Little Ship of Fools

by Charles Wilkins

  And it did, in its way. As did its crew, to whom I have not always been either polite or kind on these pages. And yet I was conscious by now of the degree to which I was beginning to care, and care deeply, about these people—not (as the relativist might claim) in spite of their shortcomings and grievances (and chaos and liabilities and doubts) but in larger part because of all of these, and because of their nonstop reminders, both stated and otherwise, of my own rather glaring and artless deficiencies. It was these people and their improbable blue boat, not the record-breakers or rowing society or ethics inspectors, who were going to get me home and save my life and inhabit my story. And in some thorny inner part of me, I was increasingly reluctant to hear anybody call them down. Well, except for myself—or perhaps Steve, who, for all he had done, had in a sense earned the right. And the right to be dismayed. And be painfully, mortally disappointed. And be our token alpha male.

  I should acknowledge while in the mood that even when I was livid at Steve, I still loved the guy—and in my way loved Angela and Tom... and Liam and Ryan... and all the rest, every one of them, for their humanity and fortitude and folly—and most especially, I want to say, for whatever mysterious compulsion had brought them, and had brought me too, to this curious little community making its way stubbornly across the Atlantic.

  Meanwhile, there were nights in the rowing trenches that were so black and cold and lonesome that quite apart from my evolving affection for the crew, I felt redoubled in my love for those back home. My kids. My family. My old friends. Where were they? What were they doing while I was out here on the ocean in the dark?

  “We’ll rename it the Love Boat!” enthused Tom when I mentioned the fragility of my emotions, the affection I was feeling toward the crew and toward my loved ones back on land.

  On a more immediate level, I continued to nurse a hope that perhaps Trish might come to Barbados to meet the boat. The possibility was increased somewhat by the fact that she had fallen in with Steve’s wife, Janet, whom she had met for the first time during my reunion with Janet and Steve at Thessalon in 2009. Indeed, the two of them seemed inspired by each other on a level more intuitive and exhilarating than either of them seemed inspired by Steve or me.

  15

  THE BREAK FROM STEADY rowing, unfortunately, did not make the voyage any easier. On the twenty-third night, I went out on watch for an hour and—reluctant to go back into the cabin, which was as crowded and inhospitable as ever—scrunched myself into the port bow hold, where I hoped to sleep till dawn. There, below deck, the darkness was absolute, the air stifling, and the crashing and bouncing of the waves tended to bring on nightmares about the boat breaking up while you were more or less trapped in the hull. As I crouched, sweating, with my head between my knees, I was transported rather suddenly to a forgotten childhood dread that I would get imprisoned by bad guys in a space that was too small to allow me to move, and would be left there to suffocate. I emerged into the moonlight and, in my haste to get free of the hatch, tripped and tumbled into the rowing trench. I was not wearing my life line, meaning that if I had fallen in the other direction, I’d have been gone into the sea. As it was, before I could catch myself I had bashed my shin so severely that to prevent myself from screaming as I peered through the torn flesh at the bone, I settled onto the rowing seat, grasped my ankles in my hands and, for what seemed like half an hour but was probably ten minutes or less, rocked back and forth in a kind of rapture of pain as intense as any I have ever experienced.

  Within forty-eight hours, the injury had turned ugly. Not only had it failed to scab over, it had produced an oval of angry-looking swelling as big as my hand. The pain grew so severe I feared having the lesion touched and took to wrapping it in a T-shirt and wearing long pants to protect it. Realizing it needed attention but not wanting to put pressure on Steve or Sylvain, who had enough to think about, I got up from my seat on the 10 a.m. watch on the twenty-sixth day, limped forward along the tramp and, raising my pant leg, asked Liam what he thought. “Good God!” he exclaimed and immediately demanded to know why I hadn’t brought the injury to anyone’s attention. “Show it to Steve or Sylvain immediately!” he said. Which I did when Sylvain came out at watch change. And I happily accepted his recommendation that I draw a ballpoint line around the swelling to gauge its progress over the next few hours. However, even touching the ballpoint to the skin was an exercise in acute masochism. Meanwhile, Liam mentioned the wound to Steve, who later, in the cabin, asked me for a look and with no hesitation prescribed an antibiotic and handed over a plastic bottle of pills.

