The topic was decidedly less funky the next afternoon, when, as if to celebrate the return of the sun, Dylan embarked on an all-but-heroic monologue—on evolution, on scientific modeling, on correlatives for human intelligence in the animal world. At one point he wondered aloud whether altruism had “an evolutionary purpose.” In other words, did extending oneself to others advance the species in any Darwinian sense? Was the Golden Rule a scientific as well as a moral tenet? To my mind it most certainly was; it ensured community survival, kept populations at a level where they were big enough both to breed and to withstand catastrophe. None of my crewmates considered anything as banal or folksy as the Golden Rule to have any connection to the evolutionary well-being of the species. When I asked one of the kids if he even knew what the Golden Rule was, he said: “Don’t let them piss on your fire,” then “No smoking within ten feet of the pumps”—both of which, it occurred to me to remind him, possess at least a smidgen of Darwinian validity.
AT SOME POINT during our forty-fourth night aboard, the mileage counter on the GPS slipped below 500 miles. And was at 360 by sunset of Day 46. Our navigational challenge as we entered the voyage’s unforeseeable final week was that the winds were driving us ever-farther south. In order to make land at Port St. Charles, on the back side of the island of Barbados, we absolutely had to keep a course that would take us north of the island’s most northerly point. Had it been possible we would have landed on the island’s near or east coast, the windward coast. However, that coastline is rocky and mountainous, subject to heavy surf, and there are no suitable landing spots (which is why crossings sanctioned by the Ocean Rowing Society end at Port St. Charles). The difficulty was that we could not get to Port St. Charles by going around the south end of the island; the currents and winds would not permit it in a rowboat. A Russian solo rower had gone south of Barbados some years ago, hoping to travel north up the back side of the island to Port St. Charles. But as he passed the island’s southern extremity he was swept hard to the west by current and wind and ended up in South America.
On that forty-sixth evening, the GPS indicated that we were latitudinally just six or seven miles north of the northernmost tip of Barbados. In the mid-Atlantic we’d been a hundred miles north. In the event that it became impossible for us to get around the north tip, we could call for a tow into Port St. Charles. If we did so, however, our crossing would not be recognized—or would be designated an “assisted” or “incomplete” crossing. Skeptical though I was about the designations of the Ocean Rowing Society and the world record, I was at least determined (more determined than some, it seemed) that we be credited with a “completed” crossing.
I report all of this both for its own sake and because on the next night it precipitated a yowling quarrel for which I have to take a certain amount of responsibility. Our course by this time was a mere two miles north of the island and we could allow ourselves to drift no farther toward the equator for fear of getting swept south of Barbados. With the wind still coming steadily out of the northeast we were resigned to taking a beating from the crosswinds through the night. And indeed were taking one.
The problem started when Margaret came on watch at about 3:55 a.m. and, for a few seconds, raised the Plexiglas cover on the instrument shelf atop the bridge and fussed briefly with the GPS, which sat within inches of the autopilot controls. Aware that we had zero margin for going farther south, I said to Steve when I came into the cabin that maybe somebody should check with Angela or David to see what bearing we were supposed to be on, and make sure that we were still on it. Dylan overheard me, burst forward into Angela’s quarters, and reported that Margaret had been at the autopilot, reminding Angela not just that we had no leeway for any further movement south but that Margaret had at times adjusted the boat’s bearing to facilitate rowing on night watches involving her half of the crew.
“I’ve had it with these fuckups over the bearing!” somebody bleated from the fore-cabin.
As the clamor rose, Angela, spurred to duty, lurched through the cabin and out on deck, returning minutes later to report that the bearing was acceptable—and that Margaret was most indignant at having been suspected of boat crimes that she did not commit. While I felt somewhat badly that I had asked about the bearing in the first place, and badly to have added to Margaret’s ever-shifting burden, I (like the others) felt a great sense of relief that we weren’t about to lose another couple of miles and perhaps the entire battle to stay north of the island.
