Open Water
Where the compass fails, a man trusts the faces that depend on him
On a grey afternoon in the seventh week of the march, the ahead of us stopped and shouted.
Beyond the last ridge of ice lay a of dark, moving water, the first we had seen in a year.
The sight of it undid something in the men, and several of them sat down and wept openly.
Open water meant the boats; the boats meant escape; escape meant, at last, a direction other than endurance.
And yet the same water that promised our lives was entirely capable of taking them within the hour.
The sea in those latitudes is not a road but a trap that occasionally resembles a road.
I gave the men an hour to rejoice, and then I made them look at the danger clearly.
We were three small boats, heavily , facing a passage that had drowned far better ships than ours.
The ice we cursed had also sheltered us, and now we were leaving its cruel protection behind.
I remember the exact moment the first boat slid from the floe and took the of the sea.
Until then we had been men lost upon the ice; now we were sailors again, and I was glad.
The change was not only in our situation but in our tense, in the very grammar of our hope.
For a year we had spoken of what had happened to us, in the helpless language of the past.
Now, for the first time, we spoke of what we would do, and the future returned to our mouths.
The wind rose against us almost at once, as though the sea resented our small .
Waves broke over the bows, and we bailed with frozen hands, and the boats stayed afloat.
Perry, the stowaway, laughed aloud as the struck him, and I did not order him to stop.
There is a joy that lives on the far side of terror, and we had crossed into it.
Two of the boats were roped together; the third, mine, ranged ahead to search the drifting ice for a path.
Every closed as others opened, and became a matter of the next ten minutes only.
I steered by , for the compass, this near the pole, wandered like a frightened animal.
Where the compass fails, a man must trust the sea, his memory, and the faces of those depending on him.
Night fell, and we could not land, and we rowed and bailed and prayed through the darkness.
Twice I thought we were lost, and twice the ice opened a path a moment before I despaired.
When the grey light returned, the low shape of an island stood upon the northern horizon.
The men saw it, and a sound went up from the boats that was half a cheer and half a sob.
It was land, real land, the first that any of us had touched in four hundred and ninety days.
I set our course toward it, and did not let them see how uncertain I was that we would arrive.