SEAN WILSEY
Open Water

FROM The New Yorker

 

SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN, not so long ago, I stood in the stern of a small boat in the Venetian lagoon. I was rowing with a single oar, facing forward, heading west. Floodlights on the wharves of the mainland chemical plants, six miles away, glowed in front of me. I crossed a mile of shadowed, shallow, open water (dry—secca—is the name for such areas, accessible only by motorless, flat-bottomed boats) and entered a dredged-out channel called Canale Orfano, the Orphan Canal. It took me to the Graces, an island that measured 800 feet by 600 feet and was surrounded by a marble-topped brick wall that plunged into the water. Confined within the wall was a complex of tile-roofed buildings, sculptures, meadows, trees. In the 15th century, it was a monastery. More recently, it served as the site of an infectious-diseases hospital. Now it was abandoned. At the island’s dock, a series of signs declared, WARNING ARMED GUARDS; BEWARE OF DOGS; WARNING VERY DANGEROUS DOGS; WARNING DANGER!!

I tied up and called, “Ciao?”

The yellow façade of an administrative building was penetrated by a breezeway leading to the island’s interior. I saw green, wildness. I jumped ashore—silence—and took some tentative steps. Through a dusty window on the right side of the breezeway, a receptionist’s desk held a touchtone telephone and a gray appointment book, covered in dust. Lined up on a low wall were discarded medical instruments: a speculum, a curette, a mysterious metal rod that ended in a nautilus whorl. Paths led off in three directions. A shovel—long, wood-handled, sturdy—sat in a pile of rubble. I grabbed it to ward off the dogs.

Then I heard a motor. First commuter of the day. I spun and walked back to the dock. A big, fat-bellied, bargelike boat, known as a rat—topo—and used for hauling everything in the city, from trash to melons to cement, three men in it, burbled by. I leaned on my shovel and stared them down. Then I walked back through the breezeway and hooked to the right, down an overgrown path. I found an abandoned boathouse, a 12-person Carrara marble banquet table with a corner knocked off, a vegetable garden going to seed, a delicately carved Renaissance wellhead. An actual rat crossed in front of me, stopped, turned, and gave me a proprietorial glare.

 

This was my third day rowing the 212-square-mile Venetian lagoon—at high tide, a crescent-shaped mirror broken by bricks and trees that seem to float; at low tide, a series of multiacre puddles threaded with shipping channels—and camping on a selection of its many abandoned or semiabandoned islands. I’d lived in the city when I was younger, and had seen its identity steadily succumb to tourism. I wanted to find out if it was possible to have an unmediated experience of the place, to discover a Venice that was all my own. And so: the islands. Some are no larger than a gas station, while others contain villages, farms, cathedrals. Venice occupies the center point of its lagoon, which is 8 miles at the widest, and 30 miles long. This center is all that most visitors see today. But when the city was flourishing, between the 9th and the 18th centuries, its islands were used to grow its food, defend against invaders, provide respite for its rulers, and isolate the sick, the insane, the pious, the dead, and the hazardous (gunpowder; glass furnaces; unmarried women). The 19th-century poet and critic Luigi Carrer wrote of the islands, “It could be said that the marvelous city, falling from the sky and splintering apart, had scattered about itself these shards of beauty.”

Now, on this particular shard, inside a quarantine ward, I wandered through dispensaries carpeted in glass. Rifled-through cabinetry spilled paper onto nurses’ stations. Back outside, the sun was starting to burn off the morning fog. Butterflies—along with rats, the principal inhabitants of Venice’s islands these days—were coming out. Three hundred feet to my left, in a grove of trees, a Doric capital was shining in the sunlight. I made for it, plunging waist-deep into brush and thorns, beating both back with the shovel. I found a large clearing in which two freestanding columns were connected by a rusted iron bar. An open meadow ran like an aisle between them, concluding at the island’s southern perimeter wall, where a marble throne was built into the bricks. A sad, regal, teenage girl was sitting on it. She was opulently dressed, and tiny—three feet tall. Around her neck was a plastic necklace so oversize that it hung to her ankles. A wicked-looking little boy in a beret stood between her knees, tangled in it. He was staring right at me, pointing all his fingers, obviously modeled on some naughty, centuries-old Venetian child. I pulled off the necklace. And I could easily have removed Mary, Jesus, and the throne, and taken them with me. Instead, I put down the rosary and was hit with a strong feeling that I’d had my share of trespasser’s good fortune.

