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

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THE BIG MORNING arrived, and in a pilgrimage more spirited than our parade to the launch ramp at Shelter Island, we grouped up around the boat as a smallish tractor hauled it at an emperor’s pace out the boatyard’s wide front gates. Each of us had a job, mine being to carry a sheet of bendy galvanized steel that could be thrown down over a rough patch in the road to allow any of the four dollies beneath the hulls to pass smoothly overtop.

As we heaved through the potholed streets, the tires on the casters, frightful little things on stamped rims and hubs, began to disintegrate. Meanwhile, a crowd of chatty and inquisitive rubberneckers fell in around us—kids with soccer balls, men in work clothes or business suits, women in Muslim head coverings, yapping dogs, gulls, gannets, the lot of them making a carnival of it, the centerpiece of which, our space-age rowboat, was a clearly irresistible piper to those who were seeing her for the first time. Left and right we went, this way and that, eventually down to the port’s monstrous boat ramp. There, the broad concrete aprons were a dry-dock for trawlers and dories and tugboats, dozens of them, beyond which, in the inky waters off the docks, floated an armada of sardine trawlers and rusting freighters, some of which gave the impression of having been there for decades. It was all quite a contrast to Big Blue, which by the time she sledded into the shallows, to a modest cheer, had made dump waste of her dolly wheels, an appropriate symbol, I thought, of her being free at last of the land.