Samuel Florman - The Aftermath

Captain Nordstrom remarked, “For a petroleum engineer, Senor Cortez, you seem to know a lot about the sea.”

“Only about the great Spanish explorers, Captain.”

“I thought that Columbus was Italian,” the captain said. But he quickly smiled and held up his hand as if to say, no, let’s not go down that road.

The other boat was to sail north, partway up the east African coast, then across the Indian Ocean. After stopping at Southern India, Ceylon, and Malaysia, it would enter the South China Sea. Plans called for reaching Vietnam and China. It would be good to get as far as Korea and Japan, but that seemed out of the realm of possibility. An attempt could be made, but only if such a journey proved to be feasible within the allotted year.

The aim was to move quickly, to see as much as possible. However, if either boat were to come across a large functioning community, relatively unharmed by the Event, that boat was to return home immediately with the news.

As Captain Nordstrom told the brothers, looking at them intently: “We have been operating under the assumption that world civilization lies in ashes. If by some miracle that is not the case, we don’t want to wait a year to find out.”

Since the boats would be starting out almost eight months after the Event, one could hope that the burned-over fields would be regenerating, and that edible plants would be found along the way. There should be sources of fresh water at every coastal stop, and our own experience indicated that fishing would be productive. Nevertheless, the crews were to carry food rations with them and were not to sail beyond the point where such rations, plus nourishment found en route, would see them safely home.

Uncertainty about sources of food meant that the size of the crews had to be severely limited. The decision was to send six people in each boat.

Ernesto suggested that he would sail to the west and that one member of his crew would be his girlfriend, Anna Colombo, who is fluent in Italian, French, and Spanish, and also speaks passable Portuguese. Anna hails from Milan, where her father, a celebrated mechanical engineer, designed automobiles. Anna is gorgeous, and comes from a world of sleek Ferraris and chic designer gowns. As for seamanship, she has done her share of serious yachting all over the Mediterranean. I never would have guessed that her glitterati lifestyle would mesh with Ernesto’s beer-drinking adventurousness. But it did, as soon as they met aboard the Queen of Africa, and they have been inseparable.

Jose amenably agreed to go east, but also insisted on taking his girlfriend, Peggy McManus, even though she had no special language qualifications. As it happened, Peggy was an excellent short-order cook, having shipped on the Queen of Africa as a sous-chef. Also, under Jose’s tutelage, she had become a proficient hand with halyards, lanyards, and all that sailboat stuff.

As interpreter, Jose recruited Emily Chan, who not only spoke several Chinese dialects but was conversant with other Asian languages, her special field of study. Emily was the daughter of Gordon Chan, who was not at all happy to hear of her enlistment. In fact, he forbade her to go until he could see that she was totally determined no matter what, at which point he relented and gave her his blessing. Jose, heading east, also took a representative from the In landers’ Indian population. And he thought it prudent to take a member of the Zulu community. However, he insisted on more than language and cultural qualifications. He wanted two young men who were congenial, athletic, and familiar with boats. Since Durban had long been the center of a lively yachting community, this was readily accomplished.

As a sixth, Jose chose one of the engineering officers from the Queen of Africa, a technician who served the double purpose of being handy around a boat and knowledgeable about machines, just in case any machines were found to have survived the fires and floods.

Ernesto, in filling out his crew, also enlisted two young men from the Durban sailing community, one white and one black. He then recruited a geologist and a talented machinist. Fortuitously, the geologist was female, so each of the two vessels would have two women on board.

This pleased my father and others concerned about suitable representation of women in all our activities. On the other hand, some worried that the male-female composition of the crew might make for tensions on a long journey. To this, the brothers responded as one. They had been on ocean trips with members of both sexes, and for serious sailors and mature people there should be no problems. As for their own women friends, there was a long tradition of captains’ wives or consorts accompanying them on voyages. Plus, they had picked their crews carefully, confident that they were psychologically sound as well as physically fit. And, after all, a year is not forever—and this is the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth.

Work on the boats progressed rapidly, and a date was set for departure. There remained the question of giving the sloops names. Many suggestions were forthcoming, ranging from such standards as Hope, Faith, Belief, Intrepid, and Dauntless to dozens of more idiosyncratic proposals. Ridiculous as it may seem, the debates began to get acrimonious. So Ernesto and Jose were authorized to make the choice. Accordingly, the vessels were christened Atlantic and Pacific. These names, simple yet emotionally resonant, gained general approval.

One day in early August, with a festive crowd gathered at the shore and band music drowning out the sound of the surf, the two expeditions set forth.

Herb searched his memory for a poetic phrase from the past. “You know,” he said to Sarah, “the one about Cortez looking out over the ocean.” Sarah obliged him with the lines by Keats:

While the Atlantic and Pacific were being fitted out for their voyages, I was swept up in the pervasive mood of anticipation and adventure, putting behind me the bad taste left by the pirates’ invasion of our peaceful community. If I had known about another expedition being planned, I would have been less high-spirited. In fact, this other journey, when I found out about it, made me sick at heart.

I learned the sad news at a meeting of the Focus Group held in October, about two months after the Cortez brothers and their crews sailed over the horizon. These get-togethers had become less frequent than they had been in the earliest days of our friendship. Marriage and busy schedules took us in different directions and we no longer felt the emotional need to check in with each other daily. Still, we never let more than three or four evenings pass without a good sitdown, often featuring the tasting of a new homemade beer. By now there were a number of different brews from which to choose, and Roxy, through her friends among the Inlanders, assured our supply.

So there we were, lazing about on a mild evening, engaged in languid end-of-the-day conversation, when Herb suddenly cleared his throat and said that he and Roxy had an announcement to make.

“We have decided to move away from Engineering Village.”

For a moment there was the silence of total shock, and then everybody started to talk at once. “You can’t be serious.” “Why on earth?” “Hold on now.” “We won’t permit it.” Mary started to cry. Sarah was ashen. Tom flushed. I don’t know how I looked, but I felt terrible.

Tom was the first to pull himself together and ask the obvious questions: Where, when, and most important, why?