It was a lie, but before anybody could question it we came onto a shoal, and David hollered at Angela to move the boat into deeper water. And that was that. The idea of a premature landing passed.
David was by this time rowing with one hand, a sure sign that he was exhausted; I had done it a thousand times. I bounced down the tramp and said, “Why don’t I give you a break?” And within seconds was in the stirrups, aware that the only way to stay there was to pull with the persistence of a mule. I was soon plowing so hard through the power phase of my stroke that my bruised and bony ass at times flew right off the seat.
In front of me, Ryan and Nigel were trading places at five-minute intervals, pulling like Percherons, leaping in and out of the trench with such athleticism that they did not miss a stroke in the exchange.
A sailing yacht had fallen in alongside us, under power, keeping pace, as a woman snapped photos and waved an enthusiastic welcome from its deck. So out of touch was I with reality, it did not occur to me that she would have any idea about the identity of the strange-looking rowboat and crew that had come into local waters. But of course she knew—had sailed out of the very yacht club at Port St. Charles where we would soon be putting ashore.
I found it ironic, and rather touching, that the only two members of our crew who were holding flags, the Australian and Canadian respectively, were Margaret and Steve, who had positioned themselves so their colors could be seen ashore. A few minutes later Tom had the flag of Toronto Island up and flying. The U.S. flag was aloft above the bridge.
When we were perhaps a quarter mile out, somebody noted that there were people, a lot of them, spread out along the stone jetty that protected the harbor. From somewhere on the jetty, a flare went up. But the cabin was in my sight line and I could not see what was happening. “Are they our people?” I asked Nigel, who was standing on the tramp. But he did not hear me in the developing hubbub. “Nigel,” I said again, more loudly, “are they our people?” I wanted to know.
“Yes,” he said, giving me his attention, “they’re our people.”
At that moment a small Zodiac outboard came racing out from behind the jetty and circled us twice, corralling us like a border collie. It was the harbor master, come to lead us into port. But even as we drew within shouting distance, I could not, despite the welcome, bring myself to look at those who had gathered. Because of the positioning of the cabin, I was hidden from them as we made our approach—and was no more ready for the landing when it came than if we had crashed into the dock at a hundred miles an hour.
For a few seconds I sat in my seat, still hidden from view as the others got up and moved onto the bridge and the gangway. Needing a moment or two of privacy, I ducked into the cabin, where my kit and clothing were packed on the bunk beside Sylvain’s. From the small yellow bag in which I carried my treasures I took my good sunglasses and exchanged them for the wrecks I had been wearing. From my dry bag, I pulled a white long-sleeved T-shirt that bore the insignia of the Montauk Tackle Company, one of our Long Island sponsors. I sniffed its armpits, the better to return to civilization, and put it on. And sniffed and repositioned my peaked hat. I had not seen my reflection since the barbershop in Agadir, and on a whim picked up a tiny frameless make-up mirror that I believe belonged to Louise Graff. People eventually told me that I had looked “fragile,” had looked “haunted” as I stepped from the boat. One woman told me she had been “shocked” by my appearance. But from what I could see in the glass I was no more emaciated or “shocking” than any other old man who had had his teeth knocked out, his eye blackened, and had lost a fifth of his body mass in relatively short order. Oh, and had not slept for more than ninety minutes at a stretch in fifty-two days.
Outside, a celebration was going on. Beer was beginning to flow. Food was on the grill. Measured against the elation of arrival was the forfeiture of our lives at sea. And of our freedom: not absolute freedom, which would be meaningless, but freedom from getting and spending, from the never-ending imperatives of life on land. Sir Richard Burton felt that in traveling we search for what is missing in ourselves. I am inclined to think we go in search of what affirms us, of what we already are and know. For some, our days at sea were a journey into the lessons of exactitude. For me they appealed largely to the imagination—to the imponderables at the core of what it is to be a human being. They had also, I now knew, been a much simpler kind of journey, the kind that ended with its second-oldest citizen, which is to say myself, peering into a tiny magic casement caked in salt, seeing a skeleton in Ray-Ban sunglasses, a creature he did not recognize, and beginning quietly, perhaps crazily, to laugh.