ROUND 45 of the Rowing Knockouts took place the following day when Steve, offended by yet another of Margaret’s intrusions on his sense of self and decorum, walked into Angela’s quarters—or stuck his head in—and in a stage whisper that could be heard from one end of the boat to the other, told the captain that he had had it with her pathetic evasion of responsibilities (chiefly her inability to “control” and muzzle Margaret), had had it with the insufficiencies of her leadership, had had it with her avoidance of command—she had failed him, had failed him big-time, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore.
It was a grim and irrevocable flaying, and when it was done Steve informed Angela that he would finish the row as an independent contributor to the effort but that from this point forward she was to consider him off limits to her authority.
I have occasionally wondered why Angela did not strike back, as she had every right, perhaps even a responsibility, to do. She could have ordered him to shut up, or off her boat, or to menial labor, and might well have received some support from the crew. But she was intimidated by him, and for that reason she failed to respond—as well as for all the other reasons Steve gave in defining the inadequacies of her captaincy.
Rather, she endured the keelhauling with a shrug—a kind of ho-hum retreat both into her strengths (her capacity for stoicism and self-sufficiency) and into all of the aforementioned weaknesses.
The lot of it left me not only distressed over the state of the boat’s politics but annoyed at Steve, who I thought could have held on another few days without having so thoroughly to denounce Angela’s failures and to separate himself from them in such an open and scornful way. What’s more, his withdrawal came at a point in the voyage when it was of no conceivable benefit to anyone but Steve (and then only in that it drew a line between him and the flawed universe in which the rest of us were bound and doomed to exist). What would Steve’s boat look like? I thought later—and had to admit that while there might be just one person on it (Steve), it would look a lot more seaworthy than mine or that of anybody else aboard. Which is fine if pure seaworthiness is the goal.
Later, I felt obliged to tell Angela that obviously not everybody felt the way Steve did about her. From within the recesses of her cramped berth, she looked out at me and said softly, “I guess ya gotta do whatcha gotta do.”
Certainly Sylvain did what he had to do late that night when Margaret and Ryan joked openly about his being forced to retreat briefly into one of the holds because he was bare-legged and on the verge of hypothermia. “You two wouldn’t know about cold legs,” he told them in response to their needling. “You’re both wearing an extra pair of pants made out of half an inch of fat”—which as I understand it brought a quick end to the discussion.
The following morning, when Margaret advised Sylvain that he should stop rowing when she and Ryan arrived (late) on watch, so that they could all row in sync, his response was less a protest—a doing-whatcha-gotta-do—than a sort of laryngeal explosion, an alarming and profane yowl, that brought an immediate silence to the boat, and a new respect for the man who, for weeks, had been a model of restraint and self-control. Later, however, when I told him I knew how upset he was because of his unprecedented deployment of the F-word, he said, “Oh, no, I’d never do that—I don’t use that word.” I let the matter rest, and for several hours entertained doubts not only about what I was sure I had heard but about the broader validity of my recollections as a memoirist and storyteller. The doubts were allayed that evening when
I mentioned the incident to Nigel, who assured me that Sylvain had “definitely lobbed a few F-bombs” and that I wasn’t “the only one who was surprised.”
At this stage, I confess, I found it curiously reassuring that I was not alone in finding something comically inspirational, something borderline poetic, in the thread of absurdity that ran so persistently through the Big Blue saga. Ernst told me he thought our story might best be told as a kind of 1930s-Berlin-style cabaret: the gentle captain, the cunning first mate, the hard-driving lieutenant, the loud-singing but frequently discordant crew—the lot of it framed by a sub-cast of mermaids and sea gods, with perhaps a cameo by Zeus or Poseidon. Steve had been incensed a day earlier when Ernst had referred to the expedition as “a little bit unprofessional”—had taken it as a strike against David, toward whom he was infinitely sympathetic. I took it as fair comment by a guy whose English is a trifle uncertain. I think he meant “rough around the edges,” and am ever loath to imagine what a more austere or Hallin-like “professionalism” might have looked like aboard Big Blue. (Would the absence of toothbrush handles and a more military attitude have improved matters or simply brought us closer to a parody of professionalism, made of us a sort of contemporary HMS Pinafore?)
