THE CROSSING

ALEC WILKINSON. The New Yorker. New York: Jun 27, 2005.

 

Twenty-one years ago, David Pearlman decided that he should have a new name, and began calling himself by the first one that came to him: Poppa Neutrino. A neutrino is an itinerant particle so small that it can hardly be detected. Pearlman, who was fifty, incorrectly believed that its existence was theoretical. The name appealed to him because, being suppositional, the particle represented the elements of the hidden life that exert their influence discreetly. Also because of the particle's capacity for unremitting movement. Mr. Neutrino is nomadic. I once unfolded a map of the country and asked him to trace the routes he had travelled, and he hadn't completed the first twenty years of his life before the pen had worn through the paper.

A year ago, Neutrino and his dog, a female Boston terrier, left Key West for California in a van he had been given by some friends. Attached to the van was a trailer on which sat a crudely made raft that Neutrino had built from plywood. Some of the plywood he had bought and some he had found thrown away at construction sites. The raft was twelve feet long and four feet wide, and it had a small cabin. People who saw it did not usually conclude that it was a raft. It looked like a tree house, or possibly a shed for poultry. It did not look like anything that would float. Neutrino planned to sail across the Pacific by himself, something that had been accomplished on a raft only once, by William Willis, in 1964, when Willis was seventy-one years old. Thor Heyerdahl, the first modern man to sail some ways across the Pacific on a raft, sailed, in 1947, with five companions aboard the raft Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia. Neutrino regarded Heyerdahl and Willis as heroes.

Neutrino drove to Los Angeles and left the raft at a friend's house. While he was in Los Angeles, his wife, Betsy Terrell, who had been visiting her family in Maine, called his cell phone and said that she wanted to drive out West and see him before he left. They met in Phoenix, then Neutrino drove back to Los Angeles and retrieved the raft, and he and Terrell drove to Flagstaff to escape the desert heat. After Terrell had left, Neutrino parked the raft on its trailer in a storage lot in Buckeye, Arizona, off Interstate 10, near Phoenix, and drove to Los Angeles again. He now thought that if he could make it across the Pacific he could continue around the world and return to Key West. No one has ever sailed around the world on a raft.

Neutrino is about five feet nine, with broad, sloping shoulders. His forearms and hands are so thick that they look like tools. He has a square face, widely set eyes, and a flawless nose. From each of its wings a curved line descends to enclose his lips, like parentheses. His eyes are a chalky blue, like a glaze on pottery. His regard is direct and measuring. He is extremely vigilant. He has a short white beard and short white hair, which he cuts by gathering strands of it between his second and third fingers and clipping the parts that stick out. He began losing teeth years ago, and he has only two of them left, one in each jaw.

The first teeth Neutrino lost were the front ones, in a fight when he was fifteen. He found the teeth on the ground. It was a very cold night, and he pressed them back into place and pinched the gums, and, perhaps because of the cold, when he took his hands away they stayed where they were, and they were fine for fifteen years. He looked funny, though, because he had reversed them. In the center of his forehead is a scar he received one night as a young man when he came out of a bar in San Francisco playing a trumpet. A kid on the sidewalk asked to see the trumpet, and when Neutrino gave it to him he hit Neutrino with the bell of it right between the eyes.

Neutrino is implacably restless. He has never occupied a house or an apartment for more than a year. He finds possessions oppressive and, being an idealist, has tirelessly pursued an existence in which he would be free of all burdens. On the few occasions when he has worked for money, he has performed mostly day labor. When I first met him, through a friend, he was in Los Angeles, singing on the street. He had found a place that he liked on Venice Beach, among people who sold incense and beads and fragrant oils and T-shirts with sayings such as "If I'm Not Here, I'm Out Looking for Myself." The next day, when I called him on his cell phone, it sounded as if he was in a car that was moving and had the window open. I asked where he was, and he said about twenty miles outside San Diego. "I needed to get some motion under me," he said. He has three grown children, a son and two daughters. (A third daughter died from an illness in her thirties.) In addition, he has a stepdaughter and has raised two other children. When I asked Ingrid, the older of the daughters, why she thought that her father moved so often, she said, "I don't think he can help himself." I asked him once, "What keeps you moving?," and he said, "I wish I knew that." He thought for a moment. "What it comes down to is I don't want to ride the same horse in the same race tomorrow," he said. "I want to ride a different horse, or be in a different race." The solitary apprehension he has been unable to shed, and which has only deepened with the years, is that something significant might have happened for him somewhere if only he had stayed a little longer.

Like many people who behave capriciously, Neutrino believes that he acts only after much reflection. His idea of existence requires constant refreshment and renewal. If he has ever become so absorbed by a pursuit that he hasn't been willing to discard it for another that seems more appealing, I don't know what it is. I told him once that I thought his behavior was inconsistent. He shrugged. "A series of incidents have created your present reality," he said. "Because of the forces involved in anyone's life, better situations are going to come along than the one you're engaged in. If you can break the alignment without hurting somebody, why not break the alignment? Death is going to break your alignment eventually anyway."

Neutrino is as profane a figure as I have ever encountered, but there is also something sanctified about him, something sweet and undefended and raw and noble--his insistence on remaining uncorrupted by material ambitions, his almost desperate responsiveness to joy, to being footloose and feverish, to moving forward with his arms opened wide and his eyes on the horizon. There must have been more like him in earlier times--chasers after stakes and claims, odds players, followers of the reckless and wild hope--especially among the citizens of the Western territories, where his ancestors are from.

Neutrino was born in San Francisco in 1933. His bloodlines are motley. His father, Louis Pearlman, was in the Navy. He left on a ship shortly after Neutrino was conceived and never appeared again. His mother, Vilma McDaniel, married a man named James Maloney, who Neutrino believed was his father. He was raised as David Maloney. In 1966, Neutrino went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for a small newspaper in San Francisco. His second wife--he has had four--was the paper's editor. The security clearance he was required to obtain turned up his real name.

Vilma McDaniel was an incorrigible gambler. She liked dice games and lowball poker. Vilma was descended from a family named Farlow, from Lander, Wyoming. According to the Pioneer Museum in Lander, Neutrino's cousin Albert Farlow, who had short legs as a child and was called Stubby, is the cowboy riding the bucking bronco on the Wyoming license plate.

Neutrino spent his childhood in cheap hotels. Maloney worked as a fish-and-poultry man in a market in San Francisco, and on Monday mornings he drew money from his boss and paid a week's rent on a room. What was left over he gave Vilma to gamble with. Vilma would spend much of the day in bed, "reading and concocting schemes," Neutrino says. If she went out during daylight, it was usually to someone's house to play pinochle or gin rummy.

