Safe from the Sea (12 page)

“And then you went to get the other guys?” he said, handing it back.

Olaf began fingering the clasp with one hand as he tried to remove some of the patina. “It’s a damn strange thing, isn’t it?” he asked. “This flimsy little watch, this soft metal chain.” He looked up at Noah. “And that big old boat. Steel made from the ore of her predecessors, steel they’d made army tanks from. Almost a million rivets, two football fields long, eight thousand tons. One of them made it and the other one didn’t.”

Olaf worked the patina on the watch with his fingers, his jaw quivering in a now familiar way. The look of concentration on his face had given way to drowsiness.

“How did you pick the guys to cross the deck with you?”

“I picked Red because he was the single strongest guy I ever knew,” Olaf said. “Short bastard, built like a brick shithouse, with a red
beard that hung to his chest and eyebrows the same color, bushy as a hedge. He had a cannonball of a gut, rock solid and sticking out there like a pregnant woman’s. Huge shoulders”—he hunched his shoulders up for effect—“but the smallest goddamn feet you ever saw. Like a bird.

“And a goofball, too. Always laughing and joking and playing pranks, good guy to have on your boat any time of year but especially in the fall, when everyone’s good and goddamn tired of each other. He wore the damnedest red boots.

“During a lifesaving drill earlier that year, he hauled one of the lifeboats twenty yards up a Lake Ontario beach. Might not sound like much, but I could have picked any team of three other guys on that boat and together we wouldn’t have been able to do the same thing. Amazing. I’m sure I had that in mind when I told him to bundle up.”

“Why Luke?”

“Luke was the guy I trusted most on that boat. He was the only guy—aside from Jan—who I believed would do anything to save another guy’s life. You said something about heroes, well, Luke was as close as we got.

“He was in his cabin, and I poked my head in and said, ‘Luke, we’re going aft. We’ve got trouble,’ and he was up and in his gear in thirty seconds. Keep in mind he was asleep in his drawers at the time. Always willing to help, always had the best interest of the crew in mind.” Olaf yawned, twitched his nose, and tried to cross his legs but couldn’t.

“And why Bjorn?”

“Bjorn was sitting closest to the door.”

Again the photograph in the maritime museum of the three men huddled on the beach came to mind. The distance between Bjorn’s
place at the card table and that otherworldly beach suddenly seemed like an impossible span. Noah wondered how much the picking of that particular group of men mattered. He wondered if Red had been a weakling, or if Luke had been less willing, or if Bjorn had been asleep in his bunk, whether things would have turned out differently.

Olaf interrupted Noah’s thought. “We were out on the deck within minutes. I instructed the boys to keep together and latched myself onto the lifeline. I went first, then Red, then Bjorn, and Luke was last. The lifeline was a taut, half-inch steel cable that ran from the bow decking to the stern decking right down the middle of the boat. We had lines attached to our waists that we clipped onto it.

“We each had a flashlight or headlamp. Red had a walkie-talkie. There were half-a-dozen lamps running down the edge of either side of the deck. On a clear night they lit the
Rag
up like a boulevard, but they barely cracked the darkness that night. And the spotlight Jan had shining down on us from the roof of the pilothouse was just a little glimmer in the dark. Might as well have been a star on a cloudy night for all the good it was doing.

“The darkness wasn’t the terrible part, though. It was everything else. Even though we’d gotten the ship turned around, we were still taking some pretty heavy seas, and our big problem was the ice. The deck was covered with it, the lifeline was heavy with it, and in no time at all we were covered in it ourselves. And the wind—Jesus Christ, the wind—so strong at times it’d just whip up behind us and send one of us sprawling face-first onto the deck.

“And the snow,” he said finally and whistled.

“And cold?”

“So goddamn cold I felt like I was on fire,” Olaf said.

