A Mile Down

by David Vann

  “I asked to have the small bills paid on time,” I said. “Especially ones like this related to marketing materials.”

  “I know,” Amber said. “I meant to pay this one, and he called several times. But I just forgot.” Then she giggled. She actually giggled, and Heather, who was standing in the doorway, had to suppress a giggle. I learned a couple of years later that Amber was a stoner, so I have to assume now that this giggling was marijuana.

  “Well it says here he’s going to report me to credit agencies if it’s not paid by September 1. But it looks like it wasn’t paid until late October.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what happened.” And she smiled.

  I looked at her, and I couldn’t figure out how things had gotten this bad between us. “This is my credit,” I said. “It’s not funny.”

  “Look, David. You weren’t here. I’m always having to juggle bills because you don’t have enough money. I’m tired of it. Now you get to do the juggling.”

  “You mispaid bills by $48,000 in one month,” I said. “And you let me be reported to credit agencies for small bills that we could have paid.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s all done now. And it’s late. We’re outta here.” She and Heather left.

  I sat in my office under the fluorescent lights that night and finally just put my forehead down on the desk. I had been out of the country most of the time, but Amber was a smart, educated person, a Stanford graduate who had needed a job after her marriage engagement was broken off, and I was a reasonable and obviously trusting employer. I just didn’t understand.

  I spent every waking hour that week in the office. I went through all of our records and updated QuickBooks, having to call Amber several times a day because records were missing or entered incorrectly. She hadn’t recorded deposits, for instance. I could find a deposit on a bank statement but had no way of knowing which three passenger payments were included in it, and she had kept no record at all. Taxes were going to be a nightmare.

  I also tried to save our winter charters. I made a lot of phone calls, but the list was too old. These were potential passengers from a month or two earlier who had never received a brochure in the mail or a follow-up call from Amber. By now, they had made other plans, booked other vacations. She had let my business die.

  I wasn’t convinced my new employee was going to be much better. If I’d had more time and other choices, I wouldn’t have hired her. But I didn’t have more time or other choices, and I had to have someone in the office. So I simplified our sales and customer service protocols, producing a series of sheets which told her exactly what to do at every step in all aspects of the business. The only important element I had to rely upon her for would be sales. I couldn’t return calls from the middle of the ocean.

  I still didn’t have John’s loan, and I needed it desperately, so I wanted to drive down to Hemet in Southern California to see him, but he wouldn’t return my calls, and I didn’t know exactly where he was living. I had talked with him a week earlier, and he had told me then that he was delayed because the bank was slow to clear funds out of the trust. But he had assured me he was still giving the loan.

  I did manage to pull in two more small loans, $5,000 and $10,000, but I was getting frantic. I was supposed to pay $35,000 in interest on December 1, a few days away, and I didn’t have enough money.

  I returned to Spain trying to remain hopeful. But in my week away, the contractors had really slacked off, so I was in a panic trying to get everything done. My new crew were arriving in a few days and I planned to set sail in a week for Mexico. Everything had to be finished immediately.

  So many things had to come together, it was overwhelming. I really didn’t think it could be finished on time. Further delay would mean canceling more winter charters, and possibly losing my crew again, neither of which I could afford.

  The welders stayed until after 8 P.M. every day, and I had to pay overtime and tips and be there through all of it to pat their backs and do some of the work myself and keep them going.

  The carpenter was high-maintenance, a young guy with long curly hair who felt he was an artist, but he did replace the deck piece and aft rail. The painters touched up the side of the boat and bow, and a few days before we were to launch, I actually had a new rudder and post in place. I still didn’t have a skeg, but the fabricator assured me it would go quickly, and it did. He brought out some pieces of steel, welded them to the hull, welded the attachment, and there it was, ugly but burly. A rudder that looked a little small to me, smaller than the last one, but which certainly would never fall off. Nick Bushnell and the naval architect approved it for Pantaenius, so that I would still be insured, then some bottom paint was brushed on and we were ready.

