Little Ship of Fools. Charles Wilkins L.
reward for my diligence, placed a saucepan of heated water in the bathroom that I could mix with cold tap water in a grubby plastic bucket that subbed as the apartment’s shower.
Ten of us lived ass-over-chinstrap in this weird little den—all the men but David, who was installed in the Ibis Hotel, a nice-ish two-star a fifteen-minute walk away, with his dark-eyed fiancée, Lali, who was visiting from Tbilisi. Because she spoke only Georgian, Lali could do little more than smile at the rest of us, and languish, and look longingly at David. They were tender and smoochy with one another and spoke softly, probably about taxi fares or laundry, and yet it always sounded intimate and mysterious. At the boatyard, she would stand motionless and decisive-looking beside Big Blue with her hand on the gunnels for a few seconds, then would pirouette suddenly and take a step or two and put her hand on the rudder and stand there for a minute—then would stand on the ladder that led up to the bridge, while David, a few feet away, sweated and hung upside down, fussing with the wiring, or whatever, in some impossible-to-reach place inside one of the holds.
I had an urge to talk to Lali, to be friends with her; she was so alone. Plus, I knew she had lots to say, having survived a ruinous civil war in Georgia, as had David, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. But to carry on even a few minutes of conversation would have required focused translation by David, who spoke a poetically quirky English, cut with the inevitable shorthand of television and the web. But he didn’t have time, what with getting the boat ready twelve hours a day. So our discourse was limited to a daily morning greeting—“Hi Lali!”—to which she would respond brightly, “Hi Chordly!”
The women meanwhile lived in a tidy resort apartment five miles from the men, near the waterfront and the port entrance. The place had a contemporary kitchen, a television, two cushy bathrooms with hot showers, plenty of dishes and towels and bedding. About the only thing it had in common with our place was that its furniture appeared to have been swiped out of the same hellacious cathouse. The place had originally been rented by Angela and her partner, Deb Moeller from Bakersfield, California, a woman who put heart and soul into looking after not just Angela—whom she called “Madsen” and treated with tender exasperation—but half of the administrative chores around the expedition: communications, website, media relations, plus any sort of messaging and boat contact that was required from land once we set off. From the time I met them at Shelter Island, it was hard to imagine that Angela could have carried on as she did without Deb, who was her “girl,” so to speak, her adjutant, as well as her manager, advisor, and agent; and driver and photographer; and social coordinator and lover—all of it puttied up and patted into place with painstaking care and affection. If you wanted the lowdown on Angela, you went to Deb; if you asked Angela directly, she’d say, “You’d better ask Deb.”
Above all, Deb protected Angela. On the way into New York City in the van after the training weekend, she had confided to me her rather poignant (and ultimately accurate) fear that people would “take advantage of Madsen” because she was so essentially gentle and unassertive. It was an image that did not seem to jibe with that of a woman who, before her spinal injury, had been in the police corps of that toughest of military branches, the U.S. Marines. The truth was, she had joined the Marines with the hope of becoming a mechanic like her brothers and dad before her, and it was only because of her size (not to mention her reluctance to refuse) that the towering recruit had been pushed into police work. She told me one night over dinner in Agadir about being summoned repeatedly and unhappily to deal with domestic violence at the residences of Marines who had returned from conflicts in, I believe, Southeast Asia. “All these guys,” she said, “had taken ‘desensitization’ training so they wouldn’t be affected by orders, say, to go into villages and slaughter women and children, which was bad enough. But when they got home, nobody ‘re-sensitized’ them, so they were equally insensitive to their own wives and children.”
