A Speck in the Sea

by John Aldridge

  Theel had requested that Cathy wait five minutes before phoning her parents or informing anyone else. It was a duty he felt the Coast Guard owed John and Addie Aldridge, especially as he had been the one to bring them the awful news that morning. Cathy acceded to the request.

  But Theel’s call came maybe a beat too late. At the Oakdale house Uncle Jimmy got a text from a fellow law enforcement retiree who had heard the news over the network of signals that connects all former cops. Theel’s call confirmed for John and Addie and the vigil keepers in Oakdale what Uncle Jimmy’s shout had presaged: their boy was alive and well.

  Cathy waited the five minutes she had promised, then sent a broadcast text to the ninety or so people she had been hearing from all morning. At The Dock, at Sammys, around the harbor, all across the East End, at a vacation spot in Maine, and in a young woman’s home in Arizona, cheers erupted as the message was received.

  Cathy, Tommy, Jillian, and Teresa headed for Johnny’s apartment in Montauk. There they retrieved clean clothes for him and drank cold beer from his fridge. Then they set off for Cape Cod.

  After the ambulance took John Aldridge away, the air crew of helicopter MH-6002 waited for the fixed-wing aircraft to return to base, then all of them debriefed together. They also connected with the SAR team at the New Haven command center. The discussion was about how things could have gone better: in the military services, they always need to figure out how things could have gone better. The discussion went on for a while—there was a lot to say.

  But the businesslike briefing, the ticking-off of points on an agenda, was not enough to dim the emotions stirred in the MH-6002 crew, the four guys who had found and extricated Aldridge with such smoothly efficient professionalism. For Ethan Hill the experience of having found Johnny alive and well was “a jolt of energy,” and talking with him even briefly—notoriously difficult in the very noisy cabin of the helicopter—was “awesome.” To copilot Mike Deal, shaking Aldridge’s hand was “one of the proudest moments I’ve had in the US Coast Guard.” It’s safe to say that Jamros and Hovey felt the same.

  Most of the crew members who had participated in the rescue in one way or another got home in time to see the full story reported on the nightly news and to consider the effort they had made and the impact it had had on a human life. The next morning each of them was back on duty.

  John Sosinski got off the bus from the Senior Center at around three that afternoon, same as every Monday through Friday during those months when he and Anthony are in Montauk. Once back in the house, he looked forward, as is his habit, to the four o’clock news on television that would fill him in on the day’s events. But before the news got started, his granddaughter Emma called him. She filled him in on the one event of that day that came so close to John Sosinski’s life. “Daddy’s okay,” she assured him. “Johnny is alive, and Daddy is on the Anna Mary, and he’s fine.”

  The call was another smart move on Emma’s part. The first image on the four o’clock news that day was of Johnny Aldridge being hoisted into the helicopter. Had he not received the call from Emma, John Sosinski’s first thought would have been: What happened to my son and where’s the boat?

  His son was on the boat, and he was bringing it home.

  Mike Skarimbas was still on his mission of searching when the call came over the VHF that Johnny had been found. “I bawled,” Skarimbas says simply. Earlier Skarimbas had been concerned when the Coast Guard instructed the volunteer fleet to turn east, questioning the decision in his mind while carrying it out anyway. Nothing here goes east, he thought to himself. But even learning that Johnny had been found west of where he had been instructed to go, he couldn’t have cared less. He did not care where, how, or by whom the rescue had come about. His best friend was safe, and Mike Skarimbas bawled.

  “Because it’s not supposed to work that way,” says Skarimbas. “It always, always works the other way. This was a total anomaly. A total anomaly.” He pauses. “It was the worst day of my life, and it became the best day of my life.”

