The gist of her message was that whatever the weather or water, we were now going to row night and day continuously and that in so doing we could be in Barbados by February 28, two weeks hence. “You guys are building confidence in yourselves as rowers!” she hollered above the wind. “You’re building confidence in the boat! You know you can do this!”
While all three of these last brisk endorsements were of dubious validity, none was as disconcerting as Angela’s ensuing contention that if she didn’t push us to the limit day and night until we got there, she’d be depriving us of our earned and rightful legacy as ocean rowers. “Part of the experience of rowing an ocean,” she enthused, “is to get there looking like a bag of bones, to get there famished and wasted; to get there in a daze! It’s all part of the euphoria of arrival!”
If it was true, I more than the rest of the crew was on target for some high times. Indeed, it occurred to me as she spoke that by extension, the ultimate euphoria would be to arrive having blissed off into eternity—yet a possibility. For now, I was reminded of what Steve had said when I had complained to him that I was sick to death of the exhaustion, sick of the hunger, sick of the “endless meaningless dousings in cold water.”
“In ocean rowing,” he had reminded me facetiously, “the meaninglessness is the biggest part of the meaning.”
He was no less facetious (in fact was downright cynical) in his response to Angela’s speech. When I mentioned it in passing the next morning, he said, “What speech? Did Angela make a speech?”
“Yeah, right,” I said, unable for the moment to deal with his evolving scorn, especially as it spilled onto me.
But there was nothing sarcastic or facetious in his storming into Angela’s little fo’c’sle at 4 the next morning and unloading on her for her delinquency in continuing to allow Margaret more or less free rein on deck. It seemed to me that as soon as Margaret perceived some stasis had been reached in her relationship with Steve, she would do some little thing, seemingly irrepressibly, to tip his wagon. For example, one day when my leg was healing she said to me—quite officiously and within earshot of Steve—“Charlie, I want to keep an eye on that injury of yours. If there’s even the slightest problem with it, you must come and see either me or Angela immediately.”
The next day on watch, I got thinking about a rather vicious book on pirates that I had enjoyed as a kid—in particular a passage in which it was explained that even bloodthirsty buccaneers needed a degree of coddling against the hardships of the sea. For that reason senior officers on their boats were generally chosen for their “decency” toward the men. The gist of things was that when the pirates weren’t busy pillaging and cutting throats, they were treated with significant kindness and consideration. It seemed that Margaret did not quite grasp that her own job, like that of the pirate officers, should have been to charm, to invigorate, to assuage privation, not to aggravate it.
Meanwhile, Margaret’s insecurities were beginning to rebound on her. Dylan, who had been videotaping interviews with the crew as he had the chance, had mentioned to me that Margaret now refused to be taped. In one brief interview, she had referred to herself as “the bitch” and had explained to Dylan that she felt humiliated about losing her role as watch commander and about being, as she put it, “disliked.” My perplexity over the situation was that there seemed nothing Margaret could do to make things right with Steve or Sylvain, that she apparently had no capacity to go to those with whom she did not get along and broker a truce, ask if there was any way things could be made right. And they, in turn, seemed to have no way of setting things right with her, although I believe Sylvain had made attempts to engage her in conversation as they rowed, undoubtedly with a view to harmony. Where Steve was concerned, it seemed to me that it would not have taken a great deal of diplomacy on her part, or his, to improve the situation quite radically. I should say in fairness to Margaret that most members of the crew had no issues with her, that they more or less accepted her “edge” and did not take it seriously.
As for Steve’s facetiousness, there was little of it on display a week hence when, to celebrate his birthday, Angela fired off a flare at the end of the dawn watch, led a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” and prepared for him what was apparently her standard birthday treat—a kind of Snickers-bar pie, mixed up with candies, marshmallows, and chocolate sauce. Steve accepted it morosely, naturally rejecting any other aspect of Angela’s m.o., even as a leader of birthday parties.
As was often the case these days, I felt aggrieved at him for being so grumpy. For Angela, birthdays counted—she was a mother and grandmother, with no defenses against anyone for whom a birthday cake was just the latest obnoxious reminder of compromised focus or disciplinary decline.
