A Measurable Difference
by Mary Hutchings Reed
Dr. Harlan Cortland III held his right hand over his heart as if to prevent it from pounding out of his chest. With his left hand, he shielded his eyes from the afternoon sky, and focused all of his attention on the school's quarter-mile track. His sixteen year old son, a scrawny, five-foot-nine replica of himself, settled into the starting blocks for the 100 meter dash.
As a youngster, Harlan himself had run track, but he'd not been as good as Chip promised to be—at least, he'd not stuck with it long enough to find out. Irene, Harlan's stepmother, had said she thought it silly to train so hard for something he was never going to be the best at, especially when being the best was barely measurable. Her discouragement and disapproval had sucked the joy out of it for him. She'd pushed instead—to the extent that she'd shown any interest in him at all—for academic excellence, so that he could follow in the surgical footsteps of his own largely absent and always distant father.
Harlan had been thirteen and sullen when his mother fled his philandering father; fourteen and self-contained when his father had married Irene, his office nurse. Thereafter, the only thing his parents agreed on--and then reluctantly--was that Harlan should spend the academic year with his father and Irene, for the opportunity to go to the local preparatory school. He spent vacations and holidays with his mother, an outdoorsy sort of woman with whom he canoed and hiked in the spring and summer and snow-shoed and skied in the winter. Still, by sixteen, he'd hung up his track shoes to take two additional advanced placement courses that Irene and his father said would help him get into Harvard.
He'd enjoyed Harvard well enough, but he'd vowed that if he ever had kids, he would not substitute his dreams for theirs. Now, watching Chip struggling to shave a tenth of a second from month to month and race to race, he was finding that vow harder and harder to keep. To Harlan's disappointment, the boy was not excelling academically at Franklin Prep, although he firmly believed that if Chip spent as much time studying as he did running, he'd improve his grade-point average enough to at least have a chance at one of the small liberal arts colleges out East. As it was, Chip would be lucky if he could run his way into the state university.
Chip loved to run, and he loved to run fast. On his best days, he'd grin that he was going to the Olympics in 2008, that he was going to be the fastest man on earth. He'd been energized, rather than discouraged, when Jason Gatlin won the 100 meters in '04 by an :01 second advantage over the silver medalist and :02 over the bronze, differences not even measurable when Harlan had wanted to run track. Today, a two-tenths-of-a-second improvement in Chip's best time would earn him a place at next weekend's state finals.
“On your mark!” Sounding overtaken by a seasonal allergy, the starter's voice squeezed through the bullhorn, hushing the small crowd of parents, grandparents, and girlfriends. The gun popped and Chip shot out of the blocks.
“Attaboy!” Harlan shouted, flinging his hand from his heart to the air with enough energy to launch a discus. Around him, the air filled with a cacophony of shouts and exhortations. Chip was holding his own, even, it appeared to Harlan's admittedly biased eye, inching ahead.
“Hold on!” Harlan shouted. “Ru-un!” It would mean so much to Chip to win. When Chip had been in eighth grade, his mother had died, and Harlan had stood by in his own shock while his son retreated into a stony silence. Harlan's medical partner and friend Dan Rutherford had reached out to the boy, offering the weekly grief counseling that Harlan had been too devastated himself to provide. He'd blamed himself for his wife's undetected breast cancer, and only his sense of personal loss overwhelmed his professional embarrassment.
In an ironic twist on facing one's problems and grief, Rutherford had whet Chip's interested in running, and he'd joined the freshman team. Now, as a junior, he was on the verge of running a state-qualifying time. The runners, three close, the rest stretched out behind, lunged towards the tape, and Harlan held his breath. A woman in front of him jumped in the air, screaming “Nooooo!” She blocked Harlan's view of the finish line.
The crowd cheered; the announcer crackled something over the loudspeaker. Harlan grabbed the arm of the man standing next to him. “Who won?” he asked. “I couldn't see!”
“Number 12,” the man said. “Looks like Franklin Prep.”
“Yes!” Harlan jumped up, only vaguely aware that his delayed reaction made an amusing spectacle. He pushed his way through the crowd to the fence, and Chip jogged over, high-fived him and ran on to hug a teammate. Harlan thought to look up at the tally board. A personal best for Chip.
