If you to go to bigbluerow.com or to rocexpedition.com, you will find photos of the boat and of our training, will get at least sporadic updates from the journey and will be able to follow our progress on a map of the Atlantic, where we will appear as a tiny dot. We will also appear as a tiny dot in real space and time on the actual Atlantic—but let us not get poetic. If all goes well, the dot will reach Barbados sometime around mid-February.
As you know, we will be chasing not just a world record but a fine six-person rowboat, a tri-hull named Hallin Marine (formerly Triton), which will be leaving the Canary Islands a week or more prior to our own departure and may well establish a new record before we get to Barbados. So in effect we will be chasing Hallin’s record, not the existing thirty-three days. A more conventional single-hulled rowboat named Sara G will also be setting out from the African coast at about the time we do. So we are braced for rivalry against muscular British rowers who I am led to believe carry far higher pedigrees than do we. Indeed, our respective crews remind me of those dog teams that compete in the Alaskan Iditarod or Yukon Quest dogsled races across a thousand miles of subarctic wilderness. Some of the teams are highly pedigreed purebreds, or carefully bred crosses, while others (the canine version of the Big Blue crew) are made up of strays from the pound and are apparently the more resilient for it.
All of this “racing,” I might add, is unofficial—a projection entirely of our being out there at the same time as the other boats and with the same ambition. Yet another vessel, Britannia ii, will be leaving Africa or the Canaries with, I believe, a crew of eight just after our departure, except with no stated ambition to set a record. For all of this, it is unlikely that we will either see or hear from any of these boats, before, during, or after our respective crossings, unless of course we should happen to meet on the sea floor or fetch up within a couple of hours of one another on the coast of Mauritania or Gran Canaria.
The final two members of our crew of sixteen were added this week. Unfortunately, we lost a rower, Anne Maurissen from Belgium, who signed on a few days after our training session but fell on the ice on Christmas Eve, in Brussels, and fractured her wrist. I never met her, but in her emails sensed a kindred spirit, so I will miss what she undoubtedly would have brought to the crew.
Our latest additions are a twenty-four-year-old British medical student named Liam Flynn, who rows recreationally on the English south coast, and a thirty-one-year-old Tasmanian woman, Margaret Bowling, who is reputed to be an organizational whiz and will apparently be assisting Angela with the command.
While I have been attempting to play down any symphonic goodbyes, I want to say that I have appreciated the good wishes that so many of you have sent my way. As of the moment I have received well over a hundred messages, some of which I can barely read for the depth of their grace and goodwill.
I am heading out optimistically and with great respect for my fellow crew members, for our builder, David, and for our captain, Angela. And of course for the ocean. As the writer Simon Winchester said of the Atlantic, “It is a gray and heaving sea, not infrequently storm-bound, ponderous with swells, a sea that in the mind’s eye is thick with trawlers lurching, bows up, then crashing down through great white curtains of spume, tankers wallowing across the swells, its weather so often on the verge of gales, and all the while its waters moving with an air of settled purpose, simultaneously displaying incalculable power and inspiring by this display perpetual admiration, respect, caution, and fear.”
We will be counting on the trade winds to move us along—and on all the energy we can muster for our rowing.
And so I go—deeply appreciative of your support and of your good wishes for the trip.
I look forward to reporting to you all upon my return.
Happy New Year! Farewell for now.
Sincerely and affectionately,
Charlie
AT TRUDEAU AIRPORT in Montreal the next afternoon, as I lay on a padded bench attempting to get a little rest, I mentioned to Steve that I had a swelling and an ache in one of my ankles. I believed I had picked up a minor injury in training that had been accentuated by long hikes around downtown Toronto as I tried to find anything I was missing in clothing and kit items. Ever the pragmatist, Steve informed me that if it was blood-clotting—“thrombosis,” I believe he called it—it would either shake loose unannounced and kill me instantly (in which case I had nothing to worry about) or would dissolve without shaking loose (in which case I would live on and had nothing to worry about).
