by Joe Denham
The oceans, as the world, are no longer that large. It’s rare that any boat is ever more than one hundred miles off from another, and shortwave single side band transmissions from even the weakest of radios can normally be picked up across ocean distances of three hundred miles or more. If he were more of a seaman he would know this and so he would perhaps turn the radio upside down and inside out searching for its flaw, but there is one thing Francis doesn’t get the guts of and that’s electronics. So it doesn’t cross his mind to consider inspecting the radio further, but in thinking again about what he assumes to be its limited range, he begins to search the nav station storage drawers for the radio’s manual, which is when he finds the EPIRB.
Because there had never been one on any of the little Georgia Strait crabbing skiffs he’d worked on, and because the Belle’s had been stashed away, out of sight, in the drawer he’s now found it in, the EPIRB was not something he’d had at the forefront of his desperate, overwhelmed mind over the past week. He certainly knew what an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon was, and had learned all about them and the global search-and-rescue network they connected their carriers to in his Marine Emergency Duties courses. He’d held and used several in practice sessions, but had failed to think of doing so when the time had come in the throes of this very real, exceedingly stressful situation.
Francis climbs to the cockpit, EPIRB in hand, and scans the empty horizon. Then he lifts it from its cradle, pops its cap, and flicks the switch. Intermittently the light at its top begins to flash, indicating that it is, provided all is working as it should, sending its coordinates and SOS signal up to one of the many satellites swarming the earth, which should in turn be relaying that signal back down to the US Coast Guard Rescue Coordination Center in Honolulu, triggering an effort to have some sort of rescue crew, by boat or plane or helicopter, sent his way. He leaves it on deck and descends back to the nav station. He’ll put his call out again, and between that and the EPIRB it will only be a matter of time, he’s certain, before someone arrives to take him from this cursed boat.
•
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Six days into his stranded seclusion he recalls this quote from the Walrus article he had wanted Anna to read in the months leading up to Emily’s birth. He’s been pacing up and down the decks of the Belle—memories of Miriam and Anna and Jin Su and his children, and of the float, the pristine, unbreakable float, whirling and clanking about in his mind—calling out his distress on the shortwave at closer and closer intervals, each time to no response but silence, the unnerving silence, also unbreakable now that his own voice and footfalls seem to bleed into and not disturb it, a sunburst of sound, the ceaseless ceasing of the wind. The random radio chatter also so familiar as to seem unheard, word upon word, he screams into the handpiece and up to any god, up to the full and bright-as-daylight moon in the nights that pass without sleeping, with a dread sense of haunting, of being helplessly alone, a fear of somehow having slipped into some sort of twilight zone from which he won’t return. Six nights and days of this, each one worsening by degrees, and he’s sitting at the shortwave, naked, calling out to the anywhere that won’t answer back, when he thinks of the aphorism and decides to break out the bubbly. What the hell? He has to shirk the spell the past week has put him under, and a good piss-up should induce the much needed capillary break. It so often does, doesn’t it?
As he pops the cork and pours a glass, he thinks how old this pattern in his life is—the freight train speed and intensity of the tracks of trajectory he gets moving on and the derailed wreckage that ensues. How the fuck did he end up here exactly, on this boat somewhere in the North Pacific—his seamate, his lover, dead; his wife and first child at home; his mistress and their daughter dumped off at Svend’s, while he’s spent the past month driving himself headlong into a world of trouble he should have nothing to do with? His is an extreme tendency to get lost in the moment, swept up into whatever storm has blown over his life. No wonder Anna has shut him out. How much could she be expected to go along with? He’d bought the boat, on a market high, in a gust of ambition and inspiration without really running the numbers, without listening to her reasoning when she had diligently done so, and the ripple effect has trapped her and their son in a little shit-box rental in a town she ultimately would love to leave and never return to. All the while he’s blamed her for not standing by him?
