The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  As the miles passed, so the river widened until the banks blurred into the distance. Where I could still see them, they were as straight as a die, shelving parapets of rust-dark gravel and beyond them a landscape so featureless and bleak that it is difficult now to recall. Was it bare earth? No, for that would imply some richness, some potential for fertility. Flat fields? But no, there was no living thing, no hint of softness, nor the bleak beauty of dead winter pasture. An expanse of concrete perhaps? But that would suggest some mighty purpose, some monumental work of Man. No, the landscape was like one seen in a dreary dream, too unimportant to be sketched in by the dreaming mind, or like the unfinished background of a poor painting not worth the finishing.

  Such thoughts were not in my mind at the time. All my attention was concentrated on controlling the dinghy as she rocketed along before what had become a gale. The wind blew straight from the north out of a sky that was as raw and bitter as frozen iron, and the river had widened until I was now on a vast lake. I could not in the increasing murk see any banks at all – occasionally I would see a lonely beacon post standing high out of the water, and then another, and then another, and these I followed for want of any other guidance. Sometimes far, far away I caught sight of what might have been a series of low bunkers or an electricity pylon, but otherwise I felt that I had stumbled onto a vast lagoon just off the North Sea, or the North Bering Strait for all I knew. I certainly had nothing like this marked on my map. In fact, from this point on, my precious map of Europe’s waterways became pretty well useless.

  Yet, as always happens when the conditions grow rough, I found I was enjoying myself. I was well rugged up and the dinghy was moving almost as fast as I had ever known it. The wind had rolled up the water into big smooth waves, as big as those on the open sea, and I was riding each one in smooth, powerful succession. Jack had a spurt of foam at her prow, a bone in her teeth as the sailors say. But I still felt as though I was sailing in a grey limbo, neither foggy nor clear, neither sea nor river. And then, ahead, there really was nothing. It was not a matter of fogginess or obscurity of sight. I could see perfectly well what lay ahead, but it didn’t make sense. The vast lagoon seemed to stop in mid-air, and an uncanny nothingness to lie beyond.

  Soon I drew near enough to see the explanation for this sudden cessation of landscape. The lake lapped right up against a low parapet that stretched from east to west across my whole forward horizon, and this was just the top foot or so of a great reservoir-wall. I was later to see that it dropped two hundred feet on the other side to a flat plain, but to a small boat on the lake it appeared that the water simply ended in a grey sky, and that this low concrete rim was the dreary World’s End. With only a few feet to go and the wind blustering me onwards from behind, I realised the danger and heeled hard to the left. For the next few minutes I skimmed at high speed along the top of the wall, only a feet or two from the concrete lip, nearly shaving the wall with my gunwales. The tiller was hard over to the right as I desperately tried to steer further from that massive drop, but for some reason Jack wasn’t responding. Any minute now and she was going to touch the wall, here only a foot above the slopping waves, and the wind was going to swat her sideways and tip me out and over the edge. I was going to die.

  Then I saw what the problem was. The centreboard was not fully down. For the last three hours I had been sailing downwind and the centreboard had been half up, not needed when running before the wind. Now Jack had little steerway and was simply skidding sideways across the top of the water despite the best efforts of the rudder. I leaned forward, placed my hand on top of the centreboard and pushed down with all my might.

  Oh God, don’t jam now.

  Don’t … jam … now …!

  From where I was sitting in the stern, I could not get fully over the centreboard to plunge it further down; but if I squirmed forward to do so, I could not keep the tiller jammed over to the right. I was close enough now to the wall to look over the edge of the dam to the plain two hundred feet below. My rocketing passage was sending a bow wave swooshing up and over the wall. The wind was gusting harder still and I had to do something. Jamming my foot against the tiller to keep it in place, I lunged my body forward like an otter in the final stages of electrocution and body-slammed the centreboard down into its slot. Ah-ha! Jack responded immediately, turning up into the wind so swiftly that I very nearly went about and lost control altogether, flailing in a series of 360-degree turns. But no. I was safe and steadily moving away from that dreadful drop and towards the safety of the farther end of the dam.

