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!
TOM: Yes, I know that’s true, Margaret, and I’m very happy to make sacrifices—name one, I’ll make it. Meanwhile, I am not leaving my jeans behind.
MARGARET: Tom, do you know what sacrifices the others are making?
TOM: No, they haven’t told me. But I’m sure it’s all very difficult for them and I’d like to know so I have a better idea what I’m up against in not leaving my blue jeans behind.
A week later, at sea, Steve was infuriated to discover that Margaret had allowed at least one of the young women on the crew to bring aboard substantial bottles of hair care products, while some of the men had been cited over significantly lighter, smaller items.
In some cases, Margaret was indisputably right in her decisions, insisting for example that Ernst Fiby, he of the Viennese wit and shaved head, leave behind a pair of clunky, high rubber Wellingtons—for the sheer space they would command, as well as the weight. She was outraged to realize later that he had snuck them aboard, although he did finally toss them in the sea, where they may yet be doing thousand-mile circles in the currents of the mid-Atlantic.
EVERY EVENING at about seven o’clock, we’d slump out of the boatyard in the winter darkness, one of us pushing Angela in her wheelchair, up the mile-long hill outside the port walls to where the city proper began and we could organize our taxi-sharing for the long ride back across Agadir to the apartment. And from there on to a restaurant for a blessed hour of nourishment and relaxation. Restaurants are an adventure in Agadir, and our search for a decent tagine or couscous led us variably to little family bistros such as Daffy’s on the back side of the city’s tourist area and into the visceral horrors of the restaurant at the Riad Hotel, where, had the tagine I ordered been 50 percent better, I’d have suspected it of coming out of a can. At the same place, Tom’s much-anticipated sixteen-ounce “Entrecote USA”—“premier slice beefsteak, fired out on our uniquely charcoaling grille”—turned out to be a slab of unidentifiable zoological matter so thoroughly ridden with fat, bone, and gristle as to be entirely inedible (it would have been funny had some poor goat or donkey not died in the service of this reprehensible restaurant).
However, for the most part we ate in a breezy little outdoor barbecue in a non-tourist neighborhood near our apartment. We referred to this decidedly unregulated kitchen as “the meat place” because it served meat, bread, and pop only, the meat purchased by the customer on skewers at the fly-ridden butcher shop next door and carried a few feet to the restaurant, where it was thrown on the grill.
One night as Steve and I and a few others sat there in the company of sparrows and cats and one or two rib-thin mutts, a guy in his early twenties came along banging his palm on the metal table tops, demanding money. I reached into my pocket, realizing when I pulled my hand out that my only cash was a pair of 200-dirham notes, worth about forty bucks each, and some Canadian coins worth perhaps a dollar. So I gave him the coins and felt anguished five minutes later when he came raging up to the table and threw the money clattering down in front of me, accompanied by a blast of indecipherable scorn.
It had been stupid of me, no doubt—lazy both culturally and morally, in that I knew the coins were of limited or no value to him. But it served as a chastening, as one’s experiences on the road, particularly the embarrassments, tend to do. Happily, a couple of nights later I saw the same guy at the same place, and was able to give him a twenty-dirham note that he pushed into his pocket without a peep as he brushed past me.
THAT THESE PRECIOUS, nervous days in Agadir were winding down was impressed upon me on the 8th of January, when David did not show up at the boatyard until nearly noon—and eventually did so in tourist clothes, subdued, having taken Lali to the airport and seen her off to Tbilisi.
Late that afternoon, with our chores done, our spirits high (and about to get higher), Steve and I left the boatyard half an hour early to get our hair chopped short at Coiffure Paris, a tidy little barbering salon that we had passed numerous times within a few blocks of the apartment.
There was only one chair, and as Steve sat down, the barber, an amiable Arab of perhaps thirty-five, asked in rough, gentle English if we’d like a shot of “Moroccan whisky.” We would, and immediately he dispatched his young friend, who returned minutes later with a pair of juice tumblers full of a steamy amber-colored fluid.
It was not until I had drained this earthy potion and Steve and I were exchanging seats so that my own shearing could begin that Steve, wearing a broadening and relaxed grin—indeed, showing a state of relaxation that I had not seen in him since our arrival—wondered aloud if I realized we had been drinking marijuana tea, quite strong marijuana tea as it turned out. As a matter of fact I had not (there was a hint of peppermint to it, perhaps masking the main ingredient). But given the new tingling in my extremities and the fact that the modest barbershop, with its antique television and shelf of bright pomades, had just now begun to seem like the funniest entertainment on earth, I did not question the news.
Having been at first somewhat nervous about the threat of hepatitis, which can be contracted through a barber’s nick, I was soon sensitized to the point where I was enjoying with a kind of dreaminess the buzzing of the clippers over my skull, then the sound of the straight razor rasping down the skin of my neck and behind my ears, emitting what for me at that point was a quite euphonious pop with the snapping of each individual hair.
But the sense