by Andrew Eames
It may sound obvious, but the big disadvantage in travelling backwards is in not seeing where you are going. On a familiar piece of water you know instinctively where you should be pointing, and you can usually judge your forward course by the drift of your stern, but here I didn’t know what lay ahead. Initially I tried sculling along in the middle, but it felt exposed and lonely, and I noticed that all of the fishermen stuck to the sides, so in the end I did the same. Being in touch with the bank was comforting, but it was also irritating. From the middle, it had looked relatively unbroken, but from the edge it was full of little deceptions: the floating islands of reeds that demanded a diversion; the mats of lilies that snagged an oar; and the little bays that drew me in, unwittingly, until a casual glance over my shoulder revealed I’d been suckered and there was land dead ahead.
The bank also played host to fish-traps, and I quickly became adept at spotting them. Mostly they were hooped and strung between stakes in or around beds of weed so that only the top curve emerged from the water, like the half-submerged ribs of something that had long since died. A couple had their owners in attendance, and I watched them pole the boat around, drive a stake into the riverbed, up-end the trap into the boat, and then reposition it at a different angle if the catch wasn’t considered sufficiently good, all of it with barely a ripple. How I envied them their boats.
Harder to spot were the nets, with upended 7Up bottles as floats, and these required a wide berth if I wasn’t going to end up wrapping them around my bows. I nearly didn’t see the first one, and had to dig my oars hard into the water to stop. As I backed away, I spotted a boat hauled up under a nearby willow; the fisherman’s, no doubt. I couldn’t see him, but he’d presumably been watching me as I so nearly made a mess of his livelihood.
So on I plugged, in my clumsy way, stamping an untidy set of puddle-shaped rivets along the old course of the Danube, and taking careful interest in what I passed. I was deliberately taking it steadily, monitoring my body for signs of wear and tear, stopping every hour or so to tie up to the low branches of a white poplar and stretch my back by lying down in the bottom of the boat in an attempt to head off those old rowing injuries. By midday, blisters had started to form on my fingers, so to delay their onset I pulled a pair of socks out of my luggage and used them as gloves. An hour later I was digging into the drybag again, this time for a pair of boxer shorts; I’d lost my hat somewhere in Transylvania, and now the sun was getting savage. Resuming with socks on my hands and pants on my head, it occurred to me that I might even start a fashion amongst the Lipovan.
It wasn’t just my physical state I was concerned about; I had a weather eye on the state of the boat, too. Most worrying was the crude system for the rowlocks, where the oars were secured to metal spigots by thongs of thread. As a system it didn’t fill me with confidence, but all the Danube oarsmen used it, so I made a mental note not to work it too hard. In any case, in the event of a problem there was a bow-rope which could be improvised as a replacement. I had no such doubts about the oars themselves; they were big slabs of timber, and they may have been crudely fashioned and poorly balanced, but they’d be the last things to break.
The wind started at around noon, just as I was beginning to feel tired, and just as I came in sight of the main Sulina Channel. I was already discouraged at my slow rate of progress across the map, so a head wind that stiffened steadily came at the worst possible time. The boat, with its high sides and shallow draught, proved very vulnerable. It had no grip on the water, so it crabbed and swung, and it began to be an effort just to keep it pointing in a straight line. I could feel the stiff waves slapping against the bows, and every slap reduced my forward progress and made the next stroke more of an effort.
Originally I’d been looking forward to catching the stream as I hauled out into the Sulina Channel, but it was clear that conditions were only going to get worse, because as any ship’s captain will tell you, wind against tide is not a happy combination. The wind was coming straight up the channel, creating standing waves to which the Sulina’s episodic boat traffic added its own wash, bounding back and forth off the stone embankments. To make things worse, I now had an audience, for where previously I’d been in my own little world on the old river course, now I was on a thoroughfare whose southern bank was surprisingly built up. Clumping doggedly along the shore to try to avoid the worst of the waves, I was aware of critical eyes on my boat, my technique, my pants, my everything.
