by Casey, Susan
“Roger that,” the salvager acknowledged, with a slightly more respectful tone in his voice.
Peter hung up. “I find that when you need something, it’s a good thing to mention the sharks.”
We moved into the kitchen to wait for Blackbeard’s call. No one spoke. Minutes ticked by. Eventually, Peter stood up and started pacing. “This is unbelievable!” he said. “The way this storm just came up! It doesn’t happen like this!”
Scot glanced up from his tea with tired eyes. “Nature threw us a hardball, Pete.”
“At least Just Imagine wasn’t still anchored in Fisherman’s Bay,” I offered. If it had been, right about now we’d be picking slivers out of the rocks.
Peter stopped circling the table and looked at me. “I didn’t say anything about this, because I didn’t want to scare you,” he said. “Every day I checked those ropes and they were holding. Then, yesterday, when I went to untie them from the buoy, one of them had snapped, and the other was ninety percent gone. It would’ve broken any minute.”
I’d been instants away from careening into Tower Point, in other words.
Now I understood why it had been so easy to remove the ropes—they’d already removed themselves. And before it slipped the leash, the yacht had been on the brink of removing me, too. I felt a dull shiver of fear at the thought of the ropes suddenly being chewed down to nothing, but I also realized that, instinctively, I’d known all along that the sailboat intended to break free.
The radiophone rang. Peter grabbed it; Blackbeard was calling. This could be the answer. Or the beginning of a cold, hard reality check that no one would be coming to capture Just Imagine anytime soon. Blackbeard’s voice was deep and growly, and he had the cocky drawl of a man who knew he was the one people called when they needed bailing out of some major screwup.
“What’s the wind?” he asked, in the same unconcerned tone that someone else might use to ask the time.
“I think about thirty-five knots,” Peter said, uncomfortably.
“And the swell is nineteen feet…” Blackbeard was calculating. He didn’t like the numbers.
“Yeah, it’s not very pretty out there,” Peter acknowledged. “That’s why the boat got loose.”
He didn’t turn us down, though, and a lengthy conversation followed, most of it involving discussion of fees. At some point, I handed over my American Express number. Blackbeard wanted to rent a larger boat, and he also advised hiring an airplane with two people on board, the pilot and a marine mammal “spotter,” someone trained to make out tiny objects on the ocean’s surface.
I hadn’t been thinking of Just Imagine as a gnatlike speck on the water. It was, after all, larger than many Manhattan apartments. But I was beginning to realize that the ocean’s true scale exceeded one’s ability to grasp. Trying to envision the span of the Pacific was like hearing that Saturn was 840 million miles from the sun—too gargantuan an image to stuff between your ears. It seemed impossible that a sixty-foot sailboat could simply escape notice in perfect visibility, in broad daylight, but in reality, enormous things got lost at sea all the time. Even container ships disappeared. Sometimes lost sailboats drifted for months and ended up halfway around the world. After a time, however, the battery died and the bilge began to take on water and it was all downhill from there—the boat would slowly sink. Given the already depleted state of Just Imagine’s power system, I wondered how long we had. Certainly, it didn’t help that the yacht, with its dark blue hull and white deck, would be indistinguishable from the white-capped seas.
It was three in the morning and nothing could be done before daybreak, so a plan was formed for Blackbeard to round up his crew and call us at dawn, confirming that the spotter plane was on its way out. We’d calculated that the boat was drifting at approximately five knots per hour, a decent clip and a fair indication that it wasn’t dragging its anchor. By first light it could be thirty-five miles away, and the search area would become exponentially larger with every hour that passed, like a spilled glass of water expanding in all directions. It was a discouraging image. Initially I’d presumed that corralling the sailboat would be a routine matter and had even entertained the notion that I’d resume my tenancy in a matter of hours. Just a little additional inconvenience, a story that would be funny someday, though perhaps not to Tom. But now it was dawning on me that there was a chance we weren’t going to get Just Imagine back.
“Maybe Tom will be happy,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe he wants a new boat.”
