Little Ship of Fools Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY

  CHARLES WILKINS

  In the Land of Long Fingernails

  Walk to New York

  A Wilderness Called Home

  The Circus at the Edge of the Earth

  The Wild Ride

  Breakfast at the Hoito

  High on the Big Stone Heart

  Breakaway

  After the Applause

  Vancouver/Berkeley

  Copyright © 2013 by Charles Wilkins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Greystone Books

  343 Railway Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver BC V6A 1A4

  www.greystonebooks.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55365-878-8 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-55365-879-5 (ebook)

  Editing by Lucy Kenward

  Copyediting by Peter Norman

  Cover design by Peter Cocking and Jessica Sullivan

  Cover photographs (top) courtesy of Charles Wilkins and (bottom) iStockphoto.com

  Interior photographs courtesy of Charles Wilkins

  Map by Eric Leinberger

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  To be complete

  one must hold the whole sun

  wholly

  in the marrow of the bone

  One must celebrate

  how to be one

  with everyone

  yet forever alone

  DOROTHY LIVESAY

  It began on a boat, like The Tempest,

  like Moby Dick, a finite enclosure of floating

  space, a model of the world in little.

  JEANETTE WINTERSON

  Big Blue’s Transatlantic Crossing

  PROLOGUE

  WEEKS LATER WHEN I spoke to my buddy Steve Roedde, who had been a mainstay of the voyage, he was still rattled, still aggrieved about it all. He said among other things that he had been unable to free himself of the specter of what might have been: better discipline, better cargo control, a lighter boat, a better chosen departure date, more confident and forthright leadership—in all a more Homeric journey and, as imagined in the palmy days of the project, perhaps a world record.

  What he got—what we all got—was something botched and bastardized, something at times almost biblical in its run of torments and dark forces. We got failure, we got fuckup, we got farce. And I, more than some, was a contributor to that failure and farce.

  And yet I don’t regret a minute of it, for the simple reason that what we got besides—what we got because—was something weirdly and wildly beautiful; for some of us something magnificent; for a few even romantic, and in the ensnarement of romance I include myself. For amidst the strain and privation and exhaustion, I grew to love that botched journey; to love the boat, to love the people, the little ship of fools, as I came to think of them, a crew fancifully and farcically, and always it seemed fatefully, intertwined.

  What Steve got finally that none of the rest of us got was himself, a man bent to an all-but-impossible standard—to ambition, to truth, to exactitude; to discipline and excellence.

  And he got Margaret—incorrigible, shape-shifting Margaret, a woman who if she had paid her dues and done her time and been a half turn more circumspect might have been his ally instead of his nemesis.

  And he got Angela—sweet, wounded Angela, whom he liked well as a human being but whose disinclinations as a commander he couldn’t abide.

  And he got me—brought me to the expedition, as he did so many others; encouraged me; mentored me; laughed with me on the long night watches; poured out his history hour after hour (his boyhood, his insecurities, his marriage).

  Over the long weeks of the voyage, he showed me not just his commitment and sensitivities but his hypocrisies and shortcomings. He showed me his rage.

  And I showed him mine.

  And how different they turned out to be. And how integral to the pages that follow.

  Whereas Steve championed ideals—ascendancy, superiority, a will to win—I was juiced by what was; by the boat and sea and by the other wastrels aboard.

  All of which is at the heart of the story I am about to tell. To which honest end, I wish to say that I no longer think of our epic travels as a journey in the strictest sense of the word. I recall them rather as a kind of fable, a nuthouse opera, written not by cynics or pessimists (who to my mind miss the point) but by dreamers, by stargazers, by minstrels. I recall the fable’s jittery, soulful currents, its nightmares and eloquence, the worst and best of it captured indelibly for me by an incident that occurred on January 29, 2011, amidst seas so high that for hours they had been threatening to knock us off our rowing seats. Just after 2 a.m., word came up from the captain’s quarters—a fusty little spook hole in the cabin of our experimental rowboat—that we were through for the night and should quit rowing and try to get some rest. For a few seconds, having shipped my oar, I slumped forward in my seat and stared blindly into the rowing trench beneath me. We were just nineteen days out of our starting port of Agadir, Morocco, and already I was down twenty pounds and was losing strength. And didn’t know what to do about it. I hadn’t brought enough food. Or the right food. I had come aboard as a kind of test of what was possible for a guy my age—a test that at the moment I was failing with flying colors.

  Meanwhile, the fog was so dense, the night so black, that even with the deck lights on we could barely see our own feet. Nevertheless, within minutes we had unpacked the sea anchor, a colossal underwater parachute, and had pitched it over the bow on 200 yards of line. Even on a night so unruly, the anchor could pretty much neutralize the drifting of the boat.

  By the luck of the draw that night, I was among the first four chosen for watch duty and was given the initial shift alone. And so I took my place on the bridge while a dozen others slept in the cabin and my watchmates took to the holds.

