Sea Change

by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

  I worried about Valkyrien—she needed constant attention to keep from sinking. I felt so far from El Salvador and the trials of Valkyrien that I almost forgot that I would soon have to return.

  But return I did in the late fall, to continue my journey. Jasper had secured full-time employment that summer, and so could not rejoin me. Instead I hired a couple of hipster gringos who worked with me mostly as ship’s carpenters. The hotel we stayed in beside the estero was perfect—not too expensive, a nice swimming pool, rice and beans and fish for lunch, a few US tourists, but mostly Salvadorans. The owners looked as though they had walked straight out of a xenophobic film about the wars in Central America. They wore black suits and never removed their sunglasses.

  Sadly, and with intense irritation, I realized that very little of the work Cesar had promised to do had been done. Cesar had spent most of the summer speeding around the estuary in our Boston Whaler, apparently charging people for rides. He struck a log, crushing the gears in the lower unit of the outboard. Now the engine made a terrible sound, like someone hammering broken glass. She ran at half speed. This made the Whaler much less appealing as a last resort in case of a storm.

  I heard that at one point in the summer Cesar had actually let the Valkyrien sink down into the mud of the estero, but then with the help of many family friends, got her bailed out at low tide and refloated her, still attached to the mooring.

  It sickened me, thinking about all the money I was spending on Valkyrien’s host of problems. Nixon and I were self-funding the journey by this point. The engine no longer started, the rudder had come loose, the worm drive did not function, and the generator had failed. Real dollars were hard to come by in that part of the world, and I loathed the feeling I got when I pulled money out of my pocket, especially when it actually left my hand. For some reason charging things to a credit card back in LA was not nearly as hard. Rental cars in Salvador cost about a hundred dollars a day, so, to save money, I purchased a decrepit thirty-one-year-old faded purple Mexican Ford for about $600. It was one of the smallest trucks I had ever seen. I think it would have fit in the bed of my Ford.

  I had lost my wallet and driver’s license just before returning to El Salvador, and had somehow left my spare credit card at home. Fortunately, the front-desk clerks at the hotel remembered me, and as a returning guest they gave me a room without securing it by credit card. I handed over my entire cash reserve, about $2,000, which they kept in a safe-deposit box behind the front desk. The management was comforted by the fact that I clearly had cash to cover my bill.

  Two grand is a huge amount of money in El Salvador, and at first things went very well. But each morning as I stopped by the front desk and withdrew more of the cash from my safe box—the big outlay for the truck, $50 to pay a carpenter, $200 for fuel, $100 here and there to buy wood—I sensed the hotel staff growing more and more concerned. This coincided with my work on the boat intensifying. Each day I returned to the hotel grubbier and greasier than the day before, and with a little less money. I could feel their growing unease.

  After two weeks, I had blown through all of it—no cash left, no credit card—literally no money at all. I convinced the hotel to grant me a room and food for a few extra nights, which they reluctantly did, even though I’m pretty certain they all thought I was going to make a run for it.

  While moored in the estero we spent a huge amount of time trying to get Valkyrien’s diesel engine to run. Our biggest problem was the starter—not so much that it didn’t work (broken starters can usually be rebuilt), but that we had to remove it before we could fix it. The bolts mounting the starter to the engine had locked tighter than any I have ever seen, and were nearly inaccessible. A cocoon of wiring hid the starter bolts in the darkest portion of the engine compartment. Fuel filters and a set of copper pipes blocked access from the rear and side. The starter lay sandwiched just slightly above the oil pan, and nearly touching the water cooler above it. Worst of all, Valkyrien’s hull walls sloped diagonally to within just a couple of inches of the starter’s mounting bolts, making it impossible to turn a wrench more than a few millimeters at a time. The only way I could get close to the starter was to lie down in the bilge. I twisted my chest around and hung under the belts on the front of the engine. In that position I was able to reach through the muck to the mounting bolts.