“Thing was a bit of a beater,” Scot said.
THE SUN ROSE BLOODRED. “RED SKY IN THE MORNING…,” PETER said darkly, looking out the kitchen window. The wind still blew thirty knots, with savage gusts to thirty-five and forty, and the swell had barely subsided. But when the sunrise drained off its fire, the sky was crystalline again, as though the storm had swept away every last dust mote. Things weren’t any worse, let’s put it that way, and our sense of hopefulness had been revived by three hours of sleep.
A nautical map was splayed across the kitchen table, and Peter leaned over it, plotting a course with a red pen and a protractor. He was using last night’s compass readings to estimate the sailboat’s probable direction; an accurate guess would save hours of needle-in-a-haystack searching from the air. Getting this right involved a mix of art and science—a nuanced reading of the water and a careful assessment of the ever-shifting currents. Several powerful streams collided at the Farallones, and throughout the year they waxed and waned like the moon. There was the California Current, massive and cold, lumbering down from Alaska, and the warmer Davidson Current sweeping up from Baja, and the North Pacific Drift, flowing from the east. Beneath them all, a deep undercurrent swirled along the edge of the continental shelf. Above, shoving things along the surface, was the wind. All of it—longitude, latitude, tides, wind speed, time of year, ocean salinity, even the fact that the yacht’s hull was made of steel rather than fiberglass—needed to be thrown into the navigational blender. The end result would be a “drift profile,” a hypothetical dotted line on the map, projecting Just Imagine’s escape route.
As with anchoring, theories on the route differed. Peter believed that, right now, the Davidson Current might be stronger than people realized, in which case the boat could end up heading north. Blackbeard was convinced that it was headed offshore. Or toward shore, maybe. But not due south. Later this morning coast guard computers would spit out the official version, based on hard numbers, but after the Weather Voice’s bruising failure, it was hard to get excited about another machine interpretation of the elements.
After we received confirmation that our spotter plane was up and running, the day seemed to pass in a weird lost instant. Scot climbed to the light, where he witnessed yet another Maintop shark attack that no one could attend. I dispelled my nervous energy by charging up and down the zigzag path a few times, stopping finally at the top. As he scanned the perimeter, I sat on the steps and stared numbly at the scenery. I don’t think the islands had ever appeared more beautiful to me than they did just then—with the banshee wind and glinting water and the prismatic clarity, and more whales than I could count. They swam around us on all sides, unfazed by the turbulence; it just stirred up more things for them to eat. I scoped the entrance to Fisherman’s Bay to see if my gray whale was still there, but I couldn’t spot her.
Under the circumstances, I knew that I had to leave as quickly as possible. It was only a matter of time before the powers that be caught wind of what had happened, and an outsider’s role in it. If there was a break in the weather, Superfish would venture out here tomorrow on its whale-watching tour, and I could hitchhike a ride. It was scheduled to be a landing day in any case. Peter was going back to Inverness for two weeks, Kristie and Elias were leaving, and Brown and Nat, who had rotated off when the contractors arrived, were returning with a fresh batch of interns. Scot planned to remain through the end of the month.
I looked at him, standing on the concrete apron of the li
ghthouse, hands jammed into his pockets, eyes riveted to every odd ripple and eddy and enthusiastic gull. The radio remained silent, which could mean only one thing: no sighting yet. After a while, Peter called. “What’s going on up there?”
Scot’s reply was terse: “Lotta whalage.” No one was in the mood for conversation.
We needed to phone Tom, we knew that. But we were also harboring the quickly disintegrating hope that the sailboat would be located by the time we spoke to him, thus improving the tenor of the exchange. Morning had turned to afternoon, however, and it was time to make the call. While Scot remained at the light, I fought my way down in the gale. As I neared the back door of the house, I noticed that the barbecue had gone for a ride. Pieces of it were strewn up the side of the hill.
