A Mile Down Read online

  Praise for A Mile Down

  ‘A Mile Down would be a cautionary tale for anyone who dreams of the freedom of the high seas—if only it wasn’t so damn exciting…’ Stewart O’Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster

  ‘At once memoir, confession, travel book and thriller, David Vann’s A Mile Down is so vivid and intense you will dread to see it end…The book is a testimony of passion and courage in deadly storms and scarier calms, of a man wrestling with his ghosts and gifts in the very shadow of paradise.’

  Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek

  ‘It’s as if one of the heroes of The Perfect Storm had lived to write his memoirs.’ Julie Hilden, author of The Bad Daughter

  ‘A Mile Down is far more than a tale of ruin at sea. It’s a story, also, of desire and shame, of the struggle to escape our histories and know our dreams. You have to read this book, even if you care nothing about sailing or the sea. Just read it.’

  Lalita Tademy, author of Cane River

  ‘Mandatory reading for anyone who’s ever flirted with thoughts of a life spent at sea.’ A. Manette Ansay, author of Vinegar Hill

  ‘A Mile Down is superbly crafted. David Vann has created a tale of hubris and endurance that is both exciting and beautifully written.’ Keith Scribner, author of The Oregon Experiment

  ‘A Mile Down is a riveting and truthful account of a good man’s attempt to stay afloat on treacherous waters…The fact that Vann lived to tell it is an achievement in itself.’

  Tom Barbash, author of The Last Good Chance

  ‘A Mile Down is pure adrenaline. Vann by all rights should have died at sea, and yet he’s lived to tell about it.’ Melanie Thernstrom, author of The Pain Chronicles

  PRAISE FOR DAVID VANN’S FICTION

  Goat Mountain

  ‘David Vann is at once the most timely and timeless of writers, a literary master of humankind’s primal embrace of violence, against others and against ourselves. Goat Mountain…will touch you to the depths of our shared, flawed humanity.’ Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning

  A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

  ‘For all its unyielding darkness, Goat Mountain is, perhaps perversely, an exhilarating experience. It is, first of all, cathartic in the way of all good tragedies. But it is also exhilarating for the least perverse of reasons: the experience of reading a novelist of David Vann’s are artistry and vision.’ Observer

  ‘Goat Mountain…is muscular, existential, barbaric and dense with allegory.’ Washington Post

  ‘This story has the power of a bullet fired from a gun.’

  Economist

  ‘Goat Mountain is courageous in its metaphysical reach and transfixing in its telling.’ Wall Street Journal

  ‘A provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs…Vann writes with grace and intensity.’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Vann writes into violence; this is no clinical observation. In reading Goat Mountain, be prepared to emerge bloody and scarred.’ Melbourne Review

  ‘Vann is consistently assured in describing the physical landscape…incidents are crisply, concisely, cunningly told.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  Dirt

  ‘Brilliant…This is a novel of violence, destruction and ruin. There is no salvation. And yet Mr Vann’s soaring writing carries it forward—a reminder of the beauty that can grace even the beastliest things.’ Economist

  ‘Vann has an extravagantly literary sensibility, and his novel is full of echoes: one thinks of the stately inevitability of classical tragedy, of Chekhov’s lost souls, of the hallucinatory quality of Faulkner’s rural fantasia, and of Stephen King’s depictions of an unraveling mind.’ Washington Post

  ‘The author does for dirt what King Lear and Oedipus Rex did for sight and what Patrick Süskind did for scent…You can’t put this book down once you start it.’ Globe and Mail

  ‘If you want to feel good about the human condition, go elsewhere. If you want the naked, awful truth, then dive in.’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Compelling…Well written and vividly imagined.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘His language is sharply funny, even as his characters enact a tragedy of Greek proportions.’ New Yorker

  ‘Words and ideas seem almost dangerous in his hands and yet his work is full of heart. For me that’s probably the definition of perfection in fiction.’ New Statesman

  ‘In the same tradition as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Dirt is a relentlessly challenging read that is certainly not for the faint-of-heart.’ Herald Sun

  ‘Outlandish.’ Paris Review

  ‘Magnificent.’ Sunday Times

  Caribou Island

  ‘Caribou Island gets to places other novels can’t touch. By the end, I felt the senseless logic of the dream. Though it wears the clothes of realism—the beautiful exactness of the language, the unerring eye for detail—it takes us someplace darker, older, more powerful than the daylit world.’

