Change of Course

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “And Walker?”

  “Coconuts and bananas, mangoes that ripen on the tree. Wild sugarcane. Sea turtles that come ashore in the full moon to lay their eggs in black volcanic sand. Crawfish the size of lobsters. Rainbow-colored birds seen nowhere else on the planet.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I think there’s a Burger King, too.”

  By now, we were making good progress east-southeast, averaging better than eight knots during the day, and close to five at night. We’d fallen into a routine that permitted us to alternate regular turns at the wheel, attend to such chores as cooking and cleaning, or grab a few hours of sleep. But the sum of those activities accounted for only about half of our time, leaving the remaining hours free.

  Invariably, we chose to spend those free hours together, either in conversation or comfortable silence. When you’re with someone you love in the fullest sense of the word - someone you’ve come to know as well as you know yourself - long periods of quiet become every bit as acceptable as long stretches of talk, sometimes even more so. With Jack and me, there was never a need to fill time with words. Silence bore no price tag; quiet came free of guilt.

  It helped, no doubt, that we were doing something we both loved to do, and that we were doing it in a setting so beautiful, so profoundly majestic, that there were times when to speak was to break the spell.

  Each day brought glorious panoramas of sun, sky, and sea. As we progressed farther south - and as late April gave way to early May - the afternoons grew increasingly warmer, and often we stripped down to shorts by midday. There were times we saw clouds, to be sure, but they were either far off or high above us, and for the most part thin and white. Several days we sailed through showers, but none of them lasted long enough to bother us.

  Evening brought its own version of beauty. Early on, we were treated to incredible displays of stars. We identified every constellation in the sky, every planet visible to the naked eye. We counted shooting stars until we could count no more.

  Night by night, the moon swelled toward full, but not without exacting its own price: Nightly, we lost stars by the hundreds, by the thousands, and we went weeks without sighting a single shooting star. But the price turned out to be a small one indeed, for now each night we were treated to a moonlit ocean for as far as the eye could see. On the water, every swell came to life; every crest reflected the moon in a million shattered pieces. Flying fish became tiny rockets launched from wave to wave. Hordes of iridescent minnows, jellyfish, and sea worms parted to make room for our bow. The blackness before us - that same blackness to which I’d ascribed an imaginary depth early on - now gave way to a welcoming blue that stretched all the way to a visible horizon.

  Night became a magical time for Jack and me aboard Sea Legs, a time to huddle together in the warmth of her cockpit, or to stand riding upon her prow - the wind stinging our faces, the sea spray matting our hair, the ocean rhythmically rising and falling beneath us - watching miracles unfold before our eyes.

  By now, I’d marked our progress across several charts that showed nothing but open water, and we were reaching the point where, as navigator, I needed to know the exact position of our destination. According to what Jack had told me, if we missed Walker Island, there was simply nothing beyond it but ocean. The next landfall at our latitude would be the western coast of North Africa, some 2,500 miles away. As good a time as I was having aboard Sea Legs, that wasn’t a mistake I wanted to make.

  So one day, as I neared the eastern edge of the chart I was using, I asked Jack to find me the next one I’d need. “And while you’re at it, you might as well give me the rest of them. It’s time we began thinking about our approach.”

  “We’re weeks away,” Jack said.

  “I know.” I nodded. “Still, I’d like to start getting us lined up.”

  He disappeared below. But when he came back up a few minutes later, he had only the next chart in sequence. “The rest of them are wrapped separately - in plastic,” he explained. “I’ll open them up later and get you what you need.” And with that, he turned away and busied himself with some chore or other.

  Now the thing was, Jack never could lie to me. Perhaps that’s always the case with a younger brother; who knows? I do know that, beginning with the time when we were kids, Jack’s every attempt at deception was as transparent to me as air itself.

