Alone

by Gerard d'Aboville

  In 1980, when I rowed across the Atlantic, there were three of us who were making the solo attempt. The other two didn’t make it. Disappeared, I think I know when and how that happened, the storm that did them in. That kind of depression, of complete distress, with your boat overturned and righted with God-knows-what difficulty, then overturned again: you feel you just can’t cope anymore. Obviously, those are the times when your adventure — and you yourself— are at greatest risk.

  The second time I capsized, there was a partial sun, and that helped. Had the same thing happened at night, I don’t know what might have happened.

  I have experienced those moments of depression, those periods of discouragement when your morale gets shaky, and all your thoughts are negative. There were times when I was so tired and disgusted that I began to cry. I had the impression that what I was doing was ridiculous. Normally, I’m the kind of person who reacts positively to serious situations. But when I emerged from those nightmarish hours, knowing perfectly well that in the days and weeks to come there would very likely be situations even worse, even more unbearable, the thought crossed my mind: “And what if all this were really pointless? What if I were nothing but a clown, a seafaring buffoon, the way there are landlubber clowns and buffoons everywhere, then what’s the point of all this, what is this madness to survive all about?”

  The answers, or what seemed to be the answers, to those questions would only become clear at the end of my trip. Because I would have stayed the course, given my all, body and soul, to accomplish my goal: to have rowed across that ocean, having done it in my mind a hundred times, maybe a thousand, both before and during my crossing. I had the bit between my teeth, and I was gripping it, harder and harder.

  One evening, picking up a French Radio broadcast, I learned that a typhoon had hit Bangladesh and devastated it. The human toll was in the dozens, maybe even hundreds. And only a few short weeks earlier that ravaged land had already suffered the death of thousands of its people. That day I made the following entry in my log:

  Isn’t it an incredible luxury to have undertaken this crossing? I gave up all the modem comforts I could have enjoyed, of my own free will, put my life at risk when so many others around the world are battling fiercely simply to survive, to find enough to eat one more day. I understand that some might view my endeavor as the epitome of self-indulgence, even indecency. But who knows, even in an area as impoverished and ravaged as Bangladesh, whether there aren’t some youngsters who are dreaming of one day accomplishing some extraordinary — and perhaps “useless” — exploit.

  August 26

  A dragonfly in the cockpit! Where in the world could it have come from? It looked to me completely groggy. Maybe a storm had driven it skyward from somewhere on the Kamchatka peninsula and flung it miles and miles through the heavens till it found me here in the middle of the ocean. I picked it up, but when I tried to feed it a little sugary water, it got scared and flew off.

  1630: The boat has capsized again.

  The wave was violent enough to snap off the radio antenna. I was able to right the craft in five minutes, without too much difficulty. I fashioned a makeshift antenna so as not to miss my evening session with my ham radio pal.

  Very faint contact with Eddy — FK8CR — but nonetheless enough for him to read me two messages, one from Cornelia, the other from Guillaume, For the last several days my solar panels were not recharging my batteries, or at best ever so slightly. It pained me to think that these were perhaps their last messages.

  That night, despite the heavy sea, I filled my ballast tanks to the top, and put the sea anchors out, to prevent Sector from being swallowed up by the waves.

  The boat was being picked up by the terrifying swells and lifted for what seemed the equivalent of several stories high in the space of five to ten seconds. Then it was hurled forward by the wave, descending into the trough at the speed of madness. If it took a real nosedive, there was a good chance it would do a somersault. I bunked down with my head facing the stern, to minimize the risk of having it banged against the compartment bulkhead This time I got through the night without breaking anything. But, I kept thinking, how long before my luck ran out?

  August 28

  Another capsizing this morning. But with no real problems.

  So that makes five.

  August 29

  Evening. Tonight I succeeded in making telephone contact with my parents in Kérantré, thanks to the intermediary of a Japanese maritime station. The connection was poor, full of static and echoes, but I did manage to exchange a few words with my father and also with Guillaume, who just happened to be there. They couldn’t believe their ears. To boot, all that took place during a beautiful night, filled with the soft glow of the moon.

  August 31

  Superb day, sun virtually throughout, good session of rowing, naked for several hours.… If only winter never came, and if I weren’t such a poor wretched creature out here in the middle of the Pacific, life would be a bowl of cherries!

  I found a fish in the cockpit, a good twelve inches long. Perfectly edible, I served it for lunch. And besides, it was Friday,

  In the early stages of the crossing, a few fish had swum along beside me, using my hull as a moving shelter. During the Atlantic crossing, they had been my personal reserve, a refrigerator into which I could dip virtually at will. But here in the Pacific they very quickly spurned my company, doubtless heading for warmer waters.

  This fish, fallen like manna from heaven, would be my only catch of the entire crossing. I had already lost all my fishing gear, which had been stored in the cockpit in a sea chest whose lock had broken during one of the times the boat had turned over. In any event, I had a feeling that the equipment would not have done me much good: these waters were apparently lifeless.

