Lost!

by Thomas Thompson

  As usually happens when a government agency asks its citizenry to be on the lookout for something, numerous leads and false reports were turned in. One woman insisted that the Triton had run aground near Santa Barbara and its crew was sunbathing on the beach. Another well-meaning sharp eye claimed to have seen the Triton tied up to a luxurious restaurant in Sausalito, where its owner was reported to be buying gin and tonics for the bar crowd and telling of his exploits. All such nonsense had to be checked out.

  On the evening of July 21, all of the available information was assembled by the Search and Rescue Unit in its skyscraper office on the ninth floor of a building in the financial district of San Francisco. A computer in Washington had digested the Triton’s description, her last known position, and weather reports, and had coughed up its mechanical notion of where the boat could be found. For several hours, the Coast Guard men studied the charts, reports, and computer readouts, and examined the room-sized map of the Pacific Ocean that dominates their command central.

  The decision was to launch a major search at dawn the next morning.

  A C-130 four-engine propeller plane took off from San Francisco at sunrise and spent all the daylight hours flying low over a circle of sea with a thirty-mile radius near where Jim had last reported the Triton just before it capsized. That it was now twelve days after that radiotelephone patch made it seem unlikely that the craft would be in the same area—unless it had sunk and left debris on the surface.

  When the plane returned with a negative report, the search was widened. Another C-130 went up as well—now there were two planes equipped with ten men trained to scan the ocean with the naked eye, not trusting binoculars. The searchers work only fifteen-minute shifts before relief, because the eye grows weary when it focuses on nothing but the monotonous sea. The Air Force contributed two more planes, which joined three Coast Guard helicopters and the cutters Resolute and Comanche. More than six hundred men in six ships and thirty-four aircraft spent the next three days searching for the Triton in an ever-widening swath, growing from the original thirty miles to more than 200,000 square miles, extending from the Oregon border to Punio San Antonio, Mexico, 180 miles south of the border. The water was scanned from the shore to four hundred miles out. At a cost of $208,000, the search was one of the Coast Guard’s most massive of the year. Not more than six or eight times a year does it employ this many men and craft, and their record for finding the lost is excellent.

  On the peak days of the search, July 24, 25, and 26, the capsized trimaran was drifting almost due west in a straight line from San Francisco, between 100 and 150 miles from shore. But the inhabitants of the Triton saw no planes or ships during these days, nor did any planes or ships see them. Riding only eighteen inches above the waves, she easily eluded the hundreds of eyes tracking her from the sea and sky.

  On the evening of July 27, convinced that the territory had been checked and rechecked, that no further expense was warranted, the Coast Guard’s public relations office issued a terse statement to the media which had paid the story but slight attention anyway in a summer crowded with Watergate and attendant scandal.

  SAN FRANCISCO, JULY 27, 1973

  An extensive four-day search for the missing sailboat Triton, from Tacoma, was suspended today at dark. The search, which covered approximately 200,000 square miles, was a combined effort by the U.S. Coast Guard, Air Force, and Navy.

  Last contact with the missing vessel and its crew of James Fisher, owner and operator from Auburn, Wash., and Robert and Linda Tininenko, of Longview, Wash., was made on July 11. This contact was by Citizen Band Radio with Carol Lilley of Los Angeles and indicated that the vessel was 60–80 miles off Point Arena, Calif. and in no distress or need of assistance.

  The release contained two major errors of fact and one omission that, much later on, would become enmeshed in contradictions, excuses, and backpedaling. The Triton’s last radio contact was made not to Carol Lilley in Los Angeles, but to the Coast Guard itself, via the telephone patch by the San Carlos ham operator, N. C. DeWolfe. And the Triton’s last position, as radioed by Jim on the fateful morning, was seventy-five miles southwest of Cape Mendocino, not Point Arena, which is thirty miles farther down the California coast.