As for my own gaunt professionalism, I was by this time almost pathetically thin and exhausted. The night rowing got harder as my strength drifted. The daytime rowing, at least under favorable winds, was more than ever a kind of meditation—on sun, on sea water, on sky, on the dorado cruising endlessly beneath our oars. The record by this time was so far in the past that no one even thought about it anymore.
The hitch on the gentler afternoons was that with the languorous progress of the boat, people often got grousing about how slowly we were moving, how much time it was all taking, how the world was moving on without us. For some, this degenerated into obsessive calculation of what our arrival date might be: the twenty-ninth, the first, the second.
On the afternoon of our forty-seventh day out of Agadir, as Sylvain relieved me on the afternoon watch, I made the mistake of saying to him that I felt badly for those who could not enjoy these last days at sea and that I wasn’t going to let anybody’s impatience taint my own final hours of satisfaction in this most powerful of my planetary experiences. He was immediately onto me about my responsibility as a writer—to see their problems, to empathize with their stresses, to try to see all sides. This I explained to him was a generous ideal from a writer’s point of view, as long as you didn’t mind spending your life trapped in Journalism 101 or its moral equivalent in the wider world. I assured him that I understood well the pressures various crew members were under. Ernst and Liam, for example, had booked flights out of Bridgetown for March 4, desperately hoping we’d be in port on the third. Others had jobs to find, courses to take, money to repay, partners to placate.
In the face of it all, the cabin politics crashed back and forth between the usual appalling pettiness and the heights of generosity and goodwill. The next evening, for example, I got fed up with Sylvain, who for a day had been advising me almost hourly on the state of our shared quarters. “Charles,” he’d say quietly when he saw me coming on or off watch, “—about the bunk.” Surely I could dry my sleeping bag a little better, pick up the peanuts that someone had spilled on the adjoining floor. Had I seen his lost sweatshirt? Moved his shoes? Was the food wrapper beside the bunk mine?
As a matter of fact, no... no I hadn’t, and no it wasn’t (or maybe it was). I cared about Sylvain—in many ways loved the guy. And, while I acknowledge that the bunk could have been improved (and that I am at times an incorrigible slob), I also knew, at heart, that at that moment his pleas and complaints were less about a few peanuts or a sleeping bag than about exhaustion, about the very stresses we had been discussing, brought to bear on one of the few tiny facets of our lives aboard that he felt he could influence or control.
Nevertheless, that night, at 4 a.m., when he arrived to relieve me in the rowing trench, I crouched beside him as he lowered himself onto the seat. I was about to launch my reproach when it struck me that I was entirely on the wrong track, that by pressing my own perspective I was merely perpetuating the sort of grievances that had too often gotten out of hand during our weeks aboard. As if cued to my micro-satori, Sylvain, rather than addressing cabin issues, asked a simple question about the night sky. Immediately, I began describing to him what little I knew of Polaris, the North Star, the seaman’s navigation point, which at that moment was visible off our starboard hull amidst an avalanche of constellations cascading into the sea. Our conversation led to poetry and philosophy, eventually to Galileo and on to Descartes and the Age of Enlightenment.
For half an hour or so, we enjoyed our own little enlightenment, and in this way were able to reroute our frustrations with each other and with ourselves amidst the ongoing chaos of the boat.
I should add that the next night, when I was hungry and every bit of my clothing was soaked with sea water, Sylvain, having assessed my situation and wanting to do something to improve it, hauled out his special fine-wool pullover, his mystic cloak, explaining that it possessed something akin to special powers and that if I put it on in the bunk between watches, my entire mood and perspective would be elevated in its warmth. He said he himself liked to put it on when he needed a boost. So I did—donned the thing after the 2 a.m. watch and crawled in under the blanket I had borrowed from Steve to replace my wet sleeping bag. And indeed felt better—felt good—partly because of the garment, no doubt, but also in the glow of my bunkmate’s care and concern.