I sprinted across the island, jumped back into my boat, and rowed off. I had just made it to the island’s northern edge when two launches, bristling with armed police from the Division for the Protection of Cultural Patrimony, roared up to the dock. Men stormed the island, searching, I assumed, for a suspicious man with a shovel, recently sighted by a passing commuter. A Venetian-art expert in New York later described the Madonna as “late fourteenth century, although some parts of it already look forward to the early fifteenth century.” I attempted a nonchalant stroke and did not turn around.

 

I first came to Venice as a prisoner. Twenty-one years earlier, a blue Fiat van crossed what was once the longest bridge in the world, over the western lagoon from the mainland, carrying six inmates of a reform school.

I had committed the ridiculous crime of stealing a Yamaha motor scooter. A potential felony—which wasn’t ridiculous at all. This was in San Francisco, a few months before my 18th birthday. I blamed it on the fact that my wealthy, divorced parents had thrown me out of their homes and I’d had no money for the bus. My father, negotiating with a probation officer, hit upon a novel way to get me out of both jail and the country—a school for troubled youth in Tuscany, supported by Diane Guggenheim, who’d lived much of her life in Europe, like her cousin Peggy. Diane poured her family’s money not into art but into a school that espoused the philosophy, as the headmaster told the International Herald Tribune, that “every child has his own Renaissance.” The State of California agreed to release me. A trip to Venice was part of this rebirthing program.

Driving had removed the temptation for any of us to make a break for it on the train. Now we were hustled onto the No. 1 vaporetto (the word for ferry or waterbus). An hour later, we disembarked near the sea. It was January, and we were the only guests at our hotel.

That night, as we walked single file over a bridge, a splash and a creak made me turn. I saw a boy around my age getting into a 20-foot vessel I can now identify as a mascareta. Then a girl came out of the shadows behind him. He took a candle from his jacket pocket, impaled it on a metal spike attached to the bow, and, after a few flicks of a lighter, got it going and set a glass windshield in place. She sat on a crossbar. He picked up a long oar and started rowing—not poling but rowing, standing up and facing forward. His feet were positioned like a skateboarder’s.

I was a skateboarder. This made stealing a motor scooter not just a crime but a betrayal; what true skateboarder stole something that eliminated the need for skateboarding? Italy, with its cobbled streets, was unskateable—Venice especially so. But as the mascareta moved through the water, the boy’s glide and stance were so familiar that I felt I was looking at myself in some other life.

Nobody else noticed. The boat was silent as it navigated the dark canal, moving out of sight and then drawing close again, sliding around buildings before turning into the open lagoon.

Years later, as I prepared to return to Venice and explore the islands, I dug up a book, bound in marbled paper, entitled “The Private Journal of Sean Wilsey.” It described my first visit: “I bought a gondoliere hat today and I am wearing it constantly. A man walked by me in the street and said, ‘Gondoliere dove va?’”—“Gondolier, where are you going?” The comment was doubly sarcastic, posed, as it was, in the formal tense, but I was too enthralled by the city to notice: “I will never be quite the same after Venice because it has shown me that man can create true beauty and that I believe is Man’s purpose.” I dipped my gondolier’s hat in the Grand Canal “to season it.”

On the obligatory gondola ride with my school group, out on the open water in front of the Doge’s Palace, I asked to switch places with the gondolier. He shrugged. Standing at the top of the boat’s crescent-shaped hull added two feet to the view. But I could barely keep my footing. This was like riding a skateboard on a sheet of ice. Propulsion and control were arcane verging on impossible. We began to spin in a circle. I looked as far as I could across the water, at islands covered in trees and mysterious buildings, until the gondolier repossessed his oar. An entry in my journal reads, “I made a solemn vow to return to Venice and become a gondolier.”

 

Post-reformation, my father called me at school, saying, “Maybe you should try six months as a gondolier. How is your singing in Italian? I’d hire you for a short trip.” He suggested that I look up Gino Macropodio, who’d rowed him on his third honeymoon, with my mother. It seemed that Dad had taken note of my Venetian obsession, and figured out how to use it to avoid extending an invitation home. But this also struck me as a good way of reconciling the seeming irreconcilables of my situation. After two years in reform school, I was a naif who used to be a thief, an uneducated 20-year-old without a high school diploma. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann described the “roguish solicitude” of a gondolier. This was something I could shoot for.

First, I called the gondoliers’ union and asked for an apprenticeship. Someone there told me to learn the mechanics of rowing—no gondolier had the time to teach me—and put me in touch with a rowing club (a collection of dues-paying Venetians who convene to row traditional wooden boats). I was instructed to get off the vaporetto on the island of Giudecca, find the second-longest bridge, walk away from it to the south, and knock on the last door before the water. The sidewalk turned into a wooden gangway covered in guano and shellfish fragments. Behind the door, a heavyset man in his 50s invited me into an office where the red-and-gold banner of the Venetian Republic was displayed like a rebel flag. He took $24 off me, and held up a white V-neck T-shirt with burgundy trim, emblazoned front and back:

 

ASS. CANOTTIERI GIUDECCA

 

Gliding around with the word ass on your chest was very skaterly. I took it.

