eventually rowed for Dowling College, where she now coaches and from which she holds a post-grad degree in early childhood development. It is an unlikely complement to her full-time job as an emergency first-responder in North Babylon and her part-time career as a volunteer firefighter in Deer Park. Both are jobs in which she sees and must take in stride what she called “some of the most shocking violence” known to humanity. Meanwhile, there is a small-town innocence to Aleksa, epitomized in part by her admission that if she had to get off Long Island, driving on her own, she would be “totally unable” to find her way through the merciless bottleneck of freeways, underpasses, and bridges that connects the island to New York City and to the rest of the world beyond.
As with Liz, there were aspects of Aleksa’s person that she wanted neither exposed nor discussed in a book—she made it clear that any violations on my part would be treated with murderous severity. She was in other areas a kind of free-flowing WikiLeaks on everything from her occasionally heavy partying to her seditious pleasure in social media to the endearing intricacies of her life as the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. The family had escaped the old country when it was under the most dispiriting influences of the Soviet regime and, during thirty years on Long Island, had enacted a transcendent commitment to the preservation of Lithuanian culture, much of which had been kicked to the dogs under Muscovite imperialism. Aleksa spent her childhood and teenage summers at what she called “Lithuanian camp” in the mountains of upstate New York, putting on the costumes and learning the language, dances, music, and stories of her ancestry. Her affectionate, sometimes poignant descriptions of it all reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, in which those who love literature (most books having been burned) hide in the woods, passing memorized novels and poems on to their children.
ALONGSIDE WORK on the boat, Angela engineered a Herculean six-day bee of food sorting and packing, during which there were at times several thousand food items laid out on the concrete in sorted lots, as well as hundreds of Ziploc bags and hundreds more garbage bags, not to mention a dozen ten-pound logs of mauve-colored cling wrap.
The arrangement was this: we had all brought our own food, or had at least ordered it from the expedition supply houses, and had had it sent to Shelter Island, where it had been packed with the boat and shipped to Morocco. Most of us had brought additional food in our luggage and had picked up items from the market and stores in Agadir. The Great Sort divided it into days and, further, into lunches, dinners, and snacks. The plan was that Angela would supply some level of breakfast each day but that otherwise we would take turns cooking in pairs for the crew (which for the most part meant nothing more than heating water and adding it to envelopes of dehydrated rations).
All of this started well. However, on the fourth day rats got into the storage quarters where we kept the food at night. They ate and crapped selectively, mostly in Angela’s boxes, requiring her to pitch hundreds of dollars’ worth of meals. From that point forward the whole extravagant exercise began to seem somewhat oppressive. The harder truth was that, whereas some crew members had attempted to minimize their nutritional requirements in order to keep the weight of the boat down, others had brought what seemed a vast surfeit of entrees and desserts and snacks—and sub-snacks and pick-me-ups and treats.
Part of the disparity was that Angela had convinced some crew members they would need 10,000 calories a day—four meals, plus snacks. Roy had told us months back that no one needed or would eat more than 5,000 calories, that we simply wouldn’t feel like it, given the exertion and heat and exhaustion. He believed that when your daily ration of 5,000 calories was used up, your stored fat, if you had any, would see you through (and that when it was gone, you died).
At times I wondered what the Phoenicians or Vikings or, centuries later, the Spanish, French, and Dutch had eaten on their sea voyages. Certainly not foil packs of Bubba’s Kountry Kitchen Dehydrated Crab Gumbo (MSG-free). Or U.S. Challenger freeze-dried ice cream bars. The English, according to our British crew member Liam Flynn, ate hardtack and dried lard—and “probably lots of other really dodgy and awful stuff.”
Steve, more than I, was appalled as all of this provender, pack after pack of it—in garbage bags, in duffel bags, in dry bags, dozens upon dozens of them—was shoe-horned into the holds and hulls and onto the galley shelves of a vessel that was already weighed down with perhaps a ton and a half of hardware and appurtenances that were not aboard when we feathered so delicately down the channel off Shelter Island.
Since then, David had added four monstrously weighty solar panels that lay atop the cabin; and a pair of wind generators whose whirligigs, half as big as airplane propellers, sat twelve feet above the bridge on steel stanchions; and a thick and complex wiring harness that carried power to heavy storage batteries in one of the holds and from there to the GPS and autopilot systems, and to deck lights and running lights, and to a pair of bulky desalinators in the front holds, as well as to a half-a-dozen wall sockets where camera batteries and iPods and the boat’s two SAT phones could be recharged. He had added cooking equipment and first-aid supplies and tools; and a spare rudder; and four spare oars; and a porcelain toilet; and sump pumps; and extra bracing; and a pair of inflatable life rafts; and survival suits.
And now of course food. And more food. And bedding. And clothing. And two more people than we had had aboard at Shelter Island.
IF STEVE WAS aghast over the weight of food, he was dismayed tenfold by the arrival on January 6th, just five days before departure, of Margaret Bowling, the young Tasmanian woman who had rowed the Atlantic a couple of years earlier and to whom Angela had given first mate’s status specifically for the experience she would bring in the areas of navigation, weather awareness, charting, and so on. She would also, it was assumed, bring moral support to Angela in her attempts to direct a crew not one of whose members had rowed an ocean or rowed even a hundred miles out on one.
Unfortunately, Margaret did not have commensurate experience in handling human beings—at least those of the sort that had signed on with Big Blue. While I had my differences with her, especially over her damnable habit of telling people what to do when no telling was necessary, I eventually came to an understanding of sorts with her and found her variously exasperating, vulnerable, somewhat lonely, and perhaps a trifle nuts, although no more so than a few others aboard the boat, including myself.
If I remember correctly, it took about ten minutes on the morning of Margaret’s first working day at the boatyard for her to run afoul of Steve, from whom she demanded a “complete list” of all the medications on board.
“There’s really no need for that,” Steve told her. “Sylvain and I know what’s on board, and either he or I will be prescribing, so we’ll just leave it as is. Plus, I’m very busy right now, as you can see.”
“Well, I’d like that list,” she insisted. “I’d like it by sometime tomorrow.”
Others balked at Margaret’s adamant vetting of our kit based on stringent new limits for weight and bulk—this after we had accumulated such kit according to different, although still quite disciplined, standards. My own response, largely unspoken, was that it was a little late to begin compensating for our massive burden of food and hardware with an enforced jettisoning of light little kit items such as T-shirts and flip-flops and other bits of clothing and footwear.
Margaret’s vetting of Tom’s rather arcane paraphernalia came down to an absurd head-butting that might well have been lifted from the scripts of Harold Pinter:
MARGARET: But, Tom, don’t you see it’s not fair to the rest of the crew for you to take extra weight?
TOM: Yes, I’m sure that’s true, Margaret, and I sympathize with them; I’m all for fairness—but I’m not leaving my favorite blue jeans behind to save the weight of a few ounces of denim.
MARGARET: But, Tom, we all have to make sacrifices!
