At the meat place, we ingested skewer after skewer of chicken and pepper sausage and steak. And floated home. To the whorehouse. Where that night I had a staggering dream, a kind of fin du monde, in which a bloody and beheaded man appeared at the door of the apartment asking for me, attempting to push his way in, determined that he should find me. As Nigel and the others forced him from the room, he hollered over their shoulders that he knew I was in there, knew my name, knew everything about me, said he would track me down, would not rest until he had found me. And then he was gone, and in the hallucinogenic logic of the dream world, I was left pondering who he was, whether he would be able to pursue me with no head, and perhaps most significantly in this twisted Jungian conundrum, why he had been wearing my shoes.
THE BIG MORNING arrived, and in a pilgrimage more spirited than our parade to the launch ramp at Shelter Island, we grouped up around the boat as a smallish tractor hauled it at an emperor’s pace out the boatyard’s wide front gates. Each of us had a job, mine being to carry a sheet of bendy galvanized steel that could be thrown down over a rough patch in the road to allow any of the four dollies beneath the hulls to pass smoothly overtop.
As we heaved through the potholed streets, the tires on the casters, frightful little things on stamped rims and hubs, began to disintegrate. Meanwhile, a crowd of chatty and inquisitive rubberneckers fell in around us—kids with soccer balls, men in work clothes or business suits, women in Muslim head coverings, yapping dogs, gulls, gannets, the lot of them making a carnival of it, the centerpiece of which, our space-age rowboat, was a clearly irresistible piper to those who were seeing her for the first time. Left and right we went, this way and that, eventually down to the port’s monstrous boat ramp. There, the broad concrete aprons were a dry-dock for trawlers and dories and tugboats, dozens of them, beyond which, in the inky waters off the docks, floated an armada of sardine trawlers and rusting freighters, some of which gave the impression of having been there for decades. It was all quite a contrast to Big Blue, which by the time she sledded into the shallows, to a modest cheer, had made dump waste of her dolly wheels, an appropriate symbol, I thought, of her being free at last of the land.
Not quite free, as it turned out.
For as six or eight of our crew leapt aboard to row the boat over to the marina, it was clear that a bit too much of the land had been launched with her. The hulls were sitting perhaps six inches deeper in the water than at Shelter Island, a signal that the boat was now several tons heavier than it had been. To my eye, she seemed to wallow slightly as the rowers pulled away from the ramp.
Fortunately, we had a 250-mile shake-down run ahead of us on the way down the coast to Tarfaya, where we would stop briefly before heading properly to sea. If necessary, we could offload weight. We would also be consuming fifty pounds of food a day—and shedding body weight, a process at which I, to quote the television program, would eventually be the biggest loser.
My chief concern of the moment was that the interior of my mouth was still a nasty little nettle patch of cankers—a dozen or more of them, including one beneath my lower lip that was pretty much as big as a dime.
I have Margaret to thank for my timely recovery. As the lot of us fussed around the marina on the morning of Sunday, January 10, addressing last-minute adjustments to the boat, stowing kit, gathering fresh fruit and snacks for the run down to Tarfaya, she said to me, “Charlie, I have a job for you.”
My truest ambition for the next few hours had been to curl up in my bunk aboard the boat and there to log three or four hours of much-needed sleep. I had slept very little the night before and had been up early that morning to help empty and clean the apartment. I raised my eyebrows, feigning receptivity to whatever was coming, and she said quite gaily, “I want you to take a taxi to Marjane and get us eight or ten more packages of prepared cereal for the boat.”
Marjane is a cavernous supermarket at the far end of the city, near the men’s apartment, where I had already been that morning on behalf of the boat and to which I had no intention of returning—especially in one of Agadir’s sooty little orange taxis. Not that I didn’t enjoy Marjane. I did. It was an entertainment unto itself: aisles heaped with groceries and Moroccan clothing, kids in little djellabas, women gliding mysteriously past the bully beef display in their floor-length wraps and head scarves. Scruffy little sparrows that had undoubtedly lived their entire lives in the store darted around, chirping and shitting among the bulk nuts and fruit.
I agreed reluctantly to go, and was on my way down the promenade to catch a cab when I ran into our crewmate Louise Graff, who asked me with her customary affability if there was anything I needed at Marjane; she and her friends Noreen and Julie, who had their own apartment nearby, were on their way there now to get sandwich foods and oranges for the boat.
I had liked Louise immediately when we met at JFK on the way up to Shelter Island. From the start, we conversed easily and could always find something to laugh about. On the first night of training, after a couple of exhausting watches, she had endeared herself to me by reaching across from her bunk and holding my mittened hand for a minute, a gesture of graciously affectionate solidarity, which, for me, cemented our friendship. It would come as a laugher of a surprise to me when a few days hence, at sea, Louise revealed to me that Noreen, whom I had taken for a mere pal, was actually her husband, her lover, when all along I had joked with and related to her—indeed to both of them—as if they were single gals for whom I should best be on my toes as a (just slightly diminished) representative of the testicle-bearing class.
Within twenty minutes I was sacked out on the couch at their apartment, where I slept soundly for four hours and awoke as they came yoo-hooing up to the door to get me. The plan, if you had not guessed, was that I would parade over to the women’s apartment with them, hauling the cereal I had so responsibly acquired at the supermarket.
As we arrived, Margaret emerged from one of the bedrooms, looked at me quizzically and said, “That was quite a shopping trip, Charlie!”
Unsure whether she was on to me, but not about to concede, I said, “It was!” and neither of us said another word.
In the meantime, I felt infinitely better for the sleep. By evening my cankers and digestion had improved to the point where I was able to eat a walloping chicken tagine and drink a pint of beer at one of the restaurants along the seawall—a restaurant, as it turned out, that would come perilously close to killing poor Tom.
WE SLEPT the night on the boat, and awoke in a cool pre-dawn mist with no wind to speak of. At about 6:30, in the darkness, Steve and I walked to a restaurant along the seashore for a bite of breakfast and a last cup of decent French coffee. By the time we returned, Ryan had popped a bottle of champagne, and the countdown had begun. Behind us to the east a band of cloud-rippled azure was broadening above the mountains. A brigade of noisy gannets was aloft in the motionless air.
There were no heroics or theatrics as we pulled away from the dock at 8 a.m. sharp. Angela gave the “easy out,” eight blue blades made their first tentative strokes, and we cruised out into the harbor. And from there around the breakwater. David’s Moroccan adjutant, Hassan, and a few faithfuls from the boatyard had gathered to see us off. As had Deb, Noreen, and Julie. There were a few tears, probably of relief that we were finally leaving. Meanwhile, our Canadian friends, Damien Gilbert and Kelly Saxberg, climbed into an outboard Zodiac and banged out past us on the swells, shooting footage for the film they were making of the expedition.
A couple of days earlier Ernst and I had gone with Kelly and Damien up to the kasbah on the mountain behind the city to get some footage. From the thousand-foot elevation, the Atlantic had looked unspeakably vast. By comparison our little boat—our Tinkertoy experiment, just visible in the harbor below—had looked ridiculously small and fragile.
“Vare za motore on zis sing?” I had been