It was in this capricious mood—haunted, fragile, perhaps damned, but wearing a genuine and satisfied smile—that I emerged from the cabin, climbed gingerly over the port hull, and stepped ashore.
EPILOGUE
ON ARRIVAL IN Barbados, Ernst Fiby and Liam Flynn celebrated briefly with the crew, then raced to the airport in Bridgetown and caught afternoon flights to Vienna and London. Since then, Ernst has worked for the Vienna-based shipping company with which he communicated onboard, and has built a small business of his own, investigating shipping losses. At some point in 2013, he will again embark on a transatlantic row—with Captain Roy Finlay. Liam returned to Norwich in time for his medical exams and at last word was doing internships in oncology and cardiothoracics in Scotland. Meanwhile, he is training for the Marathon des Sables, an annual six-day, 251-kilometer footrace across the southern Sahara—considered the world’s toughest running event.
Shortly after her return, Liz Koenig moved from Long Island to Connecticut, and later that year into New York City, where she works as a social media manager for an eBay-owned company called True Action. She is simultaneously taking an MBA in social media at Southern New Hampshire University.
Aleksa Klimas-Mikalauskas remains with North Babylon’s first-response team, and with the volunteer fire department in Deer Park, NY. During November 2012, she worked for ten days, nonstop, helping victims of Hurricane Sandy, which hit the eastern seaboard hardest within minutes of her family’s home on Long Island.
Zach Scher spent the months following his return at his mother’s home in Panama, where his primary aim was to refine his capability as a surfer. Since then, he has lived in Guelph, working as a stonemason, building straw-bale houses, and learning hang-gliding. During the summer of 2013, he returned to northern Ontario as a fire-fighting crew chief and has since entered the engineering program at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
Dylan White flew to Guatemala upon his return and spent a number of weeks with his girlfriend, Zoe Barrett. Since then he has worked as an itinerant field ecologist based in Guelph, where he also teaches music. He continues his career as a stand-up bass player and composer, and tours regularly in southern Ontario with his jazz band, the Upside Trio.
During the summer of 2011, Tom Butscher rowed the length of Lake Ontario, solo, and during 2012 the length of Lake Erie. In July 2013, he will row from St. Joseph Island, at the north end of Lake Huron, to Sarnia at the south end, more than 400 miles. He wrote recently in an email, “Sometimes in blustery weather I close my eyes and I am back aboard Big Blue, rolling with the waves, hearing the sounds of the Atlantic. I see and treasure every face of our remarkable crew.” As ever, Tom lives on Toronto Island with Luisa and makes his living as a carpeting installer in Toronto hotels.
For several months in mid-2011, Nigel Roedde trained as a bicycle mechanic in Guelph, Ontario. During the spring of 2012, he and his girlfriend, Kim McKone, pedalled from Vancouver to San Diego, stopping briefly in Long Beach to surf with Angela Madsen. Nigel divides his energies and time between bicycle road racing, working with disadvantaged athletes, and making a living as a bike mechanic at Mountain Equipment Co-op in Burlington, Ontario.
In late January 2012, Margaret Bowling skippered a crew of three rowers on an attempted crossing of the 200-mile-wide Bass Strait, between Australia and Tasmania. Partway across, their boat capsi
zed in a storm, injuring one of the rowers and necessitating a dramatic rescue and a tow into port. Margaret is currently working in line production at an animation studio in Buenos Aires, where she lives with a group of Meher Baba yoga followers.
By her own estimation, Louise Graff has been “sticking close to shore” since returning to Charleston, where she and her partner, Noreen Powers, have a home on the city’s famous salt marshes. Louise paddles dragonboats and occasionally gets out on her rowing skiff. She has what she calls “selectively fond memories” of her days aboard Big Blue, and refers to the expedition as “the pinnacle of freedom and also of captivity.”
In November 2011, while cycling downhill at speed, Ryan Worth was thrown from his mountain bike, suffering near-fatal injuries to his back, ribs, and sternum. Within a week of removing his full-torso brace four months later, he led a climbing expedition through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, carrying an eighty-pound pack. Otherwise, he has spent the months since his return rowing, kayaking, and climbing—as well as completing a degree in environmental science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he is currently doing an MA in sports psychology. In June 2014, he will join three friends in rowing the Pacific from southern California to Hawaii.
