A few seconds later, as I was about to quit my excavation, I was astounded to come across a commercially foil-packed chicken breast, realizing only as I pulled it free that there was a small tear in its packaging. A warning that included the minuscule icon of a skull said DO NOT EAT IF SEAL HAS BEEN BROKEN. I stared for several seconds at the forbidden fruit, reluctant to ask anybody what they thought; if they advised me not to eat it and I did anyway, and died, I’d look rather silly. He knowingly ate rotten meat. Even dogs know better. In a curious inversion, perhaps known best to the very desperate or hungry, I found myself asking not What if it’s bad? but What if it’s good? Therein hung the risk as I perceived it; I could be missing out. I read the warning again, looking for loopholes, then read the small print, and realized the package contained nitrates, preservatives, at which point I ducked into my bunk and opened it, convincing myself that the slight garbagey smell and the bluish pallor of the chicken was just the poor cabin air and light.
Using an old trick of my dad’s to test wild mushrooms, I placed the teensiest of fragments on my tongue and determined that at very least a molecule wouldn’t kill me. And took a wee bite. And waited. And then a bigger one. And then engulfed the thing almost without chewing. And promptly fell asleep. And woke up... alive! At least alive enough to go out and row. Which is what this sport is all about. That and world records. (Never has there been a sport so obsessed with world records: for rowing across the Atlantic from the east, for rowing across the Atlantic from the west, for rowing across the Atlantic from all other directions... in a pea-green boat, etc.)
It is with restrained pride I report that while one record eluded us aboard the boat, we did claim another, or at least I did: for speed and distance in the projection of a chicken breast out the esophagus west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
I will not linger on the feat, except to say that about twenty minutes into the evening watch I was gripped by a brief but intense nausea, followed by a rumbling in the stomach. I barely had time to link these to my big score of two hours earlier when my throat opened like a birth canal, my abdomen contracted, and a somewhat molested-looking loaf of greenish yardbird shot out of me at the speed of a Katyusha rocket and disappeared over the horizon—all of this so noiselessly and delicately as to go unnoticed by those laboring in the trench before me. Actually, Dylan did turn to me about thirty seconds later and said, “Did you hear something?”
“Like what?” I said.
“I thought I heard a kind of whump,” he said—probably the chicken hitting a cargo vessel somewhere off the coast of South America.
BY THIS TIME, I was happily and shamelessly accepting gift rations. From Louise, from Ernst—perhaps most notably from Tom and Steve, the latter of whom occasionally slipped me a wallet-sized slab of his homemade fruitcake, from a recipe out of The Joy of Cooking. Tom’s wife, Luisa, had sent aboard several puck-shaped ingots of panforte, an Italian spice cake, which Tom dispensed to me in molecular portions when I was starving and which I installed on my tongue with the care and anticipation of a scientist placing fuel in a reactor.
And did I give back? Of course. Having realized that the 7D-brand dried mangoes I had brought were much prized, I would eat a few pieces from a new pack and then pass along the rest to whoever seemed most in need. On other occasions, I simply traded whole packs for, say, jerky or cashews or granola.
And did I feel sorry for myself? Not at all. If anything I felt grateful for the support I was getting as my food dwindled. Less happily, I considered the fact that I, more than some, had at one time been committed to traveling light, to getting across in thirty-three days—to doing what we’d set out to do. Now, ironically, I was all but an ambassador for those comfy with the fact that we were nearly two weeks behind schedule. The double irony was that I now had to rely on crew who had perhaps not initially believed as I had. Occasionally I wondered what the most lavish of our self-provisioners had been thinking. Surely not that we would be rowing for seven weeks! Their capacious stowage was more than just insurance—it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: we must insure ourselves in case the trip goes longer than anticipated, and by insuring ourselves (significantly increasing the weight of the boat) we increase the possibility we will require insurance!
