A Speck in the Sea

by John Aldridge

  I am in many ways a solitary man. For the most part I live alone. I am not married, have no kids of my own, and have no problem with solitude, even for an extended period of time. This aloneness is different. This feels cosmic; it feels like I am the last person alive on the planet. I can’t be seen, I can’t be heard, I can’t be found. I am utterly isolated.

  All I can feel is the tide rolling me this way and that. All I can hear is the blood pounding in my ears. I try to fight the terror. It’s an instinct to fight the terror; I focus on it.

  I know I need to conserve energy, but what is happening inside my head threatens to sap that energy. My brain feels like it will explode. I am so screwed. So totally screwed. Pictures of my parents, my family, Jake keep rushing around in my head. Am I really and truly not going to see my nephew grow up? Who will take care of my dog? What will happen to Anthony? Give in to these thoughts, a voice in my head warns me, and that’s how you die. Let those feelings in, and you die.

  I try to push the terror and grief away. I see each as a weakness. If I let one into my head, the weakness will spread and build, making room for a second weakness, which will spread and build, making room for a third, and then it will be all weakness. If I think about what I love—the people I love, the things I love—or if I think of the love my family feels for me, which is almost harder to think about, I will weaken and die. If I let myself feel the grief of losing what I am about to lose, it will take over, and I will die. So I can’t think about those things at all. I cannot let even a single despairing thought penetrate my brain. Not one. I need to feel powerful. For whatever is going to happen, I have to opt for strength at every moment. That’s the only way I can stay alive.

  How much longer until daylight? How long has it been since I fell overboard? It’s hard to tell. There is nothing here that can connect me to a sense of time—not until the first glimmer of light. I am at the mercy of the planet: I can’t do anything until the earth rotates into daylight and I can see, and meanwhile the moon up there is shaping the tide I’m riding. How small am I in comparison to those forces? On land I would be a grain of sand on the wide, white beach near where I grew up on Long Island; here I am a mere speck in the sea—too small to be visible. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how truly vulnerable I am.

  I’m suddenly seeing people who are gone. Dead. I see my grandfather, Anthony Antario, my mother’s father—my kid brother is named for him. I can hear Grandpa calling my name—“Johnny! Johnny!”—the way he always did, from the time I was a little boy to his death when I was a grown man in my thirties, as if he just couldn’t get over his happiness at seeing me. In a family in which the men did not easily express affection, he stood out.

  I see my friend Pete Fagan, a Montauk fisherman dead at fifty-six from a massive heart attack. He is wearing the camouflage pants and jacket they buried him in; Pete loved nothing so much as hunting. He kind of believed in me—he was always telling me that good things would happen to me. Now look. Just look at the disaster I have become.

  My grandfather and Pete: Are they trying to tell me something? Am I about to meet them? I feel my brain opening to another dimension in which Grandpa and Pete are coming toward me. Are they telling me to cross over to where they are? I feel like I can almost hear Pete, gruff as ever. “What the hell you doing here, man? You shouldn’t be here.”

  I begin to see how easy it would be to just let myself give in, just sink to the bottom and let the lobsters have me—their final revenge. The thought is almost seductive, like a mermaid waiting to take me down. I push that thought away too—no weakness!—and I think, I’ve got too many people who love me. There’s no way I’m dying like this.

  My brain keeps going back over and over what happened on the Anna Mary—the if-onlys and I-should-have-dones that would have kept me from going overboard. I relive that split second of not-quite-hesitation when I knew that hooking the handle to move the cooler was a bad idea. I had yanked that flimsy plastic handle a thousand times before and each time had sensed that it wasn’t a smart thing to do, but I had always just let the thought evaporate. The split second had been there this time again—yanking this flimsy thing really is a dumb idea—and I went right past it. Like when you pull out of your lane to pass a slow driver and find yourself aiming at an oncoming car. Can you make it? Will you beat the guy coming at you? Is there room to fall back? Or you’re walking home one night turning the corner onto a dark and empty street and your brain forks between “forget this, go back” and “it’s fine, been here a million times, what could happen?”—and in a split second you decide. My split second had come and gone, and I took the wrong fork, and now I am looking death in the face and making bargains even I don’t trust with a God I’m not sure I believe in.

