Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (6 page)

“Every little girl’s father is her Santa Claus,” he said.

Amazed, she turned to her brother. “Did you hear that? Daddy is Santa Claus.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the toddler said. “I knew it all the time.” And from then on, Robert—not Bob or Bobby—Walbridge, having apparently waited to select what he judged was the right moment, spoke in complete sentences.

•  •  •  

Concealed by Robert’s two-year silence was a level of analysis most adults don’t imagine in two-year-olds. He spoke and the evidence was revealed. Both the analysis and the silence would continue, however, and lead to startling convictions as the boy grew.

His sister Lucille adored Robert and perhaps understood him as well as any adult. She saw, when he was four, that he had already selected a course for his life.

From time to time, a visitor or a relative would hand the boy a coin or two as a gift. Robert would take the change, slip it in his trousers pocket, and thank the person. “That’s for my truck,” he would tell the gift giver, who would assume that the boy had his eye on some special toy.

Lucille knew otherwise. Robert had decided that when he grew up, he would be a long-haul trucker. He was saving for his first rig. (The idea of that vocation probably didn’t pop into his imagination uninvited. Howard Walbridge loved to drive, and he would often say that in another life he would be a long-haul trucker and see the world.)

Three years later, in the old farmhouse whose shelves were stacked with books and world atlases and dictionaries and various games, chessboards began appearing on every flat surface, as if delivered by elves, and on the boards were chessmen positioned as if in the midst of battle. Robert, age seven, had discovered the game and had, by mail, begun competing with other players from around the country. Quiet as always, he made no announcements but, with a passion that would last a lifetime, immersed himself in the game, exercising and strengthening his analytical powers.

In four more years, in the winter of 1960—when hundreds of miles to the northeast the shipbuilding firm of Smith and Rhuland was building the tall ship
Bounty
—Robert Walbridge began haranguing Lucille to turn over an acre of land on which she had been raising corn. She was fifteen now, he ten, and she had been harvesting her corn and selling it to raise money for college. She saw no need for Robert to have that land. There were thirty-four other acres on the Walbridge farm.

Robert didn’t say why he wanted that particular land. Like most rural New Englanders, he was taciturn. It’s a cultural thing. But with Robert Walbridge, it was different. Unlike other children his age, he kept his own counsel, always.

Howard Walbridge was aware that his daughter was under siege. He may have decided to intervene because he wondered what his son was up to. In a family meeting, he noted that Lucille had been raising the same crop on that acre for some time. Now might be the moment to move her crop to another location so the nutrients were not drawn out of that acre, he suggested. The family listened, and although Lucille may have sighed, she relented.

Robert now had his acre, in front of the house and adjacent to the roadway—Vermont Route 12—that climbed past the driveway. He had thought ahead, had a plan, and that’s why he wanted this specific plot.

Montpelier had a public swimming pool, a quarter mile beyond the Walbridge farm. To get to the pool, every kid in town had to walk past Robert’s land. No one in the family knew what he planned to plant there. They knew which catalog the seeds came from but didn’t know what crop the seeds would become.

As summer progressed, the land turned green with vines supporting yellow blossoms. Small pumpkins followed, and by autumn, all those passing children had selected the pumpkin that would be theirs at Halloween. Robert’s profit from his one acre was over $1,000, ten weeks’ pay for many grown men in 1961.

The pool up the street was the closest water to the largely landlocked Walbridge family. The grandparents from Quincy had a summer home in Post Mills, Vermont, near Lake Fairlee, where the children had access to a canoe and rowboats. The home was within walking distance of the lake, which at the time had a good beach. Most weekends during the summer, the family drove the forty miles from Montpelier southeast to the lake, where the birthdays of Lucille and her younger sister, Delia, were celebrated.

The three Walbridge children got to see salt water from time to time as well.

Anna Walbridge’s parents, the Palmers, lived on Hilda Street in Quincy, about a mile from the beach, and the family visited there often. “It [the beach] was the family’s escape from the city,” said Lucille.