  For the next few minutes, I did what I always did during cold nights on watch: enacted a tiny private indulgence, let us say a comfort, by wrapping my hands around the flimsy metal stanchion that supported the running light atop the cabin. And there I stood, as tranquil as Aquinas at prayer. While the light’s plastic housing shed no warmth, the chromed metal post that held it aloft transmitted a matchstick’s worth of heat from the electrical activity inside. But compared to the weather, it was as soothing as a woodstove in the Arctic, perhaps the only item warmer than the human body within a hundred miles of the boat.

  As I absorbed the benefits of this pitiful dollhouse furnace, a wave exploded over the bridge, putting me ankle-deep in brine. As the flood dropped, a small dark shadow fluttered in behind me, pushed by the wind, and a little black bird, a storm petrel, thwapped off the cabin door and was suddenly at my feet on the bridge, apparently as surprised as I by the turn of events. For nearly three weeks I had watched with great respect as these delicate bat-like irregulars bopped along the wave tops, pulling up tiny surface fish with their dangling and witchy feet. What I did not know at the time (it would have increased my respect significantly) is that these four-ounce strafe-artists never alight, either on water or land, except for two or three weeks a year during which they fly to distant islands to breed. Immediately, my littl
e visitor was aswim on the painted plywood, thrashing its limp legs, while its weight rested on its spread wings and belly. Initially, I believed it must be injured—or perhaps just exhausted. I knew the feeling.

  It was not until I had watched the thing struggle for a few seconds, unsure of what to do to help, that the truth dawned on me: the bird’s longish legs and claws were so well adapted to snatching up tiny fish that they had become entirely too spindly for walking. Pained by its thrashing, I reached down and picked it up, quickly discovering the other thing aboard that was warmer than the human body, and considerably softer. I closed my hand over it, holding its wings gently in place until its eyelids fluttered and closed and it went calm. Intimacy was nothing new aboard, but the daily intimacy of naked bodies and raw emotions at close quarters seemed suddenly impertinent compared to the more primitive annunciation of the little winged creature whose heart and nerves, and whose uncertain fate, had quickly become one with my own.

  Ten minutes later, I would hold the bird high, would open my hands and expel it into the night, unsure whether I was saving or dooming it. And would rejoice with it, in miniature, as it caught an updraft and was gone.

  But for now it sat, poignantly and crushably vulnerable, in the hands of a stranger, on a turbulent night in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, every instinct undoubtedly telling it that the jig was up, that this is how it ends.

  For our purposes, of course, it is not how it ends but how it begins. Always: A dark and stormy night. An ocean. A boat. A cast of strangers. A blackbird.

  A story. A storyteller.

  Listen up.

  1

  IT WAS TO BE an expedition like no other—a run across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados aboard an experimental rowboat the likes of which no one had ever seen. Powered by a crew of sixteen, backed by the westbound trade winds, the radically designed catamaran, dubbed Big Blue, would be capable, it was hoped, of making the 3,200-mile crossing in record time—max thirty-three days. The boat’s crew, the largest assembled on the Atlantic since the days of the Norse longboats, included several veterans of U.S. college rowing, a number of marathoners and triathletes, and a woman who had rowed both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. There would be no support vessel, no stored water, no sails or motor. No certification or assurances.

  The venture, to be sure, was no laughing matter.

  Well, unless you consider that one of the crew was a scrawny and bespectacled sexagenarian, the pinnacle of whose sporting career had been a couple of seasons of high school basketball and a season of hockey with the Forward Pharisees of the old Toronto Church League. This notable human blight on an otherwise durable roster had, until recently, never swung an oar in earnest or even sat on a proper rowing seat—indeed, did not know the names of even the commonest parts on a competitive rowing vessel. It is worthy of Mrs. Malaprop that on training maneuvers, when a reference was made to “the riggers” (the mechanisms that hold the oars in place), the duffer in question assumed it was the rigors of the anticipated crossing that were under discussion.

  I am speaking of course of myself, Monsieur la Mer, Charles Wilkins, dad of three, fervent narrator, aging expeditionist; and I must reluctantly report that when I stepped on deck wearing my glasses during the earliest hours of the voyage I was told by one of our toughest rowers, Ryan Worth of the University of Tennessee, that I looked as if I were on my way to the library.

  I suffered but did not protest the appraisal, and a mere eight hours later, as I came off the 2 a.m. watch, had a chance to reassess it with a vengeance. For at that point I would willingly have traded the last shreds of my dignity to have indeed been on my way to the library—to have been pretty much anywhere on earth other than where I was.

  If I could claim one rueful victory as I settled to my bunk, it was that I no longer looked like a guy approaching a library. For one thing, every item of clothing on my carcass—ball cap, socks, sneakers, plus several layers of “warmth” beneath my rain gear—was oozing sea water. My newly cropped hair was the itchy amassment of brine and microorganisms that it would remain for days, and my hands and toes (the latter from being wedged into my salt-soaked shoes) were a bleached mess of tortured skin and broken blisters.

  I was cold, I was exhausted, I was starved. Dinner, many hours earlier, had been a bowl of partially rehydrated macaroni and cheese followed by a cup of greenish pond muck (the latter cleverly presented as Wilderness Kitchen no-cook key lime pie). And yet I had no inclination to fiddle open the “all-organic GREAT TASTING one hundred percent natural” protein bar that was left from the day’s snack pack. Even had I been ravenous for this questionable pretense to food, its unwrapping would have required a modicum of coordination from hands that had been reduced to crooks and were temporarily useless for small-motor chores.