My own biggest stress by this time was of course food—I had run out. Angela continued to supply me with bits from her excess provisions—a few noodles, a scoop of beans and rice. But at this point she too had pretty much run out of grub. As a means of redistributing what food was aboard, Angela gathered up everybody’s snack packs, emptied them into a pile on the floor and re-cut them into sixteen bags, so that we all had an equal supply of candies, nuts, protein bars, and the like. I was ecstatic to get a couple of packets of “real juice fruit gums” and a lemon Builder’s bar, and was impressed at how much better some people’s snack packs were than mine. Meanwhile, I was aware that perhaps half a dozen of our crew members possessed quantities of a product called Squeezers Cheese. As I understood it, they had fallen for the manufacturer’s pitch that the stuff was “real” cheddar, which it may once have been. However, by the time it came aboard in its one-ounce plastic packets, it was an acrid, off-putting paste that for the most part had been sampled and abandoned as inedible. Nigel, for example, had stuffed sixty packets of it to the bottom of his net hammock. The reject bags had been awash in it for days, untouched even by those who were starving.
Now, on Night 49, as I rummaged through the rejects in search of stray calories, it occurred to me with a curious dispassion that if I was going to avoid fading away entirely during our last couple of days at sea, I was going to have to do so on a diet of Squeezers Cheese. And I proceeded to lay claim to every last packet of the stuff aboard—ending up with well over 150 of them, which I began eating immediately. One after another, I ripped open the little envelopes and squeezed out the odious orange goo, running it south over my tongue without mastication. By ten the next morning, I had eaten perhaps seventy-five packets, well over two pounds, and still I was as ravenous as a shark.
At about noon hour, on the bridge, I spotted Liam gnawing at a fist-sized chunk of some nondescript yellow solid and demanded to know what it was.
“Emergency rations,” he said brightly, explaining that it was “a sort of dense lemony shortbread.”
Exactly the meal I had been craving, and within minutes I had cadged from Louise Graff a foil pack of Mainstay, as it is called—generic nutrition, a product with a shelf life of five years and the specific gravity of potter’s clay.
Within minutes, for the second time in sixteen hours I was in my digs, chowing down on preservative-laden gunk the likes of which I had never eaten before
and hope never to eat again. And was grateful for every morsel of it. And for most of the other things that happened to me during the last thirty-six hours into Port St. Charles.
19
AT ABOUT 11 A.M. on Day 51 the GPS dipped below a hundred nautical miles—which is to say miles from Port St. Charles, on the far side of the island. The near side was no more than seventy or seventy-five miles away, and during the next hour or so I was not the only one who stood on the bridge staring briefly at the numbers and then directly off the prow at the western horizon.
In the cabin, talk had begun of steak dinners and warm baths and real beds. And long nights of sleep. At that point, most of us hadn’t felt a drop of hot wash water for more than seven weeks. For a while, off Africa, we had had a cheap “portable” shower, basically a suspended plastic bag in which water absorbed the heat of the sun. However, it had quickly sprung a leak and had been junked.
For several hours during the late morning and early afternoon, we rowed through a persistent mist, managing in the light crosswind to stay comfortably north of the northernmost tip of the island. At times there were a dozen or more immense dorado either beneath the boat or alongside it, nuzzling at our oars. They do a dazzling trick—swim lengthwise along the crest of a wave, just beneath its summit, so that you can see them in the translucent peak, moving at fantastic speed, perhaps just for the joy of being up there, as much as twenty feet above their surroundings. It is also possible that they elevate themselves to better see their prey. David, who had been fishing unsuccessfully for weeks, made a final day-long attempt to catch one—but didn’t get a nibble. During the second or third week, I had given him fishing tackle that had been assembled for me by my friend Jake MacDonald, a one-time fishing guide. However, nothing in the way of Hoochies or Buzz Bombs or live bait had worked.
Little Ship of Fools Page 25