by David Jurk
I stood, the cat in my arms, and looked around the beach, the fire fading into ruby coals in the sand. I felt gratitude to this place; there had been a blessing after all in the loss of the GPS and I was immensely grateful to the laws of entropy that had ensured its demise. The loss had freed me to sail the sea for as long as I could see the heavens and hold a rudder, and it had been Nikumaroro that had given me the sanctuary I needed while I learned.
Back on Windswept, the wind seemed to be piping up a bit and I worried about a blow coming. I checked both lines; they were holding well so there was nothing more to be done. I could set out now, in the dark, to be away from land if a storm hit, or trust the anchor and the prop shaft of the Norwich City to keep us secure. I decided to wait, to get that last full night’s sleep, if I could, before returning to sea and the abbreviated naps of the watch cycle.
I’d eaten earlier, though the cat was – as usual – complaining of hunger, so I gave her half a cup of the rapidly dwindling cat food I’d taken from the Big Save. Watching her go at it, I realized I had to figure out what would make sense to feed her once it was gone. How long would bagged cat food stay edible? Or canned, if I could find it? It probably made sense to change her diet, to just switch her to people food.
When she finished, I reached down and stroked the little thing; her motor started up with its happy rumble, and I hoisted her onto the sail bags and settled myself onto the settee and thought about her life. Her world was immediate, no wider in scope than the sphere she occupied, no broader in time than the moment she existed within. Take a lesson, I told myself and closed my eyes for just a moment.
I was being attacked; something clawed painfully at my inner thigh, digging into me as if with a knife. The goddamn cat, I thought, struggling from a deep sleep in the darkness, shifting my body away from the pain. Stubbornly, the pain followed me, and I reached out to her to pull the kitten away, but she wasn’t there.
Coming fully awake, I realized it wasn’t the cat at all but the damn pin I’d put into the pockets of my shorts. I thrust my hips up off the bed, clawing frantically into my pocket and yanked it free.
Rubbing at the abrasion, I sat up and switched a light on. The cat blinked at me from her place beside me, no doubt wondering what madness had overtaken me. Through the porthole, I saw the first traces of dawn against a low bank of clouds and could feel Windswept being buffeted by wind. Time to go, I thought, and set the pin on the shelf in the galley, intending to clean it up a bit later. I grudgingly admitted it had served as a good alarm clock, if not a particularly pleasant one.
On deck, the wind was much sharper, cooler and promising moisture. The sky was crystalline except for a low band of clouds covering the eastern horizon. I went below and grabbed a sweater and came back, looking curiously at the sky. I thought of the old sailor’s adage:
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight;
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.
Was that even true? And if so, did a ruddy magenta qualify as red? I realized with sudden insight that in much the same way that celestial navigation had freed me from dependency on technology to know my position, so I needed to learn the weather. There were dozens of simple truisms pertaining to local weather conditions that, once known, can mean the difference between suffering and salvation at sea. Moitessier had been a genius at it – perhaps it was time to read him again; there would be no more sitting at anchor waiting for the weather service to email you satellite images or surface forecasts. It was a new world and there was no one to rely on anymore, no one but yourself. There was no technology left to make it all painless and easy. Technology had come and gone, laid low by a miniscule virus.
Untied from the Norwich City, bow anchor freed and dragged back on deck, I raised sail, caught the breeze and bore off Nikumaroro, watching the gleaming white sand and dark green necklace of foliage sliding by us for the last time. With the strong following breeze, it sank into the sea behind us within an hour, and the little white cat and I were alone again on the blue ocean, the taffrail log trailing off our stern like any good sailing ship.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
MAGENTA MUST NOT have qualified as red because no storm materialized; either that, or we traveled so fast we left it behind us. I’d like to believe the latter.
The air remained cool, with a bite of moisture in it, almost reminiscent of October in Michigan, so I kept a long-sleeved shirt on for much of the day, not stripping it off until mid-afternoon. The cat seemed not to care either way; her focus in life was clearly food, not weather.