“But who will teach me to row?”

“Other members will help you. Just ask for lessons.”

In the club’s yard was a barn full of sandoli, s’cioponi, mascarete, pupparini, sanpierote, and vipere, flat-bottomed, slant-sided vessels—low, maneuverable, brightly painted, faster than a gondola, which presents too much freeboard to the wind. There were also a few gondola variants: a gondola traghetto, for carrying commuters (old, leaky, pink); a couple of narrow, fast, and impossible-to-control gondolini; and a caorlina, rowed by up to six men, and so big it was effectively a barge.

A sullen pensioner called Luciano sat next to a crane on the seawall, reading a communist newspaper. His job was to put craft in the water. But Venice was in a rowing recession. Oars were the province of the old. Hours passed without anyone coming to the club. I finally found a fat, shirtless man in mirrored sunglasses and asked him, “Signore, could I go out rowing with you?”

Not just silence but a complete refusal to acknowledge my presence. In the caste system of Venice, I was unnoticeable.

This went on for days. I came to the Ass., greeted Luciano—“Ciao!”; “Oh, ciao . . .”—and was ignored, until one afternoon, unexpectedly, he put down his newspaper, fetched a red-and-white mascareta, craned it into the water, and told me to climb down an iron ladder and get in. I rowed for 15 elated minutes, incompetently. Then a wiry and very tan old man showed up and agreed to take me out. He hollered, “Shonee! Your leg—you’ve got it completely wrong! You are not capable!” The next day. “Worse dun yesterday! You row from the stomach not the balls.” Soon I was being berated several hours a day.

 

Gino Macropodio, my father’s gondolier, 60 years old, wore his shirts unbuttoned to the navel and a solid-gold Lion of St. Mark on a chain around his neck. Most days, he could be found at the gondoliers’ station immediately in front of the Doge’s Palace, or at the bar around the corner, which he called “my office.” Twice a week, he partnered with a pair of young gondoliers, Roberto and Romano, to work shifts from a small wharf behind St. Mark’s Basilica.

Gino possessed Mann’s “roguish solicitude,” but in combination with knowledge, effusiveness, and style. In conversation, he could veer from Venetian history to classical music to the wonders of combining alcohol with athleticism. (He’d once rowed three miles across the lagoon with six friends to drink 40 bottles of wine—“and then we rowed back.”) He made statements like “I have a terrible defect—I like to see beauty.” In response to my credulous admiration for Giacomo Casanova’s escape, in 1756, from a cell beneath the lead roof of the Doge’s Palace, an action so bold that the memoirist found himself “alone, and at open war with all the forces of the Republic,” Gino was doubtful: “They let him go. Nobody escaped from there. It’s fiction. He worked for the state. Really, Sean, reading is good. But you must try to look between words and see the point of view.” I have never heard it put forward by any historian that Casanova went from Venice to Paris not as a fugitive but as a spy.

Gino’s favorite composer was Wagner, “an immortal artist,” who “died February 13, 1883, if I recall correctly. Maybe ’82. But of the day I am certain. February thirteenth. And he was an autodidact.”

“Like you.”

“No. I’m nothing.”

Silence.

“I’m a scoundrel of the canals of Venice.”

The first time we met, I showed up unannounced, covered in sweat, hair matted in multiple directions, wearing the Ass. shirt. Gino shook my hand. He couldn’t close his fingers completely—the result of 40-plus years of holding an oar—but looked at me hard with pinpoint pupils in eyes so shockingly blue that they seemed recently dredged. He bought me a coffee, and explained that the hunk of cast metal on the gondola’s prow was the ferro, meaning “iron.” It supposedly represents the elfin cap worn by doges in lieu of a crown, each of the six jutting teeth beneath it standing unromantically for one of the six administrative zones (sestieri) of the city. (I, romantically, considered getting it tattooed on the back of my neck.) The ferri on other Venetian boats look like ax heads, spears, shells.