Originally the whole crew was to have lived in the men’s flop pad. But when Liz Koenig and Aleksa Klimas-Mikalauskas arrived a day or two past New Year’s, after detouring to Marrakesh, it was all quite natural that they settle in with Angela and Deb. For one thing, the four of them were well acquainted after an agonizing seventy-two-hour snow delay at JFK in New York, over Christmas. Plus, they had all endured horrific problems with Royal Air Maroc, which had lost not only Liz and Aleksa’s luggage (it eventually arrived) but Angela’s custom-built ultra-light wheelchair, which the airline replaced with a flimsy little rickshaw of a thing that would occasionally drop a part or two on the sidewalk—not at all the sort of appliance to carry a 250-pound woman with very specific ergonomic requirements.
The boatyard where we worked was within the high guarded walls of the officially designated “Port of Agadir”—a square mile or so of docks and warehouses and boat-building facilities spread out along the seashore at the city’s north end. Immediately to the east rose a desert-dry mountain whose top formed the old-city kasbah, the only remaining feature of ancient Agadir, which had been destroyed by an earthquake in 1960. The city had been rebuilt and was now uniformly modern, including the souk, a vast walled city-within-a-city, where vendors sold everything from handmade leather goods and furniture to fabrics, shoes, handicrafts, fresh fruit, spices, appliances, electronic goods—anything you might want, up to and including the illicit hashish for which Morocco, perhaps the most liberal of Muslim countries, is renowned. Donkeys waited outside by their owners’ carts, amidst street garbage and squawking chickens and the occasional dead rat or dog.
Each day began for us with a long, sometimes harrowing ride from the apartment to the boatyard in one of the hundreds of tiny orange fender-bashed taxis that pinballed around the city, honking, squealing, blasting Arabic hit-parade music, throwing soot or brake parts or tire-tread. At the port gates, we showed our passes—ragged bits of tissue paper bearing a line or two of smudged Arabic—and careered on through to the Chantier Naval Hesaro. There, in the sunshine, we went at sweaty chores on a half acre of dusty concrete, amidst partially built fishing trawlers, or yachts being refurbished, one of which, a doozy built in 1948, belonged to a member of the rock band Pink Floyd and was in for a million-dollar refit that we were told had been ongoing for years.
From New Year’s Day forth, David applied himself relentlessly to getting the boat wired and rigged and (more or less) safe for the sea. He had not just the crew’s help, but the contracted assistance of a young aide-de-camp named Hassan, whose knowledge of Agadir was encyclopedic, as well as one of the yard’s most capable artigianos, an endearing and hard-working machinist named variably “Yaya” or “Shacky,” depending on who you asked. He also had the help of a yard journeyman and, later, an electrician name Essaidi, a devout Muslim with whom I occasionally attempted to converse. Unfortunately, he was a thinking man (problematic in any culture), and his ambitions to discuss political and social philosophy with me—and on one occasion the thoughts of his fellow North African, Albert Camus—went as pearls to swine in the context of my pathetically verbless and largely brainless French.
One of the most important and time-consuming jobs was getting new hardwood handles into the dozen oars (including four spares) to which we would be entrusting our progress in the days to come. The new ones were a pearly white ash, as hard as gun metal yet less apt to cause blisters than are the state-of-the-art neoprene-wrapped handles on many sculling oars and virtually all rowing machines these days. It took four of our young crew members the better part of a week to break the old handles out of their graphite sleeves, a sliver at a time, and get the new, longer handles epoxied into place. More grueling yet was the effort of getting the “trampolines” constructed and attached—taut nylon “decks” on both sides of the boat, linking the hulls to the centrally positioned cabin, giving us a crucial six-foot-wide walking and living platform to both port and starboard.
Before we left Canada, Steve and I had agreed that we would work on the tramps together. However, in the end, it was Sylvain and Tom who were Steve’s ranking assistants, while I tootled around poking at oar handles and doing fussy work—and of course note-taking, preparing to write, which as the novelist Don Bailey once pointed out is largely a process of gazing out the window or down the beach, or peeking over the fence. At times, craving a little detachment, I simply slipped out the boatyard gate and enjoyed brief walks around the port. Anywhere there was a bit of spare ground, boatbuilders with mallets and four-inch-wide chisels banged away, hand-hewing bulgy