The truth was that after the intense training of the fall and early winter—not to mention the travel, the jet lag, the abrupt change of diet and sleep—there were hours during that first week in Agadir when I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. My mood had not been improved by four days of stomach flu and now a mouthful of cankers, for me a sign that something is amiss that will only be righted by a little down time. One day Liz Koenig and I chanced a keelhauling by sneaking out of the yard for an hour to look for souvenirs that we could send home—I to my children, she to her parents and friends. And I was glad we did; it gave us a chance to get to know each other and exchange a story or two, which to my perhaps deluded mind was as important as busting ass all the time. But you couldn’t be gone long or you’d get a frosting when you got back—mostly (and justifiably) from Steve, who was working like a mule and had thereby established himself as the company yard master and conscience.
At the age of twenty-three, Liz was nonetheless among our most experienced and talented rowers, having taken up the sport when she entered St. Anthony’s High School on Long Island. She was eventually scouted by a number of universities, offered several scholarships, and ended up at the University of Rhode Island. There, during a four-year Division I career (2005–2008), she trained eight hours a day, six days a week, sufficient to put her on the podium a dozen or more times with different crews of eight at some of the sport’s premier regattas. “My one huge regret,” she said as we walked, “was that I never got to row in an NCAA final. It’s just so tough in that conference, with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Boston—all these rowing powerhouses. We came so close so many times, and just never quite got there.”
Liz has a glamorous side. Yet like Angela (and the rest of us), she has her insecurities. That day on the promenade, she said to me quietly, “Charlie, there was something I wanted to mention to you.”
After a few seconds of silence, I asked, “What is it, Liz?”
“I’m not quite sure how to put it,” she said staring out to sea, “except that I’ve been feeling a little... you know... bulky.”
I assured her she didn’t look bulky.
“No, but I feel it,” she protested. “I packed on an extra twenty pounds for the crossing, and most of it went... you know... exactly where I didn’t want it to go.” She smiled self-consciously. “I was just gonna say that if you’re going to put photos in your book, I’m wondering if you’d allow me to see what you’re going to put in that might have me in it?”
I assured her she could approve any photos that were used (the irony being that one of the two or three she eventually liked was a glorious shot of her taken from behind as she sat topless on the prow of the port hull, in a high wind, her hair flying, her arms thrown to the sun—a shot featuring the very portion of her anatomy that she had apparently been so reluctant to expose).
While they are not the least bit alike, I tended to think of Liz and Aleksa as a pair, a sort of matched Island set—in part because they are the same age and because Aleksa too attended St. Anthony’s High School, although she did not start rowing until she enrolled at Stony Brook University on Long Island. She 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