A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

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.

During these cruises, a curious thing happened: without quite meaning to, I sold loans for the new boat. I was simply telling my story to people who asked, but the story became a kind of spiel as I learned that these people — sometimes without my even asking — were willing to loan me money.

The questions came because the business was unique. But what interested these people, really, were dreams. I couldn’t get a job as a professor, and I couldn’t make any money as a writer, but instead of taking a job I didn’t want, I was creating my own university on the water. It was an American Dream founded on another more recent dream, of Continuing Education, and my guests could feel satisfaction from participation in both. The two dreams fit together so well because really, in their best parts, they’re the same dream. How many of us ever get the chance to live a life in which everything comes together perfectly, so that everything we do engages us and represents who we are?

By the end of the summer, I purchased the hull with loans from my guests. Seref and I tried to make a more detailed budget for finishing, but really there were too many unknowns. I would ship much of the equipment from the United States. The labor and wood and other basic materials were all cheaper in Turkey. Seref was going to put together a team of Bodrum’s finest: the best electrician, carpenter, mechanic, and painter. He had the contacts, and this was a good, interesting boat, so he could get the best people, he said, and still keep the cost low. We would leave the boat in the yard’s shed for three or four months, to lay the deck, paint the hull, finish the pilothouse, and install its windows, then the boat would be dragged outside and finished on the beach.

These were exciting times, making plans and walking through the enormous steel hull. I felt extremely lucky.

That fall and winter I kept raising loans and sending large amounts of money to Seref. Construction was fully underway. It was bothering me, though, that I couldn’t be there, on site, to supervise. I was still teaching at Stanford fall and spring, and running charters on Grendel in Mexico during the winter.

Already it was seeming the boat would go over budget. Seref became cagey in February and March, no longer committing to stay within a certain range.

Then came the war in Kosovo. It filled the news all spring. As a result, Americans were not traveling to Turkey and no one was signing up for my charters. In addition to creative writing classes, I was offering great courses in classics and archaeology by professors from Stanford. The potential students — successful, intelligent professionals from the San Francisco Bay Area and across the United States — told me again and again over the phone that the trips sounded wonderful and they would have signed up if not for the war.

I tried to point out that the war was not in Turkey, but in 1999, American geography lumped Turkey with all the other nameless countries around it, so no one cared. One woman, after receiving a postcard I had sent to five thousand people on the Poets & Writers mailing list, sent several notes cursing me for offering cruises in a place where warplanes were flying over every day and children were dying. I didn’t know what to write back to her. That the warplanes she was thinking of were flying over Italy but not Turkey? That children are always dying in every country, but not currently in Turkey except from causes other than the war in Kosovo? Turkey has a million-man standing army. The idea that the ground war in Kosovo could have somehow spilled into Turkey was a bit imaginative.

The big political event for Turkey was the nabbing of the Kurdish rebel leader Ocalan (pronounced Oh-je-lawn) by the government. This triggered a U.S. State Department warning to travelers and also kept Americans away from Turkey, though it shouldn’t have. Whether one considered Ocalan the true and persecuted leader of the Kurds in Turkey or simply a butcher and drug lord most Kurds didn’t want any part of, either way his capture would lead to the most politically peaceful summer in Turkey in fifteen years.

Instead of making $200,000 in net income that summer, to help pay for the construction of the boat, I would take a loss. But every two weeks I still had to come up with another $25,000 or so for construction, and I didn’t have any money. The boat was being financed through credit cards and loans from former passengers, and my reliance on credit cards was increasing. I was working hard at selling loans, but with Ocalan and Kosovo, they were getting harder to sell.

By the time I left again for Turkey, in early June 1999, after frantically reading and grading to finish teaching my four spring courses at Stanford, I was far behind financially. It was possible that construction would stop and the boat would not be launched. I was forced to cancel several empty charters to consolidate the summer and reduce my losses. Now my first charter wasn’t until the end of July. But I wasn’t sure the boat could be ready by then even if I came up with the money to keep construction going. I wasn’t sleeping, and I was doubting myself, wondering why on earth I had ever decided to build this bigger boat. The weight of debt and failure seemed a physical thing lodged in my chest and far beyond my control.

The things I believed about myself were becoming untrue. I believed I always succeeded. I believed my hard work would pay off. I believed I was good for my word, that of course I would repay any debt. I believed I treated people well and fairly. I wanted to keep believing these things. And I knew my father had felt this same fear, of becoming something other than what he had always imagined himself to be. I wondered if this was part of what had made suicide begin to seem reasonable.

WHEN I ARRIVED in Turkey that June, the boat was down on the beach, among the great wooden hulls. Its masts lay alongside, one ninety feet long, the other sixty. I had chosen wood because it evokes the romance of sailing and the sea.

“I selected this wood myself,” Seref said, a hand on the main mast. “I let it dry for over two months. So strong.”

I walked along the mast, happy to be with Seref again and happy to be in this beautiful place, on ancient shores. But the two men who were screwing aluminum sail track to its aft edge were not caulking. They were just putting the screws in dry, which would rot the wood. One of the two men had a bandage over his thumb, except that it ended short of where a thumb should be.

“What happened to his thumb?” I asked Seref.

“He lost it a few days ago working on some wood for the boat.”

I looked again at the man and his bandage. This was terrible. I couldn’t believe he had lost his thumb building my boat.

“He is clumsy,” Seref said. “He already loses another finger building another boat. You don’t need to worry about it. And he doesn’t understand English, don’t worry.”

“But I have to do something.” Though I couldn’t think of what to do. It seemed so crass to give money. How does money replace a thumb? What I wanted was to make it not have happened.

“I already give him something,” Seref said. “It is done. Don’t think about it. Come.” He gestured toward the other end of the mast. “We have to decide something.”

I looked at the man again and nodded to him. “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt like a monster. He had a face that didn’t show anything to me, no remorse or pain or resentment or even recognition. If anything, he seemed impatient for me to leave so he could get back to work. I had no idea what to think or feel or do, so I turned and followed Seref.

The top of the main mast had a stainless steel cap with a lot of wires and attachments.

“We have to decide this,” Seref said. “You said you want battery cable to here, and a post for the lightning?”

“That’s right,” I said. “And a bonding plate below on one of the keels, and the grounds run to the hull. That way the lightning has a quick path to the water.”

“Okay,” he said. “You like your masts?”

“Well, they’re not caulking the screws. And they’re using two pieces of track, not one continuous piece, so every time I pull the sail down, it will get caught where the track is being joined. And the lower spreaders are supposed to have twin notches for the wires, not just one notch, and the ends of all the spreaders need boots. And the masts themselves are very heavy.”

Seref smiled at me, then grabbed both of my shoulders. “David. I will say this to you. This boat is not finished. When it is finished, I will hand you the keys and everything will be done. Everything. Okay?” He let go of one of my shoulders and held an imaginary set of keys in the air.

I didn’t believe him, but what could I say? I knew now I should have been working with a shipyard to finish the boat, not with the owner of a tour company, because at least some and perhaps all of the mistakes Seref was making were from lack of experience, not by design. But the summer before, when I had first bought the hull, I had believed, and Seref had encouraged me to believe, that he possessed the necessary experience and expertise and could finish the boat for less without the shipyard. Now he was doing his best, but his best might not be good enough, and it was too late for me to go with anyone else. I had given all of my money to Seref.

Seref led me up the ladder to see more. The deck was newly sanded, the space enormous, magnificent for sailing through the Mediterranean and Caribbean. The pilothouse was nearly finished. The dash under the forward windows, in mahogany strips caulked like decking, was varnished a deep, gleaming auburn.

“This looks great,” I said, and Seref smiled and beckoned me below, down the companionway.

Below was a different story. I felt sick seeing it. The main salon and galley were bare steel. No deck, no walls, no ceiling, no galley partition or settee or desk. He hadn’t done anything in here.

But Seref had already gone down the next set of stairs to the aft cabins, so I followed. Here, too, the floor was only steel, the ceilings bare with wires hanging. The walls for the hallway were tongue-and-groove mahogany, and the frames for the doors to the six aft staterooms had been fitted, but the wall going aft on the starboard side had a large bend to it. I was overwhelmed by disappointment and fear and could latch onto only this one detail. “This wall,” I told Seref. “It isn’t straight.”

“It will be straightened,” Seref said.

“When? I run a charter in six weeks. The wall has already been set. They’re building the room onto it now.”

“David. I said I would fix it. Now look at one of your staterooms.”

I looked at one, and it was not what he had promised. It was solid mahogany, tongue-and-groove, as requested. But the strips of mahogany were greatly uneven. As I looked along any wall, I could see a strip of mahogany sticking out here and there. And it was all too late. The boat would have these imperfections until its final day. It had already gone far over budget, it still required more equipment and construction, and it was being built full of flaws.

I saw, too, that the insulation they were using behind the walls was only Styrofoam. They had just broken pieces of Styrofoam and stuck them in against the steel, then nailed the plywood over it. The corrosion would be a nightmare. In April, when I had visited for three days, I had asked for spray foam over all the steel before any wood was placed. That way the hull would last, would not rust from the inside.

“What about the spray foam?” I asked. “Where is the spray foam?”

“Yes, we need to talk about this. Now tell me what it is exactly that you want.”

“But we’ve already talked about it, many times. And now it’s too late. You can’t spray anymore. You’ve already built over the steel.” I turned away from Seref into one of the other rooms. I was not proud of myself, of how I was complaining, but nothing was right, and it was all too late, and what does one do?

I looked in one of the heads and saw that they were not finished either. Toilets still not installed, no sinks, no tile on the floor, walls unpainted. Eight of these bathrooms, one for each stateroom, and nothing had been done yet with any of them.

“We must talk about the bathrooms,” Seref said. “What type of sinks you want. We will have to buy these. I have an idea, a good type of sink.”

“Where are the toilets?” I asked. “The nine toilets that I bought and sent clear back in December, half a year ago, $750 each, so they could be installed right away?”