  Close to ten o’clock that night the Anna Mary and the vessels of the volunteer fishing fleet pulled back into Montauk harbor. That was maybe a good thing for Anthony—the delay gave him time to “come down” from the emotional peak he had been climbing since six in the morning when Mike woke him and told him Johnny was gone. His physiology had gone haywire—first with chills, then with sweating that poured off his body, then with the taste of acid in his mouth all day long. He had pushed all the emotion down somewhere—maybe that was why the sweat came out of his feet—to do what he had to do during the search. At the time Johnny was found he was steaming east to the other side of the volunteer fleet, calculating that if Johnny had been drifting for somewhere between eight and ten hours at a half a knot per hour, that is where he might be. His mind was on the conditions and on making use of the hours of daylight still left for finding his partner.

  Learning that the Coast Guard had him was as much a jolt to the system as learning he was lost—just much, much better. He was, he said, “over the top.”

  He likens the physical effect to the sensation he once felt when he was vacationing out West and took a helicopter ride through the Grand Canyon. “The lift-off, following the first little lift-up, is a shock to the system,” he says, “a physical sensation to the body. I can’t explain it, but this was similar. It was a lift-off I felt in my body.”

  A crowd of some forty or more people awaited Anthony and Mike Migliaccio and the rest of the volunteer fleet at the town dock that night, Nancy Atlas among them. The waiting crowd formed a rope line for the returning captains and crews to walk through to applause and hugs. The loudest applause and the tightest hugs were for Anthony. Atlas remembers one big, burly guy crying, grabbing Anthony in a hug, telling the crowd how well Anthony had coordinated the volunteer fleet and how important that work was. The Coast Guard agreed. Jason Walter would state officially that “the fishing crews allowed us to search a much greater area,” thereby contributing significantly to the eventual rescue.

  Anthony and Mike, once Johnny’s rescue had been confirmed and they were heading for home, had put out their lines and caught two tuna, which Anthony filleted neatly as the Anna Mary steamed toward the harbor. Now, on the town dock in Montauk, Anthony gave away chunks of very fresh Atlantic tuna to the folks greeting him.

  There was a moon that night too—“magnificent,” says Atlas, “almost reddish, very still, beautiful.” She took a good, slow look at the moon, then joined everybody heading into The Dock to celebrate.

  Chapter 16

  The Good Daughter

  July 25, 2013

  My sister arrived at the hospital late last night—close to midnight, in fact—along with Tommy and Jillian and Teresa. They had driven up from Montauk, where they had been at the Coast Guard station since early morning. They started up here at about 4:00 or 4:30 yesterday afternoon, with basically just the clothes they were wearing. No cash, no gas in the car, not even a toothbrush. The trek from Montauk was quite a trip: they had to take three ferries, and when they finally arrived, they weren’t even sure which hospital to go to. Cathy’s first time on Cape Cod ever—not exactly a luxury vacation trip. Cathy didn’t care. She seemed almost lightheaded, freed from the weight of worry I knew she had been carrying. They all seemed incredibly happy and free. I was so glad to see them.

  They headed off for their motel, and I tried to sleep. I already knew from a couple of other experiences that hospitals are not a great place for that. There’s so much going on all the time, plus the lights in the hall, nurses coming in to check my IVs, noise. I think I got almost no sleep. Then this morning the doctors come in and tell me I’m fine; I can leave. To prove it, they wheel me out of my storage closet into the waiting area at the hospital door. Thank God Cathy has left me her cell phone. I punch in Tommy’s number and tell them to come and get me as soon as possible. Cathy and all of them had just sat down to have breakfast at some diner and are blown away by the
news. Eat fast, I beg: the waiting area is even more chaotic than when I arrived last night, partly because the PR people are now fielding all sorts of questions about me.

  They must have wolfed down their food, because pretty soon they all walk in the hospital door, and we are ready to go. I sort of automatically get in the front seat of the car, next to Tommy who is driving. It’s the roomiest seat, yes, but with my burned skin and scraped groin and aching muscles, I figure it’s the best spot for me. But it means the three women share the backseat, which is probably not all that comfortable, and it also means, obviously, that I have my back to them—to the woman I’ve been in a relationship with, to my sister-in-law who has been unbelievably supportive, and to my sister to whom I owe so much, although I still haven’t learned the full extent of her strength in all this.

