The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (31 page)

John Spillane gets a job as a New York City fireman, in addition to his PJ status. One night he's half awakened by the station alarm, and for some reason the room lights don't go on. He's terrified. He finds himself by the exit pole thinking, "It's okay, you've been through this before, just keep your head." All he knows is that it's dark, there's not much time, and he's got to go downward—exactly the same situation as in the helicopter. By the time he finally understands where he is, he's put on all his fire-fighting clothes. He's fully cocked and ready to go.

The storm hasn't yet finished with people, though; hasn't stopped reverberating through people's lives. Eighteen months after the ditchings, a nor'easter roars up the coast that, even before it's fully formed, meteorologists are referring to as the "Mother of All Storms." It has a distinct eye, just like a hurricane, and a desperately low central barometric pressure. One ship in its path watches wave heights jump from three feet to twenty feet
in less than two hours.
The storm drops fifty inches of snow on the mountains of North Carolina and sets all-time barometric records from Delaware to Boston. Winds hit no miles an hour in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Coast Guard rescues 235 people off boats during the first two days alone. Wave heights surpass sixty feet off much of the East Coast and creep up toward one hundred feet off Nova Scotia. Data buoys record significant wave heights—the average of the top third—only a few feet lower than in the storm that sank the
Andrea Gail.
By the narrowest of margins the "Halloween Gale," as that storm has come to be known, retains the record for most powerful nor'easter of the century.

Caught in the worst of this is the 584-foot
Gold Bond Conveyor,
the freighter that, two years earlier, had relayed the
Satori's
mayday to Boston. The
Gold Bond Conveyor
has a regular run between Halifax and Tampa carrying gypsum ore, and on March 14th, about a hundred miles southeast of where Billy Tyne went down, she runs into the Mother of All Storms. She's the only vessel of any kind to encounter both storms at their height, and they happen to be two of the most powerful nor'easters of the century. One could say the vessel was marked. That evening the captain radios Halifax that waves are breaking over their upper decks, and shortly after midnight he calls again to say that they're abandoning ship. The seas are a hundred feet and the snow is driving down sideways in the dark. Thirty-three men go over the side and are never seen again.

But it's still not over; the Halloween Gale has one last shoulder to tap. Adam Randall has been working steadily on the
Mary T,
but in February, Albert Johnston hauls her out for repairs and Randall has to find another job. He finds one on the
Terri Lei,
a tuna longliner out of Georgetown, South Carolina. The
Terri Lei
is a big, heavily built boat with a highly experienced crew, and she's due to go out at the end of March. Chris Hansen, Randall's girlfriend, drives him to Logan Airport for the flight south, but all the planes are grounded because of the blizzard—the Mother of All Storms. He gets a flight out the next day, but when he talks with Chris Hansen on the phone from South Carolina, she tells him she's worried about him. Are you okay? There's a funny sound in your voice, she says.

Yeah, I'm fine, he says. I don't really want to go on this trip. It'll be good, though—maybe I'll make some money.

The night before leaving, the crew of the
Terri Lei
go to a local bar and get into a fight with the crew of another boat. Several men wind up in the hospital, but the next day, bruised and sore, the crew of the
Terri Lei
cut their lines and head out to sea. They're going to work the deep waters just off the continental shelf, due east of Charleston. It's spring, the fish are working their way up the Gulf Stream, and with a little luck they'll make their trip in ten or twelve sets. On the night of April 6th they finish setting their gear and then Randall calls Chris Hansen on the ship-to-shore radio. They talk for over half an hour—ship to shore isn't cheap, Randall's phone bill is regularly five hundred dollars—and he tells Chris that they'd had some bad weather but it's passed and all their gear is in the water. He says he'll call her soon.

Randall's a tough one to categorize. He's an expert fisherman and marine welder but has also, at various times, considered hairdressing or nursing as careers. He has a tattoo of a clipper ship on one arm, an anchor on the other, and a scar on his hand where he once stitched himself up with a needle and thread. He has the sort of long blond hair that one associates with English rock stars, but he also has the muscled build of a man who works hard. ("You can hit him with a hammer and he won't bruise," Chris Hansen says.) Randall says that at times he can feel ghosts swirling around the boat, the ghosts of men who died at sea. They're not at peace. They want back in.

