Dead Reckoning (21 page)

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DAY 51 AT SEA, MOUTH OF BARKLEY SOUND, VANCOUVER ISLAND, CANADA (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 48.8°N, 125.3°W)

The fog comes

on
little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on
silent haunches

and
then moves on.

-Carl Sandburg

              It was Jill’s turn to babysit me as I stood watch. The weather remained benign, so we chatted about mostly meaningless things to pass the time. I tried to impress her with things that always fascinated me. I told her about how the sun converts six million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, which is enough to power civilization for hundreds of thousands of years. I pointed out that since electrons orbit the nucleus of every atom at a great distance, solid objects are mostly empty space. She just stared ahead. Such things didn’t interest her, which I found interesting in and of itself.

             
Jeff came topside and silently stepped past us. He stared up at the mast.

“You know what interests me?” she finally asked.

              “No. What?” I replied, excited to find out what it was and glad that she was, apparently, listening.

             
“Evolution.”

             
“Really?” I replied. “So you don’t believe in the Biblical account of creation?”

             
“Pfff!” she exclaimed. “No. The evidence in favor of evolution is overwhelming!”

             
I hesitated. She brought up the topic, and I wasn’t sure where it was going, but I found nearly everything interesting, so I waited.

             
“I mean some things you have to take as a matter of faith, but that doesn’t mean you suspend all critical thinking and ignore huge bodies of scientific evidence,” she said.

             
I nodded in agreement.

             
“Creation could just be an analogy for the moment when mankind became sentient,” she continued. “Couldn’t it be that God breathed consciousness into us rather than literal life?”

             
I thought for a second and decided that wasn’t too bad of an idea.

             
“So what interests you about evolution?” I asked, steering her back to the original topic.

             
“It’s amazing enough that all this diversity evolved from just a few, or maybe one organism,” she continued. “But when you think about the complexity of our systems, it’s just overwhelming. The brain, for example. Or the eye—it is thought that it evolved from a patch of light sensitive cells.”

             
“I’ve always thought that seemed absurd,” I said.

             
She looked at me quizzically. “Really?”

             
I knew that evolution made perfect sense. Natural selection can be seen in action today. But certain aspects of it were just unbelievable. I struggled for how to articulate what I thought about it. Suddenly, I thought of an analogy.

             
“Let’s say I wanted to start the process to grow another arm on our backs a million years from now,” I said. “Is there something I could consciously do to bring it about?”

             
She shook her head in acknowledgement of the obvious.

             
“So then how can an unconscious process like selection start with a patch of light sensitive cells, evolve that into a ball, connect it to the brain via cords, grow lenses in there, and make it see?”

             
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it happened.”

             
“Just because we have eyes, doesn’t mean that’s how it happened,” I said. “I know that’s our best theory, but it’s just hard to swallow—for me, anyway. As they say, what good is half an eyeball?”

             
Jill smiled.

             
“I’m well aware that just because I can’t see how it could happen doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” I continued. “But it’s beyond incredible if you ask me though.”

             
Jill seemed like a different person since the last philosophical conversation we’d had. I sensed that she was in a much better place mentally, much less fragile. So I asked her a question that I’d been curious about since the last time we went down this road: “Jill, as a doctor, isn’t religious faith a little incompatible with your scientific training? Scientifically, much of religion is absurd.”

             
“Like what?” she asked immediately.

             
“Jesus rising from the dead, for one. Scientifically speaking, people don’t rise from the dead. The flood—there isn’t enough water in our entire earth/atmosphere system to submerge all the land masses. Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale. All the miracles.”

             
“Don’t you think a god who could create the universe could temporarily suspend the scientific laws he created in order to accomplish something?” she replied.

             
“Yes, I do,” I replied. “But then I would also have to allow for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy too because, theoretically, God could create all those things.”

             
“That’s where faith comes in,” she said. “I believe God could and did suspend the laws to accomplish things that were needed in his plan.”

             
After a few moments of thought, I replied: “I don’t really understand faith.”

             
“I’ll bet you have faith in all sorts of things,” she responded.

             
I shot her a skeptical look. She mentioned that I used satellites in my work and believe that the pictures they send actually are from space, but I don’t really know. I get a burger from a restaurant and have faith that it’s beef and not dog meat. Really, any understanding or belief in history requires a modicum of faith, according to Jill.

             
“But I believe in those things because I have no reason to doubt them, which is because they are plausible,” I responded. “I am willing to believe things that I don’t know for certain about as long as they are plausible. A guy spending three days in the belly of a whale and coming out alive, just isn’t plausible. So I have absolutely no reason to believe that. There is no reason for the engineers to lie to me about weather satellites and it is plausible that we sent up those satellites and they’re sending down photos.”

