Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  These sailing days had a basic routine. I would usually go to sleep at midnight and wake when the sun was fifteen degrees above the horizon—a good time to take a first sun fix and cook some breakfast. Then I would check Dove’s mileage over the twenty-four-hour period and figure out how long it would take me to the next landfall—in this instance Paramaribo in Surinam. If I’d made good progress I was happy; if I hadn’t I was depressed. Then I would sit on deck in the morning sun, collecting an all-over tan, and daydream or read. At noon I would get my LOP and, if I was hungry, eat again and feed the cats. I preferred to plot my position on the larger charts because my penciled markings showed up as a bigger movement across the ocean. In the afternoon I would read again and take a seawater bucket bath. I didn’t have any salt water soap so I didn’t lather up. But the bath was always a high point of the day because it was so refreshing, and there was no shortage of bathwater.

  Evening was the time I liked best. Then I would listen to the BBC or the Voice of America and watch the sun set. I felt especially close to Patti in the evenings. If my sailing distance had proved disappointing I’d go to bed early. Depending on the movement of the boat I would sleep curled up forward on the floor of the cabin or in the cave.

  The best thing about the cave was its contrast to the vastness of the sky. The head shrinkers would probably tell me I wanted to return to the womb or something.

  I explained this routine on my tape recorder and said: You just look at the progress you make each day, hoping to get a little further, which you do most of the time…. I haven’t used much of the stuff aboard that has to be cooked. It’s just a waste of time to cook when you can’t enjoy it. I’d rather heat up a can.

  Because of constant trade winds and the east-west current, I generally made good distances on this long leg of the voyage. On August 23—my eleventh day out of Ascension—the taffrail log checked 129 miles but my LOP showed Dove had covered 177 miles over the bottom. The record was broken again on August 30, with a true distance of 185 miles. I rarely had to change sails, the two jibs, wing and wing, bowling Dove along at her best speed.

  On my fifteenth day at sea I taped: Just caught a twenty-pound barracuda…the cats liked it too…. Listening to a Spanish program and don’t understand a word. The newscaster sounds excited about something. Am now on the equator and it’s really hot—always hotter in the morning than in the afternoon. Dove’s in a mess. It’s amazing what a mess a little boat can get into! House-cleaning keeps me busy. Every day I’ve got to fight the loneliness of this voyage. It’s a slow torture, not like the sudden fear you get in a storm, but more like a bad toothache. I’m never really free of it.

  Blind Fili’s courage amazed me. She knew her way about the boat, though if I moved any piece of gear out of its usual position she would bump into it—but only once. Next time around she would take evasive action.

  Unlike her sighted brother, the blind kitten padded about Dove with her whiskers forward like radio antennae. She knew just how close to walk to the edge of the deck, sensing the danger even when chasing Kili. Sightless Fili was more independent than Kili, who would come to my lap and purr, demanding affection and approval. But Fili would move away when I stroked her back.

  Perhaps, I reflected into the tape, blind creatures, human or animal, have their own pride, and prefer bruises to dependence on another creature. They are good company, these kittens.

  On August 30 I saw the first sign of human life in eighteen days. A Brazilian schooner moved across my port beam. She was sailing wing and wing and looked like a huge white butterfly on the water. When she came close I saw she was aptly called Grace.

  At midnight on the thirty-first I spotted the lightship at the mouth of the Suriname River and at dawn I was sailing Dove upstream toward Paramaribo. In the evening I anchored off what appeared to be the town’s main square, hoping that this was the place where Patti would be most likely to find me. Next morning I cleared customs and made for the post office, where the clerk said there was no mail for me at all.

  Back on Dove I taped: I knew there must be mail. I could have punched the guy on the nose. That wouldn’t have helped though. I’m just so depressed.

  A hostile customs officer came aboard and poked about for contraband and then told me the district commissioner wanted to see me immediately. I could think of no crime I’d committed on the high seas in the forty-four days it had taken me to sail from Cape Town. Anyway all was well: the commissioner, Mr. Frits Barend, had collected my mail for me—including ten letters from Patti.

