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

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“Welllllllll...,” said Janet, when it was her and Steve’s turn, dragging out the syllable as if hesitating to announce, say, that they had turned to gambling and lost everything, or had bought a herd of rhinos and it wasn’t working out.

“I’ll let Steve fill you in on the details,” she said after a few seconds, “but he and Nigel are in training to row across the Atlantic Ocean.”

Nigel is their twenty-three-year-old son, and as Steve took up the tale, I heard, as if through radio static, the phrases “crew of fourteen”... “world-record attempt”... “four months from now”... “tropical Atlantic.” By the time he had uttered half a dozen sentences it no longer seemed as if anyone was actually speaking to me, answering my questions, attempting to impart information. It was rather as if a kind of force field had descended, reducing me first to defenselessness, to purest susceptibility, then to a single evolving compulsion. During the minutes that followed, every other thought in my head was displaced, if not eradicated, by an outlandish inner hankering to be part of the remarkable expedition Steve was describing. I love boats, particularly those without motors; love outdoor adventure. I had in fact been stirred in recent months toward what I felt might be a last grand attempt to do something extraordinary in the realm of travel, something that would push me hard up against my limits, perhaps even my mortality. What that might be, I didn’t know, and could never have named it as specifically as it had just been named for me. Beyond my private ambitions, the writer in me was fascinated by the idea of being out on the ocean, at sea level, in a rowboat of all things, and of having to be fit enough to power such a vessel across an ocean.