Gino took me out rowing. All boats rowed with a single oar require a forward and a reverse stroke to execute a straight line. This is complicated by the fact that a Venetian oar is 14 feet long, and is held in place by a piece of carved walnut called a forcola (a bastardization of the word fork) that rises up from the right side of the aft gunwale. A little C-shaped incursion, called a bite (morso), is cut into the forcola and acts as a cradle for the oar. At the entrance to the bite, a nib, known as the little nose (nasèlo), takes the full power of the straight-course-keeping reverse stroke and, if you have no skill, fails to keep the oar from popping out. My oar popped out all the time. This was called “losing the forcola.” When I lost the forcola, 14 feet of hardwood crashed onto the starboard freeboard, knocked me off balance, and needed to be lifted back into place as the vessel bobbed and pitched. It was weightlifting while surfing. When he saw how terrible I was, Gino said I should keep practicing and invited me to dinner. His policy: feed me, teach me about Venice, and see if I became a rower.

Gino loaned me a copy of Life on the Lagoons, by the Scottish historian Horatio Brown. Published in 1894, and dedicated to “my gondolier,” the book stated that the “traditions and instincts of republican Venice endure with greatest tenacity among the gondoliers . . . They, more than any other institution of Venice, have successfully withstood the changes and chances of progress.” As I got to know Gino, I realized that custodian of the past was a role he inhabited with seriousness. I once heard him express his esteem for a friend by saying, “He has never owned a motor.”

Gino was only ever called Gino, making him an exception to the rule that all gondoliers have nicknames—when he was young, he was known as the Rooster, but nobody called him that anymore. His shift partners, Roberto (nickname: Nanoci—Little Giovanni) and Romano (nickname: Pullman—Bus), called me Che Qua e Che Eà. This was pronounced as a single (Hawaiian-sounding) word, “Kekquakeà,” and meant “He Who Is Here and There.” It seemed to encapsulate my efforts at self-reconciliation.

 

Most of the talented amateur rowers in Venice were training for regattas. My breakthrough came at the instigation of a female racer named Claudia Forcolin, who taught me the most important thing about rowing: not to think. She had blond hair (like most Venetian women), and when she took me out, she wore a bikini. This was overwhelming to Kekquakeà. I forgot how bad I was and started to get better. Then she said, “I think you’re good enough to row in the back.”

This allowed her to lounge in the prow. She seemed to love this. I definitely loved this. Claudia occupied some of the more spectacularly clueless passages of my journal: “She is quite attractive. She took off her clothes and rowed in her bathing suit which was distracting. Bikini. Madonna! We are friends, though, and I am in no way interested in her. She is really sweet and I made her smile parecchio”—a lot. I went on: “She said yes. I CAN ROW DA SOLO! I then went to San Marco to tell my Gondolier friends the good news. They bought me drinks like usual and I asked Gino if he would adopt me.”

Claudia was the object of gondolier admiration. Perhaps there was more to Kekquakeà than at first there seemed? Or perhaps not. The nickname was uttered with a knowing smile and a slight handsome shake of the head. Not contempt. There was fondness in it. It was understood that there was something charming about me. But I was dimly aware that the phrase alluded to other, less flattering qualities. Roberto told me, “It doesn’t really have a meaning.” So I decided it just meant me. In the evening, I’d find myself crossing a bridge and hear it shouted by somebody rowing in the canal below: “Oi! Kekquakeà!” and then the person would drift around a corner and be gone. It was like a surfer’s name. Like the big kahuna. Only 20 years later, at the start of my trip through the lagoon, did I learn that it was a phrase applied to misfits, and, among gondoliers, it was double-edged in its affections. An Italian friend alerted me to yet another connotation: “It’s sort of a way of saying you’re kind of a fag.”

I began to venture out on my own. From the journal of Kekquakeà: “The wind was pretty difficult . . . I couldn’t even get going and went backwards . . . Then I got pushed into a boat with two guys fishing. I said Ciao, how are you, I came to visit, and believe it or not they knew me. One of the guys was a gondolier.”

“Kekquakeà,” he said, and gave me a shove. “And from there on I handled it. I went out and circled a pole that I had chosen. I then drank my milk and came back.”

I rowed the canals of Giudecca. I rowed a mile south to St. Clement’s Island, known to locals as the Island of the Insane, for its female psychiatric ward. Gino described the inmates as “dangerously crazy women, not just moody ones.” He added, “There’s another one for those.” I tried to cross the Canal of Giudecca to Venice but couldn’t handle the waves kicked up by motorboat traffic. After a handful of solo outings, I came alongside the seawall and Luciano refused to lower the Ass.’s crane. The man who denied my existence (Gigi, I’d learned from the other rowers) appeared, accompanied by Claudia. He took off his shirt and handed it to her—I wanted to do that.

She smiled and said, “Good luck.”

He climbed down into my boat, installed a second forcola, in the front, and put an oar in the bite, and we rowed into the lagoon. A few hundred feet out, he spoke to me for the first time.