  New York Times Book Review

  ‘Vann, who has turned his boyhood pain and confusion into a clear-eyed understanding of the human condition, has broadened his canvas and honoured his promise as one of the most exciting writers at work today.’ Australian

  ‘Vann’s people are hurtling irretrievably toward a dark outcome, and while putting the book down might save you from it, you can’t stop reading, just as you can’t unlearn its truths.’ Los Angeles Times

  ‘A novel as precise and unflinching as this makes other recently celebrated books seem melodramatic. Caribou Island proves that art wrought from personal pain and obsessed with negative emotion can still be profoundly positive.’ Canberra Times

  ‘Caribou Island is a novel of fine artistry and stark emotional truth—full of our darkest currents and faintest sounds.’ The Times

  ‘A writer to read and reread. A man to watch carefully.’ Economist

  ‘Caribou Island is a beautiful, richly atmospheric if unsettling novel, and deserves to consolidate Vann’s position among America’s literary high flyers.’

  Evening Standard

  ‘Vann is a forceful, potent writer.’ Guardian

  Legend of a Suicide

  ‘David Vann’s extraordinary and inventive set of fictional variations on his father’s death will surely become an American classic.’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘His legend is at once the truest memoir and the purest fiction…Nothing quite like this book has been written before.’ Observer

  ‘One of the best writers of his generation.’ Le Figaro

  ‘Vengeful yet sorrowing and empathetic, plausible yet dreamlike, and completely absorbing.’ Guardian

  ‘One jaw-droppingly powerful, courageous and original fiction debut…As a tenth work of fiction this would be impressive; as a debut, it is remarkable.’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Quite possibly the finest American debut of the year.’

  Independent

  ‘Extraordinary…Vann has written something truly memorable, disturbing and heartbreaking.’ Courier Mail

  ‘Stunning…Heart-wrenching and gorgeous and its several voices are done indelibly and with unwavering authority.’

  Lorrie Moore

  ‘Vann’s prose is as pure as a gulp of water from an Alaskan stream.’ Financial Times

  ‘A piece of relentless, heartbreaking brilliance that bears comparison with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.’

  Weekend Australian

  ‘The son spins a lethal web of memory and imagination to achieve a darkly disturbing revenge. A deeply affecting and spookily evocative literary debut.’ Sunday Canberra Times

  ALSO BY DAVID VANN

  Fiction

  Goat Mountain

  Dirt

  Caribou Islan
d

  Legend of a Suicide

  Nonfiction

  Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter

  A MILE DOWN

  David Vann is an internationally bestselling author published in twenty languages. He is the winner of fifteen prizes, including France’s Prix Médicis étranger, Spain’s Premi Llibreter, and the Grace Paley Prize. His books have appeared on more than seventy Best Books lists in a dozen countries. He is a professor at the University of Warwick in England and lives in New Zealand for half of the year.

  davidvann.com

  A MILE

  DOWN

  THE TRUE STORY OF A

  DISASTROUS CAREER AT SEA

  DAVID VANN

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © 2005 David Vann

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Originally published in the United States by Thunder’s Mouth Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, New York, 2005

  This revised edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2014

  Book design by Text

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Vann, David, author.

  Title: A mile down : the true story of a disastrous career at sea/ by David Vann.

  ISBN: 9781922182081 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781925095081 (ebook)

  Subjects: Vann, David.

  Boatbuilding—Turkey—Anecdotes.

  Sailboats—Chartering—Turkey—Anecdotes.

  Business losses—Turkey—Anecdotes.

  Dewey number: 623.8203

  For my wife Nancy

  PART ONE

  THERE’S MORE ART in this world than we think. The art of welding, for instance. In the faint green light through the welding mask, the electrode in my right hand sends a funnel of energy shielded by inert gas, a miniature environment of purity, without the contamination of oxygen. At the melting point, the surfaces of the two aluminum plates form a molten crescent moon. With my left hand, I tap the end of an aluminum rod into the center of this moon and a new crescent instantly forms. Superheated, it sucks up into the sides of the plates and tugs at their edges, creating two small rivers and this vortex where I tap again, forming the newest moon. It’s as beautiful as writing or love or anything else in this world, and it surprises me. I had imagined welding to be a brute task and nothing more.

  The afterlife of ruin had seemed brutish, also. Sleepless nights, a general aching, and disbelief. But there were no recriminations from my wife or her family, and they gave me the room and support to recover, until new dreams arose and opportunities presented themselves. I’ve come to realize that a life can be like a work of art, constantly melted away and reshaped. This story is of that melting away.

  In the summer of 1976, my father’s new, sixty-three-foot aluminum commercial fishing boat was launched, and in the eight months of construction beforehand and the nine months of using the boat afterward, he must have experienced many of the very same vexations and dreams I was to experience building my own ninety-foot yacht in Turkey. I have thought more than once that perhaps I embarked on the entire boating enterprise simply to repeat his experience so that I could know him better—perhaps even, in a way, recover him after his death.

  My father killed himself when I was thirteen, so my knowledge of him is limited. No one can tell me exactly why he decided to quit his dental practice and build a commercial fishing boat or what he felt when he had to sell the boat and return to dentistry.

