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

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As the line at the aircraft door shortened to six or seven people (there were already several hundred aboard), only Steve hung back at the top of the tunnel, hoping against the hopelessness of the situation that Tom might still show up. As far as we knew, he had never checked in for the flight.

If I were to tell you that as we howled down the runway for takeoff, an elfin sixty-seven-year-old apostate waving his arms and wearing a little red gob hat came sprinting along beside the plane, leapt onto a wing, made his way forward along the fuselage to the door and thence inside with a grin, you might question my reliability as a storyteller. But in my memory of the evening, that, within a hair’s breadth of the truth, is what happened. Had Tom been thirty seconds later than he was, there would at liftoff have been six distressed, not seven relieved, Canucks in the front right quarter of perhaps the dingiest jetliner, with the cruddiest bathrooms and toilets, that I, or perhaps any of us, had ever been on.