15. Seth
Seth
There’s cold, and then there’s cold. There’s wet, and then there’s wet. There’s rough, and then there’s rough.
Working in commercial fishing long enough, you learn the difference between them. It’s why the greenies catch so much shit for bitching about the weather on a thirty-degree day with ten-foot swells.
Try negative fifteen, with twenty-foot-plus waves pummeling the ship while you’re out on deck, holding on for dear life to the very frozen railing you’ve got to de-ice.
Try doing that for the third hour running.
When you stopped feeling your hands about forty-five minutes ago, but somehow, you can still feel all the muscles in your arms burning.
I’ve never in my life thrown up on a boat—well, not without a hangover—but days like this make me question if even I might be seasick.
There is no reprieve. Just constant rolling. The rise, the drop, and the assault of freezing spray to the face. Relentless and indifferent as a machine.
The wind is screaming. Whipping through the spaces between the traps and all the lines securing the equipment, creating this ear-piercing shriek that gives you goosebumps under the collar.
The Suoja groans under the torrent. Deep sounds, like an animal in pain, begging to be put out of its misery. The hull cracks and pops with the immense weight of every violent wave.
I’ve heard her make noises in rough weather before. You get used to the language of a vessel after a while.
Creak. One. Two. Three.
Slam. One. Two. Three.
Even if I wish I could be down in the cabin—and believe me, I do—it wouldn’t matter. It’d take me all of two seconds to get thrown out of my bunk and break a damn hip.
Jorgensen found that out the hard way two hours ago.
There’s a nasty gash across his forearm from a cabinet latch that caught him when a rogue swell hit broadside and threw him into the wall.
I wrapped it myself on the deck with my ice chisel tucked under my armpit.
The two of us hunched against the wind while Perry held a flashlight and Orlov kept up our war against the ice.
This might be the first time I’ve ever seen Jorg too cold to say a damn word. I never thought I’d miss those tone-deaf serenades of his.
The worst part of it all isn’t the injury risk, though.
It isn’t the freezing rain or the lash of saltwater burning my eyes or the ache in my muscles from holding on tight.
It’s not the nausea sitting low in my gut, the stomach acid I keep swallowing back.
It’s not the slow creep of the cold, past the point of discomfort and into something that becomes a part of you as much as the blood pumping through your veins.
It’s the passing of time.
During a storm like this, time compresses and stretches simultaneously. One minute passes in a blink and the next lasts forever, an eternity of wet, frigid torture.
There’s no way of knowing when it will be over. No land on the horizon, no hopeful thinning of the clouds, and nothing to measure yourself against. The dark is endless. The cold is unwavering.
The ocean is infinite and tumultuous and deeply, profoundly uninterested in whether any of us make it home, and it feels like it’ll never pass.
It’ll drive you to pray, and then it’ll make you pissed the fuck off that all your prayers fall on deaf ears—because the storm is still howling. The waves won’t stop coming.
And you’re just one human. One bag of flesh, bones, and entrails, going up against the most powerful forces on earth and being reminded, repeatedly, that the ocean was here before you and will be here long after.
I’ve been through bad storms. I’ve white-knuckled my way through conditions that would make somebody from the lower forty-eight pack their bags for Kansas and never lay eyes on saltwater again.
I know the difference between miserable and dangerous, and I know when a situation has crossed from one into the other.
I thought about it sometime after nightfall, when everything went from dark to black and the waves built from rolling hills to rocky mountains. There was a thin, sobering thread of recognition.
This one is different. This is the storm that becomes the new benchmark of comparison for all other rough days at sea. The one that reminds you how alive you are, because of how quickly it’ll kill you if your attention lapses.
This is the storm we’ll be talking about when we’re old and gray, and the young guys at the pub are pestering us for stories about all our time spent at sea.
I haven’t let myself think about that since, though. I can’t afford to.
I keep my head down, and I chip ice, and I watch out for my crew, and I do what has to be done.
And I try not to worry too hard about Nick, all alone up in that wheelhouse. Running on whatever’s left in his tank after far too many fucking hours at the helm.
He’d argue that I’ve got the worse end of this arrangement, being turned into a human ice cube down here while he’s up in the heated bridge. He’d be wrong though.
I don’t envy the crushing weight of nature he takes upon his shoulders, assumes as his responsibility.
Captaining a ship in a storm like this is almost entirely intuition.
Split second decisions, one after another, all with life-threatening consequences.
It’s the confidence of knowing your vessel enough to guide her through the chaos, and the humility of never knowing what the ocean will throw at you next.
Nick’s brought it up a couple times now—why I’ve never gone for my captain’s license. My answers have all been true. I’m more than content where I’m at. But a bigger part of the answer is that he is the reason.
He was born for this. Fair and just. Calculative with risks and quick to always make the right call. Calm under pressure, no matter how much he takes on.
I’ve admired Nicolas Lundvall from the moment we first set out together, but never as much as I do right now.
Never as much as when I feel everything start to go terribly, terribly wrong.
After four years, I know the Suoja. You can’t spend that long on a vessel without absorbing her rhythms, the same way you can recognize your favorite songs from a few seconds of audio or your favorite book from its opening line.
