The Old Man and the Sea

I was also sure that her unhappiness with what she was doing would have quickly brought her back to me. And there was good reason to assume that she would never do it again.

But she had forced me to face the fact that I had never really loved her, or at least not like I did Kari. There was no devastating sense of outrage and profound despair over her loss - no extreme hatred of her or her paramour - no regret at what I had discovered - just melancholy.

I said with despondency in my voice, "I am going home now. And I am going to ask you to move out as soon as you get back. You recall that the condo is solely in my name, right?

"I am certain your fuck-buddy would be more than happy to take you in. What you were doing looked pretty hot. I'm sure he will want a lot more of that.

"Just tell me when you need to get your stuff and I will help you pack."

At that, she started to wail. She kept repeating, "I love you Danny. I didn't mean for this to happen. Please-please-please can't we work something out? Don't throw away twelve wonderful years. I'll do anything!!"

Then she broke down into soul wrench sobs.

I said with the weight of the world in my voice, "YOU threw it away not me. I wasn't the one who opened her legs to that horny piece of shit. Frankly, I don't love you enough to forgive you for THAT betrayal!!"

She said with spite and bitterness, "You'd forgive HER. I know you would. I could never compete with her, EVER!! THAT was why I did it!!"

I understood what she was saying. And she was absolutely right.

I said gently and with sadness, "I know."

Then I turned and walked out, closing the door on the penultimate room of my life.

_____________________________________

After the Fall

I hired a lawyer to untangle the mess. Most of what we had in asset form was brought into the marriage. So sorting out our worldly goods was a relatively quick and straightforward process.

Janet tried every trick of persuasion in an attempt to get me to take her back. But in the end she showed me how smart she was. She accepted that she had crossed the line that no woman ever returns from and signed the papers.

In many respects I was punishing myself more than I was her. Nobody wants to die alone and that was what I was sentencing myself to. I was not going to find another woman.

Whereas Janet married Shithead almost as soon as the divorce was final.

I got a dog instead. As far as I was concerned I was getting the more loving and faithful of the two creatures.

I had a conversation with the Dean the day after I got back.

The pictures on my phone led to Shithead's immediate termination. It was easy to invoke the faculty morals clause with him because he was not tenured.

Janet was tenured. So nothing happened to her. At least immediately. But the promotion to Full Professor would never happen in her lifetime now.

Overnight, Janet went from being a rising superstar, to a pariah. It crushed her.

I felt bad about that. It meant that her career would end in ignominy. But there was no way I could torch Dr. Norbert Willis without burning my ex-wife.

I ran into her several times. It couldn't be avoided. We worked in the same place.

She always gave me the saddest look. It was a potent cocktail of regret and yearning mixed with shame.

I didn't want her to suffer but I had no answers. She'd created the problem.

Willis was totally ruined in academe. No place will hire a faculty member with a morals dismissal on their record.

He had a lot of money, all of it inherited. Janet had no place to go so she moved in with him. I saw them around Georgetown from time-to-time.

Neither party looked like they wanted to be with the other. But circumstances being what they were they were stuck now.

I hear from the faculty grapevine that he still fucks around a lot.

It might be karma but it actually hurt me to know that Janet had to put up with that. I still loved her in my own way.

I taught for another three years and retired at sixty six. I had a good pension and with Kari's money I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted with the rest of my life.

I bought a small RV and Buster and I traveled around for three years, visiting every place I'd ever wanted to see in the U.S. and Canada.

But I was getting sick of cold weather and I didn't want to spend the remainder of my life on the road.

Accordingly, Buster and I sailed the boat down to Key West. I was planning to hole up there for the duration.

I expected that to be another decade or so, since I was still a healthy and hearty seventy-one. Which brings me back to the present day.

Present Day: 1500 Hrs. on a Monday Afternoon

It was a bright blue-sky day in Key West. I had been on the island for the past three years and it fit my lifestyle.

All I ever wanted was the feeling of peace and contentment that I had in those years with Kari.

I remembered those times like they were yesterday. Even if it had been a half century ago.

The easy-going life of a boat bum was as close as I could get to earthly paradise without her.

It was a little disturbing to realize that I was only thinking about Kari, not my former wife.

Janet was correct. I had never loved anybody but Kari. And I had probably done Janet a huge disservice by marrying her in the first place.

But you do stupid things when you lose track of life's ultimate goals.

I knew what I wanted now. So all I did was sit in the sun with my faithful old friend and wait.

I was also back to talking to her, which probably explained why all of the tourists gave me a wide berth.

Nevertheless, as I moved into my seventies Kari was more and more on my mind.

I was relaxing with a cheap scotch and rocks at Captain Tony's. That was Hemingway's REAL drink, not the daiquiris that they sell to the tourists.

