A to Z Challenge - "H"

H - as in "Hurricane"

One "devil wind" I never want to have to face - neither on land nor at sea - is a hurricane. After friends lost their beautiful sailboat (yes, a Valiant-40; the one I used in SIROCCO) during Hugo, I wrote a short story what it must have been like for the two, alone at sea, in a hurricane.

Hugo, the Atlantic’s Misbegotten Child

Excerpt from Moments of the Heart, A Book of Poems and Short Prose

*

Sometimes, I did wonder where and how I would die. This night, it seemed, held the answer, my murderess not the Atlantic but her misbegotten child Hugo, screeching its dirge over our pristine cutter, ripping our topsides bare. We were sailing miles offshore, likely beyond the saving reach of the Coast Guard.

A dripping figure swathed in stiff foul-weather gear slithered down the companionway, bringing with it the deluge of a following sea.

“Pouch! GPS! Water! Flares!” the bug-eyed monster screamed into my ear.

“Move, Move, Move!” the yellow apparition shouted and shook the diving goggles from his head. Wham! The boat’s death-shudder ripped away another strand of my badly frayed nerves.

Suddenly, it seemed that the noisy freight-train had pushed past us, leaving behind a sudden eerie calm. At least, we were still afloat. Oily water sloshed over my ankles and I shivered with cold. I could not move. My teeth hurt from uncontrolled chattering. There was a searing pain in my right temple. I watched Richard dig for something under the splintered chart table. The stove had wedged itself on top of it, its oven door hanging open like a village idiot’s uncomprehending mouth.

“Christ!” Richard said and laid his gloved hand against my face. “Did the stove hit you?”

“I don’t remember.” I began to dry-heave.

“Hang in there, baby,” he said softly. “Can you help me?”

Help him? How? I couldn’t even move. I wanted to lay my head on his chest and cry my heart out; for me, for him, for our surely doomed Artemesia, our Nevada Tumbleweed, that had helped us forget our desert origins and carried us over thousands of miles of benevolent seas; until this awful night.

“Are we a-b-b-b-abandoning?” My teeth still chattered violently.

“Not yet. We’ll wait,” the lover I had followed into his dream said gently while hurriedly stuffing things into plastic bags.

“Wait for what?” I whispered again.

“We can’t launch the life-raft until after,” Richard said and pulled a foul-weather jacket over my head, careful not to scrape against my blood-encrusted temple.

“Until after what? The water is getting higher in here. Why not now?”

The man I knew to be such a capable sailor didn’t look at me. He smiled with lips that formed a crooked apology. “We are in the eye of the hurricane.”

All of a sudden, I felt myself propelled forward. Pouch! GPS! Water! Flares! I grabbed the long flashlight from under the companionway stairs and practiced:
"Dit-Dit-Dit -- Da-Da-Da -- Dit-Dit-Dit."
Three Short, Three Long, Three Short. S.O.S.

* * *