Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea

by Steven Callahan

  I spend an increasing amount of time thinking about food. Fantasies about an inn-restaurant become very detailed. I know how the chairs will be arranged and what the menu will offer. Steaming sherried crab overflows flaky pie shells bedded on rice pilaf and toasted almonds. Fresh muffins puff out of pans. Melted butter drools down the sides of warm, broken bread. The aroma of baking pies and brownies wafts through the air. Chilly mounds of ice cream stand firm in my mind’s eye. I try to make the visions melt away, but hunger keeps me awake for hours at night. I am angry with the pain of hunger, but even as I eat it will not stop.

  I save the bulk of my water ration for dessert. Since I have rebuilt my stock, I can afford to drink a half pint during the day and three-quarters of a pint at dinner, and still have a couple of ounces for the night. I slowly roll a mouthful around on my tongue until the water is absorbed rather than swallowed. When I return, ice cream will be no more pleasurable.

  In these moments of peace, deprivation seems a strange sort of gift. I find food in a couple hours of fishing each day, and I seek shelter in a rubber tent. How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time, I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants. Before this voyage, I always had what I needed—food, shelter, clothing, and companionship—yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn’t get everything I wanted, when people didn’t meet my expectations, when a goal was thwarted, or when I couldn’t acquire some material goody. My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness. Even here, there is richness all around me. As I look out of the raft, I see God’s face in the smooth waves, His grace in the dorado’s swim, feel His breath against my cheek as it sweeps down from the sky. I see that all of creation is made in His image. Yet despite His constant company, I need more. I need more than food and drink. I need to feel the company of other human spirits. I need to find more than a moment of tranquility, faith, and love. A ship. Yes, I still need a ship.

  The sea has flattened. All is still. Inside of me I feel a symphony of excitement growing, like music that begins very low, almost inaudible, then grows stronger and stronger until the entire audience is swept up in it with a single synchronized, thumping heartbeat. I rise to scan the horizon. Blowing up from astern are gigantic clumps of cumulonimbus clouds. Rain bursts from their flat, black bottoms, above which thick, snowy fleece billows up to great heights, until it is blown off in anvil heads of feathery ice crystals. The clouds push bright blue sky ahead of their walls of gray rain streaking to earth. An invisible paintbrush suddenly splashes a full rainbow of sharply defined color from one horizon to the other. The top of its arc comes directly overhead, lost in turbulent white ten thousand feet up. The breeze caresses my face; the canopy of the raft snaps. The smooth, slate sea is broken with white tumbling cracks. The sun suddenly pops out between billowing sky sculptures far to the west and balances on the horizon. It sends warmth tracking to the east upon its path, heats my back, and sets the bright orange canopy aglow. Another invisible brush stroke paints another perfect rainbow inside and behind the first. Between their belts of color are walls of deep gray. The smaller rainbow is a cavernous mouth well lit on the rim, leading inward to a deeper, electric blue. I feel as if I am passing down the corridor of a heavenly vault of irreproducible grandeur and color. The dorados leap in very high arcs as if they are trying to reach the clouds, catching the setting sun on their sparkling skins. I stand comfortably, back to the sun, as cool rain splashes on my face, fills my cup, and washes me clean. Far away to the north and south the ends of the rainbows touch the sea. Four rainbow ends and no pots of gold, but the treasure is mine nonetheless. Perhaps until now I have always looked for the wrong kind of coin.

  As the spectacle moves on, I empty the captured water into containers, pull the sleeping bag over me and close my eyes. My body is sore, but I am strangely at peace. For a short while I feel as if I’ve moved off of that seat in hell. The benign routine lasts three days. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, nothing lasts forever.

  MARCH 6

  DAY 30

  By the night of March 6, it is blowing like hell again. All night I am thrown about; it’s like trying to sleep in a bumper car. The next day the gale reachs forty knots. Combers crash down on Rubber Ducky, and I wonder if the strong wind will pick us up and fly us to Antigua. Keeping watch is out of the question. The entrance is lashed down tight. Even tending the still is impossible. If only I had windows, I could see what’s going on outside before it leaps inside, and maybe I would see a ship that could get me out of this mess.

