Lost!

by Thomas Thompson

  Now Jim buried his face in his hands. He was close to tears. “I guess I just made up a Costa Rican number,” he said, his voice hidden and muffled. “I’m sorry.”

  Linda was puzzled. She did not grasp what it all meant. “But you know how to use the radio,” she said brightly. “Can’t we call my folks anyway?”

  “It’s against the law,” said Jim. “It’s a federal crime. You could get two years in jail.”

  Taking his hands off the wheel, Bob rose in anger. “You know that was the condition,” he said, “the number one condition for our coming on this cruise. You think I’d be out here risking my life—and Linda’s life—if we didn’t have a radio, and somebody who had a license to operate it? This isn’t Lake Washington, for Pete’s sake.”

  “I’m sorry, Bob. I really am sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us before?”

  “I never said I had a license.”

  “You never said you didn’t have one, either. Isn’t there anything in that moral code of yours that prohibits lying by omission?” Bob was shouting now and not even the winds could carry the strength of his words away.

  Linda touched her husband’s arm, her sign for him to cool off.

  But Bob would not have it. “You’re nothing but a hypocrite,” he cried, “a religious hypocrite! You and your no-smoking, no-drinking, no-dancing, no-movies, no-new-ideas, no-nothing way of life!”

  Crying now, Jim bowed his head and worked his lips silently in prayer.

  Bob would not tolerate a prayer. “You really think God listens to a liar? Why waste your time? If this is the kind of hypocrisy your church teaches, then I’m glad to be out of it. I only wonder why it took me so long!”

  “Bob, please. I said I was sorry.” Jim turned begging to Linda, imploring her to make the torrent of invective cease.

  “Let’s have a cup of tea,” suggested Linda. Bob did not acknowledge the idea.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Brother Jim,” he said instead. “I don’t belong to your church anymore. But I do believe in one thing. And that’s in telling the truth. By your standards, I’m a lost soul. But I wouldn’t do what you’ve just done. My code is more moral than yours!” Bob turned his attention back to the wheel, not really caring what the Triton’s position had become in in the moments she sailed unattended.

  His condemnation so violated Jim’s being that he was unable to marshal any articulate weapons of rebuttal. He tried instead to elaborate on his explanation. “I guess I thought that after we got outside the twelve-mile limit, then we’d be in international waters and the federal laws wouldn’t apply,” said Jim.

  “That’s crap and you know it. That’s another lie, Jim. You know damn well the laws are international as applied to radio transmission. What were you going to do if we sprang a leak and started to sink? Gather us around the radio and pray?”

  “Bob, please.” Linda’s voice was stern. She felt her husband had gone too far. Jim was in deep distress.

  No one said anything for a time, an awkward time. They all watched the grayness settling over the day.

  Then Jim began to plead. He urged Bob to put away his anger and stay on board the Triton until Los Angeles. There, if Bob still wanted, he and Linda could get off, and perhaps Jim could find a substitute crew to continue on to Costa Rica.

  “If there was a port over there,” said Bob, gesturing with an outflung arm in the direction of unseen land, “then I would take us there and we’d be off in about fifteen seconds.”

  Bob took a cup of Linda’s tea and fell across the bed. He had finished his shift in the middle of the morning and wordlessly turned the wheel over to Jim. Now Linda sat beside him, not familiar with her husband in this troubled condition. The quarrel between the men, one-sided as it was, had raged for almost two hours. Above their heads, the winds were rising, punctuating the mood that had so suddenly settled over their voyage.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” said Bob, quieter now. “I think we should get off.”

  Linda giggled. “I don’t think I can swim that far.”

  Bob smiled. She always had a way of turning down the flame under a boiling pot. “I mean,” he said, “get off at the first possible port. We could probably make Coos Bay tomorrow.”

  “Can’t we at least go as far as San Francisco?” asked Linda, making it sound somehow important.

  Bob shook his head. “We have no business being out in the Pacific Ocean without a usable radio. It’s insanity. Any sailor would tell you that.”