  On this ocean, where I encountered so few signs of life, the traces of my fellow man were nonetheless very much in evidence. Pollution was visible everywhere. I am not referring to those signs of terrible and perhaps irremediable pollution, such as the oil spills from the gigantic tankers, but of a rampant ordinary pollution that revealed itself in countless little ways: plastic bags, Styrofoam packing, et cetera.

  Every twenty minutes or so I would come upon some sort or another of debris, which, considering my limited horizon, suggests the magnitude of the problem: I could only imagine the mountain it would all make were it gathered together and piled up. Worse, I knew that most of this detritus was indestructible, and that each year a new batch was added to that of the previous year. What irony, when you think that these were not even the waste products of human consumption but merely the packing material in which they had come! To be sure, this petty pollution did not have the same devastating effect on the environment that the oil spills did, but it still was a terrible feeling for me to find this in the midst of what should have been the great pristine sea. I felt a little like a mountain climber who finally reaches the top of Mount Everest only to discover a bevy of beer cans. None of that diminished the difficulty of my task, but it did slightly tarnish the dream.

  The only point of interest of this situation: I began to sift through the garbage, looking for something useful. This morning I fished out a large parallelepiped of plastic, which, once it was securely fastened to the deck, might help me right the boat when next it capsized.

  I also fished out a buoy. Clinging to it was a tiny crab, which reminded me of the Little Prince on his planet. I invited the crab on board and offered it a bit of dehydrated rice, which it seemed to enjoy immensely.

  In the course of the afternoon, I put a message in a bottle and set it adrift. During the Atlantic crossing, I had dropped three empty rum bottles into the sea, each with the same message. I’d never received a reply to my communication efforts in the Atlantic, so I hoped this time the results might be different. In my message I promised the person who found and returned it a reward of $100. Much to my surprise, I had not one but two responses At the end of my trip, the large-circulatio
n French photo magazine Paris-Match published a picture I had taken of the message before I cast it into the sea. On the photo was my home address. A short time later, I received from Venezuela a copy of my message written on lined paper. Pretty smart. Another clever kid from Africa also sent me a letter claiming the reward: all he had done was cut out the picture from Paris-Match and pin it to his letter. I sent it back to him with a photograph of a hundred dollar bill. One good photo deserves another!

  * * *

  When my trip was over, I received some four thousand letters. Most of them, to my astonishment, and in contrast to the letters I received after my Atlantic crossing, simply said thank you rather than “congratulations” or “bravo,” which was the most frequent message of those earlier letters. The first time I read a letter that began by thanking me, I thought it was an exception. But after the tenth, then the hundredth, I began to wonder. Thanks for what? When I set out from Choshi, my goal had not been altruistic. I’m not a guru by any manner of means. I have no message to deliver. No light to shine upon the world. And yet, as I read on, day after day, I realized that despite myself I had given hope to all kinds of people: prisoners, the unemployed, the downtrodden, the homeless. I had touched the lives of people who, for whatever reason, were depressed and discouraged. And, I also saw, I had brought a ray of hope and sunshine into the lives of the aged, those who so often were, as I had been, distressingly alone.

  Here is an extract of one letter, from a man doing time:

  For 134 days you gave me, and a lot of the guys in here, I am sure, an incredible boost in morale. I have to tell you, when the news came through that you had landed, I blubbered like a baby I saw you live, on TV. I couldn’t believe your strength, your courage. You had a dream and made it happen, and for us, the unfortunate victims of the judicial system, it was as though you had made our dreams come true, too.

  When you said to that television reporter, “Weve not all idiots,” I laughed. And, believe me, in prison we don’t laugh a lot.

  Then there was the owner of a little store in our neighborhood who saw Cornelia one day in late autumn, not long before the end of my trip, and said to her: “You know, you’re lucky to find me still in business. Things were so slow, I was having such a hard time making ends meet, that I’d just about decided to give up and close the shop. And then, day after day, I started following the radio reports of your husband’s progress. What he’s doing is incredible. Do you know what — if I’m still open, it’s because of him. He gave me courage. I said to myself, if he can make it, so can I. So I held on. My confidence came back. And today I have the absolute conviction that I am going to make it. And he will, too, I’m sure of it.”

  Throughout my trip there were a hundred times when I couldn’t refrain from telling myself: this whole thing is pointless. Well, I was wrong. “This whole thing” did serve a purpose. The simple fact that an ordinary man, endowed with normal physical capabilities, outfitted with simple means, should make an effort to push himself to the limits of his ability — and maybe well beyond — seemed to inspire a great many people, giving them renewed courage and energy to do the same. I had succeeded; why shouldn’t they?

  The discovery that people were identifying with me did raise some questions of conscience in my mind. You have to be very careful in situations where people look at you as some kind of role model. Too many public adventures have dubious motives, too many causes are subverted and undermined. But when I think back (and I do think back, every day since I’ve landed, and doubtless will do so for the next ten years), when each stroke of the oars has found its place in my mind, when all that happened has been decanted, pondered, sifted through — if, then, I will have proved that you can fulfill your personal goals by digging deep into your own inner resources, that is already something.