During my rare pangs of despair, all I had to do was look across at Dylan, who, like me, had not brought enough food—largely, I suspect, because he was a student and didn’t have much to spend, rather than out of faith we would arrive in a jiff. When I had mangoes, I gave him some. On other days I’d look over at his pathetic little bird meals and would have to look away. On I think Day 42, nothing came out of the galley for him at dinner. I later saw him eating what I believe was a smear of peanut butter on a half piece of U.S. Air Force soda bread, a kind of biscuit that came foil-sealed, as dry as plaster, one of the most dispiriting items on our increasingly dispiriting menu.
An hour or so after Angela’s announcement about rationing, Liam came forward in the cabin and, standing between Dylan’s and my bunks, told Angela he thought a meal, not rationing, was in order, and pretty much pronto. While grateful to Angela, I was with Liam on this: eat now, deal with hunger when it comes (as for some of us it already had). It is apparent to me in retrospect that those with a mind to do so could insult Angela openly over her navigational or administrative choices, and that through her general grace and tolerance, they were more or less forgiven immediately. Had it been otherwise, Steve would long ago have been buried in durance vile. However, to question her decisions about food, about meals and their presentation, was a more personal and intimate offense.
Liam had no sooner departed her bivouac than Angela erupted in rage over our ingratitude—and undoubtedly over a dozen other stresses, the lot of which had been nudging her toward the boiling point. It was awful. We didn’t appreciate her attempts to keep us fed, to keep order—didn’t realize how hard she was working.
Dylan, who all along had been a kind of ombudsman for the crew, immediately reminded her that just the previous day she had told us how wonderful we were.
“I guess I was wrong,” she shot back.
“Maybe so,” agreed Dylan, who suggested now that she had “misunderstood Liam,” whose “communication skills” were “not what they might be.”
“I’ll say,” said Angela, who took the opportunity to slag those on the crew who she believed were undercutting her authority. Her example was directed anonymously but clearly at Steve, who she said had “pretty much decided he could do whatever he wanted with the direction of the boat.”
“I think there are some misunderstandings about people’s intentions,” said Dylan.
“Maybe there’s gonna be a mutiny,” chirped Angela, almost hopefully.
“Or maybe you’ll come to understand that much of the problem here is not insubordination but simple miscommunication,” burbled Dylan, to which she uttered a soft, derisive laugh. “Oh, you’re good,” she said.
And he was good. Was a kind of diplomat. With teeth. And thus he talked her down, leaving her brooding in the little stall that was increasingly a kind of symbol of her life aboard, particularly of the limits of her authority.
I agreed with Angela, at least to the extent that too many of us didn’t appreciate her considerable skills in nursing the expedition along, or staying out of its way when required. One of her biggest problems lay in having to accommodate everyone from hard-dieseling middle-aged men—men unaccustomed to being told what to do, in fact accustomed to doing the telling—to wilful boys (in some cases more judicious than the men) to restless young women who, despite their independence, needed her occasional nurturing and reassurance.
Angela’s genius for the latter was most evident with Aleksa, a strong rower and a good kid, temporarily burdened by her thousand salt sores, her scrapes, her sunburn, her injured ankle, her homesickness, her loss of closeness with Liz who by this time had partnered pretty much exclusively with Liam. After each tough shift, day and night, Aleksa would rock forward
through the cabin to tell the captain how it was, to partake briefly of her company and receive her blessing. What she received almost as an afterthought was Angela’s considerable experience in dealing with the hundred nagging ailments that can befall a rower at sea. I’d hear them talking softly, mulling every lump and lesion; and never once, in weeks, did Angela, who was often tired and in pain herself, deny Aleksa the support and comfort she needed.
She showed little such patience for Ernst that same night when he mentioned to her that to save his job, he might attempt to get a helicopter to pick him up off the boat as soon as we were within helicopter range of land (about 200 miles). We were still nearly 700 miles out. I’m not sure the plan ever got parsed into specifics. However, it was quickly clear that Angela had little sympathy for anyone who wasn’t willing to blow off a mere job for the satisfactions of adventure at sea and in particular of completing a tour aboard Big Blue. “One thing goes, another comes along,” she called from her hidey-hole, assertively including everyone in the cabin in what might otherwise have been considered a private conversation.
