Ghosts of the Pacific (12 page)

The other thought was that all of these machines were
designed to kill. They weren't
only
designed to kill, but that
was a big part of what they could do. Why was I so excited
about things that were designed to kill? That didn't feel
right. What made them any different from the bad shrimp
trawlers or the pollution that was killing the sea? All of
these things were bad. And yet, I liked the machines. And
that confused me.

I remembered Ziegfried once telling me that there was a
world of difference between weapons in the hands of people
like Hitler, and weapons in the hands of people fighting
against him. “If we hadn't stopped Hitler, Al,” he had said,
“we'd all be living in a tyranny. All the Jews of the world
would be dead, so would millions of other people Hitler
didn't like. And in the Pacific, if we hadn't stopped the Japanese Emperor, we'd all be servants of an autocracy. Freedom's
a precious thing, Al. Now, Japan and Germany are two of the
richest countries in the world, and they're free, like us. But
we had to fight them back then, Al, when they were ruled by
dictators. And we had to use weapons. We had no choice.”

I wished I had pointed out that if there were no weapons
in the first place, Hitler and the Emperor would never have
become so powerful. But it only occurred to me just now.
On the other hand, if we didn't have mechanical machines,
I wouldn't have my sub. As I rested my head on my knees
and stared across the lagoon at the sun sparkling on the tiny
waves, I sighed. I missed Ziegfried.

I WOKE FROM THE
deepest sleep. For a moment I didn't
know where we were. Were we in the Arctic? I sure hoped
not. No, we couldn't be. I remembered the
Saratoga
. How
long had we slept? I raised my head. Seaweed was sitting on
his spot like a statue. Where was Hollie? I had the vague
feeling I had lost him. Had I lost him? I looked under my
cot. No, he was there, chewing his rope. Thank heavens. I
lay back down. Then I remembered. We were outside of
Bikini Lagoon. We walked on the beach for hours. I had got
sunburnt. Hollie had too, or maybe it was sunstroke. Anyway, we had crawled into the sub, submerged a hundred
feet off the beach, dropped into bed and fell asleep. That
was fourteen hours ago. It was time to get up. It was time to
sail to Saipan.

I felt like an old man getting up and putting on the kettle.
Seaweed shook out his feathers. That was his way of stretching. I stretched too. Then Hollie did, though he didn't need
to. He was already awake and ready to go. I looked up at my
chin-up bar. Was my arm strong enough yet? I climbed up
and hung from the bar. That felt good. I did three chin-ups
before my arm felt too sore to continue. That wasn't too
bad. It was getting better.

After breakfast I had my first small successful meditation,
though it was probably only because I was still too sleepy to
think about anything yet. Then we surfaced to greet the brilliant sunshine.

But it wasn't there.

I felt the toss of waves even before I opened the hatch.
When I opened it the wind howled above me and rain
lashed against my face. Seaweed started up the ladder then
went back down. I turned to look at the beach and saw the
coconut trees bending in the wind. I couldn't believe this
was the same place where we had walked on the beach hours
before without the merest breath of wind. Was this the start
of a typhoon? If it were, I wanted to sail out of it. I didn't feel
like fighting with a typhoon. It would last for days. Nor did
I want to keep the crew cooped up the way we were in the
Arctic. Since the wind was coming from the east, I turned
south and cranked up the engine. We would ride the surface
as long as we could, then go under.

We sailed twenty hours straight. Half that time we spent
on the surface and half beneath. I rode the bike for a few
hours, Hollie ran on the treadmill and Seaweed did a little
too. I groomed Hollie's fur, attempted to groom Seaweed's
feathers, meditated a little, spent some time reading, tried
to reach Ziegfried and sent a message to Angel and hoped
she received it. After twenty hours I went back to sleep.

This time I set the alarm for four hours. I wanted to stay
ahead of the storm, or rather, south of it, because the sky
was darkest to the north. The winds were blowing steadily
from the east. I believed we were escaping the worst of it by
continuing south. But who knew what a typhoon would do?