During the spring of 2011, Angela Madsen began a year of intense training for the Paralympic Games in London. There, in September 2012, she won a bronze medal for the U.S. in the shot put. In February 2013, she married her partner, Deb Moeller, on Shelter Island. The ceremony took place in the same guesthouse where the pair had stayed during training maneuvers for Big Blue’s crossing of the Atlantic. As of this writing, Angela is about to embark alone, in a boat named Positive Outcomes, on a 3,000-mile row from southern California to Hawaii—an endeavor dedicated to veterans of the U.S. military.
Sylvain Croteau remains a fixture in the emergency ward at Gatineau Hospital. But he has also started a software company called SEKMED (Software for the Evolution of Knowledge in Medicine). The program will allow physicians across the globe to share awareness and information related to medical diagnoses and treatment. In June 2012, Sylvain fulfilled a long-standing ambition to row the St. Lawrence River from Montreal to Quebec City, a distance of 150 miles, in less than twenty-four hours—and did so with half an hour to spare. Later that summer, he and his wife, Suzanne, won the Canadian Sculling Marathon for the second time.
Steve Roedde made it back to St. Joseph Island just in time to harvest the sap from his maple bush and to “sugar off,” as they say in the syrup business. Since then, he has traveled, farmed, and rowed—and in early 2012 shed twenty-five pounds in six weeks so that he could compete as a lightweight in the C.R.A.S.H-Bs, the world indoor rowing championships—which is to say, rowing-machine championships—in Boston. There, five pounds below the weight at which he arrived in Barbados, he became world champion in the men’s “veteran” category (aged fifty-five to fifty-nine), a feat he repeated, with an improved time, in February 2013.
After a brief vacation in Barbados with his dad, David Davlianidze returned to his Shelter Island boat shop, where for the past eighteen months he has been working overtime to repay his substantial debts from the expedition. During the summer of 2011, his fiancée, Lali, emigrated permanently from Tbilisi to join him. Together they have a baby son named Dachi.
I myself have spent much of the past year and a half thinking and writing about our lives aboard Big Blue, as well as recovering from the effects of the rowing, which seem permanently to have altered my spine and range of motion. More than a year ago I was denounced by Angela for declaring that I intended to tell our story “as it happened,” which she took as a betrayal. Even the title offended her. Others believed, as I did, that the betrayal (to both crew and reader) would be in not attempting to tell it as it happened. So I told away, unfiltered, restricted only by the limits of my awareness and perspective. And by my subjective interpretation of events.
One of the few stories I did not tell in the book is about the crew member who, when we saw Barbados from perhaps thirty miles out, groaned, “Thank God. It’s over. We’re home!”
But when I saw that crew member six months later and asked how he’d adjusted to being back, he said, “I haven’t. Too much of me is still out there.”
A part of me, too, is still out there. And I suspect will be out there for a long time yet. Meanwhile, one of the questions I get asked is: Would you go again? And the answer is simple: For now, I don’t have to. But I’ll consider it when I get back.
Big Blue, bless her heart, is still in Barbados, afloat in the shallows near Port St. Charles. David’s intention, well noted in these pages, was to bring her home to Shelter Island. But during late 2011 she was hit hard by vandals, who stole everything they could remove from her cabin and hulls. Since then, sun and salt have destroyed much of what remained. In mid-2012 David gave the deteriorating vessel to her Barbadian caretaker, noting that while it broke his heart to abandon his beloved boat, he had decided it was “time to move on.” At last word, her new owner had scraped and painted her, added a string of patio lanterns, and was operating her as a floating bar.
If you happen upon her while in Barbados, you are encouraged to go aboard and raise a glass to her days on the Atlantic, and to those who brought her across.
