“This is no ordinary fisherman,” she said, her voice both taut with worry and rigid with authority. “This is my brother. Don’t end this search. Promise me. Promise you will not give up.”
There was no question of giving up. Two hours beforehand the order had gone out to continue searching through the night and into the morning. And although boats might come back to the station to resupply and refuel, and although crews might hit their sustainability limit and have to be replaced by other crews, it takes an order from the district level—above the sector command—to call off a search, and even then, as Jason Walter says, “it doesn’t happen fast.”
Not long thereafter Walter himself returned to the station from the search. The crew of four had been out for some six hours in the small response boat, had been cleared to search beyond its normal range, and, given the boat’s speed, had been able to search over a relatively sizeable area. But there was no sign of Johnny Aldridge when the crew, tired and a bit dejected, was ordered to head back to the station.
As they turned into the inlet they were stunned to see “fifty or more people,” in Walter’s words, lining the beach, waiting and watching. The crowd surged forward. “Did you find him?” people shouted. “Have you got Johnny?”
Glumly, they shook their heads.
What Cathy didn’t know about that shift in the air pressure at a few minutes before 1:00 p.m.—what she would learn only much later—was that back in the command center in New Haven, at 12:45 p.m., SAROPS had crashed.
Jason Rodocker attributes the crash to data overload. The system was simply swamped by all the added information coming in from the volunteer fleet—it was too big a bite to swallow. Rodocker is a slender man, yet the fingertips of his hands seem particularly well padded—maybe the result of so much time spent at keyboards, maybe an added reason he is so good at the work. Either way, Jason recognized the crash as something that sometimes just happens with computers—a reality of his job. “I have to keep rolling till somebody relieves me,” he says, the fingertips flying over the keys as he works. That wasn’t going to happen for a while, so Rodocker rebooted, started over, and kept going.
But around him in the command center in New Haven and in the communications suite at Montauk Station, the suddenly stilled computer screen seemed eerie, and the staff felt the dip in the atmosphere. Six-plus hours after notification, in what was turning into a prolonged case, to lose your most powerful technical tool was a blow. Until the multicolored particles could again be seen clustering on a monitor, everyone felt that where finding Johnny Aldridge was concerned, they were now as good as flying blind.
Chapter 11
The Landward Watch
Noon
The Aldridge house in Oakdale was bursting at the seams, filled with people who knew only that they wanted to be present to support John and Addie, to embrace Anthony, who seemed almost broken by despair, to encircle the family in a chain of love that would withstand whatever was going to happen in the hours ahead.
But they were also there for their own sakes. Partly they felt a need to be with other people who knew Johnny. And partly they were there because today was fast becoming what Tony Vincente called “one of the worst days of my life.” And when you are having one of the worst days of your life, who can bear to be alone?
Those who gathered there had not accepted that Johnny was gone. With all his might, Tony didn’t want to believe it. Steve D’Amico didn’t believe it at all, not for a second. “I didn’t have the feeling that he was gone,” D’Amico recalls. “I knew the water was warm and that Johnny would know what to do. I hoped he was doing it.”
D’Amico had reason to believe in the power of Johnny Aldridge’s strong mind, a mind powerful enough to show him whatever he had to do to stay alive. He remembered an incident from when they were young guys hanging out together, a bit of fun gone wrong that D’Amico believed summed up the man Johnny Aldridge became. The two were in their late teens, young men strutting their stuff, and what better or at least noisier way to do it than on dirt bikes? Steve and Johnny each owned one, and they liked to take them into the woods to run them up and down a big mound of soil, gravel, and debris left behind by a construction crew. The name of the game was to see how high they could jump the bikes, and there was always a bit of bravado to it, not to mention a bit of competitiveness.
