That night, we did not row at all; the crosswinds were too high, the sea too rough. As usual at the beginning of the midnight watch, Steve brought a big mug of cold instant coffee onto the bridge, stirred up with Nestle’s powdered cream. He and Tom and I slurped at it in the wind and chatted idly, and I thought about what I wanted to say to Steve by way of a truce. I was still running small talk when he spoke up, explaining that he was sorry for what had happened, that he regretted losing his cool, and that my “deftly chosen words” had hurt him deeply.
There was a silence, and he said, “You’re a writer. You choose your words for maximum effect.”
Under other circumstances, I might have taken this last comment as a compliment. For now, I attempted to explain that I had fired from the hip, with no deft choosing, and that I too was sorry for what had happened, for what I had said. Instinctively, we gave each other a hug.
But I knew deep down that he was convinced I had taken aim at his vulnerabilities, at his sensitivity about his image as a hard-ass, that I had done my best to wound him. Steve, I hasten to say, is one of the brightest, most capable, and impassioned people I know. He is a guy, like David, whom I would trust with my life. And in this case he may have been right: that on some level I had aimed to injure.
He told me he regretted the effect he sometimes had on people, and that he was attempting to be more aware of it—was attempting to change.
This impressed me. Perhaps I too should be attempting to change. I knew people who would say so. On the other hand, it had taken me forty years to locate a degree of contentedness with who I am: which is to say a cloud watcher, a storyteller, a rhapsodist—I like to sing the song. Steve prefers the chant, the lament; enjoys the north wind. During the past couple of weeks he had several times said to me, “Come on over to the dark side, Charlie!” Or “So you’ve finally come over to the dark side.” Or simply, “Welcome to the dark side, my friend.”
On other occasions, he had sung and sung again the chorus from an old Stan Rogers jeremiad about a “broken man on a Halifax pier.” It was a line in which he had located a version, however transitory or cartoonish, of his conflicted and disappointed self. It was his story, as the saying goes, and he was sticking to it.
I regret to report that Steve and I never rowed together again. And yet I do not regret the spat. It was both inevitable and therapeutic. And occurred in a context where forgiveness too was inevitable and therapeutic. And both desired and desirable.
16
TOWARD THE END OF his search for the snow leopard in the Himalayan mountains during the early 1970s, the writer Peter Matthiessen received a packet of mail from home but refused to open it until his mission was over. If the news was bad, he wrote in his journal, there was nothing he could have done about it. “Good news, too, would be intrusive,” he said, “spoiling this chance to live moment by moment in the present by stirring up the past, the future, and encouraging delusions of continuity just when I am trying to let go.”
While I’d have welcomed good news from home, I understood Matthiessen’s rationale. A part of me, too, was attempting to let go, to let be, to let happen. On that account, for nearly four weeks out of port I had questioned the validity of using the phone, as most of the others were doing regularly—of attempting to conflate what was happening at sea (what was happening in my head) with what was happening back home. Not that I didn’t want to speak to my children. I did, very much so—indeed thought about them day and night, in particular because they had faced some challenges at home in recent months. At the best of times over the years, I have felt a degree of remorse at having imposed upon them my uncertain, often peripatetic life as a writer. For that reason, I vowed years ago that I would do my best to show them a normal existence, to provide more or less normal comforts and securities, so that in one way or another they would not end up paying for my obsessions. Which to a degree was what they were doing at that moment. And at times had done in the past. Whatever the case, I dreaded finding them in anything less than good spirits when I was decidedly unable to be of any help or comfort to them.
Nevertheless, on Day 26 out of Agadir, feeling remote and exhausted and perhaps a trifle culpable, I did finally call Thunder Bay on the SAT phone and was deeply moved to hear the voices of my son and daughters so far away, and to attempt to allay their concerns about how I was doing.
“Are you safe, Daddy?” begged Georgia with a plaintiveness that I had not heard in her voice since she was tiny, and to which I could only respond that we had safety lines and inflatable life boats, and that the boat was doing well and had already ridden out some rough seas.
“I’m looking forward to seeing you soon, honey,” I said at last, and she said quietly, “Please wear your life jacket and safety line, Daddy,” at which point the phone crackled and we parted amidst the static with the customary expressions of love and concern.
When I called again a week later from the mid-Atlantic, I found Eden sullen and restrained, in part—if indirectly—over my absence from the scene. When the call ended on a low note a few minutes later, I spent the next couple of watches in a leaden funk, agonizing over my choices, in particular the current one, and what it meant to be out here, away, apart, gone, living out some skittish, perhaps selfish, variation of my private need to keep testing, keep exploring, keep escaping, keep stimulating and exciting myself, at the cost of my connections elsewhere.
Beyond getting farther and farther from a world record, what exactly were we doing out there, I found myself wondering later that day. Steve had a notion that the spirit of going, of taking risks, was of some intrinsic evolutionary advantage to us and was recognized by the human spirit as something best kept alive. Or was there something in the related notion that as descendents of our prehistoric past we have been deprived of the intensity of survival, the risk-taking and derring-do for which evolution has prepared us? “We are hunters,” as Geronimo is reputed to have said, “and when the buffalo are gone we will hunt mice.” He might as easily have said we are seafarers, and when the galleons have disappeared, and the war is over, we will embark on a thirty-eight-foot catamaran with iPods and EPIRBs and a GPS, and we will fight not enemy sailors but among ourselves.
