A Mile Down

by David Vann

  These days were busy but also much easier than the rest of the summer, because the financial crush had been lifted. Amber was happy to hear about the money coming in, after having to juggle bills all summer, and reassured me that she had just spoken with John, whose loan would arrive in about three weeks.

  Not everything went smoothly, though. Now that the new seams had cured, Ercan and another man were sanding the entire deck with a large grinder, and naturally Ercan was barefoot. I had told him to wear boots many times that summer, but he was always scoffing at my safety worries, and this time the grinder caught a bit of deck, jumped, and tore up his foot and hand pretty badly. It didn’t saw through, but it mangled skin and several toes and cut the bone.

  We rushed him to the hospital, which was already a familiar place. A few weeks earlier, Seref’s son had been run over by a car while riding his bicycle through one of Bodrum’s narrow streets. He pulled through without permanent damage, and Ercan was going to do the same, but I couldn’t help being reminded of how easy it was to die or lose a limb here, how cheap life was.

  I stayed with Ercan through that first afternoon and evening, and I paid for all his care. I also gave him extra cash in addition to his pay. There’s no workers’ health insurance to speak of in Turkey. Employers just pay if an employee gets hurt, or else the employee is out of luck. The cost of medical care, fortunately, is about a tenth of what it is in the United States.

  As we came to our last day in Bodrum, Seref was holding all of my papers. Ostensibly this was because he was clearing customs and immigration for me. But it was also a power play. I had to pay him the last two or three thousand I owed before I could go. I promised I would make the payment within a week, with a transfer from the U.S., since I didn’t have the cash now, and he finally agreed to this, seeing no other option, but then he wanted to go for a little walk to discuss his “commission.”

  The boat that was supposed to cost $300,000 or $350,000 and be perfect had in fact cost $600,000 and was full of flaws I would be fixing for years, but Seref expected a bonus for all of the good work he had done. He wanted his tip to be based on the total cost, including the original purchase of the hull and the cost of the items I had shipped. He wanted 15 percent, which was $90,000. I knew that he had been collecting commissions all along and had probably bought some of his new rental car fleet with my money during the winter, delaying the construction. But for now I had to pretend a commission was coming so he would let me leave.

  Seref had one hand on the back of my neck as we walked along. It was evening, very balmy, the Bodrum waterfront a place I was actually quite fond of and was going to miss, even the mopeds sputtering past.

  “I build this boat for you like it is my own boat,” he said. “Do you like your boat?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s beautiful. Thank you. And though we’ve had some bad moments, I want you to know how much I appreciate the work you’ve done for me.”

  He seemed to relax a bit. “You are my friend,” he said. “Most men demand full commission before the boat leaves, but I know your money, that you have no money until you get this loan from John, and your schedule, and I know you won’t forget me when you leave here.”

  “No,” I said. “And you’ll have to come visit this winter in Mexico, and then I’ll be back here next summer. We have the new thing for the Brits next summer, after all.”

  “Yes,” he said. He had made a new alliance in the past few weeks with a British travel company that catered to older guests. He had told them about my educational charters and they seemed interested. The next summer, using leased boats, we were going to run educational charters for hundreds of old Brits, and I was going to supply all of the professors and set up the curriculum.

  I didn’t believe any of this, of course. It was just a ploy by Seref to encourage me to pay his commission. If I thought I was going to make a lot on future business, I would have more incentive.

  “Yes,” Seref said again. “This will be very good business for us.” Then he stopped, and I stopped, too, since he still had his big hand on my neck. He reached into his pocket with his other hand and pulled out an old compass. “I have a gift for you. My father give me this compass, for my first boat.”

  “Seref,” I said. “I can’t take that. That has so many memories for you.”

  “Please,” he said. “My friend.”

  So I took the compass and made a great show of my gratitude and how much his friendship meant to me and how much I was going to miss him.

  “Come,” he said, satisfied finally, or at least realizing this was the best he was going to get. “We go to my office for the papers.”

