Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I mused, “These may be my last thoughts. I should be thinking something important.” But I couldn’t think of anything important to think. My mind drifted to Shakespeare and the great philosophers, but I didn’t have any new insights. I tried to get my life to flash before my eyes, but all that was flashing were the squinty prismatic colors caused by too much time in the sun on the sea. I considered my last words, even if no one was around to hear them. I couldn’t come up with anything profound or witty to say to the waves. I found myself dwelling on my favorite Winnie-the-Pooh story, “In Which Piglet Is Entirely Surrounded by Water,” when a frightened Piglet misses Pooh and thinks, “It’s so much more friendly with two.”

I was glad that John was safe and that he would be able to care for George and Blaine, and I was sorry he wasn’t with me—both, at once. By that time, I’d been trying to stay afloat for about an hour and a half. I was sunburned to a crisp and felt a little feverish. I seemed to have swallowed gallons and gallons of seawater.

I had never felt so alone.

I remembered the literary trope that we all die alone, no matter how we die.

I tried to enumerate what I had planned to do with and for my children. My own life wasn’t flashing before my eyes, but their lives were. I’ve never been good at the present moment, so I once more took refuge in planning an unplannable future.

I felt my own insignificance; I felt the smallness of man. I felt how little it mattered, really, whether any one person lived or died.

My reverie was punctured by a voice on the wind—a voice that sounded eerily like John’s—shouting, “Help! Help!” I tried to shout back, but the wind still stymied me. Then I heard another voice. It dawned on me that the other three must be in the same situation I was. Because I was downwind, I could hear them, but they couldn’t hear me. Judging by their voices, we were far from one another and from the boat. But perhaps the divemaster knew the answers I didn’t.

On the horizon, I suddenly saw a boat, though I wasn’t sure it was our boat.

Something that resembled a giant pink breast, perhaps five feet tall, came into view, heading toward the now clearly discernible boat. Perhaps the voices, the boat, and the breast were mere hallucinations. The boat, which was beginning to look clearly like our boat, moved toward the pink breast, and they appeared to merge. Then the boat headed in the direction from which the other voices had arisen. It stopped for a few minutes.

And then it began to move toward me.

Never in my life have I greeted any lover with the joy I felt when I grabbed the dive ladder. I climbed up shakily and collapsed into John’s arms.

John had had a difficult experience, too, but quite different from mine. He was with two other people, one of them a divemaster, and they had surfaced about forty-five minutes after I did. They had faced the same dilemma of being unable to get the attention of the boat captain. They had taken turns trying to swim to the boat, but it always had motored elsewhere before they could reach it. Once, John got within about fifty feet of it. The pink breast was actually an emergency balloon the divemaster had been carrying. Later, I wondered how anyone who knew such a thing might be needed could have let a novice such as me return to the surface alone. The divemaster had inflated the balloon when she spotted the boat, then swum with it until the captain finally saw it and motored over to pick her up. Once on board, she had pointed the boat toward John and the aquarium girl. All the while they were stranded, John had assumed that I was already back on board; he became frantic when he learned that I was unaccounted for. But the divemaster had heard me trying to holler back to John and pointed the ship accordingly. I’d been afloat for nearly two hours and had drifted several miles.

Only after I climbed aboard did I begin to get angry: at the boat captain, at the divemaster, at the hotel management. But I also felt so grateful to be alive, and it’s hard to be angry and profoundly grateful at the same time. I hugged John; I hugged the aquarium girl; I hugged the divemaster; I hugged the man from Maryland, slightly to his dismay. The boat captain tried to make cheery conversation, to which I replied in what John later described as my “Linda Blair voice,” a guttural growl like that of the demon-possessed little girl in The Exorcist.

You actually can be grateful and angry at the same time.