Steve suspected she was “setting Tom up,” wearing him down with the rowing, so that he would be more likely to withdraw from the expedition when we reached Tarfaya a day hence. To be fair, she may merely have been testing his resolve. Even so, it would seem highly unfair to have “tested” him while he was still suffering what appeared to be a potentially deathly illness.
In a surprise turn of events, it was Angela herself who came closest to withdrawing from the expedition—this on the morning of day five, in Tarfaya, on the edge of the Sahara, where we suffered our first, and one of our foremost, crises of personnel.
Our approach to Tarfaya had in a sense begun the previous afternoon, when after a day of relative calm we were picked up and driven south by a hard and exhilarating northeast wind. Whereas the previous day the boat’s speed had peaked somewhere under three knots, we were quite suddenly plunging along at four-and-a-half knots, a speed that had it continued would have put us in Barbados in record time.
One of the more debilitating influences on our approach to Tarfaya was that in the rush of the past few weeks, or out of simple neglect or budget consciousness, no one had bothered to acquire detailed charts of the Moroccan coast. So we had no clue what to expect in the way of shoals or sudden depth changes as, in the early morning, we bore down hard on the little sardine port. So fragile was our control in the high seas that a mile or so out we stopped rowing altogether and simply drifted, knowing that at the point we passed the end of the town’s breakwater, which extended out into the sea, hooking sharply to the south, we would have to make a hairpin turn east into port. All we could hope was that the wind and waves would not carry us past the harbor mouth onto the surrounding rocks, against which our boat would almost certainly have been demolished.
If our confidence was further diminished as David scanned the shoreline through binoculars, it was because the captain was at that moment fast asleep, seemingly comatose, in the bunk she shared with David inside the door. She had retired to bed before dawn, complaining of what she called “sinusitis,” apparently having taken a painkiller or sleeping pill or perhaps some powerful sinus medication. A couple of us tapped her on the shoulder, or called her by name at close range. However, if the calamitous bouncing of the boat and the yattering of excited voices within inches of her bunk had not been enough to waken her over a period of an hour, it seemed unlikely that any amount of polite prodding would do the job. Nobody knew what to think—she was the captain! We were in a potentially fatal situation.
As we swept across the harbor mouth at a bad angle heading for the rocks, David, who had assumed command, gave the order, and our eight rowers dug in hard at perhaps thirty strokes a minute, across the wind, and in no time had pulled the boat within the lee of the breakwater. But there wasn’t a moment to relax. For by now a deflected wind had picked us up and was pushing us at speed across our limited refuge, amidst dozens of dories and larger cabin vessels. I give credit to Margaret for her pluck in leaping into the water in an attempt to set the anchor, which would not catch in the sand. As she climbed back aboard, she slipped on the steelwork of the bridge and injured her foot, and was clearly in severe pain.
After several attempts to anchor the boat, or moor it against the harbor’s stone wall—and with advice flying in six directions—David decided to let it drift toward the docks and then to run, prow first, onto a small adjacent beach on the harbor’s south side. There, the impact of the bow sprits on the sand made a heavy, grinding thud.
Off we jumped, happy to be briefly on land, a little wobbly on our legs after four days aboard.
However, we had not been there an hour when we were suddenly in boat trouble again as the tide began to recede. Ryan noticed it first and hollered a warning, but by that time the boat’s stern, which had been floating free, had dropped to the point where the rudders, the lower thirteen or fourteen inches of them, had been driven hard into the sandy sea bottom. For an hour or more we shoveled and levered and heaved, standing up to our waists in water, attempting to free Big Blue from her unexpected incarceration. If the rudders broke we were finished; we had no way of repairing them in Tarfaya. The greater fear was that with the boat so heavy and resting on its rudder mounts, the transoms themselves—the back walls of the hulls—would be unable to take the weight and would crack.
Eventually, David gave the order just to leave it; he had faith that both the rudder posts and transoms would hold until the tide came back in and sucked the boat out of the mud.
