While Margaret and I had never resolved our mutual claim on my rowing cushion, she had made peace to the point of offering me her spare Crocs when mine went overboard and a bit of sheepskin to protect my feet, and a water bottle when mine went into the sea. Later in the voyage, she would suggest that at some point we might walk the Spanish Camino de Santiago together. And we talked, if occasionally, about books (she had brought along a Jane Austen novel); about writing (mostly mine, although I had the feeling she had penned a poem or two); about her day job (as a production coordinator on BBC Television shoots); about her family (successive generations of Tasmanian farmers, although her parents were social workers who lived in Queensland, where they were handy to the Indian ashram at which they spent their winters).
By now, as I have hinted, I was developing a grudging appreciation of Margaret, who since losing her job as watch commander had shown an almost heroic fortitude in reasserting herself as someone to be reckoned with.
Late that afternoon, as Sylvain came on deck to row he said to her quite amicably, “Margaret, what is the weather report for tonight?”
She turned, glared at him and said, “Didn’t I already give you the report?”
“No, you didn’t,” he responded with homicidal solemnity.
“Oh, well then,” she brightened, “I’ve got us heading more south again.”
“But what is the forecast?” he said.
“Well, I’m going to keep us heading south,” she said, at which point he rolled his eyes, turned his attention to his iPod, and took his seat.
EARLY THAT evening, I watched a small school of dorado cruising alongside the boat, apparently curious about the oars. From time to time one of them would detour up to a blade as it entered the water and nudge it with its nose, perhaps testing its edibility. For me, it was a quite heady little intimacy, in that each time it happened a tremor of this wild creature’s power came pulsing up the graphite shaft of the oar, like current in a wire, into my hands. Dorado are not pretty fish, but they are elegant: silvery, about three feet long, with blunt heads and underbites that (having seen three of my children through orthodontic reconstruction) I am glad I do not have to pay to resolve. Their showiest feature is their dorsal fin, a sapphire appendage that, extended, forms a kind of ripsaw or Chinese fan, as much as ten inches deep, running the length of their backs.
Even at night we’d see them ghosting along, often in schools of six or eight. At dawn, one or two of them would invariably come rocketing out of the water, hitting some helpless little flying fish or sardine. Or a shark would appear, and in an instant the hunter would become the hunted.
That evening, about twenty minutes before dusk, one of our silvery acquaintances came flaring up out of the ocean about a hundred yards from the boat and screamed toward us, leaping on its tail, bouncing off waves, ripping open the surface like a zipper until, at a point about twenty yards from our port hull, a surfboard-sized shadow settled in underneath it at speed. As in the panic sequence out of some Jacques Cousteau extravaganza, a shark’s snout appeared above the waterline, mouth wide open, teeth on display, and in a last lightning plunge engulfed the fish, sending up a burst of pink mist and vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.
At the time, Dylan was rowing in front of me. He had stopped as the chase ensued, and now turned to me and, as amateurs will, we reviewed the performance in the sort of breathless overstatements I had once used to review plays for CBC Radio: A splashy tour de force!... Oceanic in scope!... Sharkspeare at the height of his powers!
“I think it was a white!” enthused Dylan (White).
“I think a Wilkins,” I said, suspecting in reality that it had been a blue, because of its speed. I had learned to identify sharks during a year living in Nassau in the 1970s when I went almost daily to the harbor to watch the hammerheads and tigers and bulls—basically anything that cruised up to the docks, particularly in the lights at night, looking for a stray grouper or parrot fish, outside the Montagu Beach Hotel.