At his waist, Harlan's beeper buzzed, and, swearing gently under his breath, he called his service. Not recognizing the doctor's name, he listened, at first confused. Slowly, one at a time, like the hurdles set up at the far end of the track, he understood the words. The call was not about a patient, it was about his stepmother Irene. She'd been hospitalized a few days ago, when her breathing had become labored, but she'd been expected to go home. Now, the doctor was saying it was time. Irene's emphysema had run its course, her eighty-two year old body was faltering. The doctor wanted to put her on hospice.
How many times had Harlan given that same advice and message to a grieving family? How many times had he waited, sometimes impatiently, for them to accept the inevitable, to stop pretending they had a choice? He stared at the track, where another heat was in the blocks, and he heard the pop of the starting gun.
“If you agree,” the voice on the telephone said. “You know the protocol.”
“Yes,” he whispered, then cleared his throat and said again, “Yes. Tell her I'll come visit,” he said. He'd always done what he perceived to be his duty to his father's wife. He sent Christmas presents--in recent years a check--and she would spend the day with her sisters. He usually remembered to send a birthday bouquet, too, but months could pass without his giving her a thought. She didn't seem to mind. After his father died ten years ago, she'd made a life for herself, keeping up her golf club activities and social contacts, and then moving to the posh senior community where all the ladies of a certain social status lived.
“Within the week,” the voice said, the warning implicit.
The timing was terrible. The state finals were next weekend. Irene lived six hours away, three hours beyond the site of the state meet. If he drove over Thursday night, he could see her Friday and drive back to the meet late that night or Saturday morning. He was feeling pressured, as if Irene had deliberately interfered with his plans. Yet, he felt compelled to do his duty, and even at a minimum that meant he should visit before the weekend. He could hardly send word that he was putting a track meet before her. She would never understand. A hundredth of a second ? Not a meaningful difference, she would say. Not worth wasting Chip's time over.
Harlan Cortland enjoyed a certain reputation for his kind and soothing bedside manner, but he felt unsure of himself as he entered Irene's room in the palliative-care wing of the hospital. Translucent green tubes fed oxygen to her nose, and a urine bag hung discreetly from the side of the bed, but she was free of other medical interventions.
The visitor's chair was against the far wall, so he knelt beside her bed on one knee and took her hand. He could not remember ever touching it before, although he must have, the way he'd been trained to, to help her out of a car, her golf cart, a pew. Now, he was shocked at how soft it was, the hand of a woman pampered all her life, although she would deny it. When he'd been a teen, she'd been fond of reminding him that she'd worked her way through nursing school as a cleaning lady, and now that she'd married the elder Dr. Cortland, she wasn't about to wait on his son hand and foot. She'd hired both a cleaning lady and a gardener.
“How ya doing?” he said, forcing the vernacular in an effort not to sound alarmed. Irene, the stern and imposing woman of his youth, lay slightly propped up on several pillows, her skin like pale wax, her hair uncharacteristically unkempt, her always-polished fingernails naked.
“It takes a long time to die,” she said.
“Sometimes,” he said. His own mother, then eighty, had collapsed on the tennis court, during her weekly doubles match.
“Did they tell you to come because I was going to die?”
“No, I was planning to come,” he lied. “To see how you were. Chip sends his love, but he's in the state finals of the 100 meters tomorrow. He ran his personal best in regionals last week, so he's all geared up.”
“Is he going to win?” she asked.
“He's going to try,” he answered.
She furrowed her brow in disapproval. “I suppose my hair looks terrible,” she said.
He chuckled. “It looks pretty good,” he said.
“The nurse tried to do it, but she couldn't do it right,” she said, rolling her eyes. For that brief moment, they shared the joke, that her vanity was so misplaced as to be amusing, even to the one dying.
She smacked her lips. Harlan knew her lungs were filling with fluids, that her mouth was probably as dry as ash. She removed her hand from his and pointed determinedly at the hospital tray, at a pitcher of ice cubes. He put one in a glass. He knew that she knew, because she was a doctor's wife, that the nurses didn't want to bloat her with fluids, but she was dying. He couldn't find the discipline to deny her water. Complaining, she gobbled the cube.
