“Life’s getting simpler,” joked Steve in response to my personal forfeitures, blissfully unaware that he would soon suffer his own dire loss, one easily as agonizing as anything I had experienced to date.
Regrettably, our losses overboard were the merest beginnings of the voyage’s ecological deficit. Notwithstanding the absence of motors and exhaust, our carbon debt would eventually include the contaminants from more than 140 long-distance flights (Shelter Island, Agadir, Barbados; crew, family, friends), the shipping of nearly a ton of food across the U.S. by air, and the shipping of the boat and supplies across the Atlantic on a container vessel, one of the dirtiest forms of transportation on earth. Even in Agadir, our comings and goings had required hundreds of cross-town rides in taxis whose exhaust reminded me of the apocalyptic tire fires of my youth. In all, the trip—a superficially eco-friendly journey by oar—was responsible for some 30,000 pounds of carbon emissions, a debt that would barely have been matched if we’d been burning a hundred survival suits a day on board, plus a ton of garbage. I mention all of this not out of my intrinsic skepticism about ocean rowing or other extreme recreation, but as a comment on the state of the seas generally, and as a reality check of sorts on the preposterous claim by some ocean rowers, as well as those involved in other seemingly planet-friendly travel and sport, that their pursuits are a testament to sound ecology.
That we still had too much food was made obvious over the next couple of days by the “reject” bags in the cabin—a pair of insulated picnic-style totes in which we could put food we didn’t want and which were brimming, as always, with nutrition bars, fake-cheese packets, crumbled peanuts, squashed raisins, all manner of protein and electrolyte supplements, and candies, many of them conveniently pre-digested by the humidity. The new joke aboard was that we were on target to set a world record for rowboats carrying 600 pounds of dehydrated stroganoff and 200 Snickers bars.
Another knee-slapper had us arriving so hopelessly far into the future that, like Rip Van Winkle, we would be aliens in the places we once knew and among loved ones who no longer recognized us. That failure at humor had at least metaphoric appeal to me, including a hint of Paul Theroux’s observation that “You go for a long time and return a different person”—return to people and places that, in your absence, have themselves often become unrecognizable.
8
A PHONE CALL TO the boat on the morning of day five out of Tarfaya brought word that we had fallen significantly farther behind Hallin and Sara G, which were apparently enjoying bumper tailwinds and were well out into the trades while we languished. On the 10-to-noon, led by Steve, our little sub-watch of four discussed in the gravest of terms what options there might be for improvement. Hollering back and forth above the crashing of the waves, we concluded, not surprisingly, that since we couldn’t alter the wind direction we could at least be more punctual. I needled Steve by pointing out that punctuality, once achieved, cannot be improved upon—in other words that there is no such thing as being “less punctual” or “more punctual.” At the same time, I acknowledged my regard for the advice once given by Lee Strasberg to Marlon Brando, another late-arriving reprobate: that if he couldn’t show up on time, he might try showing up early.
“In your case,” Steve said, “punctuality will be fine,” confirming what I had already suspected: that since the others in our sub-crew were for the most part already showing up on time, the new commitment was largely for my benefit.
Steve’s aim at this point, he said, was that we should get across at least fast enough that we didn’t “embarrass ourselves.” In whose eyes I wasn’t sure, but I imagined he was thinking about his friend David Hosking, the venerable captain of our competitor Hallin Marine, and a couple of others aboard Hallin who, before the shake-up, had been a part of the Big Blue expedition. Hosking is a British ex-naval officer with little use for anything less than superiority in human endeavor, or at least a striving for it. In what little contact I had with him during our mutual involvement with Big Blue, it became clear that he is obsessed with mental and physical toughness, with a corpuscle-busting commitment to “the cause,” whatever it might be. For me, the lot of it seemed exaggerated to a point where, by comparison, the cause itself had become a mere testing mechanism for competitive durability—for “spirit” in the sense that it was manifested by, say, Horatio at the Bridge or the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, who when questioned about his belief that “winning was everything” responded, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”
In some ways, Steve might have preferred to be aboard Hosking’s boat—and could have been, were it not for his entanglements aboard Big Blue. At the same time, I have sometimes wondered if those entanglements weren’t also a gracious convenience in that a part of Steve didn’t want anything to do with Hallin Marine. Hosking’s rallying cry for the Hallin endeavor, “One boat, one aim, one ocean,” was all very much in keeping with an m.o. that even Steve realized would be a serious and hellish punishment for a middle-aged guy with back problems, Crohn’s disease, and what he once described to me as “a bunch of other internal difficulties.”