Or was there something simpler at work here—perhaps merely an acknowledgment that life is short, death long, and that as Robert Frost said, “Earth’s the right place for love”—which is to say for imagination, for possibility, for nurturing. I perhaps risk an impertinence in acknowledging that some ultimately practical fragment of me has always known that adventure is, deep down, about honoring and nurturing oneself. And passing the nourishment along—and the impulse toward adventure, too. In my own case, the latter has been well lodged in my kids, all of whom have since birth been irrepressible travelers, often on their own: by river, by air, by land; into the wilderness, through the backstreets. Was it ultimately less responsible to my children and loved ones to be out here, attempting to keep my spirit and sensibilities nourished, than to be depleting such spirit in whatever pursuits might have kept me in harness and in contempt?
In answer to the question of what one is to do with one’s freedom, the Depression-era adventure writer Richard Halliburton (who, like Ryan, was from Tennessee) answered: “Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid... Let those who wish have their respectability—I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic.”
It is lamentably worth noting that Halliburton’s search for the joyous and romantic took him to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in 1939, as he attempted to run a seventy-five-foot diesel-powered junk (built by a Kowloon cartwright named Fat Kau) from Hong Kong to the World’s Fair in San Francisco.
MEANWHILE, if the phone played a significant role on the boat, it had nowhere near the minute-by-minute allure, the addicti
ve authority, of the sometimes blessed, sometimes pestilential iPods or MP3 players.
One night in the mid-Atlantic, I tried to persuade Dylan, who was in front of me, to abandon his earbuds in favor of paying attention to the sea (if that failed, he could at very least be paying attention to me). I explained to him, as it had been explained to me, that in the absence of electronic distraction, which tends to do our inner living for us, our imaginations begin to breathe, to connect with parts of ourselves that are ancient coefficients of wind and water and waves.
“I can connect to myself through my iPod,” he told me, adding that he was busy even now listening to one of his jazz influences—was working out some riffs and arrangements for his work on the stand-up bass. I wondered aloud if in the long run the waves wouldn’t be just as good an influence, which at least gave him a smile.
Back at our adjacent bunks, I mentioned having read that the sound of a vibrating violin string has been found to resonate for nearly a minute in the human ear after the audible wavelengths have gone silent—evidence not just of the range and quality of natural sound, and the levels on which it invites human response, but of the broader allegiance between the planet and human senses. On the other hand, when a mere recording of a vibrating violin string is silenced, there is no resonance at all beyond the click of the switch, and hence no further response from the ear.
I took it as a harrowing symptom of the young rowers’ addiction to their electronic devices that one night when the boat was rocking furiously and anyone without a safety line on was in imminent danger, one of the kids (who shall go nameless for his mother’s sake), took his line off on the bridge and, balancing on the toes of one foot, leaned out recklessly above the abyss to ensure that the iPod he was passing to the other hull would safely reach its destination even if he did not.
Recalling my high school experience of the classics, I told Dylan one afternoon how Odysseus’s rowers had packed their ears with beeswax so as not to hear the mermaids—the Sirens, as they were called—who were likely to coax them astray. “They were like you guys with your iPods on,” I said, trying to convince him that it was only by listening, as Odysseus had done, that they could get a sense of what the sea and its mysteries might be about.
All of which was greeted rather skeptically—perhaps more so when I mentioned that Odysseus had considered the sea’s message so compelling he had had his men tie him to the mast so that he could not be seduced away by what he was determined to hear.
On Day 28, Sylvain, perhaps looking to catalyze his journey inward or create at least a suggestion of privacy or sanctuary, announced that he was imposing a vow of silence on himself for twenty-four hours and that anybody else was welcome to do so too. Immediately several others, including Nigel, Liam, and Zach, joined him. However, no sooner were they out on deck in their new psychic harness than it became clear it was not silence or focus they were observing but merely another version of distraction—they had their iPods on!
During the course of our travels, Sylvain listened not just to music but to e-versions of some thirty books. Beyond inner nourishment, he may have been seeking to isolate himself from his watchmates, Margaret and Ryan, whose patter and attitudes and (real or inferred) antipathies toward him drove him deeper into himself and his recordings as the trip progressed. I know he was unsettled by Ryan’s occasionally compulsive whooping and sometimes yowling accompaniment to whatever he happened to be listening to on his iPod. On perhaps Day 31, Sylvain said to me quietly in the cabin, “I’m going nuts out there. I can hear Ryan’s singing even when I have my iPod turned up.” For their part, Ryan and Margaret believed that the strain between themselves and Sylvain was heightened if not caused by Sylvain’s wilful isolation of himself: “He’s always got his iPod on!” Margaret complained to me one day.
