The Daily - From The Sunday Read Archives: ‘Alone at Sea’

Episode Date: July 11, 2021

For Aleksander Doba, pitting himself against the wide-open sea — storms, sunstroke, monotony, hunger and loneliness — was a way to feel alive in old age. Today, listen to the story of a man who paddled toward the existential crisis that is life and crossed the Atlantic alone in a kayak. Three times.Mr. Doba died on Feb. 22 on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa. He was 74.This story was written by Elizabeth Weil and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

My name is Liz Weil. I'm here in my basement in San Francisco where I work. And I want to tell you about a story I wrote two years ago. This is maybe my favorite story I've ever written in my 25 years as a journalist. It's a profile of a Polish man named Alexander Doba, who, when I reported the story, was 71 years old and had kayaked across the Atlantic three times by himself. I've been thinking a lot about him lately because he seemed to me this like savant of the existential crisis that is life. existential crisis that is life. He had no illusion that everything is meaningful and enjoyable all the time, but he had this way of flipping his mind to embrace the suffering and embrace what a lot of us would see as the meaninglessness, like essentially being a speck

in the universe and deciding to just rush towards all of it and make himself the tiniest speck in the biggest universe he could possibly imagine there in his kayak, alone in the Atlantic. So here's my story, Alone at Sea, read by January LaVoy. very level way. When Alexander Doba kayaked into the port in Le Conquet, France on September 3rd, 2017, he had just completed his third and by far most dangerous solo transatlantic kayak trip. He was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. He was unaccustomed to wearing pants. He'd been at sea 110 days alone, having last touched land that May at New Jersey's Barnegat Bay. The trip could have easily ended five days earlier, when Doba was just a few hundred feet

off the British coast. But he had promised himself when he left New Jersey that he would kayak not just to Europe, but to the continent proper. So he stayed on the water nearly another week in the one-meter-wide boat where he'd endured towering waves, in the coffin-like cabin where he spent almost four months not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch, where he severely tried his loved one's patience in order to be lonely, naked, and afraid. Then he paddled to the French shore. Kayaking is an absurd form of long-distance ocean travel. All the big muscles in the body are useless. A real katorga, says Doba, who is Polish, katorga being the Polish word for forced labor in Siberia. But by katorga, Doba does not mean

an activity he does not wish to do. What most of us experience as suffering, he repurposes as contrarian self-determination, and that gives him an existential thrill. Among Doba's bigger regrets in life are the times when he has succumbed, when he has perceived and reacted to suffering in conventional ways. For instance, the night in April 1989, when he built a fire in order to make tea and dry his clothes while paddling on the Vistula River near the city of Płock in central Poland. Or the afternoon a week later on that same river, when he succumbed to the temptation of eating pancakes, tomato soup, and rice at the Milk Bar restaurant, when he should

have been at his campsite by his kayak, eating cold canned goulash in order to condition his body for Arctic temperatures. Doba had promised himself he would be tougher than all that. Doba maintains that his need to cross the Atlantic in a kayak did not originate within him. With my hand on my heart, it wasn't my idea, Doba told me when I met him in Poland in January. Doba doesn't speak much English, so we communicated through a translator. I was infected with a virus. In 2003, when he was already the most seasoned kayaker in Poland, a Polish professor approached him to get advice on his quest to kayak across the Baltic Sea.

The professor eventually persuaded Doba to cross the southern Atlantic with him from Ghana to Brazil in separate one-man kayaks, lashing those kayaks together at night to make a platform on which to sleep. The trip was a fiasco. Forty-two hours after leaving, they washed up back on the beach.

Doba flew back to Poland, returned to his hometown, Police, in the country's northwest, where he had been managing maintenance and repairs at an enormous chemical factory, and swore off kayaking with a partner ever again. Then Doba sketched out a design for a new boat that could make the trip. He knew that the kayak needed to be unsinkable, as well as self-riding in the event that it capsized, and that it needed lockers to store food and a cabin in which to sleep. Sketch in hand, Doba drove from Police to Strecin, the regional capital, and approached a yacht builder named Andrzej Arminski. the regional capital, and approached a yacht builder named Andrzej Arminski.

