Day 11, July 7: The New Longest Day, Part I

As I was setting up my tent in a drizzle last night, an envoy from a group dining inside appeared and asked if I might be interested in sleeping in the gazebo on the side yard. “Better for the rain, yes?” she questioned in lilting English. “Ah, yes,” I replied gratefully, wondering why I could not shake my own lilting English French accent. Apparently they’d followed my arrival from across the river through the rain, and the amusement provided by my Snoopy-like wrestling match with my tent had earned me a much-improved set-up for the night. (Note to file: the hard plank floor of a dry gazebo at Levy at the invitation of friendly diners is far preferable to bootless groveling at the Quebec Yacht Club.)

Room with a View: Quebec City from the window of my gazebo.

 

As I quaffed a pre-bedtime libation in the restaurant- something carrying tonic, for resisting the bugs, of course- I met Gerald and Denise. They lived aboard a sailboat here at the marina, and I asked them if they knew where I might purchase charts for the waters to Saguenay. I had run off my map as I arrived in Quebec City, and I knew I’d be heading into large stretches of unpopulated shoreline ahead. My day had also taught me that the water was changing rapidly; this was no longer a charming river delivering me gently to my destination. Gerald said, “Meet me here at 9:30 tomorrow; I have charts for you.” How easy! 9:30 was on the late side for me, but I immediately recalled the scene in Casablanca when the young lovers, desperate to escape, arrange a meeting with Captain Renault to receive their coveted visa.

The young man declares, “We’ll be at your office at 7, Captain.”

“Fine,” replies Renault. “I’ll be there at 10.”

So I was there this morning at 9:30 and Claude was right on time, carrying a bundle of charts under his arm along with something of an appetite for breakfast. His lovely wife Denise accompanied him, and we talked of things Canadian, global, and personal. A musician, Gerald had also spent his career as a principle figure representing artists in labor negotiations in the US, Canada, and abroad. Between liberal forkfuls of hash browns and rye toast, I offered that he should be teaching labor relations and exploring issues of equity with the next generation before so much of his incredible experience is lost. Gerald's stories evoked what recalled reading and even experiencing in my own career….Sinclair Lewis, Walter Reuther, Saul Alinsky, Studs Terkel…all somehow rolled up in my compelling, passionate, principled breakfast companion. Incredible perspectives…a delightful couple....

Gerald and Denise bid me a Bon Voyage before The Mal Voyage.

 And..zoot alours! The Charts!

Gerald’s chart collection represented a collection of maps of waters from Quebec City to Saguenay…from which two middle maps were missing. My first mistake of the day was to elect to push off that morning with an incomplete set, putting me in the dark (literally, as I would find out that night…..) for over forty miles of coastline. In retrospect, this was an incomprehensibly bad call. After all, I’d had my confidence badly shaken yesterday, I had done a pretty realistic job of assessing the mistakes in judgment I had made…and yet here I was at almost noon, pushing off from Quebec City with incomplete charts into fifty miles of essentially uninhabited coastline of increasingly oceanic conditions with 40% of my path- and tonight’s probable landfall- “off the charts” in my possession.

Armchair Analysis: On August 22nd, 2006, I faced what I thought of as “The Longest Day” in an epic struggle to exit the Delaware River for the Chesapeake as I rowed from Troy, NY, to Baltimore. That day and night I covered 62 miles in 17 hours in bad conditions and, at the end, against a building tide, arrived in a heap on a dock at one in the morning. In Quebec I found myself comparing this kind of previous experience to my current situation, finding confidence that “I could do it” because I’d faced tough sledding before. I knew the tides were much, much stronger here in Canada, as was the flow of the St Lawrence. I knew that the water temperature of the Delaware was as that of a bathtub compared to the quick hypothermia underneath me now. And I knew that I had a rocky, unapproachable, and largely uninhabited coastline ahead as opposed to the refuge of marshes and glades of the Delaware. I knew all of this because I’d experienced it in Technicolor®, Surround-Sound®, and Reality® just yesterday…and yet I allowed an incomparable earlier experience cloud my judgment and fuel my boyish enthusiasm on this July departure.

It perhaps also bears noting that I was soon to be 63 years old this morning, not newly 55. When you’re 63, details like this matter.

So I pushed off - too late in the day, underequipped, and overconfident- for the final leg of my journey. I’d soon have a new standard of comparison for a “Longest Day,” one which I’d be grateful to have lived…and passed.     

 

Day 10, July 6 : First Signs….

 

Leaving Portneuf felt a bit like leaving home yet again: delightful people, convenient amenities, a protected harbor, hot water…but with a bit of a push I’d make Quebec City today, and the push had to start early. I’d texted Phil and Helen to see if they were behind me in their newly re-masted Beneteau, but they had yet to depart Sorel; getting the mast up and secured is one thing, but accurately rigging the umpteen miles of lines and cords that hang from it all is yet another. I let them know that Portneuf was a great port even without a storm and that they should make a point of stopping. Maybe Phil could talk some sense into the Screen family.