  Patiently waiting for the gale to blow over, I chew on a fish stick. Dorado skin is much too tough to bite through, so I rake the meat off with my teeth. I feel a hard, sharp object in my mouth, like a shard of bone. I fish it out and find that it is plastic. Part of the cap that covers one of my front teeth has been chipped off. When I was young, the cap came off a few times, and I have vivid memories of the stabbing pain that ran down the exposed nerve of the uncapped tooth stub and shot into my brain. I can feel that some of the cap remains over the nerve, but it is loose and can’t last much longer.

  Water dribbles in constantly through the canopy. On March 8, Ducky is knocked down again. I bail out the gallons of water and begin to wring out the heavy lump that is supposed to be a sleeping bag. My cap is completely gone, but amazingly the tooth doesn’t hurt at all. The nerve must have died. Thank heaven for small miracles. I haven’t slept for two days. My skin is white, and even my wrinkles have wrinkles. My hair sits dripping and tangled on my head. Fish scales cling to me like ornamental slivers of nail polish. With a gap in the middle of my smile, I must be quite a mess, a real hag. Well, we rafties can’t be at our charming best all of the time.

  Two hours later Ducky is knocked down again. I sit among the floating debris, exhausted, giving in, no longer able to keep cool. Beating my fists in a splashing tantrum, I yell, “You goddamned son-of-a-bitch ocean!” For five minutes I do nothing but curse the wind and sea. I break down sobbing: “Why me? Why does it have to be me? I just want to go home, that’s all. Why can’t I just go home?” Inside, a second voice scolds me to stop acting like a child. But I’m beyond control. I yell back at myself. “I don’t give one damn about being reasonable! I’m hurt, hungry, tired, and scared. I want to cry.” So I do.

  What I do not know is that this same day, perhaps at this very moment, my father is calling the U.S. Coast Guard to notify them that Napoleon Solo is overdue. Sometime before, my mother had had a nightmare. She had seen me clawing through black waters, struggling to regain the surface. She awoke with a start, sweating, shaking, and had been tense ever since, awaiting word from me. None came.

  After a few minutes, the fire inside me subsides. I set about the endless, heavy work of bailing and wringing things out. Perhaps when I get back I will have a picnic with friends and neighbors. Yes, I must return for that. There will be laughter and children and fresh-cut grass, pine trees and trout ponds. I’ll have them at last. We will have a brontosaurus of a barbecue, trees of salads, and hills of ice cream. People will ask me what it was like. I will tell them I hated it, all of it. There was not one slimy corner that did not stink. You can never love it. You can only do what you must. I hated the sea’s snapping off shots of heavy rifle fire next to my ear, rolling heavy stones over me, ripping wounds open, beating me, winning. Weeks on end, no bells, no rounds, continued onslaught. I even hated the equipment that saved my life—the primitive raft that was an aimless, drifting pig of a boat, the wretched tent that turned clean water foul. I hated having to catch drinking water in the same box I had to defecate in. I hated having to haul aboard lovely creatures and tear into their flesh like a beast. I hated counting minutes for thirty-two days. I hated … I hated…

  I did not know a man could have so much hatred and so much longing within him. Yes, I will get home somehow. I must. Has the wind eased a
little or is it my imagination?

  MARCH 10

  DAY 34

  No. For the next two days the gale continues and life is hellish. I have managed to catch another triggerfish, my third, and another dorado, my fourth. The dorado bent the spear again. I must ration the use of my equipment. Who knows how many dorados it will take to break my spear beyond repair? And how long must the spear last?

  The distillate collection bag of the solar still was nearly full an hour ago. Now it hangs flaccid. A tiny, burred hole has been bitten from one edge of the bag. Friggin’ triggerfish. I’ve lost over six ounces of water. That’s a half day of life gone, old boy.