  Most curious of all, the Coast Guard did not mention, either in its news release or in its numerous conversations with family members of the missing three young people, that Jim had reported on the morning of July 11 that his ship had been in a storm. Perhaps it was a case of the right hand not knowing what the left was doing. Perhaps there are so many hundreds of radio messages received by the Coast Guard from ships at sea that nobody remembered this one. Or, most probably, the Coast Guard assumed that the storm was not a factor in the boat’s disappearance, since Jim, after all, had used the phrase “We are becalmed.” Whatever, the families of Jim and Bob and Linda would not learn that there had been a storm until several weeks later. And then they would grow angry at the Coast Guard and contend, in retrospect, that if they had just been given this information, on the morning it was received, then they would have insisted a search begin immediately—not a dozen days later. But hindsight is as cheap as denial and neither has much value.

  A Coast Guard officer telephoned Wilma Fisher and informed her courteously that the official search was over.

  “What does that mean?” she asked a little fearfully.

  It means, said the man from the Coast Guard, that the government could no longer afford to keep 620 men, thirty-four airplanes, three helicopters, and six ships at sea looking for three people in a sailboat. But rest assured, he said, everyone would keep an eye peeled as they worked the ocean on other missions. And the civilian fleet would be reminded from time to time to keep a casual lookout.

  “What do you think?” Wilma asked then.

  “It means that we are unable to find them,” he said. “It means they are …”

  Wilma thanked him and hung up. She could fill in the blank. It means they are lost, and presumed dead.

  (10)

  Even as Wilma put down the telephone and went to find her Bible and begin yet another prayer, the three who lived within the overturned Triton had settled into an almost rigid daily routine. Gradually Bob led the others to accept his hour-by-hour schedule of activities, and now all were dependent upon it to get through the day. The routine was almost inviolate.

  At 7 A.M. Bob called out wake-up to Linda and Jim. The agreed-upon rule held that if a person was still sleepy and wanted another hour of rest, that was permitted. But rare was the morning when all were not anxious to be awake and rid of the loneliness of slumber. This first hour of the morning was spent in grooming and personal needs. Each washed and dried his face with a hand towel tied to a rope. The towels could be dipped into the salt water and raised and lowered at will. Then hair was combed, teeth were brushed (toothpaste was spit into the running sea beneath them). Linda put on lipstick, eye pencil, and makeup, then passed her mirror around to the others so the men could peer at their countenances. And all had to inspect carefully the other’s faces to determine if the eyes remained clear and shiny, if the skin tone was healthy. During this hour, they were not required to converse. Each could be alone in spirit, and Jim usually spent the time after grooming in silent prayer and meditation.

  Bob filled the remainder of his free hour doctoring Linda’s sores, which continued to improve with daily application of penicillin salve. Some of them were drying rapidly. Others still festered angrily. But her pain seemed less, and the bruises at her elbows and knees were lightening.

  At precisely 8 A.M., the breakfast hour began, and it was just that, a full hour, despite the meagerness of their menus. Linda sipped at the milk shakes that Bob continued to prepare, mixing them in the quart plastic container and keeping them cool in the sea beneath their bed. When she grew weary of the same drink at every meal, Bob alternated a cup of what he deemed to be “chicken cacciatore,” which was the chicken bouillon powder mixed with sea water. “A good cook would
put salt in the water, anyway,” he said encouragingly. Linda preferred the milk shakes.

  The men took a few bites of canned vegetables, or half an artificial hamburger, or a half-dozen English peas, sometimes taking ten minutes to savor, chew, and slowly swallow one solitary pea. If a person professed no appetite, the other two would gang up, forcing him or her to try and eat.

  Early in their survival, the realization had come to Bob that the easiest thing by far would be to starve to death. “It’s so strange,” he confessed to Linda one midnight in a whispered moment, “after a day or two of not eating very much, you lose all interest in food. Your stomach doesn’t even growl. You have to force yourself to eat. What you’d really like to do is just lie back and go to sleep.”

