Little Ship of Fools. Charles Wilkins L.
with no stated ambition to set a record. For all of this, it is unlikely that we will either see or hear from any of these boats, before, during, or after our respective crossings, unless of course we should happen to meet on the sea floor or fetch up within a couple of hours of one another on the coast of Mauritania or Gran Canaria.
The final two members of our crew of sixteen were added this week. Unfortunately, we lost a rower, Anne Maurissen from Belgium, who signed on a few days after our training session but fell on the ice on Christmas Eve, in Brussels, and fractured her wrist. I never met her, but in her emails sensed a kindred spirit, so I will miss what she undoubtedly would have brought to the crew.
Our latest additions are a twenty-four-year-old British medical student named Liam Flynn, who rows recreationally on the English south coast, and a thirty-one-year-old Tasmanian woman, Margaret Bowling, who is reputed to be an organizational whiz and will apparently be assisting Angela with the command.
While I have been attempting to play down any symphonic goodbyes, I want to say that I have appreciated the good wishes that so many of you have sent my way. As of the moment I have received well over a hundred messages, some of which I can barely read for the depth of their grace and goodwill.
I am heading out optimistically and with great respect for my fellow crew members, for our builder, David, and for our captain, Angela. And of course for the ocean. As the writer Simon Winchester said of the Atlantic, “It is a gray and heaving sea, not infrequently storm-bound, ponderous with swells, a sea that in the mind’s eye is thick with trawlers lurching, bows up, then crashing down through great white curtains of spume, tankers wallowing across the swells, its weather so often on the verge of gales, and all the while its waters moving with an air of settled purpose, simultaneously displaying incalculable power and inspiring by this display perpetual admiration, respect, caution, and fear.”
We will be counting on the trade winds to move us along—and on all the energy we can muster for our rowing.
And so I go—deeply appreciative of your support and of your good wishes for the trip.
I look forward to reporting to you all upon my return.
Happy New Year! Farewell for now.
Sincerely and affectionately,
Charlie
AT TRUDEAU AIRPORT in Montreal the next afternoon, as I lay on a padded bench attempting to get a little rest, I mentioned to Steve that I had a swelling and an ache in one of my ankles. I believed I had picked up a minor injury in training that had been accentuated by long hikes around downtown Toronto as I tried to find anything I was missing in clothing and kit items. Ever the pragmatist, Steve informed me that if it was blood-clotting—“thrombosis,” I believe he called it—it would either shake loose unannounced and kill me instantly (in which case I had nothing to worry about) or would dissolve without shaking loose (in which case I would live on and had nothing to worry about).
At perhaps 5 p.m. (having found something to worry about) I went on an extended tour of the airport in search of Tom, who had taken the train from Toronto rather than flying with the rest of the Canadians, and with ninety minutes to go till boarding for Casablanca was nowhere to be found. I called his wife, Luisa, who said he had left on a later train than he had intended and should now be in Montreal.
A kind of gallows watch ensued, during which one or two of us would saunter down the long row of international gates, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tom’s distinctive bald head or hear the equally distinctive kazoo of his voice. My concern was that as we got to within forty-five minutes of takeoff, he would, for security reasons, not be allowed on the plane.
The flight was eventually called, and the six of us lingered in the departure lounge until I, for one, couldn’t stand it anymore and said to Dylan White, “We’ll see him in Agadir.” And I got up, showed my passport at the gate, and walked into the tunnel that led to the big Royal Air Maroc jet. But I felt wretched knowing that Tom, who did not like money transactions or even using a credit card (he had gotten Steve to buy his plane ticket), would probably get hit for four or five hundred dollars in rescheduling fees, as well as having to find a place to stay for the night and to negotiate Casablanca and Agadir on his own. If there was even the faintest comfort in any of it, it was that he speaks fluent French, so would be okay both in Montreal and on arrival in North Africa.
As the line at the aircraft door shortened to six or seven people (there were already several hundred aboard), only Steve hung back at the top of the tunnel, hoping against the hopelessness of the situation that Tom might still show up. As far as we knew, he had never checked in for the flight.
If I were to tell you that as we howled down the runway for takeoff, an elfin sixty-seven-year-old apostate waving his arms and wearing a little red gob hat came sprinting along beside the plane, leapt onto a wing, made his way forward along the fuselage to the door and thence inside with a grin, you might question my reliability as a storyteller. But in my memory of the evening, that, within a hair’s breadth of the truth, is what happened. Had Tom been thirty seconds later than he was, there would at liftoff have been six distressed, not seven relieved, Canucks in the front right quarter of perhaps the dingiest jetliner, with the cruddiest bathrooms and toilets, that I, or perhaps any of us, had ever been on.
Typically, as in days to come, Tom was the first one asleep, passed out like a lizard in a patch of sunlight, while the rest of us fidgeted and shivered and wrenched our thin blankets around us, attempting to dispossess ourselves of the stresses of the past few hours, not to mention the past few months. We had worked hard, very hard, for a reward that lay bristling before us and, for each of us, would redefine what working hard could mean.
Finally, in the darkness over the eastern Atlantic, a grumpy stewardess with breasts like warheads and the eyes of an executioner served something approximating breakfast and, in a great arcing swoosh, we rode the rising sun into Casablanca, where the airport at 6 a.m. was populated by a dozen healthy-looking cats and a scattering of unhealthy-looking human beings.
We flew on to Agadir, across the Atlas Mountains, aboard a rickety twin-engine de Havilland, the proverbial flying coffin, which might have been disconcerting had we been awake enough to notice. And drove on into the city—twenty miles in a big Mercedes cab: past date palms and argan orchards and palmettos; and bursts of bougainvillea on the cinder-block shacks; and little roadside stalls selling French pastries and used car bumpers and chips of burnt meat on a stick; all of it spread out against the unending brownish rock that, whether in mountains or coastal plains or city outcrops—or reduced to sand by the wind—is the fundamental landscape of North Africa.
5
FOR THE NEXT TWELVE days, the men of the crew lived in a windowless backstreet apartment that had been rented for us by David. This morose concrete grotto was crammed with lurid Moorish furniture: ensembles of leopard skin and red vinyl and purple plush, with big velveteen cushions, and tassels on everything, and poorly dyed carpets. All the trappings of whoredom, right down to the red lightbulb in the front hall. So much attention to tactility but with no actual comforts—not even proper light, or hot water, or even a table to eat off. And of course no art or books. The bathroom, whose encrusted shitter was surely a castoff of Royal Air Maroc, both looked and smelled like a leprosarium. I admired Steve’s response when, together, we laid eyes on the bowl: the double take, the queasy smile, the glance my way as if to say It’s you or me, brother, and the immediate commitment (his) to scouring the thing out.
The kitchen wasn’t much better, and since there was no means of dealing with the trash produced by a perpetually famished rowing crew with little inclination to clean up, it simply accumulated: first in garbage bags, six, seven, eight of them, crowding the kitchen floor, and then in an impassable knee-high heap of loose egg cartons, cereal boxes, orange peels, soup cans, cookie packages; plus the endless plastic bottles and tubs in which Moroccan dairy products are sold and go moldy and die.
The highlight of my days on Rue Salaam (Peace Street)—a lovely address, I thought, for a place that even our gentle-tongued crewmate Sylvain referred