“I didn't think it would be like this.”
Helpless, he nodded. He'd witnessed hundreds of deaths in his career, but still he wondered, what will it be like, that time of dying?
The black leather family Bible was on the window sill, and she directed him to open it. He hesitated, thinking that she wanted him to read it to her out loud, and he didn't think he could do that without his voice cracking with his residual grief for his wife, but instead she asked him to skim two typewritten sheets tucked inside, her final instructions: what funeral home to use (the one where all the widows went whose debutante parties had been at the hotel down the block), where the silver should go for appraisal, where to find the lock-box key, and what the obituary should say. She was eighty-two, and it should not say her age.
“I did the best I could,” she said, her green eyes like glass. Did she mean in organizing this transition? In managing her funds? In trying to raise an adolescent step-son?
“We know you did,” Harlan said, pretending to reread the typed instructions. “You did the best you could.”
“They were good people,” she said. She meant, he knew, her sisters, and the nieces and nephews on her side of the family who had been the sons and daughters Harlan couldn't be. She wasn't his mother. She was the woman he was forced to live with half the year, so he could go to a good high school. She was the woman who wouldn't let him run.
“I loved Harlan,” she said. She meant his father. “He was my life,” she said.
“He's waiting for you,” Harlan said. Thinking of his own wife, he wasn't sure he believed that, but it was, he felt, what the dying wanted to hear. He could give her that much.
And then she grabbed his hand. “I did the best I could,” she repeated. Harlan nodded again, swallowing his disagreement. She could have done better, been more likable, more supportive, more whatever it would have taken to remove the trauma of his mother and father's divorce. The thought caught him off-guard. What could she have done? Would it have made a difference?
She closed her eyes, her breathing nearly still, as if she'd said all she wanted to say. It takes a long time to die, she'd said, and he thought she was trying to hurry it along.
A nurse came in, checked on Irene, asked Harlan if he needed anything. He thanked her, he didn't. He looked at his watch. Soon, he should consider heading back to the meet. Irene coughed, and Harlan stood up from his chair and knelt once more by her bed. A few minutes passed as he listened, and listened, finally, only to his own breath. He stroked her cold hand. Out of professional habit, he took a note card from his pocket and scribbled the time of death.
4:07 pm.
Then, thinking about his son and about finish lines, he added the measurable difference.
4:07:01.
Deploying the Life-Raft: Facing the Fear
by
Mary Hutchings Reed
I clutch a huge stuffed sheep as I sit on the plane to Norfolk , the port of debarkation for my first ocean passage. Around its neck, the sheep wears a life-preserver which my sister crafted from orange broadcloth. My nieces gave it to me last night at a family farewell dinner--a kind of Irish wake for the living. My husband, Bill, and I are off to meet a sailing fleet called the Caribbean 1500. In a week we will be aboard our thirty-two foot sailboat, Vikara , bound for St. Thomas : an off-shore voyage of fifteen hundred miles.
“Mommy says you might die,” my ten-year old niece had said to me at dinner. “I know you're scared to death,” my actress-sister added in an accusatory tone. “You shouldn't have to do this just because Bill wants you to. Don't do it if you're scared.”
“Of course I'm scared, but that's not a reason not to do it,” I'd said, feigning a bravado I didn't feel. My sister rolled her eyes, heaved a pre-migraine sigh, and said I was crazy. Silently, I agreed with her.
Now, as the plane lifts off, I harbor a boat-load of fears. I worry about what my obit will say if I die out there, on the open sea. What have I contributed of any importance to the world? What legacy will I leave? Will my family weep, “I told you so?”
The Caribbean 1500 is a non-competitive rally of sailors who are taking their boats south for the winter. Some, like Bill and me, are Great Lakes sailors who have not been even a hundred miles from shore before. The event includes a week of safety inspections at dock prior to the start, and a daily radio check-in while underway. These activities are designed to reduce our fears. They don't.
