Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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I suffered but did not protest the appraisal, and a mere eight hours later, as I came off the 2 a.m. watch, had a chance to reassess it with a vengeance. For at that point I would willingly have traded the last shreds of my dignity to have indeed been on my way to the library—to have been pretty much anywhere on earth other than where I was.

If I could claim one rueful victory as I settled to my bunk, it was that I no longer looked like a guy approaching a library. For one thing, every item of clothing on my carcass—ball cap, socks, sneakers, plus several layers of “warmth” beneath my rain gear—was oozing sea water. My newly cropped hair was the itchy amassment of brine and microorganisms that it would remain for days, and my hands and toes (the latter from being wedged into my salt-soaked shoes) were a bleached mess of tortured skin and broken blisters.

I was cold, I was exhausted, I was starved. Dinner, many hours earlier, had been a bowl of partially rehydrated macaroni and cheese followed by a cup of greenish pond muck (the latter cleverly presented as Wilderness Kitchen no-cook key lime pie). And yet I had no inclination to fiddle open the “all-organic GREAT TASTING one hundred percent natural” protein bar that was left from the day’s snack pack. Even had I been ravenous for this questionable pretense to food, its unwrapping would have required a modicum of coordination from hands that had been reduced to crooks and were temporarily useless for small-motor chores.