Peter sat by the radiophone, waiting for me. Neither of us was enthusiastic about this task. Taking a deep breath, he dialed. Tom answered the phone in his booming, friendly voice—always happy to hear from us. How were things? Had we seen many sharks? And how was that goddamned 12-volt battery? Goddamn system drove him nuts! He wished he knew more about these 12-volt systems—Peter interrupted the effusive greeting with the universal windup to very bad news: “You might want to sit down.” He explained the situation in all its horrible detail and then added, “Look on the bright side, Tom. You might not have to fix the plumbing.”
As it happened, Tom did not want a new boat. Not even somewhat. He wanted that boat, the old, stinking, bleeding, busted one. I envisioned him receiving the news, sitting in his law office wearing a tie with little sailboats printed all over it, looking like he’d been knifed in the stomach. Our call came—literally—from out of the blue. Today’s weather in San Francisco was sunny and hot, a little blustery perhaps, but nothing noteworthy, and the swell was a concern only if you were a surfer. The conversation was brief; he was quite obviously knocked for a loop, and he wanted to call his insurance company, his wife, and Bob, his sailing partner. Tom said that he would be back in touch early this evening. By then, in all likelihood, the yacht would’ve been spotted.
“He took it about as well as he possibly could have,” Peter told me. He looked drained but relieved. The only thing that we could do at this point was wait for Blackbeard’s call. Which would come any moment now. Surely.
Two o’clock came and went, followed closely by three o’clock, and still there was radio silence. When Blackbeard finally hailed us, it was almost four, and daylight was ebbing. He didn’t have good news.
Through a scrim of static he informed us of several false sightings, most of them involving large whitecaps. As for the real thing: no sign of it. Anywhere. The plane was methodically winging up and down the corridors of an extra large search grid, the coast guard drift profile had been consulted, and still the yacht remained at large. And as the shadows lengthened on the water, it would only get harder to separate reality from mirage. Time was running out.
So were food supplies. The mood at dinner was strained, and not just because of the sobering update. Peter and I cooked together, mixing frozen albacore with canned soup donated by the departed coast guard crew. We combined this kitchen-sink cioppino with an expired salad, a few potatoes, and some banana cookies that Kristie had baked, and we ate for a good, long time, as though while we were chewing, nothing could possibly be that bad.
Every few minutes, between bites, someone would lament the fact that the storm hadn’t been in the forecast. “Lemme tell you,” Scot said. “That was a one-two punch. High wind we could’ve dealt with. Swells we could’ve dealt with. But both together…” He rocked back in his chair. “Anyway, the main thing is we’re all here, and we’re all okay. And the boat just happens to be—over there. As long as it’s floating, it’s okay. We just need a little help to get it, that’s all.”
“Maybe it’s underwater,” I suggested.
“It’s not underwater,” Peter said, with conviction.
“Well,” I persisted. “What if a container ship just…”
Scot finished my thought: “Mows it down.”
Peter set down his fork. “We’d hear about that. Even a container ship is going to notice if it plows into a sixty-foot steel-hulled sailboat.” Plus, he added, “there would be a bunch of stuff floating.”
I couldn’t get the image out of my head—the bow tipping skyward as Just Imagine’s metal hull was sucked to the seafloor. And then: ling cod weaving through the cabin, starfish glomming onto the naked lady, barnacles atop knotty pine. My books and clothing would slowly rise to the surface in a veil of bubbles, or perhaps they would just disintegrate.
After dinner, Tom called back. He’d had some time to digest the situation. He’d taken stock of what had happened here, and he had one question: “Where was Susan? Why wasn’t Susan on the boat?” I got on the phone. “I was on the island,” I said, adding testily: “And in bad shape. It wasn’t exactly a picnic out there before the storm, either.”
Tom was unsympathetic. “Yes, but if you were on board, the coast guard would have come out there last night and saved your, excuse my French, pretty little ass.”