  I remember once misplacing a baseball bat, a brand-new thirty-two ounce Gene Woodling Louisville Slugger. A week later, I noticed Jack using an identical model - only his looked old and dirty. I grabbed it from him and began inspecting it, ready to accuse him of larceny. “Hey!” he complained. “That’s mine! It’s even got my name on it.” And so it did. There was his JACK, freshly engraved with a wood- burning set of the very type our father kept in the drawer of his workbench. As for the dirt, it came free with the rub of a cloth. In a moment of uncharacteristic charity, I let Jack off the hook. I told him he could keep the bat, provided he let me borrow it whenever I was up. But both of us knew from that moment on that he’d never be able to get anything past me.

  Another time, in our early teens, Playboy magazines began arriving mysteriously, once a month, at our home. The label bore our last name, preceded only by the initial J., a clue that only narrowed it down to Jack, my father, and me. Jack swore up and down that he was innocent, and I think he may have convinced my parents, who no doubt considered him too young to be interested in such things. But once a month for a full year, my brother found it absolutely impossible to look me in the eye without dissolving into confessional laughter. There were lots of things Jack could do. Lying to me just didn’t happen to be one of them.

  That’s why I so easily rejected Jack’s excuse about the remaining charts being wrapped in plastic - and why he didn’t even press the point when I asked him about it a day or two later.

  We were running wing and wing at the time, though why I remember that now, I can’t say. The wind was directly behind us, coming over our stern and pushing us along in an efficient, if unexciting, manner. To take advantage of the conditions, we’d let the boom swing well out over the starboard side and had coaxed the jib all the way out to port. The result was a great expanse of sail, set almost perpendicular to the wind, our version of the balloon-like spinnaker often flown by bigger boats running downwind.

  “So what’s the deal with Walker Island?” I asked.

  I don’t know precisely what I expected in the way of an answer. Maybe that Jack would admit we were heading for Africa after all, or the Canary Islands, just off its coast. Or perhaps he’d tell me again about the coconuts and bananas, the mangoes that ripened on the trees, the wild sugarcane, the sea turtles, the black volcanic sand, the crawfish the size of lobsters, and the rainbow-colored birds seen nowhere else on the planet. But I was pretty certain of one thing: He wouldn’t lie to me. He knew better than that.

  Still, I wasn’t prepared for what he did say.

  And now, as I sit over my typewriter fifteen years later, I can still hear my brother’s words as though they’d been spoken this very moment. They ring in my ears to this day. They will echo in my mind forever.

  “There is no Walker Island” is what Jack said.

  In trying to re-create the effect of Jack’s statement on me some fifteen years after the fact, I realize that, at the time I heard his words, I experienced such a tremendous onslaught of emotions that it’s difficult for me to sort them out now and place them in any precise, meaningful sequence.

  At first, I suppose, I must have thought he was joking, that he’d succumbed to his occasional flair for the melodramatic. I waited for some tale of how our destination had mysteriously disappeared off the charts, some Twilight Zone account involving interrupted radio transmissions and unconfirmed sightings of giant whirlpools that our government refused tο confirm but couldn’t deny. But no tale came.

  I expected an announcement that we were going to try to make it clear across the Atlantic in our thirty-six-foot boat, in
search of a place in the history books, or at the bottom of the ocean. But no announcement followed.

  I was thoroughly, hopelessly confused; something was going on, yet I had absolutely no clue what it was. I felt stupid for failing to catch on and negligent for not having studied up on our destination on my own. I also felt seriously betrayed: Jack had told me about one plan, and now it was apparent that all the while he’d had something else in mind.

  But as upsetting as all those feelings were, none of them (indeed, not all of them combined) rose to the level of being deeply disturbing. And yet I remember how deeply, how profoundly disturbed I began to feel as I struggled to make sense of what Jack had just told me.