“Turn the boat around.”

Pulling a 180 is a simple maneuver if the vessel has any forward momentum: you slip your oar under the water, feather it, and press down. As I did so, I noticed that people had gathered on top of the wall to watch us. Gigi shouted, “Via!”—“Away!”

The mascareta lurched, and he’d already completed two strokes by the time I regained my balance. Then two more. I suddenly understood that I was supposed to do what any Venetian could do: use the leverage of my position in the back to overpower him and turn us away from the wall. It was a battle—a tug of war—in which I had the advantages of youth and physics.

My oar popped out of the forcola. I slammed it back in and rowed a stroke. He completed two more in the time it took me to get back in position for another. We were going straight for the wall. I put in one more hard stroke, applying so much force to the forcola that it threatened to shatter. I heard cheers from the wall. Then I lost the forcola again, said “Fuck!” in English, felt the boat turn his way, slammed the oar back in, threw my whole body into the next stroke, hit the water with the wrong part of the blade, and sent a curtain of spray over us both.

Someone shouted, “Go, go, Sean!”

I fell to a knee. We began to turn in his direction. I got up, socketed the oar, and put in two decent strokes, and we were straight again.

I matched him stroke for stroke for the next 10 strokes. Everyone on the wall was screaming now. We headed straight for the bricks and the noise, fast, neither of us stopping, 50, 30, 10 feet, and I was still giving it everything, no longer flailing, the spear tip of the boat’s ferro shaking back and forth: his way, my way. Just before we crashed, he snapped his oar out of the forcola and stabbed it into the lagoon. The boat turned and slapped the wall sideways.

Everybody whistled and shouted: “Gigiiiii! Shoneeee!”

He pointed to himself, and said, “Sessantaquattro”—sixty-four.

 

Youth is full of prohibitions. Stealing that Yamaha in San Francisco was a gesture of autonomy. Once I was cleansed of my criminality, naiveté became my way forward. Kekquakeà’s way—to deny even the existence of prohibitions. And returning at the age of 40 to row the parts of the lagoon that I’d never been able to reach was an attempt to reclaim my independence and my naiveté (both long gone). When I left Venice, the old man who’d told me to row from the stomach had said, “You can’t go; you’re a Venetian now.” But I’d known just enough to be certain of how little I knew. Now I thought I was ready. It was a midlife-crisis kind of readiness—I figured that I wasn’t going to do it when I was 64. But I also sensed a possibility of balancing between two places and getting to some long-desired third. And what better place to balance than in a rowboat on the waves?

In Manhattan, where I’d lived for 18 years, I talked to Dean Poll, the holder of the concession to run Central Park’s boathouse, and the custodian of the gondola La Fia di Venezia (subsequently rechristened Dry Martini)—a gift to the Central Park Conservancy from a Venice-loving philanthropist. Poll gave me permission to go out on the lake, after specifying, “Any money you make with that you gotta split with me.” The official gondolier, Andrés García-Peña, an Italian Colombian painter, took me on as his apprentice after I promised I wasn’t out to steal his job.

The only customers I ever rowed were a pair of 11-year-old Latino kids, Alex and Benny, who shouted from the shore, “How much for a ride?” I quoted the base rate, $30, and they replied, “Can we just sit in it?” I took them out anyway. Afterward, they declared, “You got mad skills!” and insisted on paying me a dollar. Like any good scoundrel of the canals, I kept Dean Poll’s 50 cents.

I contacted the Venice City Hall, got permission to visit the islands (many of them are barred to visitors), asked Gino Macropodio if he could help me find a boat—and if he would come with me.

“No,” he said. “I’ve put down the oar. And don’t try and do it in a gondola. Gondolas aren’t made for the wind. You need an outboard motor to be safe.”

“No way. I’m doing this with my own strength.”

“But not in a gondola.”

So he found me a wooden racing sandolo owned by a rowing club on a littoral island between the Adriatic and the lagoon. After I’d passed a rowing exam, I was given the boat—sky-blue and bright yellow, 24 feet long—and warned of numerous dangers. There was a crime wave in the lagoon. Albanians were running guns and stashing them on deserted islands. Mosquitoes carried West Nile virus. Certain gondoliers were fighting certain taxi drivers for the city’s cocaine trade, so taxi drivers were capsizing rowboats.

 

Aside from encountering a woman sunbathing nude on the deck of a runabout, and some inquisitive monks on an island that had been given to an Armenian, in 1717, to establish a religious order (one asked if I’d discovered “the nymphs, the sirens, the women who live under the water”), I found that my first two days were uneventful. On the third day, on fire with adrenaline from my close encounter with the police, I rowed two miles, hard, for Bailer Island, where, out of sight, I tied my sandolo up to a navigational piling and fell asleep.

