Little Ship of Fools. Charles Wilkins L.

      WEEKS LATER WHEN I spoke to my buddy Steve Roedde, who had been a mainstay of the voyage, he was still rattled, still aggrieved about it all. He said among other things that he had been unable to free himself of the specter of what might have been: better discipline, better cargo control, a lighter boat, a better chosen departure date, more confident and forthright leadership—in all a more Homeric journey and, as imagined in the palmy days of the project, perhaps a world record.

      What he got—what we all got—was something botched and bastardized, something at times almost biblical in its run of torments and dark forces. We got failure, we got fuckup, we got farce. And I, more than some, was a contributor to that failure and farce.

      And yet I don’t regret a minute of it, for the simple reason that what we got besides—what we got because—was something weirdly and wildly beautiful; for some of us something magnificent; for a few even romantic, and in the ensnarement of romance I include myself. For amidst the strain and privation and exhaustion, I grew to love that botched journey; to love the boat, to love the people, the little ship of fools, as I came to think of them, a crew fancifully and farcically, and always it seemed fatefully, intertwined.

      What Steve got finally that none of the rest of us got was himself, a man bent to an all-but-impossible standard—to ambition, to truth, to exactitude; to discipline and excellence.

      And he got Margaret—incorrigible, shape-shifting Margaret, a woman who if she had paid her dues and done her time and been a half turn more circumspect might have been his ally instead of his nemesis.

      And he got Angela—sweet, wounded Angela, whom he liked well as a human being but whose disinclinations as a commander he couldn’t abide.

      And he got me—brought me to the expedition, as he did so many others; encouraged me; mentored me; laughed with me on the long night watches; poured out his history hour after hour (his boyhood, his insecurities, his marriage).

      Over the long weeks of the voyage, he showed me not just his commitment and sensitivities but his hypocrisies and shortcomings. He showed me his rage.

      And I showed him mine.

      And how different they turned out to be. And how integral to the pages that follow.

      Whereas Steve championed ideals—ascendancy, superiority, a will to win—I was juiced by what was; by the boat and sea and by the other wastrels aboard.

      All of which is at the heart of the story I am about to tell. To which honest end, I wish to say that I no longer think of our epic travels as a journey in the strictest sense of the word. I recall them rather as a kind of fable, a nuthouse opera, written not by cynics or pessimists (who to my mind miss the point) but by dreamers, by stargazers, by minstrels. I recall the fable’s jittery, soulful currents, its nightmares and eloquence, the worst and best of it captured indelibly for me by an incident that occurred on January 29, 2011, amidst seas so high that for hours they had been threatening to knock us off our rowing seats. Just after 2 a.m., word came up from the captain’s quarters—a fusty little spook hole in the cabin of our experimental rowboat—that we were through for the night and should quit rowing and try to get some rest. For a few seconds, having shipped my oar, I slumped forward in my seat and stared blindly into the rowing trench beneath me. We were just nineteen days out of our starting port of Agadir, Morocco, and already I was down twenty pounds and was losing strength. And didn’t know what 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