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Alone

Page 13

by Gerard d'Aboville


  I told myself that when I got back, in the not too distant future, I would regale myself and my senses, that I would till my eyes and ears with sights and sounds, would fill my lungs with air, would touch and taste till I had had my fill. But I knew I could never get enough, and the detailed list of all the senses’ satisfactions crowded my head.

  Then I was overwhelmed with a desire to go to a village, a little village far inland where you can’t see the sea, where people didn’t even know the sea existed. I told myself I would make sure never to tell them about it!

  A message from my brother Norbert revealed to what degree my family and close friends, in their desire to send me comfort and reassurance, had no clue, no notion, of what I was feeling. Departing from my customary reserve, I sent off a long telex in which I tried to clarify things.

  DABOVIL 63L234F

  SINGAPORE TELECOM

  REFERENCE NO. 081083

  Kindly forward to Norbert d’Aboville, who “would like to make sure I have a modicum of pleasure during my voyage.”

  Dear Norbert,

  There I was, yesterday morning, at the end of a perfect night. Perfect weather, almost a full moon, clear sky, a few stars that seemed to be resisting the lunar incandescence. The mild breeze gently propelling the boat forward almost made me forget I was rowing. I was thinking about your message, asking me whether I had achieved a sense of being “on top of things now.”

  At the risk of disappointing you, I have to say that there is no way for me ever to feel on top of things.

  The problem is, every minute, every second, all I can think about is making it, getting there, achieving my goal. My mind focuses — far too lucidly, I might add — on all the risks that stand in my way, all the obstacles that threaten to wipe out in a moment the extraordinary amount of time and effort and personal sacrifice I have put into this undertaking. I am affected, indelibly affected, by what I have just been through. While it is said that with the passage of time the most painful memories have a way of turning into positive memories, these will never change; they were, and will always remain, terrible and terrifying.

  I’ll never forget the many times the boat capsized, especially the one when it turned a complete somersault, throwing me against the bulkhead. Then, with my frayed nerves stretched to the breaking point, I kept waiting for the final blow, the blow that would end it all, and let out a primal scream, like some wild beast. Nor will I ever forget those other times when I battled for my life, feeling my strength waning minute by minute. And the taste of seawater in my mouth, in my lungs. The taste of death. And all that alone, alone, alone.

  So in order to find a few moments of relative pleasure such as that night I just described, my only recourse is to get away from this boat, from this crossing, from this ocean. I try to tell myself that I am somewhere else, that I am walking in the desert, without any set goal, preferably without any goal at all; or else I imagine myself at the rudder of some other boat, on some other sea.

  But the illusion is brief, and you have to watch out for its counterpart, the danger of letting go and feeling sorry for yourself or your situation, for if I were to let that feeling in, even for a moment, it would be like opening the gates of the fortress to your worst enemy. So I only allow myself rare moments when I picture myself elsewhere, in some wonderful never-never land, because the awakening is not only rude but dangerous.

  So you think there will be an arrival? You believe it’s really going to happen?

  Ah, that arrival, so dreamed of, so longed for. True, the joy will be commensurate with the expectation, but also what a terrible feeling of “I’ve already been there.” You want your happiness not to end, you want to set a little aside for tomorrow and the day after, but there’s no way you can; it’s the liqueur of absolute happiness, but all you have is a drop, one tiny drop, the effect of which is immediate. You see this happiness in the full knowledge that, by the very act of experiencing it, it has already been lived, it belongs to the past, and that each of these marvelous moments is already no more than a memory, as though there were no present between this future so long and so ardently awaited that I am living through now — and will live through until I get there — and the past, which will be the rest of my life after I do arrive … And you are there, looking at the crowd. They think it’s the beginning of something, But you know it’s already over.

  So is there an “after”?

  After — that is, after the successful completion of your daring adventure — there is a whirlwind, a touch of glory or what passes for glory, which does not last long (right after your act, don’t forget the clowns come on). There is even relative material comfort. Vanity and self-interest, these pleasures are base; they inevitably enter into the calculations.

  Let’s talk only about the satisfactions.

  So what remains?

  Nothing, that’s what. And that’s life. Provided it lasts.