Neutrino's attendance at school was sporadic. Vilma would sometimes appear in his classroom and say, "David, come on, we're going," and Maloney would be waiting in a car at the curb to take them to Reno. He thinks that by the time he was fifteen he had gone to forty or fifty schools. "I was always being shifted around," he says. "And for some reason I loved this. If I ever wanted a more stable life as a child, I've repressed it." Now and then, in the stream of conversation that passed above his head, Neutrino heard the adults deploring the vagrant life he was subject to, and he would wonder what they could possibly mean. "It may have been a strange childhood," he says. "I suppose it was a strange childhood, but it was the best one for me."

Neutrino says he joined the Army at fifteen, having said he was eighteen. He was discharged at sixteen, and for the next several years he moved mainly along the track of Route 66, living the species of exalted life that Jack Kerouac later described in "On the Road." In Texas, he enrolled in a seminary and became a preacher. In Nevada, he gambled. When he was twenty-one, he arrived in San Francisco and met a group of bohemians that included Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Neal Cassady, the man on whom Kerouac based the character Dean Moriarty. With his third wife, he walked for months through the Mexican desert. In New Mexico, he tried selling life insurance. In New York, he built a canoe in the basement of an apartment building. He planned to launch the canoe in the East River and sail to Cuba and shake Castro's hand, but the canoe turned out to be too large to fit through the basement door. He started a church called the First Church of Fulfillment, the first church in history that didn't claim to know the way, and it thrived for several months. In California, he formed a group of roughly a dozen people who travelled around the country painting signs and called it the Salvation Navy. So as not to pay rent, the Navy lived on rafts, mainly on the Mississippi River. "Mind you, nobody's interested in repeating the experience--not my children, not anyone else who was with me--but it defined their lives," Neutrino says. "It made them self-reliant. It gave them the power to know that no material obstacle could defeat them." In the nineteen-eighties, Neutrino formed a band with Terrell, her daughter Marisa, and Ingrid. The girls were five and twelve. Marisa played drums, and Ingrid danced. The band also included a boy named Todd Londigan, who played trombone. Londigan was the child of a woman named Donna Londigan, who played accordion, and whom Neutrino had raised. They called themselves the Flying Neutrinos, and went to New Orleans to play music on the street. Eventually, Terrell and Neutrino's daughter, Jessica, joined the band, and so did a girl they had adopted named Esther.

In 1988, the Neutrinos went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Neutrino was given a barge that the town had condemned. From parts of floating docks that had been thrown away and driftwood he found in the harbor, he and the family built a raft on the barge hull. Using scavenged lumber, they built cabins and two paddle wheels, one on each side of the bow. The paddle wheels turned by means of a motor that had been part of a generator discarded from the town hall, so Neutrino called the raft Town Hall. It was cumbersome and unsightly, but the paddle wheels, painted yellow and blue and red, gave the raft a rakish appeal. Neutrino decided to sail it to New York.

The raft made four or five miles an hour. It went, almost in slow motion, across Cape Cod Bay and through the Cape Cod Canal and down along the coast. In Newport, Rhode Island, Neutrino ran aground and had to be pushed off the beach by a bulldozer. In Narragansett, he was taken to court for refusing to pay mooring fees. On Christmas Eve, he ran aground in Southport, Connecticut, in front of a house that belonged to the actor Jason Robards. The paddle wheel was damaged, and a huge crew of people helped the family rebuild it. More than a hundred came to see them get under way once more.

Neutrino had heard about a club on the Hudson called the Amazon Village, which was built on Pier 25, not far from the World Trade Center, and he thought the owner might be amused by his raft and let him tie up beside the club. When he docked, Neutrino says he walked up the gangway and was met by the actor Jack Nicholson, who shook his hand and said, "You've got a great-looking vessel." The owner, Shimon Bokovza, an Israeli, "built like a brick firehouse," Neutrino says, "very strong and very commando," came over. He took Neutrino to his security guards, "huge karate guys dressed in black," and said that Neutrino was to have access at all hours to the club and the pier and that no one in his party was required to observe the club's dress code. Neutrino spent the next four years coming and going from the pier.

A lot of people in the city regarded the raft as an eyesore. Kids threw rocks at it. They broke the windows so many times that Neutrino repaired some of them only with saran wrap. The Coast Guard told Neutrino that the raft could stay in the Hudson River but it couldn't leave. "Their vessel is grossly unsafe," Chief Petty Officer Alan Burd told a reporter from Newsday. "It's pieced together with scrap."

Neutrino had for several years thought about building a raft that could cross the Atlantic Ocean. He began walking around the city looking for materials. Floating in the harbor one day were four thirty-two-foot-long timbers that had been part of a seawall. Neutrino decided that they could frame the hull. Bokovza told him that he could build the raft at Pier 25. In Rockaway, in a bird sanctuary, Neutrino, Terrell, and some friends retrieved Styrofoam bricks that were floating among the reeds. People gave them wood. They made frames of two-by-sixes and filled them with empty plastic bottles, pieces of cork--anything that would float--then fixed all the objects in place with polyurethane foam. Then they covered the frames with plywood.

In a trash pile in Tribeca, Neutrino found a parachute, which he laid over a webbing of rope to make a sail. His idea was that the sails should be made not of one piece of material but of many pieces, so that repairing one would mean replacing only the section that had torn. Elsewhere in Tribeca, he and Terrell found in a Dumpster a coil of rope, about three thousand feet long, which the power company had got rid of.

Boats float because water can't get into them. Water invading a raft built with foam is a matter of indifference. Foam floats whether it is wet or dry. Water can come and go, except your feet get wet. "If a raft is unable to sink," Neutrino says, "I only had to make sure that it stayed right side up and did not come apart." A heavy sea can batter a boat or a raft to pieces--the wood splinters, the screws and nails are torn from their shafts. Neutrino drilled holes every two feet in the hull and the cabins of his raft. He fed rope through each hole, then knotted it and ran it through the next hole, so that when he was finished the raft was woven together like a basket. A structure held together by screws and glue and nails is rigid. A basket is supple. Even if all the carpentry failed, he believed that the raft would remain intact.

"Where did I get this notion? I have no idea," Neutrino says. "From the cornucopia of my mind. Somebody put it in there a long time ago, and it came out in this way."

When Son of Town Hall was ready to be launched, Neutrino threw a party. About a hundred people attended. They wedged pipes underneath the raft as levers and tipped the hull toward the water. Eventually, the raft slid over the edge of the pier, and dropped ten feet into the water. It landed upside down. Almost immediately it righted itself. The raft drew seven inches, exactly what Neutrino had planned. By the time the motor was aboard and the family's belongings--including the piano from the Amazon Village, which had since closed--it drew eighteen, which was also what he had hoped for.