Liz’s birthday five days earlier had been quite a different affair, with hats and bunting and a special meal, and Margaret dressed up as a sort of Chippendale girl, in sequins and a bow tie and skimpy black panties. Steve had been equally dismissive of those hijinks. I had witnessed it all from my rowing seat and had participated only later, when, in the claustrophobic bowels of the ship (party central), Angela gave me a few leftover goodies, including some fiery wasabi peas, harder than calculus, on which I promptly broke a molar in honor of Liz’s twenty-fourth.
Tom and Angela celebrated with a brisk exchange of unpleasantries over a fishing rod that David had left on the bridge, in a holder, with its treble hooks exposed. Earlier in the day, Tom had asked Angela to please order it removed before somebody got caught on it and injured. She had either refused or neglected to do so, and it was of course Tom who eventually got the hooks entangled in his jacket—or more accurately a jacket he had borrowed from Ernst, an expensive one, which he had to cut with David’s bowie knife so the hooks could be removed. Tom’s frustrations had been whetted a few days earlier when he had lost a pair of hundred-dollar slush pants lent to him by Louise.
How, you might wonder, could we just lose things, big things, in such a tiny cabin (the equivalent, one would think, of losing an overcoat in a hotel closet)? And the answer is that we didn’t lose them, we didn’t have to; they lost themselves! You couldn’t keep them: your pants, your T-shirts, your socks, your jackets, your gloves, your hats, your shoes—all of which looked just like everybody else’s gloves and pants and T-shirts! The more so because there was no proper light, and the stuff was soaked and blackish and bunched up. In a heap. In a bag. In the hold. On the floor. In your bunk. In somebody else’s bunk. On hooks or little bungee loops, some of which supported fifteen or twenty similar items. The only thing worse than this diabolical mess was the thought of anybody attempting to sort the mess out, which almost by definition meant cramming it into dry bags or bunk crannies or net hammocks, or hanging it from bungee cords, or out the hatch onto the inflatable lifeboats, or bundling it into other clothing, from which it would never reappear. Occasionally those with a passion for something neater than a dumpsite in Lagos, which by now was what the cabin resembled, would take the heaps of shoes and clothes and push at least some of them out onto the bridge, or “hang” them outdoors on the cabin, which could mean anything from pinning them to the clothes lines in lumps or tying them in job lots around the various generator and antenna poles, to just dropping them on the tramps, where the wind and waves eventually carried everything away.
One evening I spotted my treasured gray sweatshirt on the tramp, soaked. I nipped into the cabin on other business and, by the time I returned to claim it thirty seconds later, it was gone. And nobody had seen it. Nobody ever saw anything. At least of anybody else’s. In our exhaustion and ineptitude, it was all we could do to remember what our own stuff looked like. Dear Angela did some laundry for me one day. However, by the time I reclaimed it off the cabin wall about three hours later, three out of the seven or eight items had disappeared. All of which is to say nothing of our tiny items: our sporks and sunglasses and flashlights; and pens and nail clippers and duct tape; and razors and jackknives. I started the voyage with six goo
d ballpoint pens, and by mid-Atlantic was writing with a pencil stub three inches long that I was sharpening with my thumbnail. If by some accident you came upon your folding scissors in your storage space or dry bag, you used them immediately whether you needed to or not, because the next time you looked they would be gone. Forever. Same with your Penaten or Sudocrem (I cannot, without sounding like a pervert, describe to you the satisfaction of smearing diaper cream on your bottom end and giddy-bits when you’re itchy and squirmy and rashy down there from the dried salt).
On the morning of our thirty-fifth day aboard, I cleaned out the long net storage enclosure beside my bunk, which had begun to fester, and at the bottom, on the floor, in a puddle of sunscreen and argan oil, found my dad’s graduation ring from Toronto Normal School in 1932 (which I had brought along as a kind of talisman and had forgotten was on the boat). Beside it, wet through and reeking, I found the little leather wallet in which I carry my credit cards and documents, all of which seemed accounted for, all happily useless out there in the middle of the ocean.
