Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

The utter silence of the house, broken only by the pinging stove and Olaf’s labored breathing, compounded the image of the riotous night in the boat. The old man elbowed himself up on the couch. He rearranged the afghan over his shoulders. He cleared his throat.

“We kept the gunwales clear as we could. Kept from freezing by working so goddamn hard. Somehow we stayed in the boat. I mentioned luck before. No amount of luck earlier in the night measured up to staying alive all night in that mess. By the time morning broke I ought to have learned to believe in God.”

“It truly was a miracle,” Noah said, more to himself than to his father.

But Olaf heard him. “Here’s the thing.” He coughed to clear something in his throat not there. “It’s a whole lot more remarkable-sounding now than it seemed at the time. Maybe that’s obvious, maybe not, but the fact is, for those eight hours it was like we weren’t really there. It was downright impossible that we could be so cold, so wet. That it could be so dark. And even though we were working hard to stay alive, I suspect that each of us was waiting to die, too. I know I was.

“I’d spend some minutes woolgathering over you kids and your mother all tucked under your quilts at home without realizing that my hands were so cold I could hardly grip the tiller. I wanted to say good-night so badly, wanted to touch each of your foreheads the way I always did. When I’d snap out of it, it was like I’d been shot. All the pain would surge up, all the panic. But just as quick I’d be back in some other trance, thinking about getting ready for church when I was a tyke back in Norway, thinking about my mother pulling the curlers from her hair. And the whole time we were just frantically working, rowing and hammering and bailing. I suppose I kept at it with thoughts of all of you because I knew that any minute the boat would heave me out into the lake and that would be it. That would be the end.” He closed his eyes. Rested.

Noah looked at his father there on the sofa, bereft of the vitality he had once possessed so abundantly. For the old man’s son there was as much sadness in the moment as relief. He suspected his father felt little of either, was likely unmoved and unchanged. Perhaps emptiness filled the place where once a secret had resided.

“I don’t know,” Olaf said. “It’s amazing, the memories you carry around with you. Never once had I thought of my mother getting ready for church until that night. But there she was. Those memories are in you all the time. On a night like that they’re just hurrying up for one last trip across your mind. I suppose a wise man might have learned something. But what did I do? I ended up wrapped around a tree growing out of the rocks on a frozen beach not sixty miles as the gull flies from where we sit now. You start wondering, why me?” He pointed feebly at his own chest.

Noah wanted to console him but didn’t know how.

“You end up as the line in a poem, as the face in a picture in a museum. Meanwhile, your crewmates are dead and you haven’t talked to your wife — honestly talked to her — in years. And your kids grow to fear you. And instead of making it right you let it ride. You drink in the raunchiest bars in eight states. Jesus, do you drink.” He cleared his voice now and said more loudly than he had said anything in an hour, “And you lose all shame.” In his faintest voice yet he concluded, “Chrissakes, that is some ancient grief.”

Noah stood. He walked over to the sofa and sat down next to his father as if his proximity might ease the pain of the memory, as if the gesture could speak. He put his hand on his father’s shoulder, moved the afghan to make the moment less awkward.

“So there’s your story, Noah. Sorry as it is, that’s it. We washed onto the beach at Hat Point and all I had in me was jetsam and you suffered for it. So did your mother and sister.”

Noah thought, I wonder if he’s dying right now. In this instant. I imagine this is what it might look like .

Instead Olaf said, “The morning broke and we could see the shoreline. We rowed like hell to get there. Did you know it was below zero that morning? We were sitting there like we’d just been for a swim, for Chrissakes. We thought about trying to build a fire but the only thing we might have burned on that barren shore was the lifeboat, and it was covered with ice. Bjorn, he was trying to light his coat on fire with his lighter.” He mimicked Bjorn trying to start his sleeve ablaze. “But his thumb was just a lump of ice. Could have used it for a hammer.

“It’s strange, but had we been out on the lake on a clear day, passing Hat Point, I could have given you our coordinates to within a minute each way. But pressed up against those rocks, that cliff looming behind us, snowy as the morning was, I wouldn’t have guessed it with ten tries. Delirious, that’s what we were, all of us. Hallucinating. We had one blanket among us, from one of the stows in the lifeboat. That was it. We were just waiting to die again.” He paused and scratched his bald head. “And of course Red washed up.”

“Red,” Noah said.

They sat in silence for a moment before Noah continued, “How long before they found you?”

“Seemed like days but it wasn’t long. We didn’t have time to freeze to death, so that tells you something. First a plane circled above us, then we saw a cutter offshore. I tried to get up and wave, but I couldn’t. I think we were all in shock. Everything was blurry. My eyes were coated with ice. None of us could talk. Soon enough an army of highway patrolmen and paramedics were there, coming up the shore like so many dreams.”

“And you were saved.”

Olaf looked at Noah, put his hand on his son’s shoulder now. “That’s one way of saying it. They got us out of our clothes, bundled us up in blankets and parkas and whatever else they had around. First they took us to a lodge, a place in Grand Portage. They worked on us there until the helicopters came to bring us down to Duluth. I asked for a cup of coffee, I remember, like we were getting up for breakfast.” He actually smiled, halfway and to himself, to be sure. “Just like that, the whole thing was over.”

Noah started to say he was sorry but Olaf interrupted him. “Actually, it wasn’t over.” He leaned over the coffee table, traced a line from the black X off Isle Royale to Hat Point. He traced it back. After a few minutes Olaf looked at Noah again. “For most of your life I’ve used that night as an excuse. Not because I wanted or needed one but because I had no control over what it did to me. I should have. Hard as it would’ve been, I should have beaten it.

“I never told anyone any of this before, son. Never told your mother, even though she deserved to know. Never told your sister. Never told any of the guys down at the Freighter, not even on my worst night. I never told it on the bridge of a single ship I later sailed. Hell, I never even told the NTSB or the bosses at Superior Steel the whole story. Everything I just told you, it’s been rotting in me all this time.”

“Why,” Noah said, his own voice now faint, “did you tell me?”

Olaf looked at him. He leaned forward and took off his glasses. “You asked me, Noah. That’s why. And you deserved to know. Aside from your mother, you deserved it more than anyone.”

Cold the next morning, as cold as it could be in early November. He drove a half hour up the rutted highway to Gunflint with the sunrise, the road unwinding to lake vistas magnificent in the metallic onset of the morning and winter. There seemed equal resolve among both the day and the season.

On the south end of town a pickup truck waited outside the ranger station at the head of the Brule Trail, a solitary man leaning against the bumper smoking a cigarette. Otherwise the town hunkered ghostlike, a few streets along the lake that gave way behind them to an incalculable wilderness. No Wednesday-morning rush hour here. The semblance of a village nestled around the harbor. Cars were filling up at the Holiday gas station. Noah stopped at a traffic signal on Wisconsin Street. Next to him a white-haired woman in a Chevy sedan almost as old as his father’s truck smiled as if expecting the codger. When she saw Noah she waved anyway. He had decided he loved driving that old Suburban and thought he’d never be able to drive his half-electric car again.