Twelve Mile Limit

10

In the mangrove heat of an autumn afternoon, Amelia and I ran along the marina’s shell road that tunnels through prop-roots, tidal swamp, out into the light and traffic of Tarpon Bay Road, then straight to the beach. We were on the late November cusp of tourist season, so there were a lot of rental cars, metallic bubbles in crimson, bronze, white; a noticeable increase in the number of license plates from Ohio, Michigan, New York, Canada.

The first ten minutes or so, we talked about how crappy we felt, how shaky.

“I’m not going to drink any alcohol for a month,” she said. Her tone told me that she was angry at herself, disappointed, too, and communicated to me on a deeper level so that I could be certain it was uncharacteristic behavior.

In a similar tone, I said, “Couldn’t agree more. What an idiotic waste of time. It ruined my whole damn morning. I slept for a couple hours, woke up at seven, went straight to the lab, but didn’t get any work done at all.”

Later, watching the sunset from the patio outside the Mucky Duck, me holding a draft beer, her with a glass of wine, we’d both laugh at our own weakness and hypocrisy. Now, though, we were determined to get ourselves clean again, to take control, and physical penance seemed like an appropriate start.

If you run or swim much, you can tell very quickly if an unfamiliar workout partner takes either discipline seriously. Amelia clearly did-she ran with a long, pure stride; she seemed to glide as I pounded along, big and muscle-dense, at her side. When I asked her, “Okay with you if we pick up the pace a little?” she answered, “Seriously? I’d love to,” with an edge that made me think, Uh-oh.

So we punished ourselves. Got the sweat going, hearts pounding, the lungs burning. Got the tiny little voice of reason that lives on the outskirts of the modern brain whispering couch-potato lies: Slow down. Why push yourself? Listen to the pain. Listen to your body, not your instincts! Stop fighting against the inevitable!

We ran southeast on the sand ridge that is higher and harder than the actual beach. To our right, the Gulf of Mexico was mineral green, dense with salt, swollen with autumnal light. There were beach umbrellas, bikini swatches triangulated on strawberry breasts, oiled thighs, boom-box Margaritaville music, and bearish men sleeping facedown, their white skin seared the color of ham. Off to the left were sea oats and condos and expensive hotels with pools and package deals, outdoor cabana bars with familiar names: Casa Ybel, Sandal Foot, Snook Inn, Westwind.

After slightly more than twenty minutes of pushing myself way too hard-we had to have gone at least three miles-I took a couple of big gulps of air in order to speak, and said, “What I’m worried about is, if you don’t know CPR, I could collapse right here and die.”

She guffawed, broke stride, held out her palm to me, still jogging, and we shook hands. “That was a hell of a five-k. We had to be running sub-sevens. And in this damn sand!”

“I know, I know. Mind if we walk until my legs stop shaking?”

We turned back toward Tarpon Bay Road, and I listened as she made small talk about her work. She’d graduated from South Florida, got her law degree from Stetson, then went to work for the state, representing migrant workers in Immokalee and Belle Glade.

“My dad, God rest his good, good soul, always told me that I was born to be a rescuer. I so wish he’d been right.”

I said, “You’re being pretty hard on yourself, lady.”

“I know, I know. I keep hoping it will go away. That feeling keeps coming back, survivor’s guilt.”

I decided it was as good a time as any to bring up the subject again, so I asked her, “Any chance the guilt is so strong that you might have imagined seeing the boat? The one you think could have picked up the other three, the boat without lights?”

“No… no, I don’t think so. At least… well, I probably did go a little crazy sitting on that tower for two nights, but not that crazy. The mind can do funny things, but I know in my heart that I saw something. It was there. I could hear it. I could smell it even before I saw it. Even with all the dried bird guano on the tower, the air out there is so clean, the smell really stuck with me. Diesel fumes and cigarette smoke and something else… a kind of…” Her nose wrinkled, remembering it. “Stench. A stink. That’s the only word that describes it. Not just old fish. The boat had this really foul odor. I’ve never smelled anything like it before. Worse than garbage. Which means I couldn’t have imagined it.”

