The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (4 page)

S
unrise seeped into my cabin through a small porthole, where just hours earlier I watched thirty-five-foot swells rise like mountains in the distance. I’d woken up with my bed tossed diagonally across a room that I no longer recognized. My tiny dresser, with the drawers I had taped shut to keep from hearing them open and slam closed, open and slam, was flipped on its side. Clothes and textbooks carpeted the floor. My cherished Canon SD300, cracked, lay on the ground. I looked over at my roommate, Jaret, who was usually so upbeat and always writing furiously in his journal. He was pale and locked with fear. I couldn’t figure out what was happening, but I knew it couldn’t be good.

At least my headache was gone.

I’d forgotten to pack my Excedrin PM, so the night before when a horrific migraine took hold of me, I swallowed an Ambien to knock me out. I wasn’t a stranger to sleep aids; I’d been taking them to battle
bouts of insomnia since high school. Ambien didn’t lull me to sleep; it pinned me in a deep slumber and held me there against all odds.

“What the hell happened in here?” I asked Jaret. I attempted to stand, and the room swayed to its side. We braced ourselves against our beds.

“The past few hours have been insane,” he said with a panicked look. I didn’t remember any of it, but he said he was awoken at 3:00 a.m. by heavy items sliding across our cabin—dressers, beds, tables—so he went out into the hall, where he thought he’d be safest. Most of the other people on our hall did the same. After an hour, Jaret returned to the room to say a few prayers, write down some thoughts, and check on me. Apparently while the world was crashing down around us, my Ambien was functioning properly.

*  *  *

Thirteen days earlier, I’d boarded the MV
Explorer
cruise ship in Vancouver, British Columbia, eager to start Semester at Sea. On the hundred-day trip we would circle the globe, opening our senses to cultures on four continents. It would be the trip of a lifetime.

But as soon as we left the port, bound for South Korea, we met rough seas. Low-pressure air currents swept across the icy northern rim of the Pacific, churning the waters around us. During winter the older Semester at Sea ships usually sailed the more expensive, but safer, east-to-west route, but our brand-new vessel would attempt a North Pacific crossing.

As the ship’s swaying increased with each passing day, students began popping Dramamine like Skittles to quell their queasy stomachs. Nonetheless, spirits remained high. We stumbled from class to class and made bad jokes about “finding our sea legs.” When lunch plates slid off the tables during meals, we laughed with giddy excitement. This was an adventure. We were 650 college students
aboard a twenty-four-hundred-ton vessel, powered by mighty twin engines. We were invincible.

We didn’t have TV and the Internet was expensive and slow, so we created nightly diversions to entertain ourselves. We read Lonely Planet guidebooks, played board games from our childhood like Monopoly and Scrabble, and spent hours debating guitarists and G-d.

Day after day the storms grew worse, but we had complete confidence in the ship’s leader, Captain Buzz, a gray-haired seafarer with a Southern drawl. When Captain Buzz gave directives, we listened. And when he said we’d be fine powering through the rising storms, we believed him.

Every day, Captain Buzz gave us a weather update and a list of the ship’s coordinates. Google Maps wasn’t a part of our daily life yet, so students anxiously wrote down the longitude and latitude of our current position, then later used them to figure out the ship’s location on an actual map. An administrator known as the dean of student life, whom we’d yet to meet, joined Captain Buzz on the intercom in the afternoon to provide a series of updates about ship procedures and happenings. Because of his soothing, late-night radio delivery, we started calling him the Voice. A loud tone sounded to get our attention—
bing bong
—and then the Voice echoed through the entire ship.

“Good afternoon, and welcome to your noon announcements,” he crooned, though he could have been saying,
You’re listening to the Voice, with more music and less talk radio. . . .
If Captain Buzz and the Voice weren’t worried, neither were we.

*  *  *

For nearly two weeks we endured clattering silverware and sliding chairs as the waters grew rougher. Just before sunrise on our
thirteenth day at sea, about seven hundred miles off the coast of Alaska, as I was deep in an Ambien-induced haze, our ship sailed directly into three major storm systems. Shortly after I awoke, the Voice crackled across the speaker system.

