Book Read Free

A Speck in the Sea

Page 18

by John Aldridge


  So did the beach party in Montauk two days later, on Monday, July 29. This one was on the bay side of Montauk, on the Navy Road beach, and it pretty much belonged to the Montauk fishing fraternity. There must have been two hundred people there that day—hosted by Anthony and Mike Migliaccio. Lots of veterans of the volunteer fleet were there, folks who had gone out looking for Johnny just a few days before. The music was by local musicians like Joe Delia and Thomas Muse, with Muse’s wife, Nancy Atlas herself, performing on the deck of the Anna Mary, which was backed up to the beach. The beach itself was packed with stoves and hibachis cooking up a storm and with coolers filled to the brim with drinks, all of it being consumed at all times. There was even an ice luge—a huge block of ice down which liquor could be poured into the waiting mouth of whoever was thirsty at that moment.

  There wasn’t even a puff of steam still to be let out after this party. For Montauk, that is saying something…

  Afterward Johnny and Anthony went back to work.

  By October the relationship with Teresa was over. Johnny and Laurie reconnected, and she gave him an ultimatum: this time we either have to be all-in-and-forever, or forget it.

  They took the all-in-and-forever option.

  In December of that momentous year, on the supposedly unlucky Friday the Thirteenth, a contrarily auspicious event took place at the Montauk Fire Department. There the commander of the US Coast Guard’s Sector Long Island Sound, Captain Edward J. Cubanski, presented to the members of Coast Guard Station Montauk the service’s Meritorious Team Commendation for the station’s part in the rescue of John Aldridge. On hand for the ceremony were the members of the Coast Guard who had been present on July 24 and involved, one way or another, in the rescue effort; Aldridge himself; Anthony Sosinski; and all those captains and crew members of the volunteer fleet who could make it that evening. The award citation spoke of the Coasties’ “devotion to duty” and “outstanding performance,” and all present were aware that the same words applied to the fishermen who went out looking for their man, to Sosinski, and to the man himself.

  Epilogue

  Three years after he spent six hours of one day fearing his son had drowned, John Aldridge senior told an interviewer he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since that day. Every night when he closes his eyes he expects he will wake up at some point in the night to the same old nightmare—the one he lived through on July 24, 2013.

  His wife says she no longer relives the experience every day, as she did for a long time after the event, but when something triggers the memory, she has to remind herself that her son Johnny is alive and well and living his life.

  Both of them worry more than they used to about his fishing trips. John senior confesses that he will phone his son the day after a trip, and if it rings once, he will hang up, with the ring itself serving as evidence that the phone is okay and therefore so is Johnny.

  For the first week after she brought her brother home Cathy Patterson had stomach pains; it took days before the stress wore off. She also called her brother at least once a day for three weeks until a friend told her she was driving him crazy. Today she says she doesn’t worry about her brother when he’s out at sea, but the emotional scar she wears is very raw. The mention of the day he fell overboard is enough to start her tears flowing. A glimpse of the Coast Guard station’s porch on a visit to Montauk will do the same.

  For youngest sibling Anthony, the trauma simply never goes away. “There is not one day of my life that I don’t think about what happened back then,” he says. “I think about it all the time.” Anthony is the baby of the family, the kid brother. Anybody who has ever looked up to an older sibling will understand what he is saying. It’s not that he worries about Johnny—although he knows the danger of being on the water, he is confident in his brother’s proven ability to survive. But every day he relives what he calls “the worst day of my life” and the startling moment when he “could actually feel what it was like that Johnny had died.” Johnny himself tells Anthony to “get a grip,” but he can’t. This isn’t a memory Anthony can put aside. “It’s branded in my mind,” he says, burned indelibly into his brain.

  Laurie Zapolski, now Johnny’s life partner for real, says the memory of the day Johnny went overboard arrives unexpectedly and for no reason she can discern, that it runs like a movie in her head, and that it stops her cold.

