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

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Originally the whole crew was to have lived in the men’s flop pad. But when Liz Koenig and Aleksa Klimas-Mikalauskas arrived a day or two past New Year’s, after detouring to Marrakesh, it was all quite natural that they settle in with Angela and Deb. For one thing, the four of them were well acquainted after an agonizing seventy-two-hour snow delay at JFK in New York, over Christmas. Plus, they had all endured horrific problems with Royal Air Maroc, which had lost not only Liz and Aleksa’s luggage (it eventually arrived) but Angela’s custom-built ultra-light wheelchair, which the airline replaced with a flimsy little rickshaw of a thing that would occasionally drop a part or two on the sidewalk—not at all the sort of appliance to carry a 250-pound woman with very specific ergonomic requirements.

The boatyard where we worked was within the high guarded walls of the officially designated “Port of Agadir”—a square mile or so of docks and warehouses and boat-building facilities spread out along the seashore at the city’s north end. Immediately to the east rose a desert-dry mountain whose top formed the old-city kasbah, the only remaining feature of ancient Agadir, which had been destroyed by an earthquake in 1960. The city had been rebuilt and was now uniformly modern, including the souk, a vast walled city-within-a-city, where vendors sold everything from handmade leather goods and furniture to fabrics, shoes, handicrafts, fresh fruit, spices, appliances, electronic goods—anything you might want, up to and including the illicit hashish for which Morocco, perhaps the most liberal of Muslim countries, is renowned. Donkeys waited outside by their owners’ carts, amidst street garbage and squawking chickens and the occasional dead rat or dog.