Little Ship of Fools

by Charles Wilkins

  Until one day when, as she sloped into the little fo’c’sle that was her stateroom and asylum, she said quietly to no one in particular and with just a hint of irony, “As far as you guys are concerned, I’m nothin’ but your cabin bitch—I know what you think of me.” It was a joke, but wasn’t a joke, and was greeted not so much by silence as by an echoing absence of response as the waves crashed off the cabin floor, and our reluctant commander vanished into the hidey-hole from which she would eventually emerge with the next meal.

  Or would not emerge.

  On the thirty-sixth day out of Agadir, perhaps depressed, perhaps zonked with pain, Angela had disappeared for nearly thirty hours, making no attempt to communicate with her crew, sending the meals out with an extended hand and a request that somebody, anybody, take them from her and pass them along. When she did eventually materialize on deck, it was not with news from home, or of our projected bearing or anticipated weather—or of the continued fine-tuning of the admiralty. It was, rather, to announce a more important development: that we were running short of dehydrated entrees and that today’s lunch would be “desserts only.” The word “cheesecake” figured prominently in the message, amidst a reverential cataloguing of the available “crumbles” and “jubilees” and “chiffons.”

  I got a quite edible chocolate mousse out of the deal (rehydrated of course), and would be a hypocrite to suggest that I did not benefit significantly from Angela’s obsessive gastronomic ministrations. I had by this time become so devoted that I had reconfigured her compulsions into an entirely new model of leadership—“feedership,” I called it, a concept well understood by, say, the early traveling circuses, whose daily priority, always, was to keep their workers fed; and by the North West Mounted Police, who on their long march west across the Canadian prairies in 1873 put the food on the lead wagons, knowing that with dinner out front, the shoeless and bone-weary stragglers, often miles behind by the end of the day, would keep on trudging until they caught up and ate.

  At night I could often hear Angela on the satellite phone, just inches from my bunk, in hushed conversation with Deb in California, offering up espionage-level reports, gustatory intelligence, on what she had eaten that day—“noodles Roma,” “shrimp Rivoli,” “shortcake à la crème,”—and what she had prepared of any special nature for the rest of us. During the course of the voyage, perhaps my favorite sight from the bunk was that of Angela, on Day 30 or 31, extracting a mini-Snickers bar, her fave, from among her goodies, peeling it, holding it in tender anticipation before her face, and then biting its li’l head off.

  IF ANGELA had one notable area of culinary insufficiency it was breakfast. From the start her intention had been to prepare it every morning for her crew—a sort of commander’s noblesse oblige. If I had better understood the degree to which sugar had insinuated itself into her dietary choices, I would have brought better breakfast foods for myself. When in her early communications she spoke of “cereal,” however, I inferred something dense and oaty, even porridgey, perhaps with raisins and nuts. I could live with powdered milk and was buoyed by the promise of added protein powder—all outlined in her original prospectus. So I had been surprised, to say the least, when on the second morning out of Agadir my twelve-ounce thermal cup was passed to me from her galley containing something resembling porcupine turds afloat in a watery gruel. I spooned a few of these slimy brown balls into my mouth, suffering at first a kind of gag reflex, then a compulsive reprise of a long-standing distaste.

  “Cocoa Puffs!” I exclaimed across the alleyway in Dylan’s direction.

  “Yeah, Cocoa Puffs,” he said distractedly, spooning them in, while Tom did likewise on the upper bunk.

  “These are Cocoa Puffs!” I said again, finding it impossible to believe that everybody wasn’t as impressed as I—and, more so, that anybody considered sugar-laden widgets, devoid of all natural food value, to be an even remotely plausible breakfast for people rowing twelve hours a day and in acute need of proper nutrition.

  The next week brought Sugar Pops (Moroccan version) and the next Frosted Flakes, which I would eat in desperation as I came famished and exhausted off the dawn watch. Steve and Nigel, meanwhile, were eating the gourmet granola they had baked for themselves, submerged in the Nestlé’s powdered cream they had bought in Agadir, perhaps without realizing what a godsend it would turn out to be.