Arminski agreed to build the boat, and in spring of 2010, Olo, as Doba named his kayak, after his own nickname, Olek, was complete. Doba told his wife that he was going to try to cross the Atlantic again. Only one person had ever crossed the Atlantic in a kayak using solely muscle power, and he traveled island to island, from Newfoundland to Ireland. Doba's goal was to go continent to continent between the mainlands, from Senegal to Brazil, unsupported. This time Doba's trip was far more successful, which is not to say it was pleasant. The weather was disgusting, humid and hot. Doba tried to sleep during the day but couldn't, so he tried to paddle during the day

and nearly got sunstroke. He kept no schedule. I am not German. Always 9 a.m. paddle, he explained. I am Polish. I paddle when I would like. His skin broke out in salt-induced rashes, including blisters in his armpits and groin. His eyes blew up with conjunctivitis. His fingernails

and toenails just about peeled off. His clothes, permeated with salt, refused to dry. The fabric smelled horrendous and aggravated his skin, so he abandoned clothes. Ocean kayaking is catastrophically monotonous. The primary challenge is not physical. Doba describes the tedium as a form of dementia. Hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of repetitions. The brain is removed from the process. Alone at sea without his hearing aids, Doba joked, he grew so disoriented that he started shouting at himself, so that I could hear. Doba is fairly deaf, but didn't bring the aids along because they're expensive and not waterproof, and there was no one to talk to anyway. He intended to keep muscle tone in his legs by swimming,

but he had to abort that plan because his body in the water attracted sharks. He was assaulted by hailstorms of flying fish. Do you know how fast they go? He said. This does not feel good. When he couldn't sleep because of the unrelenting stuffiness of his cabin

and the waves crashing through the portal onto his head, Doboth thought about his wife, children, and his young granddaughter. He thought about his dead parents. He communed with the turtles, whose shells he tapped while they swam alongside him to make sure they were alive, whose shells he tapped while they swam alongside him to make sure they were alive, and the birds, who landed on Olo for a rest and often entered his cabin and did not want to leave. He did have a satellite phone, and he texted with Arminski, who, as his trip navigator, sent a regular forecast for wind and weather.

Doba also called his wife, twice. But after she got the bill for $500, she says, the desire to talk decreased. Doba rotated through three kinds of freeze-dried porridge for breakfast, four kinds of freeze-dried soup for lunch, and an assortment of a dozen freeze-dried entrees. He ate all the meat options first. He also snacked on dried fruit and his wife's plum jam,

but he ran out of that halfway across the ocean. Every time he closed his eyes, Doba told me, I dreamed I was paddling in the winter in Poland. He lost 45 pounds. Still, the trip was perfect. 99 days after leaving Senegal, Doba arrived in Brazil. He was greeted by one journalist and the Polish ambassador. Nobody cares if you cross the Atlantic in a kayak. The fact that Doba knows this is clear in his eyes. In photos from the ends of his trips,

he looks ecstatic and feral in the best possible sense, intrinsically wild and free. The day I arrived in Warsaw, a very chic woman named Martina Wojciechowska, the host of a Polish documentary TV show called Woman at the End of the World, showed up at my hotel to explain Doba to me. I was not in a great state. To be precise, I was a Jew with the flu about to go kayaking in Poland

in January. Not a setup likely to end well. But still, I was so happy I'd gotten away. I'd been feeling buried by stuff exactly as predictable as you'd imagine for a working mother of two kids. Honestly, you don't need the details. Voyehovska drank a double cappuccino and told me that she'd been engaged five times but never married. She felt it would be impossible to follow her dreams with a husband. She also left her daughter at age eight months to go climb a mountain in Antarctica because she was trying to complete the seven summits, the highest mountains on each continent, and achieving that goal at that time felt like a matter of life or death.

She felt bad about it, she said, and she felt judged, but here we were, weren't we? Then she sat me down at a nearby restaurant, ordered pierogies and borscht, and told me a joke. The devil, a German man, a Frenchman, and a Polish man are all in a hot air balloon, Wojciechowska said. They are falling, falling. A catastrophe is about to happen. So the devil says to the German man,

you must jump. This is an devil says to the German man, you must jump. This is an order. And the German man jumps. Then the devil says to the Frenchman, you must jump. The Frenchman says, what does this mean? The devil says, it means that life is meaningless, but when you jump, you will look very chic, very modern. So the Frenchman jumps. Then the devil gets to the Polish man. He tries the reasons he used on the German and French men without success. Shoot, the devil says. I know you will not jump.

