A Mile Down Read Online Free PDF

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