Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools - Charles Wilkins L. - Страница 9

IF FURTHER EVIDENCE IS necessary of either the mirth or sobriety of this fanciful and fateful expedition, consider that by the time we cast off I, like the rest of the crew, had invested US$10,000 in the boat and several thousand more in travel and training (this at a time when an American greenback still bought half a tennis ball and the treasury in Washington had not commenced perforating its currency and dispensing it on a roll). What’s more, having begged my way aboard as a chronicler of the follies to come, I had spent nearly a year and a half in arduous training in order to be ready. This grossly protracted fitness spree left me so exhausted at times that toward the end of it I began seriously to wonder if I had the jam to do what dozens of far stronger athletes had failed to do in the past. Of the 700-odd fools who had attempted to row the Atlantic during the past hundred years, a mere 400 had made it—compared, for example, to the roughly 5,000 who have reached the summit of Everest.

That said, there is a part of me (the mating of Puritan and cockroach) that thrived on the training and exhaustion, that looked forward to the salt drenchings and sun, to the scouring of the hands against the oars. “Everest Shmeverest,” I told a mountain climber at one point, jestingly contemptuous of those who needed Sherpas and oxygen and Depends to fulfil their questionable goals where I needed only blind determination and stupidity—well, and a crew of much stronger rowers than I... oh, and a mini-Everest of 222s, the wobbly pharmaceutical crutch on which I have stumbled along for a dozen years, six a day, taken as a stop-gap against arthritis and muscle pain and migraines.

Fortunately I did not need privacy. For when we weren’t rowing or soaked, or under other pestilential influences, we lived like gophers, far more scuzzily than you might imagine, in a cabin about the size of a Volks-wagen van. It was a cell that, for reasons easily imagined, I came to think of as the Gas Chamber—or, in airier moments, the House that Dave Built: eight bunks, upper and lower, each about the dimensions of a pygmy’s coffin, on opposite sides of a narrow central passageway, and a Lilliputian fore-galley which on the third day at sea was colonized by the boat’s captain, Angela Madsen, and converted into a berth. In that tiny enclosure, our oft-inscrutable commander had almost enough space to lay out a sleeping bag, but not enough to roll over in the night or even to stand up without sticking her head and upper body out the ventilation hatch on the inclined front wall.

By Dave I mean David Davlianidze, the unflappable Georgian expat—hawk-nosed, brilliant, soft-spoken—in whose boat shop on Shelter Island, NY, our eccentric craft had taken shape. In the days after Georgia gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992 and was plunged into civil war, this gentle, free-spirited economist and entrepreneur carried a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver and ran with other gun-toting “paramilitarists” in order to guard the money he was making by importing cigarettes from Austria and selling them out of what he refers to as his “boutique” in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. His introduction to the Land of Hope and Glory, which we shall visit in due time, was as outrageous and picaresque as that of a character in the boldest and most subversive fiction. He had for months been an outlaw. But for most of us he was all hero—a guy you could trust with your life, as we did literally from the moment we signed on.

The question no one dared ask during the days leading up to our departure was whether our trust was justified. Would the spidery and eccentric vessel Dave had built hold up on the Atlantic? Would the beams connecting the hulls do their job? Would the boat surf, as any rowboat riding the trade winds has to do?

At least one person, a naval architect in Agadir, had been decidedly non-committal in assessing Big Blue’s seaworthiness. When asked, as he was several times, he would roll his eyes, shake his presumably knowledgeable head, and allow that he would certainly not want to be aboard.

In effect, we were test pilots for a boat that might at best become a model for the future of the sport—or at very least an honorable experiment. At worst, Big Blue would end her days as a scattering of expensive flotsam amidst an array of kit bags and life preservers on the lonely and heaving surface of the Atlantic.