When our watch came on deck to row that afternoon, the GPS monitor indicated that we had covered nearly 2,000 nautical miles (1,400 of them since coming into the trades) and were quickly approaching the point at which we would have just a thousand nautical miles to go. The endless speculation, often pessimism, over when we were going to reach Barbados had been getting to me—like the harping of kids in the back seat, fussing interminably over how much longer we’d be on the road. For Zach and Nigel, it seemed to be a kind of game; I had heard them making bets on when we might arrive. It grated on me particularly when Deb had suggested on the phone the previous day that at our current pace we would not be in Barbados before the middle of March, nearly a month hence. She had measured our progress as an average of the thirty-five days thus far, including days of just a few miles, when for the past couple of weeks we had been averaging nearly a hundred miles a day, a pace that, if continued, would put us in Barbados within a couple of weeks. The hard part of it for me was that if we went much past the beginning of March I would all but certainly fade away from hunger, given my current state of provisioning and health. Up against the nutritional demands of the twelve-hour rowing day, the rest of the crew too would have trouble surviving much past the beginning of the month.
MEANWHILE, as the weather along the equator got hotter and more crew members got “right down to bare-ass,” as Tom put it, I found myself increasingly out of sync with the evolving naturism of the boat. Not that I cared, except for an occasional inner sigh over my aging inhibitions. I was relieved that there were others who kept at least scraps of clothing in place—bandanas and bits of sheepskin and cotton skivvies. Angela had encouraged the men to bring “cock socks”—presumably to keep their brains from getting sunburned—although, happily, no one did, and we were spared the discomfiture that such wince-inducing finery might have brought to the boat.
Occasionally, in the dark, in the cabin, I would pull my shorts off and just lie there, stewing in the fetid air, sunny-side up, attempting to catch any whisper of sea breeze that might drift into the cabin when the door (normally closed to keep water out) was open for a few seconds as someone came or went. Not that it was always hot. Even at those latitudes, a windy afternoon could go cool with the disappearance of the sun, and nights often required a jacket and long pants.
On the afternoon of Day 36, as I shimmied up out of the toilet well (attempting to yank my shorts into place while I simultaneously got my safety line re-hooked and held the hatch open so as not to get skulled), Liz, who was in the stroke seat and thereby close enough that she could have leaned forward and peeked into the well, said quite jauntily, “Charlie, you’re the only one aboard whose ass I haven’t seen!”
“Yeah, I’ll show it to ya sometime,” I told her, adding that for now I didn’t want to frighten the dolphins, a dozen or so of which were at that moment dieseling along beside the boat, rising out of the waves in syrupy loops, occasionally powering to within yards of the oars before diving out of sight. That morning, just after dawn, one had surfaced within a hundred feet of the port hull and kipped onto its tail and danced upright for longer than seemed possible given the roughness of the swells and chop. At first I imagined it was dancing for the joy of it, or perhaps as entertainment even for a comparatively festered audience such as ourselves. But when a few seconds later it rocketed straight up out of the water, to a height of eight or ten feet, presumably nabbing its breakfast en route, it occurred to me that its tail-dancing was more likely a kind of reconnaissance, a rise to max elevation so that it could survey its surroundings for prey, as the early hominids rose on their back legs to better case the savannah in the pursuit of game.
My resistance to exhibiting my sorry ass might have been trumped in the name of comfort. Certainly there was intelligence in avoiding the constriction of one’s “junk” in the sea-soaked innards of a pair of shorts—or avoiding the crazy-making friction of a salt-thickened waistband or seam. Or in a simple desire to stay cool in the equatorial sun.
However, by this time I had grown so skinny that, besides everything else, I felt entirely too wasted and pitiable to hang around naked. Whereas I had spent months building up a modest reserve of muscle in my arms and chest and had arrived in Agadir at nearly 170 pounds, I had since then been dropping nearly a pound a day, as Angela had predicted, and was by now down pretty close to 140. My knees, the part of my anatomy most in evidence to me as I rowed, bore a distressing resemblance to doorknobs, my stomach and chest to a kind of rumble strip of old chicken skin. Worse yet, my hindquarters and thighs had begun to atrophy. Normally, the legs thicken with rowing. But in the heavy seas, with our quick and truncated strokes, we were not using our legs to push off as one does in more orthodox versions of the sport. Out here, as in the nightmares of Walter Gropius, function trumped form—“core strength” was what counted. There were times amidst the heaviest seas when it was all I could do to get my oar in for a fraction of a second, yank my torso around for a touch of propulsion, and get the oar out before its blade got trapped and its handle became a potentially lethal distaff.