CW
May 2013
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE MAKING OF a book is invariably a complex and lengthy endeavor. But, for me, this one set new records in all stages, beginning with sixteen months of intense physical training, a long and demanding journey by sea, followed by all the customary implausibilities of getting the story down—in notes, then drafts, and finally a finished manuscript. As the months passed, so many people became part of the process, providing generous and good-humored support, that it would be difficult for me to cite in detail the nature and variety of their many valued contributions. Suffice it to say that to all of them I am far more grateful than the mere listing of their names might suggest. I am talking about John Sifton, Carol McLaughlin, Chris Casuccio, Betty Carpick, Jake MacDonald, Sue Langer, Kelly Saxberg, Damien Gilbert, Tom Hazenberg, Jim Crooks, Peter White, Mary and Bryan Frost, Mary Louise and Peter Crooks, Caitlin Crooks, Bob Edwards and Carol Bruni, Kevin Cleghorn, Jim Stevens, Joan Baril, Richard Alguire, Kevin and Adele Parkinson, John Parkinson (1924–2010), Sue Bishop, Karen Keeley, Stewart Kallio, Joan Skelton, Stan Kurisko, Janet McLeod, Steve Roedde, Heather Blois, Jan and Ron Saddington, Mary and George Morrison, Paddy Bailie, Sally Colquhoun and Dan Newton, Kal Nikkila (1934–2010), Erica Burton, Celina Reitberger, Alf Petrone (1925–2009), Doug Morrill, Sue and Mike Bryan, Liz Stewart, Dorothy and Pete Colby, Gerry and Rosemary Waldron, Kate and Clint Harvey, Keith Travis, Lori and Aldo Ruberto, Deborah and Paul DeBakker, Mabel and Jamie Crooks, Larry Dustin, Cappy and Jim Colquhoun, Peter Leclair, Ann and John Hargadon, Lainie Burton, James Arthur, John Warner, Elleda Warner (1919–2011), Patrick Newman, Laura Robinson and John Cameron, Joe Fiorito, Mary Roach, Deb Kinsella, Dale Syme, Rhonda Beck, and Al Zikovitz.
I am also much indebted to my literary friends at the Stories in the North writers’ festival and Bookends Book Club. And to my business and corporate backers, all of them friends: Gargoyles Grille & Ale, Gerry Waldron Consulting Ecologists, bfusion design, Young Living, and Cottage Life Media.
I would be remiss if I did not make special mention of a number of people who, at crucial times, gave me invaluable moral or literary support—among them Dan Diamond, who read the manuscript when I most needed a reader and advisor and gave heartening encouragement; Philip Syme, who listened closely, appraised generously, and went paddleboarding with me when I needed a break; Margie Bettiol and Doug Flegel, who housed and fed me and always listened with great patience and care; Frank Pollari, whose spare room and late-night conversation were invariably a welcome respite; and my sisters, Susan and Ann, who have been in my corner a long time.
Many thanks as well to James Little at explore magazine, who published my earliest writin
gs about the journey, and J.B. MacKinnon for his assertive editing of those early efforts; and David Hosking for the training advice; and Anne Maurissen, a one-time crew member who was injured before departure but remained a supportive and sadly missed part of the expedition.
I am equally indebted to Rob Sanders of Greystone Books, who saw merit in the project long before it began and signed me up to tell the tale—and stuck with me. And to my agent, Jackie Kaiser at Westwood Creative Artists, who has always been one of the truest believers in my writing. Sincere thanks are also due my editor, Lucy Kenward, an astute and fearless observer of the writer’s art, who made numerous insightful suggestions for improvement as the book took shape (and was patient with my occasional reluctance to do what needed doing). And to Peter Norman, a most exacting and erudite copyeditor, whose sensibilities as a poet and novelist were a ready resource as I polished the manuscript. And to Nancy Flight for marshaling the project at headquarters, and Zoe Grams for promoting the book with such enthusiasm, diplomacy, and skill.
And, once more, without embellishment, to my fellow rowers. I am profoundly grateful to them.
Finally, I wish to thank my friend Trish Wilson for her support throughout the months of training and writing—and my children, Matt, Georgia, and Eden, who, as always, are my foremost reason for doing and being, and to whom, at the deepest level, all of my efforts are devoted.
My love and warm wishes to you all.
Nigel and Steve Roedde (left and right) during training at Shelter Island, New York.
The city of Agadir and the Atlantic Ocean, seen from Agadir’s mountaintop kasbah.
Outfitting Big Blue at the boatyard in Agadir.
Launching Big Blue, Agadir.
Big Blue leaving Morocco, the Atlas Mountains visible in the background.
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