Neutrino and Terrell spent a few months sewing the sails and buying food for the crossing. They decided that rather than leave for Europe from New York they would sail to Provincetown first and show their friends the raft. Before they could depart, the Coast Guard boarded them. The officers looked in the cabins and the engine room and inspected the sails and then, according to Neutrino, they told him, "No way are you going. No way does this vessel even leave the dock." The Captain of the Port, from his office, issued an order saying that Son of Town Hall was "manifestly unsafe." The phrase denotes the highest category of risk a vessel can receive, and it means that it cannot leave port.

The matter came into the hands of Michael Karr, a Coast Guard commander, who was the chief of the Inspection Department. Karr wanted to see the raft before affirming the judgment. No regulations or standards apply in the decision of whether or not a raft is seaworthy. "You know it when you see it," Karr says. We spoke on the phone. I asked if he had ever before seen anything resembling Son of Town Hall. "Let me think about that. Seen anything like it," he said. He paused. Then he said, "I'd have to say no. It was certainly not like any other homemade craft."

Neutrino recalls that Karr's inspection lasted several hours. Karr had heard of "Kon-Tiki," Heyerdahl's account of his voyage, so he knew that a raft is capable of travelling on an ocean. Son of Town Hall had outriggers, and wasn't likely to tip over. It had a motor. Careful thought had obviously gone into assuring its buoyancy. Karr asked Neutrino what route he planned to take to Provincetown, and they looked at charts together.

Karr sent his report to harbormasters up the coast. "I'm thinking, If Thor Heyerdahl could do it, why can't someone else?" Karr says. "It's a free country." Karr likes to point out that what he gave Neutrino was permission to leave New York Harbor and travel to Provincetown. He did not give him permission to "cross the open ocean."

Neutrino and Terrell sailed from New York on Son of Town Hall in the fall of 1995. They left Town Hall moored in the river off Pier 25, a privilege they believed was protected by maritime law. Aboard Town Hall were the family's clothes and books and photographs--everything they owned that they didn't want to take on the crossing. Developers saw the raft as a blight on the waterfront. They felt that it would encourage other transients to build rafts, with the result that the riverfront would become a floating slum. A state official said he would have the Neutrinos evicted. Another told the Daily News, "It is time for the Flying Neutrinos to stop being the floating neutrinos and get out of the river."

In May of 2000, the Hudson River Park Trust towed the raft upriver. As Town Hall was being lifted by a crane, one of the straps supporting it gave way. The raft fell to the river and broke apart, and the Neutrinos' belongings floated away or sank.

Rafts: Neutrino's hero William Willis made two trips on the Pacific in rafts. The first, in 1954, when he was sixty-one, took him from Peru to Samoa, six thousand seven hundred miles. (Heyerdahl had sailed four thousand three hundred miles.) The second, begun in 1963, when he was sixty-nine, took him from Peru to Australia, nearly ten thousand miles, the longest raft trip ever. The first trip was made on a raft built from balsa logs lashed together, in imitation of Heyerdahl, and the second trip was made on a raft built from steel pipes and pontoons filled with foam.

Willis was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1893. He was fifteen when he began working aboard sailing ships. He moved to America when he was seventeen. In addition to being a merchant sailor, he was a longshoreman in California, a logger in Alaska, California, and the Pacific Northwest, a hand in the wheat harvests on the Great Plains, and a rig builder in the Texas oil fields. He also wrote six books, among them a book of poems called "Hell, Hail and Hurricanes."

Willis married a theatrical agent in New York who had an office in Rockefeller Center. For his first trip across the Pacific, he read charts of the tides and currents in the map room of the New York Public Library, on Forty-second Street. He left Peru in June of 1954. He took with him a black cat and a parrot. The cat killed the parrot. To keep himself awake, he ate raw sugar and drank instant coffee.

As he sat through storms, he wondered how much his raft could take before it would come apart. Fishing for dolphin one day, he caught a shark and, in retrieving the hook, he fell overboard. The raft sailed away without him. He realized that the fishing line wrapped around his wrist was attached to the raft. The line was frayed. If it snapped, Willis was lost. About two hundred feet lay between Willis and the raft. Hand over hand, he began pulling himself toward it. The line cut his hand deeply, and the water around him filled with blood. He wondered where the sharks were that had been following him for days, and particularly one about nine feet long whom he called Long Tom and who for weeks had seemed to be underneath the raft or just behind it. When he finally reached the raft and hauled himself aboard, he found a needle and thread and sewed his hand.

Willis was about halfway across the Pacific when he discovered that salt had corroded the seams of his water cans and almost all his water had leaked out. He allowed himself one cup a day, which he supplemented by drinking one cup of seawater. He was careful to dip his cup in the water only when he was sure no sharks were around. He often dreamed of New York, where his wife was. Lying one afternoon asleep on the deck with a shirt over his head, he woke when the raft moved, and in a wave that loomed above him he plainly saw a shark that looked ready to attack him. He assumed the shark would be washed on deck. He jumped up to defend himself. The shark fell and the raft rose on the wave that had contained it. Occasionally at night, the phosphorescence thrown up by the waves as they struck the bow would seem to merge with the sky, and he would feel as if he were sailing among the stars.

He landed after a hundred and fifteen days at sea.

In the spring of 1996, Son of Town Hall sailed from Provincetown to Maine, and from there left for Europe with four people aboard: Neutrino, Terrell, Jessica, who was twelve, and their friend Ed Garry. They also had with them two Rottweilers and a little mutt they had picked up in Mexico. The first night, they were about thirty miles offshore when the wind rose to twenty miles an hour. Instead of steering downwind, the raft turned sideways, and Neutrino couldn't correct it. "I realized then that I have failed utterly," he says. "No way we're going to make it across the Atlantic sideways." They waited for the storm to pass, then they put in at Portland. They were tied up at the dock, broke and discouraged, when Neutrino, seated on a stool and opening a can of beer, passed out and fell backward into a basin filled with dirty water. He'd had a heart attack. For nearly two weeks, he lay in intensive care.

While he was recovering, a ship struck a piling in Portland Harbor and spilled some oil. Representatives from an insurance company went through the harbor settling claims. They gave the Neutrinos fifty-five hundred dollars, because oil had got into the raft's foam and shrunk it. With the money, Neutrino made a daggerboard out of sheets of plywood he bolted together. They took the raft to sea, and when the wind rose they dropped the daggerboard, and the raft sailed downwind.

They put in by the shipyards at Bath. A friend named Rodger Doncaster took Jessica's place. Doncaster didn't know how to sail. In June of 1997, moving so slowly that they left almost no wake, they headed for the ocean. Neutrino was exhausted but also elated to be under way.

"To launch this expedition after all the setbacks and obstacles, to hold on when the will to say hold on was gone, to go against all the harbormasters that ridiculed this vessel, the police who came to drive it off public property, the near-impossibility of financing it on our own, the heart attack, and the failures of design we had to correct--all of it drove me to my deepest, deepest despair," he says. "We had taken this wood from the streets of New York and set it in motion, and now either we'll make it or we won't."

