swimming

1992

   At 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, August 15, 1992, RESURGAM’s bow dipped beneath a wave as it had millions of times in the nine years and almost two circumnavigations during which I had owned her.  But this one was to be different.  Although only a foot high, it was RESURGAM’s last.  Her bow did not break though, doggedly or triumphantly,  as it had in every latitude from beyond 50ºN to beyond 50ºS, in near survival storms to gentle trade winds, from the English Channel to the great Southern capes.  This wave ran up the deck to the mast, before hesitating for a moment, as if surprised by its temerity and success. 

    The bow sank lower beneath the water; the stern rose several feet into the air.   In the steeply inclined cockpit, I pulled myself to my feet, stood up and stepped over the lifelines into the ocean.  The water was warm.  After all, this was the Gulf Stream, ten or twelve miles off Fort Lauderdale, whose lights I could still see in the distance. 

    RESURGAM’s stern loomed above me, echoing scenes from newsreels of ships sinking in WWII.  Her rudder and propeller were exposed.  I noticed a gooseneck barnacle on the strut that I had missed when I snorkeled to clean the bottom a week earlier in Key West.  I  thought:  that barnacle made a mistake.  It will not survive the depths toward which RESURGAM  is headed.  A thousand feet of water lay beneath us. 

    RESURGAM’s stern rose higher, and then slid down and disappeared.  A few ripples.  A few bubbles.  No suction.  Some loose objects, which had been possessions, but were now strange and foreign in the black water, drifted around me.  I swam a few strokes to get clear of them.  RESURGAM was my home.  Everything I owned, except for the t-shirt and shorts I was wearing, and the billfold I put in my pocket, thinking that the plastic credit card might be the only way for anyone to identify the body, in the unlikely event it was discovered, was gone. 

    I pulled the eyeglasses from my head and let them drop from my fingers.  I  could not see through the wet lenses, and I would not need them any more.  The shore lights became diffused fuzzy spheres.  With small movements of my hands I turned away and faced out to sea.  It was in many ways a lovely night.  The breeze was a gentle six knots; the waves less than a foot high;  the moon full.  I leaned back in the shimmering water and floated.

    I was calm.  I was Socrates after drinking the hemlock, waiting for the numbness to move up from my feet, asking, “Why should I fear death?  For when I am, death is not.  And when death is, I am not.”

    I make no claim to bravery.  Courage did not enter into this.  I had lived a certain way, and it had brought me here.  “Live passionately, even if it kills you, for something is going to kill you anyway,” I had written; and now it would.  “Intensity not duration,”  I had written; but against all odds I had lasted fifty years.

    A little wave, the first of many, too many, splashed into my face.  Sputtering I let my legs drop and came upright in the water.  I pictured  RESURGAM sailing below me, her new mainsail still set.  I wondered how long it would take her to reach the ocean floor.    

    I let myself turn slowly until I faced the distant shore lights. 

    I am a good swimmer, but I had never tried to swim so far.  It was at least ten miles, and I doubt I had ever swum a mile at a time.  There is nothing for me there, I thought.  I deliberately turned and swam a few strokes further out to sea, but then I stopped and leaned back and floated.  I thought of RESURGAM again.  What will it be like down there?  I speculated idly about how far my body would sink, and how long it would be before I weakened and drowned.  Staying afloat was so easy.

    Another little wave lapped over my face.  I came upright.  Treading water was more comfortable than floating.  I looked at my watch and was surprised to discover that it was already 4:00 am.  I had been in the water an hour, which seemed only a few minutes.  

    I undid the strap and let the watch fall away. I was beyond time.  In the moonlight, the water was extraordinarily clear, and I could follow the watch for several seconds.  My hands, moving slowly near my waist, were pale.

    I don’t know what I expected, but nothing was happening.  This was taking too long.  Without taking a breath, I lowered my head beneath the sea and swam down.