“David, really you push too much. They are in the back rooms, the same as when you visited in April. We are waiting to decide on the floors first.” He was looking out into the hallway. Many of the men were listening to us with one ear while they worked, some of them able to understand English, and I knew this bothered him.

“Well decide it now. Tile. Just put in some tile. White or green or whatever you can find. I have to run a charter in six weeks. You have to start deciding and working faster. You will not finish at this pace.”

Seref put one hand through his hair and exhaled, then he walked out of the room. I was pissing him off, which was fine with me. It seemed necessary at this point.

I walked back through the bare main salon and down a hatch in the galley to the engine room. I found Ecrem in there with a shop light. I had met Ecrem in April, a small guy who looked almost English but spoke no English. He worked for very little money, Seref said, and he was doing most of the mechanical and plumbing work. We both smiled and nodded and said hello in Turkish. That was all we could do, so he went back to work, welding a platform for a discharge pump, sending white-blue light in jagged shapes along the steel walls. I could see myself outlined in these flashes like a burglar as I walked back between the engines.

I pulled out my flashlight. Beautiful new diesels painted a dull blue. I traced their fuel lines and exhaust systems and found problems.

Seref called for me and I yelled I was in the engine room. I was going to tell him about the engines, but he came down the ladder with the electrician, a formal old man I had met in April who was reputed to be the best in Bodrum for a boat’s electrical systems. He and Seref showed me the fuse box for the twenty-four-volt system, and I asked how the engine batteries tied in. They looked puzzled and we went up to the electrical panels, which had been custom made in the United States and shipped to Turkey. Behind the panels were the big switches, and it was the cables to these I started tracing. They weren’t run the way I had asked.

“These switches here,” I showed both men, “in the emergency position, need to connect to the house banks.”

The old man waved his finger back and forth, telling me no. He clucked with his tongue, as if I were an ignorant child. Then he talked to Seref in Turkish.

“He says they cannot connect to the house banks,” Seref said. “He says the engines are only twelve volts and the house banks are twenty-four.”

“What?” I asked.

Seref talked with the man again, then repeated the news to me.

“Seref, you told me the engines were twenty-four-volt. I had the panels built, the switches ordered, and the entire system designed around twenty-four-volt engines.”

Seref looked bewildered. “No,” he said. “Just a moment.”

He talked again with the man, who started gesturing. I didn’t feel like waiting.

“What was he doing in putting together the whole wiring plan, Seref? None of it made any sense if the engines were twelve volt. What are these switches doing now?”

Seref put his hand up. “Calm down, David. Really. You mustn’t talk like that. Really.”

I tried not to get upset. I tried just to listen and explain. But none of this boded well at all.

“I don’t know how he make this mistake,” Seref said finally when the old man had gone. He had his hand rubbing the top of his head. I decided to back off, but then I remembered the engines.

“We should talk about the engines, too, Seref.”

“Ecrem is working on the engines. He will arrange all.”

“There are no siphon breaks. The engines could be flooded with saltwater. They were supposed to be added by the yard before the boat was moved out here.”

“They are coming, in the next week or two, they will do this. They know about this. They have not forgotten. Or I will have Ecrem do it. I take care of this. You don’t worry. Come. We go.” He walked up on deck and I followed. Before going down the ladder to the ground, though, I wanted to see the crew quarters. “Nothing has happened in the crew quarters,” he said. “Let’s go.”

On the drive back to Bodrum, Seref did not want to speak to me. I looked out at the water passing, at the large boats, the new hotels, the bougainvillea and whitewashed patios, the castle on the point. This beautiful place.

“I have a charter in six weeks,” I said. “If everything is not done, and done right, I will fail, and then I will not bring more guests or build more boats. There will be no more business from me.” Seref made a considerable amount from my guests, since he arranged hotels, cars, flights, and tours for them before and after my charters. He was receiving commissions from everything I spent, too. That’s the system in Turkey. He never did admit to me that he was taking commissions every time we bought anything for the boat, but I was fairly certain he was.

“It is your first night in Bodrum,” Seref said. “Have dinner with my family tonight. We will pick you up from your hotel at eight o’clock.”

We didn’t say anything more the rest of the drive. He dropped me off at a hotel that was not fancy, since I had asked for something cheap. I wanted to sleep on the boat but that would not be possible for some time, probably not until after launch.

The room was small, with bare dirty carpet, a small bathroom, and no air-conditioning. It was hot but I didn’t care. I opened the window to a view of small houses on a hill, bright in the sunlight with white walls, red tile, and purple flowers. I could hear the latest Cher song blasting from some corner club, “Do you believe in life after love, after love, after love, after love…?” Nancy and I loved Turkey for its obnoxious waterfront clubs. I flopped down on the bed exhausted and set my alarm to sleep for two hours. In a few minutes, as I was drifting off, I heard the loudspeakers from the minarets start up from three mosques. The Arabic chanting over the pop music, the tones leading up toward Allah, the praise and subjugation in it and the sound, too, of bitterness and defeat, of human disappointment. Maybe I was making up that last part. I was still tired from the flights.

I awoke slowly, heavy with jet lag, and was whisked off to a magnificent garden with tables set beneath the trees. Seref’s family was gathered at the bar, chatting with friends, and when we arrived, Seref’s wife greeted me first. She was beautiful, with bright eyes and a genuine laugh.

“Welcome back to Bodrum,” she said. “The lucky owner of a beautiful new boat.”

“Thank you,” I said, then turned to greet the next and the next, all very friendly and kissing me on both cheeks. They really were a wonderful group of people, Seref’s family and friends.

We sat at a long table for twelve and, without ordering, several large plates of mezes (appetizers) were passed around.

“I can’t wait to run the charters,” I said to Seref but really to the group. “All of the delicious mezes and other Turkish dishes.”

“The cook, Muhsin, is very good,” Seref said. “You will meet him tomorrow.”

“I can’t wait,” I said. There were fifteen or twenty men working on the boat. One of them, Ercan, I recognized as one of my crew members. I had met him in April. The other two had signed on since then.

“I must give a toast,” Seref said. He picked up his wine glass and we all picked up ours. “To David, who is very special to me, with him I am building not only a beautiful boat but also a lasting friendship.”

Seref’s charm was hard to resist. I thanked him and we all clinked and drank. I began talking then with Nazim, Seref’s best friend, sitting beside me. He spoke very good English and was a pleasant man. He had long curly hair and round glasses, like a rock star. He was the Camel cigarette distributor for the Bodrum area and smoked like a fiend.

“Your boat,” he said. “People are talking about it. They say it will be worth a million dollars when it is finished.”

Despite what I had originally hoped, there was no universe in which the boat was worth a million, especially here in Turkey. Still, I didn’t want to sound nasty. “Well,” I said. “It isn’t finished yet.”

“Yes, I know, but it will be finished. Seref is building this boat for you like it is his own boat. He goes to it every day since the winter, and he is trying to make everything perfect.”

I studied Nazim. He seemed genuine. He seemed to believe what he was saying, and it really was possible he did believe. It was even possible that Seref believed he was building the boat as if it were his own. This was what frustrated me about doing business in Turkey. I couldn’t know what to believe. Had Seref purposely ignored many of my requests and allowed shoddy work because he knew he could get away with it, because my time and finances were limited and I would have no legal recourse here in Turkey? Had he lied to me from the first about the cost of the boat, and was he putting the screws to me now because I was trapped and he thought I could raise more money?

I knew the original purchase of the hull and engines had been a bargain, but I couldn’t be certain of anything that had happened since.

“I know Seref is doing everything he can for the boat,” I said. “And I’m grateful. But I’m still worried we won’t be ready on time.”

“Have faith, my friend. I have known Seref a very long time. He will come through with what he has promised.”

I decided this man just didn’t know. He probably did believe Seref was doing his best. Or he was planted next to me at this dinner table to brainwash me. It didn’t change anything, either way. “Let’s drink to that,” I said.

After dinner, I walked down to the harbor, which is magical at night. Hundreds of wooden masts and carved sterns, the peninsula on the southern side with its maze of restaurants, shops, and clubs. The castle, its walls lit, defending the entrance and the bay. A true medieval castle, intact with its towers from the crusades, one for the French, one for the English, one for the Germans, etc.; each of the European nations warring in the name of Christianity stayed here and kept building. No major battles, except among themselves. At one point some treachery in which dozens were killed by their own and buried in a common grave. When the castle at Rhodes finally fell, they scampered away without a fight. The only bombardment came in World War I from a French ship. Then it became a prison. Now it’s a museum, specializing in underwater archaeology, and flies a Turkish flag. We live in better times than most.

The phones lined up near the base of this castle rarely work. I went down the line of them inserting my card and found a working one on the fifth try. I called Amber first. She was running the business from our new, cheap office space in Menlo Park, California, and would have messages and bills and problems for me. Because of the travel, it had been two days since I had checked in.

As it turned out, though, Amber did not have the list of bills together. She promised she would put it together in an e-mail and I’d have it the next morning. She didn’t have any new clients, no trips sold. She hadn’t been doing any call-backs, either. She was somewhat busy with her own life, it seemed, and not at all apologetic about it. She also hadn’t updated the website with any of the new course information or itineraries for our winter offerings in Mexico.

“So any news from any potential lenders?” I asked.

“I talked with John. He’s still going to give us the loan.”

I only had to make it until October, four months away, when John, who was one of my lenders and Amber’s former fiancé, would inherit half of his seven million from his father on his twenty-fifth birthday and give me a loan for $150,000, which would bail me out.

I called Nancy next, a much more pleasant call. Though I had been gone for only two days, I already missed her. We had been together for a year, and I was used to seeing her every day. It was possible we might marry, so I couldn’t help but wonder if it was her future now, too, that might be collapsing.

BEING A FOREIGNER reshapes you. You feel born again into the world. I was no longer a teacher at Stanford, a California resident, a local. I was the captain and owner of a ninety-foot yacht being built by the Turks on the shores of the Aegean. This, combined with the fact that I was on the edge of ruin and under extreme time pressure, was an interesting feeling.