  Linda agreed. She did not tell him that she perhaps knew this better than he.

  From 9 A.M. to 10 came water dispersion hour. Each could draw from the gallon jug tied between their beds an amount ranging from the tiniest of sips up to a full cup, depending upon the person’s mood or need. Because Linda could sustain only liquids, she normally drank most of her full daily cup during this hour. Jim preferred to drink half his cup at this hour, the remainder at dinner. Bob usually stretched his intake throughout the day in sips, always announcing them out loud, saving perhaps an eighth of a cup for the middle of the night when he always awoke, mouth parched and dry.

  At 10 A.M., discussion hour began, sometimes enduring, on a lively day, until past noon. It was not always so. When Bob first introduced this period, the others wanted to know what the rules were.

  “I don’t know,” said Bob. “I suppose there are no rules. The point is, we should have a definite time of the day when we must talk to one another about specific topics. I can introduce a topic each day, but I don’t want to be the chairman, so you each should bring up something now and then to discuss.”

  But they already did talk, Jim pointed out.

  Only in fits and starts, said Bob, and with too much time dangling in silence. Only with the discipline of a formal subject could they sustain their interest and pass the time.

  But what would the subjects be? wondered Jim, never having been good or comfortable in social chitchat.

  “Anything!” said Bob a little testily. “People you’ve known, people you like, people you don’t like, places you’ve been, books you’ve read, ideas you want to explore, politics, hobbies, your kids, whatever.”

  “Why should we talk about these things?” asked Jim.

  “Because,” said Bob patiently, “it will get us through an hour every morning and because it will keep our minds occupied and because it might even be fun.”

  There was no mistaking the dubiousness on Jim’s face, but Linda urged him at least to try. “It won’t work unless we all participate,” she said. Jim said he would.

  At 11 A.M. came an hour of games—Twenty Questions or a mental version of Probe in which the player who was “it” kept a word in mind while the others tried to identify its letters, a difficult variation of the standard board and cardboard letters. At midday, there not being enough food for lunch, a free hour was scheduled during which the three could nap or remain resolutely silent. That became a privilege, silence, for Bob was almost despotic in enforcing the periods of the day. Unless someone wanted to sleep, he or she was expected to participate in each hour’s activity. Nor was faking of sleep permitted. It was easy to tell whether eyelids were only fluttering or firmly shut in sleep.

  During one free midday hour, Bob began fooling with the Boy Scout knife he had retrieved from the water. He had never carved before, but over the days that passed he became adept. The wedge of plywood on which Linda passed the first night became a deck of playing cards for cribbage. Realizing that Jim’s religion forbade anything related to gambling, Bob shrewdly eliminated the jack, queen, and king, carving instead one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen. This made it a game of numbers. Instead of suits, Bob colored the pieces of wood—one group white with the paint he had been using for his messages, one red with Linda’s reluctantly contributed lipstick, one the black of eyebrow pencil; the fourth remained natural.

  With the success of the cribbage board and playing cards, Bob moved on to a major effort—whittling a pair of dice and a board game he entitled Bump. This consisted of a Monopoly-like set of squares, over which markers were moved according to the throw of the dice. A series of penalties and handicaps was devised and the idea was to get to the last square, which Bob called Rescue.

  After the midday free hour, the afternoon was passed by repeats of the discussion and game periods, with another free hour just before the evening meal. Jim frequently took this time to go topside, paddling around in his scuba equipment when the sea was calm or sitting patiently watching the sky and the horizon for God’s rescue.

  One afternoon toward the end of July, Jim returned to his bed exhausted after his swim, his face drained of color. Bob remarked that swimming claimed too much of his energy.

  “Let me worry about that,” answered Jim. “It’s a free hour, isn’t it?”

