Fresh Air Fiend (10 page)

From that day on, I realized that I could go kayaking year-round, in almost any weather, even on the coldest day. The paddling muscles are the same upper-body ones used in cross-country skiing, so I was prepared for the physical effort. I worked on learning to paddle in heavy seas and landing in surf, and I studied safety—self-rescue in a kayak is essential. The so-called Eskimo roll is only one of many methods of righting a kayak. A paddler who does not have a rescue plan has no business venturing out—it can mean the difference between life and death.

All kayaks look pretty much the same, yet every one is different, not only in speed and weight but in handling. In a rowboat these would be almost unnoticeable nuances, but since a kayak is something you sit in, the small differences are significant. The kayak is attached to the paddler, who is snug in it, filling the seat, feet jammed against the foot-rests, waterproofed by a spray deck that encloses the paddler in the cockpit as tightly as a drumhead. The Inuit were sewn into their kayaks, and there they stayed for seal-hunting trips of several days and nights. For that period they were warm, leakproof, and unsinkable.

Traveling in various countries in Africa and Asia, I realized how much I was missing by not having a boat. I had no way of going down a river or seeing a coastline; small boats were never readily available. On my second visit to China, in 1986, I saw how much better off I would have been if I had had a boat in my luggage.

This is not a crackpot idea. Many companies make collapsible or folding kayaks. The two best are the German Klepper and the Canadian Feathercraft. These boats come in bags that can be checked with other luggage at airports. In each case, the single-person version weighs less than sixty pounds and is just under sixteen feet long when assembled. The Klepper's frame is made of wood, and the Feathercraft's is high-quality aluminum and plastic; the hulls are similar, canvas and Hypalon rubber.

I own both models and have gone thousands of miles in them, sailed as well as paddled them, in every sort of weather, watching seabirds off the coast of Wales, threading my way among the harbor seals on the Cape in winter and the vigilant ospreys of Florida's barrier islands, as well as bouncing around the fifty-odd islands I visited for my book
The Happy Isles of Oceania.
Some of those islands were inaccessible to any but a small boat. People fly to Tonga, hire a yacht, and cruise the Vavau Archipelago, but because of the shifting sands, some islands there are unreachable even to a yachtie with a tender. A collapsible kayak is the answer. Kayaks are the small-boat choice of the U.S. Navy SEALs, the British Special Forces, and seagoing commandos all over the world.

If passion implies escape—and I think it does, embodying secrecy, fantasy, intense emotion, and a flight from the ordinary that fills us with a sense of well-being—then passion is the right word for how I feel about setting off in a small boat. About sixteen feet of deck and just a few inches of freeboard are all I need. I give thanks for this little craft, because without it, a career of writing would be like a life sentence in solitary confinement. So it was writing that forced me to become a fresh air fiend, and that madness, that passion, has enlightened me, as the greatest passions ought to.

W
HEN MY
French publisher, Robert Laffont, asked me who in the whole of France I wished to meet, I said d'Aboville, whose book
Seul (Alone)
had just appeared. The next day, in the shadow of Saint-Sulpice, I said to d'Aboville's wife, Cornelia, "He is my hero." She replied softly, with feeling, "Mine too."

Almost anyone can go to the moon: you pass a physical and NASA puts you in a rocket and shoots you there. I once met Buzz Aldrin. He said to me, "Your grandmother could go to the moon"—a bewitching thought: Granny's handbag, Granny's space suit, Granny's "Oh, dear." It is perhaps invidious to compare an oarsman with an astronaut, but rowing across the Pacific Ocean alone in a small boat, as the Frenchman Gerard d'Aboville did in 1993, shows old-fashioned bravery. Even those of us who go on journeys in eccentric circles simpler and far less challenging than d'Aboville's seldom understand what propels us. In 1988 an American named Ed Gillet paddled a kayak from the harbor at Monterey, California, across twenty-two hundred miles of the blue Pacific to Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands, the world's longest open-ocean crossing. He almost died—he was without food and water for the last three days of this sixty-three-day trip. He was without radio contact. And afterward all he ever wrote about his epic ordeal was a modest and somewhat self-mocking two-page piece for a New Zealand kayaking newsletter. He cursed himself much of the way for not knowing why he was making such a reckless crossing. Astronauts have a clear, scientific motive, but adventurers tend to evade the awkward question why.

