From time to time I turned around to look at the waves coming towards me, and to brace myself for especially big waves. Often, one of my legs lost its grip on the gunwale, leaving me to rotate helplessly on the other leg that was still on the gunwale. Several times I lost my grip with both legs, was swept loose, paddled back or was pulled back by Malik, and in panic tried to regain my leg grip on the gunwales. During the entire time since the capsizing, the struggle to survive from one wave to the next had been all-consuming. I had the sense that there was no pause in the struggle. Each wave threatened to shake me loose. Each time that I did get shaken loose, there was a panicked struggle to get back to the canoe and to get a grip again. I was often gasping from water in my face.
Because Malik’s stance on the engine seemed more secure than my foot grip on the gunwales, I eventually moved from the canoe’s side to its stern and stood with one leg on the submerged engine next to Malik, leaning forward and resting my arms on the round hull. Then I found and grabbed with my right hand some wooden bars attached to the hull, probably a partially broken piece of gunwale. This was the first good handhold that I had had since the canoe capsized. Standing on the engine and leaning forwards over the hull had the advantage that it kept my head higher above the waves than when I had been standing on the more deeply submerged gunwale, but it had the disadvantage that it placed more strain on my leg and was more tiring.
We didn’t seem to be drifting any closer to the two islands visible in the distance. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay afloat for more than a minute if the canoe, already floating low in the water, sank. I asked Malik if the canoe was just being held up by trapped air under the hull and was at risk of sinking if that air somehow came out, but he answered that the canoe timbers themselves would float. There was nothing that I could do except to hold on, react to each wave, wait (for what?), and watch. I kept asking Malik whether he was OK—probably just to assure myself that I was OK.
Luggage floated out from underneath the canoe. Some of it had been lashed to the canoe and stayed floating near the prow, including my own three suitcases. But other luggage was loose and drifted away, including my red rucksack, my green duffel bags, and Malik’s luggage. It flashed through my mind that the most important thing was to save my life, and that what happened to my luggage was trivial by comparison. I nevertheless found myself slipping into my usual what-if mode of mulling over how I would deal with problems that arise in the course of travel. If I lost my passport, I thought, I could always get another one, though it would be a big mess to have to go to the nearest American embassy in Indonesia’s capital 1,600 miles away. If I lost all my money and traveler’s checks, I wasn’t sure if I had a separate record of my traveler’s check numbers, and that record would be in my drifting or floating luggage anyway. If we did get rescued, I would have to borrow a lot of money in order to fly to Indonesia’s capital and get a new passport: how and from whom could I borrow money? My most important possessions—that passport, money, and traveler’s checks, plus my bird notes from the whole trip—were in my yellow knapsack, which I had been holding in my lap in the canoe and didn’t see now. If I didn’t succeed in retrieving my knapsack, perhaps I could at least reconstruct from memory the bird lists for the main sites that I had visited. Then I realized that it was absurd to be thinking about my passport, money, and bird lists, when I didn’t know if I was going be alive an hour from now anyway.
The scene of our struggles was paradoxically beautiful. There was a cloudless blue sky overhead, lovely tropical islands were visible from afar, and birds were flying. Even with the distraction of my struggle for survival, I continued to identify the birds: there were Lesser Crested Terns (or were they Greater Crested?), possibly a smaller species of tern, and one Striated Heron. But, for the first time in my life, I was in a situation where I didn’t know if I would live. I couldn’t acknowledge my own feelings about the prospect of death. Instead, I reflected on how upset my mother and my fiancée would be if I died. I recited to myself the telegram that I imagined my mother receiving: “We are sorry to have to tell you that your son Jared drowned in the Pacific Ocean yesterday.”
At some point I told myself that, if I did survive, I should stop obsessing about things in life less important than survival. What would I do differently with the rest of my life if I did survive this accident? One thought was to devote myself to having children, about which I had been uncertain. (Afterwards, I did decide to have children.) Would I ever return to New Guinea if I survived? The risks of New Guinea—risks associated with boats like this, with crashes of the small planes on which I depended for travel, and with injuries or illnesses that could leave me physically incapacitated in a remote mountain range—all those risks weren’t worth just obtaining a list of birds for yet another previously unexplored mountain. Perhaps this would be the end of my New Guinea career, even if I did survive.
But I then reminded myself that I had more immediate problems than to figure out what I would do if I survived. I recalled that one of my locked suitcases floating lashed to the canoe’s prow contained two folded-up air mattresses and two air pillows, which would be excellent life preservers if inflated. I asked Malik to ask one of the men perched on the canoe’s prow to open the suitcase and extract the mattresses and pillows. I dug the suitcase key out of my pocket and passed it to Malik, to pass on to one of the men on the prow. But no one did open my suitcase, for reasons that I never learned.
The canoe’s other seven people besides Malik and me—the other four passengers and three crew—were now all sitting on or clinging to the front of the canoe’s upside-down hull. The Ceram passenger made several dives under the canoe to look for anything useful, and he succeeded in pulling out the canoe’s three life preservers, which he gave to the seven people at the front. No one did anything to help Malik and me. The Ambon passenger was weeping and repeating, “I can’t swim, we are going to die!” The Javan passenger was reciting prayers. The Chinese fisherman said that he was afraid of rain and big waves if we were still afloat and alive after sunset; “God help us then!” he added. Malik said that, if we were not rescued within the hour or so remaining before sunset, there would be no hope for us, because the direction of the ocean currents was carrying us out to sea away from land, and we would not survive the night. I didn’t think seriously of what would happen to us if we were not rescued before sunset, except to reflect how hard it had already been to be wet, shivering, and clinging to the rolling hull for an hour in daylight, and how much harder it would be to continue to do so for 12 hours at night in the dark. But the three crew and the Ceram man seemed secure and relaxed. One of them was singing, one or two of them occasionally swam near the hull, and the Ceram man sat on the hull eating a big fruit called a durian, of which passengers had brought several and which were now floating loose.