  Each time I moved my arm, or slid it in and out, I would first run my wrist and forearm along the top of the bilge, which is where most of the oil gathered, and then, lubricated with the foul grease, I would slide my arm between the bilge boards and the engine, to the starter bolts. Despite the lubricant, I cut my arm each time I reached in, and cut it again each time I turned. My elbow fell numb until I could barely sense it.

  I did not realize why the bilge was so foul until I had been working in it for about a week. Jasper had repaired the head back in Monterey, but had reversed the pipes so that throughout the trip down the coast, when we thought we were dumping our waste into the sea it was actually going into our holding tank, which had filled with feces, then cracked and overflowed. The walls of the bilge were literally pasted with crap.

  The tight workspace forced me to spend time crouched on my left knee, which hurt a bit more each day, until it finally opened up for about a week, expelling pus that turned from greenish black to an almost perfectly eggshell white. I scrubbed the narrow, two-inch wound hard with soap and water each night, finishing with a bath of iodine. Before going to sleep, I washed it finally with bottled water, caulking in some Neosporin before turning off the light.

  I had nearly lost a leg to a neglected infection as a child. That, and Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” made me careful with infected cuts, especially in the tropics. But if I had known the true contents of the muck in the bilge compartments, I might have been more careful still.

  Many times I thought to myself, “I am stuck in a Graham Greene novel.” Fluorescent lightbulbs drew throngs of truncated geckos (truncated, because something had eaten their tail). I spent most mornings in Valkyrien’s bilge coughing up black dust mixed with various VOCs (volatile organic compounds), from paint thinner, spray paint, carburetor cleaner, starting fluid, glue, used diesel oil, and gasoline. Later, in the purple truck, I inhaled burned radiator fluid, brake oil, and power-steering fluid.

  More than anything I breathed in an extraordinary agglomeration of molds of various sizes, shapes, and thicknesses. I realized that molds were like snowflakes—no two were alike. Some were beautiful, like the ones that grew only in partially burned fuel oil. Others were more disturbing, like the dark molds that appeared to be moving. They grew under the bunk where the strange boat boy slept. Others lived in oil combined with cleansing agents banned in the United States in the early 1970s. When these were stirred up by a hand groping for a dropped wrench, they released a gas. This gas knocked you hard, making it difficult to think straight, making you wonder why you would want a wrench anyway, and what was the rush? Might as well lie down in the muck for a while.

  Someone always waited topside when we worked in these deep bilge areas of the boat. When they stopped hearing anything below, it was time to wake up the fellow turning a screw.

  One of my proudest moments came on the day I loosened the starter bolt that we had been working on for most of two days. Basically I put a wrench on the bolt, then tied a rope to the wrench and pulled up on the rope to turn the bolt. It was a complex maneuver. First, I covered the starter bolt in WD-40 and let it sit while I used a grinder to file down the box end of the wrench. I used a 1/8th-inch drill bit to cut a hole in the open end of the wrench and slid fifteen inches of bailing wire through the hole, then knotted the wire so it made a very strong loop.

  I tied a strong rope around a metal pry bar and strung the other end of the rope through the floor, into the engine compartment, and around the side of the engine to the wire loop on the wrench. I slid the open end of the wrench over the bolt, jammed a co
uple chunks of wood beneath the wrench head to hold it in place, then climbed onto the floor joists above the engine. I bent my knees, and holding the pry bar in both hands, straightened my knees, hauling upward. The rope began to stretch and then suddenly and beautifully, I felt the bolt slip.

  It turned easily after that, and we removed the starter and carried it to a shop where they would rebuild it.

  With the starter out of the way I offered Cesar $100 to clean the bilge. This was a month’s pay in El Salvador. He refused. Later that day Cesar watched as I climbed into the filthy bilge, unscrewing all of the hoses and pipes and fixtures that held the giant holding tank in place. Twelve or fourteen inches of dark sludge sloshed around inside the holding tank, oozing out the cracked top. The only way to get the tank out was to lift it over my head and make a run for the stern of Valkyrien. Every step I took caused the crack in the top to open wider, dumping old and recent feces on my head. The sludge plopped on my shoulder, down my arms, and into my eyes. Awful. I made it to the end of the cockpit and dove overboard into the estero, and then swam the tank to shore.

