David Vann - A Mile Down - The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

I loved the view, the mountains a spinning panorama. It was a great outing, diminished only by the fact of returning to Kas and knowing we weren’t leaving the next day until I had cleared out, in, out, and in.

By 7:30 A.M., I was waiting at the door of the customs office, but again it was deserted. I tried calling and asking around, but no luck. He finally showed up at about ten-thirty. I went in and politely asked for a clearance, showing him my papers, but he had already heard about the weekend’s events.

“You file a complaint against me,” he said. “Why you do this?”

“I didn’t mean to file a complaint,” I said. “I thought I was filling out paperwork to get a clearance from the police.”

“Ah,” he said. He was smoking, as all Turks do, especially in closed spaces. He was a young, handsome man, obviously taken with himself as an inspector and insulted by my complaint. “So you make a mistake?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes, yes, you certainly make a mistake,” he said. “You make a mistake with me.” He smoked some more and looked at the various walls with nothing on them. Behind him was a large portrait of Ataturk, which seemed to be the only portrait of anyone hanging in any office in Turkey. Modern Turkey was basically his idea, so this was appropriate. “You go to the police and take back this complaint, then you come see me again.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.” There was no point in fighting. This man had the power to keep me in port for months if he felt like it.

I went to the police station and retracted my complaint. Curiously, they weren’t disappointed to lose it. The other day they had expressed annoyance with the customs inspector, but now they talked of him as their great friend and colleague. I had clearly been made a pawn in some kind of local power struggle. My side had lost, and now no one else was on my side.

They sent me and my passport back to the customs inspector under police escort, as if I couldn’t be trusted not to attempt escape.

Then the customs inspector called in the immigration inspector, and they discussed at length the various difficulties of my noxious passport. When they finally stamped it, they charged me over $100 for a clearance out, which is supposed to be free. Then they lectured me a bit, blew smoke in my face, and sent me back to the police. The police made me wait for a while, then finally cleared me and charged another $40 just for fun.

It was almost 1 P.M. before I was back on board. I cast off with only Muhsin as crew, since Ercan and Baresh didn’t have the required visas, and we motored for about half an hour to cross the channel.

The harbor on this Greek island was picturesque and completely different from Kas, the architecture and layout and feel of the town much more European. There was more money here, and greater order, and a general sense of drowsiness. No one moving very quickly.

The Greek customs officer, in his middle years, was sitting outside his office, on a chair against the wall. “You are English?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Just the flag. I’m American.”

“And you?” he asked Muhsin. “Turkish?”

“Yes,” Muhsin nodded.

The customs officer made some sour faces, letting us know how he felt about Americans and Turks. His lips pinched closed but his tongue moved around in his mouth, wanting to break free. This was 1999. The Greeks were supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and Ocalan and resented U.S. and Israeli cooperation with the Turkish government in his capture. They were Christian, but not nearly as closely allied to the U.S. as Muslim Turkey was. And they had Cyprus and all the coastal islands as sore spots with the Turks. Just a few years before, the two countries had almost gone to war over possession of a few small, uninhabited pieces of rock sticking up along the coast. So this customs officer was ruminating a bit, and he was making us ruminate, too. But finally he stood up, walked into his office, and gave us our entry and clearance.

It was 3 P.M. by the time we were docked again in Kas, and I still had to clear back into Turkey before we could move on to the next port.

I went to the customs inspector first. He was in his office, which was convenient, and unusual, but he also had made up some new regulations for me. He said my charter paperwork from Bodrum was incorrect and I would have to obtain a doctor’s clearance and pay a lighthouse tax. “Maybe in Bodrum they do not know these regulations,” he said, smoking and gazing absentmindedly at his blank walls. “But here we are very careful.”

I knew he was full of shit, but knowledge is not power when it comes to dealing with government officials, so I had to run to the police, then to the other side of town to find the doctor, then to a notary, then back to the doctor, then to the police, and finally to customs and immigration. By the end, I had paid more than $500 just to clear in, almost all of which was bogus. I left Kas in a foul mood. And my guests weren’t happy, either; it was after six by the time we left. We arrived at our next port long after dark.

The rest of the trip went well. It’s hard to beat the ruins and coves and towns along that coast, and it’s hard to beat a poetry workshop with Talvi Ansel. The only difficulties were when Ercan hit on Steve, by blowing in his ear, and my lack of money. When it was time to get diesel, though, Steve helped me out. He loaned me $2,200, which would fill our tanks almost halfway.

We did have one other problem that trip, which was that the air-conditioners leaked water under the beds from condensation, and this water made the cheap wood laminate flooring buckle. So I told Seref, and he promised me he would have the air-conditioning man fix the drains to the units, and he would do something about the flooring. He was vague about what and when, of course.

Then a huge earthquake hit near Istanbul. Oddly, this was one event that summer in Turkey that had no effect on my business. Although the quake was an enormous national tragedy, killing eighteen thousand people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, it left the airport in Istanbul strangely intact. Which shows, despite other indications to the contrary, that perhaps luck is only luck.

MY NEXT CHARTER was a course on Homer’s Odyssey taught by Charlie Junkerman, who was my boss at Stanford, and Rush Rehm, his friend in the classics department. Four adult students had signed up, which was a record for paying guests that summer. Everyone arrived in high spirits, charmed by the medieval walls of Antalya’s harbor and excited to sail the coast that Homer and Odysseus had sailed.

On this trip, we had the usual Turkish guides for the ruins but we also had Rush, who was extremely knowledgeable and likeable. In Myra, as we gazed at tombs carved into the cliffs, he told us the stories of the figures depicted. As we toured the large and well-preserved Roman theater, he told us about theater conventions of the time. The group had read quite a bit of background material about the sites we were visiting, and the debates were lively. This was what I had hoped for in setting up these educational charters. Vacations that were explorations and adventures, not just lying in the sun and drinking.

Rush and Charlie held class on the aft deck every morning, the students in their swimsuits and snacking on olives. It was perfect, and if it hadn’t been for the war in Kosovo, it might have been a viable business.

Each charter, we toured the ruins of Phaselis, Olympos, the Church of St. Nicholas, Myra, Kekova and Kekova Island, Patara, Letoon, Xanthos, Tlos, Fethiye, and Cleopatra’s baths, in addition to hiking and tubing at Saklikent and exploring lovely seaside towns and coves from Antalya to Gocek. It was hard, after setting all of this up and seeing how wonderful the trips could be, to know that the business was failing.