  I felt sheepish when an hour or so later Sylvain and Steve engaged each other briefly but passionately over their conflicting assessments. I attempted to explain to Sylvain that it was not I who had sought out Steve’s opinion, but he who had asked to see the injury (and of course I was happy to show it to him and was grateful I had). I will say that at no point did the wound prevent me from rowing, one of precious few aspects of my physical performance on the boat in which I take any pride. That and the fact that I did not go overboard—or otherwise require burial at sea, which, among other insults to my self-confidence, would have been an indelible blot on my record as a seaman.

  If I had a single abiding regret about the injury, it was that by a series of misunderstandings and misstatements, it brought a day of most excruciating distress to my children. I would not find out until weeks later that my hometown newspaper in Thunder Bay had carried a story reporting that I had been “badly injured” on my crossing of the Atlantic. I believe the report originated from a brief SAT phone conversation between Dylan White and Kelly Saxberg concerning the progress of Dylan’s video-taking—a chat in which the state of my wounded leg was described by Dylan in perhaps overly vivid hues (rendered more vivid yet in their transmission to the news-paper, which was in regular contact with Kelly). The next day, one of my children was told at school that my injury was so severe I had been “taken off the boat.” The supposition at home was that I was dying in some Senegalese hospital or had lost a limb and was lying comatose aboard some tramp freighter on its way to Kuala Lumpur. Only by a series of phone calls from my ex-wife in Thunder Bay to Trish in Toronto and to Angela’s partner, Deb, in California was the matter cleared up—unfortunately, not before it had created a day of anxiety and fear for Eden, Georgia, and Matt.

  FOR THE MOST part we wore safety lines clipped to various parts of the boat. When the seas were roughest, we wore life preservers. But even those precautions weren’t “bombproof,” as the saying goes; and on the afternoon of our twenty-sixth day aboard, as I lay in my bunk pondering the wildness of the sea beneath the cabin floor, it struck me with considerable force that there was a reason, a very specific one, for Angela’s ongoing evasions about our man-overboard procedures—or lack thereof. In an instant of bleak insight it dawned on me that if you went into the sea under these conditions, even with a life vest on, you were gone, you were dead. That in the heaviest seas there was no possibility of turning Big Blue around, of rowing back upwind into the waves to effect a rescue.

  Even if the victim was in possession of an EPIRB such as the one in the emergency throw bag, the efficacy of same depended on a ship or sailing vessel being nearby and being willing to seek out a swimmer who, in all likelihood, perhaps in the dark, would have perished by the time the vessel got there. As for helicopters—how many of them are there a thousand miles offshore? A good estimate would be none, since most have a fuel range that keeps them within 200 miles of the coast. Besides, who in, say, Mauritania (where life is cheap and citizens are routinely killed for crimes far less ostentatious than taking to the sea in a rowboat) is going to send one out?

  Angela’s ambivalence about addressing the dangers directly was, I should say, not an indication of ambivalence toward the dangers themselves. Several times during the days to come I heard her say to Deb on the phone late at night, “Well, another day, and we didn’t lose anybody,” or merely, “At least we haven’t lost anybody.”r />
  Meanwhile, it was our remoteness and isolation that made ludicrous the notion of my being “taken off the boat” with an injured leg. But when I explained this to my daughter Georgia months later, she said impatiently, “Dad, that is exactly what scared us. We knew there was no way of being taken off the boat. So we figured if somebody’d gone to the extreme of actually doing it, you must have been in really rough shape.”

