Time Bandit (25 page)

The hull boomed against the building ice as it broke leads of a boat length. But huge chunks of jagged ice erupted from the broken solid mass, and these threatened to rip into the hull. I craned my head out the window. The cold was unbelievable. The lights of the
Independence
shone brightly in the distance. I made the decision to leave the southerly track. We were not going to reach open water through ice that was rapidly thickening. The tension was tightening in my chest. I was smoking one cigarette off another. I had considered myself a veteran at handling pressures, but this now reached a new level of intensity.

I made the decision to turn around and return to the
Independence.
Making a 180-degree turn with a 113-foot platform in the middle of slab ice had its challenges. By backing up and laying on the throttles I risked shearing off the rudder or bending a shaft or fracturing the prop. I could feel the resistance in my hands on the throttles. I thought about how I had laughed at Mike Myers as Austin Powers in the movie, turning around a golf cart in a corridor that was only inches wider than the cart was long. With a boat, a similar maneuver was no laughing matter.
Forward, backward, forward, backward,
slowly turning by degrees, until at last the
Time Bandit
’s bow was aimed toward the lights of
Independence.

We returned to her thrall through ice that had closed and thickened in our wake. Backtracking that single mile was measured in Winstons and coffee. The crew stood near me in the wheelhouse adding their eyes to mine. We were stationary in the water half a mile off the coast. Neal said the winds were shifting out of the south, which could signal that the ice pack would start moving again. The next few hours would tell. I advised the crew to get some sleep until I decided on a new course of action.

S
itting in
Fishing Fever
’s wheelhouse, smoking, I was reminded of how fundamentally I am entwined with nature when I am at sea. At times like these, I really do think these things, these big thoughts that never ripple through my brain on land. Some people might think of this connection to nature as obvious, but not me. Usually I take for granted that nature is my master every minute I am on the sea. I can decide nothing independent of her immediate presence—the wind, weather, seas, temperatures, the fish and crabs. I am their slave. They dictate my fate. I am as a farmer, dependent on weather for his crops, on an unstable, rippling, ever-changing, and perilous land.

Does this make me different from people who live with buffers between their daily existence and the rawness of nature? Absolutely, yes, it does. It makes me a daily survivalist who is innately wary and in fear of change. I am filled with abandon when I return to land, where I have nothing like the sea to fear. What is to fear on land that can compare to a boat on the Bering Sea? Do I fear that I will be thrown off my Harley or beaten in a bar fight? Is this why I am like I am? Is this the reason Andy wants to spend more of his life working with the quintessential
land
animal? Is this why, his conscious desire notwithstanding, he goes back to the sea year after year, as if sirens were calling him toward jagged rocks on the shore?

I
pondered my predicament in that ice pack. I knew what I did wrong. I ignored my cardinal rule. I had wanted, more than even the safety of my boat, to deliver my catch on time to the
Independence,
and thus cash in on $216,000 of crabs in our holds. I had fallen prey to the logic of the new system. If I missed my delivery date, I would go to the back of the line, and my crabs would all die. I had defied my basic instincts as a captain by sending
Time Bandit
through the pack ice. In most of our lives, we get away with our mistakes. Nothing touches us with absolute inflexibility. But that is not nature’s way. She demands her payment for any small transgression. And now I was paying dearly for mine.

The ice pack changed again. This seemed like the devil at work. The wind must have shifted in the dark. Through those night hours, the temperature dropped further and the wind swung around from the north. More pack ice joined that which was already pushing around the island. Bay rollers under the ice undulated the flat shiny plane around our hull. I felt these rollers grinding the ice against our hull. The force of the wind on the ice was pushing us toward the shore. The engine sawed when the prop struck broken ice blocks and the sound pierced to my soul. The engine quit twice, and the engine alarms sounded below. I was not going to let nature wreck
Time Bandit
on the land, no matter how few choices remained to me. She would go down, if that was her fate, but she would never die like the
Alaskan Monarch.