Nobody came to arrest me. Waking, an hour later, I rowed a couple more miles in the wind (barely easier than swimming), and wound up on St. George in the Seaweed, where, in the 1850s, John Ruskin was captivated by “the kind of scenes which were daily set before the eyes of . . . Titian.” A monastery had been founded there in the 11th century, and in the early 1400s St. Lorenzo Giustiniani, the first patriarch of Venice, after renouncing his wealthy family (“Christ died on a cross and you want me to die on a feather bed?”), lived there in seclusion, as did the young Pope Eugene IV. The monastery contained a library of rare manuscripts and paintings by Bellini, which were destroyed in a fire in 1716. Before the completion of a railroad bridge from the mainland, in 1846, St. George was the first piece of Venice that travelers encountered when arriving from the west, and it was the site of grand receptions intended to impress them. Eugenio Miozzi, the renowned Venetian bridge engineer, described the treaties hammered out in the seaweed as “anticipating by eight centuries the role of the League of Nations.”

I rowed for all that, aiming for the western side of the island. But the tide had shifted and was heading out fast. Whitewater broadsided the boat. I lost the forcola. Finally, I gave in and rode the current, like a surfer, to the east side.

The wind died as I rounded a corner and entered a canal-cum-driveway that led into the island’s walled interior. A boathouse at the end had collapsed—rammed, it looked like, by a huge topo, which was still sitting there. I spied a mooring spot, tied up, jumped ashore, and immediately stumbled upon a matching pair of bronze door handles, scaled in rust, sitting in a pile of bricks, bottles, seaweed. They were heavy, and when I scratched them, dull gold shone beneath the corrosion. I stashed them in my boat. The way onto the island was blocked by the wreck, which had been turned on its side by whatever wind, current, or drunk had brought it here. I pulled myself aboard, balanced along the vessel’s gunwales, and then dropped to the other side. I was in a room at the bottom of a stone staircase that clung to a wall with no visible means of support. Everything was powdered with flaked plaster. Vaulted ceilings were punctured by sunlit holes.

I decided to climb the unsupported staircase. Before I could reconsider this plan, I was 40 feet up in the air. I hugged the wall as I went, sidestepping pieces of fallen ceiling, and tiptoed, imagining that silence would make me lighter. On the top level of the building, the floor had collapsed in sections 10 feet wide. The wind blew hard through empty windows. It was a monumentally stupid place to go alone. But here was a pope’s-eye view.

I tiptoed back downstairs, thinking that I would row east, to the former insane asylum. Now it was a five-star hotel. I’d find the concierge, ask if I could camp on the lawn, spend the evening at the hotel bar.

But I’d been enchanted by the stillness. Leaving the island’s protected canal was like entering the jet stream sideways. The wind and the current had picked up, and I got snapped around a full circle and a half—like a skateboard trick. When I tried to flee back to St. George, I was hauled 200 feet to the Fusina Canal, the last dredged channel before the mainland. I began to row as I’d done with shirtless Gigi 20 years before, imagining that spirits were punishing me for taking the corroded door handles from the island. Door handles that saints and popes had grasped. I wanted to throw them overboard but couldn’t take a hand off the oar.

I gave six hard pushes, came alongside a navigational piling, and grabbed—almost hugged—it. I’d been blown a quarter mile and could see the long bridge to the mainland. I turned on my cell phone for the first time in days. Crouching to get out of the wind, I called Gino. He didn’t answer. And what was I going to ask him? When he was 12, he’d brandished a disastrous report card and told his mother, “The undersigned is done with this.” She’d told him, “Go work.” He’d lied about his age, got a construction job, saved enough money to buy a gondola, and became the fifth in a line of Macropodios to take up the profession. He never married or had children. He never joined the gondoliers’ union. He never needed anyone’s help. I lay in the boat, and an hour later called again.

He said, “Good idea tying yourself to the piling.”

“Yeah. But, Gino, how much longer is this wind going to last?”

“Who can say? It’s the wind. It’ll last till it’s over. And now you see it’s no joke out there in the lagoon. I told you you should have got a motor. Aren’t you glad you didn’t go in a gondola?”

“Yes.”

“Well, anyway, I’m going to move my car right now. Which is good luck for you, as it’s in the parking lot on Little Trunk.” In the distance, I could see this island, which was devoted entirely to parking facilities.

“If you can meet me there, come meet me,” Gino said.

“I’ll try. The wind seems favorable.”

