It was the first food to cross their lips in more than a week. Between three men, a small fish didn’t go far, but the protein gave them a push of energy. Louie had demonstrated that if they were persistent and resourceful, they could catch food, and both he and Phil felt inspired. Only Mac remained unchanged.
Phil felt uneasy about the albatross. Like many schoolboys of his era, he had read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In the poem, a sailor kills a friendly albatross that, it is said, had made the winds blow. In consequence, the sailor and his crew are stranded in infernal, windless waters, tormented by thirst and monstrous creatures. The crewmen all die, and the sailor is left in a hellish limbo, the albatross hung about his neck, his eyes closed against the accusing stares of his dead crewmen.
Louie wasn’t superstitious, but he’d grown fond of albatrosses on that Christmas he’d spent watching them crash-land on Midway. He felt sorry for the bird. Phil reminded Louie that killing an albatross was said to bring bad luck. After a plane crash, Louie replied, what more bad luck could they have?
——
Several more days passed. Louie caught nothing, and his hook supply dwindled. No more birds landed on the raft. Periodically, rain replenished the water tins, but only partway.
The men floated in a sensory vacuum. When the weather was calm, the ocean was silent. There was nothing to touch but water, skin, hair, and canvas. Other than the charred smell of the raft, there were no odors. There was nothing to look at but sky and sea. At some point, Louie stuck his finger in his ear and felt wax there. He smelled his finger, and by virtue of being new, the scent of the wax was curiously refreshing. He developed a habit of twisting his finger in his ear and sniffing it. Phil began doing it too.
When Louie slept, he dreamed of being on land, trying to sleep, but there was never a place to rest safely—only rocks, sucking mud, beds of cactus. He would be on perilous cliffs or unstable boulders, and the ground would heave and shift under his weight. Phil was having the same dreams.
As time passed, Phil began thinking about an article, written by the World War I ace pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, that he had read in Life magazine that winter. The previous October, a B-17 carrying Rickenbacker and a crew over the Pacific had become lost and run out of fuel. The pilot had ditched the plane, and it had floated long enough for the men to get into rafts. The men had drifted for weeks, surviving on stores in the rafts, rainwater, fish, and bird meat. One man had died, and the rest had hallucinated, babbling at invisible companions, singing bizarre songs, arguing about where to pull over the imaginary car in which they were riding. One lieutenant had been visited by a specter who had tried to lure him to the bottom of the ocean. Finally, the rafts had split up, and one had reached an island. Natives had radioed to Funafuti, and the other men had been rescued.
It seemed that Rickenbacker’s crew had stretched the capacity for human survival as far as it would go. Rickenbacker had written that he had drifted for twenty-one days (he had actually drifted for twenty-four), and Phil, Louie, and Mac believed that this was a survival record. In fact, the record for inflated raft survival appears to have been set in 1942, when three navy plane crash victims survived for thirty-four days on the Pacific before reaching an island, where they were sheltered by natives.*
At first, Phil gave no thought to counting days, but when time stretched on, he began paying attention to how long they’d been out there. He had no trouble counting days without confusion; because they were on the raft for only part of the day they crashed, Phil and Louie counted the following day as day 1. With each new day, Phil told himself that surely they’d be picked up before reaching Rickenbacker’s mark. When he considered what they’d do if they passed that mark, he had no answer.
Rickenbacker’s story, familiar to Louie also, was important for another reason. Exposure, dehydration, stress, and hunger had quickly driven many of Rickenbacker’s party insane, a common fate for raft-bound men. Louie was more concerned about sanity than he was about sustenance. He kept thinking of a college physiology class he had taken, in which the instructor had taught them to think of the mind as a muscle that would atrophy if left idle. Louie was determined that no matter what happened to their bodies, their minds would stay under their control.