Steve often remarked that Hosking had ordered Hallin’s crew to “cut the handles off their toothbrushes” in order to reduce weight aboard (prompting Tom’s speculation that they could have eliminated toothbrushes entirely by having their teeth pulled, another significant reduction in weight). At watch change, according to Steve, Hallin’s six rowers were permitted a total of twenty missed strokes between the six of them. One of the boat’s youngest and toughest rowers, Chris Covey, another graduate of the original Big Blue expedition, complained lavishly on the boat’s live blog about the pernicious conditions aboard Hallin: the cold, the poor food, the soakings, the pain, the exhaustion. Which in all but the toothbrushes and watch changes—and of course the skull-busting commitment and chain of command—sounded pretty much like life aboard our own little chamber of horrors.
From what I know of Hosking apart from his preoccupation with record-chasing, he is a thoughtful and generous guy who, when I joined Big Blue, emailed me almost daily to encourage me in my training and rowing techniques. Such considerations aside, I couldn’t have cared less what he thought about our effort or progress. Or what those aboard Sara G might have thought. More than once I pointed out to Steve that Sara G had crossed just a year earlier, with a presumably decent crew, in a month and a half—more than a dozen days off the record. And that no one had held them up to ridicule. Hosking himself had crossed well above record time in the 2010 Woodvale race—poor boat, lackluster crew, undoubtedly some bad weather.
Back at the boatyard, when Margaret had asked how much importance I placed on setting a record, I had responded honestly that I considered the attempt significant, that it meant something to me to do our best, and that of course I’d be excited if we crossed in record time. But that if there was no record I would not be broken-hearted. What else could I say? That if we fell behind I’d hold my breath till we caught up?
At the time, I had taken the opportunity to relay to Margaret a comment by the writer Pico Iyer that travel is most rewarding when it ceases to be about “reaching a destination”—much less reaching it in record time. Really, though, I preferred Steve’s question (the answer to which he considered something of a deal breaker): If we had a chance for the record with just days to go, and needed to lighten the boat for more speed, would I be willing to jettison the remaining food for that advantage? Of course was my emphatic reply. More than most, I believed, I was willing to jettison another 500 pounds right now (easy enough for me to say, since it wasn’t my food).
If I was feeling embarrassment of my own at this stage, it was not for the pathos or dejection that was Big Blue—to my mind a most humanizing funk—but because our entire endeavor, and to a degree our civility, was being sublimated to this absurd notion that somehow the journey was debased or even meaningless because we weren’t getting across as quickly as we’d hoped.
&n
bsp; In Steve’s eyes, different leadership from the beginning would have changed things. And he may have been right. It would not have improved the weather or wind direction, but it would have altered our focus and would certainly have meant that Margaret was not aboard, which would have pleased Steve immensely. It might even have resulted in the boat being ready sooner, and thereby an earlier departure and different winds. But that was debatable. David had all the help he needed in Agadir, and had worked like a peon himself, and we were still not ready to go until January the 11th.
One thing was certain: under a different captain we would have had less food and a lighter boat. We would also have been traveling under a lighter irony, in that it was Steve who, late in the game, on behalf of the expedition, had offered Angela the captaincy, and had persuaded her to take it.