  Talk to Johnny’s friends—from kindly Helen Battista to crusty cynic George Watson to devoted Mike Skarimbas, from Oakdale pal Pat Quinn now three thousand miles away in Oregon to Tony Vincente still right there in Oakdale, all those friends who’ve seen life from all sides by now—and mention the day Johnny went missing, then watch for the tears to start. You won’t wait long.

  The experience never fully leaves any of them.

  That is natural. Entirely recognizable. The psychic manifestation of posttraumatic stress disorder—PTSD—is a phenomenon everyone has heard about.

  Statistically, of course, the chances of another fishing or boating mishap ever again happening to Johnny Aldridge are virtually nil. Moreover, Johnny Aldridge is fine. He is alive and well and back where he wants to be and doing the work he loves. But statistics and logic do not matter in this case. Flashbacks—the sudden remembering that retriggers the nightmare—are a cardinal sign of PTSD, a classic indication that the individual is reliving the event and the distress it produced.

  Unexpected, unforeseen, unrealistic—in every way imaginable Johnny Aldridge’s falling overboard was all of those things. This is a man who takes no chances with the unexpected, who consistently makes preparations against the unforeseen, who has little or no patience with unreality. Meticulous in his commitment to all the details of his work, Johnny Aldridge is known as a guy who follows the checklist. You can set your watch by it.

  Then he goes and yanks at a plastic handle that instantly comes apart, and the universe that you suspected was held together by toothpicks anyway is utterly shattered. It is shattered because you knew, everybody knew, above all he knew that this was a possibility. He knew that the handle was loose, and when the guy who never lets a detail get past him lets this detail get past him, the world that was once safe and predictable for all of us gets thrown totally out of whack. That is the nightmare that comes back to haunt people who suffer from the flashbacks again and again: it’s the nightmare in which you say to yourself, You mean the ground I am standing on could give way at any second?

  Occurrences of these nightmares and flashbacks may persist for some time—months, years, decades. They can fade eventually, although for some people they may stick around forever. Trauma accumulates, and who knows what underlying layers of trauma in any one individual’s brain Johnny’s incident may be piling onto. Or, in the case of parents and siblings, it may be that six hours of visualizing life without Johnny was just too viscerally disastrous. For those folks, a “cure” may take some time.

  The two protagonists in the story who are suffering no flashbacks, no nightmares, no real evidence of posttraumatic stress at all are Anthony Sosinski and Johnny Aldridge himself. Anthony says it is simply not in his nature to be hung up on what is past and can no longer be changed. He has always been a man who sees the glass as half full and is glad of what his life is rather than pondering or worrying over what might have been. He has seen his share of loss and casualty. He has, as he says, pulled enough bodies out of the water and suffered the loss of enough friends to supply anxiety for a lifetime.

  This is not to suggest, however, that Anthony has forgotten that day or the loss that for so many hours seemed so very real. He never forgets it, and the memory never fails to hurt. Years after the fact, just reading an industry report that unwitnessed, man-overboard fatalities “are especially prevalent in the northeastern lobster fishery” can make his whole body shudder all over again.*

  The upshot, however, is that Anthony feels lucky—to be alive, to be the father of healthy children whose achievements have surpassed all his wildest expectatio
ns; to have a house, to be able to take care of his father, to be a partner in the Anna Mary, and to go fishing for a living. He is not a man to dwell on what almost happened on July 24, 2013. His concern is the here and now.

  As for Johnny Aldridge, maybe one reason he escapes the nightmares and flashbacks is that he’s the guy that lived the experience and therefore worked through it—beginning, middle, end—in real time. It is memory for him, not a bad dream. Perhaps for that same reason the boots that saved his life are still in his closet—and always will be.

  He remembers telling the Coasties in the helicopter that the twelve hours in the water “wasn’t so bad.” It was a dumb thing to say, yet he can see that same idea on some people’s faces when they look at him. He knows they’re thinking: Twelve hours in the ocean on a calm day? How tough could it have been? He wants to say to them: You try swallowing ocean water for twelve hours, then come back and tell me how you like it. He remembers the battle waged in his brain for twelve hours between giving in and not giving in. He knows how the battle was won, but he still wonders whether he will ever again look at an ocean swell without charting its course and speed and recalling how he both fought and rode similar swells.