When I walked into the Borda office, Seref at his desk in the back was freshly showered and his hair neatly combed. He wore a polo shirt, shorts, boat mocs, an expensive watch, and sunglasses tucked into the front of his shirt. He was always like this, no matter how busy things were. I always felt like an American slob, and I also felt genuine affection for him. I liked this man. I think he liked me, too, despite the difficulties. I was hoping today would be better than yesterday.

“Good morning, my friend,” he said.

“Gun ayden,” I said. Turkish is a completely foreign language, with no cognates. Gun means day, not good.

“Have you had breakfast?” He pointed to an opened white paper package of my favorite Turkish breakfast treat, pastry dough in many layers filled with potatoes cooked in some delicious sauce similar to curry.

“I love these,” I said.

“You are welcome, my friend. Have what you like, and then we will talk.”

Turks and Europeans and maybe all other people in the world are better than Americans about not polluting every moment with business. They take pauses, no matter what’s going on. In the States, I would have been chewing and talking at the same time, being efficient, but I appreciated that here I could take a few minutes to enjoy my breakfast.

The other people in Seref’s office were friendly. The travel arrangements for my guests would be arranged by Ugur, who introduced himself. His name was difficult for me to pronounce, like ooh-er but with something else going on with the g. He was in his mid-thirties, balding, and cheery.

“How’s business this summer?” I asked him while I ate my breakfast, breaking the rule without even thinking.

“It’s terrible,” he said. “Really terrible. This Ocalan problem is a big problem for Turkey.”

“It’s been going on since 1984 or 1985, right?”

“Yes, many years, but now they catch him. Your government and Israel government help. I am Kurdish, but I would like to kill this man. He end all business. This summer finished.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was a sensitive subject, and I didn’t know much about it. I had done some research online, since the capture of Ocalan was screwing up sales for my charters and people were asking me about him, and from everything I could find, it seemed he was a butcher and a criminal, not a political leader deserving any sympathy. It was true the Turks had been barbaric to the Kurds, but Ocalan wasn’t just leading his people out of this oppression. He was trafficking in arms and drugs, and he was slaughtering a lot of innocent people, including Kurds. He had murdered Kurdish teachers in eastern Turkey, for instance, because they were teaching Turkish to Kurdish children. A desire to preserve his language and culture was laudable, but murdering teachers made me think he should swing. The best option, of course, was what the Turkish government was doing, which was to keep him behind bars and never kill him, so they had a hostage to help prevent further terrorism by Ocalan’s organization. I wasn’t going to say any of this out loud in Turkey, however, because it was possible I was wrong, and it might not matter whether I was wrong or right. Someone might take offense regardless. “Huh,” I finally said. That seemed noncommittal enough. Just another American who didn’t read the news.

“Really I would like to kill him,” Ugur said.

I wiped my hands on a napkin and nodded to Seref. “Well, it’s nice meeting you,” I said to Ugur.

“Nice to meet you,” he said.

I sat down opposite Seref, and he opened a folder that had printouts of e-mails from me, faxed plans for the electrical system, receipts, etc.

“Now, we need another transfer,” Seref said. “I make these men wait, because I can. I know them many years. But they need to have their money now. Also, we need much equipment. We need tiles for the bathrooms, sinks, some marble for the galley, all the cushions need to be made now. The cushions we make with a good friend of mine, he say he begins right away, but still is necessary two or three weeks. This boat take a lot of cushions. Seventeen beds, one sitting area inside, five big sitting areas outside.” Seref puffed his cheeks a bit. “This is many things. And many other things, too. Everything for the galley, we need to buy this. I know a place here in Bodrum. And the floors. We have to decide wood or carpet.”

“I want wood,” I said. “Carpet gets wet and mildews.”

“But what type of wood? Wood is expensive, it takes time.”

“I know,” I said. “But I really don’t want carpet, as I said before, when we talked last summer.”

“Okay.” He nodded his head.

We went through many other items, from pots and pans to blankets and anchors. A boat is made up of literally thousands of items, most of them special-purpose or oddly shaped. We still had pumps to get, plumbing and electrical decisions to make, the layout of the main salon to design. It was truly overwhelming. If I’d had more money and hadn’t had any charters scheduled for that summer, it wouldn’t have been difficult. But on a tight budget and time schedule, it was.

“We go,” Seref finally said, and we drove out to Icmeler, to the boat. This would become our daily routine. I’d meet Seref in his office for breakfast and talk about finances and construction plans, then we’d drive out to the boat to discuss issues and oversee the work, then we’d run errands around town, trying to buy the various things we needed, then back to the boat to deal with more problems. In the evening, I’d go to the phones and Internet cafés to get loans and sell trips and try to hold my business together.

At the boat that day, I met the crew. Ercan (pronounced Air-John) I had met before. He was strong, about my height, same age (thirty-two), his head nearly shaved. He had a reputation for being a hard worker and a competent captain. The cook, Muhsin, was in his forties. He was a big guy who wore overalls and a baseball cap and smoked even more than the others, if that was possible. He spoke English fairly well and would be my interpreter for the other two crew. The sailor was Baresh, only seventeen years old. He was a kid. Small and wiry, handsome. He was friendly but didn’t speak any English. Seref said he was taking the kid on as a favor to his mother, a family friend, but he thought Baresh would be good crew.

There were at least a dozen other men working on the boat at all times, mostly on carpentry but also painters, electricians, and the mechanic, Ecrem. It felt odd to be the owner, the client, walking around the boat inspecting, checking the work of sometimes up to twenty-five men. I felt like a boss, but that was only for a few moments. Mostly I felt helpless, because I kept finding new problems and there wasn’t time or money to fix them.

The environment inside the boat was smoke and sawdust and the whine of saws and other power tools. Everyone puffing away as they worked. I was especially interested in the head carpenter, a thin, homely guy who had a quick smile and was very traditional. He was one of only two or three who followed the call to prayer during the work day, spreading out a small, rough carpet inside whatever stateroom he was working on and doing his prostrations and prayers. He was not a good carpenter at all by American standards, but he seemed like a good and honest man, full of jokes and songs and obviously liked by the other men. I liked his songs especially, when I could hear them over the table saws and drills. Traditional songs, his voice wavering up high, full of melancholy. The others quiet in their work when he sang. The sound of tools, but no talking. Occasionally one or two would join in. His songs were of a world I had never inhabited. Listening to him, I could forget, for a few minutes at least, all my worry. I was in a foreign land, with all that is rich and good about that.

The men took an afternoon break for tea at about four o’clock. They would gather out in the pilothouse and a boy came from one of the shipyard kitchens with the traditional pot and small glasses. The men put sugar cubes in and stirred with tiny spoons. They relaxed and chatted, the carpenter frequently telling jokes. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying, but I liked the atmosphere. They were laborers and poor, but they seemed more European than third-world. They looked aft to the sea and one of the islands, lovely in late afternoon, and they were part of an older culture. Constantinople had been the height of western civilization for five hundred years, and that fact had not been forgotten.

I visited many small vendors and shops with Seref, some right up from the beach, next to the boat. The teak lattice for the bowsprit was being made in a shop a hundred yards away.

Next door was the shop for stainless steel, which the Turks call Inox. The man here was young and skilled, making all custom fittings. I explained and sketched the various pieces I would need for the rigging, including many items he had never seen before. Winches mounted on stainless bands around the masts so that no screws went into the wood. Angled mounts for rope-clutches so that a single winch could manage four lines.

Most of the shops Seref and I visited were in Bodrum. The carpenter’s shop was high up on a hill above town, and we went there many times, sometimes early in the morning to pick up the crew of carpenters and lumber. The place was more like a den. We had to walk down from the dirt road into a basement, where the shop stretched through four or five large, dark rooms. Enormous tools for milling. They were making everything from scratch out of logs Seref had purchased.

As Seref talked with the carpenters I saw boards planed and sawed, grooves cut, plugs drilled. The one thing I did not see was a lot of sanding. Everything was rough cut and then delivered to the boat, where it was installed. The lack of sanding was beginning to annoy me. They had already varnished some parts of the boat that hadn’t been thoroughly sanded. I could see chattermarks and valleys in what should have been smooth, hard, level surfaces. Seref’s response was always “All will be fixed. All will be ready when the boat is finished. I will take care of all,” so I wasn’t prevailing. It was hard to ask for rushed construction and careful construction at the same time.

My favorite place was the marble yard. When we first visited, it looked like a new, fresh, unfinished graveyard, with slabs of marble propped up everywhere but not engraved. As we walked to the office we passed an open-air shop with only a roof and three walls. Two men were cutting marble, and I was startled by them. They came up to shake Seref’s hand and then mine, and they looked identical. They were entirely white from the dust, from their shoes up to their curly hair and beautiful faces. They were brothers — twins, I finally realized. They had perfect Mediterranean features, with full lips and sculpted noses and brows. Their curly hair must have been dark but was now white, pure white from the dust of marble, which is unlike any other dust. They looked like statues. Twin brothers metamorphosed into marble after running from something — a terrible father, perhaps. They were worthy of myth. I stared. I couldn’t help it. They were perhaps the most wonderful and strange vision I had ever seen.

Seref pulled me away into the office, where we sat with a grimy old man who fought over price, but my mind was still back with the mythic brothers. I found it hard to care about the price or the thickness of the counter or the diameter of the two rounded sinks.

In the evenings, when I left Seref and the boat and all the shops and oddities, I stood again under the minaret and Bodrum castle making my calls, and I tried to express some of what I had seen to Nancy. Our calls were too short, because the cost was too high, but I wanted to share some of this experience. I was falling in love with Turkey, despite the frustrations and fears. No matter how the boat turned out, this was a magical place and I was grateful for my time here, to be seeing this.

Nancy was anxious to join me. She had visited Turkey the previous summer for only two charters and a few days afterward, but in those last few days we had toured the new route through ancient Lycia. Seref had driven us farther south along the coast. We saw towns and coves from Gocek to Antalya, so we knew it was going to be even better than ancient Caria. The ruins, especially, would be much more numerous, older and more ornate, and better preserved. Nancy and I wanted the charters to begin.

