My name is Liz Wile. 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 Dova 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. 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

you could possibly imagine there in his kayak alone in the Atlantic.

So here's my story, along at sea, read by January, love away.

When Alexander Dova kayaked into the port in Luchon-K 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 unacoustummed to

wearing pants. He'd been at sea 110 days alone, having last touched land that

may at New Jersey's Barneget Bay. The trip could have easily ended five days

earlier when Dova 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

...