Besides, I was not putting enough protein in my stomach to maintain muscle. By Steve’s account, my carcass had consumed any spare fat and was now cannibalizing muscle in the interest of ongoing metabolism. He had a theory, undoubtedly valid, that the muscles most vigorously in use would be the last to deteriorate. Sylvain had warned us months ago that in the absence of full sleep cycles (which can require as much as 110 minutes and are indispensible for tissue restoration and growth) we would forfeit muscle at a far faster rate than would be caused by mere lack of nutrition. Whereas in the early days I had been sure-footed and quick in getting around the boat, I was now hesitating as I moved from bridge to tramp or hull, making certain I had a handhold for support. The others were graciously, diffidently concerned about me. Tom said to me one day, “Charlie, I think maybe you’re getting just a wee little bit too slim.” And Louise commented that I was “certainly keeping trim.”
As an antidote, I had been attempting to spend a little more time in my bunk. Plus, every time I thought of it and could tolerate the prospect, I stuffed in a protein bar, grateful for the existence of these propitious turds, and even more so for peristalsis, given that there was little I could have done voluntarily to get one down. I had also been eating raisins and almonds and peanuts, which though healthy were a poor substitute for the gooey fats and carbs—the noodles and meat and eggs—that by this point I craved twenty-four hours a day.
On perhaps Day 37, as I lay in my bunk after the noon watch, I mentioned aloud (in what I hoped was a casual voice but was probably recognizable as something close to prayer) that if anybody had a spare pack of tuna or salmon I’d happily relieve them of it in exchange for a package of dried mangoes as soon as one came up in my snack packs. Immediately, a hand (Liam’s) shot around the bulkhead and dropped a six-ounce foil pack of bluefin on my pillow. Later, when I opened the day’s sna
ck pack, I was elated, all but tearful, to find not just a package of cheap shortbread biscuits, which I inhaled on the spot, but one of the five-ounce tins of sardines that, way back in Agadir, I had secreted among my treats. I quickly drank off the heavy oil (which might as well have been sewing machine oil after the weeks of heat in the hold), then gobbled the bony carcasses and licked out the tin, at the risk of cutting my tongue. In the rank air of the cabin, I didn’t have to worry that anyone would suss out my peccadillo on smell alone and, on the next watch, dropped the tin quietly into the sea. There, I believed, it would be at least less harmful than, say, the fishing tackle and Styrofoam and plastic bags that we saw strewn on the water, mile after mile, all the way from Africa to the Caribbean. In the most childlike part of my imagination, I saw my smelly little can, a wee golden coracle, sinking languorously over a period of hours to five miles’ depth. Or settling atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where monkfish and other prudent species would deconsecrate it, scorning it in pilgrimages as a monument to the folly of humanity.
What impressed me, meanwhile, was that everybody else aboard seemed to be flourishing. The women had certainly lost weight but were nonetheless robust-looking—muscular and ruddy and full-chested. Only Angela was something of an anomaly. While ample in the shoulders and thighs, she had, a few years earlier, lost much of her chest tissue to breast cancer. Which didn’t stop her from pitching about the boat on hot days clothed only in her scars and tattoos—and in her estimable self-possession. Her poise may have evolved gradually and at a price (it had taken some punishing blows since Agadir and would take a couple more before we reached our destination), but she conveyed the impression that it was holding quite nicely in the continuing jostle of egos and was unlikely to be further eroded by the occasional splash of flying venom. One of her tattoos was a bracelet, a dolphin-hibiscus motif around her upper right arm, the other an immense cartoon zipper (R. Crumb meets Marilyn Manson) running from her tailbone up the heavy vertical scar left by her catastrophic back surgery of the early 1990s. The latter seemed a lurid if imperfect metaphor for her achievements in keeping her fragments together—her family, her self, the patched-up ambitions of both her professional and athletic careers. There were days, she told me, when the agonies of her wrecked back made everything, up to and including breathing, difficult. Sleeping pills got her through the night, painkillers through the day. And yet when duty called at mealtime, she rallied her energies, rising from her bed of nails, lurching up and down the alleyway between bunks, lumping along on her prosthetic leg supports, dealing lunches, collecting dirty dishes, delivering clean water bottles, picking up garbage, not always with a smile but invariably without complaint.
Little Ship of Fools Page 22