Twelve Mile Limit df-9

by Randy Wayne White

On the fourth day of the Coast Guard search, Tuesday, November 8, we got a little break, a tiny glimmer of hope. About twenty-one nautical miles southwest of the wreck site, one of the Jensen guides found a dive bag and videocamera that belonged to Janet. A day later, in the same area, we found two empty air tanks and an orange life jacket with a section of rope tied to it.

  But that was it. Not another piece of flotsam.

  Working open water in a small boat is exhausting business. An autumnal high pressure system catalyzed steady, relentless winds, fifteen to twenty knots all day long, creating seas that whitecapped higher than my head as we surfed our little skiffs up one gray ridge, then down another, minute after minute, hour by hour, looking, searching, our eyes always straining to see. At sunset, we would return to our assigned mother ship and collapse into salon chairs, numb with fatigue, while a macrodome of silver stars revolved slowly above a black horizon.

  Jeth and I stayed aboard the Satin Doll with Rhonda and JoAnn. I wanted Jeth with me because I didn’t trust his emotional condition. He blamed himself for keeping Janet at a distance because of a small infidelity in which he’d caught her-not an actual infidelity because, at the time, they were in an off-again cycle of their love affair. The few times he did speak, it was to denigrate himself or to repeat variations on a maxim that, sooner or later, we all learn to be true: “I didn’t know what I had, Doc, ’till I lost it.”

  On the sixth day of the Coast Guard search, Lt. Cmdr. Dalton Dorsey contacted me via VHF and told me what I already knew: He’d extended the search time because of our friendship, but it had to stop. The Coast Guard and its assets had hunted more than 23,000 square miles of water on a carefully coordinated grid search, using the latest high-tech radar and heat-sensitive vector systems but had found nothing. It was as if all three people had fallen through a hole in the ocean, and vanished.

  He also told me that, the previous day, marine salvage divers out of Sarasota had towed in Sanford’s boat, the Seminole Wind. Speaking more formally because he was on the radio, Dorsey told me, “They found it in one hundred and ten feet of water, lying upside-down atop the Baja California. They used air bags to refloat and right it.”

  When I asked if the Coast Guard or the family of Michael Sanford had asked the salvage company to refloat the boat, his terse reply-“Absolutely not”-told me he was pissed off about it and would tell me more later.

  That night, after the Coast Guard suspended what had been one of the most massive sea searches in the history of South Florida, JoAnn Smallwood came tippy-toe a’creeping up onto the stern deck where I was lying on the companion bench seat under a light blanket. She put her hand on my shoulder and whispered, “You asleep?”

  I said, “I wish I could sleep. I truly do.”

  “I know, it’s impossible and I can’t stand it anymore. You mind some company?”

  JoAnn and I have had a long and mutual sexual chemistry that we have carefully and successfully battled-dating within the communal marina family is much too risky-but this had to do with friendship, not physical attraction, so I scooched over and made room for the lady. I felt the heat of her skin on my bare legs, felt the bosomy softness beneath her T-shirt as she pulled herself close, using my chest for a pillow. Her breath was warmer than the wind as she said into my ear, “Should we go say something to him? How long can he keep that up?”

  From the guest stateroom forward, muted by bulkheads of fiberglass and wood, came a booming thud-a-thud-a-thud backdropped by the sound of a grown man sobbing. It was Jeth, banging his fist or his head against the hull as he cried.

  I said, “No. We’ve got to let him get it out in his own way. But after this, when we get home, we need to keep a close eye on him. There are all kinds of ways for people to self-destruct. I’d say he’s a prime candidate.”

  She laid there quietly for a couple of minutes, holding me tight, hearing the wind, hearing Jeth, before she said, “What I hate to even think about, Doc, is that Janet’s still out there. Still alive and hoping we’ll find her, but that we haven’t looked in the right place. God, it just kills me when I think of that! Makes me feel so helpless.”

  I hadn’t yet said anything to anyone about what I felt the chances were of Janet surviving for even twenty-four hours adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, but now I did. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I’m far from being an expert on human physiology, but because I’ve done a fair amount of diving, I’ve read the basic literature on survival at sea. Rightly or wrongly, I attempted to comfort her, because false hope is a common source of human pain.