I know the way this boat rises and levels out. The exact motion of her recovery.
Which is why I know, before I can pinpoint how, that something has changed.
Creak. One. Two… Three.
Slam. One. Two… Three.
It’s not a sound. It’s not anything that has a name. It’s a feeling that starts under my feet, spreading through my boots and traveling until it pries its fingers into my chest.
Creak. One… Two… Three.
Slam. One… Two… Three.
The Suoja’s rhythm is off. The way she crests the next swell is sluggish. And when she rolls—the whole deck tilting in a long, sickening lean to the port side—she comes back up slower than she should.
One. Two. Three. Four.
She corrects. But later than I’ve ever felt her correct, and with less surety.
The ice. I see it everywhere the beam of my headlamp falls. Thick crystalline-white build-up is caked on the railings, on the pot stack, across the top of the wheelhouse. Forming jagged sculptures over every part of the ship’s infrastructure.
No matter how much we remove, there’s water everywhere. Sloshing onto the deck in angry waves and coming down from overhead in sheets. It’s freezing faster than we can chip it.
We’ve been out here for hours, fighting a battle I doubt we could win with a crew twice our size. And with just the four of us? We’ve been losing.
Weight has been accumulating in all the wrong places. I don’t know how much, but I do know something I wish I could be ignorant to. The Suoja is taking too long to correct.
Creak. One. Two. Three… Four.
Slam. One. Two. Three… Four.
The crew radio fuzzes to life, but I can’t make out anything over the roar of the engine and the thirty-foot waves slamming against the hull.
“Can you hear him?” I scream.
Jorgensen and Perry and Orlov are all around me and still at it, arms swinging, ice chips flying. There’s some head shaking. Nobody heard it clearly. Or did they even hear me?
The deck tilts under another rogue swell that has us all briefly airborne, clinging to the first bolted structure we can reach. Perry slips. One second he’s upright, and the next, his feet have flown out from under him.
Orlov catches him by the collar, hauling him back toward the railing until he can get a handle on something solid.
The radio fuzzes again and this time Nick is loud. He’s screaming. I thought I knew every last register of his voice, but I have never, in four years, heard him scream like this.
Still, I can’t make out the words. The wind takes them.
“We can’t hear you, Captain,” I say into the radio. I think I’m pressing the talk button, but I can’t feel my fucking fingers. “We’re okay. What’s going on?”
Crackling. Static.
Creak. The next wave rolls us.
Slam. BANG. The Suoja’s bow crashes into the trough.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Come on. Please.
She corrects. Barely.
My heart doesn’t sink. It drops. In my chest one minute, rolling around on deck the next. Shredded by towers of icicle-coated steel cages before it plunges into the Bering Sea and sinks.
I’m already moving toward the exterior ladder to the wheelhouse when Nick opens the door and meets me there.
The first thing I notice is that he’s in his survival suit like the rest of us. Bright orange, zipped to his chin.
Then I notice the canister in his hand.
He’s shaking his head. Not at me specifically. At all of it. At the whole situation, the whole impossible night.
Holy fuck. This is it.
“I called it in,” he screams over the raging storm. “We need to go. We have to abandon ship.”
I hear it. I understand the individual words. My brain just takes a moment to arrange them into something real.
“What?”
“The ice is building up too fast.” He’s already pulling me with him by the arm. We’re all out of time. We’ve been out of time longer than either one of us knew it. “We’re going to capsize. We need to get off this fucking boat, Rit. Now.”
He hurries us over to where the rest of the crew waits, and I watch their expressions drop in the sliver of face exposed by their suits as they see the life raft canister in Nick’s gloved hand and put the pieces together in real time.
And then, underneath the fear and the cold and the exhaustion and the very real chance that this might be where our story ends—there is Nick.
The steadiness. The impossible calm when everything else is in shambles.
The man who won’t hesitate to make the right call, even when it’s the hardest call to make.
Even when it means losing a part of himself.
I know what this boat means to him. I know it the way I know most things about him. Not because he’s said it in so many words, but because I’ve paid more attention to him than to anything else in my life.
The yellow raft hits the water and disappears for a second in the trough before it bobs back up. An absurdly small emergency light flashing against the heaving sea.
“Abandon ship.” Nick gives the order as the next swell takes the Suoja, flooding her with water that drags at my calves, chilly as hell and shockingly heavy. It might’ve yanked me under if not for Nick’s hand, latching onto my arm.
The crew goes over. One, then two, then three. For one, horrific second, it’s just the three of us. Me, Nick, and the Suoja, groaning her last sounds beneath our feet.
“I love you,” Nick says.
Then he yanks us both over the railing.
The water comes up to meet us. Darker than black. Cold in a way that makes every cold I’ve experienced before seem like a warm memory.
And in that moment, I’m calmer than I ever thought possible.
There is nothing more to be done. No what-ifs. There is only what happens next, and that’s out of our control.
My last thought, before the sea swallows the sound of everything, is that in all her violence, in all her indifference, she is still, somehow, beautiful.
What a beautiful place to die with the man I love.