Anytime one of the four of us—me, Masser,the captain, his helper—leaned sideways,you could feel it tip, your bodykiltering toward the place where on landyou would’ve fallen, the thing five meters longand a little over a meter wide. I tried to imaginefifty others crowded aboard, then fifty moreif the pirogue were slightly larger,some with every important thing in a single bag,others with just their souls clutchedto their chests, which is to saytheir children. Masser says in the beginningit was just boys, teenagers stealing a boatat night and heading for the open sea,Spain’s Canary Islands a thousand miles away,or maybe to Libya and then onto Italy.And still they go, he says, though 4 out of 5 will die—death by water, death by hunger, deathby lack of water, death by lack of a compass, deathby the hope of a hundred desperate peopleand too little space. On the radio,the most popular entertainer in Senegalsings, “Last night in my dreams, all over the world:food for all. Ça, c’est necessaire,” he concludes.In the pirogue on the relatively glassy watersof the Sine-Saloum delta, I lean east,and the four of us lean east. Then someone leans west,and whether we want to or notwe all lean west toward the setting sun.