I was enjoying the view of the weather outside in the street. There had been weather problems elsewhere in the Caribbean. But it had been a particularly tranquil summer in the Keys.

The sun was tropical hot but if you know how to manage it you get to enjoy the lushness of your surroundings.

And if you are at the daily sunset celebration in Mallory Square you understand the sheer enjoyment that the citizens of the Conch Republic get from their beautiful island.

The verdant greenery and the ocean are soothing to the eye. And if you are in the shade with a cool drink it is like you don't have a care in the world. It was one of the few times since the divorce that I felt content.

Unfortunately, that situation was about to change... drastically!

At that exact moment, a huge tropical depression swept down off the Sahara.

In the global mixing bowl of the earth's weather these disturbances almost always presaged serious Atlantic storms.

This front featured the lowest barometric readings that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologists had ever observed on the GOES system.

The front moved past Dakar and made its way out into the South Atlantic sucking up enormous amounts of heat and moisture as it headed for the Cape Verde Islands.

By the time it had passed over Santiago at 2015 local time, it had already escalated into a major Atlantic storm.

The Cape Verde Islanders had their capitol of Praia buttoned up tight. During that part of the season they lived with those kind of storms. But even they were amazed by the force and power of the wind.

By 2300 the National Hurricane Center issued its first tropical storm warning. Then, around 0330, the storm got a name, "Susie". The fact that NOAA had almost run through the alphabet showed what kind of year it had been for Atlantic hurricanes.

As they attempted to get a fix on the storm's track the scientists at NOAA were also seeing a rare drop in the westerly steering winds that normally guided storms of this type toward Mexico.

Without those winds, the tendency of cyclonic storms to drift toward the earth's Poles was accelerating the track northward.

The initial GOES data indicated that the target might be anywhere from Cuba to North Carolina.

The weather had been exceptionally warm that year. So as Susie churned her way across that Atlantic it was going up the scale toward force 2.

Finally, around 05:30 one of NOAAs hurricane hunting P3 Orion's got a definite fix on the storm and its track.

The news was not good. Susie was now a force 4 killer and it was aimed due west.

Even worse, as most hurricanes approach land they tend to recurve back into the ocean. Susie, on the other hand, was on a dead straight course toward the Windwards Cuba and the Florida Keys.

The last time a force four hurricane scored a direct hit on the Keys was in 1935 and it killed over 400 people.

Present Day: 1300 Hours on a Tuesday Afternoon

The NOAA C-130 had plowed its way through the leading edge of the hurricane and was in the eye itself.

It was a beautiful day in the eye, completely surrounded by the hurricane wall. The pilot always thought that that was one of the oddest phenomena of a cyclonic storm.

The four Allison T56A 15 turboprops had practically come off the wing getting them there and the pilot was in no mood for the return trip. But he had found out what he needed to know.

Susie was indeed force 4. And she was pissed.

As she began to push up against the Windward Islands and the southeast cast of Cuba Susie finally began to recurve north. It was now packing 115 mile an hour winds, which downgraded it to a Category 3 on the Simpson scale.

But that still meant that the anything in its path would experience a storm surge of 25 feet. The highest point in Key West is 18 feet above sea level. So a lot of that place was going to be under water soon.

And the storm itself was now moving much faster than predicted.

Present Day: 1730 Hours on a Tuesday Evening

I couldn't sit in harbor in Key West. Not if I wanted to keep the boat. The only option was to get out to sea and outrun the thing, or try to ride out the storm surge in the open ocean as far north of there as I could get.

The worst effects were still predicted to be a day away. The closest and by far the most logical safe harbor was Marco Island.

That was about 90 nautical miles north on the rhumb line. Which was a nine to ten hour voyage on the engine.

Given the time I had available I was certain that the run up to Marco would get me into a protected harbor in plenty of time.

The eye of the hurricane was predicted to track closer to Cuba anyhow, so I knew that would give me some leeway.

I didn't want to lose my boat. Its tanks were full of diesel fuel. And Marco was the obvious choice. So I immediately cast off and set a course East of North on a bearing of 020 across the open ocean, direct for safety.

The rest of daylight hours were spent battening down the boat. I got all of the lockers and hatches secured, and made sure that everything that moved belowdecks was tied down.

The sky was an odd blue white with apple greenish overtones and high altitude wispy clouds. The ocean was nearly flat. It was the calm before the storm.

The Volvo diesel on my C&C is a very powerful and we were making closer to 10 knots on a glassy sea. That meant that with luck we would be pulling into Marco well before sunrise.

There have been far too many times in my life that I have looked back at thoughts like that with grim irony. This was one of them.

