Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools - Charles Wilkins L. - Страница 11

ON DECEMBER 23, I bid a quiet farewell to my children in Thunder Bay. Eden, who was fifteen and in Grade 10, had in recent months grown somewhat cavalier about any show of affection toward me and was brisk, even jokey, in her goodbyes. Georgia, my seventeen-year-old, had woven me a little gold bracelet, about the thickness of butcher cord, which she fastened to my wrist with instructions that if I kept it on she would always be with me and that I would have safe travels and a safe return. (In the weeks to come, as it wore thin, I would reinforce it with everything from electrical wire to fishing line to duct tape, increasingly paranoid that it would fall off and I would lose my angelic protection.) While I am anything but an ideal father, I am tearfully close to my children, and when I had exchanged hugs with the girls, Matt, my oldest, then twenty-two, asked me quietly if I was sure I was doing the right thing.

“No, I’m not,” I felt obliged to tell him, “but I’m going anyway,” to which he offered a rather pensive smile, not so much at me as at the floor.

“Well, good luck, Dad,” he said after a few seconds, “I understand.” And they hugged me and were gone out the door, clearly under the impression that they were unlikely to see me again.

The next day, Christmas Eve, I flew to Toronto and spent Christmas with my friend Trish, with whom I had had a close, sometimes fiery four-year companionship.

Five days after that, on the morning of December 29, Trish dropped me at Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto Island, where I rendezvoused with Steve and Nigel for our flight on to Montreal. For Trish and me, it was a landmark parting, uncharacteristically affectionate and gentle—in all a heartening sendoff. The previous afternoon, I had sat at her dining room table in east Toronto and penned a farewell to those who had sustained and befriended me during the long months of my training:

December 28, 2010

Hello again to all of you who, in your variety of ways, have so faithfully supported my Atlantic adventure! And goodbye, too—or let us say, farewell, as I count down the hours to my departure for Casablanca tomorrow, then on to Agadir the following day. With luck, Big Blue (which as I write is rocking her way across the Atlantic aboard a thousand-foot container vessel) will reach Agadir about the time we do.

We expect to have her reassembled, provisioned, and ready for the crossing by January 8 or 9, although the actual date of departure will depend on the weather.

Our route will take us about 400 miles south along the African coast from Agadir to the little fishing port of Tarfaya, in what was once the state of Western Sahara, now part of Morocco. After a stop there, we will continue southwest in an attempt to pick up the westbound trade winds and equatorial current, which, if our hopes are fulfilled, will carry us out to sea. I find it fitting that we should be starting this undeniably remote adventure on the coast of Africa, which to me has always seemed the “remotest” and most mysterious of populated continents.

Most of my food is already with the boat in the shipping containers, on its way to Morocco. It includes a lot of freeze-dried stuff: Thai noodles, stroganoff, macaroni and cheese, rice and beans, bacon and eggs, potatoes with ground chicken, plus dozens of half-ounce packets of powdered Gatorade, four boxes of protein bars (twenty-four to a box), and twenty vacuum-packed cheese and bacon sandwiches. These last delicacies are of a sort reputed to have been sent into space with the astronauts and have a “best-before” date that I will not have to worry about in this lifetime.

My kit, as prescribed by Angela, is a strange little doll’s closet of trinkets, electrical gadgets, and toiletries: headlamp, flashlight, pens, folding scissors, razors, a waterproof digital camera, waterproof containers of one sort or another, a sleeping bag, an odd little blue velour “traveling” pillow, a Moleskine notebook, reading glasses (two pairs), sunglasses (two pairs), a couple of plastic “sporks,” a water bottle, an insulated mug, a food bowl, sunscreen, various heady-smelling ointments (including diaper rash cream), sea soap, a “miracle” towel, mechanic’s gloves, half a dozen asthma inhalers, and clothes for a variety of conditions that will include daytime temperatures as high as 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the deep tropics and night lows of, say, 50 F, and, of course, rain and wind.

Most importantly, I have a seat cushion made of a thick honeycombed gel which took me weeks to decide upon and buy and which I have been using to magnificent effect on the rowing machine for the past ten days.

If you to go to bigbluerow.com or to rocexpedition.com, you will find photos of the boat and of our training, will get at least sporadic updates from the journey and will be able to follow our progress on a map of the Atlantic, where we will appear as a tiny dot. We will also appear as a tiny dot in real space and time on the actual Atlantic—but let us not get poetic. If all goes well, the dot will reach Barbados sometime around mid-February.

As you know, we will be chasing not just a world record but a fine six-person rowboat, a tri-hull named Hallin Marine (formerly Triton), which will be leaving the Canary Islands a week or more prior to our own departure and may well establish a new record before we get to Barbados. So in effect we will be chasing Hallin’s record, not the existing thirty-three days. A more conventional single-hulled rowboat named Sara G will also be setting out from the African coast at about the time we do. So we are braced for rivalry against muscular British rowers who I am led to believe carry far higher pedigrees than do we. Indeed, our respective crews remind me of those dog teams that compete in the Alaskan Iditarod or Yukon Quest dogsled races across a thousand miles of subarctic wilderness. Some of the teams are highly pedigreed purebreds, or carefully bred crosses, while others (the canine version of the Big Blue crew) are made up of strays from the pound and are apparently the more resilient for it.

All of this “racing,” I might add, is unofficial—a projection entirely of our being out there at the same time as the other boats and with the same ambition. Yet another vessel, Britannia ii, will be leaving Africa or the Canaries with, I believe, a crew of eight just after our departure, except with no stated ambition to set a record. For all of this, it is unlikely that we will either see or hear from any of these boats, before, during, or after our respective crossings, unless of course we should happen to meet on the sea floor or fetch up within a couple of hours of one another on the coast of Mauritania or Gran Canaria.