  If only there were something to grasp. Back when we had the house in Vermont I used to go into the woods and try to get myself lost in the mountains. I would hike all over the place on my own, aware of every inch of my surroundings, never afraid. There was always something to grab and hold—a tree, a rock, something to stand on, steady earth beneath my feet. I always made my way back home. I felt then that I’d passed a test. Now all of that looks like a game for infants. I keep saying aloud that I can’t believe I am in this situation, that it cannot be real. How can it be real?

  In the moonlight I look down again at my white legs and my feet in their white socks. My legs go wavy with the distortions of water, and this adds to how unreal everything is. My brain goes into wide-angle mode, zooms out and up high so that it’s like I am outside of my body, looking down on this little person, so completely vulnerable, with milk-white legs and silly white socks in a huge ocean with a vast sky. That little person down there is me, overwhelmed by fear and the realization that I have fucked up. I have terminally fucked up. Another surge of panic sends yet another wave of despair washing through me, and I push it away. I can’t give in to that any more than I can give in to fantasies of rescue. Both can weaken me.

  Wait until daylight, I keep telling myself. Stay alive till then, that’s my mantra. I keep saying it over and over. Live till daylight.

  The truth is that I’ve thought about the possibility of something like this happening. I’ve played this scenario—or one something like it—in my mind before. As a kind of companion piece to my survival games in Vermont or when watching survivalist stories on TV, I’ve thought for real about the skills you would need for basic survival on the ocean. Survival is not just a game, not just entertainment. All sorts of people have survived situations they shouldn’t have, situations you can’t imagine they survived. I remember reading Adrift by Steven Callahan, who stayed alive in only a life raft for seventy-six days all on his own. He managed: necessity gave birth to inventions for getting and storing fresh water, for spearing fish, for dealing with loneliness and despair. If he could get through it, it can be got through. And if that’s true, why shouldn’t I be someone who gets through it too?

  Don’t think too far ahead, I warn myself. That’s another slippery slope into weakness.

  But I’ve got nowhere to go. I’m floating in the dark. I can’t see anything except my own legs, and I have no control over anything. Every few minutes I do a 360-degree spin, just to see—or smell or hear or in some way sense—what is out there, what might be near me, whether I am in danger.

  Whether I am in danger—that’s funny. I am in nothing but danger. I am in the ultimate danger. Now, finally, I understand the meaning of the word overwhelmed. I had known that whelm was an old seaman’s term for an ocean surge. Now the surge is threatening to bury me, literally and figuratively. This is the Atlantic Ocean that is washing up against me—hard, pounding swells carrying me with them up and down, up and down. I know all about this ocean. I know how scary powerful it is, how little I can do against the energy in its waves and currents and tides. And right now I am in it. Only my head is above the surface. My chin is on the water, and I have to keep my head up even as it is being slammed regularly, every m
inute, by the swells that send water into my mouth and up my nose and into my eyes, which are still red hot and stinging from the salt. Keeping my head above the water and constantly spitting out what I can’t help ingesting is a battle that doesn’t let up.

  My mind is going every which way right now. My thoughts are disconnected, lighting up different parts of my life. Old hang-ups push their way in—the woman who broke my heart when I was twenty, my failure to finish college. Why am I going over this stuff again? Am I really going to spend my dying moments with this bullshit? It is bullshit because it cannot possibly matter now. The only thing that matters now is to stay alive this minute, then the next minute, then the next. So what if this is my last chance to get a few things straight about my life? She broke my heart twenty-five years ago, and am I really going to think now, in what is probably the last moments of my life, about how that broken heart may have screwed up every relationship I have tried to have since? Am I really going to wonder what my life might have been like if I had finished college? What difference can any of this possibly make?

  I hear myself asking my dead grandfather to get me out of this: Help me, Grandpa! I want to be home. I want to be safe. I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, my grandfather is there. Maybe he can hear me. Maybe this will work.