Present Day: 0230 Hours on a Wednesday Morning

We had motored to a point about 30 nautical miles south and west of Marco when the wind picked up out of the northeast at about 40 knots.

We had been averaging 9 knots up to that point but there was no way I could make progress against the huge waves that the increasing wind was whipping up.

So in order to keep headway I had to fall off the rhumb line and run closer to zero-four-five.

To the best of my reckoning I was headed for the area south of Cape Romano. I could probably lay up in the Dismal Islands off shore of Lake Okeechobee if things got worse.

I knew that I had outrun some of the hurricane's force but not enough of it. The waves were still killers.

The sun had set four and a half hours earlier and the waves were in the range of 10-12 feet breaking over the port bow. I told Buster that I wanted him in the cabin.

He told ME in his most eloquent dog fashion where I could stuff my good intentions. So I put a life jacket on my brave, but stubborn old buddy and we set forth to battle the storm together.

At that point I battened the cabin shut, effectively making the boat water proof no matter what hit it.

The boat was doing the roller coaster thing on the swells but still riding relatively sound when the first of the really big waves hit us square on the port quarter.

We were in relatively shallow water at that point. I knew that because those kind of rollers are an artifact of the depth.

We went up perhaps 15 feet and crashed down bow first burying the boat up to the forepeak. We popped back up just as we ran into the second roller. It was probably 20 feet high. We went up and down and this time the boat dove to the front of the cabin.

We must have been taking water because I could hear the bilge pumps start up. I had lashed both Buster and me to the helm stantion using lines to our life jackets.

That was a good thing because Buster sailed right past me when we dove and if I had not hooked him to something solid he would have gone over the side.

He shook himself and said, "Gott im Himmel!"

Did I mention he was mostly Rottweiler?

I was holding onto the wheel for dear life and I said to him, "You've got that right buddy!"

We continued that way for another hour. The waves were rollers, not breakers. So we would travel up to the crest and then plunge twenty or thirty feet into a trough.

The rain stung my face like bee-bees even through my insulated foul-weather suit and goggles.

I eventually lashed the wheel. At that point steering was out of the question anyhow.

But my trusty old Volvo engine was still giving us a enough headway to stay on the course we were following. The wind was blowing so hard that I had to shelter in the lee of the cabin.

The kind of pitching and rolling that we were doing might be barely survivable in a 40 foot powerboat. But it is not anything a sailing ship can withstand for long.

Shortly thereafter the entire mainmast came down. I could see that I was about to lose it when I heard the stays snap one after another like shots.

Then, the mother of all waves dropped us so far on the other side of the crest that the boat literally stood on its nose up to the cockpit, dragging the mast with it.

I knew for sure the next one was going to get us.

That was when I saw her. She was standing in middle of the cockpit, in her familiar pose, with a hand on one hip.

She was looking at me with the slightly amused smile that I remembered so well.

She was dressed in the outfit that she was wearing when she went off to jog. It was like she had been waiting for me, frozen in the moment from that fateful day.

Oddly, the boat had stopped pitching and the rain had ceased. It was perfectly calm. Maybe we were in the eye of the storm?

She walked slowly to me with adoration written on her perfect face. She wrapped her arms around my waist, just like always, and fastened those incredible emerald eyes on me.

There were tears running down her cheeks. She said with profound emotion, "I've been waiting fifty years for this moment my love, and now it has arrived."

Then she turned those luscious lips up to me and we kissed.

Indescribable peace descended on me. Our souls fused into a single entity and we were bonded as one spirit within an eternity of blinding light.

My last thought was, "So THIS is Heaven!!"

Epilog: Hotel Echo Three Five Four Niner

The hurricane had blown through the night before and as frequently happens with cyclonic storms the sky was now clear and bright.

Coast Guard Sikorsky S-61R HE-3549 out of United States Coast Guard Station Islamorada was looking for survivors.

They had gotten an SOS from several boats in that vicinity and they were doing a sweep of the area looking for survivors.

The Sea-King was at the limits of its search quadrant when the crew saw a large debris field along with a life raft. The raft was completely buttoned up.

The S-61 went into a standard hover at 25 feet and the rescue diver was deployed. He unzipped the outer shell of the raft and then started waving for an airlift.

The crew chief dropped a body harness from the rescue hoist.

The diver grabbed it. What followed was a perplexing amount of fiddling around in the raft.

There was even more puzzlement when the diver gave the thumbs up to hoist the occupant.

The occupant was a big dog. He was complaining loudly all the way up to the helicopter.

As they swung him aboard the crew chief noticed that he had one of those dry erase boards that scuba divers use attached to his collar.

The message said, "This is my dog Buster. Please take good care of him. No need to look for me. I'm with her now."