She loved to row, and she was good at it. She had rowed crew in college. The rowboat beneath her now was a far cry from a streamlined skull, but rowing was rowing in some sense. The skiff felt leaden and bogged in the water, but when she leaned into the oars the boat responded reasonably well.
Eamon, she understood, would be furious with her. She knew that. But he would insist on rowing the passage himself, playing the senior teacher role, or at the very least the guy role, and she hated that stuff. Given her skill with oars, it made sense for her to attempt the crossing. She hoped it would not be a big deal in any case.
When she pulled on the oars again she checked the oarlocks. Specifically, she checked to see if the oarlocks were going to hold. Everything about the boat felt like a damp paper bag, soggy and ready to pull apart given any pressure, but at least it cut through the first tiny chop successfully. The oarlocks — the seats for the oars, the metal posthole where you slid the metal bracket into it — looked as though they could pull out anytime.
What she worried about was the halfway point.
It was like the old joke-riddle: How far can you go into the woods?
Answer: Halfway.
At some point, Ursula understood, she would have to make a decision to go for it or to turn back. She promised herself that she would be coolly clinical about the decision. Now was not the time for heroics or shoddy calculations. But at some point, depending on currents and the state of the water, she would have to head for the mainland and abandon any plan of limping back to the island. Or not. But knowing which way to lean, knowing whether to risk it or not, was the million-dollar puzzle.
Meanwhile, she concentrated on rowing. It felt good to get some exercise, and the work warmed her. It had been cold the night before. The temperature had dropped off somewhere close to zero, she estimated. Everything had become brittle and sharp and no one moved from the fire if she or he could help it. But now, with the sun only a yellow mist at the edge of the sea, she liked digging the oars into the water and pulling backward. Some of her best memories revolved around rowing.
When she had brought the boat maybe two hundred yards off shore, she stopped to bail. The water seeped in steadily, for sure, but at least it hadn’t frozen. It remained liquid, doubtless from the salt content, and she scooped, poured, scooped, poured for a full five minutes before setting forth again.
The island, when she checked it as she resumed rowing, had suddenly slipped sideways on her. Tides, she thought. Or currents. Apparently the currents were fairly stiff, because they had moved the boat a fair distance off course after only a short interval of bailing. That was interesting. She made a mental note to keep that in mind when she made her calculation about going forward or retreating.
The water, when she scanned the sea behind her, had smoothed into a piece of black ice. Even the gulls that rode the tiny swells hardly moved. Now and then she felt a braid of water tuck against the bow of the boat, a current, she imagined, wrapping around the island and carrying everything out to sea. With luck, she thought, someone on a boat would see her and swing by. Eventually boats had to pass by the island, she knew, but for the time being it was Thanksgiving weekend and people were busy. It struck her as uncanny when she thought about how many things had worked against them on this trip. It started with the quake. Who had ever heard of an earthquake in Maine hurting anyone? But it had caught them at just the wrong moment and everything had snowballed from there. Black Friday weekend, being in the magazine when the quake hit, the fact that there was a quake at all, the wall collapsing on the camp supplies, poor Azzy, poor Sam, the decision not to allow electronics on the trip, the fact that their emergency phone had been near the wall and had been covered along with the food …
It was astonishing, really, how poorly things had gone.
And it was astonishing, she realized now as she rowed deeper toward the center point of the crossing, how strong the currents had turned out to be. They were no joke. She performed a little experiment by lifting up her oars and focusing her eyes on a landmark — a Citgo tower marking a gas station, barely visible on the horizon line — and watched to see what the current would do to the boat. She tried to triangulate, estimating various points and distances, but the sea made it tricky. No question, though, that the currents pushed against her and tried to carry her out to sea.
Part of the problem was the boat was too darn heavy.
It dug into the current. Its heaviness, its waterlogged state, made it a more generous target for the currents. If it had been light and crisp, the tides might have affected it less. But the skiff moved like an old turtle, heavy and ponderous, and it was that sluggish quality that started to itch in Ursula’s thinking.
I should turn around, she thought. I should do it now.
Water lapped around her feet. The boat settled more comfortably into the sea. She felt a little tug of dread begin to pull whenever she touched the oars. Things weren’t going exactly as planned.
On the way back from the designated latrine area, Harry spotted a boat on the horizon. It was hard to say what it was, but it looked like a tanker. It stretched a long way on the edge of the world, its smoky discharge faintly visible in the calmness. He stopped to watch it for a moment. He dug his hand into his pocket and felt for the harmonica. He lifted it out and put it to his lips, tasting the woodsmoke from the fire the night before. He blew up and down the holes, then slapped the spit out against his jeans.
He started to put the harmonica back when he happened to see Ms. Carpenter sitting on the ocean.
At least it looked that way. She sat on the ocean.
He had to rub his eyes a little and tell himself to concentrate. The evidence of his eyes didn’t make much sense. What was Ms. Carpenter doing out on the water in the first place? And where was the boat? He took a step forward, as if that tiny distance would help to explain everything. He squinted and held his hand up to shade his eyes from the emerging sun. In tiny heartbeats, the meaning of his vision became clear.