  And then I bring myself back again. There is no one at all who can help me. There is no one else here. Only me. My body and my brain are my tools, my weapons to keep myself alive. If I let myself forget this, even for a moment, or if I indulge in fantasies about my dead grandfather coming to my rescue, that is how I die.

  Think. Use your mind. The best way to push down all the weakening thoughts is to assess and analyze my situation and, by a process of elimination, come up with some way to get out of it. So I need to go over my situation again, think it through one more time, figure out what it’s telling me. I know where I am: the Anna Mary was heading due south on a course just west of 180 degrees. When I went overboard at what I figure was about 3:00 a.m., she had just reached the forty-fathom curve, which is where the Atlantic water starts to turn warmer because you’re getting closer to the Gulf Stream. At that point she would have been about an hour and a half away from our traps—about fifteen miles. So I am some forty miles from Montauk, which is to the north. I know the direction the wind is blowing. When the sun comes up, I will know the time—about 5:30 a.m.—and I will also know the direction of due east.

  I know too that with sunup, people will start searching for me, if they haven’t started already. The problem is that I am the proverbial needle in a haystack, and I am virtually invisible. My hair is black, my T-shirt is pale blue—colors that will simply disappear in the waves. I have to make myself visible, and that means I will need to find a buoy, something brightly colored that someone on a boat or in a plane can see. Out here that means a lobsterman’s string of traps, and the lobsterman whose string of traps I am not too far from, once again, is Pete Spong. So when daylight comes I will start looking for Pete’s gear. Keep saying that. Saying it over and over makes it seem real, makes it seem possible.

  Sunup must be close now, which also means fish are starting to feed. I’m not sure what this will mean for me until I see in the moonlight two dorsal fins jutting above the surface of the ocean. These are the fins of sharks. They are the fins of sharks that are moving swiftly and gracefully toward me and are suddenly tracing circles around me. They are assessing me as a food option.

  Another red-hot burst of adrenaline-laced terror runs through me, tensing my body rigid, and out loud I order myself to chill out. In the depths I can see the shadows of the two sharks, illumined by the moonlight. In this part of the ocean at this time of year they must be blue sharks. They look to be somewhere between six to eight feet long. I know about this species of shark. I know they like to feed on squid but will eat any fish as well as sea birds. They are not known man-eaters, but if they are hungry and there is nothing better around, they will attack and eat humans. Of course. Any animal will do so. Humans have also done so throughout history.

  I reach into the pocket of my shorts and unclip the three-inch Buck folding knife I always carry, very careful as I open it to not graze my skin with its sharp edge. Last thing I want is even a drop of blood in the water.

  Blood. I bet these animals can sense the blood pounding inside my body, so now I have a new mantra, and I start reciting it to my heart: Slow down, I tell my heart. Be calm.

  I think about stabbing the sharks if they come at me. But as soon as I have that thought, I know how foolish it is. A three-inch knife against the jaws and teeth of even one shark? Ridiculous. Futile. The sharks keep circling—ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. Control your breathing, I order myself. Slow your heart rate. It takes effort, but I feel my heart pumping more regularly. And in this calmer state I say to myself that if the sharks come, they come. When they get here, I’ll fight them. But right now I need to stop freaking out about the sharks and start putting my mind to what will happen when daylight comes. I have to concentrate on catching the light the moment it breaks so I can see what I have to do next. Time is not on my side. Time is another killer. Still clutching the knife, I swim away from the sharks, and soon enough they head off in the opposite direction.

  I’m still floating, still alone, still lost when the light very suddenly breaks through. They call this the golden hour, when the sun is so near the horizon that its light travels through thick atmosphere and comes at us indirectly, redder and softer than it will later in the day. Now I can see a little, and soon I will be able to see more, and this utterly transforms my situation. Like being a little kid: take away the dark, and everything seems better.

  Now I just have to find a buoy.

  Chapter 4

  “He’s Not Here”

  6:22 a.m.