  We picked up the papers, including passports and the bluebook for the boat, then I was back on board, the boat and new crew and guests ready, and I was greatly relieved. I was going to get out of here in one piece. It was dark, about 10 P.M., our spreader lights on as we pulled anchor and freed our lines. Baresh was waving goodbye to us. He was a sweet young man. He had been paid the least, and I had given him the biggest tip, which I was glad of now.

  We motored out from under the magnificent castle, set our sails, and escaped across the wine-dark sea.

  PART TWO

  MALTA AT SUNRISE is one of the more spectacular things a sailor can see. It’s always a pleasure to view an island for the first time from the water, to approach it as the ancients did, as travelers did through all the ages until the airplane. But Malta is a special treat, because at first you see only lovely hills, light beige and pink in the light before the sun has risen fully, with what seem to be cliff faces, and it is only as you come closer that you see that some of this rock, some of these cliffs, are in fact fortifications and monuments, built from the stone of the island. You begin to make out the medieval walls and the towers. You watch the city make itself in the light, and still you don’t see anything modern, but only what a medieval traveler would have seen. And this impression remains mostly intact, even as you draw close. Only after you’re inside the harbor do you notice the smaller shops and buses and cars and power lines. Malta is an enchanted island, the place I was most eager to visit of all our ports from Turkey to Mexico.

  I radioed for a slip and was assigned an agent, who would take care of our other needs as well. I had quite a few things to buy and fix while in Malta. One of the inverters had blown out, and we needed a spotlight, a pump, several spares, and some hardware. This in addition to filling diesel, propane, water, and provisioning for the next leg to Ibiza, in the Spanish Balearic Islands.

  I was afraid, with all of this to do, that I wouldn’t see Malta at all, and this in fact is what happened. While my guests and Nancy and even the crew were able to tour the island, I worked nonstop. I heard about the Blue Grotto and other places I had wanted to visit, but I didn’t see them. A lot of pirate movies have been filmed on Malta, because of the spectacular coastline, and renting these movies was going to be the closest I would get.

  The only taste of Malta available to me was the language. Because Malta is a small island country in the middle of the Mediterranean and has been an important trading port for thousands of years, its language is a blend of the tongues of all the sailors and conquerors who have passed through. When I first heard Maltese, I actually laughed, because I thought someone was just being very funny. But it was no joke. The blend is mostly Arabic and Sicilian but includes Greek, Spanish, French, English and other tongues, including African tongues, with a bit of the Swedish chef thrown in. It’s the most improbable, liquid, beautiful mess of language I have ever heard.

  This humored me as I went about my tasks. But I was preoccupied by the fact that business at home in California was not good. Amber was not selling our winter trips in Mexico.

  There was no reason these trips should not have sold. I had a famous professor teaching the Archaeology of the Maya, an excellent Spanish language instructor, a famous poet, and other solid offerings. Mine was the only overnight charter boat on that entire coast south of Can
cun. And Cancun was an easy place to fly into. I had advertising through the University of San Diego as well as through Stanford. The advertising budget was a bit short for magazine ads and direct-mail postcards, but the numbers were still far too low. Amber just wasn’t good at selling trips, or she wasn’t trying.

  I was also worried that she wasn’t paying bills correctly. I sent an e-mail with precise instructions for the new loan from Rand and Lee; exact amounts were to be paid on each of my dozen credit cards. I was so late on so many bills that I had to be careful what I paid when, to keep all of the various creditors sufficiently appeased.

  We finished our preparations and set sail for Ibiza. My crew were college students taking fall semester off. Nick, Charlie Junkerman’s son, had suffered up the California coast with me two summers earlier, on the way to my first charter season in the San Juans with Grendel. I had promised him and his parents that this trip would be better, an enjoyable cruise through the Med and then an easy downwind sail across the Atlantic and Caribbean to the Yucatan. Emi had been a student in one of my undergraduate courses. She was from Homer, Alaska, and had spent many seasons working on her family’s commercial fishing boat. Her boyfriend Matt, also an Alaskan commercial fisherman, had joined us even though I wasn’t paying him.