He pours another glass. And now he’s gone and thrown Jin Su and Emily into the mix, barrelling forth without pausing to take bearing, to get a real sense of his heart and feelings as he’s told Jin Su time and time again that his leaving Anna is only a question of timing. Which is a fallacy, isn’t it? If he truly were ready to leave her he’d have done so years ago, before ever taking up with Jin Su, or at least before the birth of their daughter. And now he’s compounded his infidelity these past few weeks with Miriam, acquiring both clarity and confusion in so doing, and where now does that leave him? On his third glass of champagne, eyeing already the second bottle he’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t open, losing hope of anyone coming to rescue him, praying to the oppressively bright sky for storm.
•
No recitations of poetry this time as he drunkenly relieves himself over the side of the boat. Instead, a memory of watching Megan Follows play Anne of Green Gables on TV with his Oma and Opa when he was a child. He’s staring down at the dinghy as his stream trickles into the water beside it, envisioning the scene where Anne acts the part of the deceased Lady of Shalott being set adrift in a leaky old dory. He climbs down into the dinghy and unties it from the Belle. Then he lies down, naked, in the bottom of the boat, his arms crossed over his chest as he recalls hers were. He closes his eyes, reciting his own rendition of the funeral rites he seems to remember she spoke, though he can’t be sure that’s what she did, but it doesn’t matter, he’s drunk and drifting away from that boat turned sour with the stench of his sweat and that of Miriam’s bodily emptyings he’s yet to clean from her forward stateroom. He can’t face it, her aftermath. He’s been running as far from what’s happened to her as he can, though there’s nowhere to run, is there? And he’s been nothing but a childish coward all this time, for years now, Miriam’s death and this stranding being only his latest mess. Lifting himself up, he hurls his guts out yet again into the sea, and the sobs start, his eyes stinging with the tears, until the convulsions subside and he lies down foetal in the bottom of the little boat, falling fast asleep for the first time in days under the blistering hot sun.
•
He unpeels his eyelids and focuses through his alcoholic haze on a small knot in the wood of the dinghy’s hull. It’s a knot that was crosscut in the milling, so it tails off across the one-by-four board like a comet streaking the sky. Around the time Willow was born he and Anna dreamed of buying some land out on one of the islands, maybe Salt Spring or Cortes, somewhere they could live more with the creatures of the world, with the unobscured stars and the sea. They’d stay up late nights together sketching floor plans and elevation profiles on graph paper, imagining the perfect home for the life they would have, the big kitchen for canning and preserving and drying, the root cellar off the northeast corner, a large attached greenhouse to the south, all heated by a central masonry stove. Anna read books by Michael Reynolds and learned about greywater systems, rain catchments, R and K values and site design, the azimuth angle and the differing qualities of clay, gravel, sand and soil. There had been a point though where her enthusiasm outpaced his own, and that’s where things started going sideways. She’d wanted to cobble whatever money they could save, beg, borrow or steal and get whatever piece of land they could afford as soon as possible. She wanted to get started. She talked as though that were the only answer, the only real response to what was happening in the world and the only decent way to raise their son and the children they would have in the future.
Francis, having grown up on Lasqueti, knew better. He’d
seen countless young adults come with their idealized dreams from all over—small towns, suburbs and cities—to end up living in plastic shacks and half-finished huts on land that offered nothing more than space and solitude. No good wood to work, soil to sow or water to drink and harness for power. They lived in the cold and the dark through the winters, their water lines frozen or clogged with crud, their roofs leaking, host to families of rodents that shat and pissed in the insulation until their homes stank of musty dens and their children grew sickly from the mould that proliferated in the walls and roof cavities. Most lasted less than five years, and the ones who stayed aged quickly, living as they did with cold floors and the endless struggling with inadequate supplies and equipment and know-how to build and furnish a life off-grid, in isolation. So he and Anna locked horns, neither listening to the wisdom of the other, and their life together has remained stuck like that since. Her wanting more than anything to leave the small-town suburbs behind, and him wanting that, too, but even more so to not end up like so many he’s seen before: a wrecked rural sawyer with a beat-up old Wood-Mizer mill and a back just this side of broken.