  What’s more, I had been beaten up—slapped around by waves that sometime before midnight had started coming hard out of the northeast onto our port flank. Many of them had broken over the gunnels into our laps, onto our chests, into our faces. At one point, when for the briefest of moments my focus had lapsed (my brain having detoured into fantasies of my former life as a human being), a wave had snatched my oar, driving the handle into my chest, pinning me with savage efficiency against the bulkhead that defined the prow end of the rowing trench. My right ear had taken so much salt water that it had effectively gone deaf.

  As if it all weren’t enough, for perhaps twenty minutes toward the end of the watch I had experienced a running hallucination—a sense that a monstrous rusting scow, the SS Apocalypse, perhaps the moldering container vessel we had seen at dusk, had reefed out and sunk and was somehow lying just beneath us, or was about to surface in the mists off our bow.

  I had been told that at times like this I would be unable to remember my own address, or my mother’s name, or where I had gone to school. Or who loved me.

  I could remember it all just fine.

  Unfortunately, I no longer cared.

  Meanwhile, if I was lucky, I had ninety minutes to sleep before being jarred awake for my next two-hour stint on the oars. That was the deal—two hours on, two hours off, for whatever number of days it took to get from Africa to North America. When you weren’t in your bunk, somebody else was: in my case a mindfully ambitious emergency room physician named Sylvain Croteau from Gatineau, Quebec. Such were the good doc’s focus and self-possession that a week earlier, in Agadir, when he got news that his dad had died, he had, rather than wilting or packing up, taken an hour in the boatyard where we were getting Big Blue ready, reflected on the life of his estranged papa, and gone industriously back to work.

  As for the rest of the crew, I can say now that if we had known what lay ahead, some of us mightn’t have been there. In the desultory losses and recrimination that would ensue a couple of weeks hence, one or two considered putting ashore at the Cape Verde Islands. I believed at the time, and said so, that if anyone wanted to go, he or she should get in a lifeboat and do it. And good riddance.

  Which isn’t to say I did not have traitorous thoughts of my own, among them a scorching heresy that, had I divulged it at the time, would have had me vilified, if not shunned, by some aboard: Namely, that my one-time interest in establishing a world record (the very reason for the voyage) had largely been displaced by a fascination with the journey itself—what it would require of me, what I could give to it and what it might give back. At the same time, there is a competitive and cement-headed part of me that would have reveled, have danced naked on the roof, to set a world record. One of my sustaining fantasies during the endless weeks of training was a mental projection of the last hours into Barbados, the old guys saving the day, persisting through the night, winning the battle against the clock—the lot of it an echo of my own internecine war, the one in which, as Mr. Donne put it, we are all finally trumpeted from the field.

  As for what the journey would require, on that first night out of Agadir it was demanding everything I could offer in the way of wits and sanity
. I had determined days ago that if I was to fulfil my duties to the boat during those early hours aboard, my biggest responsibility would be to myself—specifically to establish sleeping and eating patterns. Suffice it to say, my survival plan had already gone to hell, replaced by lesser, stupider efficiencies. I imagined, for example, that to save time as I came off the 2 a.m. watch that night, I would attempt simply to sleep in my wet clothes.

  First, though, I had something to attend to in the darkness of the cabin—and must at this point grant a moment’s shore leave to anyone of delicate nature. For even so early in my story, I must thrust into the limelight a part of my anatomy typically off limits to non-professionals or to those whose house key does not match my own. By which I am referring to my ass. To what was left of my ass.

  My problem astern, I am embarrassed to report, had begun earlier that evening, barely out of Agadir, when, in a moment of distraction and weariness, I had dropped my precious gel seat cushion overboard into the sea. It was an item that had taken me weeks of sampling and experimentation to decide upon and buy, and as I stood on the bridge watching it disappear into the depths, a little part of my optimism for the trip disappeared with it.

  Now, in the darkness, tummy-down in the bunk, I raised my hips a few inches and, using my thumbs as grappling hooks, eased my Class-3 high-tech rain pants onto my thighs. By this time I had endured three watches in succession with no seat pad, or with replacement pads so woeful (a pair of gloves, a folded sweatshirt) that none at all might have been an improvement. With the help of my stubbly chin, I pried open a tin of Penaten Medicated Cream and, working blind, pressed great sticky gobs of the sweet-smelling emollient onto the weeping sores, one of them as big as a Ritz cracker, that had been grated into my backside by the rowing seat.

  If I had any reason to feel positive as I lay in my soaked garments—or at least to feel less negative—it was that I was considerably better off than a couple of my cabinmates. One of them, Dylan White, a dazzling young musician and biologist from Toronto, who occupied the bunk opposite mine, had developed muscle spasms in his thighs and abdomen and for several hours had lost the ability to urinate. This one-time football player, little more than a third my age, had told me earlier in the evening that after three frightful watches he was no longer sure he was cut out to row the Atlantic.