One of the few points of difference in the chronicles of that night was the moment at which the fire became the central fact of the catastrophe.
Although Bjorn had told a reporter during an interview a few weeks after the wreck that they could smell the fire while they were crossing the deck—a detail that should have put the speculation to rest—some refused to believe this could have been true. They argued that it would have been impossible to smell the fire, seeing how the smoke would have been contained in the engine room, how by then the wind would have been coming from behind them. These same people argued that any fire would certainly have resulted in an immediate explosion that the men on the deck would have heard and felt despite the rough crossing. Noah doubted these speculations. Although it seemed fair enough to assume that they might have felt or heard the explosion, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that they might not have, either. As for smelling the fire, Noah had little doubt that the stench could have escaped from any of a hundred crannies in the decking.

“How soon did you know she was burning?” Noah said.

“Hard to say. We were probably better than halfway across the deck when it dawned on me that something smelled wrong. It was like burning hair is what it was, but there was so much other goddamn commotion that it must have been another minute or two before it hit me. We’d crossed under the hatch crane and were probably only thirty or forty feet from reaching the decking when the stink took over.

“All at once I knew what was happening, and no sooner had I put it all together than Red grabs me by the shoulder. I thought he was falling and using me for balance, so I didn’t turn around right away. But when he shook me again I turned, and he was shining his flashlight on the walkie-talkie.

“‘Boss,’ he said, hollering at the top of his goddamn lungs, ‘the captain’s calling.’

“There was so much static and interference from the noise in the background that I could barely hear what Jan was saying, but the long and short of it was that we were pretty well sunk.” He looked off into the corner for a few seconds.

“He told me we had no steerage, that the engine room was incommunicado again. That’s what I gathered from the static anyway. But then his voice came clear:
‘The Rag is burning,’
he said. It seemed absolutely impossible.” He looked down and quit talking.

“Jan must have already made the mayday, huh?”

Olaf lifted his eyes slowly. In the dim light Noah might have mistaken their glassiness for tears.

“Hand me the book,” Olaf said. “And grab my glasses off the counter.”

Noah did.

“I don’t know exactly what time it was when Jan radioed us on the deck, but it had to have been some time around quarter of eleven. Everything was happening so fast.” He had the open book under his nose in the lamplight and was scanning the page with his long, thick finger. “He made the mayday at ten thirty-three. And I’m sure he made the mayday before he signaled us.”

“You said something about all the answers being in the mayday transcript,” Noah said.

“I said as much as we’ll ever know is in here.” Olaf looked back down at the page for a second. “In the mayday,” he said, closing the book but keeping it marked with his finger, “he gives them our position—which had hardly changed from the time of the pan-pan—and tells them there’s a fire in the engine room, that he’s lost contact with the stern, that he’s got four men en route to investigate, and that he’s lost his rudder.

“We know the fuel line was leaking. We know that everyone on
the stern was busy trying to contain the leak. We know that sometime between, say, ten twenty and ten thirty, the whole thing went up, and that within minutes the steerage was shot and Jan made the mayday. It’s safe to assume that there was some sort of explosion because a fire alone wouldn’t have put the rudder out of commission so fast. It’s also safe to assume there was an explosion because we never saw any of those boys alive.

“When we finally reached the stern, I sent Luke and Red down below to see what was going on while Bjorn and I went up to the boat deck to see about steering that son of a bitch.”

“What do you mean steering it?”

“At the very stern of the ship, behind the stack, up on the boat deck, there were two emergency wheels. Jan told us he’d lost the rudder, so up we went. I’ll tell you what, there couldn’t have been a more wide-open spot for heaven to piss on us than the ass end of that ship.”

Noah was trying to piece it all together. “But you didn’t have a compass, you didn’t have a radar or the charts.”

“We knew which way the wind was blowing, though. I figured if we kept it behind us, we’d be okay.”

Olaf pinched the bridge of his nose as he took off his glasses. “We were fighting it, you know? We had no idea what in the hell was going on but that we had to keep the boat pointed in the right direction.” He was shaking his head and suddenly sounded as if he were pleading to a jury. “After a while—right before we ran aground—Red and Luke came up to the boat deck. Bear in mind, we’re still right in the middle of hell. It was cold and windy and we were soaked and coated with ice and standing up on that deck with targets on our chests, just waiting to get dead. We’ve got no idea what the hell is happening below us until Luke comes back up. In the
middle of all that screaming wind he tells me we’re done, that the engine room and her crew are gone, that right below us all four decks are up in flames: The fantail deck, the windlass room, the cabins—everything—poof”—he exploded his hands—“roaring away. He tells me they didn’t see anyone, that we’ve got no chance. Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath.