Bing bong
.

“Good morning.” The Voice sounded as if he hadn’t slept all night. “We are encountering severe weather, so we’re asking everyone to put on your life jackets and stay in your rooms. We’re experiencing extremely large swells, so this is merely a precaution to ensure the safety of all passengers. Once again, we are asking you to put on your life jackets and stay in your rooms.”

Jaret and I looked at each other, smiled nervously, and searched the closet for our clunky, neon life jackets. The night we’d left Vancouver, all students had gathered for a drill at our assigned “muster stations,” where we’d congregate in the event of an emergency. From there we practiced boarding the lifeboats hooked outside the ship walls. Dressed in our life jackets, we playfully turned on their blinking lights and poked one another, as we struggled to seem cool on the voyage’s first night. It was like freshman year all over again, and nobody paid much attention to the instructions we were given.

This time it wasn’t a drill, though we still didn’t take the instructions seriously. Once Jaret and I strapped on our life jackets, we stood on our mattresses and watched through the porthole window as the waves rose higher and higher. We rode the ship’s ebb and flow for an hour, like cowboys straddling a bucking bronco at the state fair—until we felt the entire boat shudder.

“Something’s wrong,” Jaret said.

We didn’t know it yet, but the combined force of the three storms had created a sixty-foot rogue wave that charged across the ocean toward our ship. It smashed into the vessel head-on. And as
the wall of water rushed over the bow, it shattered the bulletproof windows of the ship’s bridge and flooded the main power supply. The icy water shorted the electronic controls, which caused the engines to die and the navigational equipment to shut down.

Bing bong
.

The Voice sounded as if he’d just sprinted a marathon. He gasped for air between each urgent statement.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Get to the fifth floor or higher! Stay out of the elevators. Help the women and children up the stairs. Keep your life jackets on,
and get to your muster stations immediately!
”

I coughed out a single breath as the weight of realization struck my chest. Bile from my stomach rose into my throat, my legs went wobbly, and I lost all strength to stand.

From what I could remember from our drills, the dangling lifeboats were our only way off the ship. Given the conditions, there was no way we could get outside to board them, and any inflatable rafts would flip almost instantly. There was no good plan of escape.

I’m going to die today,
I thought.
I’m going to drown in freezing waters within the next two hours.
I was in free fall. How was this possible?

This ship is definitely going down,
I thought,
and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I could feel the panic rising within me.
But why? Is this what my time here was meant for? For me to perish in the middle of the ocean?
I closed my eyes, asked those questions to the higher power I’d always prayed to, and suddenly a wave of calm washed over me.

With 100 percent conviction, I knew that it wasn’t my time. It was a feeling unlike anything else I’d ever experienced. With perfect knowledge, I suddenly knew that I had more to do during my time here than to disappear into the frigid waters. “21-Year-Old Perishes
at Sea” would not be my story. There would be no candlelight vigils or scholarship funds in my name. I wasn’t sure what my purpose was, but I suddenly knew that it both existed and hadn’t been fulfilled. As quickly as I thought I’d die, I was now certain that I would survive.

I just had to figure out how.

I looked through the porthole again to see what I was up against. We were nearly seven hundred miles from land, in the North Pacific, in winter—wildly thrashing against the waves. Hypothermia was a given, and one of the few tips I remembered from our drills was to wear warm, long-sleeved clothing if we had to evacuate into water. I threw on my Brown University basketball sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt to stay warm. Just then, my friends Dave and Reed charged into my room.

Dave’s father was a pastor, which made Dave a very, very religious dude. Reed, a Texas native, was a real Southern gentleman. And Jaret was a born-again Christian from Stillwater, Oklahoma. So not only was I in the company of a new band of brothers, but traditional, chivalrous ones at that.

“There’s mass hysteria outside, prayer circles, and everyone thinks we’re dying,” Reed said. He and Dave urged that no matter what happened, it was our duty to put on a strong front as we guided others up the stairs to the fifth and sixth floors.