  I suppose the single word that most comes to mind now is dread. All Jack had really done was to tell me that we were headed to some place different from the one he’d led me to believe. What was so unnerving about that? My brother had always been full of surprises, for as long as I could remember. Nonetheless, I felt a sense of gathering dread like no other I’d ever felt before or have felt since. The result was that I found myself momentarily immobilized, suspended between curiosity and panic, wanting to know what was going on - where we were heading - and at the same time not wanting to know. Desperately not wanting to know.

  So I readily confess to you that I took the easy way out. I closed my eyes and covered my ears and asked no questions. I sought refuge in the safe harbor of ignorance. And I curled up in my bunk that night and found sleep in the snuggest of all hurricane holes - avoidance.

  Students of human behavior tell us that much is to be learned from the ways in which we sleep. Whole laboratories are devoted to the videotaping of sleeping subjects. We are now able to study the tiny electrical impulses that travel through the brain, and in doing so, we’ve learned much about our unconscious selves. And it is no accident that our language is full of descriptive phrases such as “slept the sleep of the just” or “slept like a baby,” in ready contrast to “slept fitfully” or “had a troubled sleep.”

  I’ve always tended to sleep sprawled out, splayed across the mattress, my unconscious self apparently determined to fill whatever space there is. My wife long ago learned to stake out a small space for herself in our bed and defend it tenaciously against my incursions.

  But that morning, I awoke, disoriented, to find myself clenched into a fetal ball, drawn in upon myself in some desperation to seal myself off from the world outside. My eyes burned, and my body ached. I felt every bit as tired as I had when I first lay down. I struggled to my feet. I stretched my back and kneaded my muscles to unknot the cramps that had set in during the night. With difficulty, I made my way up the steps to the cockpit.

  For the first time, instead of being greeted by a sun that warmed from orange to yellow as it rose from the horizon, I found myself staring into a blood-red sky above our bow.

  Jack was already at the wheel, the sun’s glow reflected hotly on his face. We exchanged grunts, and I took over for him as he went below to make coffee and see what there was for breakfast.

  The whole morning is now nothing more than a blur to me, down the passage of these fifteen years. I must have steered the boat and trimmed the sails; I’m sure we drank coffee, black and strong and sweet, as always; probably we ate, though I cannot recall what it was or how it tasted. I was still involved in the business of avoidance. If there was no Walker Island, I wasn’t yet ready to talk about where we were going, or what was to happen once we got there.

  But avoidance is, for me at least, a difficult exercise. Instead of allowing one to be relaxed and open, avoidance demands effort, concentration, vigilance. It is exhausting stuff. By midday, I was worn out, and I retreated once again to the womb of my bunk. There I drifted in and out of sleep. For the first time since we’d been at sea, I dreamt of home.

  When finally I forced myself to get up, it wasn’t because I was rested; I wasn’t. I simply knew that Jack deserved some relief at the wheel. I brushed my teeth, splashed some water on my face, and made my way up the steps.

  Emerging from the cabin, I was immediately struck by two things - or, more accurately, by the absence of two things.

  The first was sunlight.

  Sailing in good weather can be a terribly seductive thing. Without realizing it, you soon fall into a rhythm that is so pleasant, it is positively hypnotic. You get so accustomed to bright sun and steady breezes that you can’t help being lulled into believing that there’ll be no end to them. After a while, you begin to take things for granted, you become sloppy. You don’t bother checking the barometer quite so often. You forget to turn on the radio periodically to hunt for a weather report on the shortwave band. The business of sailing becomes so easy, so comfortable - so second nature - that you develop a sense of confidence in your own competence, a feeling that you’re in complete control not only over your boat but also over your surroundings.

  Now, coming back up on deck, I saw a sky inexplicably filled with clouds. Not the high white wisps that from time to time had brought us relief from the heat, either by filtering the sun’s heat or gracing us with an occasional cooling shower. These were thick gray clouds, stretching from the horizon in front of us like a giant carpet being unrolled above our heads. The sun was still visible behind us to the west, but it seemed as though it was in retreat, being crowded out of the sky by the advancing mass.