And the Polish man jumps. Wojciechowska looked at me squarely to make sure I understood. The more you don't believe in Polish people, the more determined we are. To prove themselves, Polish people will endure everything. If you aren't willing to suffer, you can do nothing. You can sit and die. This is the only one thing you can do. Doba has a deep, almost performance art-like sense of this. You can be

made small by life or rage against it. He told me, I do not want to be a little gray man. This is a common expression in Poland and a good motto for us all. and a good motto for us all. Doba was born in 1946 in Svargansk, Poland, right after the end of World War II, when the country had been run over by the Soviets and the Germans, then bombed to dust. The whole nation was starving.

Previous generations had not fared better. Doba's maternal grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the Tsarist army, was poisoned in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. His maternal grandmother was sent to Siberia. Their three sons, Doba's uncles, disappeared. And yet Doba describes his youth as magical, almost fantastical. Near his house, he said, there was a pond. Behind the pond was a forest.

In the forest, there were mushrooms. And behind all that was a small airport with gliders and storks, which migrated there for the summer. Doba's father, a master at building and repairing things from scraps, made his son a bike. At 15, Doba rode around Poland by himself. After he graduated from Postnanie University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, Doba met Gabriela Stucka, his future wife, on a backpacking trip. He did explain to her how to boil water,

which, to this day, she finds ridiculous. But she was charmed by his impish streak, his stories of smuggling ski boots back from East Germany by walking across the border in them, the beard he grew over a summer holiday so he could return to university and his mandatory military training as the only soldier in Poland with facial hair.

Doba started kayaking in 1980, after he and Gabriela moved to Polica, where Doba took his equipment repair job at the chemical factory, and Gabriela was a social worker. One day, a colleague of Doba's said the factory's kayaking club was going on a two-week expedition. Doba had been into hang gliding and skydiving, but the government often closed the airspace because Politsa was near the East German border. Doba signed up for the factory kayaking trip and went again the following year. After, on weekends, Doba would put a kayak on a train,

debark as close to a river as possible, and walk the kayak on a wheeled contraption built from bicycle and stroller parts 25 miles if necessary to put in. Sometimes he took his young sons, Bartek and Czesik, born in 1979 and 1982. Before they left, Gabriela would make Doba state for the record the condition of the children.

Bartek has a small sniffle and is tired, but otherwise is well, so that she could compare it with the condition of her children upon their return. After a while, the boys began to mutiny. He took us on long trips, only him and us both in the middle of nowhere. And we hated that, Bartek recalled.

It was raining. There were spiders. There were small rivers and we were squeezing through the bushes. Freed from the ballast of his sons, Doba started setting goals for himself. Surpassed the record of the greatest number of days paddled by a Polish man in a single year, 108. Kayak the longest possible route in Poland, 1,189 kilometers. Before the Iron Curtain fell, the Communist Party declared it illegal to kayak on the Baltic Sea, lest anyone defect. Doba did anyway. I was just paddling down

the river, he told the border patrol when he inevitably was caught. I don't know how I ended up here. The soldiers told Doba he had broken so many laws that they didn't know how to charge him. Doba responded, in that case, I'll be on my way. After the transition, as the Poles call their country's change to a democratic government in the early 1990s, Doba's trips became more extreme. He spent 100 days paddling the circumference of the Baltic Sea. He kayaked the coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle. Along the way, he was thrown from his kayak in a storm. The rope tethering Doba to the kayak came undone. He passed out. He woke up on shore to the sound

of screaming, his own. Doba does not regret this experience. He has no interest in dying in his bed. One afternoon, Doba parked his Mazda 5 minivan in the lot beside his apartment building, pointed to a nearby forest of Scots pines standing rigid and competing for light, and said, amused, sometimes we have the great adventure of going out there to drink a beer. Doba's apartment building is a five-story cube of blank concrete with blank concrete stairwells. It looks straight out of a dystopian young adult novel in which the state is intent on creating little gray men. But the inside of the apartment feels much better. Shoes in the entrance hall, pencil marks of grandchildren's heights in the kitchen door jam, atlases,