  I asked about the muesli that I knew had been purchased on my phantom shopping trip the day before our departure and was told it had been destroyed in the hull flooding. It was not until another two weeks had passed and I was ravenous that I ventured one day into Angela’s tiny pantry and rustled through the bundles and packages until I located a one-pound bag of U.S.-made granola. And stuck it under my T-shirt and stepped back to my bunk and stuffed it into my dry bag. It was the sort of maneuver that 200 years ago, aboard any trade or naval vessel, would have earned me a flogging or perhaps a day upside down in the rigging (and then a flogging). Which occurred to me on every one of the next four or five mornings as I surreptitiously poured a few tablespoons of the lumpy mixture into the sugary sunrise soup that continued to come out of the galley.

  Not that I blamed Angela. I appreciated that at heart she was a kid, a candy lover—sugar made her happy. In her way, she was just passing the pleasure along. Indeed, acting on my dad’s reasonable principle that one should always compliment the cook, I would thank her, if hypocritically, for the breakfast.

  NOW, ON DAY 40, alert to my weight loss, Angela “overruled” my prescribed meal of rice and beans, treating me instead to a steamy double bender of chicken à la king. This paltry poultry was lumpy and rubbery and salty—was in fact so delectable in every way that I found it hard to stop scraping with my spork at the folds in the bottom of the pack, on the chance that I had somehow missed a molecule.

  At sunset that evening, as Angela was engaged with David on deck, I stepped into her quarters to spring the fore-hatch, which had been closed at dinner because of a few drops of rain. I opened it three or four inches and was about to extricate myself when Margaret’s voice sounded behind me. “Did Angela say you could open that?” she demanded in a tone that suggested both the meddling afoot and, somehow, the fate of continents.

  I did not even want to begin. However, infuriated by the notion that I should need Angela’s permission to attempt to get a lungful of decent air, I said quietly, “Yes, she did,” preferring the lie and its consequences to some dreary plea for breath in a ninety-five-degree cabin that, from dusk to dawn, was variably a steam cabinet and a fart-ridden tomb.

  From Day 2 or 3 on, I had done my best to initiate a moratorium on farts while people were eating. But at all other times the smell was a mere symptom of cabin life and lassitude, a processed derivative of rehydrated tamale pie or Hoho’s Szechuan chicken or Maria’s campfire beans. It was mushrooms; it was gull poop; it was the tire fires of my youth. It was sweat and foot fungus and sulfur gas.

  We endured such impositions with a wince, and grew inured to the salt-swollen raisins or decomposing chicken bits or bacteria-ridden socks that had accumulated in all but the tidiest bunks; or the lumps of sea-soaked clothing that sat for days beneath the air mattresses or in the corners of people’s cubby holes, or even under their pillows. By mid-Atlantic, I myself had a welter of wet T-shirts and socks moldering at the foot of the Croteau/Wilkins bunk. There they sat, stinking, undoubtedly offensive to Sylvain, awaiting the moment when I felt motivated to stagger out on the tramp after a hard shift of rowing, carrying a bottle of sea soap and a leaky bag of fresh water, so that I could knuckle my stinking garments into a less odious version of their current sliminess.

  There were days during those later weeks aboard when even the rowing trenches carried a low-level pong, emanating from the toilet hold or the accumulating garbage bags below deck. Or from We the People, surely including myself. Not that anybody was deliberately letting his or her hygiene lapse—we brushed and flossed, lathered our pits and crevices. Curiously
, we did not actually sweat, not very much; it was as if our bodies, our skin, like that of desert dwellers or the surface of cacti, had adjusted, had closed its pores, in order to preserve moisture (could this have been why the sea salt was getting trapped in the dermal tissue, having to force its way out as salt sores?). And yet we were grubby—or at least salty from the dousings. On the afternoon of Day 39, seated behind Dylan, who was busy shooting video and had been avoiding soap and water like a cat, I mentioned to him as discreetly as possible that I’d developed a kind of mini-method of lathering and rinsing my armpits and undercarriage, requiring just a few seconds and a mere cup of fresh water or even sea water—I had a little bottle of sea soap right there in my pocket.

