Little Ship of Fools by Charles Wilkins

Author:Charles Wilkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55365-879-5
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2013-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

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ACCORDING TO THE ADVENTURER Dervla Murphy, whose books are an all-but-howling subversion of common contemporary travel practices, the value and meaning of journeying are drastically eroded, if not destroyed, by our inability, even at the far edges of the planet and psyche, to rid ourselves of satellite phones, smart phones, dumb phones, laptops, iPads, iPods, and the like.

Dervla would not have been happy aboard Big Blue, or even among its crew, where the agenda from the start was a kind of post-vaudevillian absurdity of electronic devices and communication. Long before we’d even met one another, we were cluttering cyberspace with torrents of emails and retorts, proliferating muddles of information, much of it sciencey and argoty, addressing everything from nutritional chemistry to meteorology, to suitable sea clothing, to media coverage, to the evolving state of the boat, to commercial sponsorship, to the mathematics of navigation, to how the food would be packed for stowage, to dispatches from the training gym (where the contemporary vernacular is a battle-ready shorthand of “targets” and “loads” and “zones,” of “setups” and “rips” and “reps”). The lot of it came with admonishments from fellow crew members urging us to “communicate,” intensify our training, de-intensify our training, update our logs, identify our requirements, be more sensitive, be less sensitive. Or came with dispatches from Roy, demanding (sometimes after weeks of silence) that we look alive, smarten up, start acting like ocean beaters, prove our mettle, get our money in (the implied salutation invariably being you dumb swabs). There were attached essays and charts, links to more links, the great incorporeal bulk of it exploding from our inboxes with, at best, occasional human touches: bits of drama or humor, such as when Angela and Steve would get sparring (prophetically, as it turned out) over their sense of, say, how many calories constituted an adequate daily supply for the average rower, or whether Steve’s insistence on “liquid” calories (protein and electrolyte supplements, necessary as a concession to his digestive difficulties) was a fitting approach to nutrition. “What would happen,” Angela asked him at one point, “if the desalination equipment broke down, and we had to go on maintenance rations of fresh water?”

“I’d fix the equipment,” responded Steve.

Angela is an intelligent woman, quick with a retort, and yet her emails as often as not read like alphabet soup or the random output of a bingo tumbler. A month before departure, in response to a dozen of Angela’s food emails, each intended to clarify the last, Nigel wrote, “Ok. Shit. I’m sorry. I’ve re-read the emails a bunch of times. I still have a question, perhaps because what I THINK the process is just doesn’t make sense to me.” And so it went.

Our lives in Agadir had been similarly permeated by this bristling electro-profusion. Deb, for example, sat by the hour at her laptop in the women’s apartment, writing emails, sorting data, fussing with photos—and I think even keeping up with her day job back in Bakersfield, California. In her off-hours,

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