  Along to the eastern end of the dam wall was a concrete tower now familiar as the control-tower of a lock, and it was at this tower that I aimed. With the waves side-on, the sailing was less comfortable but infinitely safer than launching into mid-air at a height of two hundred feet above the landscape, so we bore up well, Jack and I. It was with a wholly false sense of approaching safety and calm that I approached the concrete complex of piers and wharves directing shipping into the huge double locks that would let us continue on the river far below. For once we sailed around into the relatively narrow jaws of the lock-approach, the waves went berserk. Until now they had been big enough but regular and rolling. Between the sheer concrete walls of the piers, however, they shot up in savage vertical turrets of water, rebounding and interfering with one another to make a vicious chop the like of which I had never encountered. Even in the Thames Estuary, even in the Channel, the water hadn’t behaved like this; in fact, I had only seen anything similar on film-footage of underwater mines being detonated. All about me, explosions of water shot up in six-foot high towers, now here, now there, as though a hundred depth-charges had been triggered by my arrival.

  The Jaws of Gabcikovo

  It was with great difficulty that we made it to the pier and an iron ladder up the side. Stowing the sails in their usual wrapped bundle about the gaff and boom, I hoisted them up out of the way where they swung murderously from side to side. Jack was still battering helplessly against the concrete wall with every new wave, but there was little I could do about that except to set off to see the lockkeeper about getting into the lock as soon as possible.

  The lock-keeper was less than happy. This, he explained in a mixture of Slovakian and German, was the notorious Gabcikovo Lock, and the very presence of small craft on the reservoir or in the lock was strictly verboten. He told me that a yacht had arrived here two years back. It had been around the world several times. It had survived storms off Cape Horn; it had weathered typhoons in the Caribbean; it had run the gauntlet of the Torres Strait reefs. But here, here, he smirked with a perverse pride, here at the Gabcikovo Lock it sunk with all hands. One of the crew they never found. Nevertheless, as I had presented him with a fait accompli by my arrival, he grudgingly agreed to allow me through along with a barge that was due in the next half-hour. I was to wait until it had passed into the further of the two parallel locks, and row in afterwards. Meanwhile, ja, I was welcome to wait here out of the Arctic wind until it was time to go.

  Eventually through the murk we saw the barge approaching and I buttoned up warmly and trudged the five hundred metres to the end of the pier ready to cast off and follow her in. She was half a mile away and approaching steadily. It was only when I was close by Jack that I thought to myself how odd it was that she was no longer lying facing into the wind, as all boats do when tethered at the bow. Three seconds later I realised that she was no longer tethered at all. The blue painter was still tied firmly around the bollard, but with the sawing of Jack up and down against the pier in the dreadful waves, the rope had frayed right through. Jack was adrift!

  Normally this would not have been too disastrous. A dinghy adrift tends to blow aimlessly and quite slowly directly downwind, and this would have brought Jack bumping along the pier wall until she fetched up against the closed lock-gates of the nearer lock, in a sort of cul-de-sac. At the worst I might need to fetch a boathook to reclaim her and so miss the chance to go through with
the approaching barge. But I had underestimated the free spirit of Jack de Crow. She needed no skipper aboard to guide her on a properly steered and purposeful course. The rudder was down, the tiller was held firmly by an elastic cord, and the hoisted bundle of canvas and gaff was enough of a sail in this wind to send her skipping across the waves on a course all of her own. She was sailing solo. The only problem with this jaunty show of independence was that the course she was on would end in a collision with the open lock-gates and the approaching barge. She was, in fact, racing to get there first, and from the look of it, would arrive at the lock-gates at precisely the same time as her rival.

  In the serious world of Slovakian industrial river transport, the locks are the size of hydro-electric schemes and the barges could sit squarely in the middle of two football pitches end to end and not leave a lot of room for players around the edge. These iron giants have names like ‘Bratislava Hulk Haulage’ and are not to be trifled with. They are captained and crewed by grim-eyed, unshaven Romanians in grimy overalls who live on vodka, deep-fried pig’s blood sausages and any dinghy sailors they can run down and gut.

