Dead Reckoning (13 page)

But why was I thinking of that now? Then I suddenly remembered what he was doing when he told me that story. He was working on a tractor engine, and I could suddenly recall every detail of how he got that motor started
—the meticulous way he tested the electronic components, isolated the problem, and then fixed it. “Engines seem like something, but they’s really simple once you boil ‘em down,” he told me. “Everything’s cause and effect. When somepin don’t work, there’s a good reason. All’s you got to do is narrow it down. Everything can be fixed somehow.”

             
I jumped to my feet, grabbed the toolbox, and headed for the door. I stopped half-way and opened the refrigerator. I found a sour, old grape in the produce drawer, smashed it and left it on the counter. Then I started up the stairs.

             
“What are you doing?” Jeff asked as I bolted up the stairs and toward the engine compartment.

             
“I’m going to get that motor started.”

             
“Good luck,” he said.

“By the way, his name is Shithead,” I said.

              “Who’s name?”

             
“The fly.”

             
“What? It’s still onboard?”

             
“Yep. And I’ve decided to let him live. He’s my pet now.”

             
“I think you’re losing it.”

             
“Probably,” I said.

             
I opened the engine compartment and stared at the small Volvo engine. It was covered in a gray film, which was a combination of soot, smoke, and fire extinguisher fluid. I inspected the various lines and hoses for fire damage, and there was none that I could see. It looked as if the fire had originated at the point where the fuel line entered the fuel filter. Perhaps it had a small leak which was ignited by the current. The fuel filter casing was warped from the heat but still intact, and the line leading into it had melted away, revealing its inside. I did not see any fuel in the line, and when I turned it over, none came out. Using wire clippers, I removed the melted end of the fuel line and slid it back onto the filter casing.

             
I needed a way to turn the engine over, which is another way of saying that I needed to rotate the crankshaft to operate the pistons. I grabbed the belt attached to the center-most wheel, the one most likely attached directly to the crankshaft, and pulled. It strongly resisted at first, but then gave way and moved easily through a small motion. It grabbed again, coming to a firm stop after about one-quarter turn and then oscillated back and forth a few times like a car lurching to a stop between successive speed bumps. I wondered if that should have created a spark in all the cylinders, just one, or maybe none.

             
I reasoned that since the engine had four cylinders and that a one-quarter turn seemed to have completed some sort of cycle in the engine, that a full turn should operate all the pistons and therefore, all of the spark plugs. I removed a spark plug at random, and like I had seen my Grandfather do, placed it against the engine block. I pulled the belt again and on the third quarter turn, I saw a tiny spark at the base of the plug. I performed the same test on all the spark plugs and each one eventually sparked. I found that it took only one complete turn to make each plug fire at least once. The results made me think that the main electrical components of the engine were fine and that perhaps the problem was just in the ignition, starter, or battery.

Theoretically, the engine would run if we could start it. Of course, we could not simply roll it down a hill to compression start it like I had seen my Grandfather do many times with his old ’45 Willy’s.

Jeff sat down next to me.

“The radio is screwed. How’s the engine looking?” he asked.

“I think the engine is fine. I can get a spark manually in all the plugs so I guess that means the wiring and distributor and so forth are ok.”

“Really?” said Jeff, surprised and suddenly more upbeat.

“But I don’t know how we are going to start it without the ignition system.”

“Easy,” Jeff said. “We’ll hot wire it.”

He grabbed a wrench and slid around toward the controls at the helm. He opened the cabinet revealing the ignition switch and wiring. He removed some wires, stripped them, and then asked me if I was ready.

“I hope the battery is ok,” he said. “If not, we’re really screwed.”

He touched the wires together, and the engine turned over several times.

“Yes!” we both exclaimed in unison.

The flood light flickered to life. Jeff reached over and flipped its switch to off.

“Fuel?” Jeff asked.

“Hold on,” I said. I pulled the tubing off the fuel filter and began sucking at it. Eventually some gas spilled into my mouth, which I held there as I placed my thumb over the end of the tube. I held the tube upside down as low as I could while I attached it to the filter again. A little fuel spilled into the filter. I spit over the side, swished with a little salt water and said: “Go ahead.”

The wires sparked as Jeff touched them together and the engine turned over. I watched as fuel surged into the filter in spurts much like blood pulses through the needle and into the tube when drawn by a nurse. After about ten seconds, the filter was full, and after another five seconds, the engine sputtered to life. Black smoke belched from the stern, and the smell of half-spent fuel filled the air, but then the exhaust cleared as the engine regulated itself.