During the week of preparations in Norfolk , Bill and I attend informative seminars entitled, in ascending order of urgency, “Man-Overboard;” “Abandon Ship,” and finally, as if the first two aren't disastrous enough, “Emergencies at Sea.” I feel my incompetence growing in direct proportion to how much I learn. None of my success in any other phase of my life counts here, where the game is off-shore sailing and there is no deference to or even interest in my prestigious legal career back home. By the end of the week, I am in a dither about how much I don't know of celestial navigation, diesel mechanics and the logic of our automatic steering mechanism, the wind vane. I'm not even sure I will know the basics of left (port) and right (starboard) when the time comes. I fend off my fears with humor and scotch.
During the week, Bill and I have two important tasks: provisioning for both thirty days at sea and a prolonged stay in islands without Wal-Marts and Warehouse Clubs, and preparing a little life-raft for when we are lost at sea.
We fill two shopping carts at a local grocery, without much more of a plan than it looks like “enough.” We play a kind of scissors, paper, rock game as we stand in the canned food aisle.
“How much tuna should we buy?” I ask Bill.
“Lots,” comes his typical reply, “like four cans.”
“For thirty days? Plus two months after we get there?”
“They have stores down there, Mary Michael.”
“But not out there,” I say, and buy fifteen.
We don't have refrigeration on board, but we are not terribly limited in what we can bring. Potatoes, carrots, margarine, hard cheeses, vacuum packed salamis, and even eggs do not require it. I am not fond of canned vegetables, but we buy canned corn and beans and spinach anyway. I dutifully strip the labels, which could get wet and peel away, and write on the cans in indelible laundry marker: tuna, beef stew, corned beef hash, chicken, salmon. I put the dry foods--instant mashed potatoes, rice, flour, sugar, soup mix, instant oatmeal, and crackers and cookies--in plastic canisters. I leave the peanut butter and jelly readily available in the cabinet above the sink. We make up ten pounds of GORP--peanuts and raisins and M&M's--and I add an emergency bottle of scotch and one of brandy. Just in case.
That week we also pack our abandon-ship bag, the bag of survival necessities that one of us is supposed to remember to take with us if we have to “deploy the life-raft.” I am not prepared to face the contents of the life-raft's survival tool box: a plastic sextant, chart, pencil and watch, so we can know where and when we are dying; a mirror, so we can see ourselves dying, (and perhaps flash reflected sun rays at a passing ship which may want to catch a glimpse of our dying); sunscreen, so we won't burn to a crisp before we die; a couple fishhooks, in case there is a fish or two that will sacrifice its life for ours before we die, and a space blanket to cover our weakened bodies as we lay dying. Since the humor of it escapes me, I toast our packing with a shot of scotch.
When the life-raft had come in the mail, Bill had deployed it in the living room of our city apartment. “Way cool,” he gushed, inviting me in. “Isn't this cozy?” My heart had pounded and my palms dampened. Some place deep inside me then I'd felt a chill, the same panic I feel sometimes when I wake up at four in the morning and have the stark revelation that I will in fact one day die, and it takes my breath away. Oblivious to my terror, Bill calmly explained what will happen when we have to abandon ship--how the raft will blow itself up with its attached tent, and where I should blow if it doesn't, and how to close it up tight around us so that we won't be swamped, and how to tie the abandon-ship bag with the Velcro straps and position the little head pillow snugly in one corner. He sounded like he was looking forward to it. I wanted to throw up.
During the week, Bill and I develop new relationships with fellow sailors based on common fears. We get sucked into a feeding frenzy of “keeping up with the Joneses,” as fear perversely becomes the measure of preparedness. When one boat owner buys the last dozen spare water jugs available in the entire city of Norfolk, the rest of us panic: if he needs one hundred spare gallons of fresh water for his six-person crew, is a total of eighty, including our emergency stash, sufficient for the two of us?
We make friends with Lee and Dee on About Time and Alan and Pat on Sea Otter . Pat, who has lived on her boat for six months, intimidates the hell out of me with her computerized organization and technical knowledge of everything on board. Dee cows me, too: she is the only woman listed in the Caribbean 1500 as “captain” and, as a nurse, she knows how to give enemas. Towards the end of the week we have dinner with About Time --by then everyone is known primarily by their boat name rather than their given name--and play “What's your greatest fear?”