Though there were times when it may well have been the best of possible worlds to escape into a trance of familiar tunes, there were occasions too when I wanted to stand on the bridge, facing the iPodders, and holler at them to get the junk off their heads. I told Dylan one day that I believed an encounter with the unrestricted planet was an encounter with the unrestricted self.
“In what sense?” he said.
“Because we are the planet. We’re of the planet”—not of tiny electronic impulses emerging from an iPod.
Dylan, being Dylan, argued that just maybe we were nothing more than tiny electronic signals.
“But not from a machine built by Steve Jobs,” I protested, having to acknowledge immediately (in the face of Dylan’s persistent and free-thinking cosmology) that maybe we were mere electronic signals emitted by a machine designed by Steve Jobs.
In all of this, I have to admit, it was perhaps more myself I wanted to scream at and declaim to. For I too have been a non-listener, a self-absorber, as inclined as anyone to ignore what nature and the planet (and sometimes its human inhabitants) might have to tell me.
What’s more, I am a hypocrite—I had my own little iPod aboard. My daughters, Georgia and Eden, had pooled their resources and had given it to me while I was in training, and I was grateful for it. Occasionally, on watch in the middle of the night, I would haul it out, start it up, and disappear into Bob Marley or Joni Mitchell or Sonny Rollins—or into Bach or Gershwin or George Harrison.
One night as I listened to the thing I got a most inspired and unanticipated lift. Over the course of our weeks aboard, I had rolled perhaps three or four times through the hundred-odd selections on my playlist but had invariably skipped past a certain unidentified piece because it began with an uninviting flurry of trumpets. Then, one night, bored with the run of my tunes and too numb to work the microscopic controls of the machine, I let the unknown item run. Because of my upbringing in the Baptist Church, gospel music is deeper in me than bone. And here on a rough and rainy night on the Atlantic, when I most needed a boost, I was immersed unexpectedly in a medley of old standards sung by the Native American rhapsodist Rita Coolidge: “Precious Lord,” “Peace in the Valley,” “It Is No Secret”—hymns as comforting to me as a burst of serotonin, as reassuring as the simple truths of my childhood. And to this day, I have no idea how they came to be there.
Meanwhile, I should not be too critical of Dylan, who was at times as attuned as anyone to the messages and weirdness of our surroundings. On the morning of Day 33, as we went out to row in the pre-dawn darkness, we looked at each other in the faint glow of the running light on the bridge and, for reasons that I cannot now articulate, I knew what he was going to say. And he said it:
“Did you hear it?”
And I told him I had: a kind of howling through the wee hours beneath the boat, something neither of us had heard before.
“What did you make of it?” he asked as we Velcro’d ourselves into the stirrups.
I told him I had taken it as a warning.
“Of what?” he said solemnly.
“You know what,” I said. “We’ve talked about it.”
After a few seconds of silence, he said, “You mean paying attention?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“But to what?” he wanted to know.
“To what requires it,” I told him. Which at that moment was about as accurate an evasion as I could come up with in our little game, and about as close to the truth as either of us was likely to get.
WHILE THE iPods gave more or less what was expected of them, the phones seemed a perverse sort of denial of what they promised, which is to say direct communication, a version of the truth. In reality, little in the way of hard truth could be reported from the boat to, say, parents or children or partners in need of reassurance—to those who hadn’t wanted to see their loved ones disappear over the horizon in the first place. What could you tell them? That the sea was so rough we couldn’t row? That we were destined to run out of food? That if you went overboard you were gone? If you were Dylan, I guess you could tell them that the EPIRB you’d received for Christmas, while a reassuring gizmo, would be useless, or pre
tty close to it, if you were in the drink on your own in a storm.
Dylan had mentioned to me one day that his grandparents had attempted to persuade him not to go—had even offered him a financial reward of some sort to stay home. I know that Zach’s dad too was not entirely pleased with his son’s presence aboard the boat (he did ultimately show up in Barbados to greet Zach but did not tell him in advance that he was coming, an omission he called his “revenge on Zach” for putting him through all this anxiety). For Nigel’s mom, Janet, as I have mentioned, there was an all-but-paralyzing stress in seeing her son head off on an untried boat on an uncertain sea, with some decidedly untried crewmates. “Imagine if he and Steve were both lost,” she had said to me at a point during the summer. “That’s half my family!” There were days and nights, with the Sirens chanting, with the boat shipping water like a bathtub, when it occurred to me that if those who had feared for their children and loved ones’ safety had somehow seen us now, all of their darkest trepidations would have been confirmed. It was dangerous, it was a flirtation with death, and if my own children ever decide they want to do something similar, I will do my best to persuade them to stay home, or to do something less “beautiful and joyous and romantic,” as the doomed Mr. Halliburton might have put it. If they insist and go anyway I will quite naturally urge them to carry an iPod, the one item of survival gear apparently indispensible to the contemporary global adventurer.
17
AS THE SUN SET behind us on our thirty-fifth day, Angela stuck her head out of her quarters to say again how proud she was of us all. “You’ve rowed through some of the toughest shit on the planet!” she proclaimed with the authority of one who had rowed through some large and sticky feces in her day. “I have no doubt at all you guys could row any water there is!”
Little Ship of Fools Page 21