    Only ten or fifteen feet beneath the surface I ran out of air.  Instinct, what I call the animal, took over.  The mind can say, “You are in a hopeless situation.  I do not fear death, only the suffering along the way.”  But what I call the animal always wants to live, and my animal is strong.  It had kept me alive for five months in a damaged boat in the Southern Ocean during my first circumnavigation, bailing seven tons of water every twenty-four hours.  It had kept me alive for twenty-five thousand miles in an open boat.  It had kept me alive while drifting three hundred miles in a inflatable in the South Pacific, until I reached land unassisted.  The panicked animal struggled back to the surface.

    Gasping, sputtering, I deliberately slowed my arms and legs.  A wave curled over my head,  I coughed water.  I was getting tired of these waves.  They were a bit higher now, though still only one to two feet.  The sky was  brightening to the east.  I turned.  Either because they were lost in the oncoming dawn or because I was being carried further offshore by the Gulf Stream, the shore lights were no longer visible.   I let myself rotate slowly.  In every direction was only the ocean.  I stopped myself facing east, and calm again, quietly, dispassionately,  observed what I expected to be my last dawn.

   

    I treaded water and floated.  An hour or two passed.  Perhaps more.  I continued to be amazed at how easy it was to keep afloat.  I had been swimming for at least five or six hours, and I was completely fresh.   Drowning might be a sailor’s death.  But the animal wasn’t having any.

    Low mist was turning into fog.  For the first time, I shivered. Perhaps this was the beginning of hypothermia.  I knew that you lose more heat by movement.  I was not moving very much.  Slow strokes with my hands; an occasional slow kick with my legs.  I was seeking neither life nor death.  I was simply waiting.

    Something, a darkness in the fog, caught my eye.  As I watched, it became a small fishing boat.  Instinctively my spirits soared.  I heard the low throbbing  diesel.  It would pass close to me.  Not more than twenty or thirty yards away.  The engine became louder.  I was wearing a yellow t-shirt.  I pulled it over my head and tried to wave it in the air, but the shirt was sodden and heavy and stuck to my hand. 

    When the boat was close,  I yelled, “Help.”  once.  The boat puttered steadily onward.  I watched it fade into the fog and disappear.  “All right, don’t help,” I said aloud in a normal conversational tone, and struggled back into my t-shirt and turned back toward where a bright spot in the fog indicated the sun and east.

    My instinctive reaction to the fishing boat came as a surprise.  But there was nothing for me ashore.  Everything really was gone.  And death is not optional.  If not now in the next few hours, then sometime in the next ten or twenty years, probably from heart disease or cancer, more painfully and with less dignity.  “That is the trick:  to give up a few good years to death before it is too late,”  I had written in a poem about the death by cancer almost twenty years earlier of the man I thought of as my grandfather.  Recalling the words calmed me.  I was glad the fishing boat was gone, glad to be alone again.  Of the six or seven years I had spent at sea, three of four of them had been alone.

    I thought of what I had written, of my voyages, of the places I had been.  I would miss a lot:  my friends; being in love; listening to music; Laphroaig scotch in a crystal glass; light reflecting from a rose in the narrow bud vase on RESURGAM’s table when we were in port;  many, many places:  Moorea; Lord Howe; Bali; Cape Town; Sydney; New Zealand.  My mind held the entire world.

    While I slowly treaded water, my movements mechanical, my mind wandering, the fog dispersed.  I became aware of the sun warming my face.   The sky was blue and clear.  I turned toward the west.  No land was visible; but even without my glasses I could make out the fuzzy outline of a ship heading north several miles inshore of me.  The Gulf Stream would have carried me a few miles north and perhaps a bit east.  Land must be more than fifteen miles away by now, I concluded.

    Although I had regained my tan four months earlier after rounding Cape Horn, I could feel the sun burning my face.  No need to worry about skin cancer any more, I thought; but I pulled the back of my t-shirt over my head as a kind of cowl.   Evaporation from the damp cloth was soothing.

    The sun was almost directly overhead.  I had been in the water for nine hours, and was only a little tired.  The wind had increased to ten knots.  The seas were still low, but dotted with scattered whitecaps.  More and more of them splashed into my face.  I was not hungry, but thirst was becoming a torment, as it had been when I was adrift in a dinghy for two weeks in the South Pacific.  I felt something brush my leg, then a tentative nip.   My leg kicked out automatically.  I looked down and saw several small silver dollar size fish  scurrying away.  “Not yet,” I told them.  And then, having started, I continued aloud, “How long is this going to take?”  The words provided an impetus, and the animal ran with it.  Before I knew what I was doing, I had turned and started swimming west.

