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 little 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