I AM PREPARED to allow that I was wrong, that the true gist of the journey did lie in discipline and punctuality and a rejection of individual preference or interests. Certainly we had a varied crew, some of whom might have performed better if driven a little harder. At the same time, most of us were already at the limits of our capabilities and endurance—we were putting out; we were banged up; we were exhausted. It might have been different if, having risen from our bunks, we’d been able to go peaceably and quietly to our rowing seats, to have begun work in practiced meditation rather than under the relentless unspoken dunning, the nonstop pressure to wake up, to get dressed, to get out, to get down, to get rowing, get wet, get cold, get numb. There were nights when every wave that went over me made me want to scream, to throw my oar as far overboard as I could throw it, to crawl into the cabin and curl up in Eden’s little sleeping bag (which in its suffocating dampness was itself these days enough to get me screaming).
Above all, it was fatiguing, both mentally and physically, and in the darkest part of my brain I began a private deliberation on who among us would be the first to break, to stand screaming in the trench or on the bridge, or to awaken from the nightmare cursing God—or crying quietly in the bunk. Out of perhaps necessary self- delusionment, I assumed it would not be me.
Which is not to say I was far from the brink, or in any kind of shape to feel confident. More than once during those early weeks, Steve told me that he had had to look twice at me in my bunk, where I lay dreamless, mouth-breathing, comatose, to determine whether I was alive. On Day 3 or 4 he observed that I had briefly stopped breathing during an afternoon nap but had shuddered to life with a snore when he nudged me. It occurred to me that I had indeed perhaps been Gone for a few seconds—had mistaken Charon’s rough ride across the Styx for the nonstop Tilt-A-Whirl that was the boat.
Because our videographer, Dylan White, was under instructions from Kelly Saxberg to capture what he could of my anticipated disintegration (which I assure you would get worse), and because his bunk was next to mine, there is plenty of unauthorized footage of me doing a rather convincing impersonation of a cadaver. It is only in retrospect that it occurs to me how morbid it was that my projected decline should have been perceived as a central theme in Kelly’s film. Had I died out there it would of course have been the ultimate boost to the film and to my TRAGICALLY ABBREVIATED SCREEN CAREER. Even my literary agent, Jackie Kaiser, had joked that my story would be worth more if I croaked (eliciting a promise that I’d go again when the manuscript was done, with the hope of raising its value).
As for discipline, I have no doubt about the advantages of prompt watch changes on a rowing expedition such as ours. Or that a high standard for effort was indispensible. While to my mind neither was as important as morale, it is here that my own debilitating pathologies become apparent, as does the shakiness of the lens through which I view the world. I can go long, can go lean, can discipline myself to sit in a room for 200 days and write; can drive a thousand miles at a stretch or walk 1,500 miles to New York City. However, all my limited capabilities fall to ruin when it comes to having to get anywhere on time. Or perform a task on time. One of my modest distinctions in the writing community is that, during forty years of publication, I have never met a deadline for a piece longer than a few thousand words (although I have come close and am getting closer). As a kindergarten student, living on Parkdale Avenue in Deep River, Ontario, I would lock myself in the bathroom when it was time to go to school and embark on fake hour-long bowel movements, complete with vocalized sound effects, while my mother hammered the door, demanding entry. One of my sisters claims I once showed up a month late for Christmas dinner at her home. No question, I prefer the bendy road to the straight one, the late hour to the early. At the same time I do not believe that my battle with the clock was any more than the tiniest of factors in the evolving frustrations aboard, the impatience and pessimism, the festering sense that we must get in the seats and stay in them—and don’t get out of them until it’s time to get back in them!
