer to the question of what items would have had to be lost overboard to compel a brief delay, it was not apparent, except that it was an easier choice if the boat was simply never allowed to turn around.
Coincidentally, Angela did stop the boat late that afternoon under a cloudless sky, on a glassy-calm sea, so that for half an hour she and several of the kids could enjoy a swim, more specifically a buck-naked skinny dip, the first and last of the voyage. As they horsed around, a sea turtle swam past, visible from the deck as a kind of hazy yellow bean bag, its slow fins churning, unseen by those in the water. A minute later I spotted a five-foot tuna about twenty yards off the port hull, but didn’t mention it, as I thought it could be taken for a shark, which might have precipitated panic.
A few minutes later, as Ryan and Nigel scraped at the barnacles, we felt the first tickle of what seemed to be a change of wind and immediately began to speculate on whether or not we had finally come into the trades, or they into us. By 5 p.m. a steady succession of long gentle rollers was coming directly out of the east, pushing us decidedly toward Barbados. Slowly, the mood expanded. By the time the watch changed at six, the rollers had begun to break and we were running a steady three knots.
Throughout my adult life, I have maintained an ambivalent commitment to the meaning and power of prayer. And will say now what I could not have said to the platoon of atheists on my watch (but perhaps should have said): that that evening, on the twilight shift, as the sunset flared behind me, I closed my eyes, summoned the best of my energies, and pleaded long and hard with the Gracious Loving Spirit of the Universe—let us say, with God—to spill some of Her infinite loving blessings our way, to pour Her endless Imagination into the westbound wind, and to let ’er rip immediately if it pleased Her loving and capacious heart.
As I did so, mirabile dictu, I experienced for the first time on the voyage the distinct sensation of pulling away from Africa. By seven o’clock our speed had several times topped four knots, and was spiking at five. We were moving due west.
Angela’s reporting of the speeds off the GPS in her quarters would become a familiar cry during the weeks to come—“Six point four!” she’d scream—or “Seven point eight!” When a monster came through, all but swallowing our transoms and then proceeding up the trenches at waist level, the cry would hit Ten point six!... Eleven point two!... Twelve point five!
While we had rowed a thousand miles or more during the seventeen days since leaving Tarfaya, we had advanced just 500 miles toward Barbados. The absurd part was that with the trades properly behind us, and with some luck, the mileage ahead—perhaps 2,500 miles—could be covered in just a little more time than we had needed to cover the mileage behind.
I FEEL ALMOST embarrassed to report that at about ten that night, without warning, the wind began to
squall then swirl and, within an hour, had risen so hard out of the southwest that by the end of the watch, at midnight, we were taking a dousing every five minutes over our shoulders on the port hull.
At 2 a.m., as we were about to come back on watch, Angela stuck her head out the hatch and called for the sea anchor.
And so it was: another night of standing watches and crowded bunks and all but tearful disillusionment—made deeper this time for being measured against the optimism of the afternoon.
For a while, Sylvain and I tried sharing the bunk, head to toe. But he is a big guy, more than six feet tall and solid, and as soon as he dozed off his feet and legs began colonizing whatever space I wasn’t in. Finally I was trussed up, as if by Torquemada, so that I could barely move a muscle, and was soon half nuts with it and was out onto the floor with whoever else happened to be scrabbling to protect their sanity in the narrow plywood passage. At perhaps 7 a.m., desperate to piss but unable to move in the darkness, I grabbed a steel water bottle that for several days had been rolling around the cabin floor without a top. I filled it to the neck and propped it upright between my legs, thinking to hold it there until daylight. What I had not counted on was the exquisitely therapeutic warmth that now emanated from its metal flanks. Unwilling to forego such a comfort, I began shifting it carefully between my thighs and finally onto my stomach beneath my T-shirt, a far-from-perfect little space heater, but still upright and dry when I woke at dawn.
As we resumed rowing at about 8 a.m., Margaret announced that since David was now in sick bay (he had injured his knee and would not take a regular turn again), we’d each have to row another hour a day to make up for the loss of power. Fortunately, by late morning the watch captains took charge and made the added hour optional, although not until I had put in my overtime, meaning I had no break before the 10-to-noon, which on this day was a dreamy, sun-bathed idyll.
Little Ship of Fools Page 17