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

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So it was a week or so later that the soft-spoken grandma from Xenia, Ohio, via Long Beach, was introduced to the crew, via email, as our new commander, Cap’n Angela—excited, as she put it, to be part of “this historic ocean row.”

MEANWHILE, in Thunder Bay, not everyone was as magnanimous about my decision to row the Atlantic as I might have liked. “Are you doing this because you want to die?” I was asked at one point by a smart-aleck acquaintance—to which I responded, in finest mock Confucianism, that I was doing it “because I didn’t want to die.”

“But what is the meaning of it?” I was asked by a nettlesome neighbor.

“Discovery,” I thought to tell her, adding that I assumed I would be better able to report on such abstractions when I returned.

“And if you don’t return?” she said slyly.

For now, I told her, I had discovered meaning in my training, which, happily, in mid-June, moved outdoors onto water—at Clear Lake, in the Muskoka region of central Ontario, where the family keeps a summer cottage. What a relief it was to be splashing, to be moving, to see shoreline passing, after ten months indoors on the old black C2 torture machine. My outdoor rowboat, it needs be said, was not one of those spiffy needle-nosed skiffs that you see rowers using in the Olympics but an old Norwegian sailing vessel—a Gresvig 5—given to me by my parents on my twelfth birthday. With a tuck here, a tap there, I converted it into a rowboat that worked the muscles of the upper body and abdomen to the point where several times that summer I was approached by people speculating on how youthfully and seductively “ripped” I must be somewhere beneath my T-shirt. And of course I was. Profoundly. However, as you might imagine with a guy of my age and inclinations, mine was more a metaphysical ripping, an inner muscularity, than one merely of the flesh.¹