“I don’t live that way,” objected Ernst (who manifestly has lived that way through much of the adult portion of his forty years on the planet).
“Take the risk!” she goaded, to which he responded that he’d already taken too many risks that didn’t pay off.
She said, “I don’t understand what kind of a company wouldn’t cut you some slack in your current situation.”
“They’ll consider me unreliable,” he said. “Shipping’s a small industry. Everybody knows everybody.”
Clearly, Angela’s perspective was angled to the interests of the boat, to keeping a good rower aboard. At the same time, I appreciated the broader rattle of her argument, or at least part of it: that the corporate world could dance in hell, which, in reverse, is what she perceived it had been telling the rest of us for years.
Meanwhile, feeling badly for Angela as her argument with Dylan wound down, I scribbled on a scrap of paper that there were “lots of us on board” who appreciated what she was doing, and how she was doing it. I handed it through to her, wishing (perhaps pathetically) that I was someone from whom such an endorsement would mean more to her. But from the beginning I had been on the periphery of her sense of who aboard mattered. The journey quite simply was about those who could make a difference in the speed of the boat—or those she sensed might be a problem for her (who were in some cases the same people). So remote was my relevance, indeed, that Angela never seemed to give so much as a thought to how she might be depicted on these pages. And more power to her. Why should she care? In her world, writing was promo, not revelation, and certainly not inquiry. As her blog entries about the trip eventually made clear, the story of Cap’n Angela existed not in the assessments of some scrawny back-country scribbler but in the jargon and butt-polishing of “professionalism,” the truisms of self-advertisement: The Big Blue experience was amazing! My crew was amazing! The expedition showed what people can accomplish when they work together.
But I liked her anyway—all the more for her perceived apathy toward me, because it gave me added freedom to come and go (it is so much easier to insinuate yourself into whatever’s going on when nobody’s paying attention). Months ago, I had, at her request, sent her one of my books so she’d be able to see what I did—had in fact offered to help her edit her autobiography, which she said was sitting drafted but unedited in California. However, she never mentioned either again, leading me to suspect that her own writing may well have been as tedious to her as mine would undoubtedly have been. The one book in the women’s living room in Agadir was an uncracked Harlequin about three inches thick, whose embossed cover showed a pneumatic young belle in a mauve gown, a gal with a foot-long neck, gliding purposefully into the antebellum mansion where all such stories invariably achieve their loin-chafing denouements. It wasn’t that Angela didn’t have an imagination. On at least a couple of occasions, onboard or in Agadir, she made fond if oblique references to sexual practices that, it seemed, involved leather and handcuffs and (because it was Angela) quite possibly whipped cream and chocolate fondue. And she sustained a vision of herself that, against the indignities of the past, invariably included at least a fretwork of optimism and reinvention. It was always a pleasure to see her sitting in a kind of lotus position on the starboard bow, eyes closed, hands extended and upturned, as if to honor the water and receive its blessings.
OTHERS WERE more curious about what I was up to. At one point, David, bored by the inactivity forced on him by his injured knee (he had at this point played a thousand games of solitaire on his iPhone and had read everything on the boat, including the toilet manual), asked me rather plaintively if I had any of my books with me; he wanted to read them. On another day, Margaret said to me, “Charlie, about this book you’re writing,” and she tendered a few questions, aimed at discovering, I suspect, whether she might have to murder me. Steve, dear chap, had already read most of my books, and I was flattered to know that Louise, of her own accord, had sent for a U.S. edition of a memoir I had written about working in a cemetery as a kid. Sylvain had peeked into my opus, as had Tom’s wife, Luisa. And Ryan told me outright that the book he’d asked me for had been passed along immediately to I think his mother, an English teacher, who was on orders to let him know if it was any good.