“Mom would tell us to smell the salt air, feel the slippery seaweed, examine the seashells. We had countless numbers of picnics down there. Dad also liked the sea but not as intensely as my mother. In the whole family, Mom seemed to have the most intense liking for the sea.” She also loved a poem by John Masefield:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

Like a mantra, someone in the family was always reciting the poem along the thin beach in a bay of the Atlantic Ocean.

On these visits to Quincy, Lucille Walbridge had, in addition to the beach, a favorite excursion. Although nearby Boston was filled with historical sites, Lucille’s compass always directed her gaze toward Old Ironsides, the USS
Constitution
, the historic tall ship docked near the heart of the city.

“It held a certain fascination [for me] that Paul Revere’s house didn’t have,” Lucille said.

So that’s where the family went, again and again, with Robert in tow.

One memorable summer vacation led not to Quincy but to a campground in Eastport, Maine, near the Canadian border. Robert was about ten, and the family had packed everything in and on the Volkswagen. When Howard struck up a conversation with a fellow, the man invited the whole family to stay in his cabin at the ocean’s edge. In fact, the cabin was built out over the water, and nearby, lobster boats floated on their moorings. The Walbridges ate lobster from the sea and slept over the lapping waves of the Atlantic. When they got home, young Robert wanted his own lobster boat.

The request was not granted, and this angered the boy, turning him against his mother. But the boy was going to be a long-haul trucker, anyway. That was his focus. When he entered high school, he concentrated on acquiring the money to fund that vision. He had jobs delivering two local newspapers. He worked at a ski area helping to pack the snow. He had an egg route, selling eggs from the family chickens. He raised three hundred turkeys at a time to sell for Thanksgiving. At night, he had a job at a local Howard Johnson restaurant.

“He had fudged a bit on his age,” Lucille said. He was thirteen, not the required sixteen, when he was hired. “He was rapidly promoted to opening and closing” the restaurant, she said. “His theory was [that] wherever you worked, you learned everything you could, every job in the place.”

By the time he was fifteen, Robert had a steady business buying, repairing, and selling cars, even though he wasn’t old enough to hold a driver’s license. At times, the long driveway at the farm would be cluttered with old cars. As a sideline, he sold scrap metal.

The price that the boy was willing to pay was academic. He thought school was a good place to catch up on his sleep. Like the son of a preacher, this son of teachers seemed to snub the family trade. He managed to earn B’s, but thought his plan would be advanced more quickly if he quit school altogether. He informed his parents.

Learning was considered fun in the old farmhouse north of Montpelier. What was the boy thinking? His mother was distraught, pleading with Robert to stay in school.

Robert Walbridge relented and completed high school. He had another reason to be angry with his mother. But the hostility did not interfere with the boy’s drive to excel. He earned the rank of Eagle in Boy Scouts, an achievement announced in the local newspaper. Among his badges was one for canoeing.

Nor were these years in Montpelier devoid of simple joy for the boy. In winter, he would climb the hill behind their home and ski down before school with his sisters. After supper, Anna Walbridge would read to her children. In the summer, during family picnics, one of the larger rocks on a hillside field served as the table. Everyone would sit and talk around a campfire. Anna quoted different poems, Howard quoted Shakespeare, Grandfather recited Longfellow, Milton, and Shelley, and Grandmother a little bit of everything.

Robert and his sisters helped set the table; washed dishes; dusted; fed the farm animals—they raised their own cows and chickens, as well as vegetables; mowed lawns; weeded their assigned three rows of peas each day during the summer; drove the tractor for haying; assisted in canning the vegetables—anything their parents were doing, the Walbridge children did.

In Boy Scouts, Robert learned to cook. One morning, Lucille started to cook eggs in the farmhouse kitchen. “He put his arm around me and gently shoved me aside and said, ‘Let me do that,’ ” Lucille recalled. “He took four eggs, two in each hand, and then simultaneously cracked all four of them and dumped the shells in the wastebasket in one smooth motion. Eggs went in the frying pan and shells went in the trash. He was thirteen. It was a few days after that that he got the job cooking at Howard Johnson’s.”