He peels his body off the ribs and hullboards and feels the ache of his sunburn as he stretches out his limbs and spits out the taste of vomit and the parched, sticky saliva from his mouth. He needs water. He rows back to the boat and ties the dinghy off to the taffrail once again, then climbs slowly aboard and down into the galley. When he twists open the tap it sputters, spitting out intermittent bursts of water and air. Thirsty as he is, he gulps back what he gets, two and a half glasses, until the pump pushes out nothing. He closes the tap and starts to laugh. What fun God, whatever that is, must be having with him.
The glass he’s drinking from shatters as it lands at his feet. Then he empties the cupboards in front of him of their contents, the glasses and plates and bowls crashing to the floor, those that are breakable scattering in pieces across the cabin. He rips the cupboard doors from their hinges, winging them across the cabin like Frisbees. When he finally feels the blood trickling from his punctured and sliced feet, he climbs up to the cockpit and grabs the EPIRB he’d left out on deck days before. He waits for it to flash, indicating that its signal is being sent, but it doesn’t. What? How long has the EPIRB not been transmitting? He hadn’t even thought to check, hadn’t noticed it not blinking, blinded by boredom and fear as he’s been, cloistered below deck, hiding from the oppressive magnitude of the endless emptiness of his surroundings.
When Horace bought his new Category 1, 406/121.5 MHZ EPIRB, he was in Madrid on business, a loosely-termed practice of his that constituted old friends, wine, polo and talk of investment opportunities over fine Scotch and cigars. After the long flight back to Vancouver he got a room at the Hotel Georgia and over the course of three days met individually with his money men: his accountant, his stock broker and his financial planner. When he finally arrived home at the Glass Globe he found that the EPIRB had been accidentally activated in his luggage. He switched it off, resolved to replace the battery, and shortly after stowed it in the nav station drawer where Francis found it. Of course he never gave it another thought, the EPIRB not being a priority piece of equipment for the short inshore trips he and Miriam took on the Belle.
Francis bashes it against the side of the cabin door several times, each time staring it down and cursing its inactivity. Each time nothing happens. So he flings it in a rage spinning out into the ocean. Then he hobbles down into the nav station and again starts hollering into the shortwave. “Where the fuck are you, you stupid fuckers?” he screams. “Where?” He tugs at the handpiece until its cord stretches and snaps from the unit, the little sheathed wires shearing apart. He throws it too across the cabin and tears the radio from its mount. His thumb slides over the little CALL STOP switch at the bottom and clicks it off as he hurls the shortwave to the floor, picks up one of the cupboard doors he’d Frisbeed across the galley, and beats the radio to bits at his feet.
Water, Water, Everywhere
IF MIRIAM’S HUSBAND Yule were with Francis he would recite these, some of the most famous lines from Coleridge’s epic: Water, water, every where, and all the boards did shrink; water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink. At this point in the poem the mariner has just slain with his crossbow the blessed albatross (for reasons not wholly conveyed) which has travelled many miles in dense mist and fog with his ship and crew around Antarctica. The mariner’s crew, two hundred strong, had embraced the bird as one of good omen, as upon its arrival the ice that gripped the hull cracked free and a sailable breeze began to blow. Upon the mariner’s slaying of the bird, conditions improve even more, the fog lifting finally and the breeze strengthening, and the crew applaud his killing. Then they come to the subtropical high and the winds die, as does the crew, all two hundred men, of starvation and dehydration. All but the mariner, who is eventually returned by a supernatural wind to land, where he is cursed to roam in perpetual penance, forever telling his tale to the strangers he meets.
But Francis didn’t slay the one albatross that visited them so many days ago, and he holds little hope for the help of any divine intervention. The sails haven’t more than fluttered over the past week, and though there truly is water everywhere—not just the endless volumes of the sea, but also that which is in the bilge, the cooling system of the main engine, and in each cell of the lead-acid batteries—none of it is drinkable. There may be some still sloshing about in the bottom of the tank, and they’ll be a few drops in the lines, but this he knows won’t amount to more than a day’s worth at best and he’s already thirsty, mildly dehydrated as he is from his drinking earlier in the day.