On the third day out, the sky darkened and the wind picked up. The waves grew to almost twenty feet. Rain fell heavily. Neutrino sat in the stern, in the cockpit, which was raised above the deck, steering. The first big wave loomed over them like a wall. They waited for it to collapse on their heads. Instead, the raft rose suddenly. Then the deck tilted toward the vertical, and Neutrino was suspended aloft. "It seemed like I was looking straight down from the top of a building," he says. Being held like an arrow at the end of a taut bowstring was not anything he had imagined before. He thought the raft would topple over, throwing him into the water with all the weight of it behind him.

"I thought, I'd done all this work, made all these plans, come this far, only to get out here and kill everybody." It was, he says, "the first and only time I ever remember being scared at sea. There must have been other times, but I can't recall them. This I recall." Instead of falling over, the raft slid down the wave like a sled down a hill. By the time it reached the bottom, Neutrino felt sure that it could take the strain. "She would have climbed up fifty-foot waves," he says. "I might not have taken it, but she would."

After that, the days passed slowly. The broad black backs of whales broke the surface off the stern. In a thick fog, the crew had a close call with a fishing boat that crossed their bow hauling a net. No one had taught them how to read their radar, so eventually they learned on their own that the shapes on the screen were not always other boats--they might also be storms--and that sometimes boats close enough to harm them might not show up at all. It was much colder than they had expected July on the ocean to be. The fog made the air clammy, and the damp cold worked its way under their watch caps and the layers of sweaters and parkas. In the North Atlantic, something called the "fifty-fifty-fifty rule" applies. If you fall overboard into fifty-degree water, you have a fifty-fifty chance of surviving more than fifty minutes. The water around them was generally sixty degrees.

On the first morning of their third week, Neutrino woke Terrell and asked for the nitroglycerin tablets that the hospital had given him for his heart. He took two of the tablets, and she put her arms around him, and he lost consciousness. "A gentle fadeout" is how he describes it. He came to with her pounding his chest and shouting, "Wake up! Wake up!" About a minute had passed. She put him to bed, and he slept. "We are all very badly shaken," she wrote in the captain's log.

Neutrino woke in the afternoon and got up, "acting like nothing had happened," Terrell wrote. He needed to drink more water, he said. They changed the watch schedule to allow him to rest.

The ocean appeared to be growing warmer, leading them to think that they were approaching the Gulf Stream. Halfway through the third week, according to the charts, they reached it, but their momentum seemed no different from what it had been. "All of us are exhausted," Terrell wrote. "All we do is sleep, eat, and take watch."

On the night of August 3rd, they hit a thunderstorm. Rain fell in sheets. The waves were steep and close together. Each one knocked the raft off its keel, sometimes by as much as forty-five or fifty degrees, "only to come sharply back and be hit again. Slam, slam. Very uncomfortable," Terrell wrote. "Nearly sleepless night." A day later, Neutrino called them together, and they agreed to go with the wind rather than fight it, which would take them to Newfoundland, about a hundred miles behind them. If the wind turned around, they would continue to France.

Through a ship they spoke to on the radio, they raised the Coast Guard, who arranged for them to be towed to Fermeuse, Newfoundland. They arrived on August 9th, after forty days at sea.

For nearly a week, a steady stream of people came to the wharf to see the raft. They brought babies and children. Men planted their backsides against the fenders of pickup trucks and folded their arms and shook their heads. Neutrino told them that the raft was unsinkable, that it handled the waves well, and that their biggest fear was termites. On the deck, he set up a keyboard, and he sang and Terrell played saxophone, and they sold CDs of the Flying Neutrinos.

The raft spent ten months in Newfoundland. Leaving Garry aboard, Neutrino and Terrell spent the winter painting signs in Texas and Arizona. On their way back, they drove to Nova Scotia to take the ferry and left their car in the parking lot. "It's probably still there," Neutrino says.

Neutrino, Terrell, and Doncaster returned in May of 1998. They had the raft lifted out of the water for repairs. The lift had a scale; the raft weighed seventeen tons. A month later, they put it back in the water. The Canadian authorities came to inspect it, and, after taking the raft for a test run, Neutrino and the others slipped out of Fermeuse when no one was around, early on the morning of June 15th.

A few days later, on the Grand Banks, Neutrino found that the engine would run at no more than idle speed. "It would move the raft just barely," Neutrino says. The engine's breaking down meant they had no way to get off the Grand Banks. "Picture the North Atlantic as a big basin," Terrell says. "The winds come across the equator and curve and circle the basin clockwise. The currents follow the winds. The middle is dead calm--the Sargasso Sea. Our plan had been to motor from Newfoundland to the Grand Banks, raise the sails, hook up with the Gulf Stream, and romp across to Europe, but we never on the entire voyage had any considerable current. On the Banks, the winds are confused, because you haven't yet really contacted the major ocean effects. We couldn't get a consistent current or wind, and almost as soon as we encountered the currents we were blown out of them."

Without the help of the wind or the currents, and without an engine, they were travelling about two miles per hour, considerably slower than a person walks. They were, in other words, walking very slowly across the ocean to France. The biggest challenge was to avoid being sent backward by the current. They woke one morning to discover that since they had last taken their position, the day before, the raft had traced a circle.

They ran short of fuel for the generator, and decided that they should use the radar, which relied on the generator, only in poor weather. Everyone had come to feel anxious, weary, and oppressed. On the open ocean, the raft looked like a spectre, a ghost ship, as if made from rags and rope and lumber, a vessel from the end of the world, something medieval, the flagship of nothingness.

One evening, Neutrino intercepted Terrell as she was headed toward the stern. She was going to jump off. The look in her eyes made him feel that she was no longer in possession of herself. "I want my children," she said, sobbing. "I want my children." He held her and talked softly to her for a long time, and she wept, and, little by little in the course of the night, she recovered herself.

Garry had the idea that, instead of fighting the current, they should sail with it and see what happened. The raft gathered momentum, and before long they intersected a crosscurrent travelling in the direction they wanted to go, and it carried them off the Grand Banks.

A few days later, Terrell was startled to hear a blast from a horn. She sighted a freighter about a mile away. The freighter was from Russia, and the captain was fascinated by the raft. On the radio, he asked if they needed anything, and they said fresh fruit and vegetables and gas. He circled them and brought the freighter alongside, which took an hour. The ship towered above them, and the wash tipped the raft. The captain sent a launch, and Neutrino and Garry went aboard. He gave them fifty pounds of potatoes, as well as oranges and apples and cabbages and beets and ten gallons of gas. The sailors waved goodbye from the deck. They took photographs. They yelled good luck. Their command of English was imperfect. "Thank you for your show to the world," the captain said. "We'll show the world this floating radish."

For a whole day, with nothing in sight but a dark-gray sea, Terrell could smell flowers, horses, "and a certain smell the earth has when it's been tilled and turned and has rain falling on it": the Azores.

