by Tara Neilson
His voice was calm, if a bit dry, but still tinged with that warm Southern accent as he related his problems. Typically, in severe weather, a trolling boat would let down its trolling poles and toss out anchors attached to them called stabilizers, or stabies, because they tended to stabilize a boat’s roll.
But, as he told my parents, he didn’t dare leave the wheel long enough to do that.
Dad talked to Rand at first, but I think post trauma from Vietnam overcame him and he couldn’t speak. He handed the mic to Mom. Besides, she’d been insisting that he ask Rand to put on his survival suit, if he had one.
It was the first thing she told him when she got hold of the microphone. “You need to get into a survival suit.”
Rand holding up a monster lingcod in the cockpit of the Wood Duck.
By then, Megan, feeling my absence in the bunk we shared, had joined me. We sat huddled on my parents’ mussed bed, listening to the wind and the crash of the waves and our uncle’s voice on the radio. The other kids joined us one after the other.
It was hard to tell what Rand said next, either that he didn’t have time to put on a survival suit, he didn’t have one, or he wasn’t able to fully suit up in it. He kept having to let go of the microphone to deal with problems in the wheelhouse. He said things were coming loose down below and his gear was being washed off the decks outside. At one point he left to make sure the dinghy, the small lifeboat, was still lashed overhead. Through the radio we could hear the boat’s engine and the cacophony of the struggle the boat was going through.
In Meyers Chuck everyone heard the conversation and knew Rand was in trouble. Someone called the Coast Guard while Rory and Lance raced to Rory’s boat, the Velvet, and cut the lines—rather than take the time to untie them—and powered up the engine to pull away from the dock as fast as they could.
Grandpa Frank wanted to go too, but he was persuaded that leaving Grandma Pat was not an option. At that point my grandfather had suffered several heart attacks and no one thought it was a good idea for him to head out into that kind of weather.
The Velvet, unfortunately, had a bad tendency to roll more than most boats during a following sea, even with the stabies out, and as soon as Rory turned the corner to head down into Union Bay, the huge swells laid his boat over again and again. Lance, out on the bow, hung on for dear life, trying to peer through the wind and stinging rain as Rory maneuvered the spotlight, searching for the Wood Duck.
I could hear the tense grimness and frustration in Rory’s usually drawling, easygoing voice when he got on the radio and said he had to turn back to less violent seas.
The Coast Guard had also sent out a Search and Rescue vessel, but they were turned back not that far from Ketchikan by the ferocity of the storm. This despite the pride Coast Guardsmen take in their unofficial motto: “You have to go out, you don’t have to come back.”
Back in Meyers Chuck, another fisherman, Bob Hunley, headed for his own boat, the Sunrise, one of the best riding and largest long-liners in the Meyers Chuck fishing fleet. Everyone felt that Rand’s best hope at that point was for the Sunrise to reach him.
Minutes later Bob Hunley’s laconic voice said over the radio, “We’re going to be delayed. Our tanks are dry. Someone siphoned the fuel out of the boat’s tanks. We have to refuel.”
On the radio Rand said the Wood Duck was being swamped, that there was water coming in everywhere.
“She’s going down,” he said.
Mom tried to convince him that he could hang in there.
“She’s gonna roll and she’s not gonna come back up,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m out.”
The frightening finality in his voice made Mom reassure him strongly that people were working to get to him, that they’d find him. “You’re going to make it, Rand. You’re going to be okay.”
He said, “I’m going to get the skiff off the boom.”
• • •
“It was really dark and the wind was howling. I remember all five of us kids standing on the front deck, or maybe inside in front of the big window, and seeing our parents go out into that horrible weather in that tiny little skiff and wonder if they were coming back. If they didn’t, what would happen to us?”
—Megan, about the night of February 13, 1981
• • •
I don’t remember my parents arguing about it when they decided to go out in our thirteen-foot Boston Whaler to try to reach him. They were impelled by the absolute necessity to save Rand. Mom told me later that as they ran down the beach, she was screaming to Dad over the wind: “The kids, Gary, the kids!” She said he just looked at her and they kept running down to the skiff.
