Dead Reckoning

  I emerged topside in a fog, literally and figuratively. Jeff had put the RY in park, which was some sort of maneuver that forced the sail, hull, and rudder to produce force in opposite directions. So long as the wind and current remained fairly constant, the boat hardly moved. I had never tried it, but I’d seen Jeff do it twice, including this one. So there we sat, stuck in a fog bank. Strangely, that was our first and only encounter with the ubiquitous North Pacific fog on our entire journey. The parking maneuver put us almost head on into the southwest wind, but it was the northwest swell that rolled the boat oddly from starboard to port, which was what I had sensed below.

  I found my three shipmates sitting at the helm talking. We were somewhere near the entrance to the strait, but there was no way we could attempt to enter with such low visibility and no instruments. It would have been suicide, and there were doubtlessly many ships on the sea floor below that could attest to the danger.

  . . .

  DAY 54 AT SEA, ENTRNACE TO THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA, NORTHWEST WASHINGTON STATE (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 48.4°N, 124.8°W)

  Two days, several arguments, and about forty secret aspirin later, it began to rain. The wind switched to easterly, and we watched the fog retreat west, like a curtain pulled offshore at the speed of the wind.

  No more than three miles to our southeast, the white and orange Cape Flattery Lighthouse stepped out of the mist and stood silent and dark atop the rocky and battered Tatoosh Island. Swells grew into giant breakers that hammered the weathered ocean side bedrock of the island, while much tamer waves lapped at the vegetated shores of the inland side. The island was dotted with no more than a half dozen trees, and save for the gnarled, bushy slopes on the leeward side, only hearty grasses survived among the tattered rock outcroppings. Of the trees that managed to cling to life on the rocky island, most were twisted and bent toward the east, permanently deformed, as if shying knowingly away from millions of years of grizzly weather.

  A scant half mile past Tatoosh Island loomed the far northwestern corner of mainland Washington State. I had been there as a child and never forgot the secrets it held. As I stood on the cliffs and looked down upon craggy channels filled with tiny tree-topped islets and crystal clear water and over slung by trees growing straight out of the dripping cliffs, I wondered how many people had ever ventured out that far to witness such beauty. I understood then why God put such treasures at the ends of the earth rather than right in the middle to be trampled upon and ignored.

  We passed miles of breathtaking scenery, numb and nearly ambivalent to it. No one stirred as we passed the tiny fishing village of Sekiu where, as a child, I took my first chartered fishing trip with my father. I failed to set the hook on my first bite as I daydreamed about the foreign country of Canada just on the other side, and it got away. I caught a King later, but my father didn’t miss another opportunity to remind me to pay attention during the rest of the trip.

  We passed Crescent Beach, where, in summers past, the waters of the protected Crescent Bay almost certainly shimmered beautifully in the fading sunlight as teenagers from Port Angeles lay on blankets on the course, gray sand and had their first kiss. We passed Crescent Lake, a lake so deep and frigid that local legend maintained that the lake was actually connected to the strait through a channel at the bottom. Folklore was that huge sea creatures had been seen in the lake at night and that a subterranean connection to the ocean was the only explanation. We passed the locations of numerous Bigfoot sightings, and we never saw a thing.

  We turned our make-shift Geiger counter on only occasionally, to save the batteries. It sampled nothing but background radiation.

  We drew ever closer to a place I knew well: Port Angeles. The mountains jutting up in the background reminded me of my friend Sean McMasters and his parents’ ranch up there. Last I heard, he was in the military and working toward being in the Special Forces or an Army Ranger or something. If he did indeed bug out to the ranch like he said, he was probably well-equipped.

  Suddenly we saw the first sign of life—a campfire on the beach. Do we even call them campfires anymore? People weren’t out camping, they were surviving. Still, no one stirred.

