Sadness permeates the boat here at anchor in Ganges, even as the rollicking background noise of a hundred happy fellow vacationers drifts in the open hatches. Four people are dead, though not here. Only one we knew, and we knew his passing might be soon, but the other three have added to the already oppressive weight, and even an afternoon ashore and our first ice cream in a week hasn’t been enough to lift it.
The one we knew, an uncle, my stepfather’s twin brother, had been long in coming… a good man, superficially cheerful, good at his job, fond of pets, he’d been drinking himself into the grave for years, and the end, when it came, was mercifully short. It came the day after our departure, but it was left for the police to find him later, alone in his home, the way he must have wanted it. We didn’t find out until I opened an e-mail today, our first touch with the outside world since we left.
The others happened the same day, and we had an inkling of those at least, but again did not know for sure until just now, a story we saw right here on Three Sheets.
We’ve listened in our more than our fair share of aircraft crashes over the radio, but this is the first that resulted in any fatalities, and it was something of a fluke we heard it at all. The crash happened off the Washington coast, hundreds and hundreds of miles away. As fate would have it, however, it happened near a place called James Island, and we were very near James Island in the San Juans at the time, and someone, possibly a Coast Guard watch officer or a boater with a freak skip reception on the VHF, confused the two and sent boaters from around the region toward a position “north of James Island” in search of a downed chopper, with two persons in the water and unaccounted for.
Over the course of the next hour, according to my log, the confusion was straightened out, and eventually Sector Seattle reported that all persons had been recovered. We knew, however, that “recovered” was an intentionally indistinct term… no one wants to say “corpse” over the radio. So we were at least prepared to find out that the story hadn’t had a happy ending. The third fatality, and the sole survivor, were surprises, but the balance of all the news we had today was bad.
That’s a risk you run when you are out doing this sort of thing. When you touch base with civilization only occasionally, you tend to find out a lot of things at once, and it’s not always pleasant. Two years ago, we returned from a trip up the Inside Passage to find my grandfather gravely ill. He passed away the day after we got back to Seattle. For whatever reason, fate, luck, what have you, I left town for Spokane, where he lay in a nursing home, almost as soon as I found out. I got to see him only hours before he passed away. It brought home the nature of being out of touch in a society that has a broad and unsurprising expectation of easy communication. A hundred years ago, no one would bat an eye at a relative passing away in a town a hundred miles distant and not learning about it for weeks or months. I imagine when people took leave of one another, it was a more portentous event than it is today… there were pretty fair odds you might never see someone again if they were in even moderately poor health.
When we pull out on the boat, we don’t think of it as being tremendously different than when we head off to another town in a car. It’s just another temporary goodbye from friends and family, a “see ya’ around” rather than an emotional leave-taking. But it really is considerably more significant than we have ever treated it. I can’t recall the last time I talked to my uncle. And as the downed helicopter sadly illustrates, accidents on or over the water are unforgiving.
There’s little to be done about any of this. We don’t believe in trading the certainty of a cell phone signal for seeing and doing the things that we enjoy while out sailing. And anyway, much of that certainty is illusory. But no matter, it’s still a sad and quiet boat here tonight in Ganges.
Clark Graebel
Lt. Sean Krueger
AMT 1C Adam Hoke
AMT 2C Brett Banks
Rest In Peace