  For a week, lasting until almost the first of August, the Pacific was serene, living up, for the first time, to its name. No white froth capped its modest heavings, no winds tormented the Triton. She floated like a child’s toy boat on a lake in a drowsy park, albeit a toy that had turned upside down and remained too far away for the child to turn upright. Now an oppressive sun was the only climatic problem, beating down from mid-morning to late afternoon, turning the inside of the Triton into a steam bath. The men first tried to cope with the heat by taking the hole cover off, but the rays were too intense. When they put the cover back on, their chamber became a pressure cooker. No matter what they did, they perspired constantly.

  The makeup that Linda continued to apply ran desolately and streaked her face. Her hair became impossible to comb, twisted as it was in knots and rats. Before they were married, Linda had worn her hair short in a gamin style. When she learned that Bob liked women with long hair, she let it grow until it reached the small of her back. Now, in the heat, Bob took his knife and sliced away his wife’s hair so it would no longer torment her. When he was done, Linda’s tresses were barely more than an inch long, and she turned her head away in sorrow as Bob threw the severed pieces into the sea.

  Toward the end of the week, Bob thought he noticed a dullness in his wife’s eyes, an opaque film that was changing their hue from vivid brown to the color of worn-out earth. But the film went away, and Linda, newly boyish-looking, remained cheerful and anxious to play the games and participate in the discussions. In fact, one morning Linda said she had a topic, and Bob, weary of inventing new conversation himself each day, gratefully deferred to her.

  “Before we capsized,” began Linda, “I was reading Anna Karenina.” Bob nodded, remembering well the hour he had spent searching the waters of their overturned bedroom for the lost book. He had given it to Linda when she expressed interest in Russian literature. He relished the Russian writers, not only for their mastery in plot and mood and characterization, but also as acknowledgment of his Russian blood and the kinship he felt for them. One of his most prized possessions was a handsomely bound set of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and he felt the easiest way for his wife to begin would be with Anna and her tragic romance.

  “That’s a good subject,” agreed Bob. “What did you think of the part you read?” He was as brisk as the moderator of a television panel show.

  Linda brightened. “I loved it. Every word of it. And I understand why Anna fell in love with the younger man. She felt imprisoned. She was unhappy with the stereotype role of wife, she wanted to assert her individuality. And she didn’t care what everybody thought about her. I think she was liberated, in a way.”

  “But she commits suicide in the end,” said Bob.

  “I know that. I’m almost glad I lost the book. I was dreading that part. I’m such a romantic I wanted her affair to work out.”

  Linda glanced acros
s at Jim, listening attentively but in the manner of a man hearing something for the very first time. Certainly he was not prepared to comment.

  “It surprises me how really modern Tolstoy is,” said Linda. “Don’t you feel he was writing about the emergence of liberalism, of people who flout convention? What do you think, Jim? Did you enjoy Tolstoy?”

  Bleakly, Jim shook his head. “I haven’t read him,” he said, a little shyly. “I’ve heard of him, but to tell the truth, I thought Tolstoy was a figure out of mythology.”

  “Mythology!” exclaimed Linda. “He was one of the greatest novelists of all time.”

  Jim nodded knowingly. “Then that explains it. He wrote fiction, didn’t he?”

  “Novels are fiction,” said Linda, dispatching a discreet can-you-believe-it glance at Bob. He did not respond, for at this moment he felt sympathy for his brother-in-law. Here was a man who had endured the strict formal education of his church school, who had spent a year in Europe studying German, who had graduated from a religious college, and who most recently had served in the administration of both a college and a high school. Yet he was so confined within the boundaries of his faith that novelists, even the greatest novelists, dwelt in a land that was forbidden to him.

  “I don’t read fiction,” said Jim. “It didn’t really happen, it isn’t the truth. Therefore it is a lie.”

  He sat back, as if waiting for the next topic. But now Bob was roused; he had a point to make.

  “But there are moral and ethical theories propounded in the great novels, theories every bit as interesting and challenging as those in your Bible and religious books.”

  Jim would not have it. He frowned. “A man could read his Bible every day of his life and never absorb it all,” said Jim. “It’s worth all the novels in the world.”