  A tanker had run aground on Ediz Hook Sand Spit, the tiny sliver of sand that enclosed Port Angeles Harbor. It leaned heavily and lifelessly to starboard. A massive, rusty anchor hung motionless, under its own weight, from a hole near the bow. The links in its massive chain looked large enough for a man to walk through. Massive shipping containers, the kind normally filled with useless crap from China, lay on the beach and in various states of submersion in the strait. The contents of the single container that someone had managed to get open lay strewn over the beach.

  As we rounded the spit, we came face to face with our first inhabitants. A large motorboat roaring out of Port Angeles Harbor slowed to watch us. We did not have time to pull our weapons or, perhaps subconsciously, we thought better of it. Women and children scattered as men raced to the gunwale and trained their weapons on us. They watched us carefully as they passed not fifty yards in front and then to our port. They finally lowered their weapons when they were safely past and went back to their families. They probably could have taken us over were they so inclined, but they apparently meant us no harm—however, they certainly allotted us no trust. We allowed ourselves to hope that civilization was still civilized; maybe there would be lots of people like us.

  Suddenly we were downwind of Port Angeles and got our first whiff of death, North American style. The smell of rotting flesh is as unmistakable as it is indescribable—but once smelled, it is not forgotten. The intensity of the odor built as we moved further downwind of the town.

  Sonny brought me out of thought with a tap to the shoulder.

  “Here,” he said as he handed me a vial of menthol jelly. He mimicked rubbing his finger under his nose as if to demonstrate the procedure. I declined, reasoning that I had better get used to it.

  We made it to the town of Sequim just as dark settled over the area. Being that close, I desperately wanted to continue, but it was just too dangerous at night. The wind died down considerably and shifted to the northeast, a direction which should keep the fog at bay. There was definitely a bite to the wind, though, as we anchored on the tip of Sequim’s Dungeness Spit. The five mile long sand spit is one of the longest in the world and was said to be growing by more than ten feet per year. We chose that location because it was over two miles from the mainland, afforded a three hundred and sixty degree view for security, and there was only one way in.

  I chose first watch that night because I wanted to be fresh as we arrived at my drop-off point the following day. I had been out on that spit before. It was not unusual to be alone out there since Sequim was a town of only about 5,000 people, and the weather, among other things, was certainly not conducive to a sunset walk on the spit. But I found the darkness of Sequim, Port Angeles, and Victoria on the Canadian side unsettling, to say the least. The light from the cities normally bathed the area in a romantic orange glow, but that night was pitch black.

  . . .

  DAY 55 AT SEA, DUNGEONESS SPIT, SEQUIM, WASHINGTON STATE (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 48.18°N, 123.09°W)

  The wind picked up and rain began to fall toward the end of my watch. By the time I awakened in the morning, it had changed to snow and blanketed our decks with six inches of wet, gray slush. A cold front had passed in the night which broke the low cloud deck and brought out the striking Olympic Mountains to our south. The snow blanketed the town, the surrounding countryside, and the mountains, but it stopped abruptly at the high tide mark on the beach.

  Now I knew something was wrong with the climate. Summer snow in Alaska was one thing, but it rarely snowed at sea level in Washington State during the winter, much less in August. A ridiculously cold northwest wind buffeted the decks, eroding the snow at the edges and chopping the strait furiously. If not for the ashen gray nuclear overcast tens of miles above us, it would have been a beautiful winter morning. T
he mountains jutted up to nearly 8,000 feet and towered over the scene, appearing much closer than normal under the high ceiling. Small lens-shaped clouds capped the peaks. I had not realized how much I missed the mountains until that moment. I felt like I was home.

  The days always get shorter in August, but the shortening was accelerating at an alarming rate. We figured there may be no light at all by the beginning of winter. The stratospheric debris was thickening, or at least becoming more uniform. The indistinguishable sun occasionally lightened a portion of the sky on its daily trek, but it never came out, even partially. We wondered what it looked like in places less prone to inclement weather, like deserts. Did the sun come out there, even briefly?