Within a few days of the crash, Louie began peppering the other two with questions on every conceivable subject. Phil took up the challenge, and soon he and Louie turned the raft into a nonstop quiz show. They shared their histories, from first memories onward, recounted in minute detail. Louie told of his days at USC; Phil spoke of Indiana. They recalled the best dates they’d ever had. They told and retold stories of practical jokes that they’d played on each other. Every answer was followed by a question. Phil sang church hymns; Louie taught the other two the lyrics to “White Christmas.” They sang it over the ocean, a holiday song in June, heard only by circling sharks.
Every conversation meandered back to food. Louie had often boasted to Phil about his mother’s cooking, and at some point, Phil asked Louie to describe how she made a meal. Louie began describing a dish, and all three men found it satisfying, so Louie kept going, telling them about each dish in the greatest possible detail. Soon, Louise’s kitchen floated there with them: Sauces simmered, spices were pinched and scattered, butter melted on tongues.
So began a thrice-daily ritual on the raft, with pumpkin pie and spaghetti being the favorite subjects. The men came to know Louise’s recipes so well that if Louie skipped a step or forgot an ingredient, Phil, and sometimes Mac, would quickly correct him and make him start over. When the imaginary meal was prepared, the men would devour every crumb, describing each mouthful. They conjured up the scene in such vivid detail that somehow their stomachs were fooled by it, if only briefly.
Once the food was eaten and the past exhausted, they moved to the future. Louie laid plans to buy the Torrance train depot and turn it into a restaurant. Phil fantasized about getting back to Indiana, maybe to teach school. He couldn’t wait to see the Indy 500 again. The race had been suspended because of the war, but Phil revived it in his mind, spreading a blanket on the infield grass, heaping it with food, and watching the cars blur past. And he thought about Cecy. It hadn’t occurred to him to tuck her picture in his wallet before he left the cottage, but in his mind, she never left him.
For Louie and Phil, the conversations were healing, pulling them out of their suffering and setting the future before them as a concrete thing. As they imagined themselves back in the world again, they willed a happy ending onto their ordeal and made it their expectation. With these talks, they created something to live for.
In all of these bull sessions, not once did they broach the subject of the crash. Louie wanted to talk about it, but something about Phil stopped him. There were times when Phil seemed lost in troubled thoughts, and Louie guessed that he was reliving the crash, and perhaps holding himself responsible for the deaths of his men. Louie wanted to reassure Phil that he’d done nothing wrong, but he decided that raising the issue would deepen Phil’s preoccupation. So he said nothing.
——
As Louie and Phil grilled each other, Mac usually sat in silence. Sometimes he’d ask Louie to describe a recipe, and occasionally he would interject, but getting him to fully participate was rough going. He shared few memories, and though the other two encouraged him, he couldn’t imagine a future. To him, it seemed, the world was too far gone.
Given the dismal record of raft-bound men, Mac’s despair was reasonable. What is remarkable is that the two men who shared Mac’s plight didn’t share his hopelessness. Though Phil was constantly wondering how long this would go on, it had not yet occurred to him that he might die. The same was true for Louie. Though they both knew that they were in an extremely serious situation, both had the ability to warn fear away from their thoughts, focusing instead on how to survive and reassuring themselves that things would work out.
It remains a mystery why these three young men, vetera
ns of the same training and the same crash, differed so radically in their perceptions of their plight. Maybe the difference was biological; some men may be wired for optimism, others for doubt. As a toddler, Louie had leapt from a train and watched it bear his family away, yet had remained cheerfully unconcerned about his safety, suggesting that he may have been a born optimist. Perhaps the men’s histories had given them opposing convictions about their capacity to overcome adversity. Phil and Louie had survived Funafuti and performed uncommonly well over Nauru, and each trusted the other. “If there was one thing left, he’d a given it to me,” Phil once said of Louie. Mac had never seen combat, didn’t know these officers, and was largely an unknown quantity to himself. All he knew about his ability to cope with this crisis was that on the first night, he had panicked and eaten the only food they had. As time passed and starvation loomed, this act took on greater and greater importance, and it may have fed Mac’s sense of futility.