  I said, “Trust me, JoAnn, you don’t need to think about that anymore. You know about tropic hypothermia? Warm water hypothermia, it’s the same thing. I need to look it up again to be sure of the details, but I think I’m pretty close. Tropic hypothermia you get in water that’s eighty-two, eighty-three degrees, and it feels like bathwater. Stay in for a couple of hours, and you won’t even notice that your body’s core temperature is gradually dropping to match the temperature of the water. But that’s what happens.

  “I didn’t memorize the tables exactly, but in water that’s in the low eighties, even a healthy person might survive for only twenty-four hours or so. I checked it our first day out-the water temp here’s seventy-seven degrees. I doubt that Janet or the other two made it through the second night still conscious.”

  I was wrong, as I would learn later. Absolutely wrong in the face of the facts and the newest research data. Like mostly poorly informed people, though, I spoke with a conviction so firm that JoAnn was convinced.

  “Oh God, Doc, that’s so sad. But they were wearing wet suits… wouldn’t that make it-”

  “Janet showed me her wet suit before she did her first open-water dive, her new pink one with the black panels. Remember when she did that trip to Key Largo? It’s a shorty, covered just her thighs and upper body. A warm-water suit. I’m not sure how thick the neoprene was, but it wasn’t real thick. Two, maybe three millimeters, which is about pretty typical for tropical water divers.

  “The other two people were wearing similar wet suits, according to my Coast Guard pals. Michael Sanford’s was blue and black, Grace Walker’s was blue and green, and Janet’s, at least, was a high-visibility pink. What people forget is that human beings are not built for the water. We are land creatures. Water removes heat from the body about twenty-five times faster than cold air, and most of that heat loss occurs through the head. Swimming, thrashing around, or struggling in water increases heat loss. And you know how rough it is out here.”

  “Do I ever. The way we’ve gotten banged around, I’ll be sore for a week.” I felt JoAnn’s body move as she sighed heavily. “Then she’s dead. Janet’s dead. That’s what you’re saying. You’ve known all along.”

  “If she’s still in the water, that’d be my guess. But like I said, I need to go back and do some research. I have a friend out west who used to be the Coast Guard’s surgeon general. The equivalent of it, anyway. He’s done a lot of research on hypothermia, so I need to give him a call.”

  “I almost hate to ask, but I have to. Doc, how would it have been for her? Those last hours?”

  I’d thought a lot about it. When you lose someone tragically that you care about, much of the anguish comes from imagining their anguish during their final moments. So I gave JoAnn an edited version. But not edited much. I told her that the body is an amazing thing-it’s got lots of ways to conserve heat. When we’re exposed to cool water, small blood vessels near the skin’s surface automatically constrict to keep blood flow away from the outer tissues. That’s true of the entire body except for the brain, which needs unrestricted blood flow. Which is why the blood vessels of the head do not constrict and why heat is lost most quickly from the area of the head.

  “So her first major organ affected,” I said, “was her brain. She probably got confused, then drowsy. More than likely, she just fell asleep. Once her core temp got below… I think it’s ninety-five degrees, once her core temperature got below t
hat, her heartbeat would have become erratic, and then, finally, it would have stopped. But, like I said, she’d have been asleep by that time.”

  “So it wouldn’t have been that bad for her and the others?”

  “No,” I lied. “Not that bad at all.”

  We lay there in silence for a time. Beyond the canvas canopy I’d rigged to keep off the dew, I could see the black horizon lifting, pausing, then falling out of a black sky. I wondered as I’d wondered before: What had it been like for Janet? As I wrestled with all the horrible scenarios, Janet was there in memory, her pudgy, girlish face alive in my mind and her sensitive eyes, green and kind, looking directly into mine.