  The trip through the Strait of Sicily was rough. So when we pulled into Ibiza after three days at sea, I was tired. A beautiful harbor, with a huge castle on the point, but also an overcast, blustery day. As I entered the narrow fairway to the marina, the wind was gusting at over thirty knots from behind, which made our entire boat act like a sail. I had the engines in reverse as I was blown down the fairway past dozens of multimillion-dollar motor yachts.

  I saw very little of Ibiza. It’s a famous party town, one of the most famous in the world. Clubs that pound all night. We were seeing it in mid-October, though, after the high season, so it was quieter. The castle was magnificent and much better preserved and more accessible than any other I had visited in the Mediterranean. I felt the full enchantment of the place at night with Nancy, walking the fortified walls lit in green and white, following mazes down inside the castle, stone passageways that twisted and turned and finally emerged in some new vista of lights overlooking the harbor and city. I longed to have just a little more time, but I was on a schedule, meeting people in Gibraltar, the Canaries, and St. Lucia, and I had to keep the boat running. I had to arrive in Mexico on time for my new permits and licenses and other preparations for the winter charters.

  So we sailed for Gibraltar, Nancy and the crew and I. No guests. And we hit no weather at all. It was flat calm. Reflective, like a mountain lake, with no boats and no wind. Even when I had hit a huge calm in the Pacific a thousand miles out from Hawaii on Grendel and seen a blue whale, I had been able to detect a very gradual swell, but on this trip there was no swell at all. We motored without sails across endless glass, laughing with each other at the oddity of it. Our last night, we passed through an enormous fishing fleet, lights everywhere on the water, like fireflies. Off in the distance were two lighter patches of sky that over the hours became the two Pillars of Hercules, Gibraltar and Europe on the right, Morocco and Africa on the left. Two such different worlds so close to touching. We could see the lights of individual buildings on both shores, and heavy shipping traffic in between. Scores of tankers and freighters were anchored in the shallows, our radar dotted up for miles.

  We entered the Bay of Gibraltar, passing just southwest of the famous rock, which was lit by spotlights, and waited half an hour or so for daylight to make our approach into a marina. I felt lucky to be experiencing all of this, voyaging from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, and I think the crew felt the same way. In the future, though, I wanted to have the luxury of visiting every port. We had passed so close to Tunis, an African port, but the schedule hadn’t allowed a stop. We had passed Sicily, also, without stopping. We had sailed close enough to see these places, the outline of their mountains, had studied them through the binoculars, knowing we were missing everything. I missed Turkey already like a second home, ached for it despite all the hassles. And what about these other countries, if only I could spend some time in them?

  In Gib, as the locals refer to it, we were joined by Barbara, one of my lenders who had already been on trips in the San Juan Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Mexico. She was happy to be on vacation, away from the responsibilities of her law firm and kids, and she was anxious to head out.

  My three crew were busy roaming Gibraltar for various spares and offshore equipment. The entire country is only three miles long and a mile wide, a warren of small shops that seem nearly invisible but are known, without exception, by every Gibraltarian. And the landmarks are houses and neighborhoods, rather than streets. “That’s near Imossi House, just before Irish Town,” they’ll say. Gates and walls are also used as landmarks. The walls run everywhere, large stone structures with various important gates commemorating war. The whole country a small wart on Spain’s backside (which Spain would like to have removed), but it looks nothing like Spain, and it even has its own weather, because of the Rock, which catches what is usually the only cloud for hundreds of miles and then manages to squeeze some rain and cold out of it, while Spain remains sunny and hot.

  The main chandlery in Gibraltar was Sheppard’s, very near our marina. They can boast the highest prices for marine hardware anywhere in the world, combined with the very worst customer service. They can offer all this because they have no competition, a condition guaranteed to continue into perpetuity because of tight, nepotistic control over business licenses.