MY FIRST AWARENESS of this fanciful experimental rowboat had come sixteen months earlier, during late August of 2009. On a visit to Thessalon, Ontario, to lead a weekend of writing seminars, I had an opportunity to catch up with my old friends Steve Roedde and Janet McLeod, whom I had met nearly a decade earlier while I was on a sixty-three-day solo hike from Thunder Bay, Ontario, to New York City. At the time, they had hosted a dinner for me at their home on St. Joseph Island, in Lake Huron, east of Sault Ste. Marie. Like any number of generous and adventurous irregulars whom I met en route, they eventually became characters in the book I wrote about the walk, and we kept in touch. By August 2009, however, we had not seen one another for several years. So we enjoyed a welcome reunion, over dinner with others, and eventually got to questions about what everybody had been up to in recent months.

“Welllllllll...,” said Janet, when it was her and Steve’s turn, dragging out the syllable as if hesitating to announce, say, that they had turned to gambling and lost everything, or had bought a herd of rhinos and it wasn’t working out.

“I’ll let Steve fill you in on the details,” she said after a few seconds, “but he and Nigel are in training to row across the Atlantic Ocean.”

Nigel is their twenty-three-year-old son, and as Steve took up the tale, I heard, as if through radio static, the phrases “crew of fourteen”... “world-record attempt”... “four months from now”... “tropical Atlantic.” By the time he had uttered half a dozen sentences it no longer seemed as if anyone was actually speaking to me, answering my questions, attempting to impart information. It was rather as if a kind of force field had descended, reducing me first to defenselessness, to purest susceptibility, then to a single evolving compulsion. During the minutes that followed, every other thought in my head was displaced, if not eradicated, by an outlandish inner hankering to be part of the remarkable expedition Steve was describing. I love boats, particularly those without motors; love outdoor adventure. I had in fact been stirred in recent months toward what I felt might be a last grand attempt to do something extraordinary in the realm of travel, something that would push me hard up against my limits, perhaps even my mortality. What that might be, I didn’t know, and could never have named it as specifically as it had just been named for me. Beyond my private ambitions, the writer in me was fascinated by the idea of being out on the ocean, at sea level, in a rowboat of all things, and of having to be fit enough to power such a vessel across an ocean.

When later I cornered Steve about the possibility of my being included, he allowed that there happened to be an opening on the crew and a very remote chance I might be taken on, although probably not—the cherished record was more likely to be broken with young titans at the oars than with skinny old writers.

Nevertheless, I got the name and phone number of the boat’s builder and captain, Roy Finlay, and a few nights later found myself on the phone with him explaining in immodest bursts what a sterling chap I was, exemplary in the clutch, durable, disciplined—how I had once walked 1,400 miles from my home in Thunder Bay to New York City, overcoming poor training, infirmity, injury, blizzards, heat waves; I had written a book about it! I would send him one! He could read for himself about the extraordinary creature I am!

For reasons too trifling to mention, I hesitated to note that I am an arthritic and near-sighted rack of bones, who had done nothing aerobically challenging for three or four years and, at the time, would have been hard-pressed to row across the St. Lawrence River, let alone the Atlantic Ocean.

SIXTY MAY WELL be the new fifty, as the culture-clappers would have us believe. At the same time, I am deeply aware that if there is an axiom for self-deceit among guys my age it is that somehow we can forestall the diminishments of time—or even reverse them—and rise to physical demands that would have defeated us at thirty or forty.

This is perhaps why, when the captain called eight or ten days later and announced to me that I would be allowed to come along as a writer, provided I could row, I hung up the phone not, as one might think, gripped by elation or a sense of triumph but in a welter of ambivalence—excited, yes, but appalled too over what I had gotten myself into. For the first time it occurred to me that at my age I couldn’t possibly get fit enough to row day and night on the high seas—to keep up with a dozen or more tough athletes, most of whom were less than half my age and either elite rowers or front-line endurance competitors in other sports.

His belief, the captain told me, was that I would have a stabilizing influence on temperamental young crew members (a first, let it be said, in that for years I have more often been cited as a destabilizing influence on the orderly progress of the universe).