They had intended to strike France, but Neutrino had grown uneasy at the thought that if they pointed toward France they might enter the Bay of Biscay and, without a motor, meet a circular current that would send them down the coast of Africa to South America. He insisted they set their course toward Scotland. They hit Ireland instead.

By the time they entered the harbor at Castletownbere, word of the strange craft approaching had spread, and the shore was lined with people. Every room in the town's bed-and-breakfasts had been taken. They were not the first sailors to cross the North Atlantic on a raft. They were the second. A Canadian named Henri Beaudout had done it in 1956. They were the first to cross on a raft made from garbage. The crew were so exhausted that they had difficulty thinking straight. They accepted a tow. They sat on the deck in lawn chairs and waved to the people. Neutrino turned to Doncaster and said, "Give us a comment."

Doncaster looked off at the water, thinking, then he looked back at Neutrino and said, "We have done the impossible."

Neutrino told reporters that they had "broken the scrap barrier." They had been at sea for sixty days.

During the first week of August, 2004, Neutrino and I met up in Los Angeles. He had business to dispose of in Tucson, and I drove there with him. Neutrino wanted me to be comfortable in his van, so he vacuumed it. Because he couldn't get all the dog hair off the passenger's seat, he covered it with a coat. Like a Frenchwoman from the historical past, Neutrino often applies perfume instead of bathing. He uses the cheapest fragrances he can find, typically ones he buys at a drugstore. We were going to cross the Mojave Desert. Neutrino thought that he could cool the van with ice. He bought four plastic laundry baskets and put them in the back, beside his bed. Before he picked me up, he filled them with ice cubes.

We left after breakfast. By the time we reached Palm Springs, the day was hot. The sky was a pale blue. On the dashboard was a paperback copy of the Bhagavad Gita. The dog sat between us, on a blanket. Now and then, Neutrino would open a bottle of water and pour some of it on the dog. The water would splash on me, but I don't think he knew it, because he was watching the road. Then he would pat the dog, and more water would spray off her. Then the dog would shake. Every few minutes, Neutrino would stick one hand behind him and wave it around. "Yeah, that's working," he'd say. "I can really feel it now. You feel it?" About once an hour, we would stop and empty the water from the baskets, and every two hours we would buy more ice.

In the desert, the land was dry and puckered like the skin of a raisin. In places, there were so many high-tension wires that they divided the sky like lines on music paper. Every so often we crossed bridges over dried-up rivers. The riverbed and the land around it were the color of linen and looked more like a beach than a riverbed. A sign said one of them was the Gila River.

That afternoon, near Phoenix, we left the highway and drove south through fields and past warehouses and stores and empty lots until we came to Buckeye, and a building that was low and long, with a roof hanging over the front of it, shading the door. A handsome, dark-haired Mexican woman was sweeping the doorway, and when we turned into the parking lot she stopped and went inside. A man with black hair and a face the color of tobacco came out. Neutrino said, "Remember me?" The man smiled and nodded and said hello. "I just wanted to show my friend the raft," Neutrino said. "That all right?" We followed the man to a dusty lot where there were a few trucks and beat-up cars and, on a trailer, like a rare bird among a flock of sparrows, Neutrino's raft. It was the first time I had seen it.

When I recall the moment, I feel my eyes widen. I expected a sleek, handmade craft, varnished and polished and elegant, a craft that would bear up to the life-and-death task being asked of it, a stylish vessel, and it was a scrappy, scuffed-up, bummy-looking, broken-down wreck of a doghouse on a bed of plywood. It looked like something a child had made. There was a cabin about four feet tall at the back of it, and in front of the cabin a deck large enough for Neutrino to sit in a chair. No seam was tight. Where there were gaps, you could see pieces of Styrofoam drink coolers. Some of the plywood was new and some was splintered and peeling and had weathered to a dark gray. The back of the cabin was made from a section of a sign that Neutrino had painted in Key West for Katha Sheehan, a woman he'd met who was running for mayor. Dark-yellow letters on a yellow ground spelled "atha for ayor." The effect of the colors and the lettering was festive. The boards were held in place by screws driven deep into the wood and at angles, instead of being flush with the surface, and the intervals between them were uneven.

"How long did it take you to build?" I asked.

"About four hours," he said.

I nodded.

"I designed her for speed," he said.

Neutrino pointed to where on the sides he meant to install outriggers. Then he told the man he would send money for the next month's rent, and we got back in the van and drove toward Phoenix. When we saw a motel from the highway, I said, "That looks O.K.," and we pulled off and I got a room. We ate dinner in a Mexican restaurant where there were a lot of families and a man who went around the room playing guitar and singing. Neutrino gave him five dollars and spoke to him in Spanish, and they settled on a song for him to sing. Then we went back to the hotel, and Neutrino put a sign in the window of the van with my name and room number on it, and he walked the dog, then went to sleep on his bed in the van.

Neutrino wanted to launch the raft from Mexico. Then he would sail south to Peru, so that he could begin from the same place that Heyerdahl had. Late in October, he attached the trailer to his van and left Buckeye for California. He stopped for several weeks in Calexico, on the border above Mexicali. He had begun thinking that he would launch the raft from San Felipe, in Baja.

In Calexico, he worked a few hours each morning on the raft, then rested, then worked on the raft again. The work was fatiguing, especially because he had to muscle around heavy sheets of plywood by himself. At night, he slept in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart. By himself, in the van in the darkness, he would imagine being on the ocean aboard the raft.

When I called and asked how he was doing, he said, "I think I'm over the fear. Once you start, you don't come back, unless you're a failure. You make it, and you've reentered Rome with a wreath on your head or you've died in battle. If you come back otherwise, it's in disgrace. Last time, with the Atlantic, I won, and, because I did, all kinds of things were possible for me. I'm down as the first scrap raft across the Atlantic. That's mine, it's locked up. No one can duplicate the feat, the century is closed. I'm starting on this new one, and it could be the biggest thing I've ever done. Old man circumnavigates the globe in a twelve-foot scrap raft. So I ask, are you going to let loneliness conquer you? I've made a break with my family. We've talked and said goodbye. I'm practicing with the dog in the car for the solitude. I talk to her at night same as I used to talk to Betsy. I'm alone in a shopping mall, and it's not pleasant, but I have to know that when I'm with the same dog, having the same talks on the water in the darkness, it'll be all right. I've adjusted my psyche and my attitude to it, and I think I have a high-percentage chance to make it. I've never had a raft trip fail. There are things I don't know, and can't know until I'm on the ocean, but if I knew everything already there wouldn't be any adventure."