Dylan and I agreed that we had expected to see more sharks, especially off the coast of Africa. Previous expeditions had seen them daily, sometimes in pairs or schools. They are the governors of the sea, the top of the food chain, as well as the carrion sweepers, and are vital to a healthy marine ecology. But their numbers are down—some biologists say as much as 90 percent during the past fifteen years—due partly, it would seem, to their slaughter for the production of shark fin soup, which has recently become a kind of pop star among China’s vast new population of tech wizards and entrepreneurs—and among expatriates as well. The result is that more than 73 million sharks were slaughtered in 2010 by fishing fleets worldwide, the most aggressive of which were from Spain, Norway, Great Britain, and France, not countries one would expect to tolerate medieval attitudes toward ecology. Such is the value of the soup’s main ingredient (the dried fins go for $350/pound retail) that shark hunters will “fin” a captured shark, which is to say chop off its dorsal and pectoral fins, generally with a machete, and release the animal to bleed to death or to be eaten by its kin, which are attracted to the victim’s blood in the water.
Dylan remarked matter-of-factly that there was a kind of justice in the fact that human beings are occasionally finned by sharks, or “limbed” by them, as the karmic case might be. His argument reminded me of journalist (and ex-seaman) Hunter S. Thompson’s sage comment that “Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.”
When the dorado weren’t around, tuna would occasionally cozy up alongside the boat, gorgeous things, outsized, platinum, sometimes cruising to within inches of our hulls. Or an army of flying fish would slingshot out of a wave, spooked by a predator or perhaps a big blue rowboat.
While whale sightings were limited, we had while on sea anchor seen what I believe was a right whale about 300 yards off our starboard hull. It breached almost invisibly, blew perhaps a twenty-foot geyser, then five minutes later erupted out of the water, a pillar of black basalt, rising thirty feet in the air before crashing into the sea. On another day we saw a pair of pilot whales, the Potato Heads of the sea, a mother and baby, no more than twenty-five yards from the boat.
Our resident expert on whales was Aleksa, who had an affinity for a range of vertebrates but particularly mammals, large ones. She could not have seen many of them in the wilds of Long Island but lived just miles from the beach at Deer Park and had apparently spent enough time offshore to familiarize herself with marine species such as minke whales and fin whales, as well as pilots and rights and grays. She had brought along a bird book, which was quickly seconded by Dylan, who kept it in his junk hammock, from which I often snatched it to read about gannets and frigate birds and albatrosses—as well as our durable little storm petrels, which were forever around us, animating the wind, both riding and dodging it, like electrons in and out of orbit.
Whatever the stresses and pettiness onboard, and no matter what the uncertainties, the sightings were a constant and exhilarating reminder to me of the unabridged dimensions of the journey—the resiliency of a script whose margin illuminations were sharks and whales and dolphins; and sea turtles and flying fish and jellyfish. It was all of this, I wish to emphasize, along with the precious camaraderie of my crewmates, even those I have slagged, that kept me going, kept me sane, that in a sense kept us all going and sane. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, against a backdrop of such splendor and interdependence, of such unspeakable wildness, to give complete ascendancy to the grousing and griping and despondency, not to mention the exhaustion and physical discomforts, that tended to dominate our lives.
Amid all the perils and privation, and bad food and compromised ideals and doubts about one’s stamina, there were mornings and afternoons in the trenches, with the sun blazing, the boat rising and falling like an elevator, the petrels diving, the flying fish soaring—mornings and afternoons when, somewhere deep down, sometimes for just a moment, I knew that as
cheerless as I sometimes felt, I had never been happier; or that as skinny as I was getting, I had never felt more robust; and that as exhausted as I was, I had never felt more alive or invigorated.
As a kind of antidote to the hassles and despondency (and because I sat behind the other rowers where nobody could see me), I would occasionally quit rowing entirely and would simply lie back and gaze at the sky. Or I would get up out of my rowing seat at dawn to better witness the sunrise. Or would wait with my camera for the dolphins or whales, or for the occasional tuna or shark. Or in the wee hours, in the rain, would turn my tiny borrowed flashlight on a stray dorado that was cruising along by one of the rudders.
The water itself played a significant part in this rolling oceanic pageant. And the wind. And skies. One’s connection to the stars on a dark night on the equatorial Atlantic—to Orion and Cygnus and the Southern Cross (barely visible above the horizon at those latitudes in winter)—is as alluring and uncontaminated as it must have been for the Phoenicians and Egyptians of antiquity. We were blessed equally by the sunsets and cloud formations, sometimes a thousand fine rills, like strands of kinked yarn, repeated in parallel from horizon to horizon. And by the power of the swells—by our immersion, day and night, in what I have come to think of as a kind of cosmological opera, replete with mysteries and melodrama and mercies.