  “But how far is San Francisco? A few days maximum?”

  “Are you being the Great Peacemaker, or is there some important, unknown reason for your wanting to go to San Francisco?”

  Linda pursed her lips. She had a story to tell. “Have I ever mentioned the time when I was a little kid, first or second grade, and all the children were supposed to tell about places they had been and things they had seen?”

  Bob shook his head.

  “Well,” she went on, “everybody’s stories were so interesting, and I didn’t have a place to compete with theirs—and you know how competitive I’ve always been—so I remembered seeing Disneyland on television, and I told the teacher I had just been to Disneyland. I had it all down, too, the way the castle looked, the rides I went on, the junk I ate, the cap with the mouse ears my daddy bought me. I guess I’ve always felt a little guilty over that big lie, especially since my teacher later complimented my mother on how well I told about my trip. So, I figure now that if we get off in San Francisco, I’ll at least touch ground in California. Then maybe I can persuade you to go on to Los Angeles and I can visit the scene of my great imaginary triumph. And …”

  Linda hesitated. Bob urged her on. “And what?”

  “And Jim can probably pick up a new crew …”

  “And everybody will live happily ever after.”

  As they laughed and touched one another with happiness, the Triton lurched in the sharpening new winds.

  (4)

  The morning after the quarrel was a Saturday, the Sabbath and most holy day of the week for Jim’s religion. It was a day when he had hoped to enlist Bob and Linda for informal worship services, but now the two men were barely speaking, only when it was necessary to transfer information about the course and the wind. No joyous hymns would fill the Triton as Jim had imagined. Before departure, he and his wife—Bob’s sister—had prayed together that the spiritual aura of the Triton’s missionary voyage to Costa Rica would somehow, someway bring Bob back to the church of his family.

  Instead, Jim knelt alone in the cockpit during his shift and prayed, one hand on the wheel, the other grasping his Bible. He held it tightly against his forehead in an attitude of repentance. It was impossible not to mark the agony that Jim was suffering, and Bob felt an occasional nag of guilt over his outburst. But he still felt real bitterness toward Jim for the radio incident. Under no condition would he stay on the Triton after she reached San Francisco.

  Below, Linda stayed in bed most of the day, feigning a headache, but in reality contending with nausea that would not go away. Only when Bob cried that dolphins were swimming near the Triton did all three young people come together, hanging over the side for a few minutes, enjoying watching the gracious creatures leap and spin and prance across the ship’s path. Linda could stay for only a moment before hurrying back to bed.

  The winds continued to rise, reaching eighteen knots on the indicator. Contrary winds, seemingly blowing at the Triton from all points on the compass, they confounded her progress. By sundown less than twenty miles had been made that day, a fifth of what had been charted.

  At day’s end, feeling better, Linda rose to cook dinner and turned on the kerosine burners. As the fumes rose, she grew dizzy again. Only then did she realize a contributing source to her discomfort—the stove. At that moment, Bob appeared in the cooking area and saw his wife’s pale face and trembling hands.

  “You’ve got more than a headache,” he said. “Little seasick
?”

  Linda denied the idea with a shake of her head. “I just figured it out,” she said. “It’s this damned stove. I’ve been getting sick twice a day, morning and night, only I didn’t want to mention it because I thought I was a bad sailor.”

  Bob reached for the skillet. “We won’t be sailors much longer. I’ll do the cooking. I’m a liberated man.”

  Linda embraced her husband, thanking him for his thoughtfulness, and sat down gratefully on the nearby bench. “I’m sorry it turned out this way,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, too.… I feel awkward, Jim and me splitting up this way—as enemies.”

  Linda thought for a moment. “I don’t know him very well,” she said.

  Bob agreed. “Neither do I. And he’s married to my sister. I don’t think anybody really knows Jim, except maybe Wilma. He doesn’t volunteer much about himself.”