  We hurriedly prepared the boat to weigh anchor. I saw movement in my periphery but ignored it—the wind had been moving the snow around on the deck since I awakened. It moved again and caught my attention. I glanced over and jumped as a young boy, maybe seven or eight years old stood on the spit not thirty feet away. His tattered, filthy clothing hung loosely over his emaciated body and flapped in the wind. The skin on his face stretched tightly over his bones. He tucked his mangled left arm up under his armpit like a chicken wing. His right arm extended stiffly in front of him with the hand at its end clamped to a hiking stick. A streamer on the top of the stick fluttered off to his right. He looked like little shaman standing there staring blankly at us.

  I yelled to him, but he just stared. This alerted the others and they gathered on deck. The boy’s eyes darted among the four of us, and then settled on Jill. At the moment she called to him, he bolted. He sprinted back down the spit toward town, carrying the stick in his right arm like a javelin, its rust colored pointy end forward. Jill lunged toward the rail as if she were going after him. Sonny grabbed her and held on.

  “Let me go!” She cried.

  “Jill!” Jeff said as he put his hand on her shoulder. “You can’t save the world.”

  “But I can save him!”

  “No you can’t,” I said. “We came here for a reason, and it wasn’t to spend half the day chasing a wild boy around Sequim.”

  “Besides, maybe he’s not alone,” Sonny weighed in. “Maybe he came out here to lure us into a trap.”

  Jill began to cry as we pulled up the anchor. The boy had stopped a half-mile down the spit and stood looking back at us.

  “He looked like Zach when he was that age,” Jill said hoarsely, through the lump in her throat.

  18

  DAY 55 AT SEA, ADMIRALTY INLET, WASHINGTON STATE (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 48.16°N, 122.73°W)

  We all stood watch as we ventured back into the strait and turned toward Admiralty Inlet. Jeff piloted and watched our makeshift Geiger counter, I scanned starboard, Sonny port, and Jill watched for anyone coming up on our stern.

  Despite our fuel problems, we decided to motor, reasoning that a boat under sail presented a much larger and more obvious target than necessary. The RY could have easily gone unnoticed from shore with no sails but would have been visible for miles with several hundred square feet of sails flapping in the wind.

  We had not talked about it in detail, but we all thought about it. It was pretty clear that there had not been a major nuclear strike on Seattle, or we surely would have seen some evidence by now. We turned the box on about once an hour, and it clicked normally each time. It was certainly possible that terrorists had set off a small nuclear device or dirty bomb nearby, but they were more likely to choose the major population centers—downtown Seattle, wealthy suburbs like Bellevue, crowded stadiums, or the like —not the places we were going. Such a small scale strike could have gone unnoticed by us.

  On the other hand, if a major adversary like China or Russia had struck, they would have gone for the military targets like the nuclear submarine base at Bangor, the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, or Fort Lewis, and they would have done so with much larger ordnance. We likely would have noticed some sign of that by now, especially if they went for the naval air station, since we were within a few miles of it. Even though a large 100 megaton nuclear warhead would produce noticeable destruction only within the first few miles from the blast itself, we couldn’t imagine not seeing some signs, or at least some radiation, assuming our Geiger counter was working correctly.

  Of course, except for the poor souls near ground zero, the blast itself wasn’t the issue; it was the radioactive fallout. Lethal fallout could spread for tens of miles downwind. Luckily, we were in the climatological downwind location for only one such site: Bangor. We had to take the chance, and if we had any luck at all, the wind would have been from the west or north on D-day, sparing our route entirely. What a queer thought: hoping that the fallout went toward the more populated areas rather than over our intended path. We had our little device, and even though we didn’t know for sure if it was working, it was better than nothing. I’m not sure what we would have done if it had started detecting radiation. Turn back?

  It took less than three hours to reach Point Wilson, and like so many before it, its lighthouse stood dark and silent. As we rounded Point Wilson, Port Townsend came into view just a couple of miles to the south. I laughed out loud at the sight of it.

  The rest of the crew listened intently as I recounted the time I talked my friend Sean into jumping off the ferry boat as it approached the dock in Port Townsend, or PT as it was called by the locals.