pencil marks of grandchildren's heights in the kitchen doorjamb, atlases, kayaking trophies, and snow globes of family photos in the living room. Doba's stinking foam sleeping pad and other gear from Olo remain, at Gabriela's request, all these months later, on the balcony. Even here at home, Doba's physicality is Siu--y generous. His body appears to be assembled from parts belonging to people of vastly different ages. His skin looks 71. His chest looks 50. His hands and forearms look 30, straight off a Montana roper. His hair and beard appear to be taken from a Michelangelo painting of God. Gabriella joined us to talk at the dining table,

where she had set bowls of peanuts, raisins, chocolates, cookies, and cake, and French presses of coffee and tea. At age 64, after 42 years of marriage, she still adores Doba, and her acceptance of him is absolute. Easier than it used to be, in fact. When people are young, sometimes they are very jealous, she said, and want to keep a piece of their partner for themselves. Gabriela's accommodations to Doba's lifestyle started in the late 1980s, when Doba became obsessed with kayaking and began insisting that Gabriela drop him and his kayak by the side of the road on the way to her mother's house for

Christmas, and then pick him up and his kayak at a prearranged point on her way back home after a few days. The plan was that if Doba was late, Gabriela would write with a stick in the dirt, Gabriella would write with a stick in the dirt, I was here. Then she'd leave. After Gabriella told me about Christmas, Doba began telling his story. It started with a small diatribe on the tyranny of politeness that dictates

a houseguest must always say he likes everything his host serves him, and the problem that results. You're fed food you don't like again and again. The first time I visited my future mother-in-law, she served duck's blood soup. I don't like it at all. I was in a pickle.

To avoid the nightmare of quiet conformity, Doba told me he said to his mother-in-law, this is a good soup. It looks good. It smells good. Probably everybody likes it. But this specific soup, I don't like. That was a shock to his mother-in-law, he said, but a short one. The next time I visited,

my mother-in-law did not prepare that soup. She knew I didn't like it. Nonetheless, Gabriella was not prepared for Doba's first transatlantic expedition. Gabriela was not prepared for Doba's first transatlantic expedition. He had been taking long trips for decades, but he always slept on land. So, Gabriela told me, she laid out for her husband all the reasons transatlantic kayaking was stupid. She threatened divorce. If you have a crisis in the middle of the Atlantic and the closest land is the bottom, she asked, what will you do then? Doba said, there will be no such crisis.

She knew she couldn't stop him. Still, Gabriela did not want to be Penelope to Doba's Odysseus. She did not want to spend her life stressed, waiting for his return. She threw herself into her work, which had become far more rewarding than she ever imagined it could when she trained as a social worker in the 1970s. Once Poland became a democracy, social structures and attitudes changed. Gabriela traveled to Denmark

to study how European Union countries handled problems like unemployment, alcoholism, and lonely young mothers. Her department grew to 100 people from five. I never expected it would be so big, she said. I joked with Gabriela that this was her Atlantic. Bigger than the Atlantic, Doba chimed in. This is Gabby's Pacific. Later that afternoon, Bartek, the couple's older son, stopped by the apartment with his two elementary school-age daughters. He told me that he took his father to the airport for his most recent crossing. Over the years, he, like Gabriela, had made internal accommodations

to his father's adventures. But this trip felt different. When he gave me a last hug, but this trip felt different. When he gave me a last hug, maybe he didn't cry, but I saw his eyes, Bartek said. I'd never seen him like that. So I thought, well, he might not come back. Doba started talking about his second transatlantic trip a few days after he returned from the first.

He had always planned to go on three crossings, South, Mid, and North Atlantic. Gabriela did not believe he would. The departure for the second trip, from Portugal to Florida, turned out to be very abrupt. In mid-September 2013, Doba still did not possess all the gear

he wanted to take on his trip. No retired man in Poland can afford to do these things, Doba still did not possess all the gear he wanted to take on his trip. No retired man in Poland can afford to do these things, Doba explained. His pension is $700 a month. But the community raised money for him, and on October 3, 2013, off he went. Neither Gabriela nor Bartek took him to the airport. Olo is 300 kilograms empty. At the start of that trip, she weighed 700 kilograms,

and she carried, among other things, two carbon fiber paddles, five spray skirts to cover Doba's body while he paddled, two pairs of kayaking gloves, three pairs of sunglasses, two pairs of reading glasses, ten boxes of waterproof matches, two big butcher's knives, one electric desalinator, two manual desalinators, three floating smoke signals, nine red flares, a cooking stove and propane canisters, two flashlights, two headlamps, an iPad, a GoPro camera, 320 lithium