  A decade prior, Bob had met his future brother-in-law at Walla Walla College. Bob taught history at the Adventist school, and Jim was majoring in German. Of German ancestry, he was the poster-perfect Aryan—hair the color of fresh wheat, piercing blue eyes, all forming into a sturdy, muscular youth of remarkable beauty, for that was the word to describe him then. He always looked foreign, remembered Bob. “When I first saw Jim on campus, I figured he was an exchange student,” Bob told Linda. “He wore his hair a little long, before it was fashionable.”

  When Jim married Wilma Tininenko, Bob had had but brief conversations with his reticent new brother-in-law, for they had little in common save family ties. But, then, Bob had had scant contact with his large family for several years, they being sorrowful over his renunciation of their church, he in no mood to explain his position. Moreover, he felt they lacked the intellectual capacity to grasp his reasons. “Things were pretty cold there for a while between me and them,” Bob had told Linda. “It was mutual freeze-out time. Not until I married you did things thaw.”

  Pouring vegetable oil into the skillet to fry the artificial burgers, Bob held his nose to indicate to Linda that he sympathized with her over the cooking odors.

  “Jim is still the most religious man I know,” said Bob, as the oil popped. He dropped the patties in and waited to turn them. “I just think he was so anxious to get to Costa Rica, so excited over finally becoming a missionary, that he cut a few corners. And now he’s up there paying for it. He’s going through the tortures of the damned.”

  Linda looked pensive. “I think,” she said softly, “that you ought to let up on him.”

  “I will. One thing has come out of this, though—I believe he finally knows me. I think he may understand that it is possible, after all, to have principles without having an Adventist preacher pound them in every Saturday morning.”

  The vegeburgers were tasteless, and the accompanying soda pop did not improve the menu. Both Bob and Linda agreed that their first night in San Francisco they would find an outrageously expensive steak and a bottle of red wine to match, and to the devil with those who considered it sinful.

  The weather bureaus that watch the sea off the western coast of the United States report that the summer months are normally benevolent to sailors. Gale force winds (by definition, from thirty-four to forty-seven miles an hour) occur only one per cent of the time from late June until early September. But this is a class statistic, scooping up tens of thousands of square miles of the Pacific Ocean. It does not accommodate those freak storms that rear up seemingly out of the depths and shriek their furies for several hours, then vanish before an observation can be made—unless a boat has the grave misfortune to be ensnared by one.

  During the first few days of July 1973, a series of weather fronts advanced across the North Pacific, edging slowly onshore at British Columbia and the State of Washington, but losing punch as they dropped downward toward California. By July 6, the day that Jim made his revelation about the radio, the summer storm seemed to be disintegrating, according to observations made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office in Redwood City, California.

  But on July 10, the storm was reborn, smearing the seascape a scowling gray, creating winds that reached nearly thirty miles an hour, commanding the waves to twelve-foot swells.

  At mid-afternoon the day of the renewed storm, Jim took a reading with his sextant and estimated that the Triton was about forty miles off the coast of northern California, near a place called Cape Mendocino.

  “How far is that from San Francisco?” asked Linda, whose nausea had returned despite abstinence from the stove. Her face was as uneasy and turbulent as the sea.

  “About a hundred thirty miles above, I think,” said Jim. “We should get there tomorrow.”

  “I thought you said we’d be there yesterday.”

  “Blame it on the winds,” said Jim, almost apologetically.

  An hour later, near 5 P.M., the receiver picked up a small craft warning issued from Eureka, predicting winds gusting to twenty miles an hour and six- to eight-foot seas. Jim hurried up to the cockpit to inform Bob, who was at that moment encountering weather far more dangerous than that being predicted. Both men agreed to prepare the Triton for a storm, and at the same time make all due speed for Eureka.

  Quickly they dressed the boat for foul weather, dropping the mainsail around the boom, stowing the jib, raising a smaller storm jib, dropping anchor with one hundred yards of line from the stern, rigging two drag anchors out of five-gallon water pails and attaching each to three hundred yards of line. These drag anchors, lashed to the outriggers, would slow the boat if the winds hit hard. It was Bob’s intention to go downwind rather than tack, hoping the Triton could ride the waves like a roller coaster.