If my perspective needed reinforcement, it received it on the afternoon of the sixth day out of Tarfaya, as I lay in my bunk reading Simon Winchester’s Atlantic, a breezy natural history of the sea around us, cut with human maritime history and the author’s own extensive experiences at sea. In a chapter entitled “Oh! The Beauty and the Might of It,” I came across an account of the participation of the famous French sailor Bernard Moitessier in a round-the-world sailing race during the late 1960s. Moitessier was leading the race as he sailed north past the Falkland Islands, and it was assumed he would win. But as he continued on toward Europe he suddenly changed course and began sailing due east, eventually right out of the Atlantic via the Mediterranean and south into the Indian Ocean. Weeks later, he squeezed a letter into a tin can and fired it with a slingshot over the rail of a passing merchant vessel. It said in part: “My intention is to continue the voyage, still nonstop, toward the Pacific Islands, where there is plenty of sun and more peace than in Europe. Please do not think I am trying to break a record [for continuous ocean sailing]. ‘Record’ is a very stupid word at sea. I am continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.”
Years later, in a kind of personal manifesto, he added, “I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats... where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation of wind, light, and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea.”
The Italian filmmaker Lorenzo Fonda’s declaration that “The sea will kick your sorry human ass” is a less eloquent, more fearful, consideration of the theme, or at least part of it. There is a dark side to our connections with the sea. However, to be out there in a boat that might or might not be equal to the relentlessness of the Atlantic—indeed in a body (mine) that might not be equal—had created a kind of suspension in my mind that could not be translated into the normal vocabulary of fear. This was in part, I realize, because for me fear too had been suspended—or perhaps merely subsumed into some seedling version of an addiction. T.E. Lawrence said that once a traveler had experienced the Sahara, “no other place was strong enough for him” or could offer what he called “the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute.”
I believe now that, in my private way, from beyond the traumas of the voyage, I too was beginning to experience that sensation.
IF THERE WAS a more tangible mystery afoot during those first five days off the Sahara, it lay in the suspicion that somehow we were running heavier, that the shedding of weight in Tarfaya and the consumption by this time of ten days’ worth of meals had not lightened the boat one ounce. The hulls seemed sluggish and were burrowing deeper into the waves and troughs.
Meanwhile, the rowing seemed harder by the watch. Or were we simply wearing down at an accelerating rate? Because of the constant chop, it was impossible to tell precisely where the waterline met the hull, although I was sure the water seemed closer than ever to the tramps and to the underside of the cabin. Some of the detonations of the waves against the bunk bottoms during the past couple of nights h
ad shaken me awake expecting to see plywood shattered in the alley and water pouring in.
It was a matter of fortuitous timing that our first ten days’ worth of “snack packs”—our personal daily bundles of raisins, nuts, cookies, candies, pepperoni, and so on (packs that had been stored in the captain’s private pantry)—ran out when they did. And that some hungry soul opened one of the four hatches in the floor of the starboard rowing trench in order to get at the next couple of weeks’ worth of same. Whoever did so on Day 6 made the alarming discovery that the hulls were sloshing with several hundred gallons of water—water that had washed over the gunnels into the trenches and, before it had had a chance to drain from the scuppers, had leaked through the hatches, which until now we had assumed were watertight.
Because Zach Scher and I rowed in the same seat (on opposite watches), our snack packs were bagged up together beneath the rearmost hatch on the starboard hull and, happily, had remained dry. But some people’s packing had proven inadequate, and hundreds of pounds of both snacks and regular meals had been damaged, if not ruined.
Up it all came onto the tramps for assessment, the ruined stuff going into the sea, minus its wrappers, the salvageable stuff going into the cabin onto Angela’s shelves. Meanwhile, we squeezed perhaps thirty pounds of crumpled cling wrap into the emptied garbage bags and rammed it all into the rear starboard hold, where perhaps a hundred pounds of rubbish, mostly food wrappers, had already accumulated.
As I was gathering up the trash in preparation for pumping out the hulls, Margaret clamped a baleful eye on me from the bridge and, surely able to see that I was engaged, said, “Charlie, I don’t think you’re needed right now—I’d like you to go into the cabin; there isn’t room out here for everybody.”
Little Ship of Fools Page 10