The second day was rough, though not as rough as it
might have been. There was one remarkable difference between a storm here and a storm anywhere else: here it was
warm, both the water and wind. It made everything feel a lot
less dangerous. But that was deceiving. It didn't feel threatening to fall overboard because you could float in the water
all day if you had to, especially if you had something to hold
on to. At least you wouldn't die of exposure right away. But
you would still die, eventually, in the vastness.

Since we were sailing due south I figured we were cutting
through the Ralik Chain, a string of seamounts and atolls
on the western border of the Marshall Islands. But with the
tossing and pitching of the storm, and poor visibility, I wasn't
actually certain where we were. All I knew for sure was that
we were sailing south.

We came close to an island once. Sonar told me to steer
west of it or we'd smash into the reef. I wondered: were we on
the north side of Namorik Atoll, or Pingelap? Was it somewhere else? I really didn't know. I was confused because the
wind had changed, but it was hours before I realized it had
happened. Now it was blowing from the north. The storm
was following us. Rats. We couldn't keep running from it; it
would just chase us all around the Pacific. I decided to head
northwest, directly towards Saipan. I didn't want to miss the
circus. But first, I needed to sleep.

We followed the rising seafloor upwards along a seamount towards a small atoll shaped like a horseshoe, though
I didn't know which one it was. If we could sail into the
lagoon, not only would we have shelter from the storm, we
might get out for a walk on the beach.

The atoll was very small, just a couple of miles wide. I
didn't recognize it from my charts. It must have been outside of the Marshall Islands. On the west side I found a
shallow channel that we could only enter in high tide. So,
we waited. Once we entered the lagoon I scouted around
before settling. If there were people here we'd sail out
before the tide turned. But there weren't. It was uninhabited. I was tempted to call it
Ziegfried Lagoon
.

I tossed the anchor in fifteen feet on the west side of the
lagoon, a hundred feet from the beach. I inflated the dinghy,
rowed to shore with Hollie, climbed out and tied the dinghy
to a tree. Seaweed stayed inside the sub. It was storming
pretty hard but there was a line of coconut trees on the beach
and they led to a small jungle on a small rise on the north
side.

Hollie was not the least bit put off by the storm, even
though it blew his fur backwards and made it difficult for
him to trot in a straight line—not that he was in the habit
of trotting in a straight line. He stayed close to me and I
stayed close to the trees. I was amazed at how much they
bent in the wind, as if they were made of rubber.

We went up the rise, which was maybe seventy-five feet
at its highest point. A tsunami would roll over this island as
if it weren't even here. But there was a tiny area of jungle. It
was only a quarter of a mile long and a few hundred feet
wide, but it was a jungle. I had never actually seen a real one
before.

The trees were close together and there were bushes and
plants with big fat leaves everywhere. I didn't know if there
were any snakes here, or spiders or dangerous animals. Probably not. We did see a large crab, and it was very aggressive.
When Hollie sniffed at it, it lunged at him and he jumped
back. That's when I picked him up. The plants were too
thick and tall for him to jump over anyway, and I didn't
want to lose sight of him. But even I had trouble getting
through the bushes.

The jungle was growing out of rocky ground, very different from the sandy beaches that surrounded most of these
atolls. Probably the rock was the remains of an old volcano.
For such a tiny jungle, it was surprisingly difficult to get
through. At one point I thought I had discovered a cave, but
it was just an overhanging rock. It made a good shelter from
the storm. Everything was moving in the wind. I had to tell
myself to ignore the leaves and bushes because it looked so
much like there were creatures running through them. And
then, I made a discovery.

First, my foot struck what I thought was a heavy rock but
turned out to be a chunk of metal. It was badly rusted but
I could tell it was part of a machine, possibly an engine.
Then, I found a cable. It had been here for a very long time.
Next, I found part of a sheet of metal. And then, against the
rock above thick bushes, I saw a propeller. My heart raced
with excitement. It was an airplane.