For Phil, there was another source of strength, one of which even Louie was unaware. According to his family, in his quiet, private way, Phil was a deeply religious man, carrying a faith instilled in him by his parents. “I had told Al several times before to always do his best as he knew how to do it,” Phil’s father once wrote, “and when things get beyond his skill and ability to ask the Lord to step in and help out.” Phil never spoke of his faith, but as he sang hymns over the ocean, conjuring up a protective God, perhaps rescue felt closer, despair more distant.
From earliest childhood, Louie had regarded every limitation placed on him as a challenge to his wits, his resourcefulness, and his determination to rebel. The result had been a mutinous youth. As maddening as his exploits had been for his parents and his town, Louie’s success in carrying them off had given him the conviction that he could think his way around any boundary. Now, as he was cast into extremity, despair and death became the focus of his defiance. The same attributes that had made him the boy terror of Torrance were keeping him alive in the greatest struggle of his life.
Though all three men faced the same hardship, their differing perceptions of it appeared to be shaping their fates. Louie and Phil’s hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac’s resignation seemed to paralyze him, and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who faded the most. Louie and Phil’s optimism, and Mac’s hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling.
——
Two weeks had passed. The men’s skin was burned, swollen, and cracked. Mysterious white lines striped their fingernails and toenails, and salt sores were marching up their legs, buttocks, and backs. The rafts were decomposing in the sun and salt water, bleeding vivid yellow dye onto the men’s clothing and skin and making everything sticky.
The men’s bodies slowly winnowed. Each day, Louie noticed incremental differences in his weight, and the weight of his raftmates, from the day before: the pants looser, the faces narrower. As they passed the fortnight mark, they began to look grotesque. Their flesh had evaporated. Their cheeks, now bearded, had sunken into concavity. Their bodies were digesting themselves.
They were reaching a stage of their ordeal that for other castaways had been a gruesome turning point. In 1820, after the whaling ship Essex was sunk by an enraged whale, the lifeboat-bound survivors, on the brink of death, resorted to cannibalism. Some sixty years later, after nineteen days adrift, starving survivors of the sunken yacht Mignonette killed and ate a teenaged crewman. Stories of cannibalism among castaways were so common that the British gave a name to the practice of choosing a victim, dubbing it the “custom of the sea.” To well-fed men on land, the idea of cannibalism has always inspired revulsion. To many sailors who have stood on the threshold of death, lost in the agony and mind-altering effects of starvation, it has seemed a reasonable, even inescapable solution.
For Louie, the idea of consuming a human being was revolting and unthinkable. To eat a human being, even if the person had died naturally, would be abhorrent for him. All three men held the same conviction. Cannibalism wouldn’t be considered, then or ever.
The two-week mark was a different kind of turning point for Louie. He began to pray aloud. He had no idea how to speak to God, so he recited snippets of prayers that he’d heard in movies. Phil bowed his head as Louie spoke, offering “Amen” at the end. Mac only listened.
The rafts slid on the current, their tethers snaking behind them. It seemed that they were still drifting west, but without any points of reference, the men weren’t sure. At least they were going somewhere.
——
The second albatross fluttered onto Louie’s head sometime around the fourteenth day. Again Louie slowly raised his hand, snatched it, and killed it. The men sat there looking at it, remembering the stench of the first albatross. When Louie opened it up, they were happily surprised to find that it didn’t smell that bad. Still, no one wanted to eat it. Louie portioned the meat and insisted that everyone eat. All three men forced the meat down. Because Mac seemed to need food the most, they gave him all of the blood.
In the bird’s stomach they found several small fish, which they decided to use as bait, and with them, Louie caught one more fish. He saved some of the bird meat for bait and set the bones out to dry in hopes that they might be useful as fishhooks.