  That night, Steve told me he’d had a terrible dream in which Nigel had been washed overboard. He had awakened calculating what he would do if ever such a thing should happen, and came to the conclusion that his best bet would be to cut free and inflate one of the life rafts, jump into it and hope he could do what needed doing. Which I immediately adopted as my own dire plan should I ever need it. I asked Steve jokingly if he’d cut a raft loose if, say, an old writer went overboard. He assured me he would, that there was nothing he wouldn’t do to save an old writer’s life, and I thanked him and told him I hoped I’d have the chance to do the same for an old doctor or sugar bush farmer some day.

  The new priority, needless to say, was to stay aboard, to stay alive. And immediately I became more fastidious about keeping my safety line fastened. Indeed, one night, alone, on standing watch, with the boat bouncing at wild angles, I fastened two safety lines, one from my wrist, one from my life jacket. As heretical as it might sound, we seldom actually wore life jackets—really only in the roughest weather, and sometimes not then. For one thing, they were hot on days of ninety degrees, and they were awkward. Besides, they were more or less redundant if you had your safety line on. The lines were heavy-duty surfboard tethers that fastened to the ankle or wrist with a double-wrapped Velcro sleeve. While they were theoretically strong enough to keep you attached to the boat if you went overboard, I sometimes wondered what the outcome would be if one of them was put to the test. Or, more specifically, if one of us was put to the test. Certainly it would have been anything but comfortable to be dragged along by the ankle, upside down, in high seas, battered by the oar riggers as those aboard attempted to drag you back into the boat. Steve mentioned to me that on their record crossing of the North Atlantic the previous year, Leven Brown and his rowing mates had at times been thrown from their seats and had saved themselves only by grabbing the riggers as they went overboard.

  A couple of days later I had my own stark dream. This time it was I who had gone overboard and was watching the boat’s lights recede into the distance. Such images tend to linger, and several times over the next few days I found myself pondering what exactly I would do with my last minutes of life out there in the water by myself. Would I have even the remotest semblance of composure or presence of mind? What, I wondered, would require the greater fortitude or courage—to dip one’s face into the water and breathe in, filling the lungs (if that is possible) or to fight to stay alive? I had read Chris Beeson’s book Survival at Sea and knew that to fend off a shark—the idea was to punch it or kick it hard on the tip of its sensitive snout as it came in to bite you in half. Which, if the shark was playing by the rules and didn’t do something sneaky, like attacking from the rear or after dark, might get you through Rounds 1 or 2. I wondered if in the extreme I would be brave enough, imaginative enough, simply to throw my head back and laugh, and enjoy the heavens, a potentially impressive last sight, as I drifted toward eternity. (I am not so sluggish as to ignore that I am of course drifting toward eternity right now but lack the impulse to throw my head back and laugh.) I would, understandably, hope to die with a modicum of courage, thinking about my kids, perhaps praying for them, or for my tattered soul—all quite the tale as it evolved in my imagination, my regret as a writer being that if it did transpire I wouldn’t be around to tell it.

  For the moment, there were more immediate images on which to focus my apprehensions. On the twenty-eighth day, for example, two rather ominous-looking cracks opened in the front lower edge of the cabin, within plain view of my rowing seat. For twenty-four hours or more, I watched with spectral fascination as these ever-expanding lacerations, one on each side, opened and closed like crudely animated mouths. At about the same time, a clunking developed where the ten-inch carriage bolts joined the cabin to the frame. Upon examination by David, both problems were deemed “non-structural” (as indeed were the first fractured hull plates on the Titanic). Whether or not Angela believed the assessment is not clear, but a day or so later she had Margaret draw thick lines in indelible red marker around the cabin cracks, carefully noting and dating each crack’s extremity. The ill-considered effect was that the already perverse-looking “mouths,” constantly opening and closing, now wore a sort of whore’s grin of creepy red lipstick.

