Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea

by Steven Callahan

learning to live like an aquatic caveman showed me time and again that I am less an individual than part of a continuum, joined to all things and driven by them more than I am in control of my own path.

She is merely there, immense, powerful, and indifferent. I do not resent her indifference, or my comparative insignificance. Indeed, it is one of the main reasons I like to sail: the sea makes the insignificance of my own small self and of all humanity so poignant.

The bag is freed but seems to weigh as much as the collected sins of the world.

Ha! A good joke, the wall of a tent against the sea, the sea that beats granite to sand.

The sea will fold her blanket over me for one last time, and I will sleep forever.

As darkness comes and I drift off to sleep, I long to be in a place with no anxieties. How repetitious and simple my desires have become.

There are no good conditions in a life raft, and no comfortable positions in which to rest. There are only the bad and the worse, the uncomfortable and the less so.

I have become both the real and the dream. I now see many worlds surrounding me: the past, present, and future; the conscious and unconscious; the tangible and the imagined. I try to convince myself that it is only the present that is hellish, that all of the other worlds are untouchable, securely unimprisonable. I want desperately to keep these other worlds safe from pain and depression so that I can escape to them whenever I wish.

Sailors are exposed to nature’s beauty and her ugliness more intensely than most men ashore. I have chosen the sailor’s life to escape society’s restrictions and I have sacrificed its protection. I have chosen freedom and have paid the price.

Why did I push on? Why did I not allow myself to soften?

Yet last night’s dream was almost too real. My life has become a composition of multilayered realities—daydreams, night dreams, and the seemingly endless physical struggle.

In these moments of peace, deprivation seems a strange sort of gift. I find food in a couple hours of fishing each day, and I seek shelter in a rubber tent. How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time, I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants. Before this voyage, I always had what I needed—food, shelter, clothing, and companionship—yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn’t get everything I wanted, when people didn’t meet my expectations, when a goal was thwarted, or when I couldn’t acquire some material goody. My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness. Even here, there is richness all around me.

I have often thought that my instincts were the tools that allowed me to survive so that my “higher functions” could continue. Now I am finding that it is more the other way around. It is my ability to reason that keeps command and allows me to survive, and the things I am surviving for are those that I want by instinct: life, companionship, comfort, play.

I look down at the dorados for the last time. Twelve of their kind, twelve triggerfish, four flyers, three birds, and a few pounds of barnacles, crabs, and assorted oceanic booty have kept me alive. Nine ships did not see me. A dozen sharks tested me. Now it is done, finally over, finished. My feelings are as confused as they were that night when I lost Solo. It has been so long since I had any reason to be happy that I don’t quite know how to handle it. Clemences bow turns and she scrapes in the sand. I whisper to my fish, “Thank you, my friends. Thank you and good-by.”

I cannot see back to the beach. There, my friends remain in the bottom of Clemence. I’ll never forget how they flew into the arms of the fishermen, the color and power of their glistening flight. I wonder if out beyond the beach, in the clear blue water, two emerald fish are looking for a new school with whom they will swim, carrying the tale of how simple fish taught a man the intricate mystery that comes with each moment of life.

From the time I hit the beach, I have slowly wound down. After two and a half months, I finally have no fears and no apprehension. There is nothing to do and nothing I want. There is only total rest. I feel like I’m floating. My blond angel finishes and breezes out.

I know that to be well fed, painless, and in the company of friends and loved ones are privileges too few enjoy in this often brutal world.

It is the quality of our lives that is important. How much spirit we are able to share with the world, to aid it in its struggle to survive, far outweighs some record of a long life. That this sounds like a cliché makes it no less true.

whether you crawl into a hole or walk a high wire, nobody gets out of here alive.

When I face a crisis, I try to keep in mind a few simple concepts: we cannot control our destinies, but we can help to shape them; we must try to make life hop a bit, but we must also accept that we can only do the best we can. Bearing these things in mind, when I feel most alone and desperate, I take comfort from all those who have suffered greater ordeals and survived, especially those who, despite it all, have even learned to thrive.