  When Johnny and Anthony first bought the Anna Mary they spent a year almost literally reconstructing it from top to bottom. Originally built as a day-trip boat, the vessel had no storage below decks and no beds, and the two set about customizing it for offshore lobster fishing. They framed out a new deck, new tanks, and a new wheelhouse, and they replaced the old hydraulic and plumbing systems. They raised the height of the ceiling below decks and crammed two bunks right in the nose of the boat, plus a galley big enough to hold a hot plate and a storage locker for their miles of rope, survival gear, spare parts, and other pieces of equipment. They tightened up the hull, filled in the seams, made the boat seaworthy for forty or fifty miles offshore—or more. In essence they had bought a hull and a permit, both of which were highly valuable, and had built a new boat around those two precious commodities.

  But they hadn’t built a head—the nautical term for a toilet—providing themselves instead with a five-gallon plastic bucket that sits on the deck until needed and gets emptied over the side after use. On the morning of July 24, 2013, that head was the intended destination of deckhand Mike Migliaccio. Somewhere between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. Mike hauled himself out of his bunk in the forepeak and made his way up the narrow stairway to the wheelhouse and out onto the deck. Still groggy with sleep, Mike only vaguely registered that Johnny wasn’t in the wheelhouse—was not seated or sprawled in the captain’s chair nor curled up on the bench behind the chair, which is where he sometimes caught a nap. Mike isn’t sure if he consciously thought to himself that Johnny must therefore be out on deck, but he is quite clear that when he had been on deck for a minute—maybe less—he realized that Johnny was not on the deck. Mike looked up: Johnny was not up in the mast either.

  This was all wrong. “Johnny is the guy who watches out for everybody else,” says Migliaccio, an ex-Marine, Vietnam vet, a guy who by his own admission is incapable of punching a time clock. “I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t there.” Normally Johnny would wake Mike before sunup and give him the wheel for a couple of hours to take the Anna Mary its final miles to its trawls. Suddenly Mike was sharply aware that it was after sunrise and there was nobody driving
the boat. That was unbelievable, and it was frightening.

  “Anthony!” Mike yelled at the top of his lungs and raced down to the hold to rouse him.

  Anthony came up out of a deep sleep to see Mike’s terrified face, his mouth moving, saying something about Johnny.

  “Johnny?” Anthony asked. “Where is he?”

  “He’s not here,” Mike answered. Then he said it again: “He’s not here.”

  Anthony was bolt upright now, and the two of them searched again, as if Johnny not being there had been a mirage or a joke or a false alarm or a bizarre game of hide-and-seek. They called his name and they looked for him, increasingly frantic as they searched. Johnny was not in the wheelhouse. He was not on deck. They noticed that the hatch was off the starboard lobster tank. Did he fall in? Hit his head and drown? They looked. Nothing.

  The Anna Mary is not a big boat. If you’re not in the bunkroom, and you’re not in the wheelhouse, and you’re not on deck, you’re gone.

  Terror flooded into Anthony’s body and weighed him down. For a moment he felt paralyzed. Memories of faces, names, voices ricocheted around the inside of his brain. One powerful memory was of the hushed talk of adults when he was a young boy about the Windblown, a tilefish boat that broke up off Block Island and went down with all hands. The muffled conversations—don’t let the kids hear this!—went on for years, it seemed to him. The fishermen lost were young men, and their mothers continued to live in Montauk all the time he was growing up. He remembers as a boy staring at them with a kind of frightened awe when they were pointed out to him.

  Other losses were closer in time and distance. He remembered the New Age, a trawler, and the crew member who got hit by a net and slipped overboard—dead from the hit itself, most likely, then lost in the ocean. There was Scott Gates, who went overboard on a wave and was never found. Indian John who was out swordfishing and fell overboard—never found. Dick Vigilent, his swordfish boat literally run over by another boat in the Gulf of Mexico, attacked and killed by sharks while his crew looked on helplessly, unable to avoid hearing the screams as Dick’s body was ripped apart. I’m always one minute away from death, he thought. But not Johnny. It is not going to be like that with Johnny. Then: I’ve got to take stock, he told himself. He noticed he was sweating.