Mom’s fears of making her kids orphaned were confirmed once they were out in those towering seas, in the dark, in the tiny open skiff. For once, the fifty-horsepower outboard, normally way too much power for a skiff that size, came into its own as Dad powered up the mountainous swells. On the other side they dove down into the trough, and then labored back up in the hissing, screaming blackness only to swoop down again—a nightmare rollercoaster full of terrible, real-world consequences.
In between shouting for Rand, though she knew he wouldn’t hear, Mom thought about her kids, that they could be orphaned. “The wind and the seas that night… it wasn’t like anything I’d experienced before. It felt different. It felt malevolent,” she recalls.
Dad never describes that night, or their attempt in the skiff to get to Rand.
“I knew when we lost him,” Mom says. “We both knew. That’s when we turned back.”
When they returned home, Mom stumbled out of the skiff, her clothes soaking wet and stiff with saltwater, and crossed through the woods with her flashlight to reach the cabin and tell Linda what had happened. Neither of them admitted that the unthinkable had happened, though Linda revealed later that she, too, had had a moment when she felt Rand was gone.
They returned to the floathouse, bolstering each other up with denial-fueled hope. Inside the floathouse we listened with them as Bob Hunley in the refueled Sunrise turned the corner and headed into the maelstrom that was Union Bay. His boat took a pounding as he watched his radar. Tentative excitement swept all of us when he narrated the search over the radio, eventually saying, “I’ve got a blip.”
“What’s a blip?” Mom demanded.
Dad said it was radar-speak for a positive contact. It was probably the dinghy, with Rand in it.
“You’re calling him a blip? You can’t call a man a blip!” Mom said through wavering laughter.
“That will be his nickname. We’ll call him Blip from now on,” Linda wisecracked.
Mom and Linda laughed until they cried. Between breaths they offered more absurd sentences using Blip as Rand’s new name. They held onto each other as they laughed hysterically while the rest of us watched them in the kerosene lamplight.
I pictured Rand getting the small dinghy down. I could see him struggling to launch the dinghy off the swamped boat with all the gear and everything surging around his legs, with the wind roaring and icy waves spitting at him. I imagined that the boat felt unstable, the way a dream can, when you have to hug the ground to keep from being swept away to something terrible.
I imagined him getting in the dinghy and tying himself to it so he wouldn’t be separated from it as the huge, salty seas crashed down over him as he peered into the darkness, hoping to see a light coming toward him. I imagined his shivering relief when he saw the Sunrise’s green and red running lights, its spotlight turning the night into day as it swept over the waves toward him. Rescue was so close, he was almost there.
Dad, to give himself something constructive to do and to help get Mom and himself dry after they were soaked by sea spray in the skiff, stuffed cardboard boxes in the stove to throw out some heat. The chimney, apparently caked with creosote, caught on fire. Dad cursed and headed outside to take care of it while Mom and Linda found this latest threat hilarious.
It felt like the world was comin
g apart at the seams.
Bob Hunley’s voice said on the radio: “We’ve got the dinghy alongside… it’s empty.”
• • •
“I remember us being in a kind of denial that evening and the days to follow. We scoured the beaches yelling his name while the Coast Guard searched out in the deep.”
—Linda, in an e-mail about that night and the days following
February 13, 1981
• • •
Everyone looked.
Everyone in the area who had a boat came and searched.
It was surreal how calm the weather was the next day, and the days after that. The Coast Guard came out in their orange-and-white helicopter and landed on the beach near the floathouse during low tide.
None of the adults were there. They were all out looking for Rand, calling his name.
My brothers and sister were too shy to deal with the strange men in their astronaut-looking orange suits and helmets stepping out of the metal and plexiglass bubble, the rotors chopping at the air. I stood on the end of one of the big logs the house sat on as a slow-trudging, reluctant man approached the floathouse. I looked down at him when he stopped in front of me.
