Under the Eye of the Storm

by John Hersey

  So Tom spun the wheel, trying to guide Harmony through a maze. She had, in spite of the methodical obstruction of the waves, a goodly amount of steerageway, and when he turned the wheel something happened. Most of the time, when the sail was full, he felt in the spokes the influence of a powerful windward helm. Was he exhausted? He did not know. He knew that he was working hard, and that his shoulders hurt when he thought about them. The wind was at a new height of frenzy.

  He decided to try laying-to in order to rest awhile, the age-old recourse of weary sailors in violent storms in the open sea—lashing the helm slightly to leeward and trimming the sail so that without his steering at all, Harmony would settle into a perpetual cycle of heading up into the wind, stopping, going backwards till the lashed rudder, scooping in her rearward motion, made her bow fall off, then, as the trysail would catch the wind again, sailing forward and rounding up into the teeth of it once more; and repeating the whole process without his having to exert a finger-muscle on the wheel. He was just about to raise himself off the lazuret lid to get at a pair of looped lines with which to tie down the wheel, and his mind was so set on this plan of action that all else had gone out of it, when there came an explosion.

  There had been machinegun fire before; this was a cannon blast. A violent detonation.

  Tom, in the act of rising when the noise came, shot all the way erect and was promptly hurled forward across the wheel—the engine had somehow blown up, and he was being upended by the deck’s eruption beneath him as it was driven up in splinters by the blast. His ribs hurt, and as he sprawled there with his face not far from the cockpit deck he could see that its planks were intact, the caulking compound undisturbed. Not the deck. Not the engine. A lurching sea must have dropped him this way. He pushed himself back up and sat down hard behind the wheel. The first thing he saw was that all three of his crew were turned inward in the cockpit toward him. Their faces urgently asked him the question to which he did not know the answer. Their trust this time was ill-founded.

  Then he saw. The trysail had blown out. It had disintegrated to shreds. It hung from the track in a thousand ribbons and tabs and flying threads. The heavy synthetic cloth would not tear readily along the weave like cotton duck, and it had simply burst with that dynamite roar. There was a fluttering like that of a congestion of panic-stricken terns around the mast. Now hundreds of tiny scraps of the sail were beginning to fly out away from the mast, still attached, pulling and unknitting the strong threads of the fabric and flying like uncontrollable kites straight out from the mast and away from the hull.

  For the benefit of the three faces, still fastened in his direction, Tom gestured. There. Look. That’s what it is.

  The heads turned on automatic swivels; the eyes looked; the heads turned back again, as if on a single set of cam gears. Such trust. They wanted to know what he was going to do now.

  So did he.

  He saw at once what value the trysail had had. Harmony had, in instants after the explosion, become a dead thing on the water, and now the wind and waves had her completely at their mercy. One huge forehead of water with blown foam for a head of hair butted her hard and threw her into the dreaded helpless position of small boats in bad weather: she was broached, broadside to the wind, her port flank exposed to the raging air, neither heading into it nor running away from it, the most apt attitude for a capsizing. She heeled over in the wind under bare sticks, and waves began to break on her high port side, and green water roared along the decks, and minute stinging drops of spray flinging themselves over the coaming turned out in aggregate to have been many gallons of salt water, which only slowly drained from the scuppers of the self-bailing cockpit. Within a short time water was sloshing around Tom’s ankles.

  His first thought, because of Harmony’s broaching, was to heave to under a sea anchor, a tough canvas cone whose drag would at least hold the yawl’s head into the wind and keep her out of this danger of swamping. Oh, yes, he had one, and with a heightened clarity of mind he could place it exactly: It was stored in what he called the canvas locker, at the after end of the cabin on the starboard side, under the bread-box, a deep cavern where he kept the hood for the forward hatch, the bosun’s chair, the canvas bucket, the lead line, and many odds and ends not often needed but needed badly when they were. Not once used, the sea anchor lay, as the trysail had, at the foot of its heap.