  So this is how I ride home after very nearly drowning in the ocean: sort of distancing myself from two key members of my family as well as from a relationship that both of us in it pretty much know is not working. In a way it’s kind of the perfect return to “normalcy.” What could be more normal than putting up with discomfort—physical on the part of the three women, of whom I am very fond, in the backseat, emotional discomfort in my case—throughout a trip lasting five hours? That’s five hours if there’s no traffic—and in the summer on the Massachusetts and Connecticut coasts, not to mention across Long Island, what are the chances of that?

  Still, I find myself staring out the window at the scenery passing by with something like the awe I felt looking out of the helicopter yesterday. I’m still trying to absorb being alive and being “back.” I don’t talk much, I guess.

  The traffic isn’t too bad—even on a Thursday most people are heading to the Cape while we are getting the hell away from it. We get to New London in a couple of hours. From here we’ll take the ferry across Long Island Sound to Orient Point on the North Fork of the island, then head west and south for Oakdale. At the ferry station I run into the Newsday reporter who interviewed me last night, Nicole Fuller. She is also heading home.

  New London is the departure point for lots of different ferries—to Block Island, to Fishers Island, to Martha’s Vineyard. But the ferry to Orient Point leaves every half hour, so we don’t have long to wait. On board, we all head straight for the bar, although all I can drink is water, which I am grateful to be able to swallow. People are looking at me like they recognize me. It is a very odd sensation.

  The ferry takes about an hour and a half, and when we arrive there’s a news crew on the dock. I find out also that the news people have been onto the family—my father has been quoted on CBS and in Newsday. I have talked to him by phone as well. I think he is doing okay, but I really want to see everyone in person. That’s how I’ll know they’re doing okay.

  Back in the car, we’re less than an hour away from him and my mother and whoever else is at the house. I’m really ready to get there. I want to see my parents, or rather, I want them to see me—to give them the absolute assurance that I am alive and well and in the house I grew up in. We get to the top of the street and look down it, and there must be fifteen, maybe twenty news vans pulled up in front of my parents’ house. Microphones, wires, satellite dishes—the scene looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.

  Cameras whir and reporters shout as the car pulls into our driveway. I am halfway out of the car when my nephew Jake just leaps into my arms, and some kind of an interrupted yelp comes out of his mouth. “Jakie, boy,” I’m saying. “Jakie boy.” I can see my parents coming toward me, and a second later my father has his arms around me in a tight grip. “It wasn’t real till now,” he says. My mother is hugging Cathy, who is saying something to her, and now my mother has come over to hold me. Then it’s my brother, Anthony. He is my baby brother, but he is bigger than I am, and I think his grip is tighter than my father’s was—now we’re holding one another up. No words. Words aren’t needed. Just gripping and breaths held and you know the phrase “tears of joy”? Here they were.

  The cameras are still whirring, and the reporters are all still there. I pick up Jake and hold him in my arms while I tell the assembled reporters this, that, whatever—I’m glad to be home, it feels good, the boots saved me, are we done here? The boots, true, but also, as I’ve already told my sister, it was thinking about not seeing Jake grow up that really kept me going.

  I go into the house. There are so many people there, and more are on the way.

  More news people are on the way too. After a while I go outside again and answer some more questions from this new batch. Actually the questions are the same as those asked by the old batch, and my answers are pretty much the same too. I begin to wonder how many times they can keep asking and I can keep answering the same words. Boots. Coast Guard. Family. It’s what everyone wants to hear: not wanting to let my family down is what kept me alive. Already a narrative has been set up and locked in.

  Back in the house a party has erupted—and it’s a good one. I’m a little overwhelmed to realize how many people have been affected by the idea of me dying. I know it’s a cliché, but I can’t help feeling that you just don’t realize how much you’re loved until you go through something like this. Also, I think that coming so close to losing everything maybe lets me understand loss a little better. I look at my parents, and I find myself measuring the size of what they feared they were losing. I know I can’t quite compute it, but having been through what I’ve been through lets me come close. I’m feeling overjoyed but also unsettled.