Jeff twisted the two wires together and we shook each other’s hand. We resumed our journey through the doldrums, blind and deaf, but not dead in the water.

I went below to find Sonny, and as I passed the counter, I saw Shithead sitting on the grape, playing the violin. I didn’t have the time or the heart to tell him that I thought he should gotten off at Wake where the wind was calm and the decaying matter plentiful. Maybe he wasn’t strong enough even to get to shore. I should have given him the grape earlier.

I found Sonny in one of the bunks.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He did not move. I turned him over, and he edged up out of sleep.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t feel so well,” he said, dazed. “My ear hurts,” he said as he held his hand up to the ear opposite of my position. When he drew back his left hand, there was blood on it.

“Hey, your ear is bleeding. Let me see that.”

I rolled him over and found out what I already knew: that blood was seeping out of his ear. There was a small red spot on his pillow.

I had heard of lightning striking people and blowing their eardrums before. It also could have been the concussion from the thunder, but again, I did not hear any thunder.

“Did the lightning strike you?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “I didn’t feel anything.”

“Did you fall and hit your head?”

He didn’t respond, but just laid there.

I checked him over and found small burn marks on his left foot and elbow. I felt his pulse, and it seemed ok. I put my ear to his chest and listened to his breathing, which also sounded normal to me. I looked in his eyes, nose and mouth and did not see any blood or other abnormalities. I rubbed his fingers and toes and he indicated that he felt it. He was able to move all his limbs with no weakness. He could follow my finger with his eyes and touch his nose with any of his fingers. I shined a light in his eyes and his pupils dilated. That was the extent of my medical diagnostic abilities.

“I’ll get you some water. I think you should stay in bed for a while,” I said.

After finishing the exam and administering a treatment consisting of a drink of water, I went topside and informed Jeff of my diagnosis.

“What are we supposed to do about his ear?” Jeff asked.

“I had a ruptured eardrum from an ear infection as a kid,” I replied. “They didn’t do anything for it. He also may be delirious. He was saying something about lesbian vampire hooker pirates when he went out again.”

“I don’t think that means anything,” Jeff said. “I bunk next to him and he’s always talking about lesbian vampire hooker pirates in his dreams.”

“In that case, I think he’ll be ok. It was probably just an indirect strike.”

“Indirect? Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better,” replied Jeff.

11

DAY 12 AT SEA (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 25.2°N, 180°E)

“I am become death. Destroyer of worlds.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the world’s first nuclear weapons.

We crossed the Tropic Of Cancer several days ago and then the wind picked up, curiously from the south. That was all right because it gave us a nice tailwind by which to sail and kept us sailing before the seas, which is much more comfortable. We could have gone more directly toward Seattle by sailing more easterly, but there was usually an upper level trough northwest of Hawaii, called the Kona Low, that we could catch and ride to North America. The wind was heading that way anyway, so we didn’t fight it.

We sailed at a heading of seventy degrees (or east-northeast), and the wind was at a perfect two-hundred degrees (or south-southwest) between ten and twelve knots. The physics of sailing is such that a tailwind is, counter intuitively, not optimal—at least if speed is your goal. Sailboats attain their maximum hull speed when the sails are correctly trimmed and the wind blows approximately perpendicular to the keel. In that condition, the air attains its greatest acceleration as it passes the sail, and as any first-year physics student will tell you, force equals mass times acceleration. The more that mass of air is accelerated, the more the force on the sails. If the wind is right and the sailor knows what he is doing, the majority of that force can be transferred from the wind to the sails and then into forward motion of the sailboat.

We had made approximately 770 miles from our previously known position in five days. Our average speed over the last five days had been almost 6 knots which was a marked improvement over the beginning of the trip. We had picked up speed in the last 24 hours or so, and we were finally pushing close to the maximum hull speed of 8 knots. If we had been able to maintain that speed on the great circle path, we would have needed just over two weeks to reach the North American coast.

Truth be told: since our GPS was fried, we were not
exactl
y sure where we were. But a sailor always has another trick up his sleeve. Since land is sharp to the hull of a boat, knowing where you are is of paramount importance, and so sailors have more than one way to get a fix on their position. If we had just been on a simple day sail around our favorite body of water, we would have made a few measurements to known points of land, done some high school trigonometry, and had our position in no time. With last land 770 miles behind us, that option was out. We could have whipped out the sextant. Finding your position with a sextant is not much different than using points of land. You need star charts (which we had) and the calculations are a little more difficult—not to mention that it is not easy to hold yourself steady enough to take a measurement on a small point of light on a boat—but we were all college graduates. We just lacked the essential element: stars. Overcast skies will do that.