The final two members of our crew of sixteen were added this week. Unfortunately, we lost a rower, Anne Maurissen from Belgium, who signed on a few days after our training session but fell on the ice on Christmas Eve, in Brussels, and fractured her wrist. I never met her, but in her emails sensed a kindred spirit, so I will miss what she undoubtedly would have brought to the crew.

Our latest additions are a twenty-four-year-old British medical student named Liam Flynn, who rows recreationally on the English south coast, and a thirty-one-year-old Tasmanian woman, Margaret Bowling, who is reputed to be an organizational whiz and will apparently be assisting Angela with the command.

While I have been attempting to play down any symphonic goodbyes, I want to say that I have appreciated the good wishes that so many of you have sent my way. As of the moment I have received well over a hundred messages, some of which I can barely read for the depth of their grace and goodwill.

I am heading out optimistically and with great respect for my fellow crew members, for our builder, David, and for our captain, Angela. And of course for the ocean. As the writer Simon Winchester said of the Atlantic, “It is a gray and heaving sea, not infrequently storm-bound, ponderous with swells, a sea that in the mind’s eye is thick with trawlers lurching, bows up, then crashing down through great white curtains of spume, tankers wallowing across the swells, its weather so often on the verge of gales, and all the while its waters moving with an air of settled purpose, simultaneously displaying incalculable power and inspiring by this display perpetual admiration, respect, caution, and fear.”

We will be counting on the trade winds to move us along—and on all the energy we can muster for our rowing.

And so I go—deeply appreciative of your support and of your good wishes for the trip.

I look forward to reporting to you all upon my return.

Happy New Year! Farewell for now.

Sincerely and affectionately,

Charlie

AT TRUDEAU AIRPORT in Montreal the next afternoon, as I lay on a padded bench attempting to get a little rest, I mentioned to Steve that I had a swelling and an ache in one of my ankles. I believed I had picked up a minor injury in training that had been accentuated by long hikes around downtown Toronto as I tried to find anything I was missing in clothing and kit items. Ever the pragmatist, Steve informed me that if it was blood-clotting—“thrombosis,” I believe he called it—it would either shake loose unannounced and kill me instantly (in which case I had nothing to worry about) or would dissolve without shaking loose (in which case I would live on and had nothing to worry about).

At perhaps 5 p.m. (having found something to worry about) I went on an extended tour of the airport in search of Tom, who had taken the train from Toronto rather than flying with the rest of the Canadians, and with ninety minutes to go till boarding for Casablanca was nowhere to be found. I called his wife, Luisa, who said he had left on a later train than he had intended and should now be in Montreal.

A kind of gallows watch ensued, during which one or two of us would saunter down the long row of international gates, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tom’s distinctive bald head or hear the equally distinctive kazoo of his voice. My concern was that as we got to within forty-five minutes of takeoff, he would, for security reasons, not be allowed on the plane.

The flight was eventually called, and the six of us lingered in the departure lounge until I, for one, couldn’t stand it anymore and said to Dylan White, “We’ll see him in Agadir.” And I got up, showed my passport at the gate, and walked into the tunnel that led to the big Royal Air Maroc jet. But I felt wretched knowing that Tom, who did not like money transactions or even using a credit card (he had gotten Steve to buy his plane ticket), would probably get hit for four or five hundred dollars in rescheduling fees, as well as having to find a place to stay for the night and to negotiate Casablanca and Agadir on his own. If there was even the faintest comfort in any of it, it was that he speaks fluent French, so would be okay both in Montreal and on arrival in North Africa.

As the line at the aircraft door shortened to six or seven people (there were already several hundred aboard), only Steve hung back at the top of the tunnel, hoping against the hopelessness of the situation that Tom might still show up. As far as we knew, he had never checked in for the flight.

If I were to tell you that as we howled down the runway for takeoff, an elfin sixty-seven-year-old apostate waving his arms and wearing a little red gob hat came sprinting along beside the plane, leapt onto a wing, made his way forward along the fuselage to the door and thence inside with a grin, you might question my reliability as a storyteller. But in my memory of the evening, that, within a hair’s breadth of the truth, is what happened. Had Tom been thirty seconds later than he was, there would at liftoff have been six distressed, not seven relieved, Canucks in the front right quarter of perhaps the dingiest jetliner, with the cruddiest bathrooms and toilets, that I, or perhaps any of us, had ever been on.

Typically, as in days to come, Tom was the first one asleep, passed out like a lizard in a patch of sunlight, while the rest of us fidgeted and shivered and wrenched our thin blankets around us, attempting to dispossess ourselves of the stresses of the past few hours, not to mention the past few months. We had worked hard, very hard, for a reward that lay bristling before us and, for each of us, would redefine what working hard could mean.

Finally, in the darkness over the eastern Atlantic, a grumpy stewardess with breasts like warheads and the eyes of an executioner served something approximating breakfast and, in a great arcing swoosh, we rode the rising sun into Casablanca, where the airport at 6 a.m. was populated by a dozen healthy-looking cats and a scattering of unhealthy-looking human beings.

We flew on to Agadir, across the Atlas Mountains, aboard a rickety twin-engine de Havilland, the proverbial flying coffin, which might have been disconcerting had we been awake enough to notice. And drove on into the city—twenty miles in a big Mercedes cab: past date palms and argan orchards and palmettos; and bursts of bougainvillea on the cinder-block shacks; and little roadside stalls selling French pastries and used car bumpers and chips of burnt meat on a stick; all of it spread out against the unending brownish rock that, whether in mountains or coastal plains or city outcrops—or reduced to sand by the wind—is the fundamental landscape of North Africa.