Meanwhile, Angela had popped from the grave like the Elect on the Day of Reckoning. She lowered herself with some difficulty from the boat, whose decks were sitting five feet above the beach, called Steve aside and, based on her intuitions of four days, informed him in so many words that there was not quite enough room for both of them aboard. She believed his tendency to shape command, coupled with the obvious inclination of several crew members to look to him for leadership, would compromise her own authority, and she was thereby prepared to abandon the voyage.
Angela was not always flawless in her assessments, but she was bang on here. Steve can indeed be a menace to authority, especially when he perceives such authority to be anything less than fully proficient or committed or confident. He is also a man of hair-trigger sensitivity, and quickly now concluded that it was he, not Angela, who should jump ship and be gone.
There was one problem. Steve’s son Nigel was aboard, as were five others, including myself, whose presence on the boat was Steve’s doing and who would have been extremely unhappy to see him go. Likewise, he didn’t feel he could abandon us.
So an agreement was reached. Privately. Both he and Angela would stay and would do so in mutual respect (and throughout the trip would suffer about equally for the decision).
Perhaps an hour later, one of our younger crew members asked me in genuine perplexity why, if Angela was “so concerned about the possibility that her authority was being compromised,” she wouldn’t have gotten out of bed that morning and taken the helm and shown everybody who was boss. It was a question that was on most of our minds, a tough one to answer. A senior crew member postulated that, under the circumstances, a more experienced crew might have demanded at that point that she resign—as we might have demanded it ourselves if we’d had someone to “do the demanding” and had been sufficiently confident in our navigational capabilities to carry on in her absence. It is also possible that she had simply been knocked right out by some combination of microbes and medication, and had been unable to answer the bell.
For now, Steve quietly informed those close to him that he would be laying back, and that any matters requiring his perspective—at least matters concerning the functioning of the vessel—should be addressed to Sylvain. Who would of course pass such concerns along to Steve (who would present them to his alter ego, Cap’n Kafka).
TARFAYA, it must be said, is one of the windiest, dustiest, most godforsaken places on earth—a town barely hydrated by the Atlantic and simultaneously sucked dry by the ceaseless winds and dust off the Sahara Desert. It is also the place where the legendary aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry kept a station for the French airmail service Aéropostale during the 1920s. As such, it figures indirectly in his novella The Little Prince, written in New York in 1942 as he reflected on his time in North Africa and on his near-fatal crash in the Sahara during the 1930s.
As a crew, we were in momentous need of the Little Prince’s wisdom as the lot of us settled onto the sand for a crucial midday conclave, our first of the voyage—in fact, our first since we launched the boat at Shelter Island.
The sun and wind were by this time so fierce that at one point, overwhelmed by the heat and dust, I jumped up and ran to an upturned fishing dory near the seawall and hid under it for a minute while I regained my cool.
The first item on the agenda was Tom, who was still, as he put it, “shitting blood” and whose whole being had been reduced to a kind of rumpled effigy of himself. His voice had fallen husky and faint
.
Having learned by now that there was a bus out of Tarfaya that could take him up to Agadir or Casablanca, from where he could catch a flight home, Angela asked him rather brusquely, “So, what are you going to do, Tom?”
He thought for a moment and said, “What are my options if I stay aboard?” He clearly meant options for medical care or emergency transportation if his health did not improve.
“Well, there’s always burial at sea,” said Angela, to which Tom howled, “I’m not interested in burial at sea! I don’t consider dying an option! I have responsibilities to my family!”
“Well then you should probably stay here,” she said, to which he responded that he would think about things through the afternoon and would give her his answer by four o’clock.