Since all else had failed, we fell back to the last resort: dead reckoning. I’ve often wondered if it is called dead reckoning because in the event you need it, it is reckoned that you are as good as dead. Nevertheless, we knew how fast we had been going, how long we had been traveling, and where we had been. Any algebra student could have taken it from there: distance equals speed times time. Plot that distance line on your heading from your last known position and you’ve got it, give or take the width of your pencil lead. And that’s what we had done, every hour, for five days straight. The problem was that you are supposed to use dead reckoning from a known position and ours was 770 miles ago. Errors creep in and multiply every time you base your current position on your last position which was a dead reckoning position.

I reckoned in the logbook that we were at twenty-five-point-two degrees north and right at the international dateline. I arbitrarily picked a moment on my watch and stood up to pay tribute to our crossing the international dateline. It was now technically a day earlier, and I set my watch back. The bad news was that it was just imaginary, and it was still day 12 of our trip. I wished that instead of being just a made-up, arbitrary line that would not lessen the actual time it took to get to our families by a single second, the dateline was a portal that could take me back to before the crisis began. It made me feel better that we were at least in the right hemisphere now.

Darkness fell as I stood third shift at the wheel. The air cooled, but south winds continued to pump tropical moisture over us, making the nights sticky and uncomfortable. The wind was nature’s air conditioning though. Temperatures could feel twenty degrees cooler by virtue of a strong breeze.

We had reached a point in the journey when there was nothing much left to do. We were as prepared as we could be for whatever lie ahead. We had already read every book we had aboard and retold all the stories from our history together in the islands. We told stories from our youthful conquests which, for men, regardless of the topic on which it started, always seemed to devolve to the lowest common denominator: sex. Stories of first lovers, strangest lovers, and numbers of lovers, and other things about lovers.

With nothing much left to talk about, we began to get on each other’s nerves—especially Sonny and Jeff. I watched the animosity between them percolate like a distant storm. Each little argument developed, billowed for a while, and then died without producing any damage—some fireworks, a big gust of cool wind, and then that was it. The two main points of contention between them—sailing and ideology—were like differing air
masses; each was capable of producing its own kind of storms. What worried me was what would happen if the two collided. As with nature, the worst weather of human emotion generally occurs along the boundary between two opposing currents—especially when things are already unstable.

There hadn’t been any major arguments yet, but I felt something coming. Like when an old farmer says “Rain’s a coming. I can feel it in my bones.”

The argument started off innocent enough. Jeff didn’t like the way Sonny tied off the mainsail and called him out on it. Jeff and Sonny were usually able to discuss their differences calmly and respectfully, but everybody has a point beyond which reason goes out the window. I didn’t really care how the mainsail was tied off as long as it was safe, so I found it amusing at first. But it didn’t take long for the argument to devolve into the usual liberal versus conservative talking points.

“What makes you think you can tell a woman what to do with her body?” Sonny asked snidely.

“Why do you think society shouldn’t be able to tell her what to do with her body if they deem it to be in society’s best interest?” Jeff asked.

“How can anything be in society’s best interest when it only affects her life?”

“Because we are not talking about just her life. Most of us believe there is a life inside her that is every bit as valuable as hers.”

“That is where we differ,” Sonny said. “I don’t think a clump of cells four or five or six weeks old is as valuable as her.”

“When is it as valuable as her?” Jeff asked. “At birth? Two weeks before birth? Six weeks? When?”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe…” Sonny started before Jeff cut him off.

“That’s exactly the point. You don’t know. Only the far left-wing, Ivy-league or Berkeley crackpots would argue that it isn’t a person, worthy of protection
after
birth, and there is fundamentally no difference between a two-minute-old baby and one two minutes before birth, and by extension, ten minutes before birth, or one day, or two weeks. There is no way to know for sure at any time so, you must go back to the only point during the process at which you know there is not a human being there.”

“And I suppose you know when that is?”

“Conception!” Jeff snapped.

They were starting to get mad, and I might have stepped in, but there was clearly more to the argument than abortion. Nobody really cared about abortion any more.

“I don’t understand most of what you think,” Jeff continued. “I mean look at the current situation. I can go through the list and show how it was really the liberal positions that got us here.”

