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 have 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.

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 spec in the universe and deciding to just rush towards all of it and make himself the tiniest spec in the biggest universe.

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

So here's my story, alone at sea, read by January, a little boy.

When Alexander Doba kayaked into the port in Luchonquet, 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 Barneget 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 ones' 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 catorca says Doba, who is Polish, catorca being the Polish word for forced labor in Siberia.

But by catorca, 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 Potsk in central Poland.

Or the afternoon, a week later, on that same river, when he succumbed to the temptation of eating pancakes to made-o-soup and rice at the Milk Bar restaurant.

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