A Speck in the Sea

by John Aldridge

  There is one chore I need to do so we will be ready to get to work once we reach our traps, but it is a chore that doesn’t particularly require extra brawn, so there seems no reason to wake Anthony at 11:30 as he had asked. We had recently installed a new refrigeration system, and it needs to be calibrated before we put it to use—precisely the kind of thing Anthony isn’t all that comfortable with anyway. A commercial fishing boat like the Anna Mary is basically an oversized fish tank, and the system we use to keep our catch alive and fresh relies on chilled seawater. It is a closed-circuit system: a pump sucks seawater into the tanks that hold what we catch but then recirculates the overflow so nothing gets discharged back into the sea. And it has to be set up each time. You have to adjust all the valves so that the water flows evenly through the holding tanks, and then you have to close and cap the discharge overflows so no discharge goes overboard. You want it as close to full as possible so the water level stays at the max and there’s minimal sloshing. Not a huge job, but it is one that demands a certain amount of patience and concentration to fine tune the valves, and that’s not Anthony’s strong suit. So I let Anthony sleep that night—I am feeling revved up anyway—and at about 2:30 or 3:00 a.m., I step out onto the deck to take care of it.

  Most of the Anna Mary is deck. Nineteen of the boat’s forty-four feet of length and pretty much all of its fourteen and a half feet of breadth are deck, and we need every inch of that space. The stern is open so we can let out string after string of traps, and the hatch doors are flush with the deck surface. I open up the center hatch—the one over the holding tanks—set each valve, and close the hatch. Then I go back into the wheelhouse to check everything again—to make sure the speed, radar, and oil pressure are just right and the compass shows the autopilot running true—and then I come back out on deck to cap the discharge. Two of our coolers, stacked one on top of the other, are sitting on top of the hatch for the tank I need to open so I can put the plastic cap over the discharge and close the system. Newly loaded with ice, the coolers are heavily planted, so I grab a long-handled box hook and drop it over the plastic handle on the bottom cooler.

  I can feel how solid this load is—almost fixed to the deck. I back away the length of the hook handle, bend at the knees, and brace myself backward—more or less squatting—then pull hard. It works. The coolers jump halfway across the tank lid toward me. I step back some more, lean back farther, squat lower, and pull harder—and the handle snaps off. The coolers stop, but I keep going, still holding the hook handle, stumbling backward fast toward the rear of the deck, where there is no gate, no rope, no nothing to hold me or for me to hold.

  And I am out of control. I am stumbling backward one, two—how many seconds? Just like they say—time freezes. The seconds move like molasses.

  I knew as I pulled on the handle that it would be a disaster. I knew it. There was no surprise when it broke, just an endless, slow-motion recognition that I had put myself into a situation I will not get out of. I reach desperately for the back corner of the boat and try to catch it with my fingers. I miss. My fingers slide off the wood and I am airborne.

  Warm. I register that as I go under. I swallow a rush of seawater, then shoot back up to the surface. I want to gulp air and scream at the same time, but neither works. I am freaking out. Red-hot adrenaline is coursing through me, and I am flailing, gagging on seawater, thrashing my arms as I reach for the receding Anna Mary. I am trying to run to my boat—to fly toward it—shrieking “Anthony! Anthony!,” then screaming “Fuuuuuuuuuuck!” at the top of my lungs.

  No way I can be heard. I scream because the scream just pours out of me, but the Anna Mary is steaming away, its motor drowning out any sound that might be heard by human ears, especially the ears of two guys who are dead asleep and snoring in the nose of the boat. The Anna Mary becomes smaller and smaller as it runs away from me, and I am still fighting to run toward it, to keep my head above the swells, but now all I can see are the lights on top of the boat. They’re getting smaller too. Dimmer. This isn’t happening. How can this be happening?

  There is nothing to hold onto, nothing floating past me, nothing to grab, not a piece of driftwood or a piece of garbage, not a lost rope or a dead fish. Nothing. The wearable flotation device that is a safety requirement aboard every commercial fishing boat is no good if you’re not wearing it. We never wear ours. I am aware that my arms and legs are thrashing around stupidly and to no purpose, that I am alone and violently beating the ocean in the middle of the night. My whole being is certain that I am going to drown. I am going to tread water uselessly until I become so exhausted I drown. My God, I wonder, what will that feel like?

  This is despair—no hope—and it is overwhelming. It has taken over my body, tensed it to the max, made my stomach muscles as rigid as iron.

  I’m forty-five years old. I’ve been frightened before. This is nothing like that. This is panic that paralyzes my lungs and makes my heart feel like it’s going to come shooting out of my body. Fight or flight: you kidding? Fight the ocean? Flight to where?

  The Anna Mary is just about out of sight heading south. I note its position in relation to the full moon and note also that the waves are breaking from the southwest. I’m not sure I consciously register this, but these are reference points. Directions. My mind automatically takes them in.

  Then the Anna Mary is gone, and there isn’t a sound of anything anywhere. You forget that you hear waves only when they ride up on the shore; in the middle of the ocean you hear nothing. The silence is deafening—scary.