At perhaps 5 p.m. (having found something to worry about) I went on an extended tour of the airport in search of Tom, who had taken the train from Toronto rather than flying with the rest of the Canadians, and with ninety minutes to go till boarding for Casablanca was nowhere to be found. I called his wife, Luisa, who said he had left on a later train than he had intended and should now be in Montreal.
A kind of gallows watch ensued, during which one or two of us would saunter down the long row of international gates, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tom’s distinctive bald head or hear the equally distinctive kazoo of his voice. My concern was that as we got to within forty-five minutes of takeoff, he would, for security reasons, not be allowed on the plane.
The flight was eventually called, and the six of us lingered in the departure lounge until I, for one, couldn’t stand it anymore and said to Dylan White, “We’ll see him in Agadir.” And I got up, showed my passport at the gate, and walked into the tunnel that led to the big Royal Air Maroc jet. But I felt wretched knowing that Tom, who did not like money transactions or even using a credit card (he had gotten Steve to buy his plane ticket), would probably get hit for four or five hundred dollars in rescheduling fees, as well as having to find a place to stay for the night and to negotiate Casablanca and Agadir on his own. If there was even the faintest comfort in any of it, it was that he speaks fluent French, so would be okay both in Montreal and on arrival in North Africa.
As the line at the aircraft door shortened to six or seven people (there were already several hundred aboard), only Steve hung back at the top of the tunnel, hoping against the hopelessness of the situation that Tom might still show up. As far as we knew, he had never checked in for the flight.
If I were to tell you that as we howled down the runway for takeoff, an elfin sixty-seven-year-old apostate waving his arms and wearing a little red gob hat came sprinting along beside the plane, leapt onto a wing, made his way forward along the fuselage to the door and thence inside with a grin, you might question my reliability as a storyteller. But in my memory of the evening, that, within a hair’s breadth of the truth, is what happened. Had Tom been thirty seconds later than he was, there would at liftoff have been six distressed, not seven relieved, Canucks in the front right quarter of perhaps the dingiest jetliner, with the cruddiest bathrooms and toilets, that I, or perhaps any of us, had ever been on.
Typically, as in days to come, Tom was the first one asleep, passed out like a lizard in a patch of sunlight, while the rest of us fidgeted and shivered and wrenched our thin blankets around us, attempting to dispossess ourselves of the stresses of the past few hours, not to mention the past few months. We had worked hard, very hard, for a reward that lay bristling before us and, for each of us, would redefine what working hard could mean.
Finally, in the darkness over the eastern Atlantic, a grumpy stewardess with breasts like warheads and the eyes of an executioner served something approximating breakfast and, in a great arcing swoosh, we rode the rising sun into Casablanca, where the airport at 6 a.m. was populated by a dozen healthy-looking cats and a scattering of unhealthy-looking human beings.
We flew on to Agadir, across the Atlas Mountains, aboard a rickety twin-engine de Havilland, the proverbial flying coffin, which might have been disconcerting had we been awake enough to notice. And drove on into the city—twenty miles in a big Mercedes cab: past date palms and argan orchards and palmettos; and bursts of bougainvillea on the cinder-block shacks; and li
ttle roadside stalls selling French pastries and used car bumpers and chips of burnt meat on a stick; all of it spread out against the unending brownish rock that, whether in mountains or coastal plains or city outcrops—or reduced to sand by the wind—is the fundamental landscape of North Africa.
5
FOR THE NEXT TWELVE days, the men of the crew lived in a windowless backstreet apartment that had been rented for us by David. This morose concrete grotto was crammed with lurid Moorish furniture: ensembles of leopard skin and red vinyl and purple plush, with big velveteen cushions, and tassels on everything, and poorly dyed carpets. All the trappings of whoredom, right down to the red lightbulb in the front hall. So much attention to tactility but with no actual comforts—not even proper light, or hot water, or even a table to eat off. And of course no art or books. The bathroom, whose encrusted shitter was surely a castoff of Royal Air Maroc, both looked and smelled like a leprosarium. I admired Steve’s response when, together, we laid eyes on the bowl: the double take, the queasy smile, the glance my way as if to say It’s you or me, brother, and the immediate commitment (his) to scouring the thing out.