Steve took his run and went pretty high, and as he landed he looked back and saw Johnny jumping “way high” and at a pretty fast clip. In fact, Johnny was going so fast and flying so high that his feet shot off the bike pegs at the very top of the jump. He lost control, and when he finally crash landed, in addition to his many cuts, scratches, and bruises, the left peg scraped his shin, cutting it open to the bone. The two boys immediately recognized the injury as one that obviously needed attention, which meant getting him to a hospital fast, and because his bike was out of commission—temporarily anyway—Steve took him there on his own, positioning Johnny on the back of the bike as best he could and driving through the city streets to the nearest emergency room.
This was illegal, as dirt bikes are not permitted on town streets, but no cop stopped them, and they made it to the hospital without further disasters. Before he gave himself over to the emergency room staff, however, Johnny begged Steve to hide his crashed dirt bike at the D’Amico house. Although Johnny thought he could shrug off his own bruises as not too bad, he was afraid that if his father saw the mauled bike, he would recognize how serious the crash had been and would try to get rid of it. And as Johnny conceded, “it wasn’t the bike’s fault”—it was his for trying to outdo Steve. He was ready to pay for that sin in pain he would try to obscure, but he did not want to lose the bike.
Steve thought of that contest now, in the Aldridge living room. He thought about a guy who was always trying to go higher, a guy who took his lumps when he had to and didn’t cry about it, a guy whose mind was consistently dealing with solutions to the problem and with endings that made sense. He figured that guy had to be alive out there on the water and that he was working through it in some way or other.
But whatever you thought or believed or conjectured or hoped, the not knowing was awful: the minutes—then the hours—dragging by without any word at all, the silence instead of answers, and no certainty about when the answers might come. So there were faces moist with tears. There were soft voices. And there were supportive words, reassurance, encouragement. “Don’t worry,” Tony Vincente insisted to Addie and John senior and to everyone else. “Johnny is alive. He is sitting on a buoy waiting, and soon he’s going to surf his way back. He’s alive.” The more obdurately you believed it, the worse the waiting seemed.
Addie Aldridge believed absolutely. “He was a survivor from birth,” says his mother of Johnny Aldridge. Born with pneumonia, he was not expected to live through the first seventy-two hours of life, even after being transported to a hospital that boasted advanced neonatal care facilities. But Addie didn’t believe the medical prognosis and never shed a tear. “I just assumed he would be fine,” she says. “Nothing is going to happen to him, and he’s going to be fine.” That is what she told herself as a young, first-time mother, and back then it all worked out exactly that way. “He was fine,” she says. “He made it. That’s what I mean that he was a survivor from birth. I didn’t see him till he was five days old, but I knew he would be fine.”
Forty-five years later she held fast to the same confident knowledge. Surrounded by friends and family who were there to keep watch with her, the same assumption took hold. “I didn’t have that feeling in my heart that he wasn’t with us anymore,” she says. “I felt that he was alive and they would find him.” Her Johnny would be fine again, just as when he was an infant—she knew it.
But at the moment the waiting had to be endured, and no one could even guess how long that would last.
How long could it last? the people there wondered to themselves—not aloud, not within earshot of John or Addie or Anthony. How many hours could any
one survive in the ocean without a life jacket, without anything, even in the summer? And how would the ordeal end? Would they find a body? An article of clothing? His boots floating on the waves? Would the Coast Guard just call off the search? When they search and search and find nothing, the next thing you hear is that they have ended the search. And there’s nothing—no body to bury, no trace, no remnant, absolutely nothing.
The phone rang frequently, and at each ring people held their breath. Family members and friends would try to field and screen the calls. If it was the Coast Guard—an officer phoning them every hour or so, almost religiously—John Aldridge was sure they were calling to say they had spotted a body. If it wasn’t the Coast Guard, then it was yet another friend or neighbor asking the same questions they were asking themselves or expressing the same concern everyone there felt. How many times, after all, could John senior or Addie be expected to answer the questions and be grateful for the concern? Not to mention that the last thing either of them needed to hear was someone on the other end of the line breaking into sobs. Better that Aunt Helen should answer the phone, or Uncle Jimmy, or Lenore from across the street, or Tony Vincente.
