Lost!

by Thomas Thompson

  “Please, baby, let me hold you,” he said gently, trying to touch the shoulder where so often his head had rested. Linda recoiled in disgust, her shrieks intensifying.

  “I know what you want,” she shouted, “you want to kill us. I won’t let you kill us.”

  “Us?” said Jim, puzzled.

  But Bob understood. He looked at his young wife, he saw the way she pressed her hands against her stomach, and he knew, in an instant of revelation, that Linda was pregnant. They had not wanted children so early in their marriage; certainly pregnancy was an accident. Linda’s seasickness and her revulsion at the kerosine fumes had been hints and clues, but he had been unwilling, or unable, to recognize them. Now, in the midst of a great storm, clinging to an overturned boat, her body cold and wet and shaking, her mind as turbulent as the sea, she unknowingly betrayed the secret. This time when Bob moved to her, trying to contain his own tears, she beat her fists against his chest. But he accepted her incoherent anger, locking himself forcibly about her for more than an hour, not caring about the screams that rained on his ears. Once, he tried to quiet her by placing a jelly bean from his pocket in her mouth, thinking its sweetness would distract her. But she seemed unfamiliar with food. The candy rolled about uneaten in her mouth, and Bob fished it out, afraid she would choke.

  Finally, by mid-afternoon, when Bob realized that he could no longer hold her with his deadening arms, that he might lose her to the sea, he found more rope and tied her securely to the steel railing.

  Thus did they endure the last hours of daylight that July 11, the woman on the edge of madness, the husband in the torture of helplessness, the zealot in the passion of prayer. By five, the winds eased, pacifying the sea to the extent that the waves no longer beat against them with the familiar shock. One last time Bob called out to Jim, as he had done so often this day, “Is the plane coming?”

  But Jim, his trembling hands locked in prayer, did not respond. He either could not, or would not, answer.

  “I’m so cold, Bob.” Linda’s voice was normal.

  He turned and saw that she was free from whatever had been tormenting her. Her face was composed, her eyes no longer beat like newly caged birds.

  “Poor baby, you blacked out on us,” said Bob kindly.

  “I don’t remember a thing,” said Linda. “What time is it?”

  “A little after five,” answered Jim, happy at her recovery, but quickly returning his eyes to the lusterless skies. There had not yet been a sign of the plane, no sound save that of the wind.

  “I only remember us turning over, then swimming out. After that …” Linda shook her head in bewilderment.

  “It’s okay,” said Bob. “I was holding you.” Bob drew her inside his wet jacket, hoping it would block the wind’s chill.

  “Is the plane still coming?” asked Linda, suddenly full of questions.

  Bob shrugged noncommittally. He knew there would be no plane today. Search missions did not waste time looking at the sea in twilight and darkness. But he did not say this, fearful of setting her off again. “I’ve been thinking,” said Bob instead, “we’d better figure out some way to get through the night. If that storm comes up again, we’ll have a hard time hanging on here.”

  He tapped his foot against the arching bottom of the Triton, riding but a foot or so above the waves. “What do you suppose it’s like under here?” he said.

  Jim looked down at where Bob was tapping. Before 9:18 this morning, it had been the floor of the main hull of his trimaran. Almost simultaneously the possibility occurred to the men that perhaps the hull was not completely filled with water. Maybe an air pocket existed, with room enough for them at least to get some shelter for the night. But the sea still felt shockingly cold and neither man had the will to plunge back in and swim underneath to explore the hull.

  “Why couldn’t we cut a hole?” said Jim, thinking out loud.

  “Wouldn’t we sink?” asked Linda. A good question.

  Jim shook his head quickly. The Triton was well lined with flotation material. “She won’t sink. If she’s lasted this long, she won’t sink.”

  The memory of the lost pocketknife came back to Bob and he cursed his clumsiness.

  Seeing a piece of wood bobbing near the railing, Bob grabbed it and tried in vain to scratch through the bottom. As Jim watched, he had a sudden inspiration. He removed the metal buckle from his life jacket and pried it apart. With the patience of a condemned man sawing a prison bar, Jim pushed the buckle back and forth against the boat on which he had spent two years of his life. The most important business in his world at this moment was to chew a hole in its upturned bowels.