  His boat seemed a ship to me, grand and impossible. It was an adventure, and I do remember my father smiling, seeming happy, feeling the adventure as much as I did. I was too young to know anything of financial worries, but I like to believe my father was not thinking only of that. I like to think he enjoyed seeing the boat take shape, felt pleasure at running his hand along its raw aluminum hull that would never rust, not in a hundred years.

  I remember how he looked then, too, very similar to how I looked when I was building my boat in Turkey. We were almost the same age, early thirties, both with the same short hair receding at the temples, both letting our beards grow a bit, both dressing in old T-shirts. And the oddity of what we were doing was remarkably similar. But I never consciously intended to repeat my father’s life, only followed the opportunities I saw, and considering the complicated factors involved, it’s just as easy to say the similarities occurred by chance.

  I first visited Turkey and met Seref in the summer of 1997, just before running my first charters on a smaller boat in the San Juan Islands north of Seattle. I was a lecturer at Stanford, teaching creative writing, and because I could not get a tenure-track job at any university without publishing my book, Legend of a Suicide, which at that time no agent would send to editors, I had started an educational charter business, earning my captain’s license and teaching creative writing workshops aboard a sailboat. The workshops were offered through Stanford Continuing Studies. I was excited about the business and my new life as captain, but when I visited Turkey that summer and saw the ninety-foot hull, my plans and dreams became much larger.

  “I am Seref, pronounced like the good guy in one of your westerns,” Seref told me. He was a handsome man in his early forties, wearing a polo shirt, shorts, and boat mocs. He owned a tourism agency on the Bodrum waterfront, and I was looking for someone to tell me about the large charter boats in the harbor. “I show you any of these boats,” he said. “I am the president of the chamber of commerce in Bodrum. Everyone knows me.”

  I have loved boats all my life, gazed at all of them longingly, large and small, but I have never been so enchanted. These were enormous wooden sailboats, like pirate ships. Eighty feet long, some over a hundred feet, with bowsprits and wooden masts, varnished rails and carved sterns. On the bow of one of these, sailing along this coastline, I could imagine I was Odysseus, and in truth the boat he sailed on would have been almost the same in shape and material, different only in equipment.

  The boats were made cheaply, however. In two of them, as I stood in their cabins, I could see sunlight through the walls.

  Seref drove me along the sea to Icmeler, where the boats were made. On a wide dirt beach was a great crowd of wooden masts and hulls, most of them under construction, others hauled out for repair.

  “We go to the yard that makes the steel boats,” Seref said. “Boats that can go on any ocean.”

  We arrived at a warehouse with an overhead crane and two hulls being constructed beneath, one a traditional design, a gulet, but out of steel, the other probably a boat for dive charters, judging by its aft deck.

  “This is my dive boat,” Seref said. “It will be finished next month.”

  “Yours?” I asked.

  “Yes, I know something about steel, David.”

  We moved on to the other section of the warehouse, which held one large steel hull. We stood beneath the stern. It was massive. “Marcellillian” was stenciled up high, temporarily. The boat had been named and registered but was sitting here unfinished except for the hull.

  “This one I think is for sale,” Seref said.

  Grendel, my forty-eight-foot boat, was large, but this hull was on a different scale. Almost ten feet of draft for its twin keels. The rudder taller than I was, and broad, hung by a single stainless pole. Above this, another ten feet of freeboard to reach the deck; the boat stood over twenty feet above us and was just as wide. Two stories
of boat. I asked its weight and length.

  Seref said it was ninety feet. “And I don’t know how many tons, but so heavy. Too heavy. Maybe 110 tons, I don’t know.”

  Since I was already in debt with Grendel, I had no idea how I could possibly scrape together the financing. But I knew, as I stood there my first afternoon in Turkey, that even if it screwed up my life considerably, I was going to try.

  I’ve always worked hard, but the idea of the working life has frightened me since childhood. I had nightmares of adults working hard and endlessly at tasks they did not enjoy so that they could continue working hard and endlessly at tasks they did not enjoy. There was no other purpose or end point. Work so that you can keep working. It seemed a proposition that could easily end in suicide. I wanted to escape this. I wanted to free myself from the working world and have time to write. And I wanted adventure. Grendel could never free me, but this boat could.

  While I inspected the boat, Seref didn’t say a lot. I think he knew, as good salesmen do, that I was already fashioning my own chains. There was no point in discussing anything practical. All that mattered was the dream. The dream of escape had me now, and everything else would get pulled along with it. I had no money at all, and it was impossible, but he must have known I had already bought this boat.

  I leased a boat from Seref the following summer and ran charters along the Turkish coast. The ports we visited were ancient and beautiful. I became good friends with some of the guests, and because Avrasya, the boat I had leased, was fully crewed, with captain, cook, and sailor, I was not responsible for maintenance or repairs or sailing the boat. I taught creative writing workshops morning and evening, enjoyed the tours with my guests, and had a glorious vacation all summer long.

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