  Gibraltar, all in all, is a dark and depressing little place. The bright spots are the pasties and the megayachts. The pasties at Dad’s Bakehouse are extremely cheap and tasty. Delicious pastry filled with the classic beef, potatoes, carrots, and onion, or variations with chicken or veggies. I was also fond of several fish-and-chips shops. And you can’t beat Gibraltar for megayachts. Everyone stops in Gibraltar on their way in or out of the Med, and these largest yachts tend to make their transits every year between the Med and the Caribbean. Boat International, the magazine that features them, is the only magazine I treasure, and for each megayacht that pulled up, Nancy and I would pull out the appropriate issue and stroll the dock to gaze at the exterior and check out the interior and specs in the magazine. Megayachts are a ridiculous waste of money, costing twenty million dollars or even ten times more, but they are also among the most beautiful and amazing objects created by humankind. Our favorite was a long blue hull of classic design with a high bow and a narrow stern, a varnished deckhouse and other classic brightwork combined with an ultramodern rig and underbody. The perfect fusion of the traditional and the modern, and as large as three city buses placed end to end.

  We made good progress on our work, despite the distraction of these yachts parked right next to us, but the weather turned sour and delayed our departure. It was cold and squally, with a lot of rain and no weather window appearing.

  I spent more and more time in the Internet café, fighting Amber. She assured me she had paid bills correctly after we received the $150,000 loan from Rand and Lee. But when I called my various cards to verify, I found she had mispaid my bills by an astounding $48,000. On my biggest AmEx card, she had paid $18,000 more than I had asked. This was $18,000 that didn’t need to be paid until the next month. She paid over $10,000 on another bill that wasn’t yet due. And she didn’t pay anything on a $12,000 bill that had to be paid immediately. I couldn’t understand how she could be so incompetent. I had written down the details very clearly and reminded her to double-check when she paid. She was a Stanford graduate, not an idiot, so the only explanation was that she didn’t care. She had already informed me she was moving on to a new job at the end of the month. A friend of hers had started a dot-com with millions of dollars, so she was getting a job as a product manager, even though she had no idea what that role entailed. And she didn’t care if my business went straight into the
toilet.

  I felt trapped. I should have been in California, saving my business, but I also had to stay with the boat and deliver it to Mexico. The winds were increasing, the weather turning foul, so I couldn’t have left the boat even if there had been no deadline for getting to Mexico.

  The storm increased to hurricane strength, with winds topping seventy-seven knots on the rock and more than fifty in the harbor. Our huge boat, with almost ten feet of hull from the water to deck level, and then the large pilothouse and thick wooden masts, was exactly broadside to the wind. We used every dock line we had, until there was a web of more than twenty lines coming from all our scuppers to every fitting on the dock. We were using winches and cleats and the windlass. But still the wind heeled the boat more than twenty degrees and we had to jump to the dock and back. Most of the time, Barbara couldn’t make the leap. Her legs weren’t long enough.

  On the other side of our concrete finger, megayachts were tied stern-to, their bows facing into the wind, held by double anchors. We watched one of these, a hundred-foot motoryacht, slip back and grind its stern against the concrete, which bit deep into its fiberglass. My crew and I ran over to help, trying to put fenders between the boat and the dock and yelling over the wind for the yacht’s crew. They couldn’t hear us, but they could feel and hear the grinding from inside. They came running out, fired up the engines, and put out more fenders, but the forces were enormous.

  We had visitors day and night from the dozen or so fifty-foot fiberglass yachts that were downwind of us. If our lines failed, we would, in a matter of seconds, be blown across about fifty feet of water and pulverize all of those little boats, many of which had cost between $300,000 and $600,000. So their owners took a special interest in our lines and how they were secured and whether they would hold. They were of the opinion, of course, that our lines were not thick enough, and they hassled me so continuously I finally went to Sheppard’s and paid more than $300 for two twenty-five-foot lines. It was a waste of money, but I was under a lot of pressure, from the marina as well as from the boat owners. So in the end we had almost thirty lines holding us to the dock, including two of the thickest that could be purchased in Gibraltar, and though we were heeled over in the wind and bouncing in the waves, we held.