As for what the journey would require, on that first night out of Agadir it was demanding everything I could offer in the way of wits and sanity. I had determined days ago that if I was to fulfil my duties to the boat during those early hours aboard, my biggest responsibility would be to myself—specifically to establish sleeping and eating patterns. Suffice it to say, my survival plan had already gone to hell, replaced by lesser, stupider efficiencies. I imagined, for example, that to save time as I came off the 2 a.m. watch that night, I would attempt simply to sleep in my wet clothes.
First, though, I had something to attend to in the darkness of the cabin—and must at this point grant a moment’s shore leave to anyone of delicate nature. For even so early in my story, I must thrust into the limelight a part of my anatomy typically off limits to non-professionals or to those whose house key does not match my own. By which I am referring to my ass. To what was left of my ass.
My problem astern, I am embarrassed to report, had begun earlier that evening, barely out of Agadir, when, in a moment of distraction and weariness, I had dropped my precious gel seat cushion overboard into the sea. It was an item that had taken me weeks of sampling and experimentation to decide upon and buy, and as I stood on the bridge watching it disappear into the depths, a little part of my optimism for the trip disappeared with it.
Now, in the darkness, tummy-down in the bunk, I raised my hips a few inches and, using my thumbs as grappling hooks, eased my Class-3 high-tech rain pants onto my thighs. By this time I had endured three watches in succession with no seat pad, or with replacement pads so woeful (a pair of gloves, a folded sweatshirt) that none at all might have been an improvement. With the help of my stubbly chin, I pried open a tin of Penaten Medicated Cream and, working blind, pressed great sticky gobs of the sweet-smelling emollient onto the weeping sores, one of them as big as a Ritz cracker, that had been grated into my backside by the rowing seat.
If I had any reason to feel positive as I lay in my soaked garments—or at least to feel less negative—it was that I was considerably better off than a couple of my cabinmates. One of them, Dylan White, a dazzling young musician and biologist from Toronto, who occupied the bunk opposite mine, had developed muscle spasms in his thighs and abdomen and for several hours had lost the ability to urinate. This one-time football player, little more than a third my age, had told me earlier in the evening that after three frightful watches he was no longer sure he was cut out to row the Atlantic.
Above him, on the upper bunk, lay Tom Butscher from Toronto Island, a former Canadian speed skating champ, a guy who at sixty-seven hoped to become the oldest man to row the Atlantic. Meanwhile, he had contracted severe gastrointestinal poisoning in Agadir, an illness that had wrecked him to a point where his normally elfin face had entirely gone missing beneath a mask of sagging wax. Unable to row, he could for now do little more than lurch back and forth between his bunk and the alfresco toilet within sniffing distance of the port stroke seat—or lie gazing at the cabin ceiling hoping that somehow his affliction would go away. Which, with the help of medication, it eventually did.
Had it not gone away, Tom would, like any other crew member postmortem, have been accorded what a prospectus for the trip had called “immediate burial at sea”—preferable one assumes to less timely options, such as, say, stowage in the food locker in a hundred degrees of heat, or being trussed up in a sleeping bag in a shared bunk and thus transported through the tropics (I had a morbid cartoon fantasy of being bound up in a blanket and thrown overboard, and somehow picking up the trade winds and beating the boat to Barbados).
“How ya doin’?” I asked Tom quietly in the dark, when I had reinstalled my soaked and now frigid pants.
“There’s blood,” he whispered.
“Ya gonna make it?”
After a lengthy pause, he said, “I dunno—at least it’s calming down out there.”
Ten seconds later, as if cued to his utterance, a fifteen-foot wave exploded over the bridge, astern, and sloshed through the cabin door, which we had not yet learned to keep closed.
When the shrieking had died down and those closest to the door had rescued their skivvies from the cabin floor, Dylan looked across at me and said, “I dunno either.” And in self-mocking insolence (the last luxury available to us under the circumstances), we began to laugh.
2
IF FURTHER EVIDENCE IS necessary of either the mirth or sobriety of this fanciful and fateful expedition, consider that by the time we cast off I, like the rest of the crew, had invested US$10,000 in the boat and several thousand more in travel and training (this at a time when an American greenback still bought half a tennis ball and the treasury in Washington had not commenced perforating its currency and dispensing it on a roll). What’s more, having begged my way aboard as a chronicler of the follies to come, I had spent nearly a year and a half in arduous training in order to be ready. This grossly protracted fitness spree left me so exhausted at times that toward the end of it I began seriously to wonder if I had the jam to do what dozens of far stronger athletes had failed to do in the past. Of the 700-odd fools who had attempted to row the Atlantic during the past hundred years, a mere 400 had made it—compared, for example, to the roughly 5,000 who have reached the summit of Everest.
That said, there is a part of me (the mating of Puritan and cockroach) that thrived on the training and exhaustion, that looked forward to the salt drenchings and sun, to the scouring of the hands against the oars. “Everest Shmeverest,” I told a mountain climber at one point, jestingly contemptuous of those who needed Sherpas and oxygen and Depends to fulfil their questionable goals where I needed only blind determination and stupidity—well, and a crew of much stronger rowers than I... oh, and a mini-Everest of 222s, the wobbly pharmaceutical crutch on which I have stumbled along for a dozen years, six a day, taken as a stop-gap against arthritis and muscle pain and migraines.
Fortunately I did not need privacy. For when we weren’t rowing or soaked, or under other pestilential influences, we lived like gophers, far more scuzzily than you might imagine, in a cabin about the size of a Volks-wagen van. It was a cell that, for reasons easily imagined, I came to think of as the Gas Chamber—or, in airier moments, the House that Dave Built: eight bunks, upper and lower, each about the dimensions of a pygmy’s coffin, on opposite sides of a narrow central passageway, and a Lilliputian fore-galley which on the third day at sea was colonized by the boat’s captain, Angela Madsen, and converted into a berth. In that tiny enclosure, our oft-inscrutable commander had almost enough space to lay out a sleeping bag, but not enough to roll over in the night or even to stand up without sticking her head and upper body out the ventilation hatch on the inclined front wall.
By Dave I mean David Davlianidze, the unflappable Georgian expat—hawk-nosed, brilliant, soft-spoken—in whose boat shop on Shelter Island, NY, our eccentric craft had taken shape. In the days after Georgia gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992 and was plunged into civil war, this gentle, free-spirited economist and entrepreneur carried a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver and ran with other gun-toting “paramilitarists” in order to guard the money he was making by importing cigarettes from Austria and selling them out of what he refers to as his “boutique” in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. His introduction to the Land of Hope and Glory, which we shall visit in due time, was as outrageous and picaresque as that of a character in the boldest and most subversive fiction. He had for months been an outlaw. But for most of us