  My new crew had arrived a few days earlier and were working hard painting bilges and such. One of them was my friend Adriana, a Mexican lawyer I’d met at Stanford who was my partner on paper for the Mexican corporation. She was going to help me obtain permits for winter charters.

  The last day was an ugly rush. The bill for the marina went higher than expected, the various contractors tacking on little bits here and there in outrageous ways, so Nick Bushnell was scrambling to get more money from the insurance company and I was scrambling to get enough of my own money to cover my part. I ran completely dry in my two checking accounts and on all of my credit cards and all of Nancy’s cards. I finally had to borrow about $150 from my crew, otherwise the marina wasn’t going to let us leave. The whole thing was embarrassing.

  But we did leave, and right away, the steering felt wrong. Just coming out of the travelift and crossing the marina, I was having trouble going straight. Even allowing for greater lag time in the steering, it wasn’t consistent. It felt random. I desperately wanted to hide the problem from Nick, so that my insurance would remain intact, but he could tell. Once we had cleared the channel and were on our way to Gibraltar to pick up the new anchor chain, he tried the helm.

  “It does seem to be a problem,” he said. “You can probably manage it, but if you wanted to go back, I could try to present that to Pantaenius.”

  “I’m screwed financially if I don’t keep going,” I said. “I can’t afford new crew or to cancel my winter charters.”

  Nick raised his eyebrows and shrugged. He was my friend. He was doing everything possible to get me to Mexico where I could bring in some income. That was my highest priority, to bring in some money to pay my bills.

  I kept testing the steering and decided we could make it to Mexico. It wasn’t a safety or seaworthiness issue. It was just a convenience issue. It was difficult to steer. I had to stay right on top of it, and even then, I sometimes couldn’t keep it straight. The crew would be frustrated, and our crossing time would be slow, probably six weeks, but the rudder would stay on, and we’d get used to it.

  “I think I need to continue on,” I told Nick. My crew was listening, and they looked worried, but they weren’t saying anything. I had never wanted to reach this point, where I was forced to go to sea. I believed a captain should take a boat to sea only when he felt it was ready. But that would have meant giving up on the business and screwing all of my lenders and Stanford Continuing Studies and teachers and students. I had made a lot of promises.

  We rounded Gibraltar, into the bay, then I had to turn ninety degrees to starboard to enter the channel for the marinas. It was hard to get the turn to begin, then I swung too far to starboard, then tried not to overcorrect, but it wasn’t turning back at all. We were heading for the rocks. So I turned farther to port, and then we swung too far in that direction. We swung four or five times before straightening out, as if I had never driven a boat before in my life.

  By the time we were done taking on our 450 feet of chain, it was after dark, and I decided it was stupid for us to sail for Mexico without a good night’s sleep. The crew appreciated dinner ashore, and we all turned in early.

  We left just after daylight. The crew tried hard to steer straight, but it was close to imposs
ible. The rudder seemed to have a mind of its own, with no pattern at all. They were good crew, but they had to say something.

  “It’s inconvenient,” I said in response. “But it’s not a safety or seaworthiness issue.” This was Gibraltar to Cancun, almost six thousand miles on the track through St. Lucia, a trip that would take at least six weeks, sailing twenty-four hours a day. They were dreading the experience, and I couldn’t blame them. But I didn’t feel I had a choice.

  Then, about an hour and a half into the trip, we heard a terrible grinding sound from one of the engines and it lost power. I took the helm, yanked the throttles back to neutral, and went below.

