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 sayingâsuch 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.
The Moving Target
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
"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 sayingâsuch 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.
The Moving Target
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
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