Close Calls and the Inevitable Fallibility of Memory
Our lives are punctuated by "what ifs."
In January, 1981, my father’s well-worn 40-foot cabin cruiser sank while returning from a grouper-fishing trip about 60 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. He’d bought her used, recently enough that he hadn’t yet chosen a name. Despite a pre-purchase inspection that declared her seaworthy, the bow stem had dry rotted and didn’t hold up. Realizing we weren’t going to make it to the marina, Dad saved our lives by running us aground on a sandbar a mile or so off Anna Maria Island’s Bean Point.
A Coast Guard diver, whose name I wish I knew, snagged me by a handful of clothing as I half stepped, half fell, into the 6-foot seas. A moment before, he'd asked me to step off the side rail where Dad and I had held on for hours as the Gulf slowly battered the boat into splinters.
What if?
What if the diver had missed in his grab for the hypothermic kid dropping feet-first into the sea? The water was rough and murky, and I doubt my body would have been found beneath the wind and waves and rain that day. Perhaps in a parallel universe that’s what occurred, and the rest of my life was erased in that moment. No high-school heartbreak, no college parties, no military deployments, no marriage, kids, houses, dogs, divorce, remarriage; no move to North Carolina. No writing these words.
The memory of that wreck at sea added a salty flavor to the rest of my life. As a young man, I looked back on it and supposed I was built to survive—that if that experience hadn't killed me, I must have some "greater purpose" to fulfill. Relatives and the religion I was raised with confirmed that bias. Feeling invincible is an attractive thing, especially as a healthy, strong, young man who’d already survived a shipwreck at sea.
Plant City, Florida. 1967: I was 18 months old the first time I nearly died. My tonsils swelled suddenly and all but prevented me from breathing. They had to come out, but my parents had trouble finding a doctor willing to operate on such a young patient. According to my mother, the delay nearly cost my life.
Fort Benning, Georgia, 1992: A soldier who stepped out of the C-130 aircraft a moment after I did had a complete parachute malfunction. He fell through the edge of my parachute canopy, deflating it, and his entire weight struck me in the back. Fortunately for us both, he passed through my risers without getting tangled and continued to fall. In the nick of time, a white puff of silk shot out from his tumbling body--his reserve parachute. My parachute reopened, and I slowed enough for a hard landing I could walk away from. This all happened in the span of about five seconds. That soldier remembered his training, and the Black Hats (Army Jump School instructors) would have been proud.
I landed, recovered my gear, and limped over to that soldier on my way off the drop zone. "You ok, man?" I asked. He didn’t answer me, he just stared at the horizon with white silk trailing behind him, his main parachute still inside the deployment bag on his back. Maybe he was wondering, "What if?”
Haleiwa, Hawaii. 2003: Overconfidence in my surfing skills nearly drowned me again. It was too late in the year for the likes of me, and I had no business out there surfing with the locals. The waves broke against the beach like falling buildings. Even in my late 30s, I held on to that feeling of invincibility. I caught a wave, planted my feet, and instead of keeping the tip of my board high, I let the nose go under. In an instant, I was tumbling in a cloud of bubbles, stunned by the impact, with no idea which way was up. I followed the ankle leash to the board and surfaced, only to get churned by another wave. I held on to the board and made it back to the beach. I kneeled there in the sand for a while, emptying my stomach, realizing I’d almost blacked out. Two days later, salt water was still draining from my sinuses.
FOB Shkin, Afghanistan. 2004: Early morning rocket attack from a Pakistani ridge.
Camp Victory, Iraq. 2008: A mortar round cratered the gravel parking area outside the gym I'd walked out of seconds before. A concrete T-wall saved me. If I'd stayed inside another five minutes, maybe I wouldn't have tinnitus today. But what if I ran into a friend outside and stopped to talk?
Once I slipped on a mountain trail precariously close to a ridgeline.
I've been hit by a car twice while biking.
We’re all living (so far, so good) through a global pandemic.
What if, what if, what if?
If we live long enough, we all end up with stories like these. But no near-death event affected me in quite the way the boat wreck did. Maybe this is because a 14-year-old is so impressionable. Maybe it's because I'd met my father for the first time only the summer before and wasn’t yet over being in awe of him—Vietnam veteran, law enforcement officer, commercial fisherman, mechanic. He was a strong, capable, competent, confident man with an endearingly simple and wholesome sense of humor. He seemed impervious to heat, cold, or any other type of discomfort. He was stoic, though usually in good spirits.
I wanted to show my newfound Dad that he could be proud of me. I wanted my recently discovered brothers to see me in a positive light as well. The sun was rising over the wide mouth of the Manatee River as we departed the Regatta Point Marina in Palmetto, Florida, on January 3rd. All three of us boys would rather have been in bed. It was cold, and we sheltered in the cabin to stay out of the wind. None of us complained. We had bologna sandwiches and home-baked cookies, all the Pepsi cola we could drink, and we were with our father.
I recently finished Mikhail Iossel's wonderful book, Love Like Water, Love Like Fire. In the last section, Iossel tells of his grandmother’s family acting on their plan to leave the Soviet Union and emigrate to the United States. They encountered a torrential downpour on the road that delayed their progress and caused them to miss the ship that would have taken them to America by a half-hour.
They missed the damned boat.
Years later, Iossel’s parents met in a Leningrad neighborhood far from where either of them came from, fell in love, married, and eventually brought Mikhail into the world.
“Just one measly half hour!” he writes. “My head was swimming pleasantly at the incomprehensible thought of how unimaginably close to eternal nonexistence, in the form of never being born, I had come some six decades earlier, and many hundreds of kilometers from Leningrad. I looked around me, just to make sure my world was real. It was.”
Iossel's story prompted my thoughts, all the what if's, and reminded me of the inevitable fallibility of memory. I have about 2,000 words, handwritten on a legal pad, of what I recall of the boat wreck that cold January day and night. But what if I don't remember the story accurately? If I manage to have it published, I expect one of my brothers to correct me on how one thing or another went down. Of course, their memories are unlikely to be more accurate than mine. We lost Dad in the ‘90s and my stepmother–their mother, a few years ago, so only the three of us remain to remember. If none of us recall it accurately, has reality been altered?
Of course not. That’s absurd. But consider Schrödinger and Heisenberg’s “interference” principle in which quantum matter weirdly changes only when observed, we alter our memories each time we access them. Over many years, we shape our memories into versions that better suit us. I find personal evidence of this in old journals where I read accounts of events, in my own handwriting, that sometimes turn out to be wildly divergent from my memories. I’ve learned to trust what I wrote over what I remember. It’s too bad I hadn’t yet picked up the writing habit by age 14. I’ll have to rely on my memory to tell the story.