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.
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,”