But Addie took the call from Melanie Sosinski Brown.
The text that reached the older daughter of Anthony Sosinski while she was on vacation in Maine with her husband was terrifying. Sent by a friend of her father at 9:48 a.m., the message read only: Have you heard about your dad and Johnny? Melanie phoned immediately and got an almost scarier message: “Somebody” on the Anna Mary had gone overboard. The friend did not know who.
Melanie Googled for news. Somewhere on Long Island, she was certain, there was a reporter who could tell her how she could learn firsthand who had gone overboard, when, where, how, and what “gone overboard” meant, but she found no one who could help.
She phoned her younger sister, Emma, in Arizona. She couldn’t not phone her. As porous as the information was, Emma had to be alerted—even early in the morning, two hours earlier out there.
At the time Emma was waitressing in a bagel café that was in the middle of its morning rush. When the phone first rang, she was busy with a customer and couldn’t answer. Three calls later, aware they were from her big sister, Emma decided she had better call back.
The news freaked her out. “We don’t know if it’s Dad or not,” Melanie told her, just that someone had fallen off the boat, and the Coast Guard was surely out there searching. But for Emma, at a distance of two thousand miles, a distance at which even the most trivial event gets magnified, the news was dismaying, especially because this event was in no way trivial. Both women had grown up with an undercurrent of awareness about the dangers of fishing—“You know and you don’t want to know,” says Melanie. They had heard stories all their lives about the realities of making a living at sea, and they knew that danger was always present. Now it was here, right on top of them.
Emma tried not to panic. Out of some desperate hope she phoned her father, and the call went straight to voicemail. Her boss told her to go home early. After she got there she kept checking Facebook: she follows so many people from Montauk—it’s where she and Melanie grew up, after all—that she thought she would find news there. She didn’t.
The sisters’ worst fear only had about another hour to run. By around 11:00 a.m. eastern time Melanie decided that the ultimate source for any news must be the Coast Guard, and when she phoned the station in Montauk and established her identity, an officer there confirmed to her that it was Johnny who was missing. Melanie called Emma at once. The relief for both sisters was “overwhelming,” in Emma’s word, but the disquieting anxiety and the distress weren’t entirely relieved. Johnny was like an uncle to both sisters; neither of them could remember a time when Johnny Aldridge and all the Aldridge family were not an integral part of their lives. They thought about Johnny alone and alive—they hoped he was alive—in the ocean, and they thought about what their father was going through aboard the Anna Mary.
The Coast Guard officer Melanie had spoken to told her that the Aldridge family had been informed. Melanie tried but failed to find phone numbers for Cathy or Tommy Patterson or for Anthony Aldridge. She wanted a contact in the Aldridge family, a connection to what was happening. But she had long been away from life on Long Island; she had no phone numbers for anyone. She thought it likely that her maternal grandmother in Arizona still had a phone number for the senior Aldridges, and she did. Melanie immediately put in her call to Addie.
They talked for several minutes. Melanie found Addie “obviously distraught” but sweet in the same way Melanie always remembered her to be, the way everybody knew her to be. She was able to tell Melanie that Cathy was on her way to the Montauk Coast Guard station, and she gave her Cathy’s number so Melanie had the point of contact she wanted. All Melanie could give her in return was to let Addie know that the Sosinski daughters, from their separate distant locations, were on watch with the Aldridges.
The watch went on. By midday the local television station, News12 Long Island, was reporting the bare bones of a story. For Anthony Aldridge, “to hear my brother’s name being said on television was an out-of-body experience. All I could think was, ‘Oh my God, they didn’t ask my permission!’” John Aldridge senior tried not to let the TV reporter’s story, boomed out in typical TV reporter fashion, deepen his already profound despair: the television report wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. But Addie shuddered at hearing the news on television—it somehow made it all the more real.