Nor, Walbridge told his sister, did he ever stop cooking. Aboard
Bounty
, he said, he baked eight loaves of bread every other day. He said he taught bread-baking to his crew members.

•  •  •  

The Vietnam War was raging when Robert graduated from Montpelier High School. That summer, he took a job as a cook at a prestigious golf resort on Vermont’s Lake Morey. He wanted a truck but he wasn’t twenty-one yet, and the Lake Morey Inn was a move up from Howard Johnson.

The resort provided its guests with small boats on which to sail the lake, where the pink summer evening clouds reflected majestically on the lake surface. Robert Walbridge borrowed a friend’s sailboat and sailed across the lake. He was hooked. The feel of the wind in the sails thrilled the teenager, who as a boy had seen lobster boats and lusted. But for a while, boats and sailing would have to wait.

He applied for conscientious objector status and took a defense-industry job at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, Connecticut. During his time at the aircraft company, he was always busy but found time to enroll in art and algebra courses at a community college. His trucking plans were on hold, and he felt that in taking courses, he also was wasting his time. He told his sister that he had earned A’s in both courses but that he had learned all that college could teach him.

On October 25, 1970, Walbridge turned twenty-one and was eligible to get a truck driver’s license. As soon as that was accomplished, he paid cash for a new semitractor—money from the egg routes and paper routes and car sales and restaurant jobs and even from the coins he’d accepted in his childhood “for my truck”—and hit the road as a long-haul trucker. He had planned for seventeen years for this moment and had made it happen.

It would be another decade or more before Robert Walbridge turned away from the highways and toward the sea. Just before he did that, he made another move he had apparently been contemplating for some time.

Few people outside the Walbridge family called him Robert. They seemed to feel that Bob or Bobby was a better name. This apparently grated on him, and in his midthirties he took action.

In some court the date is recorded when Robert Walbridge officially changed his name to Robin. He was like that, headstrong and determined. These qualities would have grave consequences as
Bounty
headed toward Hurricane Sandy.

Friday, October 26, 2012, was a good day at sea. The winds were moderate and the seas relatively calm as
Bounty
’s bluff bow plowed south across the Atlantic. Long Island had disappeared in her wake overnight. Now, dark blue water was in every direction, with only thin lines of foam atop small waves. The crew knew a change was coming, though. They had their weather fax, among other modern conveniences, to remind them that Sandy was headed north. So those sailors not on watch began tackling the jobs on Bosun Laura Groves’s list.

The C-Watch, Joshua Scornavacchi’s crew, finished its last tour at eight o’clock, ate breakfast, and now was available to help Groves. Safety ropes called jack lines had to be strung along the top—or weather—deck and on the wide-open sections of the tween deck just below. “Sailor strainer” netting had to be raised along the exposed sides of the weather deck. And Groves wanted to lower the unused royal yard to the deck to bring its weight down.

Jack lines are long lines or straps running along a sailing vessel’s deck from bow to stern. In rough seas they give crew members a place to hold on or on which to clip a tether attached to a harness to prevent them from falling and sliding overboard.

The sailor strainer is netting raised along the aft rails to catch crew members before they are washed overboard.

The royal yard is the spar that supports a royal sail, a small, light-air sail flown at the very top of a mast.

Scornavacchi, as nimble as any of the other crew members, was sent aloft first with Drew Salapatek to reef some of the sails, a normal tactic prior to foul weather and rising winds. Reefing is gathering up part of a sail into folds, thus reducing the area of sail exposed to the wind.

With the reefing accomplished, Scornavacchi alone was sent higher, to disconnect and lower the royal yard. Although
Bounty
’s stability letter—an official document stating under what circumstances a vessel is stable in the water—prohibited use of royal sails, she was rigged with the spars, and at times Walbridge ordered that canvas flown.