  These are not the most party-like thoughts. Also, I don’t think I slept at all last night, and I know I didn’t sleep the night before. It’s Thursday night, and I’ve basically been awake since Tuesday morning. I’m probably exhausted. I am also feeling a bit crowded by all the attention, which is kind of the last thing I need right now. So I signal my sister Cathy that I need to get out of here, and we take off for her place. She keeps a bedroom for me there, and on this occasion there are also flowers, balloons, and champagne on the porch.

  We both figure it is okay that we left the party. After all, Cathy had dutifully done what our mother asked of her: she brought me home.

  Chapter 17

  Postscripts and Parties

  Summer’s End, 2013

  That night, lying in bed in his sister’s house but still not sleeping, Johnny heard a knock on the door. It was Anthony. Johnny shot out of bed and the two men hugged. “You okay?” Anthony asked. “I’m okay,” Johnny said. The exchange was typically perfunctory, but equally typically, both men knew what they meant.

  Anthony scrutinized his partner. He really did look okay. Granted, his face was burned and his nose was peeling. But he was there, alive.

  “How are your eyes?” Anthony asked.

  “Okay.” Then Johnny added, “I’m tired.”

  “Yeah, you would have to be,” Anthony said. The man’s body was on day four of no substantive sleep. He had to be totally exhausted, and he was still in shock from just being alive.

  Anthony, by contrast, was intensely awake and could barely contain his joy. In Cathy Patterson’s house that night, he felt, in his words, that he was “looking at a dead man.” Throughout the prior day he had sensed in his gut that he would never see Johnny again. All day he kept hearing in his head the final scream of Joe Hodnik, the young fisherman whose drowning had spurred the creation of the Lost At Sea Memorial on Montauk Point. Even as he worked the VHF and checked coordinates and handed out assignments to the volunteer fleet, Anthony kept seeing in memory that empty black water where Hodnik and Ed Sabo had gone down so many years before. Chubby Gray wasn’t far from his thoughts either—the young man from Maine whose boat was the twin of the Anna Mary and who had been lost at sea just seven months before. Anthony had known both these men when they were young and vital, and their terrifying loss hovered above his heart all day, fueling the near certainty, reinforced by everything he knew about the ocean and all his experience of life, that Johnny was gone. To now be in the same
room with the living Johnny Aldridge was a relief so deep that he felt his heart singing.

  He did not stay long. “Get some sleep,” he told Johnny.

  The next day, Friday, Johnny Aldridge went out to lunch at McGovern’s Bar & Grill, an Oakdale institution, to eat the hamburger he had fantasized about when he was in the water, clinging to a buoy for dear life.

  By prearrangement his sister Cathy texted the location of the lunch to Laurie Zapolski, who showed up to announce to Johnny, “I need a hug.”

  She got it.

  The impromptu gathering at the home of the senior Aldridges the night of Johnny’s return had not entertained a big enough crowd nor, in the eyes of many, had it been a sufficiently substantive celebration of what had occurred. There was still a lot of steam left in the kettle.

  The valve was opened first with an Oakdale party on Saturday night, July 27, 2013. This party was by and for the community—the friends, neighbors, and family members Johnny had grown up with. The location was two barges tied together on the Connetquot River—enough room for the partygoers, the “supplies,” and the band. Said band, well known along the south shore and around the East End, was the Bedrockers, and it’s probably safe to say that lead singer Laurie Zapolski and guitarist Anthony Vincente performed like never before, that they sang and played their hearts out. Just about the whole town was there—one or two may have been sick in bed—and just about everyone in attendance wore a T-shirt with the legend “Load Lives” on the back. Drinks flowed, barbecue sizzled, and the band played song after song. There was something very real to be very happy about, and just in case anyone needed a reminder, about an hour into the party a plane flew overhead trailing a huge sign that read “Welcome Home Johnny Load. Rock, Lobster.” The sign was courtesy of Vinny Passavia, an old family friend who had hired the plane. The party went on into the wee hours.