The trips weren’t selling, however. I had maintained hope that maybe we’d have some last-minute enrollment from people who saw that the war in Kosovo hadn’t in fact spilled over into Turkey and Ocalan’s supporters hadn’t unleashed massive terrorist attacks. But no one was signing up. The few trips I was going to run would be at a loss, and though I dearly wanted to just cancel all of them, I couldn’t. I had professors coming. The Homer’s Odyssey course had a few students, so at least that trip would go off well, but the archaeology course had only two students. And a famous, extremely well-liked professor. It was going to be embarrassing.

My first summer in the San Juans, I had easily filled eight weeks. The summer of 1998, in Turkey, had been even more successful, with many repeat customers. I had also run winter trips in the Virgin Islands and the Sea of Cortez. And this summer I was offering a better route, a better boat, better course offerings, famous and accomplished teachers, and reduced prices, and still no one was coming. I didn’t see how I was going to make it. I was fighting over the construction of the boat all day, every day, trying to get it launched and finished on time, but this also meant I was spending money I didn’t have, and my credit was about to end.

Seref and I fought over so many items partially because of what he himself called his Black Sea Mentality. “I come from the Black Sea,” he said. “And there, we don’t have a lot of money, but we find a way.”

His resourcefulness was admirable, and very much in line with my own attempts to save money, but it also meant storing the propane tank down in the galley next to the stove, for instance, even though it was an explosion hazard. I wanted a box on deck, vented so the fumes couldn’t collect in any enclosed portion of the boat.

“This is not necessary, David,” he said. “All these boats here use this system.”

I hated to sound like a jerk, but his explanation didn’t matter. “I don’t care if these other boats want to blow up,” I said.

“None of these boats blow up. You do not know this system.”

“Seref. Propane is heavier than air and can ignite from a spark after collecting in any enclosed space. No amount of tradition can change science.”

So Seref took the tack he usually did when he hit a wall, which was to argue that even if I wanted this change, it wasn’t possible in the design and with how much time we had. It was the same approach he took with the anchor and the exhausts to the engines and various other items.

“Where does this tank go?” he asked. “There is no place for it out there.”

We finally put it under the captain’s seat on deck, which made the seat too high. So the days ground on, filled with anger and disappointment, and if I had had a way out of the whole business, I would have taken it. But the owners before me had spent $250,000 and received only $100,000 of the $140,000 I had paid. That’s what happens when you try to sell a boat that is still under construction. You lose a lot of money. I was locked in to finishing and then using the boat successfully. That was the only way I would be able to pay everyone back.

LAUNCH DAY FINALLY arrived. Traditionally, we should have been sacrificing an animal — a goat, I think. But I said no. I was also supposed to give big tips to everyone, for luck, but I didn’t have the money. I walked around the boat with Nancy and wished we’d had more time. It would have been better to complete everything before launching.

I kept staring at the name on the stern. It had been a lovely gift from Seref, a varnished wooden plaque carved by a friend of his in Bodrum, but I worried that all of its bolts through the steel would cause corrosion.

The name itself was odd, too: The Wife of Bath. My company was Canterbury Sails, offering educational pilgrimages, as it were, beginning with writing workshops. But no one understood the name, especially in foreign countries. My Turkish crew couldn’t even pronounce it. And I wasn’t sure the sign was lined up quite right. It was hard to tell. The sun was very bright off the white hull.

The boat would be pulled backward into the water on large wooden skids. It was an old system, with cables attached fore and aft. Planks were laid out behind the boat like railroad ties for the skids to slide over.

“We use this system for hundreds of years,” Seref said. “Not with steel cable or tractor, of course. But this is same system.”

“It’s the system the Easter Islanders used to move around those huge statues,” I said. “At least according to one theory. But other scientists say the system couldn’t have worked, that the statues would have fallen off.”

Seref shook his head and smiled. “You think like no other person,” he said. Then he patted my shoulder and walked away.

By around noon, the yard crew was finally ready, and the tractor, revving up, started pulling. There were shouts immediately, then readjustments to the skids, then movement again. The whole thing looked dangerously top-heavy, but the skids moved smoothly over the ties, and after about fifty feet, the stern hanging over the edge of the water, the tractor eased up and the boat stopped.

I was inspecting the cable system. It was anchored ahead of where the bow had been, and had a brake on it, using blocks. Seref told me the next step would be to ease the boat toward the water, then let it go so that it slid back without tipping over. If they hit the brakes once it was back at an angle, it would fall onto the stern. So they had to let it glide at the end.

“I’m very nervous about this,” I said. “The launch basically is not controlled. Has a boat ever fallen over backward or sideways?”

“David, really you worry too much. This happen maybe once or twice. But almost all the time the boat just glide into the sea.”

We would be up on deck when the boat was let go. Seref and Nancy and I, and the crew. So at least Seref was risking his own life. I asked him whether our Turkish insurance policy would cover an accident at launch, and he said it would. And there was no other solution. I couldn’t make a 150-ton travelift suddenly appear.

After various final preparations had been made, about ten people were up on deck and I was down in the bilges, checking. In the engine room I found Ecrem not doing anything about two large holes in the side of the hull. They were going to be exhausts for the generator and one of the discharge pumps; the holes were about three inches in diameter. I tried to motion for him to close them, using made-up sign language since he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Turkish. Finally I had to yell for Seref, and he came down to interpret.

“Please tell him to close these holes,” I said.

Seref talked with him and then said, “He can’t close them. These exhausts will not have valves. The hoses will fit over the pipe.”

“Well we can’t launch with them open.”

Seref talked with Ecrem again. “He says they are above the waterline.”

“When we go flying back into the water, the water is going to slosh a bit, don’t you think?”

“Okay, David, okay,” Seref said. “I tell him to close this.”

“Thanks,” I said. Then I went through the rest of the engine checks while he talked more with Ecrem. I made sure the engine intake valves, diesel lines, and shaft gland cooling valves were open. This way of launching was difficult for me to accept. We’d hit the water at speed, drifting around uncontrolled and banging into other boats if we couldn’t start our engines. I knew I shouldn’t make comparisons, but in the U.S. this would never happen. On a railway or a travelift, engines are started and tested with the boat fully afloat, before the lines are cast off. I didn’t like my options here because I didn’t have any.

When I had checked everything and was back on deck, I made sure the rudder was centered and then stood at the helm, ready with the ignition switches, and asked Seref to give the order.

Seref yelled, and Nancy looked at me with fear. We were twenty-five feet off the ground, on a hundred-ton, top-heavy steel boat on thin wooden skids sliding backward without any brakes. I had no idea what was going to happen.

At first, nothing happened. Then we began moving, slowly. Then we were moving backward quickly, a feeling of enormous weight and power released. The fall was extremely far. I clung to the helm and hoped.

A huge sound of water rushing and we were in. We hadn’t tipped over. But we were still moving fast, and starting to curve back toward shore. I hit the ignition buttons for both diesels and they roared to life. I looked at the depth — fifteen feet, only about six feet of water beneath our keels. A lot of people were yelling, telling me to do all kinds of things. I looked around for other boats. I put one of the engines in forward to slow our speed and spun the helm to bring the bow around.

Something was wrong, though. We weren’t slowing down much. I gave it more power, and we didn’t seem to slow at all. There were two small boats anchored in our path behind us. Seref pushed me aside and grabbed the throttles, but he became confused, too, and was using the throttles and wheel randomly. He was lost. Then Ercan pushed him aside and the three of us fought for the wheel.

“Stop!” I yelled. “Something’s wrong with the props or engines. They aren’t responding correctly.”

“I drive,” Ercan said. “I am captain.”

“I’m the captain,” I told him. “Get away from the helm. Both of you.”

We were close to the boats, bearing down on them, completely out of control. Then I figured it out. The throttle was backward. Ecrem had mounted it backward, so that when we hit forward, we were really hitting reverse. I put the throttles in reverse (which was forward), spun to avoid the boats, and got us into deeper water.

“Seref,” I said. “We almost ran over those boats and went aground.”

“I don’t understand how Ecrem do this,” he said.

Then I gave him the helm, asked him to steer straight at low speed, and went below to check for water.

I found Ecrem just holding on, not doing anything. The two holes were not plugged. They were showing sunlight and I could see that the hull was wet below them. I pointed at the holes and yelled at Ecrem, but just then Seref revved the engines, which was deafening, and threw the boat into a sharp turn. This put the holes underwater. Two thick streams poured in, then stopped as we rolled to starboard, then poured in again as we rolled back. Ecrem pulled his shirt off and stuffed it into one of the holes, holding his hand over the other. I took off my own shirt and stuffed it into the other hole.

I left Ecrem with the shirts and returned to the pilothouse. “What are you doing?” I asked Seref. “I said go straight, at slow speed. There’s water pouring in down there because Ecrem didn’t bother to plug the holes and you just had to do some circles.”

“Water? In the boat? Where is this water?”

On our way to Bodrum harbor, Seref made me pose for a photo with him on the aft deck, shaking hands. Our launch photo. It was silly, but he insisted, so I put on another shirt and smiled and posed. Then I went forward to the bow with Nancy to take a few deep breaths. It was a sunny, calm, beautiful day, Bodrum castle coming closer off to starboard.

“I hope this works out,” I said.

“Everything will get better,” Nancy said.

But things did not get better. Later in the day, when we were moored in the Bodrum fleet and one of the boats asked us to adjust our position, I tried starting my engines and nothing happened.

Seref asked Ecrem to figure it out, but I said no. I wanted someone other than Ecrem. So Seref called Ecrem’s brother, the “master” mechanic. He was supposed to be the best in Bodrum. And when he arrived, he was at least bigger and older than Ecrem. Literally twice his size. He went down to the engines while Ercan hit the starters from above, and he said immediately that there was saltwater in the engines. It had flooded in through the exhausts because the siphon breaks hadn’t been run correctly.