  Won’t you feel like a jerk if you die just one half day before being picked up?

  By March 11 things have calmed again, and I resume my more placid routine. I’m about halfway to the West Indies. Once again I have time to count my blessings. Solo stayed afloat long enough for me to salvage what I needed. My equipment is all working, and doing a fair job of it, too. Mountain climbing, camping, Boy Scouts, boat building, sailing, and design, and my family’s continued encouragement to confront life head on have all given me enough skill to “seastead” on this tiny, floating island. I am getting there. So far it is a tale of miracles.

  MARCH 13

  DAY 37

  On March 13, however, I’m not feeling too chipper. Because of the bad weather, the last dorado that I caught never dried properly and turned pasty and rancid. I haven’t eaten much, and I finally throw it out. I strain to do my yoga exercises, accomplishing in an hour and a half what usually takes only a half hour. Even in the calm of evening, I don’t think I can last much longer.

  Doing just enough to hang on will no longer do. I must keep myself in the best shape possible. I must eat more. I pull in the string farm trailing astern and rake off the barnacles with the blade of my knife. I scrape some rust from the peanut and coffee cans into my drinking water in the hope of absorbing some iron and alleviating anemia.

  I talk to the lazy vagrant in control of my body. I coax him to kneel by the entrance to await another dorado. At first my body is slow. A dorado swims out. I clumsily splash down. Miss. Another. Miss. But the pumping of blood helps to revive my other self, the physical part. On the third shot I ram my weapon through the fish’s back. It pulls me down over the tube as it twists and jerks to get away. I play the fish as if he’s on a light line, because I don’t want to break or bend my lance. However, I must also retrieve it as quickly as possible, before it can escape. So I let it twist and jerk while I reach down and grab the shaft close to the body; then I lift it up without the risk of bending the shaft. I flip the fish inside, onto the sailcloth blanket that protects the floor. When I get the dorado pinned down with my knees, I slip the cutting board under its head just behind the gills, push my knife into the lateral line, and break the spine with a quick twist of the blade. Usually I completely clean the fish before eating, but now I’m very hungry. I simply gut it and place the rest aside.

  By midafternoon I am eating the organs, and I feel as if I have had a transfusion. The dorado’s stomach seems full of something. I cut it open. Five partially digested flying fish spill out onto the floor. I hesitate, take a small taste of a flyer, and almost vomit. I gather them up and toss them out. As soon as they are in the air I think, Fool! You should have washed them off and then tried them. Next time. But such a waste of five fish. I mop up the spilled stomach juices and finish cleaning the dorado. Sweat pours off of my head as I squat over my catch and labor in the heat to slice up the body. I stop twice to stretch out my legs and to relieve my cramped knees and back. The work is hard, but I move fast so that I can rest sooner. I always work that way—pushing myself as hard as I can so I can finish quickly and then find complete rest.

  As I poke holes through the fish sticks in order to string them up, SLAM! Rubber Ducky crushes me between her tubes. Water dribbles in and she springs back to her normal shape as though nothing has happened. It takes me a moment to get my wind back and recover from the shock. The average wave height is only about three feet, but a monster leisurely rolls off ahead. I set to work again with a shrug. I am getting used to various levels of disaster striking with no warning.

  The still lies lifeless, draped flat over the bow. It must have gotten smacked pretty hard. Air jets out of it almost as quickly as I can blow it in. The cloth across the bottom, which allows excess seawater to drain through and which is airtight when wet, now sports a hole. The cloth has deteriorated from the constant cycles of wetting and drying and from chafing against Ducky’s tubes. Less than thirty days of use, and the still is gonzo. I’ve never been able to coerce my remaining still to work. As we have drifted west, the number of light showers has increased, but I am lucky when I can trap six or eight ounces of water within a week. Another critical safety margin has disappeared. I’m in big trouble—not that I’ve been out of big trouble for quite a while now.