  But then, thinking it through, he knew he would never in this storm-world be able to rig that big cloth cone, which would rip itself out of his clutches and take off in the air like a spinnaker; he’d never get it overboard from that prancing foredeck in such peremptory wind. There simply was no chance of it.

  The unclothed boom was thrashing viciously back and forth. It would be too risky to try to lift the rack of the gallows and fight the boom down onto it. He uncleated the main sheet and strapped it down as tight as he could and cleated it again, at a high cost of time in danger.

  Then—so tardily!—it hit him: Steerageway. He must get her out of this helpless wallowing before she went over and down.

  His big brain wasn’t as crystal clear as he had thought, by a long shot, because he knew he should have dived for the ignition key at the very moment of the loud noise. He did now. With a trembling hand he set the throttle and spark and pressed the starter button, and he kept his eye on the tachometer.

  Lovely engine! Off it went at the very first contact.

  He threw it into forward gear and pushed it to two thousand r.p.m.’s and put the helm down. And yes. Slowly. Nothing like what that absurd ten-foot sail had been able to do. But yes. Up she moved toward the wind and out of that particular kind of unsafeness.

  Patches and ribbons and tag ends of the small sail were still fluttering along the bolt rope against the mast, little flags of Dacron to taunt the storm. But now his motor was holding her up. The faces were turned toward him; they followed his moves like radar-tracking aerials. The motor was doing well. He must reassure them. He chose to nod—curious dignified gesture of his hooded head, signifying a satisfactory state of affairs but promising nothing. He had the engine revved up too fast, he must throttle it down before the whole block overheated. At fifteen hundred—a taxing rate itself—the ticker kept Harmony out of the worst gutters of danger.

  Now to think ahead. He could turn—not head-to-wind but transom-to-wind, a kind of dry jibe—and keep as close under the lee of the island as possible, going back northward. There the big bulk of it still was—half a mile away?—three quarters of a mile? Harmony was probably not holding up quite so firmly as she had been under sail, and it was likely that she would gradually slip to leeward away from the land. But the protected water, though turbulent, was a known condition; if nothing went wrong Harmony could survive in it.

  What time was it? Tom nonchalantly lifted his arm and let the hurricane push up his sleeve so he could look at his watch. Might as well let the damnable horror work for him. Eleven sixteen! Marvelous adversity! It had ripped all those tough-textured minutes away like scraps of the sail. Two hours, or less, till the eye.

  And with that remembrance of the eye of the storm Tom knew he would have to sail out into the open ocean.

  The eye. After the eye the wind would come in, probably harder than ever, from a new direction—and since the eye would be passing close by them, the new direction would be almost precisely opposite to its present one, for the eye was the gimlet center of a counter-clockwise vortex of winds; and instead of being under the shelter of Block Island then, Harmony would be in close peril of being driven down onto the land; there were rocks all along this shore. He could not turn north again. The motor might not take them clear of Sandy Point at the northern tip and clear of that keel trap of a reef north of that, in two hours. Indeed, he had no way of knowing how far south they had come up to now, and whether there was enough time to get away from those rocks before the eye arrived and, after the eye, the new onshore hurricane winds. There
was nothing to do but head for the open ocean.

  Having decided, Tom felt, once again, an unsureness that had all the discomfort of a surge of guilt. The lives behind the three pale ovals facing him depended on his judgment. Was what he intended to do really wise and right? Like the sea around him he had been confused in these last minutes—should have started the engine right away after the sail blew out, should not have toyed all that time with the fantasy of setting the sea anchor, should not have grappled all that more time with the slatting boom. If he was confused in small things, what of the fatal ones? Should he not have gone north in the first place? What had their “little sail” become, anyway?

  Flick’s lips were the green of scuppernong grapes, his skin was white as a table cloth. The man was standing up. Was he going to sing now? There was a look of astonishment on that discolored face. He opened his mouth and, standing straight up, vomited into the wind. The stuff—Flick’s interior color was vivid enough—blew back into the cockpit.

  Tom put the wheel over in sheer disgust and headed out to sea.