After an hour on the Sulina, I was seething. The boat was banging and yawing in the chop, so it was all I could do to get my oars in the water, let alone get any purchase, and every time I took them out again to prepare for the next stroke, the wind blew me backwards. My surroundings were depressing, because I was now in the heart of one of the Delta’s biggest villages, Crian, a ribbon development with a couple of garish hotels, whose guests sat out on deckchairs on pontoons in the (for them) pleasantly cooling breeze and laughed at the curious foreigner, sweating and swearing as he clubbed his way past. I was trying to think positive, telling myself that the one advantage of my boat, as against one of the fishermen’s wooden boats, was that at least it wasn’t going to be swamped, and even if I did end up in the water I’d be able to climb back on board comparatively easily, and it was at this point that I suddenly ended up flat on my back, staring at the sky. I’d been hauling at full power to try to make some headway, and the strain simply became too much for one of the thongs that held the oars. It snapped.
I got ashore and sorted out a replacement from the bow-rope, a process than forced me to acknowledge that I was in far worse shape than I’d anticipated. I was trembling with fatigue and my hands were barely steady enough to use my knife with safety. It forced me to think rationally, because to continue at that rate – barely one mile an hour – was requiring so much effort that it was effectively pointless, and yet I still had lots of hours left in the day. So I consulted my map and identified a place not far ahead where a channel dropped south and linked with the Canalul Imputita, which ran parallel with the Sulina. I reckoned there’d be more tree-cover from the wind and the sun along this side-branch. Best of all there’d be no audience for my sorry performance, so I could retreat and lick my wounds.
Two hours later I was reconciled to not reaching Sulina that day. The Canalul Imputita was, as I’d hoped it might be, far more intimate and sheltered, carpeted with green sedge and lilypads and lined with mace reed, yellow waterflag, Brooks mint and Dutch rush. In fact it wasn’t clear that there was any dry land anywhere near. But my improved forward progress was balanced by increased anxiety about getting lost in Mr B’s multi canali, and if it wasn’t for the occasional reed-cutter and fisherman out drumming the water for catfish, I wouldn’t have gone on. They confirmed I was heading in the right direction, and once I had accepted that I wasn’t going to complete my journey that day, I began to feel less frustrated. The afternoon was wearing on, the wind dropping, and the dragonflies and the birds were appearing again. The waterway smelled of sulphur, suggesting the presence of a volcanic spring, and the occasional boat passed by laden with reeds for roofing and for winter fuel.
I was on the lookout for otters, but the only swimming thing apart from the flash of fish was a snake, sashaying across the surface across my bows. Along the main river I’d identified egrets and shelduck, and now I distracted myself by following the movements of a black-headed, dart-shaped seabird, silver in colour – possibly a tern – which was such an expert flyer it could practically hover as it took fish at will from just below the surface.
Then there were the herons. The tall, somnolent, hunch-shouldered military gentlemen, like something out of the colonial service dozing by the fire. Their yellow cousins didn’t really look yellow at all until they took fright from their favoured positions, standing on the exposed ribs of the fish-traps and staring down. They could, and did, spear the trapped fish inside, but they couldn’t pull them out once they’d killed them. I saw only one solitary pelican, even t
hough the Delta has thousands, but towards evening the cormorants started to amass in colonies in the trees and shriek at each other. These colonies were loud and intensely smelly and the trees that hosted them were bleached and skeletal from the acidity of their guano. As for the birds themselves, they’d never really graduated from flying school with much distinction – the adults looked like avian bombers, clawing through the air in desperation to reach their target and offload – so their arrival amongst the upper branches usually ended in an explosion of feathers and much squawking as they dislodged a youngster, who’d come crashing down through the trees and into the water below.