  “I guess I stink, eh?” he said brightly and, in the politic delay that preceded my response, was up off his seat with my soap in his hands and in no time had gussied up and was back on his oar.

  On watch, in the middle of the night, Tom or Steve and I could invariably locate a laugh in the notion of our jaunty little stinkbox making its way laboriously through the night, beneath the heavens, hermetically sealed off from infinite volumes of the purest, the breeziest, the least contaminated air on earth.

  There was literally not a molecule of dust out there, and no pollen, at least once we were clear of the African coast. I have mild asthma and bronchial allergies and had three or four salbutamol inhalers aboard. But despite the bad air in the cabin, I never needed a puff.

  Nor, apparently, were there any viruses once those we may have been carrying when we set out had cleared our lungs and digestive tracts. Consequently, we had no colds or flu bugs during a period when our immune systems must surely have been at their most vulnerable with the exhaustion and limited nutrition.

  More surprisingly to me, there were no insects out there—except on perhaps the forty-first day, when, miraculously, a house fly appeared in the cabin, more than 2,000 miles from our starting place and still hundreds from our destination. Preposterous though it might seem, when one of the kids whacked it with a rubber Croc, leaving it aquiver on the floor and then dead, I felt a genuine pang of sadness that so persistent a bit of life, such an obvious contender, could be so easily and arbitrarily wiped from the agenda. A day later, when a tiger shark whacked a dorado off our starboard hull, leaving the front half of the victim swimming gamely for the roundup, I felt no such regret—it was nature on parade, whereas the killing of the fly was no such thing.

  GIVEN MY accelerating loss of weight, my hip bones were ever more vulnerable on the rowing seat, and even on the bunk, where Sylvain’s bulky sleeping bag provided the only padding we had. On Day 40 I had a dream in which I looked down to discover that my entire pelvis had somehow been transformed into a brittle six-quart basket of the sort in which my mother bought fruit when I was a child. Rolling around in it were what I first took to be plums, reddish-purple things with strings, but what I quickly realized were testicles, each bearing the name of a crew member, male and female. I shall leave the interpretation to those who might dare, while adding that as always my discomfort necessitated regular infusions of 222s. My problem at this point was that I was running out of them faster than I had planned. I’d brought 280 in all, a supply plentiful for a journey of thirty-five days but inadequate for the fifty or more that were now being projected.

  On the afternoon of Day 41, protective of my grubby little secret, I hung a towel from the storage hammock between the alley and bunk so that no one could see what I was up to, and poured out my stash, the entire precious motherlode, onto Sylvain’s sleeping bag. I divided the heap into islands, each of a half dozen tablets, representing a day’s intake, and realized with dismay that if we were even ten more days aboard, I was not going to make it. I would compensate, I decided, by cutting back to five hits a day, and that afternoon, for the first time, consumed just a single tablet, rather than two, to get me through to sundown. If the new economy went well, I’d cut back to four a day, perhaps three.

  As I squirmed on the next watch, frantic for a little help from my friends, Dylan and I discussed the addictions of the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, who in order to quit heroin during the 1960s went out to his father’s farm in Illinois. There, he sequestered himself in a bedroom, which was nailed shut from the outside, and sweated it out, screaming. If all else failed, I thought, I’d beg a painkiller or two from Angela or a Tylenol 3 from Steve or Sylvain. “Or I could quarantine myself like Miles,” I said to Dylan, who was aware of my habit and responded that in case I hadn’t noticed I was already in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where I was as likely to kick an addiction as I was in any cell or straightjacket on earth.