In the meantime, I plugged away at my diary (with my two-inch pencil), filling it up with lurid assessments of everything and everybody, until one day I took it from its pouch beside the bunk and, in one of those “uh-oh” moments, knew immediately that it had been disturbed, that somebody had been reading it while I was out on watch. Which changed things for me. It would be so easy for someone who did not care for the way in which I had depicted them simply to toss the diary to the dolphins. I considered whether I should start taking it out on deck with me. But how? In my pants? Plus it was probably more vulnerable than ever out there in the weather, and would be sea-saturated within a day. So I simply pushed it deeper into its cradle of junk and carried on.
BY THIS TIME, the great leap forward had begun to lose its engine, the winds their consistency. More and more the waves were coming out of the north, pounding our starboard flank instead of our transoms. The result was that we were being pushed farther into the tropics, farther south, where we did not particularly want to be.
The mood too had turned. The discipline and sense of order that were a kind of sub-clause of the consistent weather had begun to fray. Routines drifted. Normally, as I have mentioned, we switched sides every watch, in order to even out the strain on our bodies, mostly on our shoulders and abdomens. But because of a shift of weather and seating arrangements on Day 43, I rowed twice in succession on the starboard hull in a heavy crosswind that pushed an endless assault of breakers into our laps, chests, and faces. By the end of the second of those watches, at dusk, the ribs on my right side felt as if someone had taken a tire iron and pried them apart and driven wedges into the gaps. The only way I could get to sleep afterward was to take four 222s, thirty-two milligrams of codeine, which metabolized down into a soothing itsy-bitsy of morphine.
Three days later, during the evening, the waves were as high as any we’d seen, driving down on us out of the northeast, as tall as the Lusitania, some of them bringing screams from the crew as they appeared out of the rain or darkness, throwing the boat briefly into chaos. Just after dusk, one such wave yanked Dylan out of his seat and stirrups, spun him like a break-dancer on his back, and dropped him, briefly stunned, against my shins. At some point over the past few days he had developed a habit of frantically shipping his oar when he saw a dangerous wave coming, then jumping up out of his seat so as not to get walloped. All of which was understandable, except that in doing so he would leave the oar unattended, a potential flying battle axe if the oncoming wave happened to pick it up. For the most part, I had little to offer in the way of rowing advice. However, in this case, because I was the likeliest victim if the oar flew, I cau
ght Dylan’s attention early on the 10-to-midnight and implored him please to secure the oar if and when he got up, at which point he turned to me and said quietly, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” and never did it again.
Throughout the night, Angela did everything she could to keep us rowing under conditions she knew were beyond most of our capabilities. “Just a little wee stroke when you can,” she urged me at one point, aiming a flashlight at me from the fore-hatch. At another point, she passed me out an insulated mug of the sweet, creamy Vietnamese instant coffee that she knew was pretty much a craving for me and of which there was very little left aboard.
Toward the end of the 2-to-4 a.m., having had all we could take, Dylan and I simply abandoned our seats and huddled against the cabin in the rain, unable to see each other in the darkness, though we were just a few inches apart.
After perhaps five minutes of squatting with our windbreakers over our heads, Dylan said in a whisper, so as not to wake those inside, “What do you take on your cheeseburgers?”
Immediately and with no intended irony I laid out my preference for tomato, dill pickles, onion, relish, mustard, a bit of hot pepper, a slice of bacon.
Did I like the tomato sliced thick or thin? Had I tried cucumber? What about fried mushrooms? Fried onions? Vidalias? Sourdough bun? Toasted? Blue cheese? Hot mustard?
The symposium turned to fries, to sweet potato fries, then to what Dylan called “condiments for fries”—chipotle mayo, green chilli sauce, sour cream. By this time, I was craning my neck to hear every gripping word. He knew a place called Dangerous Dan’s at Broadview and Queen in Toronto that served a “kahuna” burger, with pineapple and peameal bacon, and a “McEwan,” a bun-encased heap of ground sirloin, exotic mushrooms, and soft French cheeses, topped with a grilled lobster tail—all of this discussed with great ardor as the Atlantic raged around us and a more persistent rain than we had seen for days ran off our noses and chins.
Little Ship of Fools Page 24