Lost!

by Thomas Thompson

  “It’s dangerous,” said Jim.

  “Well, I’ve got to try,” said Bob. “We need water to make milk for Linda.” Jim nodded understandingly, though he did not hide his skepticism over the mission.

  Before they went to sleep on this disappointing night, Jim prayed again. And this prayer, the third in a series, was the climactic act of a drama whose theme was now clear to Bob.

  “Dear Jesus,” Jim began, “we come to You tonight with understanding in our hearts. We know now that one of us on board is not ready for Your coming.…”

  At this Bob tensed, raising his head to watch Jim, praying in the darkness two feet from him.

  “One of us on board has not given his heart to You,” the prayer continued. “One of us on board has not consecrated his life to You. And we know that when that person does these things, when he accepts Your power, dear Jesus, when he gives You his heart, then You will rescue us …”

  There was to be more, but Bob cut in sharply.

  “I don’t appreciate that prayer, Jim.” His voice was cold.

  “I’m not finished, Bob.”

  “I said I don’t like what you just prayed. It isn’t true.”

  Unclasping his hands, opening his eyes, Jim transferred his attention from God to his brother-in-law. “I believe what I pray, Bob,” he said, speaking with an odd tenderness, as if bending down to instruct a child. “I believe that God brought the storm, that God’s hand caused us to capsize, that God is making us suffer, that God will reach down and rescue us when we are all ready. And not until then.”

  The racing began again in Bob’s head. He hardly knew where to begin in attempting to knock down Jim’s beliefs. “That’s nonsense, Jim, and you know it. That storm was probably hundreds of miles across. Maybe other boats capsized, maybe other people drowned. Do you really believe God caused that great storm just to punish me because I stopped going to church ten years ago?”

  Jim responded by shaking his head in sadness, as if thwarted by a man who could not accept the truth.

  “God didn’t capsize your boat, Jim,” Bob continued. “You did. I kept her sailing twelve hours, and fifteen minutes after you took the wheel, we were upside down. Where’s the explanation for that?”

  “I’ve said all I need to say, Bob. Just think on it. When Wilma and I planned this trip, we both prayed that somehow, something would happen that would bring you back to where you belong.”

  “And this is it?” cried Bob. “How can you sit there and even think such things, much less pray them out loud? Did God cause those sores on Linda’s legs? If so, why is He picking on her? She’s the only truly good person I ever knew.”

  Linda put her hand out to calm her husband. “Bob, please,” she murmured gently. “Let’s sleep.”

  He shook her touch away. One more thing remained to be said, and he would say it so coldly that Jim could not possibly misconstrue its meaning. “I don’t want to hear that prayer again, Jim,” he said. “I can’t stop you from praying to yourself, but I warn you—Don’t say it out loud. I won’t have it. Understand me, Jim?”

  Jim turned on his side and faced the wall.

  None of them slept well that night.

  The sun held another day and the sea calmed, yet when Bob dived in the next morning, July 19, to search the outriggers for water, the shock and cold sent pricks of pain through his body. With cramps knotting first his toes, then the balls of his feet, finally his legs, Bob swam hurriedly under the hull to the starboard outrigger, fifteen feet away. Twenty gallons of water had been stored there on the day the Triton left Tacoma. Bob suspected the hatch would be open, just as the two hatches in the main hull had been torn away in the capsizing. But as he approached the outrigger, he could see through the startlingly clear blue-green sea that it would not be necessary to find the hatch. A large jagged hole was ripped in the outrigger’s belly, probably caused by a chunk of the mainmast when it splintered and fell that stormy morning.

  He hoped for an air pocket in the outrigger, not trusting his skills as an underwater swimmer. But there was no air. His breath quickly going, his legs so numb that they would not kick, Bob hurriedly searched the storage quarters. He discovered, to his despair, that the water containers were gone.

  But on his way back out the jagged hole, Bob’s foot brushed against an object, and when he grabbed for it, his hand found Jim’s scuba diving suit and a bag of gear that had somehow found shelter in the outrigger. Bob grabbed them and burst to the surface.