I had to make a desperate run for open water; I had to get away from the shore. I wanted the crew to be ready for any contingency. They had not slept in two and a half days, except for this three-hour nap. I flipped the switch to activate the boat alarm. I shouted over the sirens to the crew deck for them to get up. I needed to share with them our troubles.

Shea, Russell, and Neal were out of bed at once, dressed and ready; Richard followed soon after. They stood by me in the wheelhouse looking out through the sodium lights at the ice floes, offering advice and consolation. I needed Neal and Russell especially to help me decide what to do, how far to go, and what stress to put on the engines. Would the screw take the beating? Or would the ice jam the rudder shaft into the lazarette, flooding the boat? These were immediate possibilities. Should we simply shut down the engines and let the wind and ice determine our fate?

Too long later, Caveman came up the stairs, dressed only in sweatpants and rubbing his eyes. He had heard the alarm, woken up, and then had gone back to sleep.

“What’s going on?” he asked at the top of the stairs.

This question made me irrationally angry; I was on edge. I needed sleep. I felt shockingly alone.

“Just shut up or I’ll kick your ass,” I told him. “We are in trouble.”

Caveman stood with his arms folded across his bare chest.

I told him, “We might have to get in survival suits. Wake up, get some clothes on, and get some coffee. We are trying to get out of this ice.” I looked at him. I was truly angry with him. I said to Shea, “I don’t know what kind of guy goes back to bed when the alarm goes off. But I am looking at one now.”

Caveman stood at the top of the stairs, I thought almost defiantly.

“You! Caveman! Get dressed!” I turned to Shea and said, “Thank God there are people onboard who actually care.”

I tried to advance the throttle but
Time Bandit
was having none of that now. The boat did not budge. The ice rumbled and boomed against the hull.

“This isn’t a pretty sight,” I told Richard.

The ice was forming in forty-and fifty-foot jagged chunks.

I sent Neal to the forepeak hatches to check on the bow for leaks.

The computer plotter, in which I had input Dutch as our destination, indicated an Estimated Time of Arrival: “NEVER.”

Caveman appeared in the wheelhouse. At least now he was dressed.

“I don’t yell for no reason,” I told him.

If the boat went down, Caveman would not have been prepared to save himself with no clothes on. A boat can go down in four minutes flat. We were not in immediate danger. But Caveman was not using his head. He was behaving like a caveman. If I had told him, “Go drop that anchor
now,
” he would have not had his shirt on. And what if our collective safety required the anchor to be dropped now, not when he was ready? I had a right to be mad. I hate captains who scream at their crews. Screaming accomplishes nothing. This once I felt justified.

But I was also mad at something else about Caveman that was under my skin. He was
always
late.

Caveman remarked, “I know I’m not getting in this cold water,” as if he would have a choice.

Neal came back to the wheelhouse to report that ice was bending the steel in the bows. At the moment, the dents were not an immediate threat to the boat. The paint had chipped off the inside of the hull, which the ice had not yet breached. Neal said that he had never heard such sounds before, “like something from another world,” he said.

Caveman must have thought over what I told him. He came up to the wheelhouse angry about how I had singled him out. I was not prepared to argue. I had said what I felt. I would not apologize. He punched me once in the nose and once in the ear. I said, “That was pretty good. You better get out of the wheelhouse.” He punched me a third time, in the throat. I said, “
That
hurt.” I was going to split his nose. Instead, I hit him on the top of the head, once, and knocked him out. I dragged him out of the wheelhouse. When he came to I said, “You can either finish this fight or you can finish this season.”

For the next four and a half hours, nerves held us together as captain and crew. If a boat weighing 298 tons can move gingerly,
Time Bandit
did. I maneuvered her like a skiff with the throttles, on and off, steering left and right with the leads in a heading south. The sea swell broke the ice and created a path that was no more than a boat’s length. We moved boat length by boat length. The sun came up. I could see clear water ahead. We reached the pack’s fringe. In another half hour, we went clear. We had made it through my worst night.

“Dude,” I told Richard, “that took a year off my life.”

