About "The Night"

I’ve put a huge pressure on myself about writing this piece. I’ve procrastinated in all the ways writers do: I’ve eaten chocolate, checked and rechecked to see that the batteries to my cameras are charged, and even resorted to doing my hand washing, taking a page out of my mentor Pam Houston’s book. I have written everything BUT this piece, laboring diligently over my laundry list, the wording for a note inviting my shipboard family for cookies in my cabin, my shopping list for Honolulu and a haiku I’ll share later. I’ve stared for hours at the now calm sapphire water and watched how the sun plays on its surface, a light I’ve missed as acutely for the past 10 days as any new resident of Seattle.

But tomorrow we dock in Honolulu and time is up. You who have offered me such support and love deserve swift word of how I am after our ordeal. The Internet has been down for reasons that will become clear but will be back up when we’re docked. I’m still waiting for balanced and profound insights, shining metaphors and a framework for an essay that includes all the carefully crafted elements of pace and tension I know should be there. Maybe it will come. For now I’m going to quote bits from my journal about “the night.” (I find it strange that the shipboard community hasn’t come up with a word or phrase to refer to the event we’ve heard has been all over the news from the ticker on CNN to a satellite phone interview with a student on the Today show. Maybe the answer is we have just been assuming for the past couple of days that it is the subject of most conversations so there’s no need yet to name it. I asked a waiter in the dining room what they called it and he said “The night.” Works for me.)

From my journal written two days later:
“No one was asleep from 1:00 am on as conditions worsened. How could it be worse? I thought my cabin had been well secured. All surfaces clean – possessions all in cabinets, nothing loose anywhere. I never thought of the furniture – tables, chairs, bed, TV, all mobile, all projectiles agitating around the space, bouncing off walls – huge heavy pieces leaving gouges in woodwork and walls. At some point before the first announcement, the electrical circuit serving the electronic latch to my balcony door went out and I had the sounds of the wind and sea loudly with me through the crack in the door, like a car on the highway with the window left a little open. I’d moved to the couch with padded arms I could use to wedge myself between. It’s a full-sized sleeper sofa that any burly and helpful friend of a new 3rd floor walk-up tenant regularly curses. With all that heft and me on top, it was still sliding across the carpet but not as much as the lighter bed which was then completely away from the wall by a few feet and catty-cornered in the room. The metal trashcan was the least dangerous but noisiest and I was glad when it finally stuck itself somewhere because it wasn’t safe to get up to try to secure it.

Wedged in the orange couch, my balcony door ajar, I heard the ship’s horn begin an unrelenting moan. We’d heard it in fog mode a few nights earlier – intermittent, on a 90 second cycle (you count these things in the middle of the night when the lurching motion of the ship prevents sleep.) But this was unmistakably different. Facing the 50 foot waves much higher than my window on the 5th deck, I knew for certain it was a distress call and we were in trouble. I tried to pull my mind up to the level of “Uh, that can’t be good” but it slipped my grasp plunging back to the surety that this was real trouble. And then the confirmation: “All passengers put on your life vests immediately and stay in your rooms.”

Like gears clicking into perfect synchrony, my soul put the truth of my instinct together with the sound of the phrase “put on your life vests.” The result was a certainly, a reality I’ve rarely felt. It wasn’t about death but it was about……what word to use that’s even close? Trouble, emergency, being at risk, vulnerability, a conviction of danger so pure it mocked all the times I’ve speculated about how I would feel if…

One young woman later said she took a picture of her parents and her little sister with her as she left for the lifeboats. She’d played slumber party games about what would you save if you had to quickly save one thing. Now she knew. The choice was so clear. The clarity gave her comfort. It wasn’t a game; she wasn’t confused about her values. And she seemed to feel both relief and pride in that. She had faced that decision feared by so many and she knew clearly what her choice would be. I say, lucky 20 year old to be able to live the rest of her life with a certainly that 80-somethings might not enjoy.”

Here my journal goes to a description of the water and light outside my balcony where I was writing this later I wrote right up to the core of it and then moved off to someone else’s story and then to the joy of what was in front of me. Two days was not enough distance to be able to write all the way through that feeling, and it still isn’t.

What had happened was a very large wave, probably about 50 feet, had hit the bridge, knocked out the big center window and flooded the room, frying all the equipment. Salt water is a very good conductor of electricity and it produced shorts in every instrument up there. (The Internet signal comes through an antenna tied to the gyroscope on the bridge to point it to the satellite; that’s why we won’t have Internet now.) Because they were no longer getting a signal from the bridge the engines shut down. I’ve since learned that we were in grave danger of a knock down, not being able to control the ship and head her into the waves. Ships with holes in the hull sink slowly giving adequate time to get off; we’ve all seen Titanic. This was different.

The next announcement was for everyone to move onto the fifth deck, the one where the life boats are. I was able to stay in my small hall on that deck with a few other adult passengers and faculty. But I’ve heard from others out in the big public areas that the crew had the men separate themselves from the women as they came onto the deck – “women and children first.” My friends Ann and Tom say the very worst part of it all for them was having to go through it separated. We sat in our heaviest coats and life jackets and sweated. One engine restarted. Doc Mike used a room on our hall to store emergency medical packs and I went back down to the clinic on deck 2 with him to fill a pillowcase with drugs to take into the boats with us. I stayed down there for awhile trying to secure the most important equipment – the contents of all the drawers and cabinets were on the floor, including some previously disposed of used “sharps” from a spilled bucket. It felt good to be useful. The other engine finally restarted. The crew sent around plastic bins of fruit and rolls. I passed nuts around my hall and my mother’s ever reliable emergency staple of peanut butter crackers. We talked a little, tried to sleep, coped in whatever way we could. I found I did best back in my cabin wedged into my couch even though the cold and noise from my partially open door was uncomfortable. I briefly thought of the possibility of one of those gigantic waves roaring across my small balcony and forcing my door open more, flooding my cabin. Somehow I was able to put that thought on a little cloud and let it float away – thank you, meditation practice!

I’ve always scored half way between introvert and extrovert on psych tests but I guess this experience decided it. I found it hard to be tolerant of other people’s coping methods. I had my hands full coping myself and did that better alone. About two in the afternoon when we could take our life jackets off and go back inside our cabins, the first thing I did was take off all the layers of my clothes, roll them in a ball and put them far back in a cabinet. I would have burned them if I could. Yes, I had been hot but there was something else. The sweat of fear has a different odor – and I don’t want to smell it ever again.

A couple of days later the sun came out and the seas calmed. We survived, learned about ourselves, bonded as a community, and so much more. I’ll leave you with my celebratory haiku:

Sunset flashing gold
Over Neptune’s placid face.
All is forgiven.