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

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And of course David—David—that most honorable of guys, who had picked up the pieces in Roy’s absence and had made a boat that with any luck would bear us all off to sea.

Of the lot, it was Angela who seemed most like a character who had somehow found her way into the wrong novel. More subdued, sweeter tempered, driftier than any of us had imagined, she was, at six-foot-two, an impressive assemblage of tree trunks and upholstery and scar tissue. Thirty years ago, as she had explained to us on the way up from JFK, several of her vertebrae had been smashed while she was playing basketball for the U.S. Marines. It was her first game; she was to have been a star. A dozen years later, the military’s best orthopedic surgeons had botched the operation that was intended to fix her up. “No hope, no recourse,” she shrugged—adding that, these days, with the exception of short hauls, where her leg braces were all the support she needed, she traveled in a wheelchair. “Or on a surfboard,” she brightened. Or on her beloved rowboat back home in Long Beach.