On Day 20, in conversation with Liam, I mentioned my pleasure in all of this, explaining that despite the difficulties and exhaustion, I felt grateful to be out there, indeed felt badly for those who had been convinced it was all a pitiful disaster. He was in smart-aleck mode, and said immediately, “I hope you’re being sarcastic,” to which I responded that I hoped he was being sarcastic, because I was not; that I was in fact thrilled to be out here experiencing the Atlantic—its creatures, its rhythms, its vastness—in this immediate and exhilarating way. I said it was “part of what I had come looking for,” his answer to which was that he wasn’t “into travel as Quest.” I told him I wasn’t either but that I thought one of the more useful delusions about an expedition such as ours was that at times it seemed like a quest, or at least represented one.
“It did when we were after the record,” he said.
“To me it still does,” I protested, adding that what bugged me about the journey was that as its original motivation had slipped away, and a need had arisen to create new motivation, some of our rowers had retreated instead into cynicism or frustration.
“Yeah, like me,” he responded quite cheerfully, although he honored our conversation by saying he would think about what had been said. I told him I thought he’d gain more by thinking about the sea. There was a flippancy to the comment, and yet I believed it. So much of the planet is water—yet most of us know so little about the power and reality of the sea, or about our own intangible connections, some of them evolutionary, to its rhythms and draw.
Where ecology was concerned, it seemed that every mile we covered—the sea life, the water, the weather, the implied geography of the sea floor—was a kind of object lesson in planetary connection and history. At a rower’s pace you’re able to see, or at least sense, the intricacies of the connections, as you never can from, say, a jet or even a ship. As for human history, several times in recent days I had found myself thinking about the earliest Atlantic crossings, in particular the slave ships leaving Africa, as we did, with their wretched cargoes and crews. They followed our route exactly, arriving in the Caribbean, where we too eventually hoped to make land and where the ecology of that dire history is all still in evidence: the descendents of the slaves still bearing the names of their masters, still working the fields, still harvesting the flying fish that their forebears harvested in chains.
That night, toward the end of the 2 a.m. watch, the sea came alive with phosphorescence, billions of one-celled creatures, microscopic phytoplankton, ignited by our oars, blinking their tiny greenish lights among the reflections of the stars. These so-called dinoflagellates are said to light up when disturbed so that whatever fish or mammal might be grazing them will be distracted just long enough to allow the wee dynamos to slip away.
At dawn, a school of dolphins materialized, perhaps twenty of them, fishing and goofing around within forty feet of the boat. They are said to move in pods or convoys for protection, but when seven of them came out of a wave in a kind of syncopated choreography, I commented to Dylan that they seemed to get more out of their community life than mere protection.
“They communicate better than we do,” he said over his shoulder, adding that each of them “has a completely distinctive voice—like his own FM radio frequency.” The result is that when one dolphin contacts the others, they know not just that one of their own has located food or encountered danger, or has decided simply to have some fun, but precisely who it is, and where and with whom he or she is traveling. According to Dylan, they have more brain capacity than most primates and are one of few mammals that engages in sex when the female is not in her estrous cycle. “In other words for the fun of it,” he said. Which is more than one can say for those psychopathic squirrels—or for the occasional human being I have met.
BY NOON that day, the wind had revived. And with it our sense of possibility. Our previous assumption that we had located the trades had been based on a rolling sea, long shallow swells that picked us up and drove us forward, then passed gently beneath the hulls. Today’s wind was more aggressive, gustier, and the waves came higher and harder into the transoms and beneath the boat. And they were breaking, both beneath and around us, indeed sometimes overtop of our hulls.
The problem was that after so many false alarms and dashed expectations, nobody dared hope.
On the other hand, something was afoot, and by 4 p.m., when the powerful east wind that had been driving us forward for nearly five hours had neither shifted nor calmed, it did begin to seem that maybe, just maybe.