Late on the second day out of Nikumaroro, the lowering sun caught a lumpy edge on the horizon in front of us that I couldn’t identify, even with the binoculars. It just didn’t make sense; a jumble of color, low in the sea, one moment appearing to be an island, the next a fishing fleet. I grabbed the paper chart and checked the position I’d just taken at noon; we were – or should be – nearly four hundred kilometers south of Nikumaroro, far from any land. There should be no islands - and I found it impossible to imagine a fishing fleet. And finally, as we closed to within five kilometers, I saw that it was neither of those things, and for a few moments, I almost wished it had been a navigational error instead of what it was.
We had come upon the northern reaches of the South Gyre Patch, a floating, migrating island of plastic and metal garbage churned together and moved by the South Gyre currents of the Pacific. The smaller sister of the North Gyre Patch that I’d skirted on my way to Hawaii, this island – roughly the size of Colorado – was made up of millions of pieces of insoluble plastic trash, some no larger than grains of sand, some the size of boxcars. I’d read somewhere that people had actually begun living on parts of it, the garbage so tightly compacted together that it formed acres of ‘land’ upon which one could build a shelter and stroll about as if on a small farm. Air-borne dust combined with the gradual dissolution of paper and carboard trash had formed a sufficient depth of soil in places to allow for small gardens. Fresh water pools existed, created by rainwater and held secure by plastic sheets and tubs.
What was there to say about a planet that fed so much of its trash into the ocean that the two Patches taken together created a landmass the size of a small continent? Scientists had been researching technology to ‘salt’ the plastic with genetically altered microbes by air; combining with seawater these could provide the means to break down the plastic in a decade – as opposed to the centuries required otherwise. Yet, they were expensive to produce – and no country would foot the bill. There’d been a UN effort to provide for a multi-nation consortium to pay for it, but the Trump assault on environmental regulations, and the ill-will he generated across the globe so damaged international relations that no multi-national consortium to address the problem ever managed to gain traction. Years ago, a Dutch college dropout managed to pull enough private money together to build and deploy a boom that was intended to slowly corral surface trash from the Patch, to be picked up by freighters. It failed – not for want of intent or energy, but because the trash existed literally as an island – not just floating on the surface, but as a column reaching deep into the sea, nearly to the bottom. Extract some of the surface matter and what lay beneath it rose to take its place.
And the U.S. was hardly alone as a culprit. The explosion of cheap 3D printers among developing nations, particularly southeast Asia – the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam – resulted in an avalanche of discarded plastic goods, an avalanche that ended, inevitably, in the ocean.
But we still sailed in open water, though chunks of outlier garbage were growing more pronounced all about us. It struck me not unlike what sailing in frozen climates must be like, as the solid ice mass drew closer and ice floes began closing in around you. I needed to decide on a tactical approach quickly. Where exactly were we intercepting it? It was south of us, but were where were we along its northern border, more to the east or the west? I had no desire to try working my way through it, so that meant going
around it. But it was huge – more than a thousand kilometers wide; if we had come across it toward its eastern edge for instance, and tried to circumvent it to the west, we’d be in for a very long detour. Navigating around it would be, at best, a guess.
Considering the variables, it seemed logical to head eastward, against the prevailing winds and current. These were the engines that provided motive power to the giant mass, and just like getting out of the way of a hurricane, the quickest strategy was usually to move in the direction opposite to its motion. Admittedly, if we were on the western edge, we’d have the entire width of it to bypass and the tactic of heading east would be a mistake. But I could sit and contemplate what might happen forever; there was nothing to do for it but to make up my mind and then commit. I’d sure as hell not be getting any satellite images.