I
should ask a lawyer to legally change my initials from J.H. to T.U. I am Tango Uniform like never before. The minute the light intensifies in the east I can see where I am in this universe. The rain lowers the sky down to the sea. A mist is changing to fog. This world is a dull gray. No one will know I am gone. The look of the cliffs in this weather is like the Land Before Time. The sight off my starboard side chills me. Jagged rocks heap along a mountain wall that rises four or five hundred feet to a short plateau of snow and ice that beats down on my face like sharp slivers. I refuse to put on my life jacket. That is not who I am. I know I can get ashore and cling to the rocks. I tie the ropes of my bumpers in knots. I shoot my last signal flare away from the cliffs.

The thrall of a current and tide takes hold of
Fishing Fever.
Inexorably, the water draws the boat toward the line of surf on the rock reef just under the cliffs. That is where I am heading. I can hear the surf collide with the rocks. I can smell the land, as if the violence of the sea against the rocks has produced its own stench. The air, filled with the sea, smells of heavy brine. I estimate forty minutes before I will be in the surf against the rocks. There can be no recovery there, no sandy beaches, no gradual bottom, indeed, no beaches, just rocks sticking out of the waves like blades, and beyond, a wall of rock against which the water explodes.

I must slow my boat’s drift. It is too deep here for an anchor to grip and hold on the bottom. I tie lines around two buckets, which I throw out as impromptu sea anchors. Their drag is imperceptible in these swells, which are getting higher with every ten feet I drift toward the rock wall. As I watch the buckets drag behind
Fishing Fever,
I look back in the direction where I came from. It is at that instant that I see a flare. But I do not see a boat under the flare. I am as certain as ever that I saw a flare. And if that is true, then that boat must have seen mine. The worst case, of course, would be if the boat in the distance that fired the flare was in trouble and in no position to come to my aid. That does not seem likely. But a flare is never to be fired only as an indicator; it should be ignited only if the boat firing the flare is in an emergency.

I watch helplessly. Everything is drenched. Nothing within my control can prevent from happening what I fear second only to the boat sinking under me. I will ride the boat into the reef, and if
Fishing Fever
does not beak up there, throwing me into the water, the swells will hammer her against the cliff walls. What that means for me is obvious. I will be cast into the water. I refuse to believe I will drown. The rocks can beat me to a pulp but I will survive. I am drifting to a place with no refuge.

I can see no harm in setting my Danforth. The water here may still be too deep, but the anchor will set, when the bottom shallows nearer the shore. I crawl along the starboard rail, and when I reach the bow deck I get down on my hands and knees for stability. The boat rocks and heaves and bucks. I tie the line to the cleat and over goes the anchor as I pay out scope. While I am still on the bow I look toward the sea. There is nothing out there. I scuttle back along the rail to the deck and the wheelhouse.

I scan the shore for a beach. I feel better when I strap on the revolver and holster, which allow me the illusion of independent action. Only pockets of beach punctuate this stretch of the Cape. A beach would offer me only different challenges. The boat would scrape through the reef and drift up on a narrow gravel strand. But brown bears crowd these beaches this time of year, and in minutes they would sniff out the salmon in my tanks. I cannot imagine holding off three or four of the largest bears on the planet with a revolver.

I feel the boat shudder and jump as the anchor scrapes bottom and grabs. The seabed along this coast consists mainly of clay and sand and some rock, but the Danforth is no match for the size of the swells that yank the boat against the anchor line with a loud snap. No shallow, gradual bottom gentles the sea to cliff walls. I look up at the rock face tangled with ice. I am no more than forty yards off the rocks.

Here’s what it comes down to: heaven and hell. They are this close. You can be in heaven or hell and what separates them is the space between my thumb and forefinger pressed together. It’s that close out here. That is what brings me out. I light my last Winston as if it were the final smoke of the condemned. I look down at the bumpers to figure out how I can work the rope under my arms and hope for the best once I am in the water. I can survive the cold if I can get in without being battered. Maybe the bumpers will overcome the force of the sea. The bumpers are my last best hope.