Before I could change my mind, I started out, and as the whitecaps of broadsiding waves sloshed in, rowed not so much with my muscles as with my bones. A wave hit so hard I thought my arm might break. The car ferries and big ships and heavy commercial traffic that frequent a shipping lane grew closer. I was in serious danger here. If I lost control, I’d get swept away to the impassable margin between water and land which Venetians call the Dead Lagoon, or drift into the path of a tanker. Yet I managed to cross the Canal of Giudecca—clogged with intersecting wakes and metal hulls, which I’d failed to cross 20 years before—aimed for an empty slip at a vaporetto depot, barely dodged a car ferry, and banged into the dock. I tied up and lay down. I was on the floor of a maritime bus station.

“And now?” Gino asked, when we found each other. “What are you going to do? Don’t you have a plan? This lagoon is very treacherous.”

Getting to Little Trunk had taken all my strength and ability. I needed Gino to help me. He was 80 and hadn’t picked up an oar in 14 years. Whenever I asked him if he missed rowing, he said, “I’ve done my part.”

He looked at the sandolo. “You made it here by yourself. Nobody towed you?”

“No.”

“But you can’t stay here.”

I pointed to a methane plant on Braid Island, 500 feet from where we stood. “I could make it to that. Or try and go under the bridge and camp on Second”—a trashy-looking island that I’d regarded with pity every time I’d crossed by road or rail into Venice. “Mostly, I’d rather sleep on a clean island, where there aren’t any rats, and I don’t think Second is a very clean island.”

“No. It’s not so clean.”

We both started laughing. He put a hand on my shoulder. “The north lagoon is calmer. And, if you make it through the night up there, then row to Venice in the morning. Find a rowing club along the edge of the city, and ask them to keep your boat so you can meet me for lunch. I’ll be in St. Mark’s Square at noon.”

 

I steered for one of the mainland bridge’s arches and slipped in. There were gray-white stalactites hanging from the ceiling, and gallery upon gallery of arched darkness. A sloppy concrete seam joined the newer automobile section to the old train trestle. The cold, damp air smelled ratty. I rowed out fast, and as I emerged by the squalid Second, littered with plastic detritus in medicinal shades of green and pink, I saw another island, about a mile away, its rolling, sunlit meadows rising, miragelike, from the water.

It was unwalled, and at the point of my ferro’s spear was a floating dock and a red sandolo with two men standing beside it. I saw them see me as I approached. I waved, taking one hand off the oar. Spooked, the men untied and rowed off in a needlessly wide arc. I pulled up and took their place. Then I heard low voices. Tucked away in a slot of water behind the dock were two more men, dressed in black, in a red-and-black speedboat. One had silver teeth and a nose ring. Both had buzzcuts.

I said, “Ciao.”

Silence. I turned away. The strong smell of pot followed me.

I looked at my map. I was on the island of High Field—a natural location for drug dealers. The rowers in the red sandolo had probably left with such haste because they’d seen my boat’s colors and feared exposure by a rival rowing society. Hoping to appear Venetian, I lay low.

Then I heard a motor. A stocky teenage girl was hunched at the tiller of a purple-and-white speedboat, prow out of the water and bearing aloft its name (in purple script): BABY FRAGOLA. She came in fast, blasting techno, holding the collar of a huge Presa Canario war dog. A clean-cut boy in a white speedboat followed. They tied up and went ashore into a grove of trees. Ten minutes later, they returned and both climbed into Baby Fragola. Behind them came a man with spiked hair, arms banded in tribal tattoos. The buzzcuts jumped to their feet. Slurred words drifted my way.

Spike: “I threw him off a bridge near St. Mark’s.”

Buzzcut No. 1: “I smoked it.”

Spike: “Then I took my clothes off.”

A small wooden rat powered by a big American outboard arrived. A middle-aged man in a white T-shirt and khakis looked suspiciously at the island’s inhabitants before coming ashore, followed by a salt-and-pepper Shih Tzu.

Spike asked for the time, and a buzzcut responded, “Five to eight.” Dinner. They started up their engine and jetted off toward Venice. I jumped onto the dock and walked up through the trees. In the middle of a large, open meadow, the mirage I’d seen from afar, I found the man and his dog.

I asked, “Is this a safe place to camp? With the drugs and all?”

He said, “The smokers are harmless. But this is a place where people come to fight.” He took a boxer’s stance. “Looking for fights.”

Aside from Piazza San Marco, all of Venice’s squares are called fields (campi). They used to be covered in grass, and served as arenas for boxing. In 1574, Henri III, before being seen off by a ceremonial artillery salvo from St. George in the Seaweed, watched a staged brawl that he described as “too small to be a real war and too cruel to be a game.”