He craned his head back and gave me a searching, oddly vulnerable look, as if he was scared to talk to me. I realize now he must have been very young. “Are your parents home?” he asked.
“No, they’re out looking.”
He hesitated, then gave his name and described where they’d already searched and found nothing. Then he told me where they were going to look next. It was obvious he was uncomfortable talking in this businesslike way, the way he’d been trained, to a nine-yearold girl about a family tragedy.
“Can you tell them that?” he finished. I think he wanted to add something personal, to say he was sorry that our family was going through this, but he didn’t know how to say it.
“I’ll tell them,” I said.
He looked at me again searchingly, as if expecting something more from me. Maybe to make it better for him, but I didn’t know how. Finally, he put his helmet on and trudged back toward the helicopter and the waiting pilot, the gravel and clam shells crunching under his boots.
I watched the two suited men rise up into the air, staring down at me and the floathouse. I could picture myself and the house getting smaller as they rose, until they were whisked away back to continue the search on the broad, reflective bay.
The five of us kids, left alone, didn’t know what to do with ourselves or our feelings—or what our feelings were. We ran around screaming and yelling at the top of our lungs, jumping on the furniture, and doing the bear drill until we were exhausted.
When our parents got home we clamored around them insistently, demanding attention, food, attention. Dad stalked off wordlessly, ignoring us, hating the world and everything and everyone in it. Mom, physically, emotionally, and all other ways exhausted, yelled at us. “I just lost my brother! I’ve been out there hour after hour yelling his name until I’m hoarse, and you’re asking if I’ll cook you macaroni and cheese?”
I don’t remember if it was the Coast Guard or one of the boats in the fishing fleet that finally found the Wood Duck. It was all but sunk, only the bow out of the water, held up by a pocket of air. It was suggested that people have been known to survive boat disasters by breathing in pockets of air like that, so for one last instant of hope, the Coast Guard dove on the wreck, but found no one aboard.
The Wood Duck was near enough to shore to be beached and salvaged and it would have become the property of Rory—but he was repulsed by the idea of benefiting from his brother’s death. For the same reason he refused to sell it. Instead, he and Dad put halibut anchors on its bow and stern and towed it into deeper water.
Rand’s family, not counting the kids, boarded the Velvet for a memorial ceremony of sorts as Rory got the mostly sunk Wood Duck under careful tow. Judy Collins’s album Colors of the Day was playing on the stereo’s speakers.
The Wood Duck sank entirely, pulling the stern of the Velvet down so that they had to cut the towline, as Judy Collins sang “Farewell to Tarwathie.” I wasn’t there, but I pictured it from what I overheard said among the adults, and now whenever I hear Judy Collins sing I think of the Wood Duck’s slow drift downward from beams of light near the surface, down through fathoms of darkness until it settled somewhere on the bottom.
• • •
“I never thought of that. That never struck me before.”
—everyone interviewed for this chapter, when I said that
my grandmother could have lost all her children that night
• • •
For many, many years I pictured Rand surviving. I had fully fleshed-out fantasies of him making it to an island that the searchers had overlooked and being picked up by a passing tourist boat, or maybe smugglers, shadowy criminals who didn’t want to reveal themselves, and him suffering from amnesia so he couldn’t tell them where to take him. I imagined bumping into him in one of the towns around here. I used to look for him even when I was an adult wherever there were crowds of people… all the way into my late twenties.
Some people were bothered by the fact that the Wood Duck went down on Friday the 13th, but my parents weren’t superstitious. To counteract the common superstition that might affect us kids, they made a point of paying attention to every Friday that landed on the thirteenth day of the month after that, and nothing bad ever again happened to our family on that day.
The truth is, it’s incredibly easy for fishermen to lose their lives in Alaska. That year alone, in 1981, eighty-eight fishermen lost their lives, and four Coast Guardsmen died when their helicopter went down in a storm while attempting a rescue. Thirty-six years later, to the day that we lost Rand, the US Coast Guard suspended its search for the six-man crew of the ninety-eight-foot crabber Destination, which was believed to have sunk approximately two miles northwest of St. George Island.