Just maybe.
By 6 p.m., the seas were the wildest we’d seen. Green water was rolling through the rowing trenches with such force that at one point Steve, who was rowing directly in front of me, was lifted off his seat, spun ninety degrees, and thrown hard into the trench at my feet. As I stood talking to Sylvain at the beginning of the next watch, holding tight to the safety line as the boat heaved, he too was lifted by a wave and thrown onto the outer gunnels in such a way that had it not been for the rigger, which took much of his weight and gave his ankle a good dig, he might well have been overboard.
The real problem with such weather comes at nightfall, when you can no longer see the waves arriving. Everything is a surprise, significantly heightening the chance of being knocked from your seat, or having your oar ripped free, or the handle of it driven into your sternum or teeth. However, Angela was insistent that we row. I was not sure she was the best one to make such a call, since she was not on deck but merely rocking around in her cubby hole. It is surprising how even a few seconds of exposure to high wind and flying spume, or to Poe-level blackness and rain, can clarify the hazards facing rowers on such a night. Perhaps the watch commanders should have been consulted. But Angela was determined that we not become “figureheads,” as she put it.
As we went out onto the bridge for the 10-to-midnight, she informed us that this was “a rowing expedition, not a pleasure cruise.”
“Make sure that’s clear in your book,” Ernst joked as we left the cabin with our life jackets on.
But there was little joking from that point forward. Within minutes, we were under such a heavy dunning from the sea that even Steve assessed the conditions as “pretty dangerous.”
If I wondered at times who would be the first to blow, to rebel openly against the hazards that were occasionally imposed on us, I got my answer maybe ten minutes into the watch. At that point a fit of wild screaming erupted on the far side of the cabin, at first so much like an animal that it took a few seconds for me to realize that it was Tom. He had hit his limits and was now hollering above the wind that he couldn’t row in this GAWDAM FUCKING
WEATHER, that NOBODY CAN ROW IN THIS FUCKING WEATHER, that command could SHOVE IT UP THEIR ASS BECAUSE I’M NOT GONNA ROW IN THIS FUCKING WEATHER!
A minute later, when the commotion had died down, Tom appeared rather meekly on the bridge, ushered along by, I think, Sylvain or Louise, who quickly marshaled him into bed. And there he stayed until dawn, when he arose as hearty and energetic as ever. And not the least bit repentant. And why should he have been? Had he not declared revolt, we might have been out there all night. Indeed, any of the rest of us might have erupted five minutes later.
As it was, within ten minutes of his little blow-up, Angela, to everyone’s relief, shut down rowing for the night. And some ten hours later had not yet called for a resumption. However, this time there was a difference in our inactivity. Rather than dragging the sea anchor, holding out against the gale, brooding on our lost progress, we were riding the gale, surfing it, borne along by what we were now convinced were the trade winds, as well as by the beginnings of the equatorial current.
I will pause here only long enough to restore Tom’s potentially diminished reputation by making it clear that he is no softy and never has been. On the contrary, he was, at sixty-seven, one of the toughest guys I have ever met, with the toughest hide and sinew and the durability of a mule. He grew up in Switzerland, cycling through the mountains, developing lungs and leg muscles that served him well as a teenaged speed skater and, during the 1960s, as a Canadian champion. He has rowed the length and breadth of Lakes Ontario and Erie by himself and, once, having fallen through the ice of Lake Ontario while skating, resurrected himself without help, found a way of drying his clothes on a construction site at twenty below zero, and carried on with his day. A short film about one of his night rows across Lake Ontario begins with the eyebrow-raising credit “Tom Cruise.” Then, as Tom puts it, “an apostrophe and an s drop into place,” so that now it’s Tom’s Cruise, “and everybody’s disappointed because it’s just me and not the movie star.” When he told me this story, he paused, reflected, and said, “What did they expect—that at the age of sixty-something I was going to be played by Tom Cruise rowing across Lake Ontario?”
Little Ship of Fools Page 18