Seref translated this for me reluctantly. I couldn’t believe I was hearing it. I had told Seref over and over how important the siphon breaks were, and he had reassured me they were correct.

Seref could see that I was losing it so he put his hands up and tried to calm me. “I don’t know how this happen, David.”

“Now you’ve destroyed my new engines,” I yelled. I just couldn’t keep from yelling. “Seventeen thousand dollars for each engine, and you’ve filled them with saltwater. How many goddamn times did I tell you to make sure the siphon breaks were right? I’m not a mechanic, I don’t know how they’re supposed to be run, but I told you over and over how important they are.”

Though I shouldn’t have lost it, all of these things were in fact true. It was very frustrating, especially after the other events of the day. At first Seref yelled back at me, but finally he gave up and left.

I stayed in the engine room with the mechanic and helped him drain thick white soup from the oil pan. Then we removed the injectors and cranked each engine with a bar on the flywheel to pump out white froth at high pressure. It went all over the engine room. I didn’t even care about the mess. Saltwater in the engines was the worst possible thing we could do to them, and I’d need to rely on these engines for years. I was aware that I had behaved like a child, screaming like that, but I was so afraid. I had borrowed so much money for this boat. I had no safety net.

For the next twelve days, I was at the boat from 7 A.M. until midnight. We finished the bathrooms with white and green tile, household-style toilets, and even a bit of varnished trim on the cabinet doors. I was pleased with how they turned out.

For the floors in the staterooms and hallways, Seref found some cheap wood laminate. He didn’t consult with me beforehand. I came up on deck one afternoon, after working in the engine room, and found a huge pile of the stuff already brought onboard. I didn’t have time to fight for anything else.

Seref and I didn’t exactly make peace after the incident with the engines. We just moved on. There was too much to do. We spent a lot of time with the young guy who was building the air-conditioning units. We weren’t going to have them for the first charter, but he would meet us in Gocek and install them in the twenty-four hours between charters.

The ceilings took more time than I would have thought. Seref had shallow grooves cut in cheap, quarter-inch ply to mimic planking. This was inserted between braces in each ceiling section, then painted white, and it actually looked good. The contrast between the dark varnished mahogany beams and the white planked spaces looked rich. No one would ever know.

The compass I had shipped from the States was broken, and because it was specialized, with magnetic arms to compensate for the steel hull, I was unable to find a replacement. I would have to order another one, which meant I would have no compass for this twenty-four-hour trip to Antalya and the first few charters, perhaps even the entire summer. The Turkish crew was nervous about this. They had never been underway at night, or for twenty-four hours non-stop, and now they would have to do it without a compass. They told me it couldn’t be done.

“Relax,” I told them. “It sucks, but a compass isn’t necessary.”

At the end of our twelve days in Bodrum harbor, we had a long list of unfinished items. Seref would bring a construction crew to Gocek. But for now, at least we were seaworthy and the systems were running.

When we cast off, the other crews in the fleet were happy to see us go. We had been an inconvenience, and everyone knew we weren’t Turkish-flagged, either, and shouldn’t have been allowed here. We left feeling remarkably relieved. The worst part was behind us.

THE MEDITERRANEAN WAS like a lake, almost flat calm, the moonlight reflected in thousands of tiny crescents. And it was warm. No other boats whatsoever. Not one other boat sailing or motoring at night on that entire coast.

As daybreak neared so did the land, and with first light we could see mountains. The Turkish crew were able to steer again. I tried to point out that, in terms of a visual reference, having a mountain off the port bow was really no different than having the moon or stars off the port bow, but they weren’t convinced. They resented not having a compass.

The sunrise was spectacular, coming up pink and orange just as we passed between tall cliffs on the port side and a jagged island to starboard, with pinnacles before and after. The gap was narrow, only about a hundred feet. I woke Nancy and she came up to see. We went to the bow, to the teak platform above the bowsprit. We were gliding above glassy, pink water, the cliffs and island pink rock dotted with olive trees, the air warm. This was paradise.

We arrived in a harbor outside Antalya at about 9 A.M. By the time my lone passenger arrived in his taxi, we had the boarding ladder down and the salt washed off the boat, everything clean and ready. Our first charter. It felt so disappointing to run the first charter for one person, but I couldn’t cancel because it was a new course for Stanford Summer Session, offering undergraduate units, and at least Kevin was a former student of mine and completely likeable. He was extremely bright, charming, and well-traveled for a twenty-year-old. He had spent a lot of time in Yemen, and as we sailed back along the coast toward our first anchorage, he told great stories about the tall, skinny houses and the drug that everyone smokes. Apparently the entire country is hooked on a local drug that the rest of the world isn’t interested in. So nothing ever really gets done in Yemen, and the land is still divided into tribal territories. To cross the country, you have to meet with each local tribal chief to pass through his land.

Nancy and I were excited because this was a new part of the coast for us. We were going to anchor in a tiny bay we’d heard about just west of the ruins of Olympos. We went forward to the bow with Kevin while Ercan steered and Muhsin and Baresh prepared lunch. We chatted and laughed, and it felt as if the good part of the summer were beginning, the good part, even, of our lives. We had many years in beautiful places to look forward to, with smart and interesting guests.

Our anchorage was magnificent. Steep mountains on either side, two small islands at the narrow entrance, and a low saddle beyond the inside shore, leading to another lovely bay. No habitations, no other boats, just this beautiful place all to ourselves. We dropped anchor in the center and I backed within about thirty feet of a white cliff, then Baresh jumped into the water with our stern line tied around his waist. He climbed to an outcropping, tied us off, and dove back in. It all went very smoothly.

Because of Kevin’s good company, the ease of running a charter for one guest, and the spectacular coves and ruins, this charter was almost entirely a pleasure. There were some problems developing with the boat, however. The caulking on deck was coming loose, for instance. Within a week, there was one section on the starboard side, near the boarding ladder, that I could actually pull out for almost a foot.

Grendel’s deck caulking had been twenty years old and showed no signs of this. One afternoon Ercan and I inspected the deck thoroughly and found loose seams from the bow all the way back to the poop deck on the stern. It was all coming up.

I waited until Nancy and Kevin went for a paddle in the kayaks and called Seref on Ercan’s cell phone.

Seref didn’t want to believe it. “This cannot be true,” he said. “There is some other problem. The Cekomastik does not come up like this.”

I asked Seref to replace the seams in Gocek, between charters, and this became a daily fight over the phone, without progress. He had the advantage of time. If he delayed long enough on anything he didn’t want to do or didn’t want to do my way, I’d have to accept his solution in the end, because I had these charters to run and then I was leaving for Mexico.

We arrived in Gocek at the end of our first charter, said goodbye to Kevin, and greeted Seref and the construction crew. They had brought a lot of materials and equipment with them, including the AC units, the roller-furling and sail, and the marine plywood and mahogany, but they hadn’t brought anything to recaulk the deck.

I pulled Seref aside to walk down the dock while the men unloaded everything. The waterfront in Gocek is lovely, the small town tucked into the head of a large bay with dozens of forested islands and a mountain rising directly behind it. The late morning was sunny and hot.

“You must understand, David,” Seref said. “I don’t make any money on this boat. I take nothing. When it is all finished, you give me some commission, what you think is right. But I don’t take any money now. All is for the boat.”

I listened to this and knew it was crap. He was getting a commission every time I bought a nail or a piece of wood.

“I don’t make any money on this boat,” he said. “I build it like it is my boat. I try to do everything right.”

“I appreciate your efforts,” I said. “But the deck caulking should last at least twenty years. This deck caulking lasted about a week. So it has to be replaced. And I’m not going to pay. I already paid for caulking the deck.”

“David, really you push too much. I cannot do this. Where do I get the money for this?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Just do it.”

We walked on without speaking for a while, then Seref said, “You do not know me.”

I didn’t respond. I actually liked Seref, and this was difficult for me. I didn’t like to push, but I had to answer to my lenders. It didn’t make sense to pay for the deck twice on a new boat. Seref was going to have to fix it.

Talvi, the poet who would be teaching the writing workshop during this charter, arrived in the evening, followed by Steve, a friend I had invited on the trip for free. As long as the trips were nearly empty and still had to be run, I could easily invite a friend.

The two of them were thrilled to be in Turkey. They had dinner with Nancy while I kept working on the boat.

In the morning, we had just enough time to clean up from the construction projects, unload all of the workmen and their tools, and finish provisioning. We had only two paying guests: a friend of mine named Cristal and her friend Jen. Both were getting discounts, so there were no guests paying full fare.

Just before we left, I called Amber in California. I was actually pulling in some new loans despite everything, but I wasn’t keeping up with my bills. The loans were only $10,000 to $20,000 at a time now. It was a week into August, and so far I had accumulated about $450,000 in private loans, far more than I had thought I would need for the entire project. That didn’t count the $125,000 I owed on just my one Stanford American Express card, which would soon shut down because even with a 120-day grace period and juggling my three other AmEx cards, I wouldn’t be able to pay enough of the balance.

I had to survive until the middle of October, two months away, for John’s loan. On my last round of bill-paying the week before, I’d had long phone conversations with AmEx reps, explaining the situation regarding the balance on my Stanford AmEx card. I was running trips for Stanford Continuing Studies, and yes, I would be able to repay the amounts, but no, I didn’t have the funds yet. I was running this whole travel program, and I needed to have the cash to keep the trips going. What I told them was true, but I also didn’t emphasize that I was on my own in this business — that if things went bad, Stanford wasn’t going to bail me out. These were my own losses I was taking, not Stanford’s.

In addition to being behind on AmEx bills and behind on money for construction, I was also running short on cash for operating the charters. I needed more diesel, but I didn’t have the money. I would probably run out before the end of this charter, so I needed to come up with a solution soon.

We motored into the bay and anchored at Cleopatra’s Baths. It was sunny and bright, pine trees reaching down to where ruins lay submerged in about ten feet of water. We snorkeled and swam around the ruins. I enjoyed it but felt preoccupied.