     I did not think I could reach shore, but I could no longer endure waiting for the sea to take me. 

    I swam crawl for a minute or two, before turning to side stroke, then back stroke, then crawl again.  It felt good to swim.  After that first instinctive burst, I swam smoothly.  My muscles enjoyed the movement. 

    Pausing every once in a while to float and rest for a few minutes, I swam,  chasing  the sun west through the afternoon.   The wind increased a few more knots, but remained moderate.  The waves pushed me; but more of them crested and filled my mouth, which was becoming a raw wound.  Breathing was easier on my side, so gradually I found myself swimming side-stroke more than the other strokes combined.

    Sometime in mid-afternoon I saw a sail to the south.   I stopped and treaded water, hope rising.  At first the sail seemed to be heading for me; but as it came closer, I saw that it would pass a half mile or so to the east.  I watched silently as a small ketch motor-sailed north.  I thought I saw a shape in the cockpit, but  without my glasses and with my eyes raw, I was not certain.  I felt a sense of loss when the sail disappeared.

      This was the longest rest I had taken since noon, and for the first time I realized that I was becoming tired.  I had been in the water about twelve hours.  I had not eaten for almost twenty, or had a drink since before midnight.  I was surprised that I still had to pause to urinate occasionally.  I am 6’1” and have weighed about 156 since I was a teenager, so there was not a lot of fat to be converted into energy.   A cramp seized my stomach.  I reached down and pressed my hands against my abdomen until the pain eased.  It was more hunger than a muscle spasm.  A growl from the animal:  “Feed me!”

    My hands felt strange.  I looked down and noticed that a half dozen of the little fish were hovering around me.  As I watched, one of them tentatively approached and bit at my khaki shorts, which he apparently did not find to his taste.  The shorts were chaffing my thighs, as the t-shirt was my arms.  I thought about discarding them, but decided they might keep in some heat if I lasted until night .

    I raised my hands above the water.  They looked like something from a horror movie.  The skin was not just puckered, but seemed to have come loose from the muscles.  As tentative as the fish, I touched the back of my left hand with the fingers of my right, half afraid the skin would peel away.  For the first time I thought of blood and sharks.  The skin  moved peculiarly, but it remained in place.  Fear gave me the boost I needed to resume swimming.

    I observed a line of clouds gradually move in from the ocean and block the sun.  Heavy rain began to fall behind me.  I stopped and waited, hoping for a drink of fresh water, but the shower passed to the south.  When I resumed swimming, I discovered that the sun was completely obscured and I was confused.  the wind had increased to eighteen or twenty knots and the waves were higher and steeper.  In quick succession three waves broke over me, leaving me coughing and gasping for breath.  The waves dictated my course.  Despite a probable wind shift with the clouds, I had no choice but to swim before them.

     I did not swim hard.  I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere.  More and more waves crashed over my face.  Each was a knife cutting my eyes and mouth.  I tried to keep my eyes closed, but found that I changed direction almost immediately.  And I had to keep my mouth open to breath.   Gargle 20,000 times with salt water.

    “Ninety-eight.  Ninety-nine.  One hundred.”  I counted strokes to myself, just as years earlier when EGREGIOUS capsized in a cyclone in the Tasman I had counted buckets full of water as I bailed.  Without thought, without any attempt to reason why, without considering hope or hopelessness, I continued swimming.

    The clouds and wind lasted until nightfall.  The sun shone long enough at sunset for me to discover that I was swimming more north-west than west.  I made a course correction and slowly continued.

    I knew I was weakening.  I was swimming only twenty strokes side-stroke, then back, then five crawl.  My right elbow hurt, and I did not have much power in any stroke.  The moon would not be up for an hour or two.  I stopped and waited for some stars to appear so I could determine west.  In the increasing darkness I noticed the lights of two ships, one heading south, one north.  It too a while before my tired mind realized that they were both a mile outside of me.  Outside.  During the rain, I had crossed the shipping lane.  Momentary elation collapsed when I turned and saw the loom of lights from the shore.  Only the loom.  Experience said that I was still at least ten miles offshore. 