If my skepticism needed burnishing, it got it a few days later, when, en route from my cottage in Muskoka to my home in Thunder Bay, I stopped overnight at Steve and Janet’s on St. Joseph Island. Steve had a rowing machine in his basement and was going to show me a few things about technique.

“Promise me no tests at this stage,” I told him, to which he responded that I should “just get on for a while—see what it feels like. No numbers.”

The Concept2 rower is a long, Inquisitional-looking contraption with a flywheel, pull chain, and sliding seat—and a computer. And as soon as I saw it, I realized in dismay that anything I did on it in terms of speed, power, or distance would be recorded, almost certainly exposing me as a fraud, perhaps even a fraud with a defective heart (to go with what was rapidly being exposed as my defective brain).

To this day, it is a reminder to me of how badly I wanted to do this that as I got onto the rower I found myself thinking and not particularly caring that if I was going to show Steve and the others I had the mettle to go out on the Atlantic with them, I would need to push myself to where I would unquestionably be risking a heart attack (heart attacks being what happen to out-of-shape sixty-two-year-olds who push their tickers up to 85 percent of capacity and attempt to hold them there for... well, the time it takes to row across the Atlantic Ocean). My best chance of surviving the next hour, I suspected, lay not in the resilience of my arteries but in the fact that Steve and Janet were both practicing emergency room physicians.

And so I rowed. And my heart pounded. And my lungs wheezed. And my heart pounded harder.

When it was over, I am relieved to report, I had not only survived but had put up numbers that moved Steve to enthuse that I was “probably going to be okay” and that he would hasten to let the others know that I would at least be able to lift my own oar onto the boat.

Later, in Steve’s absence, Janet told me how utterly relieved she had been to see me row, surely feeling that had I wobbled or begun to complain after a few minutes, the voyage, not to mention the lives of her son and husband, would have been that much further compromised and at risk.

And so began my training—the run-up to an adventure for which I still believed I had just three months to prepare. Throughout September I spent four or five hours a day at the Canada Games Complex in Thunder Bay, jogging on the track, lifting weights, pumping the rowing machines... and further pumping them... and pumping them some more. Part of my challenge was that the rest of the crew, already far stronger than I, had been training for nearly half a year. The previous February, a kind of cattle call had gone out over an array of rowing and sporting websites. The message was that Captain Roy Finlay, boat designer extraordinaire, was looking for hard-nosed rowers with an epic sense of adventure to take an experimental rowboat across the Atlantic during late 2009, and to take it across in world-record time. Steve and Nigel had been among the dozen hardy souls—from Canada, from the U.S., from Europe—who gathered at Shelter Island, showed Roy what they could do, and departed, dreams burnished, passports as good as stamped. The early instalments of their $10,000 participation fees would begin building the boat, which at that point was itself little more than a dream.

By September, the hulls had been built and the construction schedule was on catch-up—could the boat possibly be ready for mid-November, when it would have to be shipped to Morocco?

My own game of catch-up was every bit as frantic as Roy’s. While my official goading to be up to speed by the end of October came from headquarters, my real regimen came from Steve Roedde, who emailed me twice a day with endless encouragement and challenges—for this afternoon’s workout, for tomorrow’s simulated row, for the weekend’s marathon. What rattled me particularly as Week 1 slid past was my utter incapability merely to stay perched on the rowing machine. I would very shortly be expected to sit for two hours straight, six times a day, quite literally working my ass off, when for now I could barely go twenty minutes without having to get off and grimace and massage, as if I’d been flogged at the mast or thrown down the stairs. When I complained, Steve informed me that my problem was nothing more than the muscles being crushed by the pressure of the seat—“pulped,” I believe was his word. As for mental conditioning, I was led to think of it as something real ocean rowers, leather-butts, didn’t worry about because once you got out there it was pretty much a crapshoot of stresses and unpredictability and we were all more or less nuts anyway.

Gradually, I increased my “sit time” to half an hour, then forty minutes, but never really did get much beyond the latter. Even on the boat, I’d get up and stretch and adjust my cushion, or take a leak, or take off my T-shirt, or reapply my sunscreen—whatever little chore provided a modicum of cover for the fact that I simply could not sit there pulping my bony posterior for much more than half an hour at a time.

