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

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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.