——
Time spun out endlessly. Louie caught a few fish, once parlaying a tiny one, thrown into the raft by a whitecap, into bait that yielded a comparatively fat pilot fish. Rains came intermittently, leaving the men sucking up every drop that fell into their rain catchers. Louie and Phil took turns leading prayers each night. Mac remained in his own world.
The men grew thinner. Phil was gradually regaining his strength after his initial state of concussed exhaustion; Mac’s body grew weaker, following his broken spirit. Then the rains stopped and the water tins dried up. They reached day twenty-one. They caught a fish and had a little celebration for passing what they thought was Rickenbacker’s mark.
For some time, Louie had noticed a stomach-turning reek wafting to and fro over them. It was coming from Phil’s head. The blood on his T-shirt bandage was rotting, and cakes of it were chipping off and falling into the raft. Phil couldn’t smell it, but Louie couldn’t bear it. Louie untied the T-shirt and gently unwrapped it. Beneath a thick cake of dried blood, the wounds had knit neatly. The bleeding didn’t resume. The T-shirt could go.
A few days later, Louie saw something bizarre. The edge of the sea, flush to the horizon, was peeling upward. A vast black rim formed, rose up, and began speeding toward them with a tumbling motion. Louie shouted a warning and the other two men wheeled around toward it. They dropped down, getting their weight as low as possible so they wouldn’t be flipped over. As the wave closed in, they braced themselves.
Just as the wave reached them, they realized it wasn’t a wave at all. It was a giant school of dolphins, swimming with astonishing speed. The dolphins rushed at the rafts and were soon muscling all around them. Looking into the water, Phil saw small fish, thousands of them, seeming to fill the ocean. The dolphins were chasing them. The men thrust their arms into the water and tried to grab some, but the fish slipped through their fingers. If they had had a net, they could have whisked it through the water and filled the rafts. But with only their fingers, they couldn’t snare even one.
Louie was out of bait. Other than the sharks, the only fish that ventured near the rafts were pilot fish, which hugged the sides of the sharks as they circled. They were within easy reach, only when Louie tried to grab them, they squirted away. The sharks had stolen every hook small enough to fit in the mouths of pilot fish, so Louie tried albatross bones, but the fish spat them out.
Looking at the fish line that he had left, he got an idea. He cut off small portions of line, tied them to the large fishhooks, and then tied three hooks to the fingers of one hand, one on his pin
kie, one on his middle finger, one on his thumb, orienting them as if they were claws. He held his hand over the water’s surface and waited.
A shark, attended by a pilot fish, swam by. Once its head had passed, Louie sank his hand into the water. When the unsuspecting pilot fish moved under his hand, he snapped his fingers shut around its back. The hooks dug in. Louie yanked the fish out of the water, jubilant.
Sometime that week, a small tern landed on the wall of the raft, right between the men. It was closest to Phil, and without speaking, the men indicated to each other that he’d catch it. Phil clapped down on the bird. It was tiny, and offered little meat, but not long after, another tern settled on the raft. This time, Mac caught it. Louie was so famished that he went at it with his teeth, ripping the feathers loose and spitting them out in whuffs. Almost immediately, he felt a crawling sensation on his chin. The tern had been covered in lice, which were now hopping over his face.
Something about the tickle of lice on his skin rattled Louie more than anything he had yet encountered. He began scratching and rubbing at his face, but he couldn’t get at the lice, which had burrowed into his beard and were moving up his head and into his hair. He pitched his upper body into the water. Phil and Mac, realizing that Louie was going to get his head ripped off, grabbed the oars and bumped the sharks away while Louie splashed about, trying to drown the lice. After about half a dozen dunks, the tickle was gone.
As the days passed, the men caught three, perhaps four more birds. One bird kept dipping low over the raft, then soaring off again. Mac suddenly shot his hand up and snagged the bird by the leg in midair, then handed the squirming animal to Louie, who was amazed at Mac’s alacrity. The men ate every morsel of the bird, and every other bird that they caught, leaving only feathers and bones.