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

The fruit and vegetables were beautiful and strange, things I had never seen. The women were beautiful, too. One in particular I must have stared at twice, when I first walked in and when I walked out. She looked at me in a very hostile way that seemed to double as an invitation. It was something I didn’t know how to read.

I did get back on track for finding the diesel. My guide had acquired several things by now, a small bottle of the alcohol and some nuts and a few cigarettes, trading on what I would pay him in the afternoon, and he was not letting up on the stories, either, most of which I didn’t understand. I did understand that he was not living with either of the two women he had married, and that he had several children and wanted to do great things for them. He had also gone to sea, working on a small local freighter that was in constant danger of capsizing. He spoke of crooked politicians and a murder that had taken place on the docks, and he spoke of the lush, green tropical mountains that were just beyond the ones we could see from the town. I would have to come back, he said, and he would take me into these mountains. They were beautiful, not dry and barren like the ones I could see.

I came to like my guide, not for anything he had done, since he was obviously of low repute and a bit shifty, with a life that had been in ruin for years, but because he was a reminder that we are constantly inventing and reinventing ourselves, and he put no limits on how good or generous he could be in other circumstances. I believed him in this. I, too, had dreams of being generous, of giving to my family and friends if I ever made it, of helping people who needed help. But I was always behind budget and struggling financially, the business always not making it, so at this point I’m sure most people regarded me warily. I wanted to prove them wrong. I wanted to be a good and generous man, and I think this man, my guide, wanted the same things. Probably neither of us would ever realize the dream, but that didn’t make the dreaming any less pure.

The open mid-Atlantic was not quite what any of us had expected. Overcast and muggy, with very little breeze. We kept our sails out almost the entire eleven days, but we also had one engine on.

Every night, the sky cleared and the stars were brilliant. But then every morning, the haze moved in again and the skies became overcast. The seas were also monotonous, never calm but never rough, holding at no more than ten feet.

The enjoyable part of the trip for me was spending time with my uncle. At first this was while playing cards and during mealtimes and watches at the helm. But then, halfway through the trip, we began sanding the outside of the pilothouse, getting a jump on all the work to be done in Trinidad. I led with a beltsander, tearing down through old varnish, gray wood, and warped seams with rough, fifty-grit belts. My uncle followed using an orbital sander with eighty-grit disks, the first step toward smoothing the surface.

We baked in the sun, covered in reddish dust, and discussed the possibilities for the business. Schools of flying fish skimmed the water. The haze sometimes cleared away later in the afternoon, leaving a sky deep blue and enormous. It was the way we had first known each other, when I was a child and we had hunted or fished with my father, out in a wild land so beautiful, whether it was Alaska or California. We had fished for king salmon or stood at the tops of ridges scanning for bucks or wild boar. This would become one of those times.

But now we understood each other better. This business was my chance to escape wage labor and never getting ahead. Doug had seen my father try making a living on the water, too, had worked alongside him, and though it hadn’t panned out in the end, Doug considered the venture a success because of the experiences they had shared. It had been wonderful and strange.

One night in the Bering Sea, their compass and electronics had shown them spinning in a slow circle, though the rudder was dead center and they were making way on what should have been a straight course. There was no explanation for it. They tried the helm and the rudder was working, but they were slowly being pulled into a vortex. The only possible explanations, it seemed, were supernatural. It was night, of course, and they were a hundred miles from land and the seas were building. That’s always the case when something goes wrong with a boat.

Finally my uncle went out on deck, just to see, though he had no idea what he was looking for. He staggered back and forth in the rain and seas and then saw one of the stabilizers pulled out at a sharp angle, the entire boat heeling that way. They were snagged on something, out in the deep ocean.

Imagination suggested sea monsters and lost cities, but when my father stopped the engines and the boat slowed, they found the stabilizer caught on a large buoy that had dragged them in circles. It was a navigational buoy that had come loose and was drifting. Now it all made sense, but those minutes of not knowing had been unforgettable. Mystery in the world. The two of them out there alone, wondering if their lives would soon be ended.

What I enjoyed most was the new portrait of my father that was emerging. For at least fifteen years after his suicide, I had been very angry at him, hating him for abandoning us and for killing himself in such a dirty, shameful way, blowing his own head off. But now, after my bankruptcy and all of my other smaller frustrations and failures in this business, I could see a man struggling, a man who had been almost exactly my age, who had shared a similar dream of wanting to be able to invent his own life, instead of going every day to a job he hated, a man drawn to the same frontier.

My uncle had also been angry at my father, and for the first ten or fifteen years after my father’s suicide, he fought constant depression. But now he could appreciate the times he’d shared with my father and see him in a more generous light.

My uncle was also able to see me more generously. When I was growing up, he resented that my mother and sister and I had a bit more money than he did, and since my mother didn’t make me work during high school, he felt I never learned to work hard. But now he could see I did know how to work hard. And he could see that we enjoyed the same sense of adventure. One morning we worked for hours on an unusual cooling problem in one of the engines and finally found the inexplicable, a piece of seaweed so large it could not have traveled through all the various strainers to where we found it. Yet there it was. Laughing with him at the absurdity of this, I could have been crew on my father’s boat twenty-five years earlier.

This voyage was easy. A scoop of ice cream each night in the big pilothouse, card games and dice, reading, great conversation, music. But easy as it was, by the time we neared Trinidad, everyone was ready for land. I spotted Tobago in the distance at daybreak. Lush mountains, colorful homes, a tropical paradise. We continued on until Trinidad came into view, and then we cruised along its northern coast. Very rugged and mountainous, like the northern coast of Kauai. There were thousands of small jellyfish in the water, and one of our crew, Mary Helen, who was a marine biologist, told us about drift science.

The most famous “experiment” in drift science involved tennis shoes. A cargo ship had accidentally dumped thousands of new tennis shoes overboard, and for many months afterward, as these tennis shoes traveled the world, managing for the most part to stay together, scientists followed them. The tennis shoes were not strong swimmers, and they were not known to communicate with each other or to have any organizational structure, so they were a good model for studying jellyfish migration. They stayed together unbelievably well, despite storms and currents and everything else.