  Wearily he paddled to the main hull where Jim was standing. Bob held up the discovery and Jim was elated.

  “No water,” gasped Bob, gulping the fresh morning air. Jim seemed unconcerned at the disappointing news, so pleased was he to get immediately into his wet suit, mask, and fins. Quickly he dropped into the sea, as eager as a man on a yachting holiday.

  When he had the energy to stand, Bob watched Jim prowl the waters, just beneath the surface. When he came up, Jim was grinning. It was the happiest Bob had seen him since the day they set sail.

  Bob cupped his hands and called out to Jim. “Check the other outrigger as long as you’re down there,” he said. “Maybe there’s water in that one.”

  Jim shook his head negatively. He pulled off his mask. “There’s no water, Bob,” he said. “It won’t do any good to look. I told you how I feel about interfering with the Lord’s will.”

  “God helps those who help themselves, dammit! Now go and look. I found your scuba outfit. Return the favor.” It was more of an order than a request.

  Jim paddled to the port outrigger and peered through the open hatch. He called back to Bob, “Nope. Nothing.”

  “Go on in if you can,” cried Bob. “You can’t see all the way forward. I remember wedging the anchor against the water jugs to keep them from sliding around.” A few hours after departure from Tacoma, Bob had rearranged the water containers because the Triton seemed slightly off balance.

  Emerging a few minutes later, Jim held up a one-gallon Purex jar which Bob knew contained fresh water. No cask of Spanish gold pieces ever gleamed so brightly. “Just where you said it was!” shouted Jim, happy over the discovery.

  “Only one?”

  “More!” said Jim, diving under again.

  Within half an hour, thirteen one-gallon jugs of fresh water were transferred from the port outrigger to the main hull. Not all of them were full as there had been leakage and evaporation. Bob touched each with awe.

  When Jim emerged with the last one, Bob leaned down to the water’s edge. “Did you see anything else we might use in there?”

  Jim shook his head. “Nothing. Everything washed out except the water jugs and that anchor.”

  “The anchor? Is it secure?”

  “It’s not going anywhere. Why?”

  Bob shrugged. “I dunno. We might find some use for it.”

  Within three weeks, Bob would find a use, and it would be unbearably poignant.

  (9)

  Discovery of the water both cheered the three and eased the crackling tension between Bob and Jim. That the master of the Triton found the containers proved, at least to him, the validity of his communication line with God and fulfillment of his belief that his God would provide. And Bob cared little who received credit for the water, as long as it had been found. He did thank Jim, praising his courage for staying under the sea so long to find and bring up the containers.

  All celebrated with a greedy, lip-smacking cupful. Then Bob set about concocting a drink for Linda—water, powdered milk, a raw egg, vanilla extract, and a drop of peppermint. Mixing it all together in a plastic juice container, he presented her his “milk shake extraordinaire” with all the panache of a sommelier offering a vintage wine. He watched encouragingly as Linda got a few swallows down. Within an hour, she had taken the whole cup and there was new vibrancy in her voice and color in her cheeks. “Hey, you guys, you know what?” she said. “I feel much better.”

  After dinner, which consisted for the men of a few
teaspoons of chop suey mix, Bob picked up a piece of plywood and began to paint another message, which he would throw into the sea the next morning. As he painted the date, “July 19, 1973,” he lifted his brush and paused. The light was almost gone from the long summer day and the white letters gleamed in encroaching dusk. “Nine days,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. But Linda heard him.

  “They haven’t given up on us, have they?” she whispered. Jim was topside using the last light to read from his Adventist book, and Linda did not want to rouse him and cause another eruption.

  Bob reassured her quickly. “By now they’ve got an alert to the Coast Guard and the civilian fleet and every airplane owner who flies anywhere in the vicinity.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m sure. They’ll find us. Just think what tales you’ll be able to tell the first-grade kiddies this fall. Yours will be the all-time classic ‘What I Did Last Summer.’”