The second and third weeks of my training called for three- and four-hour rowing sessions at a level of strength and cardiovascular fitness that my second week told me I would not be achieving any time soon.

In response to these exaggerated demands, I was going through Gatorade by the gallon and eating whole chickens, whole lake trout, whole apple pies. At one point in October, I boiled up a five-pound bag of potatoes, tout complet, and ate them with a pound of butter and another of old cheddar within perhaps eight hours.

Meanwhile, I agonized over what I perceived to be my painfully sluggish progress, more fretful than ever that I would not be ready and would end up disgracing myself. My greatest fear was not that I would drown or be shipwrecked or die of a heart attack aboard; it was that I would simply not be equal to the task, would end up huddled and whimpering in a corner of the cabin while the others debated whether to euthanize me humanely or just throw me to the sharks.

At the same time, there was something crazily exhilarating for me in the fact that, at the ripening age of sixty-two (when, as Shakespeare put it, I might better be pulling up “the lean and slipper’d pantaloon”), I had committed myself to an adventure that I would not even have contemplated at times in my life when I would more likely have had the physical capabilities to survive what I planned to do.

In a magazine story on my training, I wrote with utmost sincerity that at twenty I would not have had the inner strength for such an endeavor, at thirty the imagination, at forty the time. At fifty I would have lacked the all-important awareness that I gained as I approached sixty: that mortality is just another setting on life’s cruise control, neither to be feared nor particularly avoided, and that the true gist of the ripening season is one’s compulsion just to go, to ask what would happen if rather than simply enduring risk and uncertainty as we add years, we decided instead to embrace risk, juice up on it, reclaim our bodies, re-establish ground—in short to reinvent ourselves, or at very least to discover what an adventure might turn up about the human comedy and how best we might play out our roles in it as we age.

WHEN WORD CAME from Roy Finlay in mid-October that the boat was not ready and that, given the shipping time to Morocco, we could not mobilize until February, I was surely the only crew member who felt even a remote sense of relief, in that I now had time to get properly into shape, as well as to sort my finances, get my will updated, and so on. Some of my fellow crew members were outraged. A few had taken specific time off work in order to participate, or had other obligations in February and couldn’t make the adjustment.

No one responded more adamantly than Steve. He and Janet have a maple syrup operation on the island, and he had to be there tapping trees and boiling sap during late February and March. I had access to some of Steve and Roy’s correspondence at the time. I am not free to quote from it, but will submit that Steve went at the captain with an all-but-animal rage over his perceived delinquency in not providing fair warning as to what was going on with the boat. It was Steve’s contention that Roy must have known weeks earlier not only what shape Big Blue was in but what sort of effort would be required to get her to Morocco.

By the time the ensuing quarrel derailed, Steve had pronounced Roy a liar and closet fraud, and Roy had declared Steve an insubordinate meddler (in words slightly more colorful) who could not accept authority and who would not now, ever, be part of the crew that would eventually row Big Blue to her rightful moorage in the record books.

When I spoke to Steve shortly after the announcement, he told me he was “devastated” that his eight months of training and anticipation—in effect the reshaping of his life to the exotic prospect that lay ahead—had come to nothing. Even if he could patch things up with Roy, there was the more concrete obstacle of the sugar bush.

We had barely absorbed this new and shattering reality, when an announcement came that it was now all off for a year. The proposed February departure could not be accomplished either, after which, for nine months, there would be too great a likelihood of tropical storms and hurricanes. For crew members such as Steve, this opened new possibilities—if and only if he could work things out with Roy. A new concern, however, was whether he could withstand another year of the sort of training that, at this point, had taken a toll not just on him but on his marriage.

For others who had stayed with the voyage, it was the last hatchet blow, and within days the crew was down to seven or eight committed rowers. One of them, fortunately, was Nigel Roedde, Steve’s son, who was determined to see the voyage through, thus significantly increasing the chances that Steve would find his way back aboard.