  I figured I might one day need that tank again. I had not seen any holding tanks for sale along the trip. I was already so filthy I had nothing more to lose. I also thought that if I cleaned the thing thoroughly, in front of Cesar and his family, he might feel obligated to work more diligently on the boat repairs. It made a difference for people to see the captain willing to do the dirty work, literally mired in crap. I scrubbed the tank myself with Dr. Bonner’s soap, inside and out, until the appalling receptacle smelled only of peppermint. Then I carried it back aboard and let it dry in the sun.

  I bathed and shampooed myself in the muddy water of the estero for nearly an hour. Standing there, with my bare feet sinking into the silt, I looked up at the stern of Valkyrien which rose above me like a giant, unruly horse that had only a moment ago stopped raging. She sat, impassive, not caring at all that she had just covered me in the worst slime I could imagine. I recalled George Orwell’s 1984, in which Big Brother is able to divine our deepest fears, then designs tortures specific to each victim. Valkyrien had covered me in one of my deepest antipathies.

  After removing the holding tank I needed to clean the bilge. Valkyrien had no wash-down system. I tried carrying buckets of water into the cabins, but this proved entirely insufficient to clean the filth-lined compartment. I needed a hose. I removed one of the bilge pumps from Valkyrien and attached some long DC wires that I had pulled from the sides of the engine compartment, onto the pump. Then I wrapped the apparatus in a hose clamp to hold the wires in place and tied on a rope. I attached a long hose to the outflow. I let the pump off the side of the boat into the estero and grabbed the free end of the hose, attaching the opposite ends of the DC wires to a car battery. Water flowed forth, and I used the hose to wash the crap down both sides of the bilge. I cleaned the walls with sponges and soap and dug everything out, from each niche and corner, dumping the solid waste into doubled-up trash bags.

  In the end the bilge looked completely clean. Scouring it had revealed some of Valkyrien’s inner beauty. Many of her planks had a triple curve to them. The shipwrights had not merely bent the planks on (steam-bending kauri is a difficult job, to be sure); they had also bent and twisted the planks, so they turned a slow arc from high on the boat’s sides down through to the keel. She is one of the most beautiful wooden boats I have ever seen.

  I wrote to Vicki:

  Most of the Europeans will not speak to us because we speak to the locals (or because we are so dirty). The locals have gotten the wrong end of a short and filthy stick for a long time. They seem more amused by us than anything else, but “confused” runs a close second. I am sitting dockside right now, dripping puke from my thumbs and sleeves, still covered in grease. Spent about 4.5 hours today lying in a bilge as stinking as most of the open sewers in this poor country.

  I was left largely on my own in Salvador, gathering wood and hardware and trying to repair Valkyrien with Cesar. I will never get past how awful San Salvador was in 2009. In the light industrial area of the city, which I frequented, a tall stone-and-concrete bridge crossed over a slow-running stream. The stream was used by everyone in that district as both a place to clean clothing and a toilet. A number of animals had apparently been thrown over the bridge. I don’t know if this occurred before or after they died. The combined stench of rotting flesh, piss, crap, and decaying trash lay thick around the center of the bridge. The foul odor hit me hard the first time I crossed, and I threw up violently over the side. Thereafter I held my breath and ran each time we crossed the bridge.

  24. Pistola

  When despair for the world grows in me . . .

  —Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things

  Weird stuff happens every day in El Salvador. Each day stands out, and yet the days and nights remain numbingly monotonous. El Salvador overflows with weapons left over from the civil war, and is one of the most violent countries on Earth. I drove from the estero to the capital city, San Salvador, nearly every other day to purchase supplies. Each trip we passed by the same dead animals left to rot where they had fallen. The drive took about ninety minutes. One afternoon Cesar and I passed a woman lying beside her broken bicycle on the side of the road, bleeding. This was one of the only sections where the road is actually divided by a full median, and the woman lay in the tall grass between lanes, moaning. I thought she had crashed her bike and I shouted to Cesar, “Stop the truck.”