I told her, “So I accept your earlier offer. I will listen to everything you say and keep it in confidence-Tomlinson is the only exception. Sometimes I need to bounce things off that big brain of his. If that’s okay with you, tell me all about it. In return, I’ll promise to help you in any way I can.”

She pursed her lips, giving it consideration, then held out her hand again to shake on it.

We did.

Probably because I’ve spent so much time in port towns and small coastal villages around the world, I’ve heard many stories about survival at sea. There are the epic tales, such as those of Shackelton and Bligh, as well as the more modern accounts of Steve Callahan’s 72 days adrift or the Baileys, who survived for 117 days in a rubber raft, eating raw turtle and trigger fish, and of the Robertson family, who endured 37 days in a raft after their sailboat was damaged by a whale.

I’m also familiar with a dozen or more accounts of SCUBA divers who surfaced only to discover that their boat had sunk or, more commonly, the charter boat they’d been on had gone off and left them, almost always because of some bored dive master’s sloppy head count.

It happens a lot. Way more often than most sport divers realize and more than most busy charter companies care to admit. Worldwide, there are dozens of similar incidents reported each year, which is why smart divers always make it a point of introducing themselves to several strangers when outward bound on an unfamiliar dive boat. Even if you’re the shy, quiet type, make very damn sure that other people aboard know who you are, where you’re from, and that they find you and your partner unforgettable.

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.”

We were back in my house now, cooling down from the run. Sitting on the upper deck outside my lab drinking water from plastic liter bottles that were cold from my little ship’s fridge. I’ve got a few cane-backed barstools on the deck (the higher the elevation, the easier it is to see fish when looking down into the water) and a couple of old rockers. We sat in the rockers, Amelia staring out over the bay, still inside herself, reliving the tragedy as she spoke.

That first night, she didn’t sleep at all. Suffered through a couple of more panic attacks similar to the one she experienced while in the water. She continued to hear her friends’ voices, too. Imagined voices.

“As crazy as I was that first night, though,” she said, “the boat’s engine was real. You know how, just before first light, way before sunrise, the sky seems to turn a misty charcoal color? There’s no light in the sky. Even the stars fade to gray. But things, individual objects-the frame of the tower I was on, the face of a wave-solids and liquids seem to have a little bit of light inside them. Not strong. Like a sky so black causes friction, so anything that moves sparks a little. That’s how I saw the boat. But that’s also why I didn’t get a good enough look to describe it.”

Amelia told me the boat passed within a quarter-mile, probably less, but there was no way to judge for certain.

“At one point, when the strobe flashed, it was close enough that I’m pretty sure it had those steel booms you see on a certain kind of boat. Just the silhouette. That’s all I saw.”

I said, “Do you mean the kind of booms found on shrimp boats?”

She nodded. “Yes, I think so, the kind they use for dragging nets. The booms were up, folded like wings. Only I can’t say for sure it was a shrimp boat. It was pretty good size, though. Not moving fast but pushing a lot of water. No lights at all, not in the cabin, none on the deck. No navigational lights, either. It went sliding by in the night like a ghost ship or something, that big strobe light showing me nothing but shadows and angles way out there on the edge of a white circle. It seemed like the boat was coming right at me. Then, all of a sudden, it turned away. Headed north, running parallel to the coast.”

I asked, “What time was that?”

She touched a hand to the stainless dive watch on her left wrist. “It was 5:50 A.M. That’s when the boat was real close and I checked my watch.”

“Was the Coast Guard helicopter still on station? Were they still searching, I mean?”

She shook her head. “No. They hadn’t been out there for a couple of hours. I found out later that the Coast Guard suspended the air search between 2 A.M. and sunrise, and the cutter they sent wasn’t even close yet. Which means it was just me out there. And the others-me on the tower, them in the water, and that boat. Which is why the Coast Guard didn’t see it. Never knew it was there.”