  Within minutes, he had created a hole directly in the center of the overturned hull, an entrance large enough for him to widen with his hands, tearing his flesh as he worked and coloring the passage with drops of blood. But it was big enough to squeeze through and within seconds, from below, came his exultant shout, “Air! At least a foot and a half of air pocket! Come on down.”

  Wriggling his chunky body through first, Bob fell into cold black water up to his shoulders. He held up his arms to aid Linda into the darkness. For a moment all three stood uneasily in the upside-down cabin, their feet resting on what had been the ceiling of their living quarters. They could feel pieces of wood and other flotsam bump against them in the water. Now that they were sheltered, they were hungry and ready for sleep, but there was no time for anything but insuring survival. They could not stand in the water all night; who knew but it might rise and drown them. Failing that, they could die from the cold and the terrible wetness. The men sought for some way to raise themselves above the water line and stay there, hoping the air pocket would remain until morning.

  Bob found a cupboard door floating near him and he carried it to the narrow end of the hull, where the sides came together in a V. There he wedged it in place, strong enough to support one person. He lifted Linda onto the platform, big enough for her to crouch in a fetal position, her face only inches from the boards above her. It seemed to her like a very small cave.

  Then the men found smaller planks to wedge against the walls, jamming their bodies with backs against one wall, feet against the other. In this manner, they were able to keep the upper parts of their torsos out of the water. Something brushed against Bob and he reached down for it, almost fearfully. A can of root beer!

  “Here’s dinner,” he said, pulling the snap tab and passing it around. Each drank carefully, holding the liquid in their mouths, savoring the taste, trying to wash away the taste of salt. When it was gone, and there was nothing left to do but listen to the waves, rising again, whooshing in and out of the chamber like the pressure noises of an iron lung, Jim asked if he could pray.

  “I don’t mind,” said Bob, for he would take anything over the silence.

  In the darkness, Jim closed his eyes and his voice rang out. “Dear Jesus,” he prayed, “please hear me in our hour of need. I do not always understand Your ways and Your will, but I always accept them. I realize there is a reason for our trouble, and I hope we are fit to bear it. If You have it in Your design to rescue us, then we are ready. We want to be rescued, Jesus.…” He prayed on, asking blessings for his wife and children and the others’ families, his voice continuing with that curious power. How, wondered Bob, did he still possess it after the ordeal of the last twenty-four hours?

  When the prayer was done, Jim began singing, softly at first, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” But by the time he was finished, his voice ringing out in the resonant place, he no longer sang alone. Bob and Linda joined in, both surprised that they remembered the words. Then they all sang the “Doxology” and sang it a second time, for there was courage contained therein.

  Later, when they said goodnight, when they began their attempts at sleep, sliding in and out of consciousness, each frightened at the blackness and the water that surrounded them, Linda screamed.

  Instantly Bob came to, at first confusing her cry with the sound of a p
lane. But he called out comfort to her. She quieted. She slept only eight feet away from him, but he did not have the strength left to swim to her.

  After midnight, Jim’s board gave way and he fell into the water. But he was too weary to put it back. Standing in the sea for the rest of the dark hours, he shivered and dozed and talked to his God.

  (6)

  The next morning, a gray dawn that let only a dim light through the jagged hole into the watery quarters where the three had slept, Jim climbed out and looked for rescue. But neither God nor anyone else had dispatched aid during the night. Nothing but the sea met his searching eyes, a sea still menacing with eight-foot swells and frothy white chops.

  Below, Bob called out to Linda in an attempt to cheer her, but she seemed remarkably chipper after her night on the plywood wedge. Half-walking, half-swimming, Bob worked his way to his wife and they embraced awkwardly. A little backache was her only complaint, she said, but not nearly so severe as the soreness after her first night camping out in a sleeping bag. “I love you,” she said, “but you do get me to do the darndest things.” They laughed and kissed.

  Climbing down through the hole, Jim dropped into the water and joined them. “Anything?” asked Bob.