  “It is okay; she will be fine.”

  “Stop immediately.”

  “This is none of our business. They will help her if she needs help.”

  “It is my truck. Stop driving now!”

  Cesar pulled to the side of the road, and I ran back to the woman who lay alone in the grass. I asked her if she could hear me.

  “Si,” she said.

  Then I said, in my terrible Spanish, “Where does it hurt?”

  “My back.”

  “Tell me, how many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Three.”

  She seemed to be alert, and conscious of her surroundings. An awful lot of blood lay splattered and clotted in the grass. I thought she must have cut her foot or head to lose that much blood. But I checked both and saw no wounds.

  “Can you feel my hand touching your hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many fingers am I touching your arm with?”

  “Two.”

  I reached down to her feet.

  “Can you wiggle your toes?”

  She wiggled them well.

  I checked to see whether she could sense my hands on her feet and toes and she kept saying, in a nice way, but wanting to rush, “It is my back.”

  Five or six men and a host of women had by then gathered around us, but none came forward.

  “Is anyone here a doctor?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Where is the nearest hospital?”

  They named two towns, both roughly an hour away.

  I gathered the men together, and we each slid our fingers beneath her head and back and legs and began to turn her over a bit. That’s when I saw the pooled blood. It had soaked her shirt and the grass around it.

  Someone said, “Disparador!”

  I did not know that word in Spanish, and, terribly confused, I made a gun shape with my hand and said, “Bang bang?”

  “Si, pistola,” they all said together, nodding.

  I ran back to the truck and drove it half a mile down the street, then across the grass median strip and into the parking lot of a lumberyard. I slammed the truck into reverse and backed into a covered loading area. I jumped out and grabbed the heaviest plywood board they had. I threw the wood into the bed of my truck and floored it out of the lot, quickly followed by six or eight astonished employees chasing after me as a thief. I drove the half-mile down the highway to
the fallen woman in the oncoming lane (there is not much traffic in southwestern El Salvador). I spun the truck around and jumped out. Four men carried the plywood with me to her side. Then—on three—we all lifted her lightly onto the board.

  The woman’s sister had come upon our heartbreaking scene and stood close by, nearly hysterical. I helped the sister into the truck bed. The two siblings held hands. Blood seeped across the new plywood board. We took off, with Cesar directing me to the hospital.

  Traffic built as I rushed toward the hospital. I cut around other cars, driving in the wrong lanes and honking like hell. The other drivers got pissed off but I didn’t care. Then my truck stalled. I turned the ignition, pumping the gas. It wouldn’t catch. A group of angry drivers climbed out of their cars and converged on my truck, and I stepped out to confront them. They were taken aback by my earnest manner. I pulled two of them forward to see the woman.

  Suddenly they all jumped into action, pushing my truck until it started. Two of the drivers sped around me and broke trail all the way to the little town where the hospital was located. Once in town the traffic became unrelenting, nearly unmoving. I drove on sidewalks. I drove the wrong way down one-way streets. I drove toward oncoming traffic in a serious game of chicken, and was amazed that at the last second the others always moved. Finally, I was chased by three police cars. They caught me at a hopelessly locked bottleneck leading into the town square by a busy outdoor market.

  I jumped out of the truck, and the police ran toward me, shouting. I pointed at the woman in the back. The police saw her sister crying, and the blood, and they took control. They did what police are supposed to do. Two or three ran down the street, telling every car to move, yelling at the drivers until they had half the cars on the sidewalk. Police cruisers turned on all of their lights and sirens, and police on motorcycles cleared the way ahead. We pulled into the hospital courtyard a few minutes later and volunteers carried her in with me, still on the board.