I found some solace hanging out with my friend Steve. He played harmonica and had interesting tales from his few days in Turkey. He had been told by a taxi driver, for instance, that the current tomato glut was Monica Lewinsky’s fault. “I know, I know,” he said. “It sounds strange. But here’s how it works.” He was doing these exaggerated gestures with his hands, cutting them up and down through the air, clearing the way for a story, holding his harmonica in one hand. It was late in the day, before dinner, and we had the forward deck to ourselves. “Clinton’s embarrassed about the whole Monica Lewinsky thing, so to divert attention, he flies to Kosovo. This makes Americans think more about Kosovo, so they decide not to travel to places like Turkey, so no one is eating in the tourist restaurants, and the restaurants stop buying tomatoes. So now there’s a giant tomato glut and the price has fallen and farmers are going out of business. It’s all Monica’s fault.”

I also found solace with Nancy. We went kayaking in the evenings.

“I could ask my dad,” she said. “He might give you a loan.”

“No,” I said. “It would be better to avoid that, don’t you think?”

“I’ll just ask,” she said. “It can’t hurt.”

I thought it was a terrible idea, but I didn’t say no again. I was that desperate. I had to at least consider any possibility.

Our next stop was Fethiye, where we toured local ruins. We climbed two hundred stone steps to a Lycian cliff tomb overlooking the harbor, and as we stood in the shade of this ancient monument, our guide told us that Alexander the Great had wanted to take this town but couldn’t. Something about the narrow harbor or the prowess of the local militia. So one of Alexander’s generals, Amyntas, sent a bunch of soldiers into town disguised as musicians, their weapons hidden in their instruments. Once inside, the soldiers played a memorable little ditty and opened the city to Alexander, who left Amyntas behind to govern.

I liked these tales. It was always hard to know how much was truth and how much was local myth, fabricated over time, like the stories Seref was telling me, but they were certainly entertaining.

We drove in a minivan through town and then along a highway through a great valley, chatting and enjoying the landscape. We crossed into another valley and climbed, finally, into foothills and stopped at Tlos, which became my favorite site that summer.

Tlos sits on a rocky bluff rising from the Xanthos valley. It has Lycian tombs carved on its lower faces, including one with Bellerophon riding Pegasus, probably a tomb for royalty, some of whom claimed descent from Bellerophon. Above these are house tombs cut deep into the rock and a few sarcophagi standing on the more level area. The acropolis at the top of the bluff is mostly Ottoman, from as late as the nineteenth century. The view from here is idyllic. High mountains behind, snowcapped even in summer, forested foothills, and a broad, fertile valley leading to the sea, holding the ruins of Xanthos, Patara, and Letoon. Truly one of the most beautiful places any of us had ever seen.

Behind the bluff that contains the tombs is a great field, now growing corn, which was once the agora, or marketplace. There are still a lot of significant structures scattered up the hill, including a large stadium, aqueducts, and our favorite, the baths. We had seen a lot of Roman baths, but these were on a cliff overlooking the valley, the arches still intact; we could sit under them and gaze out on much the same view the ancients enjoyed, with the same warm breezes coming up from the valley.

While we took these tours, my Turkish crew was working hard on the varnish and other tasks, doing a great job. I wasn’t making any progress with the deck seams, however. And in Kas, farther down the coast, I ran into some new difficulties.

Kas is a beautiful little town. The harbor area has narrow cobblestone lanes closed to vehicle traffic. Up a hill is a large Lycian sarcophagus right in the middle of the street. The shops cater mostly to tourists but are small enough to be cute.

I needed to renew my tourist visa, so while my guests enjoyed the town on the morning of our arrival, I went to the ferry, planning to hop over to the Greek island that was only a few miles away. The roundtrip, including paperwork, would take about two hours. But after I had bought my ticket and boarded, I was called off the ferry because my personal visa was linked to my boat. I couldn’t be cleared out of the country unless my boat was also cleared out.

I had discussed this issue explicitly with Seref when he was doing my charter paperwork in Bodrum. It was supposed to have been arranged so I wasn’t chained to the boat. I had paid for various licenses and permits and had even paid a $6,000 bed tax for running charters: it had been expensive, and I had expected it to be done right.

I called Seref, who told me there was nothing he could do. I would have to take the boat with me to the Greek island and back.

“But what about my guests?” I asked him. “And it’s Saturday. What if I can’t clear out today?”

“I am sorry, David. But Kas is good place. Your guests will like. And Saturday is no problem.”

So I collected my boat papers to clear out of customs and immigration. Then I’d clear in and out of Greece and back into Turkey.

When I found the customs office, though, it was locked. The hours posted on the door showed that they should have been open right now, but they weren’t.

I asked in the restaurant next door if they knew when the customs officers would be back.

“He’s never there,” a pretty young woman told me. Then her parents, apparently the owners of the restaurant, told me the customs inspector always took time off for his own business and let people wait here for days. He was not responsible, they said, and I should report his absence to the police station.

I didn’t want to become involved in local politics, but hours later, after I had called the number posted on the door and asked around and was still waiting, I finally went to the police, with Muhsin as a translator. I found the port authority section and asked if they could just clear me out.

My request was too complicated for the guys at the front desk, so I was ushered into the office of an inspector who said he’d be happy to help. I would only have to fill out a statement saying I had been unable to find the customs inspector. Then he could clear me.

So I filled out the statement and waited. The clearance didn’t come, so I asked again, through Muhsin, and was told that I would still need the customs inspector. And he wouldn’t be in on Sunday, so I would have to wait until Monday morning.

“But I just filled out the statement so that I wouldn’t need to see him,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but you must come back Monday morning,” the police inspector told me in English. “And we keep your passports. We give back to you on Monday.”

I managed to remain calm, because I couldn’t afford trouble with the police, but really this was a bit unbelievable. Muhsin tried talking with the inspector again, as politely as possible, to discover other options, but there didn’t seem to be any.

Everyone was annoyed by the delay, but especially Cristal’s friend Jen. She was upset to be trapped somewhere on her vacation. A few hours before, the town had seemed lovely. Now it was a prison. I arranged for a tour to Saklikent, which would fill the entire next day, but we were spending too much time parked in one port. We were supposed to keep moving and seeing new places.

Saklikent is a deep canyon near Tlos, a narrow gap in the face of steep mountains lining the eastern side of the Xanthos valley. The river is cold and silty, rushing out of the canyon to twist along gravel spits to the ocean. Restaurants line either side where it pours out, with platforms for tables built over the water. Fifty feet up from the restaurants, at the entrance of the canyon, a walkway built along the rock wall leads to another restaurant tucked inside. From here, the water was low enough to cross at the fork of the river’s two sources, just inside the canyon walls, and hike up the drier source, the most spectacular part of the canyon. The walls were marble, polished by the river in winter. As we continued up, we passed beneath natural cathedrals, the marble colored red and pink and even a bluish tint.

As in all of Turkey, no safety measures had been taken. Every time I walked that canyon, rocks came down to shatter against nearby stone or splash into the water, and we all ducked, too late, then grinned sheepishly at one another.

After hiking the canyon, we sat on cushions in one of the restaurants, the water rushing beneath, and ordered Turkish bread that was fried and filled with honey or cheese. Then I rented inner tubes for everyone, along with a guide, and we waded into the ice-cold water under an extremely hot sun, perfect conditions for tubing. Real squeals as we hit standing waves and took frigid water down our backs or fronts, but also enough heat from the sun to warm us back up.

I loved the view, the mountains a spinning panorama. It was a great outing, diminished only by the fact of returning to Kas and knowing we weren’t leaving the next day until I had cleared out, in, out, and in.

By 7:30 A.M., I was waiting at the door of the customs office, but again it was deserted. I tried calling and asking around, but no luck. He finally showed up at about ten-thirty. I went in and politely asked for a clearance, showing him my papers, but he had already heard about the weekend’s events.

“You file a complaint against me,” he said. “Why you do this?”

“I didn’t mean to file a complaint,” I said. “I thought I was filling out paperwork to get a clearance from the police.”

“Ah,” he said. He was smoking, as all Turks do, especially in closed spaces. He was a young, handsome man, obviously taken with himself as an inspector and insulted by my complaint. “So you make a mistake?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes, yes, you certainly make a mistake,” he said. “You make a mistake with me.” He smoked some more and looked at the various walls with nothing on them. Behind him was a large portrait of Ataturk, which seemed to be the only portrait of anyone hanging in any office in Turkey. Modern Turkey was basically his idea, so this was appropriate. “You go to the police and take back this complaint, then you come see me again.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.” There was no point in fighting. This man had the power to keep me in port for months if he felt like it.

I went to the police station and retracted my complaint. Curiously, they weren’t disappointed to lose it. The other day they had expressed annoyance with the customs inspector, but now they talked of him as their great friend and colleague. I had clearly been made a pawn in some kind of local power struggle. My side had lost, and now no one else was on my side.

They sent me and my passport back to the customs inspector under police escort, as if I couldn’t be trusted not to attempt escape.

Then the customs inspector called in the immigration inspector, and they discussed at length the various difficulties of my noxious passport. When they finally stamped it, they charged me over $100 for a clearance out, which is supposed to be free. Then they lectured me a bit, blew smoke in my face, and sent me back to the police. The police made me wait for a while, then finally cleared me and charged another $40 just for fun.

It was almost 1 P.M. before I was back on board. I cast off with only Muhsin as crew, since Ercan and Baresh didn’t have the required visas, and we motored for about half an hour to cross the channel.

The harbor on this Greek island was picturesque and completely different from Kas, the architecture and layout and feel of the town much more European. There was more money here, and greater order, and a general sense of drowsiness. No one moving very quickly.

The Greek customs officer, in his middle years, was sitting outside his office, on a chair against the wall. “You are English?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Just the flag. I’m American.”

“And you?” he asked Muhsin. “Turkish?”

“Yes,” Muhsin nodded.