I felt like a cork coming out of a bottle as I hit the main stream from the marina basin; a standing wave ripped across the river where the turbulent main course hit the relatively still water of the harbor. Before traversing it to the main channel I pulled up to take it all in. It was daunting but seemed manageable. Nevertheless, I slipped into my lifejacket….and I would remain in it all day for the first time in over 2,000 miles of rowing. 

“Daunting but seems manageable” became my rubric for the next three days on the water, but like grade inflation, my standards began to creep as I made progress through increasing risk and found success in tamping down the “daunt”. This creep in judgment vs. reality would bring my rowing to an end in two more days.

If yesterday was a sleigh ride, today’s ride was a roller coaster as the winds continued to build and the current picked up in a narrowing river. Every mile closer to the Atlantic was delivering a stronger tidal effect and on this morning, my Machmeter indicated a groundspeed of better than 7 mph through the swells. I was estimating only a bit more than forty miles to Quebec City and at this pace I’d be there for a late lunch. Yeeehaaa!!...right?

Gentle Reader, no doubt you’ve heard expressions like “less is more” or “scarcity breeds demand”? How about “go slow to go fast”? “Slow and steady wins the race”? “Haste makes waste”? “Don’t run with scissors in your hands”? Well, maybe the scissors thing doesn’t really fit but the idea here, the irony, I guess, is that this morning I’d been given a trifecta of natural phenomenon that any rower would welcome: a following current, an outgoing tide, and strong tailwind. On still water, each would be a blessing. In combination on a river rapidly morphing into ocean, they became unusable at best…and opponents at worst.

As the waves built and soon became as confused and randomly directed as the 113^th Congress, I pulled down my diminutive “pusher sail” (good for tailwinds, bad for gales), dropped out of my sliding seat (good for power and efficiency, bad for center of gravity and stability), and settled into my fixed wicker seat. For long stretches I had to stop rowing altogether simply to maintain a safe heading relative to the large waves that were building and breaking around me. At times I even turned around, facing forward, stabbing at the water with directional, not propulsive, strokes in order to be able to see and take a path through the most threatening stuff.

As I read what I have just written, I wonder why I did not simply pull for shore to wait it out. In fact, my handwritten journal at the end of the day carries this closing sentence: “Took too many chances today in open water, pushing for speed and line. Took sail down twice after scaring myself…a dump (in the water) would have ended it all. Gotta’ slow down/ take time out!”

Did I really need to be ashore, safe and dry in my sleeping bag, to have this epiphany? The fact is that on the water, in the middle of it all, concentrating on staying upright and keeping the worst of the water out of the boat, knowing that you are making progress even if more at the whim of the river than your own heavy labor, the impulse is to stay at it, keep going, plug away, press on. Perhaps because I have spent a lot of time on many trips rowing against headwinds, currents, and waves, when the cards were with me this day- even if they were one quick draw away from overpowering me- my unthinking impulse was to keep going, to make progress, to take advantage of any serendipity regardless of seemingly manageable risk. As a former pilot I’m reminded of the malady of “get-home-itis” that plagues aviators who hazard flights through conditions beyond their experience or ability. You read the accident reports of crashes based on this “probable cause” and you say, “What poor judgment. Why didn’t he just wait it out? What could have been so important to have risked it all?”

These questions are rarely answered. They hang there, hoping to be used as lessons for the rest of us. 

So “daunting but manageable” got me to Quebec City late in the day, but the trifecta had compelled me to slow down, to limp into port in a cold downpour. I’d eaten only Nature Valley granola bars and water all day and, famished and freezing, I pulled into the Quebec City Yacht Club wondering if the 1% might be feeling generous this day. I noted that there was not another boat like mine in their inventory. A taciturn bureaucrat would not grant me permission to pitch a tent on their property but was perfectly happy to sell me an early dinner, and I was too tired to be righteously indignant. Sitting alone in their capacious dining room, dripping an expanding puddle on the flagstone floor and making periodic forays to the Men’s Room to warm myself with the hand dryer, I feasted.

I asked the Yacht Club Manager where I might find success pitching a tent for the night (hoping that he might relent at the last minute seeing as how I was obviously harmless, had just dropped a fortune on an early dinner at his empty establishment, and would leave no footprint of my presence the following morning). He said that downstream, a few miles past the city, a municipal beach on the east side was sometimes “used by those kayakers for such purposes.” I asked him about the small marina that was directly across the river from us in a clearly industrial-looking area, and he frowned and waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, no. No, don’t go there.” 

Back in the boat in the cold rain of a grey evening, facing the river again just north of Quebec City, I rowed directly to Levy.

Today I’d picked up the first signs of the ocean ahead…a first taste of salt, a first taste of ceding control to the water….a first taste of doubt.

But tonight, I would sleep well at Levy.