…And then

The strangest thing happened to me (James) after setting the hook off Praia on Ilha da Santiago… a pain in my chest, no really, on the left side, a pain like I have never felt before.

Hook down Praia with the quarantine flag flying

We traveled over a thousand miles offshore and I felt stronger than I ever have, meaning I didn’t feel anything at all physically. I mean sure, I felt hammered by the Earth. I felt exhaustion from lack of sleep or whatnot but I didn’t feel anything like…well, you know, old and decrepit. But all of a sudden, and I mean immediately after I got settled down below, I felt a sharp pain a little left of center in my back that went straight through to a little left of my sternum. Holy fucking shit!

It was hard but I had to tell Dena. Now, this is a person who knows me better than anyone else in the world, who just witnessed me sail over a thousand miles without as much as a cut, so she knew to ask as many questions as possible and to go into it with the grain of salt it deserved.

“Let’s sleep on it.”

I slept in a restless state with real nightmares and all that shit but, physically, I was having chest pains. I did not want to experience this but I actually was. And there was no time to figure it out or wait it out.

The only reason we sailed to Praia was because we had some very important business to attend to.

Praia is not only the capitol of the Republic of Cabo Verde, there’s a US Embassy and my passport (at that point) was about a month from expiration. “They” say a person can not enter the country with a passport that is within 6 months of expiration but we had very little choice. We prepped the defensive arguments and gave it a go.

The dink on the beach

The Multi-Fingered Gauntlet

The thumb…

First, the Policia Maritima: We rowed into the beach on Sunday, the morning after we anchored, secured Tursiops between all the other beached boats, and followed the futbol players’ directions to the Policia, only a few hundred steps from the beach. On a Sunday, there was only one cop, who was gabbing with a buddy outside the building, and he really couldn’t be bothered with our check-in issues. He started the conversation asking if we were leaving tomorrow and seemed put out when we said we’d be a couple weeks. He grudgingly led us into the office and laboriously tracked down paper and pen. While Dena was filling out the form, he took me out to show us where he wanted us to move our boat in the anchorage…an order we very quickly ignored. Dena finished filling out the form (I [Dena] used our Azorean paperwork for the Portuguese words for things), she gave him the original, official copy of our certificate of documentation, and we were on our way.

Then we walked…Remember those chest pains…yeah, getting worse by the minute.

We mounted one of the town’s big hills and, at the top, stopped into a local chain bakery shop for some refreshment and to take a load off. They took Euros, which was good because we hadn’t gotten Escudos yet. We made it to the grocery store just before their half-day Sunday closing and discovered the truth of the warnings that this isn’t the best place to provision for a big trip. We did get local money from an ATM, though, and it’s pretty cool that they foreground musicians so strongly.

Local money

The bottom bill features Cesária Evora, which brought me (Dena) back to the early Naughties in Oakland, CA, when James and I would get an egg-pesto-cheese panini at World Grounds and listen to Putumayo compilations, including the one of music from Cape Verde. Recognizing her gave me a thrill.

James, though, was doing his absolute best to take his turns, pain be damned. I rowed in; he rowed back.

I got this, I think…

Back on the boat, I (James) collapsed into a meat-pile of sickness on the portside settee. I can’t even remember the rest of that day.

I (Dena) set an alarm for 6am so that we could have coffee and then leave the boat by 7:30am to get to the immigration office by their opening time of 8am (according to the cruising guide we’ve been using).

Index finger, the Immigration stamp…

On Monday, the next day, we rowed to the pro-fishing dock where we met Enrique and negotiated payment for him to watch after our little (nobody would ever want to steal) rowboat for the day. We cut his fee in half and realized we were still getting hosed, but…whatever.

Then we met and interacted with four different local cops who (each) called the Immigration Officer to let him know a couple of sailing folk wanted to be stamped into the country. There were no cruise ships or even ferries in port so, though we arrived at 8am, it was 9:15am when a guy from the main office arrived, got the computer booted up, and stamped us in. He totally forgot to charge us the entrance fee of 25 euros each and didn’t bring up the passport expiration date problem at all. Not complaining here!

Middle Finger, passport photo and document printing.

Holy shit, this finger was a great big fucking deal! Since clearing into the country took a little longer than we’d scheduled, we decided not to walk the several km around and then onto the lofty expanse of the Plateau. We took a cab’ish (a broke-dick-dog of a car with a driver hollering “taxi!”) to the shopping center area. It cost all of five bucks (a total rip off that we only discovered later) and dropped us off in front of a photo studio.

The “foto shop” was so packed with people that we honestly thought we couldn’t possibly be in the right place. The space was about 500 sq ft deep and was packed with maybe 30 people, all yelling at each other and waving their hands in opposite directions. We somehow managed (through no great gift of mine) to relate to the very understanding staff that we needed my passport documents printed and a photo that turned out to be the absolute worst picture that anyone has ever taken of me.

When I told him that was the ugliest old man I’ve ever seen, the photographer replied, “Oh, you like?” Of course, I said yes.