By the end of November, Neutrino had collected in a storage bin in Calexico charts for the Sea of Cortes, life jackets, a G.P.S., pots and pans and a cooking stove, a motor, and two big watertight suitcases in which he kept video equipment. He still needed a certain kind of foam he called two-part foam, which had to be laid on by hand and would fill cracks and crevices, and some fishing net for his sail. Within a few days, he had got hold of the foam and had decided that he could find the fishing net in Mexico.

One evening around Thanksgiving, in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart, as he was lying down to sleep in his van, his chest constricted and his arms went numb. He said it felt as though someone were tightening an iron band around his chest. It felt about as powerful as his first heart attack, the one that had knocked him out and put him in the hospital for two weeks. For an hour, he lay on his bed. He found his phone and called a nurse he knew in Los Angeles. The two of them believe in other means of healing than conventional ones, and he said, "She sent me a healing over the phone."

He said he was going to rest for a few days. "I've withdrawn from contact with the world, more or less," he went on. "I'm going to play some music, drive around a little, then see how I feel about going back to work."

Rafts redux: William Willis started his crossing to Australia in 1963. He was sixty-nine years old. He built this raft in a boatyard in New Jersey, on the Passaic River. He filled three pontoons with foam, placed two of them in the stern and one in the bow, and welded them together with pipes. The raft was thirty-four feet long and about twenty feet wide and had the approximate shape of a sailboat. In May, he floated the raft down the river to Newark and had it loaded on a boat that was stopping in Callao, Peru.

Before Willis left his wife in New York, he persuaded her that they could communicate telepathically. He left Callao in July. In August, he saw her standing on the deck. He also saw his mother, who had been dead for years. In September, he developed the apprehension that his wife had been killed in a car accident. A few weeks later, he heard a voice telling him that he was doomed and that his only hope for saving himself was to abandon the raft and swim. He arrived in Samoa in November of 1963. In addition to being exhausted, he had a severe hernia. His wife insisted that he return to New York and be treated. When the doctors recommended surgery, Willis concluded that, before he could recover, his raft would rust and sink, and he decided to sail with the hernia. His wife wanted to go with him, but he wouldn't let her.

Willis left Samoa in June of 1964. Immediately, he had trouble with his hernia. To settle it, he wrapped a rope around his ankles and hung himself upside down, turning from side to side until it went back into place. The effort took several hours. He had to repeat it on a number of occasions. He arrived in Australia that September. He anchored the raft and waded ashore with his passport. It took him a little while to find someone to announce himself to. "I'm Willis from New York," he said.

In 1966, when Willis was seventy-two, he left New York to cross the North Atlantic in an eleven-and-a-half-foot sailboat named Little One. He called this adventure "the Oldest Man in the Smallest Boat." He had trouble with another hernia not long after he left, and was picked up by a freighter. He left again the following year. This time, he had bad luck with winds and had been at sea for eighty-nine days when, exhausted, he was rescued by a fishing boat. He waited a year for the favorable season and tried again. This time, the boat was found after eighty days, by a Russian trawler, but Willis never was. He had been seventy-four.

At the beginning of the second week of December, I flew to San Diego, stayed overnight, and the next morning drove east across the mountains and through the desert and then turned south to Calexico. Pretty much the first thing in town you come to is the Wal-Mart. Neutrino was parked at the far end of the lot. He was wearing a dark shirt and a pair of nylon shorts over his trousers to conceal his zipper, which was broken. The day before, he had walked into Mexico and gone to a bathhouse and got a shave and had his shoes shined. He wore a brown canvas trilby that he had cleaned using carpet cleaner he'd bought at the Wal-Mart.

We drove to his storage bin on the edge of town to retrieve his power drill and toolbox and some nylon rope, then we drove to a lot where Neutrino had parked the raft. The lot enclosed several acres of flat, dusty ground that was as brittle and hard as dry clay. Neutrino had parked the raft in the farthest section of it, past the rows of trucks and trailers and among the cars that seemed abandoned, as if they'd perished where they lay, like the skulls of cattle in Western movies.

Since I had last seen the raft, in Buckeye, Neutrino had raked the bow and insulated the cabin with Styrofoam. Over the Styrofoam he had nailed pieces of cardboard. The mast, some boards, and a big folding umbrella stuck out of the cabin, and we lay them on the ground. On the back of the cabin, it still said "atha for ayor." He thrust his chin quickly toward the raft. "I know you see this raft trip as my wandering off to the horizon and maybe into oblivion," he said. "That's all right. I don't mind."

He sat down. He leaned over and picked up his dog, and then he sat up. "To me," he said, "I see it as having a club in each hand and spikes on my feet and saying, 'Now, you bastards, now I'm coming after you.' "

The next morning, I left my car at the storage lot. Neutrino had once again covered the front seat of his van for me with his corduroy coat. Towing the trailer, the van moved cumbersomely. Neutrino was delighted to be under way. He sang. He told stories about his past. Beyond Mexicali, we drove through farmland; then a line of hills rose up on our right and accompanied us into the desert. Neutrino said that he had once tried to walk over them and found that they went on for miles. They were brown when we started and as the sky grew darker they turned blue. A quarter moon appeared above them. The road had been built on a bed raised up from the desert. Every few miles there were shrines to fatal accidents.

San Felipe is about a hundred and twenty miles south of Calexico. After three hours, we were roughly twenty-five miles short of it. Night had fallen. The desert was so dark and still that it was as if someone had turned out the lights and left. Each time the van climbed even the gentlest incline, the transmission slipped and the engine raced briefly before falling into gear again. Even before Neutrino said, "What's that?," I knew that the faint bumping that began suddenly in back of us was a tire on the trailer going flat.

Neutrino drove the car off the road and into the desert. The rim had shredded the tire. Neutrino had no spare. The raft was pitched about fifteen degrees to one side. Neutrino turned off the van's headlights to save the battery. The darkness rushed right up to the windows. He said, "Let's pray." Then he walked off into the desert and stood awhile, thinking. When he came back, he said that we should leave the raft for the night and find a place to stay. As we drove away, I watched the raft, illuminated by the tail-lights, grow smaller and smaller in the sideview mirror until the darkness enclosed it.

In the morning, we drove to San Felipe and found a man at a tire shop who said he could retrieve the raft and fix the tire. San Felipe turned out to be an impoverished little town on the water, with fishing boats on the beach. Some of the streets were paved and some weren't. Along the main street were several forlorn-looking hotels painted in pastel colors and trinket shops and a few restaurants. Neutrino drove slowly through the streets. "Oh, if only I could see Dolores, not Marjorie or Florence," he sang. He drove so slowly that it was as if we were passing things on a river, holding them in view before releasing them. At one end of town was a small, muddy boatyard with a ramp. "Here's where we'll put it in the water," he said. The wind blew steadily onshore.

At the end of the day, we went to the tire shop to collect the raft. It had just arrived. The man we had dealt with--his name was Aleseo--was standing beside it and shaking his head. Neutrino paid him and pointed at the raft. "I'm looking for a place to leave this," he said.

