I could now breathe here without command.
The Box jellyfish had not taken my breath away. The sea had not taken my breath away. And, I had gotten a last breath in before the season could take my last breath away.
I stretched out. My arms extended from my shoulders perpendicular to my body. My legs crossed one over the other. From space, it would appear that I had been crucified.
They that go down to the sea in ships; that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For He commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of their distress.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that those thereof are still.
I prayed.
The new rising sun began to warm my blood but I was not able to produce even a muscle twitch. I knew that my blood needed water and food but my body was not able do anything other than lie in the new light.
After all this, this is how I am going to die.
In the water, there were numbers for and of my salvation but here, here, on this plastic plane feet away was fresh drinkable water and enough high quality food calories to sustain me for days and I was glued to this floor too weak to move.
What the—
I felt the passionate rhythm of my beating heart.
I am no disheartened, washed-up, and beached jellyfish on the shore without numbers and without hope.
Sure, it had been fun to lie lazily there on the deck spineless and without will or desire— but that was not the deal.
Thinking back on what my father had said so many times to me as a child, I heard him again:
“A man is what a man does, son.”
And, thinking what my mother had often said to me as a child, I knew what to do:
“Always look the devil in the eye, son.”
I looked upon it and arose from the deck to eat and drink—joyfully.
32
I was encrusted with sea salt but worse, I was enveloped in the smell of the sea. There are no landmarks on the sea surface, unless you count each wave a landmark but that makes no sense. It always seemed so very strange to me that the much curved un-demarcated surface of the sea could be elucidated onto a plane on a piece of plain paper with utmost definition.
11°22.260′ N x 142°35.589′ E was the compass destination. Of the closest land there was none unless you counted the sea floor that was 35,827 feet below the surface tension at the surface of the last water molecules of the surface sea.
I opened the navigational charts and made all things ready.
Captain Jean-Michele Adamah on the LaCross in 1612 first floated over this point and named the waters, Les Rouges Eaux du Pacifique. His thinking was that the ocean was bleeding. Captain Adamah in the age of enlightenment was in the dark about algal blooms. As the Global Ecology and Oceanography teams at the GEOLAB now knew, harmful algal blooms producing the red waters of this area of the Pacific were caused by the heterotrophic dinoflagellate, Pfiesteria, and related Pfiesteria Complex Organisms that released Saitoxin, Domoic Acid, and other generated brews of toxic death. The Red Tide was a universal tide of death. Perhaps, all the blood in the water was what the captain saw under his ship.
In 1781, the British National Geographic Society, in order to correct this misunderstanding—and to correct all things French—deemed it their proper duty to give the waters an English name. The name given to the area was the Red Pacific Waters. Much neater, more reasonable, and not French, were all excellent reasons to rewrite history—indeed.
In 1856 the sailing American missionary and thoroughly anti-British evangelist, the Reverend and Good Doctor Adam David Moses, renamed the area the Red Sea of the Pacific for the United States Navy on his third charting expedition of the South Seas.
Today NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association, and the AGU, the American Geophysical Union, have taken all the color from the sea and call this area not by the surface waters, but by the unique spot it has on the planet.
I thought about its name as I moved through the waters toward my destination.
It is the end of the line of the alphabet of named names and now, on the map I am navigating by, is called the simplest of all last-named names.
The spot I was heading for was The Z Hole.
What could be more colorless, what could be more meaningful, and what could be truer. The Z Hole was at best, elite in simplicity, truth, and description.
There were enough stores on hand to make a comfortable and safe voyage but all the rules of reason would have to be observed in order to stay within the parameters of precaution.And thus I set out. 11°22.260′ N x 142°35.589′ E was the compass destination.
Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead, I thought.
Admiral Farragut was correct.
One small boat versus an unending ocean, one man versus unending time was the drama. There was no fear, there was no joy, there was no gratification, there was only the job.
I kept remembering what my mother had said to me thousands and thousands of times.
“Time and tide wait for no man.”
I soon had a more refined understanding of her wisdom. Tide is the time.
I wondered on that empty surface above the full ocean base, Was my tide running out?
Why would this thought occur to me once I was at 11°22.260′ N x 142°35.589′ E?
What the—
The sun was directly overhead so there was no shadow upon the face of the sea and there were no clouds in the sky, no countenance in the air. And, this was the strangest part of it all. The sea in gradations of light goes from bright to dim to dark—from horizon to horizon or from surface to depth. But, in temperature there are warm surface waters, a thermocline demarcation line, and then cold water. The warm surface waters and the lower colder waters never integrate to produce a tepid sea.
The sea was not red, and then suddenly the sea was as red as sweet, oxygenated arterial blood. There was no gradation from pink to red; there was no red, and then there was deep red.
How many Pfiesteria Complex Organisms did it take to produce this blood-red tide since a single PCO organism contains an almost invisible red hue?
I tried to think.
There must be more PCO’s here than there are stars in the sky. It was the only answer.
What a horribly wonderful conclusion.
I was in a red pool of death. Only the fiberglass hull of my ship was between my life and my death. I could not drink, I could not swim, and I could not even reach into the red and maintain my life.
In my head, I played with the math. I knew the classical laws of Newtonian acceleration. With a little remembrance, I used the temperature, pressure, and humidity of the Ideal Gas Laws that I learned in high school to calculate the density of the air. Gas constants were always a joy to engage in as a student in Mr. Fenstermaker’s classroom. The water was so much easier. It was 1000kg/m3. That was not the absolute truth. But, what is 3.5% in the scheme of things? 1000 was a perfect number to use.