Over the next four full days, I sailed east, staying well north of the main body of the Patch, watching through the glasses with utter fascination – and horror - at the montage of trash that at times defied belief; plastic refrigerators, toys, bags, entire cars, shipping containers, garages and even a 3D-printed cottage – all made of materials that were unsinkable and without some manner of intervention would last a half millennium. In places, the individual pieces were so closely ensnarled that I could almost believe the rumors of people living on it; other times, it lay separated into a dispersion of clots. Even staying a kilometer or two from its edge, I saw that Windswept’s starboard ama was collecting small Styrofoam beads, like grains of sand, along its waterline.
The weather, as if to mock us sailing off our intended course, was beautiful; the skies were clear, the southern trades blowing a steady fifteen knots. Windswept flew on a close reach, her speed helped greatly by unnaturally flat seas. It puzzled me; these waters, because of the long fetches for storms to build waves, were known for high seas, yet here we were in water as flat as a pond. Then it occurred to me that the Patch itself must be dampening the waves. I was literally sailing in an ocean ‘shadow’, set between me and the prevailing winds. Waves were being dampened out of existence by the hundreds of kilometers of trash. And these easy waters combined with the good trade winds worked their magic; for several days we made average daily runs in excess of three hundred kilometers. If I hadn’t been sailing alongside this testament to the piggishness of mankind, it would’ve been exhilarating.
On the fifth day, I rose from an off-watch nap to find the garbage gone, seeing only open ocean to starboard, and immediately bore southward to a course of one hundred eighty degrees. After ten kilometers of this due-south sailing, I was confident that I’d gotten around it. At noon, I took a sun sight and calculated our position – something I hadn’t bothered to do as we’d sailed parallel to the Patch.
It was quite disheartening; we’d been pushed more than six hundred kilometers east of our course line, with New Zealand now very much to our southwest – further away than when we’d first encountered the Patch. Drawing the new course at two hundred and twenty degrees - making it two hundred and ten to account for drift – the route line fell perfectly between the two main Samoan islands, Savai’i and Upolu, now little more than seven hundred kilometers away. If weather and wind held, I thought we’d see them easily within three days, perhaps two.
And wind and weather did hold, and though the seas returned to a more typical state of steep waves and occasional swells, we still made good daily passages, and the clear skies gave me good opportunity to take noon sightings.
On our third day beyond the Patch, the beryl green peaks of what I assumed to be Samoa rose before me out of the blue sea. It was every bit as powerful as Hawaii had been – the sudden, delirious green so startling when you’ve seen little else but blue. Checking and rechecking the chart and the taffrail log, I was certain we were in Samoa.
As the very sound of the word ‘Marquesas’ had been magic to me, so ‘Samoa’ had been to Rachel. The nights we’d sat studying, the charts and plotter spread out before us, sketching our course - a classic ‘downhill’ trade wind run - it was Samoa she kept chatting on about. How long would we stay? What should we see? Perhaps we should spend the entire winter there? For her, Samoa represented the very essence of Polynesia and the beauty and vitality of the South Pacific. She researched it endlessly; she was in love with the very idea of it.
And ultimately, hours later, as we left it behind us, I was glad that she’d not been there to see it. Approaching the Apolima Strait between the islands, I had begun to see wisps of what I took to be fog rising from the northern shore of the island of Upola, near the capital city, Apia. Glasses in hand, I climbed on top of the cabin and saw with sinking heart that it was not fog at all. What I was seeing was a broad swath of smoking ruins – the entire city laid burnt to the ground, flattened as surely as if fire bombed. Sweeping both islands with the glasses as we closed, and then passed them, I saw nothing that suggested survivors. Splitting the middle of the strait, though we came no closer than a few kilometers to either island, it was still close enough to feel an acute sorrow at the demise of a great culture; sad end to a race of people that had conquered the Pacific.
By my best reckoning, we still had twenty-seven hundred kilometers to Auckland, which – if we continued at our current progress – we should reach in a fortnight. The course I’d laid out took us directly through the Tongan Islands, so there’d be several more chances to look for life. But by now I had little optimism. These islands lived on tourism – the international travel would’ve ensured the quick arrival of the virus.