As rowers abandoned ship, my own sense of commitment deepened. By this time, I had borrowed a rowing machine and was often on it for three hours a day. At the height of Roy’s flare-up with Steve, I emailed them both, confirming my participation, hoping it would not be read as a betrayal of my friendship with Steve. Which clearly it was not. When I visited Steve and Janet at Christmas, Steve and I “raced” on a pair of machines in their rec room, after which he informed me that I was now functioning at “the fitness level of the average twenty-five-year-old” (he did not mention which species, although I assumed he was talking about human beings and on that basis permitted myself a moment or two of satisfaction over the progress I had at times doubted I was making).

If I had a training predicament it was this: that, while I was supposed to be putting on weight, the better to survive the physiological dunning of the Atlantic, I was actually losing it, couldn’t gain an ounce no matter how many gallons of oatmeal and pounds of spaghetti and handfuls of cashews I consumed. My intention was to get up to 180 pounds from my customary 160, but I knew from experience that I would have to put the weight on gradually—couldn’t hope to add that much muscle and lard during the last couple of months.

The other hitch in my training was my tendency to go too hard and thereby to risk injury, this against the advice of every knowledgeable athlete and trainer I encountered. My friend Peter White, a Thunder Bay lawyer and former competitive rower, would remind me every time I saw him that it was crucially preferable to under-train than to over-train, and that I should simply not allow myself to fall into the “harder, faster, longer” syndrome. Nevertheless, in February, while attempting to set a personal best for power and “speed” on the machine, I messed up a disc in my back—felt it pop—and for nearly three weeks could barely walk, let alone row. At the height of my discomfort, it took me ten minutes to get out of bed, another ten to get my pants on, another ten to get downstairs to the kitchen. Shortly after it happened, I attended a dinner party and spent the entire evening pitched forward at a forty-five-degree angle from the waist, as inflexible as a 5-lie hockey stick, explaining to stupefied friends that I would soon be reclaiming my youth by powering my way across the Atlantic. A week after that, still folded like a jackknife but gussied up now in an Italian tux, I lurched around a “grand” charity ball, a literary affair, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, explaining to writers who thought they’d seen it all that in tossing off the shackles of the years I would, among other things, be testing the resiliency of the human carcass.

Meanwhile, I learned what I could about the route, the weather patterns, the prospects. I also devoured anything I could find about modern ocean rowing—not as it is practiced by fishermen or lifeguards in wooden dories or double-enders off the coasts of, say, Newfoundland or Australia, but by the hardy extremists (“the global-village idiots,” as I have heard them called) who for nearly fifty years have made a kind of game of racing one another, or the clock, across the oceans of the world.

No one would have predicted much of a future for such a game when it debuted during the summer of 1966 (indeed, in considering its history, few free of dementia would predict much of a future for it now). On May 21 of that year, while others of their generation were rolling weed or stringing flowers in their hair in Kensington Gardens or MacArthur Park, a young British pair named David Johnstone and John Hoare, motivated by heaven knows what, left Virginia Beach, Virginia, aboard a craft named Puffin, rowed for 105 days in the direction of home, and on September 3 (as their recovered log revealed) disappeared forever from the face of the planet. A second British team, John Ridgway and Chay Blyth, set out from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, two weeks later than the doomed pair, and upon their arrival in Ireland on exactly the day their cohorts are thought to have gone to the bottom, became the first of the new-age rowers to cross the Atlantic.

In 1972, after three false starts, another pair of Brits, John Fairfax and Sylvia Cook, aboard Britannia ii, became the earliest to cross the Pacific (she the first woman to cross any ocean), rowing from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia. They did so in a sprightly 361 days, including food and water stops on a variety of shores and islands.