Aleseo said, "What is it?"

Neutrino said, "It's a boat."

Aleseo began laughing.

Neutrino pointed at his chest and said, "Cruzo Atlantic." He showed him a newspaper clipping about the crossing. "Paree, Notre Dame, New York, Irelando, France," he said, waving his arm as if they lay out there in the desert.

Aleseo couldn't stop laughing. He had black hair and dark skin, and he was wearing bluejeans and a T-shirt that said "Pepperdine University, Parents Weekend, 1995."

The next morning, we went back to the tire shop. Aleseo had said he would help Neutrino put the boat in the water. There was another man there, too. He was tall and gaunt, with dark skin and a mustache and thin lips. His eyes were small, and their expression was dull. He looked like someone I might see in a bar and sit as far from as I could. His best feature was a set of very white teeth. He walked over and asked Neutrino where he was going.

Neutrino said, "Peru."

The man grinned. In a dry, raspy voice, he said, "You want to dead?"

Neutrino, unfolding a finger at a time, said, "Mexico, Honduras, Peru."

"I know where is Peru," the man said. He spat in the dirt and put his hands in his pockets.

We got into the van. The dog climbed into Neutrino's lap and put her front paws on his shoulder. The man strode up to the window. Pointing at the dog and sneering, he said, "Food for the tiburones."

I said, "What's tiburones?"

Neutrino said, "Sharks." He shook his head.

"You, too, old man," the Mexican said, and he jabbed his finger at Neutrino. "Mas food for the tiburones." It came out like a curse. Then he spat again and stuck his hands back in his pockets, pleased with himself. He watched us stolidly as we pulled away, following the raft behind Aleseo's truck. Skinny as he was, in the sideview mirror he looked like a nail driven partway into the ground. Neutrino sang the first lines of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." The wind blew constantly, making the patterns of dust on the road seem as if they were part of some restless territorial migration, the subtle and relentless movement of the land from one hemisphere to the other.

We followed the raft into town. Neutrino drove without talking. He seemed to be brooding. I know that he believes in omens and engages in magical thinking, and I wondered whether the man's remarks had disturbed his peace of mind. When he finally said something, it sounded like a reply. "Until I'm stopped finally," he said, "I'm unstoppable."

Aleseo took us through town and then south a few miles to the port, where the big fishing boats were moored inside a breakwater. The water within the jetty was a greenish blue and scuffed with whitecaps. At one end of the dock was a row of fishing skiffs that rose and fell on the waves like a chorus line. Some fishermen were taking a boat called the Punta Estrella XII from the water. When they arrived at the top of the ramp, Neutrino spoke to them and learned that they thought the wind was too strong to fish safely. Neutrino came back toward us. He shook his head. He said he couldn't launch the raft. "We can't have a disaster," he said. "If I had the motor on it, and the power to move easily, maybe I could make a judgment, but not the first time. If I knock into someone's boat, and the captain of the port comes down, and he thinks I'm a jerk with no command of myself, and he says, 'Call yourself a sailor?,' I'm in big trouble, you follow?"

Aleseo maneuvered the trailer to the curb and out of the way of any of the fishermen using the ramp. He said he would come back the next morning at ten-thirty and help us try again. Neutrino set up a folding chair beside the raft. "Ten minutes, and I'm ready for another attack," he said. The wind whipped his clothes tight against his body. He looked like he was made out of sticks and padding.

I woke around four the next morning and listened in the darkness for the wind, and didn't hear it. By nine, when Neutrino and I went to breakfast, it had risen a little, but the boats had gone out. I had decided to leave the next day. When I made my plans to meet Neutrino, it was with the expectation that we would drive to Mexico, and he would launch the raft and leave. Clearly, he wasn't going soon. He hadn't even got the mast put up. I wondered if I had properly understood the experience of imagining yourself alone on the ocean, in the dark or under a tropical sun, perhaps hungry or thirsty or sick or in a terrible storm with, say, a broken mast, or even in the best of circumstances, wishing there was someone who answered when you spoke. And as an old man who had already caught the scent of his own death. The remarks by the witless man at the tire shop seemed to have cast a pall over Neutrino. It occurred to me that perhaps he wasn't ever going to leave, that he was waiting for something to come up, someone to contact him and say that they needed something done that only he could do, or to hear of a place he wanted to visit. In my mind's eye I saw the raft, years from now, among the skiffs on the beach in San Felipe, worked by a fisherman who had been destitute before Neutrino had given him a means of making a living, then had left for Maine or New Orleans.

I went back to New York, and on the thirty-first of January Neutrino wrote me an e-mail saying that he was waiting for a check that would arrive on February 3rd. With the money, he was going to pay for the permit he needed to travel for a year in Mexican waters and to shelter on any beach. He was also intending to buy "two hydraulic jacks, some pipe, a come-along to power the raft up on the beach when the sand is too soft to support the weight of the raft. Everything must be done here to insure the success of the project. There is no place south of here to get what I may need. I am playing chess with events and funds and raft parts. I am fully committed to crossing the Pacific. I have no plans to return to the United States until after the trip. I have everything I need to succeed, except how to spell these damn words, and I don't need that particular talent to pull this off." (I have corrected the mistakes.) "I am in prime position and it will never come again for me. On the fourth or fifth of February I will put the raft in the water, immediately move onto the raft, proceed to accomplish going on the beach and off the beach. After that is accomplished I will leave the harbor either on my own or by tow south. The story is in me of crossing the Pacific on a scrap raft and practically no money. My random mind will find a way to accomplish the task."

The next day, I went back to Mexico, and on the main street of San Felipe I found Neutrino walking his dog. He was wearing sweatpants and a corduroy coat and a straw boater with a black band. The brim of the boater had been chewed by his dog. For the next few days, we went around San Felipe in my car doing errands--Neutrino had sold his van. At a flea market, we found a jack and a pair of secondhand sneakers for Neutrino. We engaged Aleseo to drive the boat on its trailer to the harbor and, with a group of fishermen watching us and hoping that it would sink, Neutrino launched it and brought it around to the beach in front of a campground. He found someone to haul the raft to the top of the beach, where it would be on level ground and above the reach of the tide. When the task was completed, Neutrino unhooked the towrope and said, "I have a home."

The raft still had no mast. When I began adding up the things that remained to be done before Neutrino could sail, it became clear to me that, despite the urgency of his message, once again he wasn't leaving soon. It came time for me to go, and he walked me to my car. We stood for a moment without speaking. "Remember, this isn't the old man who rides into the sea and that's the end of it," he said. "This is just the link to the legend."

We embraced. "Until I'm stopped permanently," he said, "I'm unstoppable."