The customs officer made some sour faces, letting us know how he felt about Americans and Turks. His lips pinched closed but his tongue moved around in his mouth, wanting to break free. This was 1999. The Greeks were supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and Ocalan and resented U.S. and Israeli cooperation with the Turkish government in his capture. They were Christian, but not nearly as closely allied to the U.S. as Muslim Turkey was. And they had Cyprus and all the coastal islands as sore spots with the Turks. Just a few years before, the two countries had almost gone to war over possession of a few small, uninhabited pieces of rock sticking up along the coast. So this customs officer was ruminating a bit, and he was making us ruminate, too. But finally he stood up, walked into his office, and gave us our entry and clearance.

It was 3 P.M. by the time we were docked again in Kas, and I still had to clear back into Turkey before we could move on to the next port.

I went to the customs inspector first. He was in his office, which was convenient, and unusual, but he also had made up some new regulations for me. He said my charter paperwork from Bodrum was incorrect and I would have to obtain a doctor’s clearance and pay a lighthouse tax. “Maybe in Bodrum they do not know these regulations,” he said, smoking and gazing absentmindedly at his blank walls. “But here we are very careful.”

I knew he was full of shit, but knowledge is not power when it comes to dealing with government officials, so I had to run to the police, then to the other side of town to find the doctor, then to a notary, then back to the doctor, then to the police, and finally to customs and immigration. By the end, I had paid more than $500 just to clear in, almost all of which was bogus. I left Kas in a foul mood. And my guests weren’t happy, either; it was after six by the time we left. We arrived at our next port long after dark.

The rest of the trip went well. It’s hard to beat the ruins and coves and towns along that coast, and it’s hard to beat a poetry workshop with Talvi Ansel. The only difficulties were when Ercan hit on Steve, by blowing in his ear, and my lack of money. When it was time to get diesel, though, Steve helped me out. He loaned me $2,200, which would fill our tanks almost halfway.

We did have one other problem that trip, which was that the air-conditioners leaked water under the beds from condensation, and this water made the cheap wood laminate flooring buckle. So I told Seref, and he promised me he would have the air-conditioning man fix the drains to the units, and he would do something about the flooring. He was vague about what and when, of course.

Then a huge earthquake hit near Istanbul. Oddly, this was one event that summer in Turkey that had no effect on my business. Although the quake was an enormous national tragedy, killing eighteen thousand people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, it left the airport in Istanbul strangely intact. Which shows, despite other indications to the contrary, that perhaps luck is only luck.

MY NEXT CHARTER was a course on Homer’s Odyssey taught by Charlie Junkerman, who was my boss at Stanford, and Rush Rehm, his friend in the classics department. Four adult students had signed up, which was a record for paying guests that summer. Everyone arrived in high spirits, charmed by the medieval walls of Antalya’s harbor and excited to sail the coast that Homer and Odysseus had sailed.

On this trip, we had the usual Turkish guides for the ruins but we also had Rush, who was extremely knowledgeable and likeable. In Myra, as we gazed at tombs carved into the cliffs, he told us the stories of the figures depicted. As we toured the large and well-preserved Roman theater, he told us about theater conventions of the time. The group had read quite a bit of background material about the sites we were visiting, and the debates were lively. This was what I had hoped for in setting up these educational charters. Vacations that were explorations and adventures, not just lying in the sun and drinking.

Rush and Charlie held class on the aft deck every morning, the students in their swimsuits and snacking on olives. It was perfect, and if it hadn’t been for the war in Kosovo, it might have been a viable business.

Each charter, we toured the ruins of Phaselis, Olympos, the Church of St. Nicholas, Myra, Kekova and Kekova Island, Patara, Letoon, Xanthos, Tlos, Fethiye, and Cleopatra’s baths, in addition to hiking and tubing at Saklikent and exploring lovely seaside towns and coves from Antalya to Gocek. It was hard, after setting all of this up and seeing how wonderful the trips could be, to know that the business was failing.

I continued to have problems with the boat, too. In Kas, I woke in the morning to Ercan and Muhsin knocking at my door.

“There is a problem,” Muhsin said. “You need to see.”

They led me onto the deck, then forward to the port bow and asked me to look over the side.

I hesitated for a moment, wondering what good fortune this town had brought me now. When I bent over and looked down at the waterline, I could see a piece of the paint hanging loose. This was difficult to believe. The paint and the thick epoxy beneath it are supposed to stick to the hull, of course. The paint job had taken months.

I called Seref on Ercan’s cell phone, up on the bow, away from my guests. Charlie and Rush had gotten up early, though, and they knew. Charlie gave me a look of pity. I think he understood all the troubles I had gone through to try to make these charters happen.

“The paint’s falling off the hull,” I told Seref, who went through his usual expressions of disbelief: how can this be true, this can’t happen, this isn’t possible, etc. “It’s true,” I said. “I’m looking at a large piece of paint and epoxy just hanging at the waterline. And I need to move the boat now, to sail to the next port, which means some of the paint is about to be stripped off of the boat. You have to fix this.”

“But how? How can this be?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we might have to sail to Bodrum after this charter and haul out for a quick paint job, maybe ten days. You’ll have to rent another boat to run the next charter, which has only four people, and then, after the painting, we’ll motor the 220 miles again from Bodrum to Antalya to pick up the last charter. I can’t think of anything else. I shouldn’t have to be dealing with this. When you build a boat, you should build it to last more than a couple of weeks. You’re going to redo the deck seams, too, and take out that laminate crap on the floors in the staterooms. It’s all buckled now, so that some of the doors don’t even close. Please arrange all of this today.”

I tried to tell my guests in light, funny tones that our paint was falling off, as if it were somehow amusing, and then we pulled out of the harbor and headed up the coast.

It was a lovely day, with calm water and blue skies, and all of us, guests and crew, took turns leaning over the side to watch large patches of white paint and paste flex and shiver then fall off, sometimes in sections as big as four or five feet long by three feet high. It was all coming off, one whole side of the boat. There was nothing I could do but keep to the schedule and come to grips with the fact that we now looked like a military vessel, stripped down to our gray primer over steel, all the welding ribs showing. I felt terrible about polluting the water, but it just wasn’t realistic to try to recover each of the fifty pieces as they ripped off, especially since they sank quickly. And I couldn’t have just stayed in Kas. That’s the main rule in charter. Unless you’re held hostage by terrorists or government authorities, you stick to the itinerary and give the guests their vacation, no matter what’s happening to the boat or the crew.

The rest of that charter, I was making arrangements. By the time we arrived in Gocek, there was another, smaller charter boat waiting at the dock for my next guests. Seref and I had fought over who would pay for this, and I had lost. He would pay for the emergency haul in Bodrum, and the labor to recaulk the deck. He would also redo the floors, and repaint the boat, but the paint company would have to pay for the new paint, and I would have to pay for the difference in cost between the two kinds of deck caulking, the new wood for the floors, and this smaller charter boat for my guests.

Out of the water, the boat looked like a yacht on one side and a battleship on the other. Seref’s cousin and Mustafa, the owner of the yard that had built my hull, came down to look at it. Seref’s cousin rich as ever, a handsome, tall, European-looking man with possible mafia connections wearing thousands of dollars of the finest clothing. Mustafa, shorter and homely, smoking his pipe as always. Then the insurance man arrived, then the representative from the paint company, and everyone examined my boat before driving to Mustafa’s yard to look at a boat under construction. The hull had been fared with epoxy paste, and small circles were drawn all over its surface to show bubbles forming under the paste, sections that were pulling away from the hull. Seref’s cousin’s boat had already been launched. Like my boat, large strips of its paint had fallen off. Finally we gathered in Mustafa’s office to discuss the problem.

This discussion took some time. In the end, we agreed the company would provide two coats of quick-drying epoxy, two top coats, and two coats of bottom paint. The meeting had been frustrating and long, but now we could move forward quickly.

This turned out not to be the case, however. I had to leave for a day and a half to meet my charter guests and their professor down the coast, and when I returned, I was disappointed. I told Seref we weren’t going to make it at this pace, but he ignored me until it was too late. Probably this was intentional. He forced me into a compromise. The floors in the staterooms would not get done until the end of September, just before I sailed for Mexico.

Seref and I were not getting along. I told him directly, as we stood in the hot sun in the dust: “You promise things, but then you don’t deliver. You’re too slow. You should have had ten guys working on this immediately, but you didn’t listen to me, and now you’re not going to be able to do it on time. Which means, to me, that you’re doing this on purpose, because I know you’re a smart man.”

“David, we will do this job. Really, you must not talk like this.”

“How are you going to do it, Seref? You’re already too late.”

These conversations usually ended in silence, filled with what I believed to be mutual regret. Too many things had gone wrong, the boat an enormous weight dragging both of us down. We took turns making excuses. Seref made excuses about botched and late construction; I made excuses about late payments. The war in Kosovo was killing both of our businesses. He was doing less than forty percent of his usual business, even with the Brits, who tend not to be deterred much by war or terrorism, and he was suffering especially from his new rental cars. I suspected he had bought some of these cars in the winter using my money. I suspected that a month or two of construction in the winter had not actually happened. But I couldn’t know for sure, and there was no possibility of recourse in the Turkish courts, anyway.

I spent every day at the boat, trying to hurry the job along. I also tried to encourage the use of safety harnesses, since the men with the sanders were up on scaffolding. They laughed at me, the silly American trying to hand out his safety equipment, but one day, after I made Baresh and Ercan put on sailing harnesses with tethers leading up to stanchions, Baresh slipped and fell off the scaffolding. His sander and the board he was standing on fell twenty feet to the ground, but he was left dangling in the air, held by his tether. Several men pulled him up on deck, and after that I was teased less. Ercan, however, blamed the fall on the harness and tether. “If he not have this equipment, he never fall.”

I’d had other impossible arguments with Ercan that summer. On one of the earlier charters, for instance, I had asked him to install siphon breaks for the bilge pump discharges, but he refused. “This not my job,” he said. “This things not necessary. This not my job.”