“Half of Oakdale,” Cathy said, had gone to her parents’ house, and by now it looked like she had it about right. The senior Aldridges and a number of others were out on the deck at the back of the house, while inside people sat or stood, moving from living room to dining room to kitchen and back again, and still others took over the front steps or huddled on the front lawn. They all knew this comfortable home from front to back—the armchairs that made you want to curl up in them, the family photographs scattered across cheerful pastel walls, the glass cabinet with precious ceramic figurines. Everyone wanted to believe they would be here again as in the past for a cup of coffee at the dining table or a cookout in the backyard or a holiday celebration—and not for the mourning all were trying to keep at bay.
When Helen Battista wandered down to the harbor at about seven that morning shortly after receiving the early-morning text about Load falling off the boat, George Watson was just about the first person she saw. He was on the phone, and he was angry. Someone or other—George forgets who—had flagged down his bicycle minutes before with the news about Johnny’s disappearance. Watson was angry because something like that shouldn’t happen on a well-run boat like the Anna Mary—or on any boat operated by competent commercial fishermen. But even as he swore at whoever he was talking to, he was not particularly worried. “I figured it’s okay,” Watson says. “Johnny will be fine. I was quite confident they would pick him up”—soon.
That was his early-morning reaction, but as the hours went on, his confidence waned. Something must have happened, he thought. Johnny must’ve hit his head. He had complete faith in Aldridge, in his overall abilities and in his skill in handling a boat. That he hadn’t been found by midmorning—then by late morning—told Watson that something unknown and untoward was at issue.
George Watson had been running The Dock for forty years that summer of 2013. He had given up a career as one of New York’s Bravest—a New York City firefighter—because from his very first visit back when he was a kid, every time he went out to Montauk the one thing he had hated about the place was leaving it. Over the decades he had become as much a part of the Montauk landscape as the Lighthouse on the Point, and if both The Dock and its owner had become must-see tourist attractions, it didn’t change the fact that Watson really knows the town, knows its people, knows who the “real Montauk characters” are, even as he has become one of them. He simply cannot imagine living anywhere else in the world, and in his eyes Johnny Aldridge is
one of the best things about Montauk—“a stand-up guy everybody loves,” says Watson. “He’s a fixture out here.”
The assumption that underlay his early confidence in Johnny’s rescue—the notion that “they would pick him up within an hour or two”—was looking like it was built of wishful thinking. Now some five hours had gone by. It was afternoon. Watson’s hopes were in pieces.
George Watson wasn’t alone in his growing despair. The Dock, which had opened at noon as usual, was filling up with people for whom hopes of Johnny Aldridge’s rescue were sinking into despair. Laurie Zapolski was there for a while, before heading over to Sammys to be with Helen Battista, whose workday would extend until evening. The fishermen who had not been at the harbor in time to go out on search boats were there. Some of the folks who had driven over from Oakdale were there; the Coast Guard Station probably couldn’t hold them all. It was an uneasy gathering: the thirty-plus customers George reckoned were there, apart from a few hapless tourists, were friends of Johnny Aldridge. For all of them it was too soon to mourn but too late to tell yourself you were drinking because it was lunchtime, or for the pleasure of it, or because you were thirsty.
The drinkers at The Dock lobbed the same desultory conversation back and forth as did the watchers in the house in Oakdale. After all, what the hell was there to say? The same thing was going on in both landward places: it was not a wake, but it was a vigil. And to the people who shared it, it felt like a prayer.
Chapter 12
Cutting Loose
Approximately 11:30 a.m.
I’m holding onto this fixed buoy rope, trying to let my muscles rest after the swim, but it’s not all that restful. Every roll of the waves washes over my head, effectively pulling me under. I have to hold my breath and fight swallowing seawater almost as much as if I were swimming. Also, I’ve become a point of resistance to the waves, so I have to grip the rope pretty hard to hold on. I think the waves may be winning the fight. In any case, I’m getting pounded.
A Speck in the Sea Page 14