batteries for Olo's satellite signaling devices, mineral supplements, a sewing kit, 175 chocolate bars, three toothbrushes, seven bottles of sunscreen, three liters of homemade wine, a pumice stone for the calluses on his hands, two pairs of sandals, and an emergency fishing kit. Doba also brought two sailing harnesses, which resemble climbing harnesses but are worn on the chest instead of the legs. He uses these to attach himself with a carabiner to the boat. Doba's sleeping cabin, which he reaches by sliding himself through a portal the size of a laptop, affords him, when he's lying down, 15 inches of headroom. He relieved himself by leaning off the side, or the stern. For a while, once again, on this second expedition, all was smooth. Doba paddled naked. He drank five cups a day of instant coffee. He ate freeze-dried

chicken tikka masala and the occasional raw, tiny flying fish that landed on his deck. He texted via satellite phone with his family and Arminski, the boat builder, who once again served as trip navigator, sending wind and weather reports. Then on December 19th, Doba's phone stopped working. He waited three days and still had no signal. So, in hopes of getting Gabriela or Arminski to look into his phone problems, he pressed the help button on his Spot device, a piece of gear that has become de rigueur among adventurers, as it can send emergency messages and GPS coordinates when a

person is far off the grid. Shortly after, a huge Greek ship steamed alongside Doba, seeking to rescue him. Doba had only wanted his phone repaired. He did not want to be saved, so he waved the Greeks off. Me? Fine, he shouted in English, pointing to himself and giving the thumbs up. Phone? Bad, he gave the thumbs down. Doba declined the ropes the crew offered to throw him. Thus, most likely assuming that Doba was deranged, he was, after all, a tiny speck bobbing in a vast universe of water. The ship turned around and tried to rescue him again. Still, Doba refused. During the third rescue attempt, he yelled a Polish vulgarity.

The Greeks got the message and left. 47 days after it stopped working, the phone came back on. Someone had forgotten to fund the prepaid credit card that covered the bill. Doba did finally accept help two weeks later. He was by then 90% of the way across the ocean,

but had spent the last six weeks paddling in circles in the Bermuda Triangle, trapped by wind and currents. A storm had damaged his rudder. He tried to fix it and failed. He texted Arminski

and Piotr Chmielinski, a Polish kayaker who in the mid-1980s, shortly after he'd defected to the United States, was part of the first team to paddle the length of the Amazon. Chmielinski had also been coordinating Doba's logistics. Doba accepted his suggestion that he paddled to Bermuda for a repair. On the island, after 143 days at sea, Doba could hardly walk, and by the time he was ready to return to the Atlantic, it was late March and the weather was turning bad. Mielinski had a hard time finding a ship captain on the island who was willing, in dangerous weather,

to put Doba back out in the ocean near where he'd gone off course. Eventually, they found him a ride, and Doba paddled away during a storm. Three weeks later, he reached Florida. He put on a clean red and white shirt, the colors of the Polish flag, and lay down on the grass. Doba returned to Police to a hero's welcome, and 14 months later flew to Washington to receive an

award from the National Geographic Society as the 2015 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year. Event producers asked him to just walk on stage and say, in English, thank you very much. Doba, who wore jeans to the June ceremony, walked on stage and said, Polish people are not geese and have their own language. Suffering tends to do more for the flagellant than it does for the flagellant's loved ones. Everyone who cared about Doba opposed his third expedition, the cold and stormy North Atlantic,

from New Jersey to France. Doba began planning it, of course, a few days after he returned from Florida. Arminski, the boat builder, spent many hours trying to argue Doba out of it. The risk of kayaking the North Atlantic, Arminski believed, was irresponsibly, even amorally high. It is impossible to design a kayak that won't capsize on the North Atlantic, Arminski told me in his British-accented English, sitting behind his desk in Strecin

in a tidy V-neck sweater and a pressed shirt. This is a matter of the size and energy of the wave compared to the mass of the kayak. Beyond the boat rolling over, there is an even more catastrophic problem. A breaking wave transfers all the potential energy in the wave's height into turbulent, violent, kinetic energy. It is basically an avalanche of water. A breaking

wave can do whatever it wants to a kayak. There was no engineering Olo for this. When Doba finally said, I will go on the North Atlantic, I said, I will not participate in this, Arminski told me. Absolutely no. It is simply too dangerous. Every three weeks there is a storm with waves that can capsize the kayak. How many capsizes can you survive? Gabriela, she says, was, to be honest, a little pissed that Doba was going again. Nonetheless, on May 29, 2016, Doba kayaked out from the New Jersey shore near the Statue of Liberty.