  Escape and confrontation. When one said, “getting away from this world” by going sailing, what did one mean? What world was there, what world had there ever been, besides this one, with foam at its lips and a single evil eye that took forever to look at one? The storm was the true world. Camus’ shade of existentialism had seemed the only viable set of thoughts for Tom in college and medical school; The Rebel had been the bible then. Somehow the man whose eyes had been sharpened by the sand-edged sunlight of Algeria, and who had had the guts to fight Hitler in the French underground, seemed to be able to see after the war precisely the absurdities that one felt most galling in the years of America’s catching up with Europe in disenchantment and disgust. But now: Now all that was absurd. All that had been a miserable blindness and affectation of pretended existence. What one spoke of as “this world”—the city; the office; people with putrescent livers and distended pocketbooks; himself going down Madison to the Westbury for a lunch of lobster bisque and chef’s salad and a nice little Riesling—“this world” was only a shadow behind the reality of a vicious and ceaseless wind blowing on a sickly sea. “This world” was the fugitive memory of a rather bad dream. He thought of what he had said to Flick that first evening in Edgartown about the illusion of fighting nature that you could get on a sailboat, when a line squall hit you. It was over soon; it was only an illusion of dealing with forces. What nonsense all that was! Illusion? That had been the imaginary existence—sipping drinks in a fat unyacht on a mooring in Edgartown harbor; this fight, to the death, was the reality of life. Out to sea! Take her out from under the lee of the land! Somewhere—perhaps under the eye of the storm—one might find the dead center of reality, the self. Look at her go! Whee!

  He was no longer trying to fight her up into the wind. In order to get clear of the base of the island he was driving Harmony off in a more southwesterly direction, keeping her head up just enough so as not to broach again and taking the steeper and steeper down-wind waves on the port bow, climbing, perching at the crests, then charging down, moving better now all the time. The wind kept the masts canted and gave the whole boat a semblance of the stability of a close reach under sail. The engine marched; Tom’s one lingering fear was that in the midst of these violent motions some sea-water might slosh past the traps of the exhaust and go steaming back up into the works. He must not dwell on that thought. She was going well; he should take each wave as it came and be thankful for surmounting it, if he did.

  Up there the land was dim in rain and spray, and at times Tom thought the intermittent glimpses he was having of a shadowy bulk of solid earth were imaginary; that elusive shape was not solid at all, but was just a cloudbank, a thickening of the fluid of gloom that stretched out to the limits of sight in every direction. Had Harmony fallen so far away from the shore that it could no longer be seen? Had they moved out from under the lee? Not yet, to judge by the seas. But…but had there ever been a Block Island? Had there ever been dirt, rocks, grass, bayberry bushes clinging to the ground under a brilliant sun?

  Two of the three faces kept turning towards him. Flick, in his vomit-and-rain-soaked shirt and with his hair spray-plastered to his skull, had sat down after being seasick on the starboard side, over the pump, in what had been Dottie’s safe place, and he was looking steadily away from the wind into the darkness off to the west. The girls kept checking in with the skipper. They must have sensed a new direction, for Harmony was not laboring now as she had been; but Tom did not want to signal to them that they were headed out for the ocean. Let them deduce. Let them guess.

  Starting the descent of one long wave in a rush Tom was aware of a vibration which half way down the slope presented itself as a deep thrumming. He could not be sure whether he heard it or felt it. It seemed to be a sound. It stopped as they climbed the next sea and did not sound again until several rises later when Harmony plunged down another particularly long and precipitous swell. It was a beautiful deep humming harmonic sound. Something about the engine—a bearing at play? The wind in the rigging? Was it a song of the shrouds and stays and halyards? Had Harmony become a huge Aeolian harp? No, this was no such light music as that. This had a resonance, a deep-chested sound, as if from beneath, as though the hull were the chamber of a monstrous cello. It came only on the swift, planing dives. It was a lovely sound—if it was in fact a sound rather than a feeling. Tom heard it or felt it when it came and enjoyed it as a diversion in this soaked chaos. It made him think of myths and mysteries of the sea—of Odysseus with a god’s gift of storm winds trapped in leather bags and tied with a shining silver wire, of Argonauts pulling at fifty oars, of Poseidon’s voice, of mermaids and sailors’ heartbreak, of Jonah in the cavern of arching ribs, of sirens on ship-killing rocks—and these relieved his mind for a short while of its awe, which was worse than fear. Lovely sound, basso profundo. “Down at the bottom of the sea”…He thought it weird and magical.