With less imperative to make progress, I rested regularly now that I was away from the main drag, and by early evening I’d started to look out for somewhere to stop and sleep. After some miles of just reeds on either side, one shore was now solid ground supporting a healthy population of poplar and willow, and I eventually spotted a tiny bay which gave access to a small clearing under the trees. It was a recently abandoned fishermen’s camp, one of those impromptu campsites where friends from the mainland had come to drink beer, chain-smoke and swat mosquitoes, while getting in touch with their inner man.
The tiny bay was sealed on one side by a wall of tree roots bearded with filigree hairs, roots which came alive with a salvo of little frogs as I approached. I tied up and climbed up the bank to find a fireplace littered with freshwater mussel shells, a carpet of fishscales and a half-eaten bag of potatoes. Beyond them lay an outer ring of wrappers, crisp packets and empty cans of beer, and beyond that a pathway that led away into the bush behind. It proved to be brutish and short, leading past the scattered remains of dead fish and into a tangle of reed that had been decorated by bits of stained tissue paper, where it abruptly stopped. The fishermen’s toilet.
I returned to the fireplace with mixed feelings. The smell of dead fish was bound to attract animals – the undergrowth was already busy with frogs – but then the stink of human faeces should keep away anything substantial like wildcat, wild boar or lynx, but would it deter snakes? Given that I didn’t have the means to light a fire, my question was would I be better advised to sleep in a makeshift reed shelter on the land, or stay in the boat?
In the end I plumped for the boat. I spread a mat of rushes on the bottom to take the edge off the hardness and stretched my mosquito net across from gunwale to gunwale. It was the first time I’d used the net in the whole journey, and it was worth bringing it, not because of any plague of mosquitoes – I’d barely seen one in a zone that was supposedly famous for them – but for the feeling of security it produced. Then I ate some of my biscuits while watching the sun go down, before crawling inside.
Back in Mila 23 I’d bought a litre of home-made wine from a Lipovani household, and now, in the bottom of that green bathtub with the ghostly white mosquito net making the sky over my head, I set about consuming it. It tasted more like grapefruit juice than any wine I’d ever drunk, but the alcohol certainly hit the spot. If there was any kind of wildlife abroad on the bank that night, I never heard it.
* * *
The next morning everything hurt, especially my head. I got going as soon as I woke, shortly after dawn, in very still air. I was grateful for the mist, grateful for any protection I could get from the sun. My back was sore, the tendons in my wrists were stiff from gripping the oar handles, and I made decrepit progress. It took me as long as an hour to feel loosened up and effective, to regain any rhythm and fluidity. But without any kind of wind to impede me, an hour was more than enough to get me out of the Canalul Imputita and back on to the Sulina at a point where I knew I had only 7 miles to go.
That last part of the journey lured me on – and then threw me a sucker punch. At first it was a completely different experience to the previous day, partly because I’d rejoined the channel where it had returned to the original river course and was now without stone embankments or houses. And partly because there was no wind, and thereby no waves, so the stream carried me along at a steady pace. I can’t say it was exactly pleasurable, the river was so broad and featureless, but in the distance over my shoulder I could already see signs of Sulina: a watertower and the shapes of warehouses.
And it was at this point that the wind started again, blowing away the mist to reveal a blazing sun, and within fifteen minutes I was cussing like a navvy as the boat started to slap and bang on rising waves and the sweat-and-suncream combination started to sting my eyes. A string of freighters came past. The Alle, registered in Belize City, the Yuri Primov from Izmail, the LS Concorde from Gibraltar – each made me feel horribly puny as I bounced around on its wash.
It lasted only two hours, that final stretch of the journey, but it was hell. I had to dig deep, physically and psychologically. The only way I could see I was advancing was by isolating some landmark on the bank – a shrub, a willow – and watch it pass, congratulating myself on its progress. Sometimes it would go easily, and I’d look back five minutes later and it was already distant, but at other times it would exert a malevolent magnetic force and it took for ever to pull away. On these occasions I told myself to grit my teeth and hang in there. I could feel the blisters popping on my hands, the discs grinding in my spine and the tears welling up in my eyes – although I’d always claim these last were the stinging of the sweat and suntan cream. I cursed this stupid idea. I cursed the stupid river. I cursed the stupid boat. I cursed the wind and water that wouldn’t stay still. I cursed this stupid way I had of making a living.