  Jim shook his head in disappointment.

  “Well, then, let’s look around,” suggested Bob, setting forth in a modest breast stroke. He was not an excellent swimmer.

  “I’ve already checked out the radios,” said Jim gloomily. “They’re ruined.” Because the communications equipment had been set up on a high shelf, the radios were now totally submerged, their innards soaked, corroded, and forever useless.

  Both men began to move cautiously about the cabin, a space roughly twenty feet long and eight feet wide, all of it filled with seawater except the air pocket, which seemed to be constant, extending approximately eighteen inches from the water level to what was now the ceiling.

  Jim felt a cupboard door with his feet, found it still shut, dived down quickly to open it. He came up with a prize—the Triton’s bag of tools. Taking them to Linda’s bed, he placed them out to dry—a hammer, pliers, drill, saw, nails, bolts, and screws.

  Elated, Jim took the saw and began smoothing out the edges of the jagged hole he had cut in the hull as exit to the outside world above them, making it some two feet square.

  While he worked, Linda talked privately with Bob. Her question was one that Bob had considered most of the night—where were they? The night the storm broke, he remembered, the Triton had been approximately 40 miles off the coast of northern California, near Cape Mendocino. During the twelve hours he fought the storm, holding the compass reading at 165 or slightly above, the Triton had made little progress, probably no more than thirty miles south, perhaps fifteen miles farther west from shore. Calculating rapidly in his head, Bob made a guess. “I’d estimate—and it’s just a guess—that we’re about a hundred miles above San Francisco, maybe forty, fifty miles offshore,” he said.

  Linda absorbed the reading. “There’ll be ships, won’t there?” she wondered. “I mean, even if the plane doesn’t come, ships pass through here all the time. We saw them constantly!” In the Triton’s nine days at sea before she turned over, more than a score of tankers and cargo ships had been in view. Only now, in their ordeal, were they suddenly alone.

  “Linda,” began Bob, carefully, haltingly, for he did not want to alarm her, “I don’t think we should count on that Coast Guard plane. Jim is kind of vague about it. Maybe he heard them wrong. He was a little shell-shocked by the storm.”

  She nodded in agreement. Her courage satisfied him.

  “So, I think we’d better spend today rigging up some way to live inside here, and conserve our energy the best we can. I feel sure somebody will pick us up soon. Wes Parker has probably sounded some sort of alarm. Jim told him yesterday we were in a storm, and when we don’t check in with him today, he’s bound to notify the authorities.”

  “They’ll come,” said Linda with confidence. “I mean, it’s not like we’re out in the middle of the ocean. I’ll bet if it cleared up, we could probably see California.”

  Bob smiled, but he could not risk telling Linda what he really believed, that the winds were shoving them farther and farther away from shore. The Triton could be more than fifty miles from land as they spoke. Besides, something else was on his mind.

  “Honey, why didn’t you tell me about the baby?” he asked gently.

  Linda shrugged. “Because,” she said coyly, “I was afraid you wouldn’t want me to come.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Since around the end of May, first of June. I’m barely pregnant.”

  Quickly Bob began counting the months on his fingers. Linda stopped him. “February!” she said happily, concluding the subject.

  Concern for Linda’s condition, and the practical need for a place to get out of the water, gave Bob an idea. He had stood looking at the water-filled room and attempting to devise a way to keep three people permanently above the water line. Every few moments a wave would rush in through one open hatch and out the other, and the water level raised and dipped. Sometimes there was as much as three feet of air space, other times it narrowed to eighteen inches. But there always seemed to be that constant air pocket where the sea did not reach.

  Bob rummaged among the tools Jim had found and pulled out the hand drill. Testing it, pleased that it still worked, Bob commenced to drill holes in one side of the hull, placing them six inches apart in a horizontal line. When he had drilled roughly twelve feet of holes on one side, he swam to a center beam and did the same. Then he took the ropes that had been used for the drag anchors during the storm and began weaving a latticework of the ropes, creating a hammock just above the water line. By working the half-inch-thick rope through the holes, back and forth, from the holes in the wall to the holes in the center brace, Bob rigged a sturdy perch, strong enough for them all.

