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

My girlfriend Nancy joined me on several charters and for a three-week break between charters to travel through Greece and Italy. We had met at Starlight Ballroom in the spring while I was still teaching at Stanford. It was drop-in night, and we happened to pick the same class. She was a beautiful Filipina with long dark hair and an easy laugh. As she switched partners around the circle, whoever she was with was laughing and showing off. I spoke with her briefly afterward, found out she was enrolling in swing and salsa, and signed up for the same classes. A few months later, we were touring the Mediterranean together on what felt like a honeymoon.

During these cruises, a curious thing happened: without quite meaning to, I sold loans for the new boat. I was simply telling my story to people who asked, but the story became a kind of spiel as I learned that these people — sometimes without my even asking — were willing to loan me money.

The questions came because the business was unique. But what interested these people, really, were dreams. I couldn’t get a job as a professor, and I couldn’t make any money as a writer, but instead of taking a job I didn’t want, I was creating my own university on the water. It was an American Dream founded on another more recent dream, of Continuing Education, and my guests could feel satisfaction from participation in both. The two dreams fit together so well because really, in their best parts, they’re the same dream. How many of us ever get the chance to live a life in which everything comes together perfectly, so that everything we do engages us and represents who we are?

By the end of the summer, I purchased the hull with loans from my guests. Seref and I tried to make a more detailed budget for finishing, but really there were too many unknowns. I would ship much of the equipment from the United States. The labor and wood and other basic materials were all cheaper in Turkey. Seref was going to put together a team of Bodrum’s finest: the best electrician, carpenter, mechanic, and painter. He had the contacts, and this was a good, interesting boat, so he could get the best people, he said, and still keep the cost low. We would leave the boat in the yard’s shed for three or four months, to lay the deck, paint the hull, finish the pilothouse, and install its windows, then the boat would be dragged outside and finished on the beach.

These were exciting times, making plans and walking through the enormous steel hull. I felt extremely lucky.

That fall and winter I kept raising loans and sending large amounts of money to Seref. Construction was fully underway. It was bothering me, though, that I couldn’t be there, on site, to supervise. I was still teaching at Stanford fall and spring, and running charters on Grendel in Mexico during the winter.

Already it was seeming the boat would go over budget. Seref became cagey in February and March, no longer committing to stay within a certain range.

Then came the war in Kosovo. It filled the news all spring. As a result, Americans were not traveling to Turkey and no one was signing up for my charters. In addition to creative writing classes, I was offering great courses in classics and archaeology by professors from Stanford. The potential students — successful, intelligent professionals from the San Francisco Bay Area and across the United States — told me again and again over the phone that the trips sounded wonderful and they would have signed up if not for the war.

I tried to point out that the war was not in Turkey, but in 1999, American geography lumped Turkey with all the other nameless countries around it, so no one cared. One woman, after receiving a postcard I had sent to five thousand people on the Poets & Writers mailing list, sent several notes cursing me for offering cruises in a place where warplanes were flying over every day and children were dying. I didn’t know what to write back to her. That the warplanes she was thinking of were flying over Italy but not Turkey? That children are always dying in every country, but not currently in Turkey except from causes other than the war in Kosovo? Turkey has a million-man standing army. The idea that the ground war in Kosovo could have somehow spilled into Turkey was a bit imaginative.

The big political event for Turkey was the nabbing of the Kurdish rebel leader Ocalan (pronounced Oh-je-lawn ) by the government. This triggered a U.S. State Department warning to travelers and also kept Americans away from Turkey, though it shouldn’t have. Whether one considered Ocalan the true and persecuted leader of the Kurds in Turkey or simply a butcher and drug lord most Kurds didn’t want any part of, either way his capture would lead to the most politically peaceful summer in Turkey in fifteen years.

Instead of making $200,000 in net income that summer, to help pay for the construction of the boat, I would take a loss. But every two weeks I still had to come up with another $25,000 or so for construction, and I didn’t have any money. The boat was being financed through credit cards and loans from former passengers, and my reliance on credit cards was increasing. I was working hard at selling loans, but with Ocalan and Kosovo, they were getting harder to sell.

By the time I left again for Turkey, in early June 1999, after frantically reading and grading to finish teaching my four spring courses at Stanford, I was far behind financially. It was possible that construction would stop and the boat would not be launched. I was forced to cancel several empty charters to consolidate the summer and reduce my losses. Now my first charter wasn’t until the end of July. But I wasn’t sure the boat could be ready by then even if I came up with the money to keep construction going. I wasn’t sleeping, and I was doubting myself, wondering why on earth I had ever decided to build this bigger boat. The weight of debt and failure seemed a physical thing lodged in my chest and far beyond my control.

The things I believed about myself were becoming untrue. I believed I always succeeded. I believed my hard work would pay off. I believed I was good for my word, that of course I would repay any debt. I believed I treated people well and fairly. I wanted to keep believing these things. And I knew my father had felt this same fear, of becoming something other than what he had always imagined himself to be. I wondered if this was part of what had made suicide begin to seem reasonable.

WHEN I ARRIVED in Turkey that June, the boat was down on the beach, among the great wooden hulls. Its masts lay alongside, one ninety feet long, the other sixty. I had chosen wood because it evokes the romance of sailing and the sea.

“I selected this wood myself,” Seref said, a hand on the main mast. “I let it dry for over two months. So strong.”

I walked along the mast, happy to be with Seref again and happy to be in this beautiful place, on ancient shores. But the two men who were screwing aluminum sail track to its aft edge were not caulking. They were just putting the screws in dry, which would rot the wood. One of the two men had a bandage over his thumb, except that it ended short of where a thumb should be.

“What happened to his thumb?” I asked Seref.

“He lost it a few days ago working on some wood for the boat.”

I looked again at the man and his bandage. This was terrible. I couldn’t believe he had lost his thumb building my boat.

“He is clumsy,” Seref said. “He already loses another finger building another boat. You don’t need to worry about it. And he doesn’t understand English, don’t worry.”

“But I have to do something.” Though I couldn’t think of what to do. It seemed so crass to give money. How does money replace a thumb? What I wanted was to make it not have happened.