I took my early-evening nap that night with Samoa already seventy-five kilometers behind us, after a small meal of canned tuna that I shared with the cat. I had little appetite. The ebullience I’d felt in sighting the islands had been replaced with a sense of foreboding, as if I were being warned: don’t think you’re getting out of this. And perhaps I wouldn’t. I was only too aware of the tenuous hold I had on survival; any single mistake, any accident - even a minor one - could easily kill me. Even the familiar rumble of the kitten, in her spot on the back of the settee, couldn’t shake the feeling I had of being balanced on a razor’s edge, death waiting on either side.
At three in the morning, I awoke drenched in sweat from horrible dreams; images of people burning, of their blackened bones being eaten by enormous birds even as they still screamed and beat at the flames consuming them. With pounding heart, I listened to the hiss of the sea against the hull as Windswept sped along, trying desperately to turn my thoughts away from these horrible scenes, trying to find good reason to rise and get about my watch. And I tried; I went to the stove and put water on for tea, busied myself with this little routine, this calming protocol. But I couldn’t seem to let go of it, couldn’t quite slip back entirely into the world of the living. The little glow of the galley light seemed not so much cheerful as inconsequential; the interior of Windswept stayed dark and foreboding.
The scream of the kettle startled me; how could the water have boiled so quickly? I found the cup I used for tea, found a tea bag and poured water over it. My hands were shaking. I let it steep for only a few seconds and left the sodden bag on the counter and took the weak tea out on deck. Something was very wrong with me; something inside me was breaking.
Cup of tea in hand, I stood looking at the sweeping quilt of stars overhead; over the two weeks and more since leaving Hawaii, the northern stars had been gradually sliding away behind us, replaced more and more by the southern constellations. The Southern Cross had been rising into prominence for some time, and now it was center stage, magnificent in its glory. I took only a single sip of the tea and set the cup down on one of the cockpit seats then crawled out onto the ama netting, laying on my back and looking up at the heavens.
I woke to early morning sunshine filtered by high thin clouds and renewed trade winds from the southeast; seas had grown from restless to boisterous, with white, frothy caps. I was wet from spray, chilled to the bone, and went slowly below and put on a windbreaker and a pair of shorts an
d made myself hot oatmeal but when I sat to eat it, found myself unable to swallow. I set the bowl down for the cat.
I felt dazed, as if with a fever, and went back on deck, secured myself with the safety harness, and stood on the port ama watching the endlessly changing sea, feeling irrelevant and very small. What was I in the face of such immensity and permanence? No more than the pitiful last of a pitiful species that had believed in our short time that we dominated the Earth, believed that we were her master and had done our utmost to despoil her. And now, as so many insignificant species before us, we would pass from her, worthy of little more celebration than a footnote in her grand book. An ugly, spiteful, quarrelsome little species that she had shrugged from her as a horse shivers an irritating fly from its flanks.
Whatever I did, whatever efforts I made, would be just as meaningless; I was the last actor on a stage that would try to trip me into a fatal mistake at every turn. There was nothing to continue to survive for – this play had no audience; the theatre had been emptied. And what was in the script for me in any case? A life of unrelenting loneliness, a constant threat of violence and hunger and disease; a hopeless search for safety because there was no safety. I faced a life in a world gone feral. A life alone.
We rushed through the sea, the water black and impenetrable. I could not take my eyes from it, and unbidden, felt my hand rising to the harness, felt it unclip it from the jack line, felt myself freed from it, untethered. Now balanced precariously as we leapt through the waves, I had only to take a single small step. I had only to let go.
In my eyes, a flash of red, and my gaze was pulled to the East, to see the red star just cresting the jagged horizon, its light casting a path on the water like some ghostly beacon, a vermillion glow leading from it to Windswept. As we surged southward, the line moved with us and suddenly illuminated within it, just at the edges of my vision, a black shape sat low in the water, in sharp relief against the illuminated sea.