  Every time the Anna Mary goes out to its trawling grounds, it follows the same track up to and past the spot where Johnny went overboard. That’s when the memories come. If the Anna Mary goes out before dawn, by 6:00 a.m. he may start thinking that by that same hour on July 24, 2013, he had been in the water for three hours, fighting the ocean and his own terror and despair. By three in the afternoon he may hear himself thinking, How did I endure being in the water all this time? At moments like that he sees it all again, feels himself saturated all over—shoulders, hair, ears, eyes, mouth—and remembers how much work it was. How did I do it? he wonders. How did I endure it?

  One night, three years after his ordeal and rescue, finding himself again alone on watch aboard the Anna Mary, Johnny decided to toss an empty bait box over the side to see how long it would take until it was out of sight. It was at the same spot where he went over. The conditions were the same—a calm summer night, the lights of the Anna Mary full on, a bit of moonlight as well. Aldridge set up his video camera, turned it on, then flung the corrugated cardboard box out the back of the boat.

  It was out of sight at the seventeen-second mark. “That is a long time,” he says, “to feel your life slip away.” It is not hard to remember the fear, as he puts it, of “being the box.” He pauses, reliving the fear. “Crazy,” he says a moment later.

  Aldridge also talks about the experience a lot, which may be another reason he is not particularly plagued by nightmares. People ask him about it all the time. Most days he can nod his head and answer their questions. He can acknowledge what he lived through, and that may keep the nightmares at bay.

  He also speaks frequently in formal settings and situations, addressing Coast Guard gatherings, school assemblies, or crowds at community events. And talking, psychologists tell us, can be something of a cure for the malady of posttraumatic stress. No one is exactly certain why that is so. Perhaps it’s because in order to put something “out there,” you must actively retrieve it from the place within you where it’s festering—expose it to the cleansing power of sunlight, so to speak. Perhaps it’s because by talking about it, you gain control over the nightmare. Perhaps it’s simply that each time you pass the story along, you relinquish a little bit more of it to others—you’re no longer the only one carrying the burden. Whatever the reason, Johnny has been telling the story for years.

  He was the keynote speaker at the 2014 Pacific Marine Expo, has been interviewed online and in print, has become a spokesman for boat safety, and has filmed a YouTube narrative of his ordeal for the Coast Guard. There’s probably little he won’t do for the Coast Guard. Within a week of his return home to Montauk Johnny had connected with all the folks at the Montauk Station—lots of family members showing up with him, bringing cookies, expressing their thanks. Those ties persist to this day, even though most station personnel from 2013 are long gone. He has also visited the sector command center in New Haven, the coordinating nerve center for his own rescue. There is a new batch of personnel there as well, but everyone likes to hear from Johnny Aldridge—he is a poster-child for SAR success.

  For a while what nearly happened to Johnny Aldridge galvanized the commercial fishing community of Montauk to raise its game where marine safety was concerned. EPIRBS—Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacons, personal tracking transmitters that can alert search-and-rescue services to within 150 feet of your location, plus or minus—were much talked about, while life jackets, long a requirement, were at least aired out. Watch alarms enjoyed a vogue. You set an alarm to beep an alert at five- or ten- or fifteen-minute increments, and if the person on watch doesn’t respond to the alert, the alarm goes off. But EPIRBS are costly, life jackets are uncomfortable and unwieldy when you’re hauling traps, and a lot of fishermen—Anthony is one—don’t want to be bothered to set an alarm that’s going to beep at them constantly, so bit by bit Montauk’s fishermen fell back to the default position of just winging it. What has persisted is the memory of what happened to someone everyone knows and likes, and that in itself has made the fishermen, already careful out of necessity, still more watchful. They see him, living proof of what could happen to them, and they remember how vulnerable they are.