  I am dressed in a T-shirt, board shorts, and big, heavy fishermen’s boots over cheap white athletic socks. No protection. The soles of these boots are made to grip the floor of the deck when the surface gets slick with fish slime. There is nothing to grip here. I am on my back, doing the backstroke to keep my head up above the water. My boots, down at the end of my feet, are full of water, heavy. All fishermen know that these boots are killers: waterlogged, they weigh you down; that’s how you drown. First thing to do if you go overboard is to lose the boots.

  I kick both boots off. They float on the surface of the water, and I grab them, one in each hand. I hold them close to my chest and rest my chin on the bottom of the boots. They are something to hold onto, something from the world I lost how long ago?—three seconds? five minutes? Doesn’t matter. Right now, that world is gone. My brain is working overtime, moving with the speed of light. They float, it tells me. The boots float.

  And something kicks into my brain. Air bubble, my brain registers. I take hold of one boot, empty it of water, creating the air bubble, then push the boot back down into the water. Whoa. It is buoyant—very buoyant. I shove it upside down under my arm. Now the other boot, another air bubble formed, under the other arm. The boots are pontoons, my own personal flotation device. Suddenly I am not dying—not right now, not this second.

  It changes everything.

  I breathe. My lungs stop feeling like they’re balloons about to burst. My heart calms down a notch or two. So does the shaking in my legs and arms. As those thundering manifestations of terror subside, the smaller afflictions take over: my eyes feel like they’re on fire from the salt; the inside of my mouth tastes of brine that I keep trying to spit out; my ears are ringing with panic. But at least I’m not flailing, I’m floating. The adrenaline is still rushing, but it’s bringing something like clarity; it feels real.

  I’m almost surely still going to die. Anybody who makes a living on the ocean knows that things like this don’t end well. There is probably no way I can survive. No one can. How can anyone live through this—overboard in the ocean, with nothing, in the middle of the night—and no one knows it? The reality is overwhelming; I can’t grasp it.

  In the dark my mind’s eye keeps seeing. I see my parents. What will the rest of their lives be like if I’m not around? My brother, my sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, my nephew. We’re a big, tight Italian family. I’m the oldest child, the firstborn of the generation. If I�
��m gone, what will it do to the family? I can’t picture their lives moving on without me. I don’t want to see that. I want that picture to go away.

  My nephew Jake, four years old, is the next generation of the family. He is the future, and one of the things I most looked forward to in the life I lived until a few seconds or minutes ago was that I would watch Jake grow up and would be part of his future. Now it doesn’t look like that is going to happen, and that’s unbearable. If I accept that I will not see Jake again, I might as well just sink back, just drop away, let my brain go blank and my body slip down to wherever.

  But I can’t accept it. I can’t see Jake growing up without me. I can’t see the people I love grieving for me, then living their lives without me being a part of those lives. If I can’t picture never seeing Jake again, then I have to find a way to stay alive and get home. I have to create “staying alive.” And to do that, I have to focus. I have to concentrate. I have to choose one or the other, either/or: I can either drift endlessly here on the waves or I can try to figure this out. “Focus!” I say out loud, talking directly to my brain. “Focus!” My mind switches on, and from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet I feel a tiny, microscopic sense of control.

  What do you actually know? my brain asks me. Here is what I know: I fell off the boat sometime around 3:00 a.m. That means I’m about forty miles offshore but nowhere near my own gear—the first string of lobster traps the Anna Mary was heading for on her course due south from Montauk. We would not have gotten to those traps for another hour, hour and a half. But it also means I’m probably not so terribly far from my friend Pete Spong’s gear. And because sunrise at this time of year is typically at about 5:30 a.m., I know daylight will break in two or two and a half hours.

  Even now the sky is not pitch black. As I grip my boots and try to make out my surroundings, the moonlight lets me see my skinny white legs floating under me. So it is not totally dark, and also I am by no means alone. The storm petrels have showed up—a whole flock of them taking time from their northward migration to check out this new creature in the water, me. They are the most common seabird and no stranger to me. Small and a dull brown in color with bright white backsides, they are a common sight, seeming to walk on the water, hovering on the surface of the waves as they pick at the water with their bills and forage for plankton and tiny crustaceans. Right now they are foraging on not-tiny me, dive-bombing me and trying to peck my head. I start swatting them away, but it’s a foolish effort that saps my energy and wrenches me around so that I’m gulping more water and spitting it out. I decide that the petrels are annoying but only that: a reminder of how out of my element I am compared to them. I put the reminder to the side of my mind. Storm petrels are the least of my worries. They won’t really hurt me.

  My bigger worries are that I am floating in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and that I have no power to affect my environment in any way. My assets are the boot-pontoons, a three-inch Buck knife clipped to the inside of my shorts pocket, my fairly fit body, my brain. But none of these give me any power over the waves or the currents, over the winds or the weather, over time or tide. I can’t do anything about anything that is happening to me or that may happen. It’s an unnatural feeling.

  People think fishermen are at home in the ocean. Not me. I’m at home on the ocean—on my boat on the ocean. The Anna Mary is an environment I have the power to manage. I know every inch of that vessel. I’m familiar with every gauge telling me where I am and how fast I’m moving and what the oil pressure is. And I can affect all of it. In the wheelhouse of my boat, I’m in command.