     The night blurred.  I swam ever more slowly.  The overcast sky partially cleared  and the moon came out.  Increasingly I lost my sense of direction and was swimming the wrong way.  Only pain was clear and sharp.  My eyes, my mouth, my throat, thirst, were intolerable.  I felt for a while a painful urge to urinate, but could not.  There was no more fluid in my body.   My right elbow, bending with each side stroke, was becoming excruciating and useless.  I simply stopped and hung almost motionless in the water more and more.

      Two or three times I started shivering uncontrollably.  The Gulf Stream was warm, but it was not body temperature, and I thought each time that this was the end.  But each time inexplicably the shivering  stopped.  Two or three times I was brought up short by swimming into jelly fish.  The stings were unpleasant, but not serious.  Two or three times my body was wracked with dry retching.  There was nothing in my stomach to come up.  Two or three times I actually fell asleep for a few seconds, but awoke when my head fell below the surface and I  breathed in water.  Only a flick of the wrist was enough to keep me afloat.  Oddly the weaker and more exhausted I became, the stronger became my will to live. If for nine hours I had been Socrates, now I became Dylan Thomas.   I was “not going gently into this good night.”

    By about 1:00 a.m., judging by the moon, I knew that I would never reach land.  The lights were still only a loom, a glow south of me, then darkness, and two other patches of light further north.  I began to hallucinate, while aware that I was doing so.  A particular cloud, illuminated by the moon, turned into a filigree of lace each time I looked at it, starting at the bottom and working upward.  I rather enjoyed watching  the process.  And I thought I saw a sailboat, a large sloop, motionless, sails down, unlit, seemingly at anchor.  While I was certain about the cloud, I was unsure of the sailboat, and spent some time treading water, studying the image.  There really seemed to be straight lines of the rigging and the mast that just could not appear naturally.   Sometimes when I looked it was there, and sometimes not.  I resumed swimming.

     On my right side, facing south, I saw the loom of lights concentrate into specific pinpoints that seemed to be running lights.  I dismissed these too as hallucinations; but they persisted and came closer until my mind finally accepted that they really were the lights of two fishing vessels.  About a half mile away, they stopped.  I continued swimming, slowly, painfully, favoring my right arm, for a few more minutes, then I stopped too.

    I hung in the water and considered the fishing boats.  One of them remained stationary, while the lights of the other described a long oval in the darkness.  Of course I did not know how long they would remain, but I knew beyond doubt that I could not reach the shore.  It was not really a gamble to turn south instead of west. 

    I swam harder than I had since nightfall, trying to ignore the pain in my elbow; but it was like trying to walk on a broken foot.  I kept myself from looking at the running lights as long as possible, and when I did finally pause to rest, one set was far out to sea; but the other was definitely closer.

    I resumed swimming, trying to maintain a sustainable pace.  When adrift  in the South Pacific, I had been surprised that after two weeks of near starvation and only six sips of water a day, I had enough strength left to row the final four or five miles to land.  But that had been a decade earlier.  I was fifty years old now and surviving on no sips of water for more than 24 hours and no food for 40.  I prevented myself from stopping to rest by trying to remember when I last had a drink.  I thought I recalled drinking a can of Coke Friday evening.  This was now sometime around 2:00 a.m. Sunday. 

    When I simply could not take another stroke, I stopped and looked up and saw that the fishing boat was only a hundred yards away.  There was no point in saving anything.  I took a couple of deep breaths and set out again.

    I had not gone more than twenty yards when I had to stop.  My body simply had no more strength.   When I looked, the fishing boat seemed no closer.  I could see the boat, details, deckhouse windows,  booms.  I yelled, “Help.” as loudly as I could.  The effort hurt my throat.  The sound seemed to fill the night.  But  there was no reaction from the boat.

    I lowered my head and swam, desperately trying to close the gap.  But this time when I looked, the lights seemed further away.  I swam again.  Each time covering less distance before having to stop.  Twenty yards.  Fifteen.  Ten.  Yet each time the fishing boat  was no closer.  Finally, in despair I understood that it was powering slowly away from me.  “Don’t go.”  I shouted.  But the gap steadily increased.  I have never talked to myself while alone before, but now I did so again.  “I am dead,”  I said unnecessarily.