  Nothing was visible on the engine, and all its gauges and fluids checked out normal. I had a crew member at the helm run the engine at different revs, and the sound happened again at high revs, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The engine bucked when it made the sound and was clearly under enormous strain. It could have been a bent shaft, but both shafts were turning smoothly. It could have been the starter engaging for some reason, but that seemed unlikely. It could have been something deep in the guts, I supposed, a piston somehow sticking or rusted bearings around the bases of the rods, but I didn’t know that part of the engine. It could have been something wrong with the transmission. I checked the transmission oil, but we were getting bounced in seas, and it was difficult to see much. The dipstick was scalding and had to be unscrewed with an eighteen mm socket, then pried out with two fingers, but in the look I was able to take, it looked fine.

  I went back on deck and took over the helm. “We only need one engine,” I said. “Even if we can’t figure out the problem with the port engine, we can still make it on the starboard. We were going to run on one engine most of the time anyway, to save diesel, and of course we’ll try to sail as much as possible. And we can have the port engine checked out when we’re in the Canaries a few days from now. But I realize this sucks, and the steering sucks. I just need to think about it for a few minutes.”

  I gave the helm to someone else and went back to sit on the poop deck with Nancy.

  It was sunny and the wind and waves weren’t bad. It seemed like we could just go, and we’d make it. We had all our food, and one engine, at least, and the crew would be all right.

  “I want to keep going,” I said. “But I think it would be a stupid decision. We should have both engines, and we should know what the problem is, and the steering is awful. It will be so frustrating, the crew will probably get off at the next port, in the Canaries. And then we’ll be stuck in the Canaries, with no cash and no crew and the insurance probably unwilling to cover the problems. The truth is, even if the steering and engine were fine, I don’t have any money for diesel along the way or to pay the crew when we arrive. I’m screwed. John’s loan just hasn’t come in on time.”

  Nancy didn’t say anything. She looked unhappy.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll tell the crew we’re turning around. The worst would be if we got caught in a storm with steering that wasn’t right and we lost control of the boat. That would be worse, I guess.”

  “This is bad enough, though,” Nancy said. “You’ll have to cancel classes, and hire new crew, and you won’t be able to pay the interest you owe…It goes on and on.”

  “I know.”

  “What a nightmare,” she said.

  So we turned around, running on one engine. I radioed the marina in advance and let them know I had one engine and a new rudder that wasn’t steering correctly, so they gave me an easy outside slip.

  After docking, I called Nick Bushnell and went looking for Fred the Perkins dealer, but Fred had just left for New Zealand. As my crew waited around for the next two days and did some work repainting bilges, I tried my best to get a quick repair. Fred’s mechanic and the mechanics from Sheppard’s and another mechanic all looked at it, but the engine wouldn’t repeat its problem. We ran it hard at the dock, in gear, with triple dock lines, but we couldn’t get it to make the sound. We did a compression test, which turned out normal. Everything else checked out normal, too. The engine problem remained mysterious, as did the rudder problem.

  These problems were nothing, however, compared to my financial problems. I was calling John several times a day, leaving messages on his answering machine which, by the end, were basically pleading. I told him I was going to go under if I didn’t get the loan. I suggested giving the loan in stages, or even just giving a smaller loan.

  I was at the Internet café for long stretches each evening, and under advice from Rand, my principal lender, I had sent an e-mail to all of the lenders asking for a restructuring of the loans. I told them that with the setbacks from the war in Kosovo, construction that was delayed and had gone over budget, repairs from the loss of the paint and the rudder, loss of crew, and a promised loan that had not yet materialized, I wasn’t able to pay the first interest payments that were now a week overdue. I had offered an interest rate that was too high and a payback schedule that was too quick if anything went wrong. I now needed $87,000 within the next week, at a minimum, to prevent American Express from taking legal action against me. And I had other bills. I was asking the lenders for a restructuring of the loans at a lower interest rate over a longer period of time, and I was asking for new loans to cover my bills now to keep the business afloat.

  It was an unpleasant letter for the lenders to receive. They wanted more info, which I gave, and Rand gave me $24,000. We had previously agreed that, because he and Lee planned to use a lot of charter time on the boat, they would pay $1,000 per month toward operating expenses over a two-year period, so he was accelerating all of those payments into one lump sum. It was remarkably generous. But none of the other lenders seemed likely to give or loan more money. As several of them put it very clearly, they didn’t want to risk throwing good money after bad.