The weather report was bad, but Chmielinski had arranged for a lot of press, and an entourage of kayakers had come to paddle out with Doba a ways, and he felt he had a duty to them. In video footage of the hour before he left, Doba looks wrecked, exhausted, and on the verge of tears. He had slept only three hours the night before, and had not even had time to double-check all his gear. Once he was out past the Statue of Liberty, Doba turned on his GPS. It didn't work. Four days later, after capsizing repeatedly, Doba finally cleared the Sandy Hook Peninsula and left Lower New York Bay. He was pummeled again by wind and waves. Leaving shore is one of the trickiest parts of a transatlantic journey. Water trapped in Olo's storage lockers short-circuited the electric desalinator. Doba was blown to the beach and called the trip off. A year later, he tried again.

Three days in, Doba received his first storm warning. He was still close to the New Jersey shore, so he landed at Barnegat Bay, ate a steak, slept at a hotel, and continued on his way. For a while, the crossing was drama-free. Doba's electric desalinator broke, as it did before, and he had to spend several hours a day manually pumping seawater through an extremely fine filter to produce the five to nine liters of fresh water he needed to stay hydrated and prepare his freeze-dried food. But so what? Toba wasn't on a schedule.

He paddled and he paddled and he paddled and he paddled. A real Catorca. Then about three weeks into the trip, more storms arrived. Winds up to 55 knots created outsized waves, mountains of water racing toward the kayak, the entire surface of the sea lurching as if a stampede of elephants were running across a giant waterbed. Rowers who've paddled the Atlantic, an easier proposition because rowing allows a person to recruit leg and back muscles, have strapped themselves to the floors of their cabins to avoid being bounced around during storms and concussed, or worse. Imagine a plane the size of a kayak hitting turbulence, but in water rather than air. At sea level, water is hundreds of times denser. The key to surviving a serious storm, Doba says, was to keep his kayak oriented with the stern

perpendicular to the waves, so that those waves hit the narrow end of the vessel instead of broadsiding the boat and rolling it over. The tool he used to accomplish this was a sea anchor, basically a parachute, secured to the stern of the kayak with a rope that he set underwater to increase drag. During a storm, the water below the ocean's surface stays relatively still. What moves radically are the waves.

The most serious trouble came for Doba when he hit a storm that lasted two days. During the worst of it, the rope on his sea anchor broke. If a breaking wave hit Olo with no sea anchor, Doba said, I knew I would roll over many times. The kayak would break into many pieces. So, wearing only his harness, Doba exited the cabin, crawled across the bucking deck with a spare sea anchor attached to a rope, tied the rope to his kayak, and threw the anchor off the stern.

Doba returned to his cabin somewhat shocked to be alive. I did it with no stuntman, Doba told me proudly, but I don't have a film. But even if I did, censorship would not let it go. After a storm on June 16th, 2017, Doba emerged from his cabin to find that the large pin that attached Olo's rudder to the stern was seriously bent.

Doba tried to heat the pin with his camping stove and smash it straight. That didn't work. He tried to drill holes in the rudder and attach the rudder to the stern with plastic ties. This did work, in that Doba managed to drill the holes, but he couldn't steer. Then Doba cut the bent portion off the pin with a hacksaw blade he'd brought along and jury-rigged a way to control the rudder with carabiners. This worked a little, but not entirely.

Doba alerted Mielinski, who alerted Gabriela, who didn't really want to know anything about how the trip was going. But this voyage was too dangerous, she told me, to keep her head where she liked it to be, stuck in the sand. Doba drifted around for days, eating freeze-dried goulash and chocolate bars. Chmielinski and others came up with what Doba describes as exotic and expensive methods of rescue.

These involved such things as catamarans sailing in from the Bahamas and helicopters dropping rudder repair gift packages out of the sky. Doba did not consent. I was the one who would have to pay, he says. He didn't particularly want to be rescued anyway. The idea was to do the crossing unsupported.