             
Jill just nodded.

             
“Are you feeling better about your faith than last time we talked about this?” I asked.

             
She nodded.

             
“I’m glad,” I said.

             
“Since you’re on the subject of interests, you know what interests me?” Jeff chimed in as he fiddled with the cables and cleats on the mast. We had forgotten that he was there. He didn’t wait for us to respond. “We all know that nothing can escape a black hole, even light. And nothing travels faster than light. So how does gravity act on objects outside the black hole if it cannot escape it?”

             
Neither Jill nor I responded. That was indeed amazing.

             
“They say that space is warped around big bodies, like a bowling ball on a trampoline,” Jeff continued. “It’s hard to imagine how space could be warped. What does that even mean?”

             
Jill, ignoring Jeff’s rhetorical question, settled back into her seat. A serious look came over her, as if deciding how best to say something weighty. I hoped it was more about evolution.

             
“What are you going to do if no one is home when you get there? Or worse, they’re all dead?” she asked.

             
Over time, my skin had thickened from the inside out, so that such lines of questioning stung less than at first. I studied her expression and it contained not a hint of remorse for having asked such a thing, but her face winced and eyes squinted in painful anticipation of what she expected to hear.

             
“Jump off a bridge, I guess,” I replied. “And I’m not sure that their not being there would be worse than just finding them dead, other than it would give me hope of finding them again. But I’m deathly afraid of what their absence would mean for them.”

             
“What would it mean, necessarily?”

             
“Nothing necessarily. But it would suggest that they had been captured or at least that they were out there somewhere where they could be captured. I assume capture would be a fate worse than death.”

             
“Maybe not. Maybe they just took up with the neighbors or friends and went off somewhere safe.”

             
“I don’t know where that would be, and, anyway, I told Kate to hunker down there with her parents and ride it out.”

             
“Does she always do exactly what you tell her?”

             
“Rarely.”

             
“Then you don’t know. Why don’t you just assume the best until you find out otherwise?”

             
“Human nature.”             

The last of Vancouver Island scrolled slowly by to port, barely visible. We stayed close to the shore the entire way down the coast, but decided to back off a little as we closed in on civilization.

The wind had remained uncharacteristically calm, and it took us three excruciatingly long days to travel the length of Vancouver Island.

             
Despite being summer, it was cold enough for snow every night, and then it warmed up enough to change the snow to rain during the day. The snow never accumulated on shore because of the salty air, but the landscape turned white not far above the beach. The gray sky never broke, even when the precipitation stopped.

             
Jeff continued to stare up at the new mast, its tan wood quickly darkening in the damp sea air.

             
“It seems to be holding up,” he said, turning to us. “We need to discuss our passage through the strait and sound and where our drop points are going to be.”

             
He went to the helm and produced a nautical chart of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound and spread it out before us. The wind lifted the edge he could not control, but Jill grabbed hold and restrained it.

             
“Obviously we’re going through the strait,” he said, pointing at the channel between the north Washington Coast and Vancouver Island labeled Strait of Juan de Fuca.

             
“The narrowest point is at the west entrance to the strait, and it is almost twelve miles,” Jeff said. “We should be able to stay out of trouble from the shore at that distance, and it’s pretty much uninhabited out there anyway. But that doesn’t address what kind of traffic we might run into on the water. There might be all kinds of people streaming out of there. We’ll just have to deal with whatever comes up.”

             
“I’ve been to Port Angeles,” I interjected. “You can see all the way to the Canadian side.”

             
“Still, six miles is a helluva distance to be able to see our little boat,” Jeff continued. “The first major constriction we come to is Admiralty Inlet, between Port Townsend and Whidbey. It is less than four miles across.”

             
“Luckily, it’s also not very inhabited,” I said.

             
“Once we get inside the sound, we’re going to need lots of luck. At best, we will never be more than three miles from land on one side or another. We’ll try to stay closer to the unpopulated side—whichever that is, west side, mostly, I guess—but we should all keep watch the whole time.”

             
Jeff paused, staring at the map. He rubbed his chin and then looked up.

             
“And we’re starting to run low on fuel,” he continued.

             
“Low on fuel?” questioned Jill.

             
“I just dumped in the last can this morning. We’ve been motoring a lot.”

             
“But that still leaves us with a hundred gallons, right?” I asked.

             
“Yes. We will be fine getting to where we are going, but if we want to go anywhere else, we need to conserve. We’ll get at best a hundred and fifty hours out of that which is about six days. You know as well as I do that it can be too calm to sail for days in the Puget Sound.”

             
“I’m sure we can find some gas somewhere,” Jill interjected.