“Is that right?” Sonny asked angrily.

“Yes. Appeasement. Let’s understand the terrorists rather than kill them. Brilliant.”

“Constantly killing people in their own countries was what pissed them off so much.” Sonny cut in. “How would you feel if some Middle Eastern country kept interfering in our business?”

“The 9/11 terrorists didn’t come from our country, they came from theirs! If we were sending out terrorists to attack other countries, I’d expect that to come back to us.”

“They think we are terrorists,” Sonny returned.

“Ridiculous!” Jeff yelled.

“Are you seriously saying that if soldiers from some Middle Eastern country were patrolling our streets and killing our citizens, for whatever reason, you wouldn’t fight back? Jeff, that’s bullshit, and you know it!”

I always enjoy a good debate, but since this was counterproductive to our goals, I wasn’t really enjoying this one. However, I thought Sonny had made an excellent point there—one I hadn’t thought of before. He was right: there were no circumstances under which I would not want to fight back against some other country patrolling our soil. I waited anxiously for Jeff’s reply.

But Jeff diverted: “That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what I don’t understand about you.”

“Really?” Sonny said, chuckling.

“Well, let me just tick through the list. Number one….”

“Don’t bother!” Sonny yelled.

“Number one…” Jeff continued unfazed. “Gun control. We wouldn’t even be able to defend ourselves right now if you liberals had your way.”

“Stop right there!” Sonny barked. “Maybe if we were able to control all these guns the world wouldn’t be so damned dangerous right now!”

“Yeah right! All that would have happened is that law abiding citizens wouldn’t have guns. Criminals don’t obey laws, even gun laws. Remember?”

“Just stop,” Sonny said.

“Number two: the environment!” Jeff persisted.

“I said stop,” Sonny said in a quiet, angry, monotone.

“The environment is king! We might as well just kill ourselves, for the good of the earth!” Jeff was becoming angrily dismissive and starting to sound irrational. “Even if it meant limitations on where people could live, play, or even where we could get our energy from—which, by the way, is a big reason we got into all this shit in the first place.”

Sonny stood up and confronted Jeff. “I said shut up.”

Jeff yelled right in Sonny’s face: “If we could have just used our own fucking energy, energy right under our own soil, instead of pissing away trillions of dollars in the turd world, we would have never had to set foot in that cesspool, they wouldn’t have been so pissed off at us, they wouldn’t have had the resources to terrorize us, and we’d probably be sitting fat, dumb, and happy right back on Kwaj right now—our families safe!”

There it was; the real reason for this argument. Sonny stopped and softened, realizing it too.

“Both of you stop,” I said, stepping between them. “How do any of these old political arguments matter anymore? No woman is out looking for an
abortion now. Only an idiot could argue for gun control now. These are the kinds of theoretical things people sit around and discuss when everything is fine. The rules have changed.”

“The bottom line is that I just look at the world differently than liberals,” Jeff said calmly.  “Liberals think that people are basically ok, and that all we need is just a little bit more government oversight here and there to keep them in line, whereas I think that people are basically no damned good.”

“Really?” Sonny asked. “People are no damned good? What makes you say such a thing?”

“Experience. Put twenty-five toddlers in a room and see if most of them are disposed to being good or being bad. That will show you the true nature of humankind, like Lord of the Flies. Look at what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That is what a good proportion of people are really like when all restraint is thrown off. Look around now!”

“And so you think that is an argument in favor of
less
government regulation of people?” Sonny said in a laughing tone. “It sounds to me like we need more government regulation!”

“Stop it!” I demanded. “We all have our opinions about these things, but what difference does it make now?” I had my opinions about these things, but, as a scientist, I based mine on evidence, reason, and intuition. I came in with no preconceived notions about how things were or how they should be. I tended to agree with Jeff on gun control and abortion and with Sonny on government regulation and terrorism, but it was irrelevant. I knew what the argument was really about and didn’t want it to get out of control because of things that didn’t matter.

“We’re all scared,” I said. “We all feel like crap. We have to work together, or we’re screwed. Arguing about these abstract, irrelevant concepts doesn’t help.”

Jeff and Sonny continued to glare at each other.

“Seriously!” I yelled. “Does this shit matter?”

They didn’t reply.

I turned to Jeff. “Do you really think there is any woman looking for an abortion right now? You can’t honestly say you wouldn’t fight back against an army occupying our country!”