  As best friends, Sean and I had a lot of history, and most of it revolved around me talking him into doing something stupid. I loved to push his buttons, and because of his competitive nature, it worked nearly every time.

  One summer day before our senior year in high school, we rode the ferry back from Whidbey Island. As it approached the dock in PT, I began to play on his machismo and told him that there was no way he could jump off the ferry—he’d drown because of the currents, or get caught by the cops, or beat up by the ferry staff—all things that I knew would rile him up. The next thing I knew (and to the utter dismay of the girls we were with), his shirt and shoes came off, and there was a splash twenty feet below. I timed my ribbing just right, so he actually could make it to the dock. After all, he was one of my best friends, and I didn’t want him to die. But beyond that, if he drowned, what would I do to entertain myself? I looked over the rail in time to see him smile, flip me the bird, and then turn and swim for shore. As I knew would be the case, the crew didn’t catch him. He was on shore and disappeared into the streets of downtown PT before the boat even docked.

  I’ll never forget the sight of a soaking wet, half naked teenager in his underwear hurrying gingerly up the barnacle-laden beach toward town. To make matters funnier, when he reached the top of the ladder onto the bulkhead, he mooned us and the rest of the stunned ferry passengers.

  Of course, we were questioned, but we just told the crew that we didn’t know him. We passed police cars hurrying toward the scene and picked him up outside the high school football stadium a few minutes later.

  That sort of competitiveness served him well though. He got a full-ride football scholarship to Oregon State in our junior year—practically unheard of back then. Unfortunately for Sean, he never reached his potential academically or athletically. Two weeks after we graduated high school, Sean was hit by a car while training for his first college football season. He died on the way to the hospital, but they were able to bring him back. He was in a coma for two months, and it took him nearly two years to fully recover from the accident. By that time, any thought of playing college football was long gone. Oregon State vowed to honor his scholarship anyway, but he never attended a single class. He went into the military instead—at least somebody still valued his physical skills.

  The crew of the RY got a kick out of the story, and it was nice to have something to laugh about.

  The PT harbor was quiet, and nothing moved. Small columns of smoke rose from the beaches, but compared to the normal hustle and bustle of the harbor to which I was accustomed, it was a veritable ghost town.

&nbs
p; Besides the ferry that normally crisscrossed the harbor, activity on the water generally included sightseeing boats coming and going, fishing vessels bringing in the days catch, ships hauling away various paper products from the PT Paper Company, whose smoke stacks hauntingly spewed no smoke that day—a sight I had never witnessed before. You could almost always see cranes swinging mechanically about as they worked to refurbish warships on Indian Island, a naval base nestled between the Olympic Peninsula and Marrowstone Island to the east. There was always traffic in town or people scattered about in pleasure craft. Something, anything! PT Harbor was like a little San Francisco nestled into a tiny harbor in a secluded portion of northwest Washington. We heard nothing but an eerie silence.

  Port Townsend’s claim to fame was that it was almost a huge town. Assuming that, as the first safe and significant port between the Pacific Ocean and the vast and productive Puget Sound to the south, legions would flock to the city as the region grew, the city’s founders decided to build a big city. I once read on a placard on one of the public docks in PT that it was built for a “large population that never came.” I assumed that it failed because of its remoteness. A similar harbor on the east side would have thrived. In fact, one did. It was called Seattle.

  With Mount Baker looming to the east, we passed Port Townsend uneventfully and entered the Triangle of Fire. The Triangle of Fire was the impenetrable military triangle formed between Forts Worden and Flagler on the west side of Admiralty Inlet, and Fort Casey on Whidbey Island. The three forts were constructed in the late 1800s to defend the Puget Sound from foreign invaders. They existed in a geologic miracle of sorts—at almost exactly three and a half miles between all the forts and with nearly sixty degree angles at each corner, the triangle of fire was as close to a perfect equilateral triangle as nature could provide.