  Not here. This is unknown to me, and I have never liked the unknown. The world below the ocean is not my world, and no one can command what happens here. When our rope gets caught in the propeller, Anthony is the one who goes down to cut it away—he is actually comfortable in the water. I am not. It feels unnatural that now I’m the one swimming, that I’m the one more than likely to die out here, and I don’t know how I will die or how long it will take or how I will respond while it is happening. For a second I think how easy it would be to just let go and find out.

  “Fuck that!” I shriek aloud to my brain. “Fuck that! Fuck you! Focus! Focus on daylight!” Two and a half hours at most, maybe two hours to the very first touch of dawn. By daylight Anthony and Mike will know I am gone, and a search will start. And this much I know with absolute certainty: once Anthony knows I am gone, he will do whatever it takes to find me; of that, I am 1,000 percent certain. He is my childhood friend, my business partner, my fellow fisherman, and I know he will come looking for me like I know the earth orbits the sun. It’s basic. But I have to be ready when it happens. I have to stay alive so that when daylight comes I can see my way to being found.

  So the goal—the first goal—is to stay alive until morning. Float. Conserve energy. Stay alive. Keep my head above the surface so I don’t swallow too much water. The Anna Mary is still heading south, home is to the north, the waves are breaking from the southwest, so east is that way. That’s where the sun will rise. The first goal is to stay alive until it does.

  I hug the boots and float, bobbing on the waves. There’s about a four-foot swell, the remnant of that storm that had passed through the other day—sufficiently long ago that the swells have grown lazy, turning the ocean into a rolling but unpredictable succession of rises and dips. All I can do is ride them. The ocean is huge, the sky above even bigger, and I am very small. Why the hell doesn’t Anthony wake up and come and get me?

  I pivot to the east to be ready when the sun breaks through.

  Chapter 2

  Montauk Fishermen

  John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski met when both were seven years old. One way and another, they have been fishing together ever since.

  They were backyard neighbors in Oakdale, a municipality designated as a hamlet within the town of Islip on the south shore of New York’s Long Island. Located in Suffolk County, the easternmost of Long Island’s counties, Oakdale is about fifty miles from the greater metropolitan area of New York City but claims a population of fewer than eight thousand souls, which makes the term “hamlet” appropriate. It sits on the Great South Bay, the body of water that stretches between Long Island and the much-buffeted barrier island known as Fire Island, and its western boundary is carved by the estuary portion of the Connetquot River just before that waterway empties into the bay. Water, in short, is Oakdale’s element. That, and the fact that the area is protected by the barrier island to its south and defined to its north by a state park meant to preserve the river’s wildness, make Oakdale a particularly pleasant American suburb.

  Once upon a time it was the playground of Gilded Age magnates with names like Vanderbilt and Bourne, yachting enthusiasts who built extravagant mansions to which they could escape on weekends, getting as far away as the conveyances of the time allowed from an increasingly teeming New York City. By 1972, however, when Brooklyn natives John and Adeline Aldridge and their three very young children sought the same escape, Oakdale had become a quintessential bedroom community for New York. The location offered John Aldridge senior an easy enough highway commute back to his job managing a car dealership in Queens, and the community was filled with similar young families similarly moving out of the city and up the ladder. In a pertinent sign of the times, the baronial mansions of the nineteenth century had become classrooms and dormitories for local schools serving the growing population of the twentieth.

  The Aldridges’ handsome split-level was near the end of a street that terminated in a cul-de-sac, in a subdivision so new they were just the second family to occupy the house. Three-and-a-half-year-old John Joseph Aldridge III—Johnny—was the oldest of the three Aldridge kids, followed by younger sister, Cathy, and baby brother, Anthony. The neighbors all had kids of similar ages, and Addie Aldridge remembers how, over time, a group of some twenty-five kids—and often more than that—made their street and particularly its dead-end cul-de-sac into a favorite playgro
und.

  There was a wooded area beyond the cul-de-sac, and this extended the possibilities for play. While the paved cul-de-sac served seasonally as a baseball/kickball/stickball/kick-the-can diamond, a hockey rink, a basketball court, and an arena for doing wheelies on your bike, the woods were a portal to more rough-and-tumble improvisation. The kids built their forts back there; a grown-up Cathy Aldridge, now Patterson, claims that “everyone had a fort in the woods.” In winter they went sledding back in the woods, and in every weather the boys in particular rode their dirt bikes on homemade trails, constructing ramps to make the rides as hairy as possible. Addie remembers the sounds of the kids playing as reassuring background noise to her housekeeping chores, and the Aldridge home became the place where the kids would congregate.

  The Sosinski family arrived in 1975, three years after the Aldridges. Like the Aldridges, they were a three-child family—an older sister, Jeanine, a younger sister, Michelle, and Anthony in the middle—and also Brooklyn natives. The two families’ houses were “about 150 yards apart,” as Anthony’s memory measures it, so all he had to do was go through the backyard and climb over the fence to arrive at the Aldridges’ back door—something he did a lot.