    The effort to reach the fishing boat had exhausted me.  I could not swim, but lay back in the dark water, keeping myself afloat with sporadic hand movements.  I watched the clouds turn to lace.  I began to shiver.  I stopped shivering.   I became aware again of the torment of my eyes and mouth and throat, and of thirst.  This is unendurable, I thought.  Literally.  Part of me would have welcomed oblivion, but it did not come.  And gradually, as I floated, I regained some strength.

    I came upright in the water.  Dawn should only be two or three hours away.  I could last that long.   And perhaps in daylight another boat would come along.  My life had  become simple, as it had before.  Just do one more thing.  Bail when EGREGIOUS’s hull was cracked.  Row when CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE capsized in the Pacific.  Now:  swim until dawn. 

    Floating and swimming a few strokes, then floating, mostly floating, I tried to move west.  I began to see the sailboat again.  I don’t believe in you, I  thought.  But I found myself stopping and staring.  I really did think I could see the hull and the straight lines of the rigging and mast.  I looked away and then back.  It was all still there.   I still don’t believe in you;  but the boat was not far out of my way, so I swam slowly toward it, breast stroke now, my least effective  stroke, but one which enabled me to keep my eyes on the boat and caused the least pain in my elbow.

    The sloop remained in place.  I don’t believe in you; but part of me was beginning to.  Then, off to my left, I noticed a light.  I turned.  My vision, blurred by exhaustion, salt water, and myopia, was suspect, but there seemed to be a white light, an anchor light.  I turned my head back to the sailboat.  It was still there.  Then toward the light.  It was still there too.  I did not know what to believe, what was real, if anything.  Somehow the anchor light made more sense.  Giving the sailboat a final glance, I started toward the light.

    I did not hurry.  My goal was to survive until dawn.   I had to swim somewhere, so it might as well be toward the light.  And I did not have the strength to do more than inch my way.  Whenever I looked, the light was closer, but I did not feel the elation I had when approaching the fishing boat an hour or two earlier.

    What seemed to be a long time passed.  Not until I was close enough to see the hull in detail was I convinced that there really was a boat.   It was  a small commercial fishing vessel about 40’ long, anchored in the middle of no where.  There was no sign of activity.  No lights except the anchor light.  No sound of an engine.  This was all very strange and made me suspicious that I was hallucinating.  The only way to find out was to swim over and knock on the hull.  But as I watched in horror the boat began to power away from me.  “Help!”  I yelled.  “Heeelllppp!  Don’t go!”  The gap between us continued to widen.  “Help!”  I yelled again.  And from the darkness a sleepy voice answered me.

    “Is there someone there?”

    “Over here.  In the water.   Fifty yards off your port quarter.  Don’t go!”

    “Where?  Keep shouting,” a second voice called.

    “To port.  Astern.  Don’t go.”

    Deck lights came on.  Then a handheld spotlight flicked across the low waves.

    “Further out.  No, to your left.”  And the beam found me.

    “Where’s your boat?” 

    “It sank yesterday off Fort Lauderdale.”

    “Fort Lauderdale?”  The voice sounded confused.

    “Just don’t go.  I’ll swim to you.  Just don’t go.”

    The pain was all still there, but I covered the final yards without stopping.  The hull rose sheer above me.

    The engine was turning over.   A voice shouted over it,  “Come around to the stern.”

    “The prop?” 

    “It’s in neutral.”

    I swam along the starboard side of the vessel and came to the stern.  Two young men were leaning over and staring at me.   Water from the cooling system and exhaust smoke were bubbling out .  “Put your foot on that step and try to reach up.”

    “I don’t think I have much strength in my legs.”   My foot slipped, found the step again, and I pushed myself high enough for hands to reach mine.  I did not think:  I will live.  I thought:  at last I will get a drink of water.

(A longer version of this, including the incidents that led up to it, is found in A SINGLE WAVE.  What happened next is found in RETURN TO THE SEA.  Both are available at www.sheridanhouse.com.)