And it was in this terrible frame of mind that I crawled slowly past the watertower, past the sign that said Sulina, past a large floating crane, past concrete bunkers on the shore, past various rusting hulks and decaying cabin cruisers stacked on dry land, and into a gully of telegraph poles and houses roofed with rusty corrugated iron, where the stony shore turned eventually into a long concrete wall, and where there were boats moving from one side to the other. This was Sulina, the end of my journey, but I felt no elation, and curiously no desire to jump ashore. It was a forgotten place, dusty and run down. Many of the turn-of-the-century warehouses on the northern shore looked long since abandoned, and many of the communist-era apartment blocks on the southern shore were also clearly empty. It was as gap-toothed as a boxer’s mouth at the end of his career, a career for which he had nothing to show. I knew it counted as a port, but there was no harbour per se, just a long quayside with occasional boats. I plodded on, past scruffy old pilot boats, past the silhouette of a mosque, around a gas-canister delivery boat and up abreast of two Russian hydrofoils, where I pulled in just astern and tied up to a ring on the shore.
Immediately one of the heavy men leaning against the first hydrofoil came lurching in my direction, saying something emphatic, but two could play at that game.
‘Look, sunshine,’ I said in English, equally emphatically, ‘I know you’re telling me I can’t park here, but I’m telling you I bloody well can.’ And I glared, not just at him, but at the whole bloody place, adding as an afterthought, ‘Oh, and by the way, do you want to buy a boat?’
The crewman stood for a moment, assessing me, my boat, my rucksack and my tone of voice, and then, mumbling something, he turned away and left me alone.
I sat for a full half-hour on that quayside, my legs dangling over the edge, unmoving, unblinking, not even thinking. Shut down. And then a freighter, the Sea Way (home port, Malta) hooted as it went past and I had to move my legs sharpish to avoid them getting trapped as my own boat lunged malevolently towards them on the Sea Way’s wash. Suddenly I was standing up.
Now that I was up, I realized I needed to do two things: find somewhere to stay, and get rid of the cursed green bathtub. Frankly, I was in a state of mind where I would have happily just walked away from the latter, delighted never to see it again, but the memory of 220 euros spent still grated on me. So, gesturing to the loitering hydrofoil crewmen that I would be away for ten minutes, I shouldered my rucksack and wandered off into Sulina’s dusty streets, ta
king care to give its big population of stray dogs a wide berth.
Two roads in from the riverside I found a guesthouse and a young man who spoke some English. I explained what I wanted, he thought for a moment and then made a phone call, and ten minutes later there were three of us standing on the water’s edge, staring down at my boat: the young man, a middle-aged woman and me. The young man had ascertained from the hydrofoil crew that I had indeed arrived in the boat that I claimed was mine, and he and the woman conferred. Eventually he turned to me.
‘No money,’ he said, ‘but she will let you stay in an apartment for three nights. In return for your boat.’
Which is how I ended my journey in a flat in one of those brutally ugly communist apartment blocks, rent free.
25
Blue River, Black Sea
The end of a journey, and the end of a book, is a discombobulating experience. If you’d have asked me beforehand, I would have said I was expecting to arrive in a blaze of glory, to experience some exhilarating emotion, and to express some major profundity. But for the rest of that day of arrival I felt nothing, said nothing, and wrote nothing. I was numb.
I guess my mental state wasn’t helped by the bottle of hooch I bought to celebrate, and which sent me almost instantly to sleep. I only finally emerged from my apartment in the early evening, where I could have been seen standing on the wasteland outside the apartment block sniffing the air like one of Sulina’s scores of under-fed and dazed strays, preparing to lift my leg.