  Patti had spent six weeks in Europe, visiting friends in Switzerland and England. One letter read:

  Europe is so lovely, so different. But you weren’t here with me, Robin, and traveling without you is so pointless, so flat, too often just plain boring. I would look up at a Swiss mountain, snow-covered and lovely against a blue sky. I wanted to point to the peak and to find you at my shoulder and tell you all about it.

  It was the same in lovely England. Oh, those gentle colors, those thatch-roofed villages, duck ponds and village greens and the gray, old cities full of history with little shops and everyone traveling on the wrong side of the road.

  From a train window I saw the green, green fields and hedgerows and a little girl riding a bicycle down a country road. And I thought, this is it. This is England! It was how I imagined it, only better. But you weren’t here, Robin. You weren’t sitting across the corner of the car. And when I looked again it was all so ordinary, so dreary without you. One day you and I will have to come back and see England again. We’ll ride on a motorcycle like we did in South Africa. It’ll all be quite different, all so perfect. I know now what you mean when you say traveling alone is for the birds. It’s funny how traveling used to be great when I was single. But when you are married and alone it’s not fun at all.

  I read her letters in sequence, carefully sorting them in order from their dates, and I tried to picture her walking through the hot boulevards of Barcelona, sipping coffee on a veranda overlooking the Lake of Geneva, picking strawberries in an English country garden or looking up at Eros in Piccadilly. I tried to see Patti swinging her slim brown legs along a cobbled street or throwing darts in a low-beamed English pub. I tried to imagine her laughing or sitting alone and sad on a park bench with kids playing on the swings.

  Her last letter reported that she had returned to Barcelona hoping to find a ship sailing directly for Surinam, but the best she could do was to get a ship for the Caribbean. She gave a Trinidad address—the home of friends. I sent a cable to await her arrival. The cable read: “Take supersonic plane or satellite for Paramaribo.”

  The district commissioner offered to show me a bit of his country, but I was worried that Patti might arrive and find me gone. Only when Mr. Barend had promised that he would have Patti flown directly into the interior to join me did I agree to go with him.

  Along with a free-lance photographer, Mr. Barend took me fishing on a huge man-made lake created by damming up the Suriname River. We caught a sackful of piranhas, the vicious fish that can strip a human body to its bones in minutes. They were surprisingly good to eat. Then we took a small plane to Paloemeu and sailed an outboard dugout canoe up the Tapanahoni River to an Indian mission station in the village of Tepoe. The Indians were really hospitable. They let me sleep in the thatched hut of a family absent from the village. The village boys showed me what good marksmen they were with their bows. The missionaries had not, as others had in other places, forced western dress and customs on the natives. Even when the Indians went to church they wore only a tiny covering fore and aft. They still hunted game with bows and arrows. I swam in rapids after being promised three times that piranhas don’t live in fast-moving water.

  One of the priests gave me a green parrot. The bird had grown up in the cloisters, so it did not know a single oath. I was standing on a jungle airstrip with the parrot on my shoulder when Patti’s small plane flew in. The plane’s door shot open and Patti jumped out lookin
g gorgeous.

  As we ran to each other the parrot screeched in alarm and flew back to the mission station. Anyway, we did not need any company, feathered or in priestly gowns, when we held each other for the first time in two months—to the day.

  Patti had started keeping a diary again, and the entry for the day we were reunited reads: “Robin’s nerves seem shot to pieces. The Atlantic crossing has really bugged him. He wants to end the voyage here and has written to his father and National Geographic saying he is not going to sail alone again.”

  These letters had fast results. Gil Grosvenor flew out from Washington to persuade me to complete the voyage alone. Both Patti and I liked Gil, and I hope he has forgiven me for the way I treated him. I wasn’t ready to listen to reason, but I really wanted to tell him, “Look Gil, I’m not like this at all. It’s just that I’m uptight now. I know you’ve come an awful long way and I know that you’re an understanding guy. But can’t you see that I’m finished, that I can’t stand going it alone any more? Just give me time and I’ll be myself again. Next time we meet I’ll be quite different, you’ll see. I’ll slap your back and keep my cool. But not now, please not now.”