  18

  THAT NIGHT, ON THE 2-to-4, under a desolate full moon—a kind of Grimshaw painting come to life—a school of perhaps 400 flying fish, a host of tiny Celtic crosses, was suddenly in the air, surfing moonlight. At that moment, Aleksa and I were on the starboard hull on our own, and before we knew it the fish were bouncing off the boat, thumping into the cabin. By the time the mass of them had disappeared, a dozen or so lay senseless or flipping on the tramp, their “wings” now compressed to their flanks so that they looked as plain as sardines, except with an eye the size of a dime and a snout as hard as a car bumper. Aleksa has great empathy for animals—was incensed, for example, by David’s continuing and futile attempts to catch dorado, which she believed mated for life—and was immediately on the job picking up the eight-inch flyers and depositing them back in the sea. They are a most astounding little creature, whose greatest survival mechanism is that their pectoral fins have evolved into wings, so that when they are threatened they can simply fly away, soaring across 150 yards or more of ocean. When a predator approaches, they drive toward the surface, thrashing their tails some seventy times a second (faster than a hummingbird’s wings), propelling themselves from the waves at speeds as high as fifty miles an hour. Though beautiful, they are such gristly little missiles that it did not occur to me until we got to Barbados, where such fish are a delicacy (pretty much the national dish), that in a pinch I could have been eating them as my food ran out, although we had no proper frying pan or stove on which to cook them. At worst, I could have chopped them up as ceviche, with a little hot sauce or a sprinkling of citric acid, of which we had plenty in the form of vitamin C supplements.

  A week earlier, Angela had enlisted Steve and me to pull every bit of cargo out of the port front hold “just to see what was in there.” And in what condition. Out it all came onto the tramp, beginning with the survival suits, which were sopping and moldy, almost petrified in their sea-soaked condition. At this point it was impossible to imagine what level of effort would be required to get sixteen people into them in an emergency, particularly if the boat was in turmoil, given that it took us ten or twelve minutes just to drag them up out of the bilge water and slime and even to begin to unpack and open them. The smell alone would have been sufficient to send a drowning man swimming for the bottom.

  Just as I was beginning to wonder what reason Angela could possibly have for this apparently pointless effort, a pack came out of the hold that I could see contained the familiar Ziploc bags that indicated food—apparently uncontaminated food. And then another. And another as we probed deeper into the hull. While the survival suits lay scattered on the tramp, the vittles flew tout de suite to Angela, who leaned from the cabin hatch to receive them, as hardy as a stevedore where the handling and stowage of food was concerned. Five hundred pounds of it, Steve estimated, lamenting again the vast load of calories aboard, and speculating on where the next secret stash would be unearthed. It was never quite clear to me whose food it was—probably Angela’s, David’s, Margaret’s, maybe breakfast stuff, some of which might find its way to me.

  Now, on the afternoon of Day 41, as we plunged along, Angela appeared on deck to announce that by her latest calculations, the food aboard, including what Steve and I had unearthed in the front hold, would get us to Barbados only if we limited ourselves to one meal a day—thi
s plus our snack packs and the “breakfasts” she continued to provide. My own snacks were at this point a desultory assortment of peanuts, raisins, dates, protein bars—nothing even remotely appealing, since I had already raided them for their shortbread and dried mangoes and digestive biscuits, basically anything that made them worth opening in the first place.

  As it was, I felt like a farm goat, an animal whose instincts for “selective grazing” attract it first to the tenderest grasses and vegetables, then to chewier greens, such as asters and chicory; and so on down through what’s available in the pasture to the tougher stuff, until finally it is eating thistles and burdock and even tree bark.

  While not literally eating thistles (I’d have been happy to get some), I had hit a new low the previous evening when what came out of the galley for me was a packet of Sicilian polenta that had not been rehydrated. At all. With the boat rocking as fiercely as it was, there was simply no way of heating water. Thus, rather than the enticing mushy cornmeal I had anticipated in reading the “heirloom recipe” on the packet, I was faced with a kind of sand soup, grittier than 2-grade aggregate and about as tasty. I chewed down a spoonful or two of it, went out, sent the rest of it to its reward, then, as usual these days, went scrounging through the reject bag for granola bars or packets of peanut butter, or odds and ends of candy or cookies. You never knew what somebody might have thrown to the bottom feeders while you were out keeping slim.