  Bob put his arms about her lightly, careful to avoid her painful sores. Before dinner he had bathed her thighs and legs in the cool fresh water, then put a new application of penicillin salve on the sores. He hoped the sea would remain calm, so that waves would not kick up inside their quarters and splash salt water onto her bed and irritate her further. But something else was also troubling him.

  “Honey,” he said, “you don’t believe I’m responsible for what’s happened to us, do you?”

  Linda shook her head. “I wanted to come. We each made our decisions. You didn’t force me.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean the capsizing and our not being rescued yet. You don’t … you don’t believe what Jim’s been praying, do you?”

  She smiled and touched his face. “Of course not. I’m not in the same league with you fellows when it comes to theology. The best I can do is ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ and ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.’”

  “Then use them, if they make you feel better. I just don’t want Jim to upset you with those weird prayers of his.”

  “He doesn’t,” she said, “because I don’t let him. Don’t be so defensive with Jim. If he gets on your nerves, don’t say anything. Jim can’t help it. He’s concerned, he’s nervous, he’s alone, really—except for his beliefs. They help him, just like you help me.”

  In the near darkness, Bob smiled to himself. Linda should have been a diplomat. “I’m not trying to change him,” he said. “I just want to keep things as peaceful as possible between us until we’re rescued. If he and I are at each other’s throats all the time, we’ll be too tired to wave at a plane when it comes.”

  Above them, Jim watched the last drops of the sunlight meld with the blue-black sea, and he reluctantly closed his book. For a time he sat in the darkness, listening to the waves. Then he descended through the hole and dropped onto his bed. This was the hour when their spirits ebbed; they dreaded the darkness. The hours of midnight endured longer than the Montana winter. Bob tried not to look at his watch during the night, for it was maddening to wake up and feel dawn to be near, only to discover that but five minutes had passed since his last look at the hour.

  “I tied the water jug here,” said Jim, his voice breaking the quiet. Twice already this day he had showed the others where the container was lashed by ropes to a place between their beds. But he seemed anxious that each realize where the water supply was kept. It had been agreed that, starting immediately, the daily ration of water would be one cupful per person. This was Bob’s idea, and although Jim grumbled that he felt it unnecessary to ration God’s generosity, he went along.

  It was further agreed that the water jug should be in full view at all times and that no one would take even the slightest sip without informing the others. If one woke up desperate for water during the night, he or she was expected to reveal the consumption at morning. The water level in the jug would become as familiar to each as their profiles.

  Denial is an all too human characteristic, one both harmful and useful, whether employed by a man condemned to terminal disease who reassures himself that it simply cannot happen to him, or seized by the families of three people missing at sea who reassure themselves that the worst has not occurred. Because it is always easier to seek alternatives to the truth, more than a week went by after the Triton capsized in the violent storm before someone on land grew worried enough to sound an alarm.

  While the Triton’s three passengers scratched out each day and night in the belief that rescue was imminent, the astonishing truth was that no one even began to look for them until July 22, the twelfth day of their ordeal. The zigzagging plane and its companion ship, it would turn out, were not in search of the trimaran, despite what Bob and Linda and Jim believed. The pair was engaged only in summer naval maneuvers. Nor had a plane been dispatched the morning of July 11 in the hours after the capsizing. Either Jim had misunderstood the Coast Guard in his weak and static-filled radiophone patch, or, in his state of shock and fear, he had imagined the whole thing.

  Certainly one of the first people to have become worried should have been Wes Parker, the radio liaison in Auburn, who had helped Jim plan the Triton’s voyage and to whom Jim spoke in Morse code each day up to and including the morning of the capsizing. Three days went by after July 11 with nothing on his radio but silence during the hour when Jim normally contacted him, and Parker did not notify the Coast Guard. Nor did he grow concerned, or at least own up to any concern. Instead, he rang up Wilma Fisher, Jim’s wife, and mentioned rather casually that the Triton was out of contact. What did that mean? asked Wilma. Not much, suggested Parker. He offered a string of “perhapses.” Perhaps the radio had broken down. Perhaps Jim, whom Parker described as a “rank novice” at communications, was unable to tune the set properly to reach him anymore. Or, most likely of the perhapses, the winds were probably blowing so fairly in their sails that the Triton was bent on making record progress to Los Angeles, with no time allowed for radio reports.