  That goes for the crew of the Anna Mary too. Johnny Aldridge has an EPIRB, but he tends to wear it more in winter than in summer. Anthony does not wear one, not even in winter. “If you go overboard in winter,” he says, “you’re dead anyway.” The watch alarm they bought has been relegated to the electronic-device netherworld. At least both men are mindful about working alone on deck when the rest of the crew is sleeping—simply put, they don’t do it. And there has been one noticeable physical change to the boat: the stern is now open only while the crew is hauling traps. The rest of the time it is closed by a newly affixed tailgate.

  In personal terms the two men continue in their partnership/friendship that may be as good an example of the marriage of true minds as there is. Linked by a formal business partnership, by the past, and by the passion for fishing they share and don’t have to explain to one another, they nevertheless live their separate lives and pursue their different interests. Sosinski remains committed to the full-time care of his father, with whom he still winters on St. John, his “straight-up paradise.” The Sosinski daughters—both self-sufficient adults now, one a social worker, the other an aesthetician—and the only Sosinski son-in-law, thus far, tend to gather there at some point in the winter also, and grandfatherhood is expanding the size of those family reunions. When he is in Montauk, Anthony involves himself with LICOP, Long Island Communities of Practice, a not-for-profit organization that runs educational, social, and recreational programs year-round for kids with disabilities and their families. He is particularly committed to working with autistic children and what he calls their “overstressed parents.” He has led bowling outings, baton walks, swim lessons, and surfboard lessons for affected kids. No one who knows him is surprised to learn that he is very good at this, and he is certainly passionate about doing it.

  Two years after he returned safe and intact from his ordeal, Johnny Aldridge suffered an accident with the pot hauler on the Anna Mary, the winching apparatus that raises the traps up from the ocean floor. The upshot was that he managed to lop off the top joint of the middle finger of his right hand. In anger and disgust—and probably in a state of low-grade shock—Aldridge tossed the minuscule body part overboard, thus making it necessary for him to adapt the ways he uses that hand and to relearn numerous actions that once were automatic. He has done this successfully.

  But Laurie Zapolski suggests that the shock and anger Johnny expressed over the accident was the delayed playback of what he might have been expected to feel from the ordeal of falling overboard. “He had no time to feel it back then,” she guesses, so he more or less let it a
ll out with the loss of part of his finger, which he confronts every day.

  Up close those who know him best see some changes in Johnny Aldridge. Mike Skarimbas is certain that “things affect him differently from the way they used to.” But he is fundamentally the same man.

  He is still the guy who relishes living in Montauk, going for long walks on the beach or in the woods, taking his nephew Jake out on the boat, finding a nearby island, putting out a little seine net, and seeing what Jake hauls in. In the winter he and Laurie are ready to travel in search of new adventures and maybe warmer temperatures when the days grow raw. But for the rest of the year they favor the East End and the ease it affords for the pursuits of ocean-side life—beach time, crabbing, clamming, flatland biking, and the like. Perhaps as a respite from the quiet, Johnny likes to watch the professional drag-racing run by the National Hot Rod Association, both on television and in person at tracks not too far away—Englishtown in New Jersey, Maple Grove in Pennsylvania. He loves to “be around that much horsepower.” He has a new hobby too: he has undertaken the restoration of an ancient Corvette, an exacting task for which his meticulous mind is well suited. Aldridge continues to give talks about what happened to him, but mostly, whenever he can, he likes to go fishing.

  What happened to Johnny continues to adhere to the lives of both men. Outside of their families and the East End community, it is mostly what they are known for. And for Aldridge it threatens to be what defines him. Those who know him say it’s really just the opposite: he defined the event, not the other way around. But the world at large may not see it that way.

  One thing the world at large can get a good look at in the story of Johnny Aldridge is the US Coast Guard, an arm of the military that, in truth, not many people know or think much about—certainly not many people who don’t live on or near coastline or waterways. Commercial fishermen in general have long held the Coast Guard, which polices certain of their activities, at arm’s length: the saying is that the only time the crew of a fishing vessel likes to see the Coast Guard is when the boat or crew is in trouble. Understandable. But when fellow fisherman Johnny Aldridge got into the very worst kind of trouble, his colleagues saw firsthand what the Coast Guard was capable of.

 

‹ Prev