  GERARD, ON BOARD SECTOR.

  LATITUDE 41 DEGREES 18 MINUTES NORTH

  LONGITUDE 159 DEGREES, 31 DEGREES WEST.

  October 6

  During the night, the wind veers suddenly to the west, the waves turn choppy. Giant sprays of white foam, on either side of the cockpit.

  A new kind of somersault: a complete back flip. I find myself flattened on the ceiling of the cabin, then bounced back onto my bunk.

  10

  Do You See the Coastline?

  October 9

  Via KMI, the American station that had finally consented to let me utilize its wavelengths, I was able to call my family. What a feeling of euphoria to make contact at last. After each call, my rowing day sped by so much more quickly, my head filled with a thousand little things to ponder. And their letters, which reached me now via satellite, could be read and reread as many times as I liked, giving me the impression at least that my loved ones were not all that far away. They forced me to keep thinking: what time is it for them now? What are they doing? What’s the weather like over there?

  Cold, but the conditions are fine, with the winds from the west at about fifteen knots. Obsessed by my goal of reaching the three-quarter mark in the crossing. Each time I attain one of these goals, however, all I can think about is not what has been accomplished but how far I still have to go.

  During the evening, a ship passed by, but I wasn’t able to make contact with it. Too bad. I wouldn’t have minded if one of the crew had tossed a bottle of Scotch in my direction!

  October 12

  Yesterday evening, just as the sun was going down, the sky turned the color of polished cotton.

  0500: Sector capsizes, as usual, then again at 0600. Violently both times, tossing me about in the cabin like a rag doll. Black and blue marks everywhere. My hand injured, too.

  October 14

  One of the little joys of the crossing: yesterday I repaired a pipe that was leaking in our Paris apartment. How? Via radio. Cornelia was on the other end of the line, and I told her which tools to use, then took her through the repair process step by step. This minor but all-important incident made me feel that I was back in contact with the real world.

  It took little to entertain me these days. Running through the scene over and over again, I managed to lift my spirits and completely forgot the slave labor I was performing in the cockpit.

  October 15

  I decided to give myself a few hours off, and instead of getting up at daybreak and heading for the cockpit, I kept to my bunk, hoping time would move more quickly. Every once in a while a big wave would arouse me from my torpor. But after a few hours of presumed rest, I realized that the constant battering of the boat by the waves left me more tired than I had been when I had begun. As I was pulling myself out of the sleeping bag, there was something about the sound of an oncoming wave I didn’t like, and I rushed to the porthole and slammed it shut. Lucky premonition — Sector was again on its back. Reflexes, well-practiced movements: the sleeping bag goes into its watertight cover, maneuver the ballast tanks, pump working. E
ven so, some water did get in before the porthole was secured, and my clothes, as well as the sleeping bag, were soaking wet.

  Checking, I noted the visible decline of my physical abilities. At the start of the trip, I could produce a liter of fresh water using the desalination pump in exactly twelve minutes. This morning it took me twenty. That translated into a “decline” of over fifty percent.

  Despite that, I decided that today I was going to “sacrifice” five liters of fresh water to wash down my sleeping bags, which were so impregnated with salt that they never dried. In fact, I had baptized them, respectively, the “Salt Mine” and the “Salt Marsh.”

  I spread both sleeping bags out to dry in the cockpit and, as if to smile on me, the sun made an appearance right on schedule to help dry them out. What a delight it would be to sleep in a clean, dry sleeping bag, without having to don a slicker! To make myself worthy of such unmitigated pleasure, and since the weather was good, I decided to put in a few nocturnal hours at the oars.

  Now the nights are as long as the days. How far still to go? Howfar? I would give a great deal to know the answer to that question.

  In five days the Paris Boat Show would open. I had wanted to reach land in time to fly there and show off Sector.

  Again in an effort to escape reality, to turn my thoughts from the present and the burning question of survival, I focused my mind on that nautical event seven thousand miles to the east. I pictured the people there, the vast panoply of boats from all over the world, then focused on my own stand. Actually, now that I thought about it, why shouldn’t we put the Captain Cook on display as well? Yes, I would have to mention that to Christopher.

