Managing a terrifying moment
Issue 53 : Mar/Apr 2007
Late August, it was. We were tied up on a dock a mile up the Carabelle River at the Moorings Marina in northern Florida. The water there wanders toward the Gulf of Mexico, out through a half-million acres of slash pines and sandy soil . . . water as brown as undiluted tea from the pine-needle tannins. Our 35-foot C&C Landfall, Capricorn, was tied loosely enough to rise and fall on the tide.
We returned after dark from Julia Mae’s, a seafood grill a mile’s walk over the bridge and up the highway, and we stepped carefully down onto the planks of the dock. The seawall above blocked the light from the parking lot and cast the dock into deep shadow.
We had been cruising Florida waters for about two months, my wife, Danna, and our two sons — Andrew, at just four, and Michael at 10 months — taking our time, headed south to the Keys but making sure we were ready, with a two-day offshore sail ahead of us, our first . . .
I had stepped across the foot-and-a-half between dock and deck, stepped down and across the cockpit, unlocked the companionway door, and descended the steps to turn on the cabin lights, when I heard my wife scream: “He fell in!”
“Who?”
“Andrew!”
And I was in the water, in the darkness, sinking, waving my arms, extended fingers, out into the void, breathless to touch my lost and sinking son.
Then I had him, grabbed, clutched him beneath my arm and kicked and stroked toward the surface, blissfully feeling his squirming torso pinned against my chest as I pushed him upward and through the surface, into the living air of the night.
Wet clothes tugging us down, I cast about for a handhold under the dock or on the hull of our boat, but there was none. Finally, wrapping calves and thighs and one free hand (the other holding and never letting go of Andrew) around an oyster-encrusted piling, I pushed him up and out of the water far enough for my wife’s grasping hand to pull him onto the dock. With the aid of a stern line, I then levered myself onto rough planks still warm in the night air. There was my wife holding Michael, and our wet son, Andrew, too scared and relieved to sob or cry.
“Well,” I said. “That was scary.” I caught myself before we tumbled into an abyss of fear and release, expostulation and catharsis, that might exacerbate, if not create, any phobia or growing fear my son would have regarding the sea.
“Hey, I found you,” I said casually. “Let’s go clean all this stuff off.” And we headed to the shower house across a field of trailered boats.
I held Andrew’s hand, warning my wife with a glance that now was not the time to comfort. He turned to me and said excitedly, “I came up!”
“Yes, you did.”
“But, Dad, I fell in, but I came back up.”
He meant that he was swimming back toward the surface by himself when I found him. Maybe he was, though I don’t remember it that way. But that was fine. He was here. He wasn’t hurt. And he felt no terror of the black water he had fallen through. That’s what I wanted.
Danna kept Michael while Andrew and I went into the men’s side of the showers, the bright bathhouse lights exposing our wet and muddy clothes and the threads and washes of fresh blood running down my legs and left arm from the oyster shells. Andrew, of course, was fascinated by the bit of blood not his own. I felt nothing but relief and joy, interspersed with that hollow, sinking pang in my heart that I could have lost him.
After that night, we always hung our rope ladder over the side.
“Remember when I fell in, Dad?”
“Yes,” I think. “I will always remember.”
“But I came back up.”
“Yes, you did.”
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