So far, I didn’t doubt the woman’s story. By law, between dusk and dawn, all vessels are mandated to show running lights, but it’s common for skippers to ignore the law and run dark. On black nights, white anchor lights, even red and green bow lights, interfere with night vision. It’s easier to see random waves without them. As to other boat traffic, there’s usually not much at night, particularly in stretches of seldom-traveled wilderness water, and the water space off the Ten Thousand Islands is about as wilderness as it gets.

Even so, something was missing from the story. Had to be. By my judgment, Amelia was a rational, logical person, and thus far, her story contained a major omission. I said, “Okay, you saw a boat. The boat wasn’t showing lights. Trust me, it’s not unusual. It slipped through a little hole in the Coast Guard search schedule. I don’t doubt that, either. So the question is obvious: What makes you think that boat may have found Janet, Michael, and Grace? It was dark. There was no way for people aboard to see three people floating in the water.”

Amelia took a sip of her water, turned her head, and looked at me. She had eyes the color of spring grass, a lucent green, and they seemed to be set slightly deeper into her face, as if having retreated from the emotional beating she’d taken over the last several weeks. “The boat stopped, that’s why. About twenty minutes later, the sky had changed from charcoal to a kind of pearly gray. It was way to the northeast, but it was out there. I could see it. Out there, floating, but not moving forward.”

“Could you hear its engines?”

“No. It was too far away by then. I’m sure you’ve seen the tower I was on. It has two platforms. One just over the waves, and the other about twenty feet above that. I climbed up to the highest platform to get a better look. It was cold up there, windy. Doc, I’m telling you now exactly what I told the Coast Guard. There was a boat out there. I’ll swear to it. And it stopped. For the first time, it showed lights. I saw it flashing a spotlight around. Then it started moving again toward shore and was gone. It’d stopped for five minutes, maybe ten.”

She paused for a moment, building her case, letting me think about it before she added, “All three of them were wearing inflated vests. If all those search boats and helicopters didn’t find Janet, Grace, and Michael in six solid days and nights of searching, doesn’t it make sense that someone else did? Someone picked them up. My God, someone had to. That’s the only reasonable explanation. We didn’t find them because they weren’t there!”

I said, “I’d like to believe that-and so would you. So would we all. But it’s a big ocean, Amelia. You know that better than most people will ever know it. Drop the average adult diver into the Gulf of Mexico, and he or she is proportionally reduced to the size of about one molecule in the atomic structure of a very large animal. Easy to miss, and sometimes almost impossible to find.”

She was nodding, anticipating my response, way ahead of me. “I agree. But it should be easy enough to prove there was another boat out there. At least that there is a possibility they were picked up. It’s like I told your friend at St. Pete Coast Guard, Commander Dorsey.

“I told him that everyone knows the government has all kinds of satellites flying around the sky, up there to monitor weather and drug trafficking and who knows what else. Maybe a satellite flew over that night and there’s a photo of the boat somewhere, a way to identify it.”

“What did Dalton think about that idea?”

“He thought it was great, but he said the Coast Guard couldn’t help me. No access to that kind of classified information. Not officially anyway. It had something to do with them not being a branch of the military, which was news to me.” She seemed to make it a point not to look in my direction when she added, “Commander Dorsey suggested that I mention the satellite idea to you. When I asked why, he didn’t say. Just sort of ignored the question. Like there was something he knew but wasn’t going to tell me. Does that make any sense to you, Doc?”

I was thinking: Satellite images. Good idea. But I said, “Nope. I have no idea why Dalton would say such a thing. But look… well, what we should decide here, as far as me helping you, Amelia-of course I will. Count on it. What I’m not clear on is what you want me to do.”

Now she turned to look at me. “I want you to question every detail of my story. This is the lawyer in me talking. Trying to prove me wrong is the only way I can be proven right. Come to some conclusions, write them out, and Commander Dalton said he would attach it to the Coast Guard file, which will make it public record. What I really want? I told you before. I want you to help all four of us get our reputations back.”