  October 17

  Page 100 of my logbook, marking the hundredth day of the crossing. Last night was superb. I rowed until dawn.

  I was beginning to grow weary of my dehydrated food. I hadn’t taken enough sweets on board. I should have brought more chocolate, more whisky.

  October 18

  At dawn, wind from the south. Huge swells, and very choppy seas. Laborious route to the northeast. Heading directly toward Vancouver — or Anchorage. If this keeps up, I’ll wind up in Alaska. Hellishly hard. Soaking wet from head to foot I stop rowing, totally depressed. I hurt all over. Progress report: ten lousy knots. Morale at its lowest ebb.

  Contrary to what some people may think, there is nothing masochistic about a crossing such as mine. Masochism consists of inflicting pain on oneself in order to derive pleasure from it. In my own case, I do concoct difficult situations but only in order to derive pleasure afterward, once the victory has been won. It is true that the more perils there are, the greater the satisfaction at having overcome them. I will have climbed a tall mountain, and earned my own esteem. But pain for pain’s sake has never held any attraction for me whatsoever.

  We all have the desire — overt or covert — to accomplish some very difficult task, something that will instill pride in ourselves. Anyone who thinks that a suicidal tendency is an element of the picture is totally wrong. If I had ever had the slightest tendency in that direction, I would have been dead long ago. It’s not as though there were lack of opportunities. It is, rather, the opposite tendency at work here, namely the insatiable will to survive. In the course of this crossing, my survival instinct was ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times, stronger than it is in the course of a so-called normal life, because I want with all my heart and soul to reach my goal.

  I have not been conditioned or programmed by any techniques of auto-suggestion. I have programmed myself, focused ever since the project began on a single objective: get there, reach my goal.

  I also add an element of pugnaciousness. Not aggressiveness, which I think is the wrong word. But pugnaciousness, which I think is what it’s all about. A combative spirit. Without it, I don’t think there’s a prayer in hell you could ever see it through to the bitter end.

  Completely demoralized, I’m beginning to have a very serious sense of failure. What I need, and need badly, is a series of low pressure systems, bringing me winds out of the west, and I am getting nothing of the sort. Worse, according to Eddy, there are no low pressure systems anywhere on the horizon.

  Winter was not far off, with everything that implies, starting with increasingly cold weather. Since I was in the midst of high pressure systems, I was shrouded in fog, which meant that my solar panels were no longer charging. My telex was permanently on the blink.

  In the evening, to add insult to injury, the moon appeared from behind the clouds — an almost full moon —just as the sun was so low on the horizon that it could do nothing to help my solar panels.

  October 22

  The wind had fallen, and I was rowing under the full moon. I much preferred the moon — a heavenly body you could gaze upon — to the blinding sun. And besides, on moonlit nights I got the impression I was making far faster progress than I could make by day.

  October 27

  I crossed the thousand-mile mark, that is, the point that was only a thousand miles from shore. The last thousand miles. Winds light out of the southwest, and I was moving right along the forty-fourth parallel, at the rate of about a degree of longitude per day. Twelve days had passed with out Sector capsizing. Quite an exploit! My obsession to get there, to reach land, was getting out of hand; it was so overwhelming that it kept waking me up in the middle of the night. I sent Christopher my projected ETAs, giving him my most optimistic and pessimistic dates. It would be between November 21 and December 1. The 21st: my God, that was only a little more than three weeks away!

  October 28

  Ring around the moon, a bad sign.

  October 29

  Strange how I had developed an acute sixth sense, a gift of double vision. Was it perhaps because I had so much time for reflection and analysis? Or was it possibly that my mind was so much more receptive? Rid of the normal intrusions of daily life, could my mind have enlarged and become more perceptive?

  There were times, for example, when for no reason at all I would be thinking of a friend whom I hadn’t seen in years, and when I talked to Christopher I was not at all surprised to hear him say that that very person had just called the office. The most astonishing aspect of the phenomenon was that it struck me as perfectly commonplace and normal.

