WIND

(From MAGIC HARBOR by Don Berry)

 

 

The first northwesterly gust slams across Eagle Harbor just before two o'clock in the morning. My boat rears back against her anchor line like a frightened horse. A burst of adrenalin wakes me, and I feel a sudden panic as I realize I've been asleep more than two hours.

Too long. I check the pressure water system quickly, and find it's frozen solid while I slept. For the past ten days I've had to run a little water through all the lines every hour or so while the temperature never rises above 20 degrees, and at nig ht is sometimes down to 4 or 5. My water lines are copper, exposed, and above the water line. Keeping them thawed takes all my time, and in the end has proven impossible, because I cannot stay awake enough to do it.

It's now been more than a week since I've had any clothes off. If I stop feeding the fire for even twenty minutes or so the inside cabin temperature drops to that of the outside freeze, a freeze that began a week before Christmas with the first wave of the Arctic Express that mutilated the Puget Sound with a ferocity not seen in a hundred years. On the land more than 200,000 houses are without power, and trees are falling like dominoes.

After the first night of northerlies, on December 18, I woke to an unexpectedly spacious harbor. The 50' ferro-cement ketch on my starboard was gone. The smaller white ketch skippered by crazy Ken was gone. When I looked toward the head of the harb or, the 100' beam trawler GRATITUDE was gone, with my friends Harvey and Debbie aboard. All were gone aground on the lee shore in the heavy gusts as the front moved through.

 

Harvey, I learned later, had spent the whole night on deck single-handed, afraid to let Debbie come up, simultaneously fighting an uncontrollable boat and 70 knot gusts that blew him into the bulwarks every time he tried to stand up. In the battle he lost both his bower and stern anchors, the frozen lines cut first by dragging against a sharp block, then by the propellor as he tried to power off the beach.

Jerry, on the sloop TARUGA, faced a classic dilemma -- freeze or asphyxiate. Every time he got a fire going in his stove, a heavy gust slammed down his chimney, putting the fire out and filling the cabin with thick smoke. He had to open the cabin to the weather to get rid of the smoke, then start all over again building a fire. The next big gust did the same thing. He never succeeded in building a fire that first night, and eventually collapsed into his sleeping bag, exhausted and nearly suffocate d.

That was the first wave. Even when the winds abated after the first hammering, it was still too strong to row against, except in short, twenty minute windows of comparative calm. In those windows, all the dinghies dashed for shore, the water rats tr ying to get together enough fuel to keep themselves from freezing for another day. In the shoreside park trees had been blowing down at a prodigious rate, leaving plenty of easily available firewood, and the little handsaws were busy.

There is some respite from the winds around Christmas Day and the day after -- a blessed gift of time enough to get fuel in for the next assault.

By now a water line has burst somewhere in the boat, and I cannot find out where. Part of my water system runs along a bulkhead in my engine compartment, isolated from the main cabin and virtually impossible to heat. In theory it's part of a "hot wa ter" system, but since it only operates when hooked to shore power, I have never used it. Now it is no longer a promise of some future luxury of hot water, but only a liability, because I cannot get the engine compartment above 15 degrees. I disable the fuse switch to the water pump and try to find some way to get heat to the exposed lines. I arrive at an attempt that is nearly fatal.

I direct the exhaust from my little generator to play across the bulkhead where the lines run, hoping the heat will at least prevent another break. Unfortunately, it is the bulkhead separating the engine compartment from the cabin, and while the exha ust heat helps to warm the engine compartment, it also feeds a steady supply of carbon monoxide into the cabin.

Normally there is plenty of ventilation in the cabin. Even in freezing weather I leave the aft partly open to give my cat Barnacle access to the deck and get rid of smoke. But in this freeze, both Barnacle and I are battened in as airtight as I can make us. The result is a fairly well arranged suicide scheme, planned not out of depression but stupidity.