  Wilma accepted this. Her faith in God was as unshakable as her husband’s, and she believed that a divine hand was sharing the wheel with Jim and Bob. Moreover, she believed in the strength of her husband’s craftsmanship and her brother Bob’s sailing ability. It was irksome not to hear from the boys, but she never thought of calling the Coast Guard to say that her husband and his two passengers were suddenly mute somewhere on the high seas.

  Because most members of Bob and Jim’s respective families were Seventh Day Adventists, their faith was like Wilma’s. God would get the Triton to Costa Rica because it was His design.

  Linda’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, were on vacation during this week and when they returned on July 15, no one seemed to know anything about their daughter and her sailing mates. By the schedule that Linda had left for her mother to follow, the boat should have been docked in Los Angeles by now. But the telephone had not rung with Linda’s cheerful voice. Nor did any of Bob’s people know anything. The Elliotts’ other daughter, Judy, was not overly concerned at the silence. Perhaps, she suggested, the weather had been so calm and windless that it was taking longer than expected to reach Los Angeles.

  “I’m very worried,” fretted Mrs. Elliott. “Can’t we do something?” Her husband, a veteran navy man, counseled his wife not to get upset. She was often too emotional over imagined matters. Their daughter and son-in-law were young, adventurous, and healthy. They were on holiday. But Joe Elliott found himself lying awake at night in the darkness, waiting for the telephone to ring.

  Finally, in Los Angeles, someone did something besides concoct mental palliatives. Bob’s sister, Carol Lilley, wife of a radiologist, grew concerned when the Triton did not dock at Marina Del Rey. The boat was scheduled to arrive about July 14, give or take a day or two, and Bob had promised to call the moment they dropped anchor. The plan was that the Lilleys would drive immediately to the marina and welcome the voyagers. If they were weary and wanted to rest a day, the Lilleys were ready to put them up in their new and spacious Pasadena home before the Triton set sail again on
its second leg, from Los Angeles to Mexico. The Lilleys, a young and athletic couple, were anxious to hear the tales of the sea.

  When the Triton worrisomely was late, Carol Lilley made several calls to the harbor master at Marina Del Rey and, getting increasingly brusque responses to her inquiries, finally telephoned the Coast Guard in Long Beach at 5:40 in the afternoon on July 18. The Triton was long overdue, she said. Had the boat been heard from? Had it encountered any difficulties? Could the Coast Guard find out if, perhaps, she had put into harbor somewhere along the coast for repair?

  The major Coast Guard stations in the port cities of America are accustomed to such calls from an affluent society enchanted with boats, able to afford them, but not overly skilled in maneuvering them. Every Sunday night of the year, Coast Guard telephones start ringing with worried wives concerned about overdue husbands. More often than not, the missing craft is at that very moment sitting lost in a fog bank not far from shore, or run embarrassingly aground on a lonely stretch of beach or reef. By noon most Mondays, the missing are normally found and sent home with a mild lecture from the Coast Guard about the need to take a refresher course in boating and safety.

  The Long Beach office bucked the Triton request up to San Francisco, where that district’s Search and Rescue Unit routinely began a long-established drill. First, Wilma Fisher was located at a relative’s home and interrogated to determine the boat’s exact size, coloring, navigational equipment, and course. With that information, each harbor from Cape Mendocino in northern California all the way down to Los Angeles was contacted by telephone—hundreds of them, from the great marinas choked with yachts to remote restaurants with room for one or two speedboats to tie alongside. In the majority of cases, the Coast Guard has come to learn, missing boats are found at an unscheduled harbor.

  At the same time, attempts were made to raise the Triton by radio. A distress report was broadcast up and down the California coast to all boats possessing marine radios, telling each to be on the lookout for the Triton, or, if it were seen, to notify the Coast Guard. The public information office released a brief news story saying that a search was under way. All of this took three days, and not until July 22 did a Coast Guard unit actually set out on the ocean to look.