The forty-eight-year-old d'Aboville single-handedly rowed a twenty-five-foot boat of his own design from Japan to Oregon. He had previously (in 1980) rowed across the Atlantic, also from west to east, Cape Cod to Brittany. But the Atlantic was a piece of cake compared to his Pacific crossing, one of the most difficult and dangerous in the world. No one had ever done it before. For various reasons d'Aboville set out very late in the season and was caught first by heavy weather and finally by tumultuous storms—gale force winds and forty- to forty-six-foot waves. Many times he was terrified, and halfway through the trip, which had no stops (no islands at all in that part of the Pacific), a Russian freighter offered to rescue him. "I was not even tempted." He turned his back on the ship and rowed on. The entire crossing, averaging seventeen strokes a minute, took him 134 days. I wanted to ask him why he had taken this enormous personal risk.

Short, compactly built, d'Aboville is no more physically prepossessing than another fairly obscure and just as brave long-distance navigator, the paddler Paul Caffyn of New Zealand. Over the past decade or so, Caffyn, in his seventeen-foot kayak, has circumnavigated Australia, Japan, Great Britain, and his own New Zealand through the low-pressure systems of Tasman Sea.

In a memorable passage in Caffyn's
The Dark Side of the Wave,
he is battling a horrible chop off the North Island and sees a fishing boat up ahead. He deliberately paddles away from the boat, fearing that someone on board will see his flimsy craft and ask him where he is going. "I knew they would ask me why I was doing it, and I did not have an answer."

I hesitated to spring the question on d'Aboville. I asked him first about his preparations for the trip. A native of Brittany, he had always rowed, he said. "We never used outboard motors—we rowed boats the way other children pedaled bicycles." Long ocean crossings interested him too, because he loved to design highly specialized boats. His Pacific craft was streamlined: it had the long, seaworthy lines of a kayak and a high-tech cockpit with a roll-up canopy that sealed in the occupant in rough weather. A pumping system using seawater as ballast easily righted the boat in the event of a capsize. The boat had few creature comforts but all necessities: a stove, a sleeping place, roomy hatches for dehydrated meals and drinking water. D'Aboville also had a video camera, and he filmed himself rowing, in the middle of nowhere, humming the Alan Jackson country-and-western song "Here in the Real World." D'Aboville sang it and hummed it for months but did not know any of the words, or indeed the title, until I recognized it on his video.

"That is a very hard question," he said when I asked him why he had set out on this seemingly suicidal trip, one of the longest ocean crossings possible, at the worst time of the year. He denied that he had any death wish. "And it is not like going over a waterfall in a barrel." He had prepared himself well. His boat was seaworthy. He is an excellent navigator. "Yes, I think I have courage," he said when I asked him pointblank whether he felt he was brave.

It was the equivalent, he said, of scaling the north face of a mountain, the most difficult ascent. But this lonely four-and-a-half-month ordeal almost ended in his death by drowning, when a severe storm lashed the coast of Oregon as d'Aboville approached it, upside down, in a furious sea. The video of his last few days at sea, taken by a rescue vessel, is so frightening that d'Aboville wiped tears from his eyes while watching it with me. "At this time last year I was in the middle of it." He quietly ignored my questions about the forty-foot waves. Clearly upset by the memory, he said, "I do not like to talk about it."

"Only an animal does useful things," he said at last, after a long silence. "An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful, not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do."

The art of it, he was saying—such an effort was as much aesthetic as athletic. And that the greatest travel always contains within it the seeds of a spiritual quest, or else what's the point? The English explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard would have agreed with this. He went with Robert Falcon Scott on the ship
Terra Nova
and made a six-week crossing of a stretch of Antarctica in 1912, on foot, in the winter, when that polar region is dark all day and night, with a whipping wind and temperatures of minus 80 degrees.

On his trek, which gave him the title for his book,
The Worst Journey in the World,
Cherry-Garrard wrote, "Why do some human beings desire with such urgency to do such things: regardless of the consequences, voluntarily, conscripted by no one but themselves? No one knows. There is a strong urge to conquer the dreadful forces of nature, and perhaps to get consciousness of ourselves, of life, and of the shadowy workings of our human minds. Physical capacity is the only limit. I have tried to tell how, and when, and where. But why? That is a mystery."