The next item of business, our grossly overweight boat, prompted a reluctant commitment to jettisoning food and kit items that might be considered unnecessary. (Not that we didn’t believe a lighter boat would make easier rowing—it was just that, well, surely it wasn’t my or my modest belongings or provisioning that was slowing things down.) In the end, the most compelling part of the ensuing offload was not the actual weight reduction, minimal at perhaps 300 pounds, but the poignant sight of the impoverished man who, at the request of our French spokesman, Sylvain, had been chosen by the port authority to receive our bizarre largesse and who came trundling along the beach with his sweet-faced daughter, pushing a rickety wheelbarrow, followed by a guilty-looking little dog. When they reached the pile of stuff, they stood frowning at it (including the dog), intrinsically humiliated by the obscene imbalance of riches that had created it. Slowly they began loading it in: dehydrated dinners, bags of protein powder, nutritional supplements, Gatorade, granola, nuts, raisins, dried fruit, candy—plus odds and ends of clothing and footwear and assorted junk; and for some reason three air mattresses, one of which Sylvain and I could have used a few days hence when the one on our bed sprang a leak that we were unable to fix.
When the wheelbarrow was stacked two feet above its lip, the girl stood up on its wheel bracings and held the load in place while her dad tucked in every last pathetic item, including a few chunks of Styrofoam and some lumped cling wrap that we’d neglected to toss in the garbage. Then he hefted it all with his skinny brown arms and wobbled back up the beach, and I thanked God that he had not demeaned himself by expressing gratitude to us for the awful pile of rubbish that was our gift to him and to his town.
Before the meeting broke up, Angela, who was now as bright as a whitecap, asked if anyone had anything to add. Liam immediately piped up that one person on our watch had been late getting out of the cabin. Aw, come on, I thought, surely, he’s not... at which point I heard him say my name, and then heard my own reedy voice, like some school kid’s, as I have heard it all my life, muffled by the blood-rush in my ears or in this case the roar of the sea, attempting to convince yet another self-appointed ethics inspector—just this one more time, please—that they should overlook my screw-ups while I try to improve things, while I try to correct things, the sales pitch of the moment being that I believed I was improving my tardiness and had actually been doing a pretty good job of getting out on watch on time.
Later I said to Liam, “Why wouldn’t you just speak to me privately about that?”
“I thought you needed the reprimand,” he chirruped, to which I had no civilized response except to nod in disbelief and to offer my appreciation for his concern over my needs.
Meanwhile Ernst, in an attempt to stanch Tom’s diarrhea, had offered him some sort of super-Imodium, one tablet of which, he told Tom, would dry him up for two days. Two, he said, and Tom would not “shit till Barbados.” Three, it seemed, and he would “never shit again.” Tom, bless his heart, took three. And by four o’clock felt well enough to tell Angela that he was back aboard and ready to row.
Steve and Sylvain were not impressed with Dr. Fiby’s Desert Sands prescription service—understandably, since it would no longer be clear to them whether Tom was actually free of his bug or merely plugged up. The important thing to Tom was that he felt better after three days of pretty much grave-ready infirmity and torment.
As if anything could get wackier, during the early afternoon a young male journalist came bounding down the breakwall onto the beach, having driven across the desert from a nearby town to get the scoop on the zany American rowboat that had pulled ashore at Tarfaya. He told Liz that, through the military, the Moroccan royal family had become aware that we were moving down the coast and that an order had gone out to mariners and the media that if there was any contact with us they were to treat us with respect and generosity, presumably a kind of sop to U.S.-Moroccan diplomacy. The twist was that we had landed illegally in Tarfaya, having officially signed the boat out of Morocco five days earlier through the Customs and Immigration office in Agadir. As such, we were prohibited from re-entering the country, even landing on its shores, without renewing our papers and passport visas. All of which was clearly immaterial to the little immigration office in Tarfaya, which, beyond an obvious sense of wonderment at our outlandish craft, treated our visit with unregulated autonomy. Had it been otherwise, ironically, the royal hospitality might well have had to be extended to us through the bars of the local jail.
THE PLAN WAS to leave Tarfaya at 10 p.m.—high tide. We needed the depth of water not just to float the boat and lift the rudders but to keep us off the coastal shoals formed by the fine sand that swirls endlessly off the Sahara and settles anywhere up to half a mile offshore. Or settles on the town.