  This particular barge would fit into the Gabcikovo lock like a truncheon into a sheath. There was barely any room between the iron precipice of the hull and the concrete precipice of the lock’s walls. There was certainly no room for a wooden dinghy off on a bid for freedom. In other words, in about three minutes’ time there was going to be a keel-crunching, hull-splitting collision between a two-thousand-ton, unstoppable industrial barge the size of Wolver-hampton, a small thirty-year-old plywood dinghy and the concrete mouth of a lock that had been there for the last thirty years and wasn’t going anywhere. It was not hard to guess who was going to come off worst.

  For three daft seconds I considered diving into the freezing choppy soup, clad in waterproof over-trousers, cagoule, fleece and several more layers of heavy winter clothing, in order to swim after the truant Jack and steer her to safety. Cowardice and sanity prevailed, however, and I set off haring down the pier in an attempt to reach the collision point before Jack did. The lock-entrance she was headed for was beyond the nearer one, and I needed to run the full length of this, across a bridge at the further end, and all the way back up the other side – about the same distance as two laps of a football pitch. The clothes I was wearing were about as suitable for a swift sprint as a Santa Claus suit. Nevertheless, I had no choice but to try.

  I arrived blinded with sweat and too late. The giant barge was halfway into the lock and there was no sign of Jack, not even a yellow smear of paint on the ironwork of the barge’s hull. I stood there numb with shock. Not only was all that I owned – passport, wallet, rucksack – now at the bottom of the lock, but the great journey had come to an abrupt end. The Gabcikovo Lock had claimed another gallant vessel. There would be no going to the Black Sea after all.

  I sat down on a bollard and watched the last metres of the barge creep inexorably into the lock. The gates were closing. The crew were busy with mooring lines, and sure enough, appeared to be the rough Romanian crew I had envisaged. They seemed so unconcerned that it was clear that they hadn’t even seen Jack, let alone noticed her demise. At least I would not have their angry recriminations to face.

  Or would I? One of them was calling out and beckoning in my direction. Ah well, time to face the music. I rose from my perch and trudged bleakly down to the stern of the huge ship – and there, bobbing at the back, jaunty as ever, was Jack de Crow. I gaped. I gawped. I could not possibly imagine how she had been saved. Some crew were tying a tow-line to her, and others were leaning over the stern examining her for damage. Somehow, I gathered, the sharp-eyed crew had seen the imminent collision while I was running blindly down the lock, had deftly nipped forward to the bows, hooked Jack with a boat-hook, and dragged her to the stern as the barge churned in through the lock-gates.

  Dazed with relief, I climbed down onto the barge into the midst of the unsmiling crew and went into my usual mime-routine, explaining that I had come from England. Beneath their unblinking gaze, I then faltered into stammering thanks and apologies, and more apologies, and thanks, and apologies, and went to untie the bow-line and disappear as quickly out of their lives as possible. At this point the grimmest of them all said, ‘Nyet! No! Kom!’ and pointed down into the bowels of the ship.

  Ah. Why? Was this the reckoning? Was I to face the stern Romanian Kapitan and an incomprehensible, enraged lecture on the folly of mixing footling pleasure craft with the serious Romanian barge-industry? Or perhaps to turn out my pockets and cough up my last Slovakian krona as a ransom before reclaiming my sorry little dinghy? Or perhaps this ugly crew were in need of a cabin-boy after the last one expired, and I would fit the bill nicely all the way to Odessa?

  Well, no, not exactly. I was sat down at a table with ten other men, all of them swarthy and smoking what smelt like tarmac, and was poured a large tumbler of schnapps. A bowl of hot soup appeared, and a platter of bread; the soup was a broth full of root vegetables, white fish, black scaly fish-skin, paprika and black pepper. Then there followed another schnapps, burning like fire in my throat, and a sizzling plate of fat rissoles, chopped tomato and salad appeared through the haze of blue smoke in front of me, and I fell on it with tears of joy and exhaustion. All the while some of the crew were getting up from their dinners and moving outside to fix something. When I followed, I saw that they were rigging up a portable pump to sit in Jack’s waterlogged bottom to rid her of all the water that had washed aboard. Another man was handing out my sodden rucksack, my sleeping bag and my mattress in their sacks, and a third was inspecting some minor damage to the prow where the perspex bow-plate fitted by Peter in Coblenz had splintered into two. I moved to help but was ushered back down into the galley and poured a third schnapps by a man who, I realised, was speaking a thick guttural French and plying me with questions.