  In any case, this morning I had the distinct feeling that today would be marked by an encounter. Not only did I have an intuition that I was going to make contact with a ship, but I knew that it would be a very specific contact. I was so sure, in fact, that when a freighter hoved into view on the horizon, I already had my camera, my video, and my VHF radio right next to me, and the French flag was flying from the radio antenna!

  It was the Russian freighter Pskov, out of Vladivostok, headed for Vancouver. Against all odds, but precisely as I had intuited, the ship reversed engines and came to a complete halt, to allow me to pull alongside.

  “What are you doing here?” the captain asked.

  “I’m going to the United States.”

  “So are we. Gome on board.”

  Convinced that I was dying to join them, they unfurled a rope ladder down the side. They were completely taken aback when I politely declined. They assumed I had just arrived from outer space.

  The crew took pictures. When they arrived in Vancouver, they were surprised to be greeted by a reception committee: Christopher, whom I alerted in Paris via radio, had arranged to have the ship met, so that the photos could be couriered back to France, where they appeared the following week on the cover of a weekly news magazine.

  Another happy anniversary: I had crossed another time zone and was now on Pacific Standard Time.

  October 31

  A stroke of bad luck. Yesterday I lost the larger of my two sea anchors, its rope frayed from its swivel.

  It was a serious blow. More serious than I wanted to admit. Now I could no longer prevent the southerly storms from pushing me inexorably northward. Without my sea anchor, my chances of putting in to San Francisco were virtuall
y nil. That was a disappointment but nothing compared to the realization that, to the north, the American coast was very inhospitable and the seas, at this time of year, extremely rough.

  My appetite was steadily decreasing. I was eating only one meal a day. My growing lassitude regarding the dehydrated food was augmented by not being able to keep myself from conjuring up images of juicy steaks and bright green salads. I had the feeling I had lost a fair amount of weight, but with my many layers of clothing I couldn’t swear to it. My guess was that I had lost somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds, which was about what I’d lost during my Atlantic crossing.

  After dark, a shower of shooting stars streaked across the sky, one of them lighting up the heavens like a bolt of lightning.

  November 1

  The south wind continues unabated. A horrible night, with the stem of the boat striking the water every two hours like a cannon shot. The foulest weather imaginable. Driving rain. Thunderous noise.

  I was sequestered in my cabin, writing the above by candlelight, since there was no more electricity. Battered by the storm. Winter had set in, and I felt like tossing in the towel. The thought of all those cheering me on, who wanted me to succeed, helped me to hang on.

  November 3

  Completely out of “hooch, “a homemade eau-de-vie my father had given me to take on the trip, I’m reduced to using the rubbing alcohol from my first-aid kit. I needed a little pick-me-up to restore my flagging spirits and poured some alcohol in my coffee. Frankly, the brew was undrinkable, but what the hell.

  If the definition of an alcoholic is somebody who imbibes excessive quantities of alcohol, then I’m not an alcoholic. But I was nonetheless beginning to ask myself the question. Directly behind my number one desire — or, more properly, obsession — to make landfall in America, was my craving for a good glass of wine in a real glass; or a gin and tonic, a Scotch, a martini. But above all I craved the glass of good wine. And if in fact I was a closet alcoholic, and I set off on this adventure without weighing fully all the consequences of that possibility (I had only one five-liter jug of wine left, which I did not dare open), then all these weeks of forced abstinence should have served as an almost certain cure. But abstinence had the opposite effect. The longer I remained on the wagon, the more I dreamed about drinking. From that I concluded I was incurable. To make matters worse, my memories seized on various occasions when I had drunk this or that memorable wine, and I relived those glorious moments in living color. No alcoholic memory escaped the widening net of my memories. Ah yes, that cool bottle of beer we savored in the British port of Falmouth — the only beer in the house, but did it taste good! And what about that divine bottle of Bordeaux that the former owner of the Lady Maud had given us, that English millionaire we just happened to meet when we put into port at Bénodet in December of 1972. Oh, and that suspect bottle of Burgundy we drank in Beaune that day in 1981. And that whisky, that delicious whisky and soda we had on the deck of Lady Maud in the bay of Bantry twenty years ago. Then on to the Place de l’Ecole Militaire in Paris where, on the terrace of a bistro, we savored a wonderful dark beer… .

 

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