“We’ll see him in Agadir.” And I got up, showed my passport at the gate, and walked into the tunnel that led to the big Royal Air Maroc jet. But I felt wretched knowing that Tom, who did not like money transactions or even using a credit card (he had gotten Steve to buy his plane ticket), would probably get hit for four or five hundred dollars in rescheduling fees, as well as having to find a place to stay for the night and to negotiate Casablanca and Agadir on his own. If there was even the faintest comfort in any of it, it was that he speaks fluent French, so would be okay both in Montreal and on arrival in North Africa.
As the line at the aircraft door shortened to six or seven people (there were already several hundred aboard), only Steve hung back at the top of the tunnel, hoping against the hopelessness of the situation that Tom might still show up. As far as we knew, he had never checked in for the flight.
If I were to tell you that as we howled down the runway for takeoff, an elfin sixty-seven-year-old apostate waving his arms and wearing a little red gob hat came sprinting along beside the plane, leapt onto a wing, made his way forward along the fuselage to the door and thence inside with a grin, you might question my reliability as a storyteller. But in my memory of the evening, that, within a hair’s breadth of the truth, is what happened. Had Tom been thirty seconds later than he was, there would at liftoff have been six distressed, not seven relieved, Canucks in the front right quarter of perhaps the dingiest jetliner, with the cruddiest bathrooms and toilets, that I, or perhaps any of us, had ever been on.
Typically, as in days to come, Tom was the first one asleep, passed out like a lizard in a patch of sunlight, while the rest of us fidgeted and shivered and wrenched our thin blankets around us, attempting to dispossess ourselves of the stresses of the past few hours, not to mention the past few months. We had worked hard, very hard, for a reward that lay bristling before us and, for each of us, would redefine what working hard could mean.
Finally, in the darkness over the eastern Atlantic, a grumpy stewardess with breasts like warheads and the eyes of an executioner served something approximating breakfast and, in a great arcing swoosh, we rode the rising sun into Casablanca, where the airport at 6 a.m. was populated by a dozen healthy-looking cats and a scattering of unhealthy-looking human beings.
We flew on to Agadir, across the Atlas Mountains, aboard a rickety twin-engine de Havilland, the proverbial flying coffin, which might have been disconcerting had we been awake enough to notice. And drove on into the city—twenty miles in a big Mercedes cab: past date palms and argan orchards and palmettos; and bursts of bougainvillea on the cinder-block shacks; and little roadside stalls selling French pastries and used car bumpers and chips of burnt meat on a stick; all of it spread out against the unending brownish rock that, whether in mountains or coastal plains or city outcrops—or reduced to sand by the wind—is the fundamental landscape of North Africa.
5
FOR THE NEXT TWELVE days, the men of the crew lived in a windowless backstreet apartment that had been rented for us by David. This morose concrete grotto was crammed with lurid Moorish furniture: ensembles of leopard skin and red vinyl and purple plush, with big velveteen cushions, and tassels on everything, and poorly dyed carpets. All the trappings of whoredom, right down to the red lightbulb in the front hall. So much attention to tactility but with no actual comforts—not even proper light, or hot water, or even a table to eat off. And of course no art or books. The bathroom, whose encrusted shitter was surely a castoff of Royal Air Maroc, both looked and smelled like a leprosarium. I admired Steve’s response when, together, we laid eyes on the bowl: the double take, the queasy smile, the glance my way as if to say It’s you or me, brother, and the immediate commitment (his) to scouring the thing out.
The kitchen wasn’t much better, and since there was no means of dealing with the trash produced by a perpetually famished rowing crew with little inclination to clean up, it simply accumulated: first in garbage bags, six, seven, eight of them, crowding the kitchen floor, and then in an impassable knee-high heap of loose egg cartons, cereal boxes, orange peels, soup cans, cookie packages; plus the endless plastic bottles and tubs in which Moroccan dairy products are sold and go moldy and die.
The highlight of my days on Rue Salaam (Peace Street)—a lovely address, I thought, for a place that even our gentle-tongued crewmate Sylvain referred to as “a bit crappy”—came on a morning when I had risen in the pre-dawn so as to be early to the boat, and Steve, as a reward for my diligence, placed a saucepan of heated water in the bathroom that I could mix with cold tap water in a grubby plastic bucket that subbed as the apartment’s shower.
Ten of us lived ass-over-chinstrap in this weird little den—all the men but David, who was installed in the Ibis Hotel, a nice-ish two-star a fifteen-minute walk away, with his dark-eyed fiancée, Lali, who was visiting from Tbilisi. Because she spoke only Georgian, Lali could do little more than smile at the rest of us, and languish, and look longingly at David. They were tender and smoochy with one another and spoke softly, probably about taxi fares or laundry, and yet it always sounded intimate and mysterious. At the boatyard, she would stand motionless and decisive-looking beside Big Blue with her hand on the gunnels for a few seconds, then would pirouette suddenly and take a step or two and put her hand on the rudder and stand there for a minute—then would stand on the ladder that led up to the bridge, while David, a few feet away, sweated and hung upside down, fussing with the wiring, or whatever, in some impossible-to-reach place inside one of the holds.
I had an urge to talk to Lali, to be friends with her; she was so alone. Plus, I knew she had lots to say, having survived a ruinous civil war in Georgia, as had David, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. But to carry on even a few minutes of conversation would have required focused translation by David, who spoke a poetically quirky English, cut with the inevitable shorthand of television and the web. But he didn’t have time, what with getting the boat ready twelve hours a day. So our discourse was limited to a daily morning greeting—“Hi Lali!”—to which she would respond brightly, “Hi Chordly!”
The women meanwhile lived in a tidy resort apartment five miles from the men, near the waterfront and the port entrance. The place had a contemporary kitchen, a television, two cushy bathrooms with hot showers, plenty of dishes and towels and bedding. About the only thing it had in common with our place was that its furniture appeared to have been swiped out of the same hellacious cathouse. The place had originally been rented by Angela and her partner, Deb Moeller from Bakersfield, California, a woman who put heart and soul into looking after not just Angela—whom she called “Madsen” and treated with tender exasperation—but half of the administrative chores around the expedition: communications, website, media relations, plus any sort of messaging and boat contact that was required from land once we set off. From the time I met them at Shelter Island, it was hard to imagine that Angela could have carried on as she did without Deb, who was her “girl,” so to speak, her adjutant, as well as her manager, advisor, and agent; and driver and photographer; and social coordinator and lover—all of it puttied up and patted into place with painstaking care and affection. If you wanted the lowdown on Angela, you went to Deb; if you asked Angela directly, she’d say, “You’d better ask Deb.”
Above all, Deb protected Angela. On the way into New York City in the van after the training weekend, she had confided to me her rather poignant (and ultimately accurate) fear that people would “take advantage of Madsen” because she was so essentially gentle and unassertive. It was an image that did not seem to jibe with that of a woman who, before her spinal injury, had been in the police corps of that toughest of military branches, the U.S. Marines. The truth was, she had joined the Marines with the hope of becoming a mechanic like her brothers and dad before her, and it was only because of her size (not to mention her reluctance to refuse) that the towering recruit had been pushed into police work. She told me one night over dinner in Agadir about being summoned repeatedly and unhappily to deal with domestic violence at the residences of Marines
