Distant Ship's Smoke

My great uncle Jack never told me much in the way of details about his near drowning when I saw him in the summer of '21. I've researched the events leading up to and culminating with his drowning in our timeline, though, so I never really pressed him for details of what it must have been like to survive, when many on the ship hadn't.

The fog. The party like atmosphere before the crash. The near silence as the ship began to tilt. Later, the shouts and screams from the water. The panic on the ship and in the water as lifeboats filled with women and children tipped over while being lowered from the ship. The cold salty water and the waves. The explosion of the still pressurized ship's boiler, which had kept the lights on while the ship was sinking and had now covered the ocean surrounding the wreck with oil. As minutes passed, the gradual numbing of limbs in the water, despite the mild August air temperature. The survivors clinging to ship's wreckage in hopes of being rescued eventually. The cries of a little girl who had been hooked onto a piece of wreckage by her clothing so that she wouldn't drown like her mother and siblings had. These are just the believable and guessable pieces of information I've gathered over the years. I've mostly ignored the dramatic accounts of the yellow journalists.

I didn't really want to know more. I didn't want to know about the seventeen mile swim/paddle to shore, which wouldn't even have been possible to make without Jack's emulation of Paul Boyton. I didn't want to know the details of his parting from his mother and sister, how he told them that in order for him to have a chance to live he would have to appear to the world to have died in the wreck. Those last two weeks they spent together on vacation before the ship sailed, yes. More details about those two weeks together would have been nice to know, but I didn't want to know all about the planning for his departure from their lives.

Grandma Amy told me about Jack's death once. I don't think the story she told me was what actually happened, though. Probably, it was the only way she could go on living, was to tell herself that it had happened that way. Fifty some years later, she still cried when talking about it to me. I think her emotional life froze for her in 1921 and never thawed. I never met her mother Elizabeth, but I suspect that was likely true for her as well. The night time family fights heard through the bedroom wall and the blaming for Jack's death on her. It was all of it too painful to think about more than occasionally and in passing. When does one know enough of the details of what happened on a night nearly a hundred years ago? At age seven? No. At age fifty? No. But now, I don't need to know more details from Jack about what that night was like when I travel back in time to 1921. Now, I know enough.

I'm going to listen to some Pink Floyd before bedtime, and contemplate "a distant ship's smoke on the horizon." Exhaustedly contemplate that ship’s smoke at dawn while sitting on a seventeen mile distant shoreline. I’ll just sit here for a bit on the beach, imagining the echo through space and time of that distant ship’s smoke. I’ll imagine I’m Jack sitting on the beach here waiting for Jackson to find him and refill his canteen. I'll imagine, while I sit here that I can see the rescue ship out there on the horizon, slowly heading for harbor with the survivors on board. Another ship will still be out there searching for bodies, but I won't think about that. Sometimes, the only "what ifs" one can ask grandma about are the ones which are too painful for her to hear. I’m sure she’d asked herself the same ones many a sleepless night, though. She's comfortably numb now, don't poke her.