Of the thirty rowing crews that attempted ocean crossings between 1966 and 1982—attempts now referred to as “historic” ocean rows—just fifteen were successful, while three were lost entirely. The most compelling of the disappearances was that of an Englishman named Kenneth Kerr, who departed St. John’s, Newfoundland, in May of 1979, rowed for fifty-eight days on the North Atlantic, gave up, and was rescued by a passing cargo ship. He set out again several months later, this time from Corner Brook, Newfoundland, rowed for 108 days, and is believed to have been wrecked and drowned, possibly within miles of his destination on the English coast.

What distinguished those first thirty attempts from rows that have occurred since was that they were undertaken without life rafts, satellite phones, or desalination equipment—or any navigational conveniences such as an autopilot or a GPS (which had of course not yet been invented). A broken rudder or oarlock meant the end not just of the voyage but quite possibly of those aboard.

Peter Bird of the U.K. had already rowed both the Atlantic and Pacific when, in August 1982, he introduced modern desalination and communications equipment to the sport during his 294-day odyssey from San Francisco to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Between June 1992 and June 1996, Bird would make five more attempts to row the Pacific, all of them unsuccessful, invariably from the east coast of Russia with the hope of reaching the west coast of the USA. The fourth attempt lasted 304 days before he gave it up. On his fifth attempt, he rowed a couple of thousand miles east from Vladivostok, made his last contact with land on Day 69 of his voyage, and was never heard from again.

A pair of Soviet rowers, Alexander and Eugene Smurgis, embarked from Tiksi, Russia, on the Arctic coast, during the summer of 1993, and reached London, England, in 131 days. Less than three months later, Eugene, alone on a relatively straightforward run across the Atlantic, disappeared somewhere above the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and, like Peter Bird, was not seen again.

During the decade to come, Smurgis’s route, an approximation of our own, emerged as the standard transatlantic crossing, beginning either on the northwest coast of Africa or in the Canary Islands and moving westward for some 3,000 miles, aided by the trade winds, to the outer islands of the Caribbean. The less common and tougher Atlantic route, eastward from North America to Europe, is aided by the current of the Gulf Stream, which arcs north and east up the U.S. seaboard, past Newfoundland, and eventually across to Ireland.

While fewer than thirty rowboats successfully crossed any of the world’s oceans during the first thirty years of the sport, the next fifteen years—from 1997 to the present—witnessed so many attempts that successful crossings now number somewhere over 400. This is a result largely of the introduction of a transatlantic rowing race, the Atlantic Challenge, in 1997. In October of that year, thirty boats, all pairs, left the Canary Islands. Twenty-four of them eventually reached Port St. Charles, Barbados. In 2003, the race became the Woodvale Atlantic Rowing Race, a contest that every second year sends as many as forty boats out from Tenerife in the Canaries. The sport is regulated and archived by an English organization called the Ocean Rowing Society, which logs the details of all crossings, sets the rules, and keeps the record books. Those rules stipulate among other things that boats must be self-sustaining from start to finish, must touch neither land nor any other vessels en route, and must run entirely without motors or sails.

Big Blue, I had realized by now, would be running not just without a motor or sail but without a toilet—the absence of which was apparently to be addressed by a handle astern, to which one could cling while dangling one’s posterior above the ocean. During my training, I read numerous accounts of excursions such as ours, at least one of which mentioned the unsettling sight of sharks, big ones, that occasionally surfaced as someone was doing his or her business over the rail. Beyond the risks of being lost at sea and the (admittedly slim) threat of having one’s hindquarters removed by a man-eating fish, the hazards of ocean rowing, as I was able to assess them, ran to sunstroke, dehydration, exhaustion, malnutrition, extreme weight loss, supertankers in the shipping lanes, salt sores, mid-Atlantic delirium, breakdown of navigation and desalination equipment, antipathies among crew members, and bad weather.

There were also, I came to understand, great pleasures to be anticipated on such crossings: parades of porpoises, pods of whales, glorious night skies, intense camaraderie, the satisfactions of high-level fitness. One crew member from a previous crossing described his boat surfing for miles at a stretch—“as thrilling as a rollercoaster”—on twenty-five-foot waves sent up by the trade winds, which would be of primary importance to us as we made our way across. Or so we believed.