It was so hot in there I honestly thought I was going to pass out. For some reason, this Monday was about passport photos for children, all of whom seemed to have arrived with their entire families…go figure. We hadn’t gotten SIM cards for internet yet but we must not have seemed like hackers, because one of the guys fired up his cell phone hotspot for us. One email sent and they had the application and receipt we needed printed.

The thrifty photo processing guy made sure that he used each sheet of photo paper to the max, so we waited for him to lay out images of several tiny people on the page before he hit print, but eventually he did. The photos, the passport renewal application, and the receipt for paying on gov.gov or whatever were in our hot ass hands.

The trip from nearly-sea-level up to Plateau (literally the name of the neighborhood) took us up a set of somewhat steep steps that wound upward. The paintings and the view were a good excuse to stop a moment.

The top of the longest stairway of my life

Ring finger, or officialdom encroaching

Believe it or not, we were a little over an hour early for the 11am drop-off time at the US Embassy. I had all of my paperwork in order, my geriatric picture, and my old passport so all I needed to do was get through those doors. A long, leisurely people-watching period and a couple of fresh OJs gave us the fortitude to head back to the well-armed security personnel at the door of the US territory in Cabo Verde.

Several people checked James’ paperwork and took bits and pieces of it and finally took him too. I (Dena) remained outside with his backpack and cell phone (verboten beyond security inside) for what seemed like a really long time…and that was before I struck up a conversation with Claudina, who will be visiting her brother in Providence, RI, on her first visit to the US in September. Having a good time watching well-dressed folks walk by and getting to know Claudina helped me with my patience until I realized that James had been inside for over an hour. I can’t say I started to sweat, since I’d been on a bench in the sun the entire time, but I definitely started to worry.

I (James) walked into the embassy and of course it was like walking into a airport in the US: disgusting in aesthetic and insulting in every other way. They told me to remove my belt and I told them if I did that my pants would quickly fall off in front of all these people. The guard allowed me to hold my pants up while they slowly x-rayed my belt for… what? Nukes?

I somehow managed my dignity through all that and the same guard pointed me to a window where I was to drop off my paperwork and then exit the building forthwith. I stuffed my paperwork in the bullet proof slot and a faceless voice said to me, “We’ll call you.”

Two hours later…no, really, you don’t have to live through a room full of nervous locals waiting to be welcomed or denied by a country that will hate them from day one simply for the darkness of their skin. Finally with only two people in line before me, a young light-skinned woman dressed in embarrassment and blushes asked me to approach the window, apologized profusely for making me wait, took my application, and released me to the wilds of Praia. It took all of 45 seconds to prove to me, once again, that the US sucks.

By this time, my back and my chest were on fire. I walked out to the street where Dena, my love, met me with a beautiful smile and a lovely story about a friend she’d just met.

We walked (stumbled) back down the long stairway to a pharmacy for some sunscreen, ibuprofen, and I forget what else that we didn’t have enough cash to pay for, walked to and stood in a bank ATM line for cash, walked back to the Farmicia, walked to the grocery store, shopped our little hearts out, and then fell into a cab that schooled us on the proper price back to the marina.

Unencumbered by any semblance of consciousness, I climbed down an industrial ramp to take Tursiops’ aft seat so Dena could row us back to Cetacea where I quickly lost track of reality.

…My (James’) savior

Isn’t the pinky finger supposed to be small?

We took a day off, but we had to provision the following day. We walked about four kilometers around a toxic Coca-Cola runoff river that empties into Praia’s harbor just downhill from the cliffside trash dump that smells like the trash collectors’ strike in Thiruvananthapuram in the phase where rotting dog required that we hold our breath as we bicycled past.

Once around the corner, we had to go uphill and my (James’) back and my chest were once again trying to kill me. It was a kind of pain I’d never experienced before so by that point I just wanted to die. It felt like it was 1000 degrees by the time we got to the top of the Plateau in Praia. All I could do was beg Dena to just let me sit somewhere…forever. I just couldn’t breath. Every breath was like lifting the world on my chest and every step was another sail across the ocean.

Dena scoped the hood for a restaurant where we could sit, eat, and rest without someone calling an ambulance on me. After what is considered the national dish, cachupa, a nice meal of maize and bean hash with a fried egg and a fried banana, we went grocery shopping one last time before cabbing back to the marina, rowing back to the boat, and passing out once again.

Getting the fuck out!

Okay, so here’s the thing… We set sail the next morning and, by the time we were out of Praia harbor proper, my chest had stopped hurting and my back felt normal and, by the time we set the hook in Cidade Velha only 7 nautical miles west of Praia, I was feeling totally normal again.

Clean and clear

I have no idea what happened to me. Maybe there was something in the stinky air that one lung couldn’t process. Dena felt no ill effects from being in Praia though the stink was omnipresent. My pain is not Dena’s or anyone else’s, so no one can experience it but me. Believe me, this was a moment of absolute mortality for me and I know for a fact that I almost died on that bluff that day in Praia.

I didn’t die that day. Today I can clearly see the bullet I missed and, without actually knowing what happened to me, all I can do is remember that my partner loves me and will do whatever she can do to help me through whatever it is I need to get through so we can be together the next day and the next, and the next…