Late that night, after six hours of running the generator, I collapse in what feels like a combination of drunken stupor and partial stroke. I lose all coordination on my left side, and I'm unable to pick up objects, my fingers closing in the air six inches above them. My legs won't hold me up, and I'm disoriented, confused, unable to interpret what is happening.

I stagger back through the cabin toward the aft deck. The door is frozen tightly shut, and I can't coordinate my actions enough to force it free. Finally I am able to break loose enough ice to open the sliding door and get out on the aft deck. I do n't know how long I lie there on the ice-coated deck, gasping, trying to force air into my lungs. It seems like a long time. Eventually I get some nervous system control back, enough to get down through the aft hatch to shut off the generator. Most of that night I spend with my head out the aft hatch, gratefully swallowing gulps of the icy air.

When the faculty of reason returns, I conclude it had not been a good plan.

The second wave hits on the Friday night after Christmas. The weather service predicts it will be as bad as the first, but nobody really believes it. Our normal winter storms come with heavy winds from the south, and Eagle Harbor is so sheltered fro m the southerlies the water rats are unnaturally complacent. Most anchors are set to take a southerly strain. None of us have seen winds here like the hammering northerlies of that first Arctic Express. It almost seems as though the harbor acts as a ve nturi, funneling and amplifying the northerlies as they slam down over the hill and roar across the harbor.

When the second wave hits, it is astonishing in its violence. The gusts in the middle harbor are 10 to 20 knots worse than the first wave.

Beginning with that first hammer blow at two o'clock, the wind rises steadily as the night turns greyish dawn. By eight o'clock a conservative guess is a steady 50 knots, and I can't even guess the velocity of gusts.

At 50 knots, the surface of the sea smokes. Like a hysterical child, the wind raises a wave and slams it down again, tearing off the foaming top and scattering it downwind in a thick, roaring haze of freezing spray like a low fog.

The waves are not high, flattened by the ferocity of the wind, but each is angrily capped with blowing white foam that streaks past my hull like the rapids of a whitewater river.

The hardest to tolerate in these conditions is the noise. I am reasonably secure about my anchor, but the noise rises to such a level that the volume alone infects me with fear. The wind roars and slams me around with a sound like three maddened gri zzly bears trying to claw my tiny little capsule of a boat to shreds.

At the waterline, the water has ceased to be liquid. The waves crash into my hull like logs, and with every strike the boat shudders as in a collision. The hull and cabin have become the interior of a drum being pounded with hysterical ferocity.

I am isolated in this fragile cocoon, surrounded above and below, on every side, with a manic roaring and hammering that is never more than a foot from my head.

There is no relief. The roar of wind and sea drowns out any other sound. There is no way to stop it, there is no way to hide from it, there is no way to sleep. And it goes on, second by second, minute on minute, hour after hour, without ceasing.

As the hours drag interminably past, the roaring sound becomes the only thing perceivable to my senses; everything else is drowned out. It seeps into my brain like a fog, filling it with a featureless cloud of helpless apprehension. There is no acti on I can take, none even to contemplate. I've crossed the border into that bleak, volitionless state of Riding It Out. It has only one rule; hang on and hope for the best.

Then, after fourteen hours, the noise drops quite suddenly. The winds abate to 30 knots. The noise is still loud, but compared to what has come before, it is celestial peace.

The exhaustion sets in immediately. I wrap myself up in my sleeping bag and am asleep in seconds. When I wake an hour later, the winds are down enough to row a dinghy. As suddenly as it came, it has gone. By sunset there are no whitecaps at all, a nd the noise has disappeared as though it had never been.

That evening I stew up a pot of beans and row over to eat on the scow-schooner OBLIO with Dale.

"Wind, hey?"

"Yeah," I say. "How'd you do?"

"I did pretty good," Dale says. "How about you?"

"Pretty good," I say. "I'm still here and I'm still afloat, anyway."

"Sometimes that's about the best you can do," Dale says.

"Good enough for me," I say.

 

end

 

Wind
©1995 Don Berry