Lee says he is concerned about keeping a steady watch. “I understand the tanker lanes are pretty well marked,” he says. “Still, those things travel. From the time you see the lights until they are on you, it's what, fifteen minutes?”
I gulp. “So, we'll watch,” Dee says nonchalantly. “What I'm not looking forward to is the Gulf Stream . It's supposed to be nasty, and with only three of us on board, we can't afford to get sick.”
“At least you have three.” I look at Bill with increasing dismay.
“The important thing is to stay hydrated,” Bill, an internist, says to Nurse Dee.
“What's the fastest way to get water into someone, when you're out there?” she asks. “Gatorade?”
“Gatorade is good, because it's got potassium. But water is absorbed just as fast. The trick is to get the person to drink it,” he says.
“In the E.R., we sometimes used enemas," Dee muses. "That's it!” she says with a devilish excitement. “Gatorade enemas!” The medical professionals laugh. I don't.
I excuse myself, take refuge in the ladies room of the restaurant, and have my first emotional collapse of the week. I cry so hard I literally taste the salt on my lips, an appetizer for the weeks to come.
After dinner, I stand at a phone booth in the pouring rain and talk to my best friend from college. Of all people, Suzanne, who wrote her own funeral six years ago when she was diagnosed with leukemia at age thirty-five, would understand my existential panic. I cry into the phone and she listens. Since college she has become a spiritual director and hospital chaplain. I need both her friendship and her professional services.
“I'm a control freak,” I tell her. “I don't know enough.”
“Maybe the trick is to be unknowing.”
“I hate uncertainty, I hate unknowing.”
“Probably don't have a choice, Hutchie,” she says, using her pet name for me. “How can we know what's going to happen to us? Is there any choice but to be open, to be willing to accept what comes, to be surprised?”
“Surprise is what we're trying to avoid!” I wail, and then find myself weighing the absurdity of going to sea without surprise. I promise to call from St. Thomas , and try to envision a second phone booth on a sunny dock 1500 miles and at least two weeks away. I understand though, that it is the uncertainty and lack of control which causes my fear.
The Caribbean 1500 begins on a frightful Halloween, in bitter and inauspicious rain. I don my new and expensive red Henry Lloyds. The overalls and hooded jacket together weigh at least seven pounds, and encase me in stiff high-tech material that repels the beating rain. With the hood tied up just under my nose, it echoes inside like pebbles on a tin-roof.
Despite my pre-trip anxiety and the sinister seminars, our first bit of bad weather, four days out, surprises me. I am alone in the cockpit, trying to let Bill get some sleep, drinking in the short twilight and trying to imagine what we would look like in a picture taken from an airplane, or a cloud, or standing on the sun. Suddenly, I hear an unfamiliar scratching sound, look up and watch helplessly as the main sail shreds just above the first reef. (Reefing is a mechanical way of reducing the area of the sail by folding its bottom down around the metal boom; the smaller sail catches less wind and thus slows the boat down and steadies it in big winds.) Reluctantly, I wake Bill up to put in the second reef line. Almost on cue, the wind kicks up. For the next forty-eight hours, we are buffeted by a 40 mph blow. Rogue waves hit us broadside, full force, and down below drawers fly open, spraying their neatly organized contents about the cabin. Pulleys, cotter pins, screws, shackles, eye rings, batteries, pens, tape, everything, everywhere. I wake up the second stormy night in mid-flight, tossed out of my bunk and over the lee cloth that is supposed to keep me from rolling out. The sheep remains snug against the abandon-ship bag.
We do what we can, putting out a "securité" call on the radio. In theory, if there is someone within a fifteen-mile radius of us, they will hear us and answer back their position and be on the look-out for us, as if we are a navigational hazard to be avoided. If they are listening.... If we aren't on deck keeping watch, we have no way of knowing , for sure, whether any other vessel is in our path, or we in theirs. We conclude that we will have no way of responding even if we do know--our engine is no match for the authority of the weather. We aren't going to be able to maneuver our way out of any close calls. We settle for a quick look around every hour or so when one of us is startled awake by a new and unfamiliar sound.
