Little Ship of Fools Read online

  Above him, on the upper bunk, lay Tom Butscher from Toronto Island, a former Canadian speed skating champ, a guy who at sixty-seven hoped to become the oldest man to row the Atlantic. Meanwhile, he had contracted severe gastrointestinal poisoning in Agadir, an illness that had wrecked him to a point where his normally elfin face had entirely gone missing beneath a mask of sagging wax. Unable to row, he could for now do little more than lurch back and forth between his bunk and the alfresco toilet within sniffing distance of the port stroke seat—or lie gazing at the cabin ceiling hoping that somehow his affliction would go away. Which, with the help of medication, it eventually did.

  Had it not gone away, Tom would, like any other crew member postmortem, have been accorded what a prospectus for the trip had called “immediate burial at sea”—preferable one assumes to less timely options, such as, say, stowage in the food locker in a hundred degrees of heat, or being trussed up in a sleeping bag in a shared bunk and thus transported through the tropics (I had a morbid cartoon fantasy of being bound up in a blanket and thrown overboard, and somehow picking up the trade winds and beating the boat to Barbados).

  “How ya doin’?” I asked Tom quietly in the dark, when I had reinstalled my soaked and now frigid pants.

  “There’s blood,” he whispered.

  “Ya gonna make it?”

  After a lengthy pause, he said, “I dunno—at least it’s calming down out there.”

  Ten seconds later, as if cued to his utterance, a fifteen-foot wave exploded over the bridge, astern, and sloshed through the cabin door, which we had not yet learned to keep closed.

  When the shrieking had died down and those closest to the door had rescued their skivvies from the cabin floor, Dylan looked across at me and said, “I dunno either.” And in self-mocking insolence (the last luxury available to us under the circumstances), we began to laugh.

  2

  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 wh
at 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.r />
  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.