  Beyond these or any of my own lingering doubts, it was decidedly reassuring to have the boat’s builder aboard. However, on Day 29, when I complimented David on how well the craft was holding up, he smiled wanly, advising me with a straight face that he wouldn’t be accepting any congratulations or applause until we were safely in Barbados. By which time he would have new stresses, new reasons for deflecting accolades over his efforts. How, for example, was he ever going to repay the hundred thousand dollars that he had rung up in debt on the expedition? And what would he do with Big Blue in Barbados? One possibility was to dismantle and ship her to the U.S. But it would add another ten or twelve thousand to his debts. If he had time, he could put an outboard on one of her transoms and run her north to Florida and then up the Intracoastal Waterway. Or he could simply leave her at Port St. Charles until a crew could be assembled to row her back out to sea, or perhaps on a jaunt around the Caribbean.

  For now, there were more pressing concerns. For example, would the desalinators hold up, thrumming away as they did, hour after hour, below decks? And would the rudders last? While they were well reinforced, one of their axis poles had bent a little too easily, I thought, during a brief grounding off Shelter Island during boat trials. Statistically, the most prevalent reasons that ocean rows fail are broken rudders and faulty desalinators.

  However, it was the hatch covers and bilge pump that were perhaps our greatest vulnerability. The former, which opened into the hulls through the floor of the rowing trench, were brittle plastic wafers about six inches in diameter that seated poorly and might, it seemed, have snapped under any sharp or sustained pressure. When we had drained the holds and rescued our food nearly three weeks earlier, Steve had tightened the hatch covers in their frames by covering each with a sandwich bag (hurricane-grade) and had retrofitted the pump with a collar made of an old seat cushion held on with duct tape. The pump, it needs saying, was little more than a toy, a pair of four-foot-long plastic pipes, one inside the other (a chamber and a plunger), and an outlet spout, so that the water being sucked out of the hulls could be squirted over the gunnels when the plunger was thrust up and down (increasingly difficult to do now that the plunger’s handle, which had broken off, had been replaced by a few rounds of tape).

  IT WAS THAT very bilge pump and those hatch covers that during the mid-afternoon watch of our thirtieth day aboard triggered my most scathing and memorable conflict with Steve. I had been rowing behind him on the starboard side. The waves had been coming over the gunnels, leaking through the hatches into the hull. It was miserable; it was cold; the boat was being banged around. I was still limping and protective of the wound on my leg.

  With minutes to go before the watch changed, Steve, on self-appointed command, enlisted Ernst and me to pump out the starboard hull beneath us. We were to do so with naval alacrity, so as to be done when the new watch came on. We were to begin on a signal from Steve, whose job, simultaneously, would be to lean out over the gunnels and to scrape the barnacles as thoroughly as possible from the starboard hull.

  And so at his signal Ernst and I went to work—yanked the rear hatch cover, got the bilge pump down, and got the compartment cleared of perhaps ten gallons of brine. For reasons now forgotten, we were briefly delayed as we moved forward to the next hatch. And for a few seconds the pump stood
in the rowing trench, squarely in the path that Steve chose to take as he repositioned himself on the gunnels.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw him snatch the thing up, and turned in time to see him fling it toward the cabin. “Either get it done,” he barked, “or get out of the way!”

  I was immediately and crazily incensed that he would apply such pressure, essentially flip out, under difficult conditions, especially when so little was at stake (we were a thousand nautical miles behind our anticipated pace). There is an old aphorism, a favorite of mine: It’s not what I don’t know that bugs me, it’s when I forget what I do know. In this case, I knew the proper course was to take a few breaths and reassemble my equilibrium—then to pick up the pump and carry on. Rather, I quacked back that Steve should “quit fucking us up,” that he should “get a grip,” that it was time he “cut the He-Man shit.”

  We glared at each other for a second, and that was that. In no time, Ernst and I were back on the pump.

  On the next watch, Dylan took Steve’s seat in front of me, informing me that Steve had told him I was “tired” of him and that I needed a break. Steve had taken Dylan’s seat on the catamaran’s other hull, separated from us by the cabin.