Our first storm at sea gives me some courage. Now I know for sure what a storm at sea is like: that the boat will creak and shudder, that drawers will fling their contents of nuts and bolts and washers and pens and flatware like flying bullets around the cabin, that sails will rip and rigging will fail. But I've also learned that the fear is as uncomfortable as the actuality.
Our second storm pushes us east a hundred miles out of our way. We close the hatch and are entombed down below. We listen to the radio and I force myself to read books to pass the time. As if I'm on a jerky train on an old track, I read the same page over and over. The second storm is no more uncomfortable than the first, but we suffer more when the single side band radio reports tell us that other, larger, boats are catching tuna in the southern sunshine and arriving in St. Thomas .
A third storm follows like a wave in the brief lull of the second. The wind mounts to a force between a howler and a screecher. Vikara vibrates, shudders, stops dead and lurches ahead. About 8 p.m. one night, Bill decides we need to take down the main. It is black and Vikara is pitching all over. Bill wants me to hold the boat into the wind. He will go forward. Tired and scared to tears, I shout at him that I don't want him to leave the cockpit. Despite all the informative seminars, if he is thrown overboard by a sudden smack of a wave, I will not be able to haul him back in. I envision him, tethered to the boat in his harness, choking on the dark night waves. Fear grips my heart, and Bill literally grips my shoulders.
His lips no more than three inches from mine, he shouts, “Mary Michael! We do not have a choice!”
For a split-second, I think he is going to slap me out of my hysterics the way I've seen it done in movies. His urgency startles me into a recognition that survival is at stake. Fear is not an option. I shove my entire body weight against the tiller, trying to hold our twenty thousand pounds of boat steady. The tiller alternately throws me back and forth with the full force of the pounding sea. Bill returns to the cockpit, breathing heavily. He can barely speak, when the staysail sheet rips loose and he has to crawl forward again to tie it down. I am crying but it doesn't matter. My tears, mixed with waves and rain, cannot be heard.
We retreat to the relative peace of the cabin, hang our water-heavy Henry Lloyd's in the galley, and trust Vikara . Finally exhausted by fear, I surrender. I sleep. In a couple hours, a terrible commotion topsides jolts us awake. Amidst a flurry of swear words I've never heard him utter before, Bill drags on his soggy foul weather gear. The clew of the little jib, the only sail we have up, has blown out, and Bill creeps again to the bow of the boat to take it down. Wet and miserable but standing watch in the cockpit, there is absolutely nothing I can do--I can't see him, and I can't hear him. His words are lost on the din of the gale. I pray. It is a classic foxhole prayer, sincere and urgent and full of promises—“I'll give up scotch”--I probably can't keep. But we make it through that night, and in the next twenty-four hours, we make our best run ever: one hundred ten miles under bare poles--no sails at all-- and in the right direction! Bill writes in our log book that we have to get there soon. He's already fixed everything on the boat that he knows how.
The next morning, I sit my watch huddled under the dodger, and a bit of a reddish mooring ball dawns on the horizon. For the first time, I understand proportion in my gut. A tiny fleck of phosphorescent plankton winks at me and is gone. I notice that the water is not spilling off the deck through the scuppers, and when I inspect, the cold surprised eye of a silver and blue flying fish stares up. The sea is vast: the Atlantic alone 31,530,000 million square miles; Vikara occupies about 250 square feet--about one-one hundred thousandth of one square mile. I pity the poor fish, its fearlessness so admirable, its timing so poor.
In eleven days we are past Bermuda , and the ocean is supposed to have a personality change, but doesn't. It continues to take its angers out on us, as if we are in its way. It improves only when we are an hundred miles or so from St. Thomas , and then, finally, I have the dolphin to talk to. I sing to them and blow my safety whistle. They dance and leap like Wisconsin deer through fifteen-foot waves, and they chase our bow for the better part of an afternoon. It is comforting to have them with us.
In these moments, with the storms and the dolphin and the flying fish, I understand the uselessness of the fear I felt on a dock in Norfolk . On the twentieth day, with St. Thomas on the horizon, I know nothing is certain, the flight is everything. At last, I feel as fearless as the flying fish.
