The modern world and its complicated series of safety nets have orphaned us from the exigencies of fundamental survival. To be adrift in a lifeboat or to be adrift in the water, floating and alone, legs dangling down into the abyss, are two very different propositions, though neither is enviable. It is the stories of the lost divers, though, that I find the most chilling. There are some heroic stories and some horrific stories, although few lost divers live to tell the tale.
Here, jogging along at my side, was a woman who had found a way to survive. I gave her my full attention, asking only the occasional leading question to prod her along when necessary. I also made little mental notes that I would later detail on paper when I returned to the lab.
When you meet one of the rare strong and good ones, a small request for help is not an imposition, it is an opportunity. Sometimes it is also an honor.
Amelia told me that at around 11 P.M., after four hours of swimming fixedly toward the light, the steel girders of the 160-foot navigational tower took shape in the blackness. When she was near enough, she let the waves wash her into the metal service ladder, then fought with the last of her strength to hang on. She held herself there until she had the waves timed, then used one of the swells to boost herself up onto the rungs, and climbed to the tower’s lowest deck. It was only about 8 feet above the water.
“I felt like I was dreaming,” she said. “The only time it was bright enough to see was every four seconds when the light at the top of the tower exploded. You know those strobe lights they use at parties sometimes when people are dancing? It was kind of like that. Very weird, nightmarish. My muscles were quivering, and I knew the barnacles had cut me up pretty good. But, after a while, I got up and started calling for the other three. As the night went on, I kept thinking I heard them. The wind makes strange sounds out there. I kept getting up and calling back, calling their names.”
Around midnight, Amelia saw what she correctly believed to be a Coast Guard helicopter off in the distance, with its searchlight fanning the water.
“My eyes just kept following the helicopter,” she said. “It went east, then south a bit, and I moved with it around the tower. I watched it for a long time, the helicopter’s flashing lights, and then it seemed to settle over an area near where I guessed our boat went down, but a couple miles too far west. Like it was too far out, understand? Right on the edge of the horizon. I thought, ‘There’s no way I could have swum that far.’”
We were back on Tarpon Bay Road now, walking shoulder to shoulder, me getting the occasional whiff of girl sweat and the morning’s shampoo. Every few minutes, she’d pull her T-shirt up to wipe her face dry, a jockish mannerism that I found endearing. I told her, “It’s tough to gauge distance over water. Sometimes things seem closer than they are, sometimes they seem farther. It’s doubly hard at night. The chopper probably used GPS coordinates to settle down right over the Baja California. ”
She touched my arm, communicating her agreement. “That’s exactly what I finally decided. The copter had found my friends. Why else would it hover like that? Which made me feel good. I didn’t stop to wonder why Janet, Michael, and Grace had swum back to the wreck site or how they could have even found it. See? My brain wasn’t working right. I was exhausted and cold and just not tracking.”
At about the same time, she also saw the lights of what she believed was a large boat. “It was out there in the same general area, several miles to the west, only it didn’t seem nearly so far out as the helicopter.”
I said, “But not the mystery boat? The boat with the foul smell, the one you say went by the next morning.”
“No, absolutely not. I’ll tell you how I know in a second. But seeing boat lights out there, the way my mind processed it, the helicopter had found Michael, Grace, and Janet, and they’d called a boat in to pick them up. A Coast Guard cutter. That’s what I wanted to be happening. But after a little bit of time, the boat seemed to head off to the southwest, so then I figured, after rescuing those three, they’d found my inflated vest. The one I’d taken off because I couldn’t swim with it. So they’d found the vest, couldn’t figure out where I was, and were now looking for me. I started jumping up and down, screaming and waving my arms, trying to time it to the strobe. Yelling ‘Here I am, I’m okay!’ As if anybody could see that far. Or hear.”
She made a soft noise in her throat, a sound of despair, or of visceral pain. Then she was quiet for a few moments before she added, “Out there, your mind has no familiar reference point, so it plays weird tricks. I was trying to make sense of what the boat was doing because I wanted to believe it so much. In real life, your boat doesn’t sink. Your friends don’t vanish. People aren’t swallowed up by the dark, leaving their loved ones back home wondering what in the hell happened.”
She made the same sad sound again, and I listened to it become a soft chuckle, then fade. “At least, that’s the way my reality was. Every story, every event has a rational, plausible ending, right? But not this one. Which is why my life has seemed a little unreal… sometimes like some really bad dream ever since.” Amelia stopped and looked at me. “You want to hear something ironic? Something way too damn tragic for me to even want to think about it?”
She told me the irony was that the boat she saw that night wasn’t a Coast Guard vessel. It was the Ellen Clair, a ninety-foot charter boat out of Fort Myers Beach. Captain Ken Peterson, with a party of ten aboard, had stopped to fish the Baja California while en route to the Dry Tortugas, fifty miles away. The Coast Guard had contacted the Ellen Clair by VHF and weeks later Lad provided Amelia with a telephone number for the boat’s captain.
“I’ve been trying to put all the pieces together,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened and why it happened. That charter boat was a tiny little piece of the puzzle of that night. So I called Captain Peterson on the phone. He told me that he first spotted the helicopter when he was about ten miles north of the Baja California. It had its spotlight on, in a search pattern. The helicopter did a fly-by of his boat, contacted him on the radio, then continued searching.
“So here’s the ironic thing. Peterson anchored on the Baja at around 1 A.M. and they sat there and fished for about an hour. Had some soft drinks, looked at the stars, the engines off. If Michael’s boat had stayed afloat for just a few hours longer, they’d have found us. If we could have found some way to stay in the area for just a littler longer, they would have found us. Michael, Janet, and Grace would be here now. Or someplace in Florida. We’d probably all be laughing about what a great adventure we’d had.”
Amelia, who hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since Friday morning, spent the next thirty-five hours on the tower, hearing noises, waving to boats, planes, and helicopters that never saw her until 9:45 Sunday morning.
One of the boats, she said, was the mystery boat. The boat without lights, the boat with the strange odor, the vessel she could smell before it was close enough to see.
“It came from the opposite direction the wind was blowing,” Amelia told me. The boat came out of the southwest, she explained, heading toward coastal Florida, maybe Marco Island, or the Ten Thousand Islands, a mangrove maze that fringes the Florida Everglades. “First I heard the engine, way off in the distance. Then the stink. That’s how strong it was. The wind wasn’t strong enough to blow it away. It was an hour or so before sunrise. Over the noise of the wind and that creaking tower, the engine kept getting closer and closer.”