The boat was under her. And she was sinking.
“Hey,” he yelled. “Hey.”
But he doubted she heard him. She was a long ways off, drifting in the direction of the tanker, and now and then he saw water pour away from the boat. It was peculiar to see.
It took a second for it all to register. She was bailing. That was what happened when the water spilled out in an arc from the boat. The currents had carried her out to sea, and now the boat wallowed in the smooth surface of the water, and she was in all kinds of trouble.
“Hey,” he yelled again, as if that might help some way.
Then he turned back to the fire and started to run as fast as he could.
Less than a minute later, Mr. Puffin and the others ran up behind him to see what had happened. He lifted his finger and pointed out to Ms. Carpenter in the boat. In the sinking boat.
“Look!” he said. “The boat!”
People skidded to a stop around him. They followed the line of his finger until their eyes picked Ms. Carpenter’s dory from the background of the sea. The sun had moved higher in the sky now and Harry saw her more clearly. She did look to be sitting in the sea, but that was an optical illusion because the boat rode so heavily and close to the water.
“Oh, no,” Mr. Puffin said. “What is she doing? What has she done?”
Then Harry felt everyone finally comprehend. He got it, too. She hadn’t meant to go in that direction. Why would she? There was nothing that way, no hint of salvation farther out to sea. The currents had her. That was the only answer that made sense.
“What do we do?” Sandy Bellow asked. “Why is she out there?”
“The currents …” Mr. Puffin said and then looked away, his eyes tearing up.
“The boat is too heavy,” Bob Worm said. “She should have waited.”
“You mean she can’t get back here?” Sandy asked, her voice rising into a cry on the last word.
“We don’t know that yet,” Mr. Puffin said.
“We can’t help her,” Mary said, her voice level with amazement. “We can’t do anything for her.”
“Maybe when she gets behind the island, the current won’t be so bad,” Harry said.
He said it just to say it. He didn’t believe it.
He felt a shiver run up his spine. Ms. Carpenter wasn’t going to make it back. That was the long and short of it. She had gone out to sea in a leaky boat and in no time the currents had taken her away. She couldn’t swim for it. Not easily, and not with the water so cold. She wouldn’t make it the length of a pool.
“We can use a human microphone,” Mary said. “Do you guys know what that is?”
It took Harry a second to realize someone had spoken to them.
When no one answered, Mary explained.
“We start by saying mic check. Then whatever the speaker says, everyone repeats. You use short sentences. People use it for protests.”
“Try it,” Mr. Puffin said.
Mary said, “Mic check.”
Everyone repeated it.
“Louder,” she said.
“Louder,” they repeated.
“I don’t know what to say,” Mary whispered.
“Mic check,” Mr. Puffin said.
They said, “Mic check.”
“Don’t fight the current,” he said.
“Don’t fight the current,” they repeated.
“Go with it,” he said.
“Go with it,” they yelled.
Then he stopped. The sound went out onto the sea and flung itself back at them. Harry watched the boat and saw Ms. Carpenter raise her hand for a moment, attempt to wave, or ask them to join her, and then the silence returned and the sound of the gulls became a regular riot of noise and insult.
She had to swim for it. That thought slowly lodged into Ursula Carpenter’s mind. The thought came sideways, crabbing in, and she tried to resist it as long as possible. The sea was cold. The sea was horribly cold, a fact she had already confirmed by sitting shin deep in the water, the bailer no longer able to match the slow bubble of incoming water. It astonished her how quickly it had all fallen apart. She had merely rowed out a couple hundred yards, testing the water, when the currents had taken the boat like a willful hand and pushed it out to sea.
She heard them yelling, then silence. She raised her hand, waved, then returned to bailing as fast as she could. Each time she stopped rowing, the current carried her farther away from the island.
After the yelling — what had they meant by it? What were they trying to say? — she twisted around to see behind her. She wondered if the current might take her past another island. It was becoming clear to her that she could not fight the current current. She smiled at that little joke, a tight, bright smile that nearly pained her to shut down. Current current. That was pretty good, she thought. That was an okay joke given her circumstances.
She did not like to think about going into the sea. She had watched too many shark documentaries and though it was unlikely that any sharks patrolled the cold waters outside of Casco Bay, you could never say that for certain. There probably were sharks, at least bottom-feeding nurse sharks and the like, but what she feared most of all was a great white. A great white surging up from the bottom, that was her nightmare. She didn’t want to leave the water and know that a shark had taken her into the air, that coming down into the white splash she would find the shark’s dead black eye holding her gaze. So even if the water was cold and would probably do her in long before she had to worry about sharks, she still didn’t like the thought.
She stopped bailing and pulled frantically on the oars for at least three minutes. The boat moved sluggishly. It moved like a sunken bathtub, and the harder she rowed, she judged, the more quickly the water came through the old cracks. Pushing the dry, flaking bow through the waves only made it leak faster, harder, fuller. That left absolutely no options available.