  But there remained a serious drawback. The ropes would cut into their bodies and make sleep troublesome, if not impossible. Something had to be found to soften the ropes. Bob snapped his fingers in inspiration! Ducking under the water and swimming through the curtained opening into what had been his and Linda’s bedroom, surprising a school of hundreds of tiny silverfish in his way, Bob was happy to find their double mattress—upside down, water-logged, but, miraculously, still there.

  All he would need to do now was throw a few boards down onto the rope platform, and atop them place the mattress, sawn into a pair of long, narrow strips. Jim’s place on the ropes would be approximately five feet long and two feet wide. Bob and Linda would have to share a strip of mattress about six feet long and little more than a foot and a half wide. They would all lie in one long line along the twelve feet of rigging, but Bob left a few inches between the two mattresses as a sort of dividing line between Jim and the two of them.

  Jim eyed the handiwork with a little skepticism. “Will that hold all three of us?” he asked.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” said Bob, climbing onto his mattress, positioning Linda beside him. There was only room enough for them to lie facing one another in a lover’s embrace. The rope groaned a little, but held.

  When Jim got onto his bed, the platform sagged perilously toward the water, but it stopped just short of touching. The water-toughened ropes seemed dependable. Bob and Linda decided to stretch out with their feet pointed toward the stern. Jim’s feet faced the other way—toward the bow—and their heads were almost touching. But because the two men did not have to face each other, except when it was desired, an imaginary frontier of privacy was established along the rope shelf.

  An immediate surge of claustrophobia enveloped all three, their heads being but an inch or two from the ceiling, and the water lapping at their mattresses, but these conditions could be tolerated. Jim’s head was positioned nearer the exit hole they had cut, and only he could catch full light and fresh air.

  As Bob worked that day—constructing
the platform beds took most of the daylight hours—Jim spent his time exploring the cabin, looking for food and supplies, like a man sadly rummaging through his flooded home while the water still filled it. The search became a kind of grim treasure hunt, a game that relieved the tension and the waiting. Taking deep breaths, submerging, feeling around the cupboards and shelves, Jim would burst out of the water sputtering, “Hey, a jar of peanut butter!” or, “Just what we needed, vanilla extract!” with each discovery, Linda applauded and cheered from her thin plywood perch, where she lay watching Bob create the rope beds. He had forbidden her to join the men in their watery work. Her task was to listen for the Coast Guard plane, although Bob now privately doubted if one would come.

  Once, during the day, Bob noticed a gallon metal container of rice bobbing in the quarters, trapped against a corner. Happily he swam to fetch it, then threw it over to Jim to store along with the other food he had found. Jim had created a makeshift shelf at the end of what was becoming his bed. But less than a quarter of an hour later, Bob saw the same metal container float past him again, this time out of reach, sucked out of the boat by a departing wave. He grabbed at it, but missed.

  “We just lost the rice, Jim!” he called out testily. “Where are you putting the stuff?”

  Jim apologized, but Bob noted once more that curious hollowness to his words, not unlike the way he had spoken of the Coast Guard and the plane supposedly coming for them. For one absurd moment, Bob imagined that Jim wanted to lose the rice. But that idea was foolish and Bob dismissed it.

  A few moments later, Bob spied two balls of Gouda cheese, retrieved them from the water, and tossed them to Jim. He caught them this time; Bob would remember later that Jim definitely caught the cheese balls. Presumably he stored them on his food shelf.

  Just before dark, Bob made a major find—the water distillation kit. Before departure at Tacoma, Jim had purchased the kit at a marine store. He had demonstrated it to Bob and Linda, pointing out that the chances of using it were remote. Developed by the U. S. Navy, the kit was simple to operate. A large balloon could be inflated by mouth up to six feet across, set down on the sea, and tied to the boat. It made use of the sun to separate out the salt and produce fresh, drinkable water. The kit had no battery, and no parts had been damaged in the capsizing. It would be invaluable if rescue did not reach the Triton soon. The twenty-gallon supply of water in the main tank was now lost, and the forty gallons stored in the outriggers were probably washed out as well.