I didn’t like arguing with him, so instead I tried to show him. We had some water in the bilge, so I had him watch the water level as I turned the pump on and off. Each time I turned it on, the water level went down. Each time I turned it off, the water level went up and kept rising until I turned it on again. “You see?” I asked. “The discharge has formed a siphon. This is what happened to the engines, too. The water coming in from the bilge pump could actually sink us. Which is why we have to use either a one-way valve or a siphon break.”

Ercan smiled. “It doesn’t do this before.”

“That’s because we just filled our water tank and partially filled diesel,” I said. “It will happen every time we’re heavy. Ecrem should have cut the discharge holes higher, but he didn’t.”

“Other boats don’t need this,” Ercan said. “I see many other boats. This is not necessary.”

I lost it at this point. I had just showed him clearly, beyond any doubt, how it could sink the boat. “You’ll sink,” I said. “Someday, on some other Turkish piece of shit, you’ll sink. I promise you. And it will be exactly what you deserve.”

In fact, the day after Baresh slipped and was saved by his harness, Seref was called away suddenly because his own boat was sinking, right in Bodrum harbor. This was the boat he had admonished me with one day when I insulted his construction prowess, ‘the first real sailboat in Bodrum’. He was cagey about it afterward, and he never did tell me exactly what happened, but he admitted that the boat sank from siphoning. By that point in the summer I had lost all respect for Seref or anyone I had met in Turkey as sailors or engineers or honest businessmen. I know that sounds uncharitable, but I base it solely on the facts of my experience. I had not arrived with a bad attitude. If anything, I was their dream of a naïve and trusting American. I trusted them and managed to convince seventeen private lenders to trust them. I had been an enormous fool, and now it was too late.

By day we worked on the hull, by night on the deck. Seref wouldn’t hire enough men to do both jobs at once. I refused to pay more for the job, and I didn’t have the money anyway, and I couldn’t figure out how to force Seref to do more than he was doing. I was already withholding the last money that was due. I had already threatened an end to future business. I had tried to shame him. And of course I had asked nicely. I didn’t know what else to do. Not having a solid court system really limits one’s options.

The hull and deck were grueling jobs. Some of the epoxy on the hull was holding, which made grinding difficult. The two coats of faring we applied were thin, not hiding the weld ribs, and we had to use a less glossy top paint to hide the flaws.

The deck seams were cleaned out inch by inch with small tools, then caulked with an air-powered gun, Ercan and his brother and I taking turns late into the night, the black caulking getting all over us. I was frantic to finish and get back in the water for the next charter.

When we did finally launch, the paint job wasn’t quite done. We motored around to Bodrum, and the painter put on the last coat right there in the middle of the harbor, using my dinghy, which became completely spattered with white paint. The job looked like crap, far inferior to the original paint. I would need a new paint job as soon as I could afford it. Until then the boat would look like a ferry or a tug rather than a yacht.

We set off that evening for Antalya, hoping to arrive the next day before dark. We still didn’t have a compass, and the crew were frustrated and spun in circles occasionally, but we did make it.

THE MORNING WAS hectic with provisioning and cleaning, then the guests arrived. I was happy to see Rand and Lee, two of my lenders. Rand had sailed with me in the British Virgin Islands and the Sea of Cortez and had been the one to originally encourage me to get a bigger boat. Lee, his wife, was a vice president at Sun Microsystems. After this twelve-day charter, they would be staying for the trip through the Med to Gibraltar and the Canary Islands. Another lender, Elizabeth, the former wife of a bigwig CEO, had invited half a dozen of her friends, so no one on this charter was a paying guest. It wasn’t just the war in Kosovo that was killing my business. I had also been too generous with the terms of the loans, offering free charter as well as principle and interest. I should have made the lenders pay at least the expenses of a charter, including diesel, crew, slip fees, customs fees, and food. Instead I was picking up the tab. Further proof of my foolishness. Self-reflection was becoming an increasingly unpleasant activity.

I spent as much of this trip as possible with Rand and Lee and Nancy. We strolled the ancient marble streets of cities such as Phaselis, with its lovely coves on either side, a city that had attracted Alexander, Rhodes pirates, and whoever else was big at any particular time. And one afternoon — in Kas, of all places — as we sat outside a small café and had ice cream, Rand and Lee expressed interest in becoming something more like partners in the boat. Lee was retiring in a year or so, and they loved the boat and the trips I ran, and they also could see the financial strain I was under, so they wanted to help out.

This came as a tremendous relief. AmEx had shut down all four cards. They wanted everything paid in full. I was out of cash and at the end of other credit and I would have expenses for the crossing to Mexico.

By the end of the charter, Rand and Lee, though they had already loaned me $100,000 in various stages, agreed to lend $150,000 more, interest free. I remember whispering about it at night in bed with Nancy. Rand and Lee were in the next stateroom, so I had to be quiet. But I was so excited. I was going to make it. Everything was going to work out. With this loan and then John’s loan I could clear all the cards, make my first interest payments in December to the lenders, and have enough cash to get through the winter in Mexico. Then I would need to have some better charter seasons, of course. But I felt like a free man again.

The more I thought about this new loan the more stunned I was by the generosity of it. Rand and Lee were loaning me a total of $250,000, sixty percent of it without interest, and they were even giving me ten years to repay the principal, instead of the usual three. This was the time of “angel” investors in Silicon Valley, but those “angels” usually tried to take most of the equity of any company they invested in. Rand and Lee were not taking any equity at all. They were the real thing.

Rand and Lee left on a four-day tour by car as Nancy and the crew and I motored back to Bodrum. We’d have a few days to take on diesel and provisions and do last-minute work on the boat before sailing for Mexico. And we’d be switching from Turkish crew to American crew, to avoid hassles with customs and immigration in various countries.

These days were busy but also much easier than the rest of the summer, because the financial crush had been lifted. Amber was happy to hear about the money coming in, after having to juggle bills all summer, and reassured me that she had just spoken with John, whose loan would arrive in about three weeks.

Not everything went smoothly, though. Now that the new seams had cured, Ercan and another man were sanding the entire deck with a large grinder, and naturally Ercan was barefoot. I had told him to wear boots many times that summer, but he was always scoffing at my safety worries, and this time the grinder caught a bit of deck, jumped, and tore up his foot and hand pretty badly. It didn’t saw through, but it mangled skin and several toes and cut the bone.

We rushed him to the hospital, which was already a familiar place. A few weeks earlier, Seref’s son had been run over by a car while riding his bicycle through one of Bodrum’s narrow streets. He pulled through without permanent damage, and Ercan was going to do the same, but I couldn’t help being reminded of how easy it was to die or lose a limb here, how cheap life was.

I stayed with Ercan through that first afternoon and evening, and I paid for all his care. I also gave him extra cash in addition to his pay. There’s no workers’ health insurance to speak of in Turkey. Employers just pay if an employee gets hurt, or else the employee is out of luck. The cost of medical care, fortunately, is about a tenth of what it is in the United States.

As we came to our last day in Bodrum, Seref was holding all of my papers. Ostensibly this was because he was clearing customs and immigration for me. But it was also a power play. I had to pay him the last two or three thousand I owed before I could go. I promised I would make the payment within a week, with a transfer from the U.S., since I didn’t have the cash now, and he finally agreed to this, seeing no other option, but then he wanted to go for a little walk to discuss his “commission.”

The boat that was supposed to cost $300,000 or $350,000 and be perfect had in fact cost $600,000 and was full of flaws I would be fixing for years, but Seref expected a bonus for all of the good work he had done. He wanted his tip to be based on the total cost, including the original purchase of the hull and the cost of the items I had shipped. He wanted 15 percent, which was $90,000. I knew that he had been collecting commissions all along and had probably bought some of his new rental car fleet with my money during the winter, delaying the construction. But for now I had to pretend a commission was coming so he would let me leave.

Seref had one hand on the back of my neck as we walked along. It was evening, very balmy, the Bodrum waterfront a place I was actually quite fond of and was going to miss, even the mopeds sputtering past.

“I build this boat for you like it is my own boat,” he said. “Do you like your boat?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s beautiful. Thank you. And though we’ve had some bad moments, I want you to know how much I appreciate the work you’ve done for me.”

He seemed to relax a bit. “You are my friend,” he said. “Most men demand full commission before the boat leaves, but I know your money, that you have no money until you get this loan from John, and your schedule, and I know you won’t forget me when you leave here.”

“No,” I said. “And you’ll have to come visit this winter in Mexico, and then I’ll be back here next summer. We have the new thing for the Brits next summer, after all.”

“Yes,” he said. He had made a new alliance in the past few weeks with a British travel company that catered to older guests. He had told them about my educational charters and they seemed interested. The next summer, using leased boats, we were going to run educational charters for hundreds of old Brits, and I was going to supply all of the professors and set up the curriculum.

I didn’t believe any of this, of course. It was just a ploy by Seref to encourage me to pay his commission. If I thought I was going to make a lot on future business, I would have more incentive.

“Yes,” Seref said again. “This will be very good business for us.” Then he stopped, and I stopped, too, since he still had his big hand on my neck. He reached into his pocket with his other hand and pulled out an old compass. “I have a gift for you. My father give me this compass, for my first boat.”

“Seref,” I said. “I can’t take that. That has so many memories for you.”

“Please,” he said. “My friend.”

So I took the compass and made a great show of my gratitude and how much his friendship meant to me and how much I was going to miss him.

“Come,” he said, satisfied finally, or at least realizing this was the best he was going to get. “We go to my office for the papers.”

We picked up the papers, including passports and the bluebook for the boat, then I was back on board, the boat and new crew and guests ready, and I was greatly relieved. I was going to get out of here in one piece. It was dark, about 10 P.M., our spreader lights on as we pulled anchor and freed our lines. Baresh was waving goodbye to us. He was a sweet young man. He had been paid the least, and I had given him the biggest tip, which I was glad of now.

We motored out from under the magnificent castle, set our sails, and escaped across the wine-dark sea.