Except swimming, a little voice mentioned again in her brain. Except swimming for shore.
She was aware, too, that every minute delayed only made the potential swim longer. She was not getting closer to the island. In fact, the current moved her directly away. If she was going to swim, it was time to swim. Delay only made things worse.
She stopped to bail again. The paint can leaked whenever she submerged it and drew it out. The boat beneath her had changed in her imagination. She pictured it now as an old brown leaf, maybe from an oak, and it swirled and fell, drifted and sank like an oak leaf on a soft autumn afternoon. And what was she? She was an ant or a young caterpillar riding the leaf on its fall, drifting for a moment above the grassy meadow, falling near the old stone wall she had always loved near her house. Each fall she had gone outside and sat on a special rock, directly beneath a mother oak, and she had read poetry and let her attention be divided between the words on the page and the sweet-scented fall of the autumn leaves. Later she would go inside and drink hot chocolate, or perhaps her mother would have made her special kale and sausage soup, and all of it stayed mixed with the sense of falling leaves and the world spinning toward colder weather.
She had those thoughts in mind when the water finally pushed over the gunwale of the boat. She sat for a moment suspended — not sinking, not truly floating, either, but calm in a way she had never been calm before. The boat began to settle more fully beneath her. She tried the oars again, but she no longer cared if they worked or not. The boat made a short, quiet pop and then began going down, down, and she spread her arms on the water and felt the cold enter her bloodstream and she no longer felt a separation between the sea and her body.
SURVIVAL TIP #4
* * *
Both cold and hot weather are a threat if you have no food. But extreme heat and cold will kill you in other ways before you have a chance at starvation. In terms of living without food, heat means faster dehydration — cold means more energy is burned to keep the body’s temperature at a cozy 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius). If you’re lucky enough to be in mild temperatures, you’ll be able to live a little longer without food.
Mary carried an armful of seaweed back to the fire. It smelled horrible and made her arms damp and cold, but it was the best she could do. They had eaten three armfuls already, each one spread around the fire on big rocks to help it dry. When it gained enough heat from the rocks and the fire, they ate it like fried onions. It tasted of salt and the sea, but at least, Mary thought, it gave her stomach something to do. She wondered, though, if it only made her hungrier in the long run.
They had been more determined about finding food after Ms. Carpenter had disappeared. Her disappearance had made them all more resolute. Even Sandy Bellow, Mary saw, carried seaweed up from the shoreline, where the team collected it. She held it out and away from her, squeamish about getting water on her clothes, but at least she carried it.
Things could happen. That was the lesson Ms. Carpenter’s disappearance had taught them all.
Mary unloaded her armful of seaweed carefully. She felt shaky and cold. When she finished she went to see how Sam was faring. Sam had been Ms. Carpenter’s special charge, but now that had been turned upside down. She went to the tent and zipped the zipper down. Then she stuck her head in, trying to see Sam in the dimness. He didn’t move.
“Sam, are you awake?” she whispered, testing his sleep.
To her astonishment, his eyes opened immediately.
“I’m hungry,” he whispered.
“We don’t have anything except seaweed. Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” he said, but whether that meant it was okay, he wanted some, or okay, let it pass, she couldn’t tell.
He didn’t say anything else for a little while. It felt warm inside the tent. It also smelled funky, like a boys’ locker room or the inside of the cafeteria on tuna day.
“I want to get out of
the tent,” he said. “If you’ll help me.”
“Do you need to go to the bathroom? I can call one of the guys.”
“No, I just want to get out of the tent. It’s making me a little crazy.”
She helped him. It took him a long time to get his shoes on and to work his way slowly onto his feet, but he stood finally. She stayed close to him and let him lean on her when he needed it. When Bob Worm and Harry came back carrying seaweed, they both whistled and fist-bumped Sam. He obliged them, but it was clear it exhausted him to perform the slightest function. Mary propped him up on the best rock near the fire.
“This feels good,” he said. “It’s good to be out of the tent.”
“I can’t believe you’re up and walking. Wait until Mr. Puffin sees you,” Harry said, his hands busy stretching the seaweed out on the rocks surrounding the fire.
“They thought you were way down for the count,” Bob Worm said.
“I don’t remember much,” Sam said. “Not after the first shake.”
“You got it bad,” Bob said. “Whammo. You looked horrible.”
“What day is it, anyway?” he asked.
“It’s Monday, around noon,” Mary said. “The lobster boat guy should be here in about twenty-four hours. We’re going to make it.”
Mr. Puffin came back then. Mary watched him take in the fact that Sam had emerged from the tent, not looking great, obviously, but at least not dying. Mary saw the calculation enter Mr. Puffin’s expressions: his colleague, Ms. Carpenter, had given her life to bring help earlier for Sam. Now Sam was here, and Ms. Carpenter wasn’t.
“Glad to see you up, Sam,” Mr. Puffin said carefully.
“I just needed to get out of the tent.”
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