  I remembered the smell of the musky perfume she sometimes wore. Remembered the distinctive cocoa-butter scent of body cream, and how, when she was excited or telling a joke, she punctuated her sentences by combing her fingers through her hair. I remembered that the first time Janet made me laugh, really laugh, was a couple of weeks after she’d been working in the lab, and she accidentally let it slip that she’d named each and every one of my fish. Janet had made me laugh many times after that, and she’d confided in me and encouraged me. She’d brought me little handmade presents at Christmas and dyed eggs with silly faces at Easter. In front of others, she’d slapped me on the ass at dock parties, and, when she knew I was stressed, she’d come quietly up behind me and massage the muscles of my neck and shoulders. Janet was a good woman, and she had been a good and true friend.

  I thought that JoAnn had drifted off to sleep when, suddenly, she spoke again. “Do you hear it?”

  I lifted my head slightly. “No. I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s what I mean. He’s stopped. Finally, the poor darling’s stopped. Probably exhausted.”

  She meant Jeth.

  Then, after another long silence, she said, “Doc, there’s one thing I will never understand. If Janet and the other two were wearing those big, inflated vests, why didn’t we find them? All those air hours, the choppers and planes, and all the boats out here looking. Why? It seems almost impossible.”

  I said, “I don’t know, JoAnn. It does seem impossible. That’s one question I can’t answer.”

  Rhonda joined us for a bit. She came topside, sniffling and snuffing, a tall, skinny-hipped woman with short brown hair and a heart as big as Tomlinson’s. Her voice was quivering as she said, “You got room there for one more?” and slid her long body in behind me when I lifted the blanket as invitation.

  I’ve read somewhere that certain religious groups and some primitive societies practice a form of healing known, variously, as “powwowing” or “hiving” in which members of the group unite in what is, essentially, an extended communal hug. I don’t believe in herbal cures or faith healing, but I have to admit that, lying between those two women, sandwiched by people whom I’ve come to respect and love, I felt better than I had since the end of our second day searching for Janet. Why? Because by the end of that long day, I was pretty certain that Janet was gone.

  The sense of respite didn’t last, though. The two ladies returned to their own beds a little after midnight, and I still couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t get the question What had it been like? out of my mind. It was a haunting question to consider.

  I am not an overly emotional person. Indeed, I believe that once a decision has been made, or an event has occurred, any investment in or concession to emotion is a waste of time and energy.

  Even so, Janet remained a lucent image, her private eyes staring into mine. There was a shyness in them, and a brand of kindness that comes only from deep pain. Finally, I realized that there was only one way to come close to understanding what she had experienced the night that she and the others were set adrift.

  I have an orderly mind that sometimes insists on factual, experiential input. So I threw off the blanket and walked to the boat’s transom. I was wearing running shorts, no shirt, and the deck was damp beneath my bare feet. Except for the wind and the creaking of wood and braided line, it was quiet now. Below, JoAnn and Rhonda were either asleep or trying to sleep.

  High in the sky was a quarter moon. It was all the light I needed. I rummaged through a stern storage hatch, tied a mooring line to a life ring, and tossed the line astern. Then I slipped over the transom into the sea.

  You might expect water that’s seventy-seven degrees to be warm, but it isn’t, and the sudden chill caused my lungs to spasm momentarily.

  I allowed my body to submerge, which seemed to warm it, then I held on to the line as breakers freighted me outward. Now, six days after the sinking of the Seminole Wind, conditions were still almost exactly as they had been the night that Janet and the other three were set adrift. The wind was fifteen to twenty knots out of the east-southeast, seas building.

  I felt my body contort rag doll-like as the first big wave flooded over me, then lifted me: big waves without rhythm on a windy night. I could feel them rolling past, lifting, suctioning, then tumbling me under. Even with the quarter moon, I couldn’t see the waves, but I could hear them coming-a keening sound, the sound of wind over ice-and their approach was felt as an expanding buoyancy.

  Janet’s first night out here was one day into a waxing moon. I’d checked the tide tables. On the previous Friday, the day her boat sunk, sunset was at 5:38 P.M.; the setting of the frail lunar crescent was exactly fifty-eight minutes later. Hers would have been a blacker night with stronger currents.