The next morning the crew of the
Terri Lei
start hauling their gear in choppy seas and gusty winds. They're 135 miles offshore and there are a lot of boats in the area, including a freighter en route from South America to Delaware. At 8:45 AM the Charleston Coast Guard pick up an EPIRB distress signal, and they immediately send out two aircraft and a cutter to investigate. It might be a false alarm—the weather is moderate and no ships have reported trouble—but they have to respond anyway. They home in on the radio signal and immediately spot the EPIRB amidst a scattering of deck gear. A short distance away floats a life raft with the canopy up and
Terri Lei
stencilled on one side.

The boat herself has vanished and no one signals from the raft, so a swimmer drops into the water to investigate. He strokes over and hauls himself up on one of the grab lines. The raft is empty. No one got off the
Terri Lei
alive.

AFTERWORD

"I'M SORRY
the way I was when I first met you," Ricky Shatford told me in a Gloucester bar not long ago. The book had been out for about three months, and the Shatford family—and Gloucester— had been rocked by a wave of publicity. Summer people were visiting Cape Pond Ice, tourists were booking rooms at the Crow's Nest, the Shatfords were being stopped in the street. "You were writing about my baby brother and I couldn't deal with it," Ricky went on. "I told people I was going to kill you."

The first time I'd ever gone into the Crow's Nest, it had taken me half an hour to work up the nerve. It wasn't the bar—I'd been in rough bars before—it was what I was going in there for. I was going in there to ask a woman about the death of her son. I wasn't a fisherman, I wasn't from Gloucester, and I wasn't a journalist, at least by my own definition of the word. I was just a guy with a pen and paper and an idea for a book. I slid a steno pad under my belt against the small of my back, where it was hidden by my jacket. I put a tape recorder and a smaller notebook in my jeans pocket in case I needed them. Then I took a long breath and I got out of the car and walked across the street.

The front door was heavier than I expected, the room was darker, and there were a dozen men clutching beers in the indoor gloom. Every single one turned and looked at me when I walked in. I ignored their looks and walked across the room and sat down at the bar. Ethel came over, and after ordering a beer I told her that I was writing about dangerous jobs, particularly fishing, and that I wanted to talk to her. "I know you lost your son a couple of years ago," I said. "I was living in Gloucester at the time, and I remember the storm. It must have been very hard for you. I can't imagine how hard that must have been."

What I didn't know was that there was a court case going on, and that Ethel's first thought was that I was working undercover for Bob Brown's insurance company. She wasn't suing him, but whenever a boat goes down, there are always people asking questions, looking for an angle. Within weeks of the sinking, in fact, a couple of lawyers had slid into the Nest, trying to interest her in a lawsuit. They were so insistent that some of the boys at the bar felt compelled to help them leave.

Ethel was friendly with me, but guarded. She talked about watching the local news, waiting for word of the
Andrea Gail.
She talked about the memorial service, and how people had stuck by her after the tragedy. She bought me a beer, and gave me the names of other fishermen who might be able to help out. And then I walked back out of the bar. It was a warm day in early spring, snow lingering in the northern exposures and a rich, loamy smell that mixed with salt air off the ocean. Reefer rigs crawled down Main Street and pickup trucks pulled in and out of Rose's parking lot, tires spraying gravel. The men in the trucks didn't smile as they drove.

This isn't exactly a town that begs to be written about,
I remember thinking.
These aren't men who really want to be asked about their lives.

And to an extent, I was right. The guys in those pick-up trucks—and on barstools at the Crow's Nest, and walking down Main Street in their deck boots and fishing gear—had no particular reason to talk to me. Men in working towns can nurture a harsh kind of pragmatism that weeds out sentimental acts, such as talking to writers, and it's generally hard to coax them out of that. If I were a Gloucester native, or had worked as a fisherman, perhaps it would have been different.