The kitchen wasn’t much better, and since there was no means of dealing with the trash produced by a perpetually famished rowing crew with little inclination to clean up, it simply accumulated: first in garbage bags, six, seven, eight of them, crowding the kitchen floor, and then in an impassable knee-high heap of loose egg cartons, cereal boxes, orange peels, soup cans, cookie packages; plus the endless plastic bottles and tubs in which Moroccan dairy products are sold and go moldy and die.
The highlight of my days on Rue Salaam (Peace Street)—a lovely address, I thought, for a place that even our gentle-tongued crewmate Sylvain referred to as “a bit crappy”—came on a morning when I had risen in the pre-dawn so as to be early to the boat, and Steve, as a reward for my diligence, placed a saucepan of heated water in the bathroom that I could mix with cold tap water in a grubby plastic bucket that subbed as the apartment’s shower.
Ten of us lived ass-over-chinstrap in this weird little den—all the men but David, who was installed in the Ibis Hotel, a nice-ish two-star a fifteen-minute walk away, with his dark-eyed fiancée, Lali, who was visiting from Tbilisi. Because she spoke only Georgian, Lali could do little more than smile at the rest of us, and languish, and look longingly at David. They were tender and smoochy with one another and spoke softly, probably about taxi fares or laundry, and yet it always sounded intimate and mysterious. At the boatyard, she would stand motionless and decisive-looking beside Big Blue with her hand on the gunnels for a few seconds, then would pirouette suddenly and take a step or two and put her hand on the rudder and stand there for a minute—then would stand on the ladder that led up to the bridge, while David, a few feet away, sweated and hung upside down, fussing with the wiring, or whatever, in some impossible-to-reach place inside one of the holds.
I had an urge to talk to Lali, to be friends with her; she was so alone. Plus, I knew she had lots to say, having survived a ruinous civil war in Georgia, as had David, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. But to carry on even a few minutes of conversation would have required focused translation by David, who spoke a poetically quirky English, cut with the inevitable shorthand of television and the web. But he didn’t have time, what with getting the boat ready twelve hours a day. So our discourse was limited to a daily morning greeting—“Hi Lali!”—to which she would respond brightly, “Hi Chordly!”
The women meanwhile lived in a tidy resort apartment five miles from the men, near the waterfront and the port entrance. The place had a contemporary kitchen, a television, two cushy bathrooms with hot showers, plenty of dishes and towels and bedding. About the only thing it had in common with our place was that its furniture appeared to have been swiped out of the same hellacious cathouse. The place had originally been rented by Angela and her partner, Deb Moeller from Bakersfield, California, a woman who put heart and soul into looking after not just Angela—whom she called “Madsen” and treated with tender exasperation—but half of the administrative chores around the expedition: communications, website, media relations, plus any sort of messaging and boat contact that was required from land once we set off. From the time I met them at Shelter Island, it was hard to imagine that Angela could have carried on as she did without Deb, who was her “girl,” so to speak, her adjutant, as well as her manager, advisor, and agent; and driver and photographer; and social coordinator and lover—all of it puttied up and patted into place with painstaking care and affection. If you wanted the lowdown on Angela, you went to Deb; if you asked Angela directly, she’d say, “You’d better ask Deb.”
Above all, Deb protected Angela. On the way into New York City in the van after the training weekend, she had confided to me her rather poignant (and ultimately accurate) fear that people would “take advantage of Madsen” because she was so essentially gentle and unassertive. It was an image that did not seem to jibe with that of a woman who, before her spinal injury, had been in the police corps of that toughest of military branches, the U.S. Marines. The truth was, she had joined the Marines with the hope of becoming a mechanic like her brothers and dad before her, and it was only because of her size (not to mention her reluctance to refuse) that the towering recruit had been pushed into police work. She told me one night over dinner in Agadir about being summoned repeatedly and unhappily to deal with domestic violence at the residences of Marines who had returned from conflicts in, I believe, Southeast Asia. “All these guys,” she said, “had taken ‘desensitization’ training so they wouldn’t be affected by orders, say, to go into villages and slaughter women and children, which was bad enough. But when they got home, nobody ‘re-sensitized’ them, so they were equally insensitive to their own wives and children.”