  I didn’t say anything like that. Over dinner in Paramaribo’s best hotel I told Gil that I’d rather face a tank of hungry piranhas than put to sea alone again.

  I told him, “I hate that bloody boat. I know her every creak, every bubble of her blistered paint. I know exactly how she’ll behave in every wind and every wave.

  “Besides,” I added, “Dove’s no longer safe. I’ve lost confidence in her. I don’t trust her any more.”

  Gil quietly suggested that National Geographic might help me buy a bigger boat with advance royalties. The offer sank into my mind just before I drank myself to sleep. Next day Gil flew out, convinced of the failure of his mission.

  Of course time is a healer, even when you’re sitting in a small boat on a dirty river. Patti nursed me back to mental health. These must have been wretched days for her as we lived through them on Dove. We sailed to Paranam, the huge bauxite plant upriver from Paramaribo. Red dust was everywhere, staining the houses of the miners, the vegetation and the water—a real James Bond setting in the jungle.

  When we’d tied Dove to a wharf we went to sleep. No one had told us about the ten-foot tide. At midnight we were suddenly thrown from our bunks as Dove fell over onto her side. The outgoing tide had left Dove precariously balanced on her keel, and perhaps one of us coughed or stirred in our sleep and upset the balance. Anyway, after the first shock of believing we’d been hit by an earthquake, we lay down across the portholes and roared with laughter. This was the turning point of my mental slide.

  The days were happier now. We’d usually go to the Paramaribo market to bargain for food, and find ourselves bidding against Indians and bush Negroes, blacks, whites, Chinese—I’d never come across such a mixup of races. They laughed at me because I was barefooted. The Negroes had been imported to work the canefields, but Surinam was one of the first countries to free the slaves. Most of the Negroes had stayed on. The Surinam flag carries five colors, representing the five different skin colors of the people.

  Dove was too small for the two of us. We couldn’t even stand up straight in the cabin. It was like living in a bathroom with nowhere to put my shaving things. Gil Grosvenor’s suggestion of a bigger boat to complete the voyage began to look more attractive. I put a call through to Washington and spoke to Charles Allmon of the NG staff, who liked my idea that I sail Dove to Barbados and from there negotiate for a bigger boat.

  I pulled out my atlas. “I suppose California isn’t all that far,” I told Patti. I had sailed 22,000 miles and three-quarters of the way around the world. The last quarter didn’t look too bad.

  Patti said quietly, “I believe you’re meant to finish what you set out to do.”

  “And prove the world is round?” I snapped.

  “And prove something important to yourself,” she said.

  We made plans to leave. I would sail to Barbados and Patti would take a boat to Trinidad and then fly over to join me.

  On October 12 I powered out to the lightship at the mouth of the Suriname River and waited for Patti’s steamer, a bauxite boat, to catch up. As the steamer passed me and made for the open sea I was attacked by another bout of anger and frustration. I hated to set sail alone again. As Patti waved good-bye from the after rail I got so mad I smashed one of the whisker poles against the mast.

  Then the pilot boat came alongside and a man in a peaked cap told me to turn on my radio. I went below and switched it to the frequency the pilot had given me. Patti was on the air.

  She guessed what I was going through and said, “Remember, Robin, it’s the last time on the little boat, and really it’s a very short sail.”

  “I’m going to be miserable.” I said.

  “No, no,” said Patti, “don’t feel like that. I’ll be thinking about you all the time and at six every morning I’ll be thinking about you really hard. You do the same at six o’clock and we’ll sort of talk to each other.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll try,” I said.

  “I’m sure it’ll work, you’ll see. Remember that old man who crossed the Pacific in a raft and how he talked to his wife thousands of miles away.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “And Robin.”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you very much.”