But I wasn't, and the only thing I had going in my favor—

other than the fact that Ethel seemed to like me, which counted for more than I realized—was that I worked as a freelance climber for tree companies. I was living on Cape Cod, but did occasional jobs in Boston, and often I'd combine trips into the city with research jaunts up to Gloucester. I'd walk into the Crow's Nest at the end of the day, tired and dirty from a day of climbing, and settle onto a stool at the bar. "Look, I don't know a thing about fishing," I'd say. "So if you don't tell me about it, I'm going to get it all wrong."

That seemed to work; gradually, the fishermen started to talk. They told me about their grandfathers dory-fishing for cod on the Grand Banks. They told me about winter gales on Georges. They told me about getting thrown out of their house by their girlfriend for one reason or another, usually good ones. And they told me about the sea. "She's a beautiful lady," one guy said, jerking his thumb oceanward out the bar door, "but she'll kill ya without a second thought."

Usually the only thing I had in front of me during these conversations was a beer, though occasionally, if the conversation looked promising enough, and I'd established a good rapport with the guy, I'd pull the steno pad out from behind my jacket. Otherwise, I'd periodically excuse myself the men's room, which—given the evening's activities—was usually necessary anyway. There I'd scribble down a few stories and then I'd go back out into the bar. When I'd really become friendly with someone, such as Chris Cotter, I'd ask if I could interview them with a tape recorder, out of the bar, someplace where we could talk without being interrupted. Usually they said yes. One guy said yes, but tried to give me the slip while I was following him in my car through town. I finally tracked him down at the Green Tavern, and we ended up talking for three hours. And a few people—like Ricky Shatford—would have nothing to do with me at all.

Ricky was angry about his brother's death, he told me later, and I was something to focus all that on. He didn't like me writing about his family, and he didn't like me writing about something I couldn't know for sure. The
Andrea Gail
had been lost without a trace. Why not just let it lie there?

Unfortunately, Ricky was articulating exactly my own insecurities about the project. Every time I ventured into the Crow's Nest, I felt like an intruder, and I'd had several excruciating dreams about the loss of the
Andrea Gail.
In one, I dreamed I'd drilled tiny holes in her hull before her last trip to see if she'd still float; and in another I dreamed I was in the wheelhouse with Billy Tyne as she went down. I didn't have to die, though, because I was a journalist, and I just looked guiltily on as we plunged into the trough of another enormous wave.
My God, you never really stopped to think how terrifying this must have been for those guys,
I remember thinking.
Those were six real men out there, not just names out of a newspaper. Don't ever forget that.

The one encouraging dream I had was in 1994, when I wrote a magazine article about the
Andrea Gail.
Most people in Gloucester liked the article, but there were the inevitable dissenting voices, and they traumatized me for months. The idea that you could do as good and thorough a job as possible and still leave people angry at you, shook some long-held illusion about journalism. In the dream I was walking along a deserted beach, and a figure strode towards me down the dunes. It was Bobby Shatford, and he walked up to me and stuck his hand. "So,
you're
Sebastian Junger," he said. "I've been wanting to meet you. I liked your article."

"Thanks, Bobby," I said. "That means a lot, coming from you."

We'd never loosened our grip, and we just stood there, holding hands. Down the beach, the rest of the Shatford family was having a cook-out. I was headed there, but Bobby couldn't come. He had to stay away.

When I finally talked to Ricky, it seemed as close as I was going to get to shaking Bobby Shatford's hand. Ricky was a fisherman, he was Bobby's older brother, and he'd wanted to kill me. Those are tough hurdles to clear. One summer night in a Gloucester bar, though, we got to talking, and he told me what it was like to lose his younger brother. To me, Ricky had always been the scary older brother who careened around town looking for trouble; now here he was, telling me about the most painful thing in his life. It wasn't an easy thing to listen to.

"When we were kids we were a real close family," says Ricky. "Me and Bobby and Rusty slept in the same bed together. Bobby worked down at the wharf, Bob Brown built the
Miss Penny
and Looper was running it and I remember one time we were down at Rosie's doing the last-minute preparations and on the way out I yelled to Bobby on the State Fish Pier,
HEY BRO!
That trip we hit one of the first storms I ever encountered in my life, it was '83 and we were crazy, it was December on the southeast part of Georges and the water was still warm, the
Rush
was right next to us and they lost every window they had. We gave them our loran to get back home."