  I finally received a short e-mail from John, titled “Nut-Vice Judas.” He had praised me on previous occasions for running a unique and risky business, for “putting my nuts in the vice” to make my dreams happen. In this e-mail, he said he couldn’t give me a new loan because of various bills and such. It was difficult to believe, however, that $3.5 million had evaporated in a few weeks, so that less than $150,000 was left. Amber must have told him not to give me the loan. That was the only explanation Nancy or I could believe.

  These were grueling, shameful times. Rand suggested bankruptcy. I took offense, at first. Bankruptcy seemed unimaginable. But when no new loans came in, and Rand canceled his $24,000 check to cut his losses, which bounced a lot of checks and left my Citibank account $11,000 overdrawn, and my previous boat Grendel still didn’t sell, even at a reduced price, and my new employee wasn’t selling any new trips, and I couldn’t even get my engine fixed, I had to admit, finally, that I had failed. I took late night walks around Gibraltar, the streets empty and hollow, what was happening to my business and life shielded by disbelief. I had liked who I was—the founder, teacher, and captain for these educational charters. A man with self-made freedom. Now I was someone else, someone who had failed and was going to cheat a lot of people out of their money, plain and simple. A guy who didn’t pay his debts, a man with no integrity. I told Rand and my new employee that I was going to have to put the boat up for sale here in Gibraltar and probably file for bankruptcy, unless it sold right away for a high amount. I would write a note to the lenders explaining.

  But my new employee jumped the gun. She told all of the lenders and passengers right away that I had filed for bankruptcy. She even put it on our answering machine message. Just the fact that I was considering it was supposed to be confidential, and this was outrageous. I was very angry.

  One of the lenders sent me a note that she had been considering lending more money, a significant amount of money, and she was amazed and upset to learn from our answering machine that I had already filed for bankruptcy. I responded to this and other long e-mails with my own long e-mails trying to explain, but the damage had been done. I
had failed in the business. I didn’t want anyone to throw away more money. On top of this, my new employee had handled the situation in the worst possible way. I hated every minute of trying to deal with this mess. I really wanted to die.

  I sent the crew home, buying their tickets and paying the marina bill with the last money I had. I could leave the boat cleared of expenses, but that was it. I didn’t have enough money left over even for my own plane ticket home. I had poured everything into the business.

  I arranged with Nick to bring the boat back to Sotogrande, where the insurance might be willing to pay for repair of the engine and hauling of the boat to modify the rudder. Or they might not. In any case, the marina there would cost less per day than Gibraltar, and the boat would be more likely to sell, and the repairs might get done. It was the best I could do for the lenders. If they wanted me to return in January to work on the boat, to fix it up for sale, I would do that too.

  Rand paid for my flight home, and Nancy’s parents paid for hers. On the morning of the day we were to fly out, we moved the boat from Gibraltar to Sotogrande with two crew Nick had lined up for us. We paid them with the food from our refrigerators and freezers.

  It was a sad last trip on the boat. It had been such a grueling, pointless struggle: getting through construction and financing and launch in Turkey; then the charters with the various problems, including water in the engines and paint falling off and the emergency haul-out; then the quick trip across the Med, the rudder falling off, and ten hours at the helm for the towing attempts, followed by six frustrating weeks in the yard, trying to get the Spaniards to do the work, afraid all the time of the bills I couldn’t pay; and now these new problems with one of the engines and the new rudder, with bankruptcy as the whipped cream and cherry. I’d had enough.

  AFTER PAYING FOR my flight home, Rand set up an appointment with a bankruptcy attorney, and he gave me cash to get through the next few weeks. If he hadn’t done this, I don’t know how I would have gotten by. I didn’t have even $10, cash or credit.