He wanted to tough out his original plan. Within a week, however, Doba let go and agreed to have a freighter that was passing nearby pluck him out of the water and repair his rudder with its welding tools. Aboard Baltic Light, he ate a hot meal and took a bunch of selfies with the Filipino crew. The ship's captain didn't think it was a great idea to set this rash-covered, sleep-deprived 70-year-old man back in the ocean alone.

But Doba insisted. I did not think I could find myself in something so downing, he texted Tichmielinski, somewhat incomprehensibly two weeks later. My attempt to get out of this terrible conflict was a signal strike. Doba then turned off all his communications, including his spot device, which uploaded his coordinates every 10 minutes. Without the spot, nobody would be able to find the kayak if they needed to rescue him. Chmielinski interpreted this communication blackout as a sign that Doba was deeply despairing. Perhaps because he was alone again after being with the crew on Baltic Light. Perhaps because, now that he had accepted help,

he worried that he would not earn a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for kayaking solo from continent to continent unsupported. Doba was ready, Chmielinski suspected, to just drift off into the eternal vastness and go down with his ship. But then Doba turned his spot and his phone back on. Before he arrived in France, he made a few GoPro videos. We watched them in his living room together with Gabriela. In three weeks, I'll be 71, he says in one, if I survive. One unseasonably balmy January morning,

Doba, dressed in baggy Gore-Tex pants and rain boots, handed me a blue plastic paddle, waved me into the front of a red double kayak, took out his hearing aids and declared happily shoving us off. Now I am in the silent zone. We had gone to a river-veined lowland of central Poland for the 53rd Annual International Winter Kayaking Congregation, an event that sounds grand, but was really just 60 Polish people, at or past middle age, spending a weekend in January together kayaking, drinking, and hanging out at a lodge. The air that day hovered around 40 degrees, about 4 degrees Celsius.

Doba was a little disappointed. One year during the kayaking convention, Doba giddily reported, it was minus 18 degrees, and the number of people who showed up was the same. Yet at least for me, the river was magic, calm, mysterious, and alive. Bright green moss covered the trees, egrets stretched like sheets blowing on a line, and the occasional ray of sun broke through the low clouds. In truth, my own trip had not been as peaceful as I'd hoped.

My flu lingered. My phone exploded with hysterical texts from home. But I was my own little speck in the vast universe. It felt good. Behind me, steering us among the 60 other kayakers and dozens of fallen trees, Doba fidgeted in his seat like an ADHD kid in class. Around noon, we pulled onto a riverbank along with the rest of the group to toast sausages and bread over a fire and eat little cookies shaped like croissants.

Kind, gracious, enthusiastic poles kept bringing me shots of alcohol, which I tried to wave off. Then a woman who noticed me coughing approached with a little glass of thick red liquid that looked like cough syrup. Medicine, she said. After I downed it, she laughed. Raspberry vodka. It's good?

The next day, hearing aids restored, Doba drove us to Police, and a few days later, he addressed a question that had been nagging at me. Why did he go on that third trip? How did he justify it to himself? To go into the sea and die, that would be a problem for my family and a problem for Andrei Arminsky too, Doba acknowledged. I came very close to the line

of my possibility and human possibility. But what he did not say, what was left hanging in the air, was that it would not be a big problem for him to go into the sea and die. He has made his own bargain with the human condition. Doba's response to Gabriela's concern about what he'd do in a crisis, if the closest land was the bottom, was to say there will be no crisis. He did not say this because he's naive. He said it because he has reimagined the concept of crisis, just as he has reimagined the concept of suffering. A crisis, in Doba's worldview,

is an opportunity for triumph. So Doba moves toward the crisis, just as he moves toward the suffering. By choosing it, he casts himself in the role of hero, not victim. He gives himself control. He does love Gabriela, however, and he does not want to cause her more pain. Will he cross the Atlantic again? Doba, for now, has a carefully constructed answer. An expedition, he told me, on the kayak, through the ocean. So far, I don't plan. Then he added, but I do like to sail. This was recorded by Autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen

to lots of audio stories from publishers such as the New York Times. Hey, this is Liz. So a bit of sad news. In February, a few months after this story first ran on Sunday Reads, Oleg died. He'd just summited Kilimanjaro and he sat down on a rock and he got some swelling in his brain and that was it. He was the most remarkable person I ever wrote about, maybe I've ever met. I still drink coffee every morning out of a mug with his face on it. Here's to the king of the ocean.