  But before long even this music of his boat communing with the deeps passed into the general noise of the storm and became commonplace, and there was nothing left to Tom but the hard work of steering, and monotony, and a sense of being all mixed up in time, as one is after a trans-Atlantic flight on a jet, and a bone-weariness that could not be admitted even to himself, to say nothing of the awareness, which he had brought into the storm, of being alone, all alone. He steered the yawl. He dared not look at his watch for fear it might be going backwards. Was he sailing into the past? Would that make things better?

  Now at last, within a short span that would have been hard to measure in minutes or miles, a sea-change took place so vast and radical that Tom knew he was, all over again, for the nth time on this one day, suffering the shock of birth from a safe and protected place into an outer world of more profound truth. If there had ever been a Block Island, Harmony was now moving out from under its lee. There was nothing essentially new outside; it was simply that having lost a sense of time one now felt that the sense of scale was also going out of whack. Harmony was shrinking. Tom could not bear to think of waves as big as these were getting; he preferred to think of his own diminution.

  They were outside in the realms of hugeness now, no question about it. He decided to try going down wind. Perhaps that would be easier than fighting his way up these mountains of wet wrath. Running more with the waves would carry Harmony away from the island; he would keep edging out to sea. They would be going down where Flick kept staring. Tom signalled with a hand to the two exposed faces: a turn. Audrey smiled. Tom realized it was not the first time she had smiled. She had smiled quite often when she had caught his eyes. But what was the meaning of her smiling now when with a turning fish-swim of a hand motion he announced the coming change of course? Was she encouraging him, or was she smiling because she had realized all along that he was out of his mind? Didn’t she even know that he was alone on the sea? What business had she to smile at him any more?

 
At first Tom eased the wheel and then he spun it fast as he came to see that he must swing Harmony as quickly as possible in order to avoid her being broached and swamped in these waves. There!

  My God! Look at her go now with both wind and sea following, and hear her making that deep thrumming all the way! The girls, turning to him, had suddenly put on roller-coaster faces. They were opening their mouths—squealing, no doubt. Flick? Still staring off to starboard. Did he know he was looking in a new direction?

  Except for the great relief of having the wind out of his face, it was harder for Tom this way, not easier. Everything was headlong and too swift. Fleeing down the enormous waves that were themselves in flight, Harmony tucked down her fat bow and lifted her duck-bottom stern so high that the rudder kept almost no bite at all, and when she reached the trough she would nose in and heave her whole white torso to one side or the other without regard for the skipper’s wishes, and this sudden wallowing skid would make her roll onto her beam ends and ship green water even over her high coaming (Flick sat there impassively as water scooped into his lap; the girls held on with straight arms, ducking their heads, looking at Tom); and then she would make the slower way up the steep slopes, hanging, the wave careening along too fast to be easily mounted, and at last she would reach the crest, where a constantly self-renewing breaker boiled along, and she would veer wildly in that froth as if in the rapids of a river, out of control, then down she would start to schuss again, with that towering overcurve of the breaker threatening to pounce on her from astern, and down she would rush, burrowing her nose, down, down, toward that dizzying lurch at the bottom.

  There on a wavetop was Audrey smiling. Tom did not expect any more to live, and Audrey was giving him a big smile. Was this some abstract force of womanhood showing itself, a mother instinct more powerful even than chaos, and having not much really to do with its object; the ultimate feminine self-love in the encouraging curve of those lips? She was not his, but she wanted, even here, to make him hers. To possess him by taking care of him. As though by her smile she was conning him and his toy boat through the most precipitous perils…And down, down the sailboat plunged.