Authors: Tom Wright
. . .
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. The 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.
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.
All three forts were built on bluffs hundreds of feet above the beaches and sported a variety of armaments. The Triangle of Fire so completely discouraged unauthorized entry that none of the forts ever had to fire a shot at an enemy. For reasons similar to those that deterred nineteenth and twentieth century commanders, we worried about entering the military choke point.
Admiralty Inlet remained as the only obstacle between me and my point of disembarkation. Despite its well-earned reputation for giving sailors trouble, Admiralty Inlet remained relatively calm on that day, almost as if in deference to our long, hard voyage. A large quantity of water from the Puget Sound basin flowed through Admiralty Inlet during tidal changes, and in calm waters we might have made the final ten miles between Port Townsend and Bush Point in an hour and a half. But naturally, on that day it took three. It seemed as if literally all the water tried to escape from the Puget Sound at the exact time we were trying to enter it.
We remained alert as we slipped through the narrow channel, our tension growing by the moment. I felt particularly apprehensive, not just fear of the unknown, but a dread of it, as we putted south along Whidbey Island toward my drop off point.
In contrast to the lushly vegetated and comparatively gentle slopes on the west side of Admiralty Inlet, the slopes to the east side on Whidbey Island are barren and stark. From a distance, Whidbey’s cliffs look like sand and extend several hundred feet above the beaches and run essentially the length of the island. Upon closer inspection, the cliffs are alternating layers of sand, soil, and rock extending back millions of years—a veritable play land for the geologist. Huge trees of all variety—Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, Lodgepole and Shore Pine, Western Red Cedar, and even Madrona—teeter on the edge of the cliff. Sometimes—usually after heavy rainstorms—large chunks of the cliffs come down and take the trees with them and a new generation of vegetation takes its rightful place as guardian of the cliffs. The evidence for such calamities is visible intermittently along the beach—as fresh scratches down the cliff face lead to out-of-place mounds of earth and debris resting on an otherwise uniformly smooth beach. It may take decades or centuries for the tide to remove the evidence, but it will, and then more will fall, and it too will be removed.
I started to feel flush as we edged to within a mile of the Bush Point Light, or what used to be a light. It was nothing more than a decrepit old shell of a lighthouse, its light not having worked for as long as I could remember. Rather than standing as a sentry against shipwrecks, it was literally a relic in someone’s back yard.
We took turns scanning the beach and surrounding cliffs for any sign of life or more to the point, any sign of trouble. Jeff looked for a long time at our landing point, a dysfunctional old dock attached to what used to be a busy marina. Adjacent to the old marina was a relatively new facility with a boat launch and a new dock designed for small recreational boats rather than larger fishing vessels of decades past. It was in much shallower water and only extended about twenty feet from the shore—not useful for our purposes.
Something like panic crept from my groin up my back and into my brain as Jeff turned on the Geiger Counter. Click, click, click—normal, background radiation.
After a half hour of observation, we made the executive decision to land.
My palms began to sweat and I sensed my consciousness slipping again. “Look!” I exclaimed, with the dual purpose of distracting myself and heading off the coming emotional storm. “I’m not one for long good-byes anyway, but I think we had better say our good-byes now. I am going to get off this boat and scramble for cover as fast as I can, and you guys need to get the hell back out to sea ASAP.”
“Agreed,” said Jeff, as he approached me.
He extended his right hand which I grasped and shook. We gave each other a half hug with our left arms, and I said to Jeff: “I can’t tell you how much I hope all is well with Brenda and the kids.”
“You don’t have to. It’s the same thing I feel for you and Kate. Please be careful. I know we haven’t discussed this, but I hope we can come back this way when we get things together. This will probably be safer than Bainbridge.”
“You are welcome here any time,” I said, sounding obligatory, but fully meaning it.
“You know,” I said “I haven’t really thought much about what I’m going to do after I find them. If they’re all fine, what then? I guess we’ll stay around her parents’ house as long as it’s safe, but I’ve already been thinking about the next step.”
Jeff looked at me with curiosity.
“I told you about my friend Sean. I’d bet my last dollar t
hat he’s holed up at his parents’ place up on the Olympic Peninsula. And if he is, he’ll be well prepared. If all else fails, I’m going to head up there to check it out.”
Jeff and Jill all stared at me skeptically. None of us knew what to say or do.
“Let’s just say right now that I will try to give you a month to get back to Kate’s house, but after that, don’t count on me being there.”
“Agreed,” said Jeff. “One month, starting now.”
Jill stood stoically looking at me. I didn’t know what to make of it.
“This isn’t right,” she said. “You are in no condition to go alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“Bull shit!” Sonny exclaimed as he walked up behind us, and dropped his backpack.
“What do you think you are doing?” I asked.
“I’m going with you.”
“The hell you are!” I said, more sternly than I had spoken to anyone in a long time.
“You need my…”
“No I don’t! They do,” I said, pointing to Jeff and Jill. “They need you to help get them to the end, wherever that is. This is as far as I need to go. The rest is on me. You’ve given me more than I could have ever asked for, and I’m not letting you abandon them for me.”