“No matter how bad it gets,” Reed said, “the four of us need to seem totally calm and confident that we’ll get through this. People will look to us for direction, so no matter how bad it gets, make sure you put on a strong face.”

Before facing the madness in the hall, I changed into a thin, long-sleeved fleece and the only pair of light khaki pants I’d packed. If I wanted to survive, I had to swim; and if I wanted to swim, I couldn’t do it in absorbent, heavy sweats.

I looked directly into the mirror, lifting my shirt to reveal
the tattoo on my chest. Two years earlier I’d inscribed the words
Ani Ma’amin
, Hebrew for “I believe,” in a reverse image over my heart so that I would read them correctly each day in the mirror. They’re the first two words in a prayer that assures that if you have lived with the right deeds and actions in this life, you will be rewarded with redemption in the next. When I’d gotten the tattoo, I respected and believed in the power of faith to carry a person through his or her darkest moments, but now my faith in a higher power was truly my only lifeline.

Ani Ma’amin
. I repeated the words, praying to those watching over me, and then walked outside to face the hysteria.

I joined Reed, Jaret, and Dave at our posts to help everyone get to higher ground while the boat swayed more violently. Once people were safely upstairs, I climbed to an enclosed area on the sixth floor and sat with my back to the elevators. Two by two, students began clinging to each other in tight bear hugs, hoping that amid the tossing the combined weight of their bodies would keep them in one place. I stayed close to Jaret and Reed as I locked arms with a girl nearby. To my left, a ship worker in his midforties who’d been traveling with the MV
Explorer
for years started hypnotically rocking and crying while clutching his Bible in one hand and rosary beads in the other.
If he’s that terrified, this is really bad
. I closed my eyes and rubbed the letters on my chest.

Bing bong.

Captain Buzz. He said we’d need to endure the storm while the crew did its best to compensate for the damage done to the controls, which had shut the engines down. He did not mention that he’d also put out a distress call to the coast guard, and rescue crews were on their way.

Meanwhile, the crying, prayers, and screams continued as we waited for instructions. I stationed myself outside the dining hall.
To keep from moving across the floor, students grabbed on to poles, railings, and each other—hoping the vessel wouldn’t capsize entirely. The boat tilted to one side until we were practically parallel with the water, and then did the same on the other, as cutlery and broken dishes screeched ominously across the dining-hall floor. I’m not sure what was more frightening—knowing we were at the mercy of the sea, or watching the portholes fill with water or clouds based on which angle we leaned toward.

After several hours, a group of students decided that we needed to explore how we might abandon this death trap. We knew we had to get the boats down from the davits, which were outside. A wooden door opened to a ten-foot-wide walkway, with a sturdy railing. Maybe if we held on tightly enough, we could make our way to a lifeboat? Someone suggested we try. A shipman cracked the door, and the wind’s brute force flung it wide open.

“Close the door! Close the door!” students screamed.

The ship was midtilt as this occurred. We were lifted into the air at a steep incline. The open door hung below us, like a gaping mouth to the deadly waters below. Students began sliding toward the door. If they fell, they’d slip into the freezing ocean waters. The screams got louder.

We grabbed each other to keep from falling, and when the MV
Explorer
rocked back onto her other side, a shipman was able to grab the door handle and close it. We collapsed, exhausted.

After several hours, the tossing eased, and Captain Buzz regained power to the first engine; five hours later, the second one began to work. The engines didn’t exactly purr, but the shakes and shudders were progress. We grew optimistic. Ship workers began passing out dinner rolls, and the day-old bread helped settle our stomachs and our nerves. Finally, after we’d spent seven hours in our life vests, the Voice returned.

Bing bong.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is now safe to return to your rooms. Please be patient with us as we figure out what to do about today’s events. The ship is badly damaged, so be careful around broken glass, and please stay tuned for further updates.”

Walking back to my room, I surveyed the wreckage in awe and apprehension. Library shelves that once held Frommer’s travel guides and atlases of the world were empty or splintered in half. Tables were smashed to pieces, and jagged shards of glass covered the floor. The historic grand piano in the Main Hall had flipped over and shattered.