I looked up the sinkings that year online at alaskashipwreck.com:
February 13, 1981 – The trawler Wood Duck sank near Union Bay with the loss of one crewman [sic].
And, scrolling farther down, boat after boat lost, crewman drowned, I found:
October 30, 1981 – The 54-foot Gem sank near Cape Spencer. David Miller, Larry Miller and another brother were picked up by the Coast Guard in a C-130. The fourth crewman, Tim Blake, was lost.
These three Millers were my Aunt Marion’s brothers, Rory’s and Rand’s brothers-in-law, and Tim Blake was a close friend. Dick Miller named his oldest son after him.
Three years later:
Sept 30, 1984 – The 48-foot wooden fishing vessel Curlew sank in a rescue attempt of fishing vessel Kelly Ann in the Shumagin Islands. The Kelly Ann cut the towline as the Curlew foundered and managed to start her engine, avoid the nearby rocks and save Ray Miller from the sinking Curlew. Lost from the Curlew were David Miller… Jeff O’Donohue and Phil O’Donohue.
David was Aunt Marion’s oldest brother, nicknamed Dobbs. Ray was her kid brother who my siblings and I grew up with. He was the same age as Jamie. Ray married Liz O’Donohue; and his and Marion’s brother, Norman, married Sheila O’Donohue. Liz and Sheila were sisters to brothers Jeff and Phil, lost on the Curlew.
If there is one constant in a commercial fishing lifestyle, it is that there will be boats that go down and family members and friends lost. I doubt there’s a fishing family in Alaska who hasn’t been affected by the sinking of someone close to them.
My Aunt Marion and Uncle Rory each lost their oldest brother. If that wasn’t bad enough, all of my grandmother’s children were on the water that night, and they might all have been lost. Her husband, Frank, could have been lost too if he hadn’t been persuaded to stay behind.
Now I wonder what my grandfather thought, if he wondered why his son would be lost when he himself had survived so many years on some of the world’s stormiest lakes, oceans, and inside waters.
He’d survived a war where many sailors an
d soldiers lost their lives, he’d been there at Iwo Jima when Japan surrendered, crossing a vast ocean to be there, and crossing it again to get back home. Yet it was his son who went down, not him.
• • •
“I was numb. For a long time I didn’t feel anything at all. While we were looking for him in the skiff, when I was going out alone in the canoe and searching the beaches, calling his name for weeks, I felt nothing. It was the first time in my life I experienced no emotions, at all. Until I hurt my foot—and all at once I could feel again. I felt it then. I felt his loss.”
—Mom, about the days and years following February 13, 1981
• • •
I didn’t know it at the time, I don’t think anyone did, but my mom sank into depression after we lost Rand. She became a different person, turned inward, writing, always writing in journal after journal.
This is an entry from one of her journals:
He was so little when he first gave me his loyalty. Those days when he manfully ate the mud pies I made for him, when he ran away with me if I told him that that was what the situation called for. He shared everything with me, and he talked serious stuff and so did I… how we felt… how it felt when we lost Smokey, our favorite person who happened to be part Cocker Spaniel… How it felt when our parents fought… How it was being “the new kid” all the time in school after school after school…
How—life—felt.
Later, when he thought he was almost a man, and I thought him my little teenage brother, he brought to me the spoils of his first theft and dumped the dime store glitter of $1.50 jewels in my lap. I told him off and he told me not to worry. He told me not to worry so many times. He was some swashbuckling, laughing highwayman set down in the wrong age.
Rand (at age five) and Mom (at age seven), best friends in Montana.
He was just a little older when he came to me and asked if I was “a slut.” His first experience of disillusionment with women had come. A girl he’d really liked had been found to have “feet of clay,” or was it “round heels”? I guess he just wanted to know if all women would let him down. He had what were once called “ideals” (at least about women he had them). I told him “no” I wasn’t “a slut” and he believed me just because I told him. Because—I—told him. I liked him for that. And for so much more… I could fill books with what I liked him for…