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Calling Maud
15:25 p.m. EDT Sep 26, 2003
13:46 p.m. EDT Sep 4, 2003
At ExplorersWeb we cover the worlds most extreme expeditions. We follow Everest and K2 climbers, polar skiers, ocean voyagers and free diving record attempts. We follow those people who go the farthest, the highest and the deepest. We can tell real from fake. There are expeditions who receive a lot of media for pretty lame achievements. Deskbound journalists can't always tell the difference between a smooth talk and a truly tough challenge.
Well, we can. We have been out there. Our friends are out there. Our fascination with modern adventure is not only about the exploration of new places and a pretty landscape. The fascination lies instead with the human mind. Only brutal challenge will truly expose it. You must see death in the eye. You must starve. You must thirst. You must balance at the edge of defeat. You must believe that all your hope is out - and still continue. Those are the corner stones of a great adventure, not where and how they take place.
Too many modern adventures are cushioned. There are sherpas to carry our load. There are resupplies laid out along our way. There are one-week adventures with guides cooking our food. There are ropes being fixed for our safety. But heck - it's an exotic place, you'll be a first or a youngest, and here comes the media and all the attention. In the mean, a poor soul somewhere entirely else is fighting for his life, or an impossible mission. These boys and girls get lost in the noise of flashy adventure media. Our idols becomes apple cheeked expedition wannabes in brand new adventure outfits. Whilst the real heroes continue their lonely quests in rags falling of their starving bodies.
That bugs us here at ExplorersWeb. We want to change that. We want to turn the spotlights on those who really deserve the attention, those who have the most to teach us in our own lives.
Yesterday, at one point, we checked our website statistics. We discovered that Everest, where all expeditions right now are trekking or spending time in Base Camp, had 65 visitors that minute. Whilst the Oceans instead, where a lonely, injured girl is rowing a small, shattered vessel in an impossible backward loop and with a dead water maker - only had 4 visitors!
I had received her sat phone number from her webmaster. We had followed Maud right from the start. From the very beginning she set out from Canada right into her first storm. We watched as she fought of a shark attack. We followed as she drifted too close to the floating ice of Greenland and was almost run down by tanker ships. We watched when her water maker died. And again when, just the next day, a storm hit her and trapped her in her cabin for 48 hours. We watched as she capsized 18 times in one day - many ocean rowers never capsize once in an entire trip. We read her desperate account of the suffocation in the airtight cabin, the darkness as her lights went out, the damage to the boat and her struggle to balance the vessel with her back and feet as she was continuously flipped and dropped down 10 meter valleys of waves.
As I walked through the trendy Soho in downtown Manhattan on my way to the ExplorersWeb office this morning, I tried to prepare what to say to Maud.
And then I called. She was strangely composed. Almost a bit detached as I spoke to her. I suddenly realized what it was like to be on the other end of an expedition - the arm chair side. I realized what others must have felt when they watched me. The fright, the disbelief, the powerless urge to do something, say something - to help. And then the expeditioner - almost oblivious to facts: A focus so strong that the mind enters another level. The fear is there, the reality is there, the problems are very clear - but the mind disregard all of that information. Instead it just accepts, perform what it must, and focus on one thing only - the goal.
I told Maud who we were, and how impressed we were by her. "You are very tough" I said. She laughed: "Well thank you, so you will come to France to meet me then?". I asked her about her situation. "The winds are changing - I'm trying to turn the boat with them and row back to France".
I went silent, yesterday Maud had gone back towards America even further on our maps. "Well, yes, they seem to be changing on our maps too - they should start pushing you to land soon" I said. I paused, and then I blurted out: "Listen Maud, last year I went with my husband to the North Pole. We were unassisted and the last week everything just fell apart on us. I fell in the water and almost died, he hit his head and was paralyzed. We were out of fuel and everything seemed lost. But somehow we just continued and made it".
"Wow" Maud said.
"Well, what I'm trying to say is that when things are like that, just keep rowing, keep making the water and don't think. Really - don't think, just go!".
"Well, I'm not ready to give up just yet" said Maud.
"How is the water situation" I asked. "The boat?"...No, the water - du l'eau...
"Oh, that's a big problem for me right now" she admitted. "I'm pumping the handheld and it's working right now, but....". (Handheld watermakers are known to brake easily).
"Well, how much water do you have now?" (Before her main water maker broke it had made 13 liters). "Nothing. The only food I have left is all freeze dried. It needs water to prepare".
"So, how much water do you need each day?"
"2 liters minimum".
"How much can you make?"
"I get half a liter with one hour pumping, I try to pump 4 hours daily".
I pictured Maud before me: I saw a small girl deprived of sleep from the past storm, deprived of sleep from the fear of getting hit by a tanker, weak and injured, trying to row the boat against the swell morning to night, and pumping for water in between.
"I don't really care where I end up at this point, France or Spain, I just want to reach land" she sighed.
"I can understand that" I laughed. She laughed too.
"Good luck Maud and Happy Birthday on Sunday" I said.
"Au revoir".
I told the team about the call. We flocked around the computers checking the maps, the winds and the waves. "I wish I could have said something to help her" I told them. Perhaps this story will. Perhaps it will draw your attention to a little girl, out on a big ocean, fighting a battle with the courage of a Giant. To us, who have been there, done that and seen it all - to us at least - this expedition, up until now, is the Expedition of the Year.
French rower Maud Fontenoy set out from St. Pierre et Miquelon, Canada on June 13 in an attempt to become the first woman to row across the Atlantic West to East.
Image courtesy of Jean-Christophe L'Espagnol, www.maudfontenoy.free.fr
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