Originally the whole crew was to have lived in the men’s flop pad. But when Liz Koenig and Aleksa Klimas-Mikalauskas arrived a day or two past New Year’s, after detouring to Marrakesh, it was all quite natural that they settle in with Angela and Deb. For one thing, the four of them were well acquainted after an agonizing seventy-two-hour snow delay at JFK in New York, over Christmas. Plus, they had all endured horrific problems with Royal Air Maroc, which had lost not only Liz and Aleksa’s luggage (it eventually arrived) but Angela’s custom-built ultra-light wheelchair, which the airline replaced with a flimsy little rickshaw of a thing that would occasionally drop a part or two on the sidewalk—not at all the sort of appliance to carry a 250-pound woman with very specific ergonomic requirements.
The boatyard where we worked was within the high guarded walls of the officially designated “Port of Agadir”—a square mile or so of docks and warehouses and boat-building facilities spread out along the seashore at the city’s north end. Immediately to the east rose a desert-dry mountain whose top formed the old-city kasbah, the only remaining feature of ancient Agadir, which had been destroyed by an earthquake in 1960. The city had been rebuilt and was now uniformly modern, including the souk, a vast walled city-within-a-city, where vendors sold everything from handmade leather goods and furniture to fabrics, shoes, handicrafts, fresh fruit, spices, appliances, electronic goods—anything you might want, up to and including the illicit hashish for which Morocco, perhaps the most liberal of Muslim countries, is renowned. Donkeys waited outside by their owners’ carts, amidst street garbage and squawking chickens and the occasional dead rat or dog.
Each day began for us with a long, sometimes harrowing ride from the apartment to the boatyard in one of the hundreds of tiny orange fender-bashed taxis that pinballed around the city, honking, squealing, blasting Arabic hit-parade music, throwing soot or brake parts or tire-tread. At the port gates, we showed our passes—ragged bits of tissue paper bearing a line or two of smudged Arabic—and careered on through to the Chantier Naval Hesaro. There, in the sunshine, we went at sweaty chores on a half acre of dusty concrete, amidst partially built fishing trawlers, or yachts being refurbished, one of which, a doozy built in 1948, belonged
to a member of the rock band Pink Floyd and was in for a million-dollar refit that we were told had been ongoing for years.
From New Year’s Day forth, David applied himself relentlessly to getting the boat wired and rigged and (more or less) safe for the sea. He had not just the crew’s help, but the contracted assistance of a young aide-de-camp named Hassan, whose knowledge of Agadir was encyclopedic, as well as one of the yard’s most capable artigianos, an endearing and hard-working machinist named variably “Yaya” or “Shacky,” depending on who you asked. He also had the help of a yard journeyman and, later, an electrician name Essaidi, a devout Muslim with whom I occasionally attempted to converse. Unfortunately, he was a thinking man (problematic in any culture), and his ambitions to discuss political and social philosophy with me—and on one occasion the thoughts of his fellow North African, Albert Camus—went as pearls to swine in the context of my pathetically verbless and largely brainless French.
One of the most important and time-consuming jobs was getting new hardwood handles into the dozen oars (including four spares) to which we would be entrusting our progress in the days to come. The new ones were a pearly white ash, as hard as gun metal yet less apt to cause blisters than are the state-of-the-art neoprene-wrapped handles on many sculling oars and virtually all rowing machines these days. It took four of our young crew members the better part of a week to break the old handles out of their graphite sleeves, a sliver at a time, and get the new, longer handles epoxied into place. More grueling yet was the effort of getting the “trampolines” constructed and attached—taut nylon “decks” on both sides of the boat, linking the hulls to the centrally positioned cabin, giving us a crucial six-foot-wide walking and living platform to both port and starboard.
Little Ship of Fools Page 5
