Read Online A Mile Down by David Vann - Free Book Online

$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.
    â€œThere 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.
    â€œThe paint’s falling off the hull,” I told Seref, who