  I must get the other still to work and keep it working, perhaps for longer than thirty days. I blow it up until it’s tight as a tick. Just below the skirt through which the lanyard passes, a tiny mouth whistles a single-note tune until the balloon’s lungs are emptied. The hole is in a tight corner and on a lumpy seam, which makes it impossible to effectively wedge a piece of repair tape into it. Making something watertight is difficult enough, even for a boat builder in an equipped shop. To make something airtight is an even taller order.

  For hours I try to think of a way to seal the leaking still. Perhaps I can burn some pieces of plastic from the old still or its packaging and drip the melted globs over the hole. But I find that my matches are sodden and my lighter has been drained of fluid. So I wedge the tape in as firmly as I can and grouchily reinflate the still every half hour. Each time, the still begins to slump as soon as I stop pumping. Water begins to collect in the distillate bag, but it is salty. At this pace, I already feel like I have a case of lockjaw, and my mouth is very dry. I must find an effective solution. If only I had some silicone seal or other kind of good goop.

  MARCH 16

  DAY 40

  I have managed to last forty days, but my water stock is declining, and I have but a few hard pieces of fish dangling in the butcher shop. It is also a little disconcerting to realize that Ducky is guaranteed for forty days of use. If she fails me now, do you suppose I can get my money back?

  Despite these problems, I have good reason to celebrate this milestone. I’ve lasted longer than I had dreamed possible in the beginning. I’m over halfway to the Caribbean. Each day, each hardship, each moment of suffering, has brought me another small step closer to salvation. The probability of rescue, as well as gear failure, continually increases. I imagine two stone-faced poker players throwing chips onto a pile. One player is named Rescue and the other is Death. The stakes keep getting bigger and bigger. The pile of chips now stands as tall as a man and as big around as a raft. Somebody is going to win soon.

  The dorados begin their morning foray. They bang away at the bottom of the raft and sometimes run around the outside, cracking stiff shots against the raft with their tails. I grab my spear and wait. Sometimes I have a little trouble focusing. During the last gale I jabbed my eye with a piece of the polypropylene line I’ve rigged to keep the still in place. After a couple of days of oozing and swelling, my eye cleared up, but I was left with a spot in my vision, which I often take to be a glimpse of an airplane or the first hint of a fish shooting out before the tip of my spear. Dorados are so fast that my shot must be instantaneous, without thought, like a bolt of lightning. A head, a microsecond of hesitation, a splash, a strike, a hard pull on my arm, and an escape. On other days I’ve hit two or three morning and evening but most of the time come up with nothing. This morning I’m lucky and catch a nice fat female. Squatting over her for two hours on the rolling floor of the raft is hard work for my matchstick legs. Finally the job is done and the fish hung up to dry. I begin to mop up the blood and scales, but my sponges have turned to useless little
globs. Evidently the stomach juices that I swabbed up from the last dorado have digested them. Since my sleeping bag has proven its ability to soak up water, I take out some of the batting and bind this up with pieces of codline to use as sponges.

  Each day now I set my priorities, based on my continuing analysis of raft condition, body condition, food, and water. Each day at least one factor lags behind what I consider adequate. The dismal problem of collecting or distilling water is one I must find a solution to.

  I take some of the black cloth wick from the first still, the one that I cut up early in the game. I affix it across the hole of the still with the rotted bottom, letting the still’s weight keep it in place. I now have one still aft and one forward, in the only positions available for frequent tending. Every ten minutes throughout the day, I am a human bellows at the service of one or the other still. In between inflations, I empty the distillate just in case salt water sneaks in to pollute it while I’m not watching. By nightfall I have collected a full two pints of fresh water. I am continually paying higher prices for my small successes. The work is demanding and boils off a lot of body fluid. I can’t decide if my steaming cells gain anything from the exercise. There is little time to dream these days, barely enough time to live, but fruit mountains still stand in the panorama of my mind’s eye.