  The other side of that coin, of course, is that if I’d failed, those who had put their hope and trust in me might have become discouraged, too. But, judging by the enormous amount of interest my exploit aroused even before my departure, and certainly before the outcome was known, I told myself that the very act of trying, of daring, even if the exploit had failed, could well have positive repercussions.

  7

  Survival

  September 2

  Another day that was almost my last. I had nonetheless promised myself, after Sector capsized on August 3 — the time I was caught outside the cabin when the wave hit — that I would do everything in my power to avoid such a mortally dangerous situation in the future. When the weather was really rough, I absolutely had to remain inside, limiting my trips outside to only the most indispensable maneuvers and regulating the sea anchors.

  How can I explain what happened? Was it that I was simply tired of spending the entire morning locked up in the cabin? The need to do something? The enticing call of a ray of sun? Whatever it was, I decided to go into the cockpit and take some photos with my waterproof camera.

  Scarcely had I closed the cabin door when a giant wave hit the boat broadside and knocked it over.

  I was slightly stunned by the blow. The overturned hull lay next to me. In vain I tried to grab the handrail, but it was too far below the surface. Each time a new wave hit, it lifted the boat broadside and brought it down on top of me. Unless I did something drastic, I realized that I was either going to drown or be knocked unconscious. I figured my only hope was to get myself to the other side of the boat, and the only way I could do that would be to duck under it and come up on the far side. The danger there was that I might get entangled in my safety harness, or get it caught underneath, and never make it to the other side. Which meant that I would have to unfasten my harness. And that in turn meant that if I made the slightest error, the tiniest miscalculation, it would be all over, for Sector was drifting much faster than I could swim. I took a deep breath and, between two waves, ducked under the cockpit.

  Now on the good side, I groped my way to the stern, all the while hanging on to the handrail. As I had done before, I hoisted myself up onto the hull, using the rudder for support. Then I managed to haul in my camera, which was floating on the waves and — a safety precaution I always followed — was securely fastened to my wrist. Even as I was still cursing myself for having ever allowed such a situation to occur, especially for such a ridiculous reason, I took a picture of the overturned hull. Even if the photo wasn’t wonderful, I couldn’t help thinking, What an extraordinary document!

  I still had to turn the boat back over, which I did by the method I had used the previous time, that is by slipping a rope around the craft and flipping it,

  Another close call…

  1 realize that for someone reading this the idea of taking pictures under such circumstances must seem absurd. I see it somewhat differently: such an act of apparent madness may well have been my way of minimizing or undercutting moments that were truly dramatic or even life-threatening. There were many times after the boat had capsized and I was struggling to man the pumps, furiously filling and emptying the ballast tanks in an effort to turn Sector right-side up, when I would pause and take a picture of myself, holding the camera out at arm’s length.

  I am sure that, in these situations of danger and extreme tension, taking a picture was a means of reassuring myself that I still believed in my future. Looking back, the photos would be no more than records of unhappy memories, a means I had used to brave the present, to write my own story. And besides, when you think about it, if I was taking a picture, did that not imply that things were not as bad as they seemed?

  My relationship with the video camera was quite different. Although my Sony camera was also in a watertight case, it took a fair amount of tinkering before it was ready to shoot. That meant I could use it only in fair weather, because when the weather was foul I had my hands full just coping with the basic problems of navigation. There was another difference, too: whereas a still photo can capture and express a fleeting emotion, the video camera presupposes a certain degree of “acting.” Frankly, I found it
difficult to be constantly natural when I was filming myself. Also, my less than ample stock of both batteries and cassettes meant that I could use the video only sparingly, for very specific purposes and on very special occasions.

  Early in the trip I had found filming a pleasant diversion, but as time went on and my patience grew thin, I almost came to resent it: every hour lost struck me as unbearable.

  September 3

  An afternoon of nightmares. The boat has capsized three times. During one of them, I lose the bottom part of the antenna, which I had kept in an “up” position, believing it to be truly indestructible. Sector was flying. Really running. The waves arrived with a huge roar and hurtled the boat forward at a speed of from fifteen to twenty knots. When all went well, the prow rose up and the boat rode with the wave, but sometimes the wave would crest with the tip of the prow up in the air, and then we would race down and hit the trough as though we were running into a brick wall. The shock of the water against the bulkhead was incredible; the boat would literally stop in its tracks and shudder from stem to stern. Not only would everything in the cabin be propelled forward, but sometimes the boat would capsize.

  Each time it did I was dealt a new hand of pain, anxiety, and uncertainty. Once the stanchion that held the frame of my bunk snapped, dropping the bunk to the deck. Another time, the netting that held my clothes in place came loose while the boat was overturned, so that I found myself holding the clothes with one hand — trying to keep them from spilling out — and pumping with the other. Still another time the plastic piece I’d fished from the sea and fastened to the deck ripped, and, in its new position, made it impossible for me to right Sector. I could see it through one of the portholes, and there was nothing I could do about it. As luck would have it, a giant wave came along and, for once, lent me a hand by righting Sector for me.