In any event, there is no conquering. "
Je n'aipas vainçu le Pacifique. Il m'a laissé passer,
"d'Aboville said after his ordeal. I did not conquer the Pacific. It let me go across.

A
COURAGEOUS
but obscure traveler named Nathaniel Bishop, from my hometown of Medford, Massachusetts, rowed a small boat called a sneakbox twenty-six hundred miles, from upper New York State to New Orleans, around 1877. When he arrived at New Orleans, exhausted, and tied his boat to a jetty, a group of young drunks congregated near his boat and mocked him, threatened him, and swore at him. This, I have come to think, is a very American reaction, rewarding eccentric effort with scorn and violence.

In the 1920s, the long-distance horseman A. F. Tschiffely saddled up in Buenos Aires and rode ten thousand miles northward, heading for New York City. He crossed deserts, mountain ranges, jungles, swamps; he labored over the Andes, toiled through Central America, trotted across Mexico. But the worst was to come. His most dispiriting days on this two-and-a-half-year journey were those he spent traversing various American states. "I had a great deal of trouble with 'road hogs,'" he wrote in
Southern Cross to Pole Star,
and he told how American motorists would deliberately swerve in order to scare him.

"Off and on different objects were thrown at us, and once even an empty bottle, whilst shouting, 'Ride 'em cowboy!'" On a back road in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a man calculatedly sideswiped him, injuring his horse's leg (the driver then honked and waved in triumph). After two more serious incidents of this kind, Tschiffely abandoned his epic trip in Washington, D.C., and took the train to New York.

At this point, the reader who is a jogger or similar sort of outdoor exerciser will shudder with recognition. Practically every jogger I know has been heckled or threatened in this way. Anyone who runs by the roadside, it seems, is subjected to catcalls, honks, verbal abuse, unwelcome invitations, and guffaws. Objects are flung from cars—coins, food, beer cans. People spit. It is remarkable how forcefully people can spit when there is someone either to impress or to intimidate. Women joggers occupy a special category of potential victim, and wherever they exercise, they can accurately be described as running a gauntlet.

In London, such behavior is less common in my experience—bystanders are more used to eccentricity. They have to be, because people live at such close quarters. Henry James remarked on this one hundred years ago in
English Hours:
"We seem loosely hung together at home as compared with the English, every man of whom is a tight fit in his place." He goes on to say, "It is not an inferential but a palpable fact that England is a crowded country."

Americans, who boast of living in a place with plenty of room for everyone, tend to object to any sort of proximity, and at the slightest hint of a loss of elbow room say, "You're in my space" or "Get out of my face." At the same time, the pressure of crowds and the uncertainties of class have made Britain a more tolerant and gentler place. Anglers can be awful to canoeists, but that is strictly territorial in a country where fishing rights are sold by the yard on rural rivers. Few people are bothered by joggers, horse riders, or athletes in outlandish clothes. The British cyclist causes the least comment of all—it might be anyone, a policeman, a schoolchild, a commuter, a racer, or your elderly father-in-law. The British jogger is allowed his or her share of the road.

American joggers are frequently harassed by people in moving cars, and these antagonists are their single greatest risk, far greater than bone spurs, gut aches, hammered knee joints, or hot flashes. I have found no literature on the subject of anti-social behavior toward people who make themselves visible through solitary exercise. What might be perceived as harmless heckling seems to me to express an intention that is related to assault, obstruction, even rape and murder.

I don't jog—too tough on my muscles and bones, it makes me feel unwell. But I value solitary aerobic exercise of other kinds, such as pedaling a bike, paddling a kayak, and rowing a boat. I happened to be cycling when I realized that my presence aroused a sort of hysteria in bystanders or people passing in cars. They shouted abuse, they laughed. What's so funny? They threw things. It was actually worse in bad weather, as though there were something in the very nature of adverse conditions that made people gloatingly more abusive, because I was more vulnerable. Rain or cold days brought out brutishness in them. I endured it for a while, and then I asked around. I was not alone. Most cyclists have stories of this kind, and joggers had much worse ones, and women joggers told the worst persecution stories.