“You’re a foreigner?”

“Yes.”

“If fighters come, just say you’re not from here. They’ll probably decide to leave you alone. Now let me show you where the good fruit is.”

He led me down a slope to a tree bearing cherry-size plums, plucked one, and said, “No pesticides—delicious.”

I ate one and immediately grabbed another.

“Don’t gorge yourself. Eat too many and you’ll get the shits.” He squatted to mime this.

After he left, I had High Field to myself. It was ringed by trees, the high, open namesake meadow like a monk’s tonsured scalp in the center. I discovered a handful of stone houses—an abandoned village—in a thick copse of trees.

At the top of the meadow, some benches had been set up under an open-sided shelter. The bleachers for battles. Nearby was a fire pit big enough to cook an ox. On a piece of planking were two competing graffiti:

 

Respect this sacred place.

Eat my penis you with your canoes of shit.

 

I lit a fire, simmered tomatoes and beans in a pan, undressed, and bathed with water that I’d brought in a huge rubber bag that doubled as ballast. A large, bright green grasshopper watched me from the graffitied plank. Then I put on pajamas, grabbed the pan and a spork, and looked out at the domes and bell towers of the city. Kekquakeà: a pajama-clad foreigner with a pot of beans and a pet grasshopper. He had found himself in the heart of Venice, alone.

 

By nine the next morning, I was back on the water, rowing toward lunch with Gino. The tide was out and the secca so extreme that I could submerge only half a blade. But a sandolo is designed to go anywhere. I quickly made it to the Canal of New Foundations, Venice’s West Side Highway. I jay-rowed across six lanes of heavy traffic, threading like a skateboarder between a cab and a bus, and claimed a lane right up against a stone embankment. I got rocked hard, without interruption. Buses passed. Taxis. Runabouts. Rats ranging in comparative size from pickup to semi. Endless mopedlike skiffs. Vaporetti filled with tourists came one after the other, backing up at the floating docks and jamming me into pockets of churning foam, stone and metal on all sides. I began to tread water with the oar, hovering in place, something I’d seen gondoliers do but didn’t know I could do. On my right was a city canal called the Stream of Beggars. A taxi cut me off and I rocked through its wake into the stillness.

A couple of hundred feet of easy water and I saw a white-haired man standing on the dock of a rowing club. I held out my hand. Without hesitation, he took it and pulled me in. I told him my name.

“Tony,” he replied.

“You must be a rowing club.”

“Yes. We’re the Generals.”

On land, I started sorting through my gear and talking expansively about the previous night. “The fruit trees. The grass. The moon. The view. The friendly grasshopper. It was incredible. The best night I’ve ever spent anywhere.”

Tony said, “It used to be a garbage dump. They closed it when it caught fire.”

I took a long shower in the club’s locker room, dressed in the cowboy boots and suit jacket I’d been hauling around in a dry bag all week, and walked across town. In St. Mark’s Square, surrounded by tourists, Gino shook my hand and said, “You made it.”

 

Before I left Venice 20 years earlier, Gino had let me row his boat for the first time with paying passengers. Two German girls, blond, twins, looked up at me in what I imagined was awe as I rowed them down the Stream of Lead. I rowed without speaking or splashing—preserving the silence in order to amplify the moment when we’d burst into the Grand Canal.

Then I one-handed my oar, pointed over their heads, and shouted, “Ponte Rialto!”

The girls performed an ungainly swivel, which rocked the boat and made me stumble. Simultaneously, the No. 2 express vaporetto came powering through the canal’s sharpest bend, arced under the bridge, and bore down on us. We were going to be rammed. My adrenaline surged—but I had no idea how to move my 36-foot skateboard out of the way. A strong hand pushed me down into a crouch and wrested the oar from my grip.

Gino had been watching, poised to take over, noting criticisms and whispering warnings. Now I stayed low as he detailed my many mistakes.

“You let go of the oar just now for what reason?”

“To point out the sights.”

“Never let go of the oar.”

“Okay.”

“Talk about history; don’t point at it.”

“Yes.”

“And what did you think you were doing with that wall you almost ran into? Do you know how much it costs to buy a new ferro?”

Gino had kept the oar. I’d crouched, embarrassed. Then a quick glance showed that the twins were enraptured. Fifteen minutes later, their parents handed over a hundred dollars in cash for the near drowning I’d provided.

“May we please have a photograph?” they asked me in perfect English.

After delivering a halting English response, “It’s. No. Problem,” I placed a daughter under each arm and Gino took the picture. I imagine I’m still in a family album, somewhere in Germany, as a gondolier’s son.