Late in the afternoon, feeling mopey and isolated, I walked up behind the port buildings toward the village mosque, where waist-high dunes, as fine as gunpowder, wound sinuously across the road or lay settled against the stone wall that separated the road from the beach, in some places burying it like snowbanks after a blizzard. A scrawny Arab, perhaps fifty years old, came shuffling along wearing filthy seersucker Capri pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Bombay Sapphire Gin.” His teeth looked like poorly driven tent stakes, and when he smiled and nodded I asked in my poor French how the town got rid of the sand so that it didn’t eventually just cover everything up. He seemed pleased to be asked a question to which he knew the answer and, through a series of charade-like gestures and growled phrases, gave me to understand that there were vingt hommes and beaucoup de pelles, and perhaps a loader of some sort, and that these vingt hommes worked full-time shoveling the sand into deux camions, which delivered it back to the desert, from where it began blowing again into Tarfaya. It reminded me of writing, although I didn’t bother saying so—time was short and my French poor, and I knew that somewhere back on the beach there were masters to appease and world records to consider, and I thought I’d best get going. But I regretted, under the pressure of the afternoon, that I did not feel comfortable going farther into town to seek out the Exupéry museum, or the monument to the great French writer, which I have seen a number of times in photos. (I might add, incidentally, that The Little Prince is the best-selling novel ever, at more than 200 million copies, in dozens of languages, and yet has the happy quality of seeming entirely non-commercial, a new and provocative experience for everyone who reads it.)
As I returned to the boat, it occurred to me in a modest satori why the port police had been able at a moment’s notice to produce a shiny new shovel to aid us in our battle with the rudders. Clearly, people here kept a sand shovel at the ready on the stoop or in the vestibule, the way Canadians keep a snow shovel by the front door in winter.
For now, if we needed a reminder of the potential hazards offshore, we had only to glance a few hundred yards beyond the beach to where the wreck of the immense car ferry Assalama sat rusting against a sandbar on which it went hard aground in the spring of 2008. As with all shipwrecks, above or below water, there was a creepiness to it, a nightmare factor, that hinted at one’s own potential for a bad end at sea. I had declined to take a photo of it that morning, spooked by an irrational fear
that having its image onboard, even in digital form, might somehow affect my dreams or bring malevolence to the cabin.
During the mid-afternoon, when we notified the port authority of our departure plan, they warned us that we would be risking our lives to leave the harbor and to attempt to navigate the coastal shoals in darkness—and strongly urged us to wait until sunrise. Warnings, of course, don’t apply to amateurs with dreams of world records or to rowers with such obvious navigational confidence that they have rejected the use of coastal charts in favor of guessing where catastrophe might lie. In the end, the ferocious north wind that had driven us into port that morning, and continued apace, proved irresistible to the boat’s brain-trust and trumped any concern we or the port authorities might have had for our safety. The decision to launch was reinforced by news that the wind was likely to blow at its current strength for just twenty-four more hours.
Thus it was that at about 7:30 p.m., in fading light, we eased Big Blue off the beach, gave the rudders a cursory examination (“They’ll be fine,” I heard someone say), and stroked confidently out of the harbor, into the night.
I CAN ADMIT now as I could not then that the choice to launch in darkness caused me fleeting but sincere doubts about the judgment of those in charge of our crazy little two-hulled ship—not to mention about the future of the expedition. It was one thing to wreck on sandbars a few hundred yards offshore, near a harbor full of fishing dories, quite another to suffer bad navigational or deployment choices in the middle of the Atlantic in sixty-knot crosswinds. In the days to come, such doubts became a sporadic theme in late-night conversations between Steve and myself, culminating a week or so hence when I informed him reluctantly that my suspicions about Angela and Margaret’s state of mind had led me to a secret search of their possessions to see what I could find out about their identities.
Little Ship of Fools Page 8