Early in March, Neutrino sent me an e-mail saying that he was putting the raft in the water on March 21st and leaving San Felipe on the twenty-third, so I went back. I arrived on the twentieth. He had made the raft much larger; it was now thirty-two feet long and had two cabins. He had the sail up when I got there. He had sewn the sail from burlap he found in Calexico. It was rigged with yellow nylon rope secured to the sail by duct tape. The rigging seemed complicated, and I asked how he had thought of it. "It's an abortion of a system I saw in a picture of a Chinese junk," he said.

The raft itself was strange and arresting but beautiful. For the wild specificity of it, the simple there-is-nothing-else-like-this-in-the-entire-world quality, it put me in mind of the Watts Towers, in Los Angeles, made from bottles and concrete and pieces of glass that the artist had picked up around the city. It still didn't look as though it would float. Neutrino had bought a catamaran, which he had lashed to the raft like a sidecar, to carry gas and water. From a prosperous boat owner named Larry Boyd, a retired contractor from Utah who had taken an interest in him, Neutrino had bought an inflatable rubber dinghy, called a Zodiac, which had a small outboard motor. Should anything cause him to abandon the raft, he could make it to shore in the Zodiac at almost thirty miles per hour.

A few days later, Neutrino put the raft in the water and drove it to the marina, where he could shelter from the wind. That evening, when the tide went out, we walked back and forth across the flats to the raft, carrying gas cans, water jugs, clothes, books, and Neutrino's chess set. He was going to leave the following morning.

The next day, March 26th, I opened my eyes and saw a line of red above the horizon, like a vein in a stone. It was five-fifteen. When I got to the harbor, just before daylight, the tide was out, and the raft wasn't where it had been the night before. I thought that Neutrino had already left. Then I found it in deeper water, out by the big shrimpers, which loomed above it like judges. I ran down the breakwater, nearly to the end, before I was even with where the raft was, about a hundred feet off the jetty. All over the harbor, I could hear gulls barking, disputing territory--it's mine; no, it's mine. I watched the raft change color in the rising light, as if, having blushed, it were composing itself. Then I heard the door hinges creak, and Neutrino stepped out onto the deck.

We waved to each other. The raft turned slowly on its mooring, as if preparing to say something, and then, having thought better of it, swung slowly away. As the light increased, the gulls fell silent. The sun was high enough now to illuminate textures and shapes and, for a moment, with the colors so rich, I felt as if everything were being tuned to one enormous chord. At the other end of the breakwater, I saw two figures making their way toward me, stepping carefully over the rocks. The man with the coffee cup in his hand, wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, and with binoculars around his neck, turned out to be Larry Boyd. He said that his wife, Eva, was behind him. While we were talking, Neutrino appeared again on the deck. He was wearing his corduroy coat. He climbed to the roof of the cabin. Boyd yelled, "Good morning, Captain." He sipped his coffee. "He needs to get going," he said. "He's got to trust me. I tried to tell him that this was a mean piece of water. There's a storm coming down from California, and every time they get a strong Santa Ana wind we get a norther."

Boyd raised his binoculars to his eyes. "He needs to get around that point before the wind kicks up," he said. Neutrino had climbed down to the rear deck. He seemed to be examining something over the stern. "Looks like he's going to try and start that motor," Boyd said. "I'm wondering if that old boy can pull that motor hard enough to start it." Then: "We're wasting good time here, Captain."

Eva arrived and asked, "Is he up?"

"No, the anchor's still down," Larry said. She was wearing shorts and a green sweatshirt like Larry's. On the front was written "Haleiva," the name of their boat. His sweatshirt said "Captain Larry" and hers said "Admiral Eva."

Neutrino got the motor started. "He's got to get that anchor up and slide out of here," Larry said. Eva nodded. He lowered the binoculars. Neutrino disappeared into the cabin, then appeared on the bow. "He's upping anchor now," Larry said. Eva knelt and took a video camera from her bag. It was six-thirty. Neutrino went back into the front cabin. In a moment, he appeared on the stern and pointed a video camera at us.

"You haven't got time for pictures," Larry yelled.

"Don't rush me," Neutrino said.

Neutrino drove the raft in a small circle, then cut the motor and drifted. He went around the hull checking his lines and tied some new knots on the catamaran. Two other friends arrived, Catalina Meders and her husband, Ed. They owned a bookstore in town.

Through Larry's binoculars I saw Neutrino bend over, then stand and give the thumbs-up sign. He started the motor and wheeled the boat around so that it pointed toward the opening in the breakwater and made his way slowly toward it.

"Fair winds, calm seas," Eva yelled.

"Punch it," Larry yelled. "I know the road."

It happened to be Semana Santa, Holy Week. Someone lit a firework on the beach. It rose above the water and made a small bright mark on the sky, like a light turned on in a daylit room. At the detonation that followed, flocks of waterbirds lifted themselves from the rocks and the riggings of the shrimpers and took to the air shrieking.

Once Neutrino had made it through the breakwater, we climbed down the rocks to the beach and walked back to our cars. We arranged to meet at a cafe for breakfast. While they drove north, into town, I drove south to follow Neutrino. I parked at the top of a hill. For a while, the raft looked like a cup and saucer on the water, or an ornament on the hood of a car. When the sun caught its wake, it sent little silver flashes of light, like code. By slow degrees, the raft grew smaller. For a time, it seemed to travel like a snail along the horizontal line made by the wings of a telephone pole. Or, it occurred to me, like an absurdly slow-moving target in a shooting gallery. When I lost him in the light on the water, I walked back to my car and drove into town.

I wondered how far he would go. It took two years and three false starts to get the Atlantic crossing under way. William Willis needed two years and three tries to get his Atlantic trip started, and he interrupted his Pacific crossing for eight months while he went to New York. It would be unreasonable to expect that Neutrino had built a vessel that would behave perfectly in all conditions. He might have to stop somewhere and exchange one version of the prow for another. Cabo San Lucas lay about eight hundred miles ahead. Neutrino was sure to take months to arrive. I knew that before long he'd have to put in somewhere to let the Mexican summer pass, and if before returning to the raft he took up another adventure--if he decided to walk to Asia across the Bering Strait, for example--I wouldn't have been surprised. His life was governed more by circles and wheels within wheels than by any linear design. (In fact, he decided to spend the layover hiking in Yosemite.)

Larry and Eva and Ed and Catalina were standing on a terrace by the cafe. From there, it turned out, they could still see the raft. When Neutrino was five or six miles away, not yet at the point, he seemed to drift toward the shore; then he recovered and headed for the point. We sat down at a table on the terrace. My seat faced the water. I could still see the raft, a barely discernible notation of color on the water. Strangely, some quality of the light made it black, as if it were its own shadow. I began telling stories about Neutrino and his past, about how as a boy he had put his front teeth back in the wrong order, about his mother and her gambling, about the Salvation Navy and the Atlantic crossing, and suddenly I realized that while I had been talking he had sailed around the point and was gone.