It was a twin-engine plane. Amelia Earhart flew a twin-engine plane. I was so excited my heart was thumping in my
chest. But the plane was difficult to reach, especially with
Hollie in my arms and the storm blowing everything
around. I decided to return to the sub, leave Hollie there and
come back with the camera.

It grew darker as we returned to the sub. I hoped it
wouldn't rain before I could take some photos. Hollie met
up with another crab on the way back. This time he was determined to stare it down, but the crab got too close and
grabbed hold of his fur with its pincers. The next thing I saw
was the crab flying through the air. It was the most ferocious
thing I had ever seen Hollie do, next to fighting off the
snake. Seaweed would have ripped the crab apart.

Hollie was content to join Seaweed in the sub, especially
as he brought a new stick in with him. I grabbed the camera and a plastic rain poncho that fit in my pocket, climbed
out and shut the hatch behind me. I paddled over to the
beach, tied up the dinghy and took off towards the jungle.
It struck me: some years ago—day or night—the pilot of
that plane had crashed here. He, or she, must have run out
of gas. Why else would they have tried to land in a place
with nowhere to land? Perhaps they had tried to land in the
lagoon. It would be hard to see at night, impossible in fact,
unless it was a clear night and there were stars and the
moon. Then the atoll would look like a black horseshoe on
a dark sea. Was I the first one to find the plane? Maybe. I
was excited.

The little jungle swallowed me up. I learned that you can't
hurry through a jungle; it is too thick. You have to climb
over, around and under things. Hopefully there were no
dangerous snakes. I couldn't see them if there were. There
was nothing for them to eat here anyway, except crabs. I
wondered what the crabs ate.

When I reached the rock face where the plane was, I
started taking pictures right away. With the zoom lens I
could see the frame of the cockpit. I had to get over there.

But it wasn't easy, especially with my sore arm. What a
nuisance! I climbed up the rock, holding on to leaves and
plant stems, but couldn't see where my feet were landing,
as the plants were too thick. It was slippery too. If I fell, I
probably would have landed in bushes, but many of them
had sharp thorns. I wondered if there were dangerous ants
here, as in the movies. I hadn't seen a single ant yet.

The plane was very beaten up. It must have hit the rock
pretty hard. Perhaps it had exploded on impact. Plants
grew tightly around it and right through the middle of it. I
climbed on top. It was broken in two. I didn't see any markings anywhere as everything was so badly rusted. I couldn't
even tell if it was a military or civilian plane. There probably
wasn't a big difference back in the 1930s. I climbed forward
towards the cockpit and saw that the glass was missing from
the windows. I looked for remains of the pilot but there was
nothing. The jungle was slowly eating the plane; perhaps
something else had eaten the pilot. Then, I saw a boot. It was
squashed into one corner. I pulled off a metal strip sticking
up and stuck it into the corner and pulled the boot out. It
was a small leather boot, all crumpled up. The pilot hadn't
been very big. I opened up the boot and turned it upside
down. Out fell dirt and a small pile of bones. They were the
bones of a foot. I looked for the other boot but it wasn't
there.

I took more photos from inside the plane and out. While
I was aiming the camera, a heavy drop of rain splashed on
my face. Shoot! It was time to go. I focused on the pilot's
seat one last time and noticed something underneath it. I
climbed in again, stuck my hand under the seat and pulled
out a small leather bag with a strap. Black marks on the
front of the bag looked like Japanese letters. I opened it and
found badly faded maps and papers. The writing was in
Japanese. It probably wasn't Amelia Earhart's plane. Too
bad. Oh well, it was still a pretty cool discovery. It started to
rain. I wrapped the camera and bag in the plastic poncho
and climbed out of the plane. I left the boot behind.