“And I’m thinking to myself, those goddamn boats sitting tight in Thunder Bay better damn well be on their way, and the Coast Guard better have a cutter and a few helicopters coming to search or we’re as good as dead.

“My mind was all tangled up. I was sitting on a time bomb with all the water in the world exploding around me. It’s so goddamn dark and cold and my guys are telling me that right beneath our feet half the crew is cooked.” He closed his eyes, looking, Noah thought, like he was trying to erase the picture from his mind. “I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I grabbed Red by the arm and we went back down.

“I told him to stay right with me, that we were going to slog it back into the engine room and see if there was anything we could do.”

“But they’d just been down there. They said it was impossible.”

“I had to see it for myself, I guess. As much as I trusted Luke, I knew it would haunt me forever if I got off that boat without checking on those guys.

“Jesus, it was something. We entered by way of the galley, grabbed fire extinguishers, and worked our way to the dining room and then toward the gangway that led into the crew’s quarters. I sounded the alarm, tried to make it into the cabins. But we had to stop. We couldn’t have gotten ten steps into those rooms without going up in flames ourselves.

“The strange part was that nothing in particular seemed to be on fire. It was like the air was on fire, all of the air. We were getting tossed around, of course, and each time I got thrown against the wall I could feel how goddamn hot it was. If I hadn’t been soaked through and halfway frozen, I probably would have come out of there with burns everywhere. Instead it was almost a relief if you can believe that.”

“How long were you down there?”

“Impossible to say, five, maybe ten minutes I’d guess. Once our extinguishers went empty we had no choice but to get back up on deck with Luke and Bjorn.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Why would you want to?” Olaf asked. “Why in the world would anyone want to imagine that hell?”

Noah took the question as a cue and sat there silently trying to remember what he knew about the ships that had laid up in Thunder Bay—whether it was just two or all three of them that had responded—and whether it was a search plane or helicopters that the Gunflint coast guard had dispatched when the wind weakened.

After a few minutes Olaf broke the silence again. “It had to be Canoe Rocks,” he said.

“What did?”

“Where we ran aground. The death blow.”

Olaf labored to his feet again, this time staying bowed at the waist as he took a few steps across the living room toward a wall shelf that sat behind the dining table. It was cluttered with cast-iron cookware and decorative Norwegian dishes, unused cookbooks, and antique cans of mosquito repellent. From the top of the shelf he grabbed what looked to Noah like a poster that was rolled up and tied with blue-and-white string.

“This is an old chart of Superior,” Olaf said, as he tried to catch some of the faint light in order to read a curled-up edge of it. “Right up your alley, come to think of it.”

“Let’s have a look at that.” Noah pushed the mugs and magazines and books on the coffee table to one end.

Olaf fiddled with the knot for a couple of seconds before he gave up and handed it to Noah, who fidgeted with it himself for a moment before biting through the string and unrolling the map on the coffee table. Olaf had grabbed a couple of heavy books from the bookcase and set one at each end of the table to keep the chart from coiling back up.

It was an old Loran-C chart published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that Noah recognized at a glance. It covered the north Superior shoreline from Grand Portage Bay, Minnesota, to Shesheeb Point, Ontario, and included the entire Isle Royale archipelago. People were always coming into his shop in Boston hoping that the folded and faded maps they had found in their attics were priceless relics. More often than not, they were just like this one, worth nothing more than what it would cost to mail them.

Olaf had turned a couple of lamps on and sat down knobby-kneed next to Noah on the sofa. “You see here?” he asked, dragging his nub pinky up the length of Isle Royale to its northeastern tip. “These are the Canoe Rocks. And this,” he said, dragging his thumb another couple of inches straight north, “is where we came about, where Jan made the mayday. The wind was coming from there,” he said, stretching his arm toward the dark corner of the great room and then signaling the direction with his thumb by pulling it back toward them, “so you see, the rocks were the first things in our path.