  The second thing that was missing was wind.

  Which is an overstatement, to be sure. But we’d enjoyed good winds behind us for so long, the immediate sensation I now felt was that our speed had been cut by half. And I was right. One look at the instruments confirmed that we were making barely four knots, compared with the usual eight or ten we’d grown used to.

  “When did this happen?” I asked Jack.

  “The pressure began dropping last night,” he answered, letting me know that at least one of us had been paying attention. “Notice this morning’s sunrise?”

  I struggled to remember, but morning seemed ages ago. Sleeping in short bursts has a way of doing that to me.

  “Red,” Jack reminded me.

  And I remembered the sun rising blood red in front of us, its glow reflected hotly on lack’s face. And I recalled the ancient rhyme:

  Red sun at night,

  Mariner’s delight.

  Red sun at morning,

  Mariner’s warning.

  At the time, I’d noticed only the beauty; Jack had read the message.

  While I took the wheel, Jack went below and tried to find a weather report on the shortwave. But neither of us expected much: We were far enough from land by this time that we seldom picked up anything during the day; at night, reception was better, and we could often pull in stations from far off, exotic places.

  When Jack emerged a half hour later, he reported the few words he’d been able to make out. “Storm . . . small craft warnings . . . tropical depression . . . Yankees three, Sox two.”

  “Isn’t it awfully early in the year for a tropical depression?” I asked. “Hurricane season isn’t supposed to begin for another two months.”

  “I guess we shoulda got that in writing,” Jack said with a smile.

  While there was still light, we did what we could to get ready. We got out our foul-weather gear. We readied life jackets, harnesses, safety lines, and flashlights. We stowed items we wouldn’t need, and lashed down everything we could. We ran a radar reflector up the mast to maximize the chance of being spotted on some larger vessel’s scope. We checked and double-checked our lines, our pumping system, and our inflatable. We set aside food and drinking water, as well as a change of clothes.

  By evening, the entire sky was clouded over, and the seas had flattened. What wind there was still came over our stern, but it was no longer enough to fill our sails, which luffed and sagged. Lines went slack and slapped against the mast, and the boom swung back and forth lazily. We continued to move forward, but our progress seemed due to nothing more than momentum. Our speed dropped to under two kno
ts; we could have walked faster.

  With dark, a light rain began to fall, and the air temperature dropped suddenly, so that we were happy to have the warmth of our foul-weather gear. Within an hour, we found ourselves totally becalmed. It was a truly eerie sensation: With neither moon nor stars visible, we were in pitch-blackness, sitting dead still in the middle of the ocean.

  We furled the mainsail altogether and tightened down the boom. We shortened the jib and allowed it to hang free at the bow, a once-proud headsail consigned now to the role of a mere telltale. And the tale it told was that there was no wind at all.

  I took the wheel while Jack went below to get some rest. But “taking the wheel” proved to be nothing more than a symbolic gesture of assuming command: Without wind, a sailboat simply cannot be steered. I soon gave up trying, I locked the rudder into place and allowed us to drift aimlessly.

  An hour went by, and a second one. I dared to think that this would be the extent of our storm: A steady rain - by now somewhere in the moderate to heavy range, but certainly no downpour - and a total absence of wind. I can handle this,” I remember telling myself.

  Some angry god must have been listening.

  A sailor becalmed during daylight hours searches for ripples on the surface of the water - the first signal of a freshening breeze. At night, you have only your sails to watch for signs of life. And after an hour of peering through the darkness, your eyes start playing tricks on you, and you begin to imagine movement when there is none, until you reach the point where you can no longer trust what you see.

  So you learn to feel.

  But even in feeling, I was fooled. I kept expecting that if the breeze was ever going to reappear, it would be at our backs, as before - as indeed it had been for weeks. So when I felt the first breaths upon my face, I mistook them for - for what, I don’t know. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that the wind would do a 180-degree turn. But turn on us it did, and with a vengeance.