Some doctors say that, on account of the natural anaesthetics the brain produces within a few days of it being denied nourishment, the process of dying by dehydration is not as painful for the sufferer as it might seem. Some even suggest the experience includes hardly any discomfort at all, since the coma-like state that is soon reached negates any perception of pain. Others refute this, saying the pain is excruciating, as can be seen in any sufferer’s agony. Regardless of what the sufferer actually experiences, death by dehydration isn’t pretty. The skin hangs loose from the flesh and becomes dry and cracked and scaly. Nosebleeds, on account of the skin cracking, occur frequently. Highly concentrated urine burns from the bladder while the eyes sink into their orbits and the sufferer dry-heaves as the stomach lining dries out. Those are the early symptoms.
Convulsions begin as the brain cells burn and coughing brings up thick secretions from the dried-out respiratory tract causing the sufferer to fight for breath. Within five days the parasympathetic nervous system is impaired as a result of toxic buildup, the regulatory mineral balance of calcium, potassium and sodium thrown out of whack, and the muscles stop working, including, eventually, the heart. There are claims that people have survived as long as three full weeks without fluids, but of course the irreparable damage to their bodies and brains was done long before they actually died. Francis knows he doesn’t have long to live without water, and so he starts tearing into the walls of the boat.
With the claw-side of a hammer he strips away the mahogany panelling, exposing the lengths of wiring and hosing beneath. He follows the water line to its source, sucking what little drops of water he can from it as he goes, until he comes to the tank buried behind his bunk in the stern. He rips the panelling away and exposes the bulk of the tank’s stainless steel sidewall. Cutting into it is another matter, and as he thrusts the claw repetitively at the shiny steel, he wonders if there will be enough water in the tank to replenish that which he’s perspiring as a result of his exertion. By this method he manages to tear away enough of the sidewall to get his arm in with a cup in his hand and scoop up that which the pump couldn’t draw. A few litres. He mops the rest up with paper towel, wringing it out into the plastic and steel bowls and cups that survived his temper tantrum. He plugs the sink and sets these down into it, and when he’s done he stands for a long time and contemplates t
hese precious vessels, a few days’ worth of water at best.
And then what? Is he supposed to just sit here waiting for the rescue that should have already arrived? For the miracle of wind that won’t blow despite his prayers and self-effacing promises to be a better man, to come clean to Anna and Jin Su both and be a steadier father to his children? It’s the deep-seated though vague vestige of his grandparents’ Catholicism coming to the fore in him, in his time now of utter desperation, staring into these cups and bowls of what little time he has left, an image of himself he hardly recognizes—bearded, sunburnt, scared and broken—staring back.
Life Is But a Dream
IT’S AGAINST OUR basic nature to do nothing in the face of imminent disaster. Which is why those long-ago sailors threw their valuable horses to the sea, perhaps a bit rash given that a boat will usually drift free of the subtropical high within a couple of weeks (though who’s to know if that was widely known and trusted knowledge in those days). Regardless, it seems equally true that it defies our nature to do the most sensible, prudent thing in such circumstances; it’s a rare person who thinks well and clearly under real stress, the kind brought on in life-threatening conditions. Francis, far as he is from being one such person, decides.
First he transfers what water he has left into the two empty champagne bottles—careful as he’s ever been not to spill a drop—corks them, and wraps them in Horace’s wool sweaters. He collects the survival blankets from the emergency closet, the first-aid kit and a survival suit. He takes pillows and blankets and clothes from his stateroom, rolls of toilet paper and sunscreen from the head. Cans of fish and veggies (the water they’re preserved in more precious than the food itself), a good knife, spoons, a can opener, a flashlight, candles and a box of matches. Sheets, shower curtains and rods for shade-making. All this he places with the fishing rod, gaff and tackle into the dinghy. Then he writes a small note. Paddling due south in a white dinghy. Find me. He duplicates this twice and tapes one to the galley table, one to the nav table and one to the cabin door. Then two last things, binoculars and a compass, and he climbs down into the little boat, unhitches the line from its bow cleat, sets the oars in their locks, and heads out with renewed vigour and hope, rowing for Hawaii.