  The next few hours passed in a tarry, schnapps-bright haze, and it was some twenty miles down the river again that they gently helped me into my dinghy, untied me from the stern and cast me adrift to make my own way again. The day had cleared, the river had narrowed down to a manageable size, and Jack and I were left alone to continue on our journey together. After a sheepish silence, Jack apologised to me for the truancy that had come so near to disaster that afternoon. I in turn did the right thing and said how sorry I was for abandoning her in Vienna and going off to art-galleries and coffee-shops without her. With a little shake of her sails, she made it quite clear that all was now well between us. To change the topic, I pointed out how well we had done that day, breaking all previous personal records. We had come just over one hundred kilometres in a single day. And so it was with a surge of mutual pride, the best of friends again, we sailed at dusk that evening out of Slovakia and into the land of Hungary.

  ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness …’

  Having got the whole of The Eve of St Agnes under my belt, I had turned back to some of Keats’ shorter works to memorise, and as before, I found that day by day the words took shape around me in the landscape I was passing through. The land was flat but mellow with old golds and purple copses, and a haze of wood-smoke hung in the bright air from morning to dusk. Two more days of steady rowing brought me to the town of Esztergom, the ancient spiritual heart of Hungary. In my ignorance, I had never heard of it, but the very name conjured up something Byzantine and mosaic. You never see it written in any way other than this:

  and it gave me an inexplicable thrill. High over the town loomed a rounded hill, and this was capped by the green-domed Dom. I wandered up through the massive fortifications of the Burg one morning. A wet night had left the ground soggy with large, sad leaves which lay like soiled paper bags on the unkempt grass and slippery paths. The place felt very Eastern Bloc, with cracked concrete and damp stone, and the Dom was cavernous and cold. I paid a small sum to climb up to the top of the dome and from there could see the whole length of the river, the Duna as we must call it now, sweeping backwards to t
he brown haze of Slovakia and onwards to the Great Bend a few miles ahead. Here the river, after so many hundreds of miles forging eastwards, turned sharply south to Budapest and beyond. Where it did so, gentle hills on either side were clothed with fruit trees and orchards, vineyards and little homesteads; here was a place where Keats could well have written his Ode to Autumn, especially as here still, as in the poet’s day, cider-presses ooze the slow hours and reaping-hooks still spare the last twinèd wreath of flowers. But not in Esztergom itself. Here the distant yapping of dogs in back lanes, the faint pervading smell of open drains and the soggy trees argued a poverty very different from the well-brushed landscapes of Austria.

  Wandering back down through the ramparts and the 400 steps to the river, I was bailed up by five dogs. Three were snarling about my ankles and another two were on a parapet engaged in a frenzy of barking and teeth-baring at the level of my head. Alarmed, and with nowhere else to go, I thumped backwards into an old wooden door set into a corner tower. To my surprise the door swung open and I fell through into the darkness beyond. As I slammed the door shut, I heard the satisfying thud and yelp of a dog hurling itself at me, but finding six-inch oak-ply instead. When I had let out a shaky but triumphant ‘Yippee!’ I was startled all over again to realise that an ancient crone was sitting less than two feet away, hidden in the shadows. After gazing at me intently from hooded eyes, she made a sweeping gesture with her arm towards a hanging curtain and cackled something like ‘Enter, kind master, and gaze upon your doom,’ though I may have imagined this. Pushing aside the curtain I found myself in a large circular room which had been converted into a temporary photographic art-gallery. My mind full of Macbeth, I had been expecting a torture chamber at the very least. I am neither very knowledgeable nor interested in photography, but these were extraordinary because not one of the exhibits had been produced on ordinary commercial film. The artists had instead used a bizarre variety of materials – hessian, corrugated iron, bleached wooden slats, muslin – and had somehow projected their images onto these surfaces. The images were grainy or patchy, coarse, splashy, brush-stroked or mottled, depending on how the materials had been impregnated with light-sensitive chemicals, and the eff ect had the power of anything that is primitive. To see a derelict wasteland of winter trees and frozen puddles projected onto a sheet of rusting tin, or to see the figure of a Bosnian refugee mother and child caught in the fibres of a piece of dusty sacking like some latter-day Turin Shroud, was a strangely moving experience.