  During the preparation, Jim made directional readings and frowned. The Triton had made but five miles toward shore in more than three hours. Jim relieved Bob at the helm a little after 5 P.M.

  As Bob dressed to take the shift at 9 P.M., Linda lay on the bed with apprehension apparent in her eyes. Even at that moment the winds slamming into the Triton caused it to roll and pitch with stomach-wrenching violence. “How much longer?” she asked, trying to put strength in a voice that wobbled.

  Bob put his arms around her. “I’ll probably be up there most of the night,” he said. “At least until things quiet down a little. I think I can handle her better than Jim.”

  Linda tried to smile. “If Jim has any influence with the man upstairs, I wish he’d make the boat stop doing this.” She held on to Bob tightly, reluctant to let him go.

  “I imagine he’s already been asking just that.” Bob pulled on two pairs of jeans, two shirts, a ski parka, his wet suit and hat, and a bright orange life jacket, making him appear almost as round as he was tall.

  When he relieved Jim at the wheel, the night sky was oddly clearing, with a nearly full moon in teasing contrast to the rising winds that screamed about him. Jim pointed to the wind indicator. The needle hovered near 30 mph, with gusting up to 35 mph, just short of gale force.

  “I’ll stay on until this thing dies down a little,” yelled Bob above the wind. He tied himself into the safety harness. “Get some rest and relieve me tomorrow morning.”

  Jim looked surprised. He was holding on to a steel bar and his face streamed salt water from the waves that smashed into the cockpit. “Can you take her that long?” he cried, though Bob was but a foot away.

  “Just stay near the radios in case we need help.”

  Nodding, Jim made his way down the hatch steps. Bob screamed after him, “And if I holler like this, come running! Hear?”

  At ten past nine, the wind indicator needle jumped to an astonishing 60 mph, and the waves became mountains.

  Quickly Bob determined there were two wave systems spawned by the freak storm. The lesser, from the northwest, rolled forty-foot swells against the trimaran, Bob estimating their height at more than twice the eighteen-foot width of the boat as she climbed their sides. The greater system, directly from the north, hurled waves up to fifty feet—as tall as a six-story building
, with a vicious fifteen-foot chop of churning white water frosting. Acting in concert, the two wave systems squeezed the Triton in a crushing vise.

  It became Bob’s plan to ride first the forty-foot swell from the northwest, then turn and try to ascend the fifty-foot swell from the north. The principal peril to this course was the enormous greater wave, exploding with its violent white water chop, smashing the Triton and drenching her with the angry froth. Each time Bob encountered one of the great waves, the cockpit filled to his chest, the churning water almost becoming a living monster, draining out in great sucking, whooshing noises, then returning in moments and swirling like flood tide about the wheel.

  But the Triton held. Shuddering, making humanesque groans and cries as she fought the storm, the now tiny speck on the canvas of the tempest fairly flew. Bob had never felt a sailboat go so fast, rocketing on the winds across suddenly created lakes of foam, lakes a thousand yards across that were born and lived and died in seconds, over and over again in a pageant that seemed to have no end.

  But within an hour, the storm eased fractionally, the wind indicator steadying at near 40 mph, frightening under normal conditions, somehow a blessing after what had already passed. The Triton still burst downwind, and, to Bob’s anguish, progressed farther and farther away from land. By midnight, his calculated guess was that the boat was at least ten miles further out into the Pacific than when the storm had begun, although he had no idea at all how far south the Triton had gone. The distance water log had became tangled and useless in the drag anchor lines, but without the lines Bob would have had no control at all. He would have been driving a truck down a mountain road with no brakes.

  All night long the storm shrieked, the waves pounding, the white caps chopping and spewing and settling into great patches of foam that became objects of hypnotic beauty. As long as Bob held the Triton to a compass reading between 165 degrees true, and 185 true, as long as he stayed within that slender 20-degree variation, the Triton seemed capable of riding out the weather. Often during the long night, Bob blessed Jim’s craftsmanship and the strong boat he had built with his own hands.