  Still drifting outward-bound on the line, I turned away from the Satin Doll. Miles to the east was a flashing light. It was the 160-foot-high navigation tower to which the lone survivor, Amelia Gardner, had swum after being separated from her companions, and where she’d been found by the Coast Guard chopper thirty-eight hours later. From the crests of waves, the light was an explosion of white; from the troughs, it was a milky concussion. Every four seconds, the light flared: a visual hypnotic that penetrated to the brain, oscillated the pupils, eroded equilibrium.

  If I stared at the light too long, I lost all depth perception. The tower might have been three miles away or it might have been a satellite flashing from outer space. When I forced myself to continue staring at the light, I began to feel a sickening sense of unreality. Where did the sky end and the sea begin? Was I looking up at the stars, or looking down from them in the midst of some disturbing dream?

  I have made many long swims in open water at night, yet it was unpleasant, even for me-the wallowing darkness of being in a wave’s trough, then suddenly vaulted starward only to be temporarily blinded by that distant strobe. I found the prospects of trying to make such a swim scary as hell. Janet was a novice diver and an average swimmer. For her, it had to have been an existential nightmare-not the first living nightmare of her tough, tough life.

  An Olympic ski racer once told me that the most frightening aspect of the sport was pointing her skis downhill. As a waterman, I had had to scan awhile to find the empathic equivalent. I decided that pointing a small boat offshore, out of sight of land, was similar. Both acts were expeditionary; both were a kind of voluntary untethering. I described for her how the wheel torques at the hands, trying to veer shoreward. She said, “Yes, yes-it’s the same with skis.” We might have been discussing mountains: Hers was white, mine gray.

  Dread of the abyss is communal among outdoor people. It is not the fear that unites us, but the potential that anything, absolutely anything, can happen. It creates a kind of congenial freemasonry-perhaps because feelings of dread, like nightmares, usually vanish when exposed to light.

  For Janet, though-if she survived it-enduring such a night would not have been mitigated by the first pale streaks of a windy dawn. The Gulf of Mexico had been slowly killing her, killing her without conscience, and she would certainly have been aware that there was no escape.

  I now knew some of the sensory components she had experienced. But rolling there on a black sea, beneath a black sky, I found myself troubled on a deeper level. The phenomenon that is human existence can be des
cribed in a number of ways, and one of those ways is chemical. There are ninety-two elements found in nature, and sixty-six of those are found in seawater. Blood and human protoplasm, the salty components that are the source of life, contain many of those elements in the same precise proportions as our major oceans.

  As I drifted, I felt reduced. I felt clinically defined, though not insignificant because the word significant implies a judgment of worth, and I had no worth. Nor did the life and death of Janet Mueller. Nor the horror she had endured. I was hydrogen, sodium, chlorine, sulfur, potassium, and carbon. I was a soup of electrolytes that fired a brain that, inexplicably and absurdly, had evolved beyond the requirements of base survival and reproduction. I was skin over a scaffolding of lime-hardened skeleton that I’d inherited from the calcium-dense oceans of Cambrian time.

  Perhaps Tomlinson was right. Perhaps humans are no better, of no more value, than dogs or a fish or manatees. For reasons I cannot comprehend, he seems to find that philosophy freeing. I meet more and more people who feel similarly. They apparently find some level of peaceful, spiritual equity by viewing all life as homogeneous and equal.

  Not me.

  My view of existence is neither romantic nor sentimental. But on this night, adrift and mourning the loss of my friend, Tomlinson’s judgment seemed, at once, valid and terrible. Eons ago, the first one-celled animal developed a circulatory system in which its lifeblood was pure seawater. I was not that much different, nor, it seemed in this moment, were the best of the many good men and women I’ve known.

  I’d put myself in Janet’s place, and I’d learned a little. But I also knew that I would never understand intellectually or emotionally what she’d felt that night. It was impossible, because the circumstances were so different and we were such dissimilar people. A few months back, to celebrate a birthday, I’d swum four miles of open water, St. Petersburg to Tampa. When I’d told Janet, she’d marveled: “My God, I’ve driven across the Sunshine Skyway, and that bay is huge! You actually swam across it?” Now I was still tethered to a floating boat that had a bed and blanket waiting for me. Aboard were people who would answer if I called for help. Aboard the boat were VHF and single sideband radios. I was in the water, but I was still safely, securely connected.