Well, I wasn’t. And furthermore, if I had to choose right now between being lost at sea, in Beaufort Force 9 weather, and the predicament we found ourselves in, there was no contest: I was staying in the kitchen. I tried to imagine my state of mind had I still been on board as the boat had broken loose, but all that came up was a sort of white noise of terror, a disconcerting static blank. On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t have survived the day; given the gyrations I’d watched through the scope, it seemed likely that I would’ve been pasted to the ceiling. I’d been through enough trauma on that scow, thank you very much. Tom’s assumption that I should go down with the ship irked me; that wasn’t part of the deal.
I thrust the phone at Peter and sulked into the living room, where Scot sat in the tattered La-Z-Boy recliner, strumming a guitar. A mouse explored the area around his foot, whiskers twitching with excitement. I flopped on the couch, tilting my head all the way back until I was staring straight up at the ceiling.
“You know,” I said. “Sharks are the least wild things around here.”
He glanced up, smiled slowly, and kept playing. “They’re not too bad, are they? Unless you’re a seal.”
Peter entered the room and sat beside the marine radio, looking ragged. He was steeling up though, I could see it, gathering strength for what he knew he needed to do: take charge of this debacle, fix yet another broken thing. He flipped on the Weather Voice. With its usual lack of empathy it informed us that for a few hours tomorrow morning, there might be a window of opportunity to pull off the landing, to load the shell-shocked crew onto a Farallon Patrol boat, the fresh crew and supplies onto the island, and for me to sneak in among the whale watchers once again. It was the first decent news we’d gotten out of the Voice in quite some time.
Blackbeard called to make plans for another day of searching tomorrow, pushing hard to charge for an additional plane or two. The fee he quoted for this new airpower was astronomical, and I caught the whiff of a hard sell, the grinding insistence of a quota-bound salesman trying to push a round of aluminum siding. The salvage cost was a bargain, he insisted, when you considered the alternatives; for instance, if the boat smashed up on the rocks anywhere near the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the cleanup cost could top three hundred thousand dollars. “You’ll have divers with tweezers picking fiberglass out of sea anemones.” Today’s fruitless search had already racked up fifteen thousand dollars in charges on my credit card, and as he spoke, it occurred to me that the sooner we found the yacht, the less money he made. Interrupting the stream-of-consciousness fearmongering, Peter broke the news that the salvage schedule was now in the hands of Tom’s insurance company, a piece of information that seemed to turn Blackbeard snarky.
“I think she’ll turn up,” he said, before signing off. “Of course, it might be in the South Pacific.”
PART OF THE RITUAL WHEN CREWS TURNED OVER WAS A THO
ROUGH housecleaning. That included dealing with all the garbage—torching the burnables and bundling the rest for disposal on the mainland. Next morning, as the effort to spruce things up got under way, I drew the two bathrooms as my assignment and threw myself into the task, scrubbing as though it were an Olympic event. After I finished swabbing the toilets, I went outside and headed toward no particular destination at a fast clip. Wind still raked the island, though not as severely. I walked across the marine terrace, letting my hair whip me in the face, and felt melancholy. I would not be coming back to this place—not soon, anyway, and perhaps not ever. As usual, I hated to leave. Even now, after everything that had happened, I would’ve given anything to hit the rewind button and relive the sharks swimming around me and Kevin tying beautiful precise knots on things and Peter fishing, listening to the Giants and Ron scooping up urchins and telling us stories and Scot rigging Seal Baby and dipping for jellies while exotic birds appeared in the sky like jewels.
It was time to leave. Much shuttling of people and groceries and garbage was scheduled in the next hour, so Scot and Peter both launched—Scot in the whaler and Peter in a Zodiac. Superfish planned to pull into Fisherman’s Bay, and I walked to North Landing, where Peter would pick me up. A pair of sea lions sunning themselves on the stone steps were put out by my arrival, and they shot me exasperated looks as they slid into the water. A surf scoter, the commando version of a duck, paddled in the shallows. Every ten seconds or so, waves flooded the gulley. I stood back from the landing, holding my sleeping bag and a white plastic sack that contained my few possessions not currently lost at sea. The only clothes I had were the ones I was wearing—had been wearing, actually, for the past five days. That ought to keep curious whale watchers at arm’s length, I thought.