  Then there was silence again.

  9

  Bigger Wings and Baby Talk

  AT BARBADOS we were lucky to find a neat little apartment overlooking a white beach and sheltered cove where I anchored Dove and buttoned her up.

  My mother flew out from California and stayed with us for three weeks. She and Patti eyed each other a bit cautiously at first but they soon relaxed and enjoyed sharing kitchen chores and shopping. Then Ken MacLeish, son of the poet Archibald MacLeish, flew in from Washington and helped me write up the second part of my three-part series for National Geographic. Like the first article, it was the journal’s cover story, and it brought in, so they told me, a bigger reader response than any other feature in the magazine’s long history. Truthfully I could have done without the publicity, because people on harbor walls and in the yacht clubs recognized me or the name of the boat, and I was always being cornered and asked questions on my voyage.

  Most people were nice but there were always name-dropping types around. These pestered me just because I was in the news. One invited us to dinner and when we were seated told us with a smug grin that he’d bet a friend he’d get us to his home. He won his bet but not our friendship. We soon got wise to these types.

  We spent a dreamy month in Barbados, water skiing, skin diving, riding horses along the beach. What I enjoyed most were hot water showers and sleeping in a home that held still. After restless catnaps at sea I began to learn what real sleep was like again. My mind unwound because I wasn’t always listening for a change of wind or wave pattern. We toured the island on a motorcycle. There was one spot on a grass hill that we really loved. We took picnics up there and lay around under trees that had been bent by the trade winds. It was all so relaxing and good.

  When my nerves no longer felt sandpapered, we flew out to Fort Lauderdale to look for a boat in which to complete the last part of my journey around the world. I had some pretty fixed ideas in my mind about the boat. She had to be more than thirty feet long so that she could take any storm, and she had to have enough headroom below so that I could stand up without cracking my skull. She had to be of fiberglass because a wood boat would require too much maintenance, and she would have to have a diesel engine. The advantage of diesel is that it is less expensive and less explosive than gasoline.

  I eventually found just the boat I was looking for in the Cat-skills yard of the Allied Boat Company in New York. They gave us a good discount, and with the advance royalties from my magazine articles we found we could afford her. Shivering in the winter cold, Patti and I wa
tched the new boat being completed in the shipyard. She was a beautifully designed thirty-three-foot fiberglass sloop. I added extra equipment to help me sail her alone, and most importantly a self-steering vane.

  The self-steering device which my father and I had designed for little Dove had worked well; but the Hassler gear selected for the new boat was more refined—the same type of rig Sir Francis Chichester had used to make his lone circumnavigation. We named the steering vane Gandalf, for the wizard in the Tolkien books.

  To the new boat’s basic layout I added extra storage, a chain plate, a rig for a staysail and roller-furling gear for two headsails.

  The Hudson River was still iced up, so we trucked the new boat down to Fort Lauderdale, where we installed a depth-sounder, took aboard spare parts for most emergencies and stocked up with provisions. Then we invited Patti’s father, Allen Ratterree, and her stepmother, Ann, to join us for a short shakedown cruise to the Bahamas.

  Patti launched the new boat with a bottle of California champagne and named her the Return of Dove, but whenever we referred to the two boats we always spoke of Little Dove and Big Dove.

  There followed wonderful days, then weeks, then months as Patti and I cruised the Bahamas and later the Virgin Islands. In the Fijis, where Patti and I had first met, we had believed we could not again discover such happiness. But in South Africa we had been even happier; and now in the Caribbean we were to discover that happiness has no frontiers, that it’s a state of mind and not a possession, not a set route through life, not a goal to be gained but something that steals in gently like an evening mist or the morning sunlight—something beyond our control.

  Our mood might best be understood by quoting directly from the tapes we made as we discovered new islands and unpeopled beaches, or when simply resting through sun-washed hours and starlit nights. Our electronic diary is a running commentary on two young people in love. Here, then, are some more excerpts from our tape recordings: