In this week’s installment of our Human Nature series, two storytellers find resilience on the high seas.
Part 1: Tragedy strikes suddenly while Lindsay Cooper is in the field studying right whales.
Lindsay Cooper is an operations professional who started out as a whale biologist. She spent years following endangered North Atlantic right whales up and down the U.S. east coast, then went on to administer a prestigious marine conservation fellowship program. Now she takes her three kids to visit the Smithsonian’s Sant Ocean Hall in DC, where they can view one of her photographs in the right whale exhibit. She will always have a deep passion for conservation science and science outreach. Lindsay loves working behind the scenes to help Story Collider manage day-to-day operations. Besides hanging out with her kids, Lindsay takes time to volunteer for the local swim team and elementary school PTA. She loves coffee, pajamas, and dancing, and once a year you can find her performing with the famous Olney, MD Hip Hop Mamas.
Part 2: Rachel Cassandra dreams of a life on the sea, but her captain makes unwelcome advances.
Rachel Cassandra is a journalist and essayist, working in print and radio. She lives with her snake, Squeeze, in Oakland, California. You can find her work at RachelCassandra.net. This story was adapted from a piece that Rachel wrote for Narratively, here.
Story Transcripts
Story 1: Lindsay Cooper
I climb into the smallest airplane I have ever seen. Three scientists and a pilot that I can just reach up and touch the shoulder of. I’m 22 and I am so excited. I can’t believe I get to do this job. I have wanted to study whales since I can remember, since I recorded PBS nature shows on blank VHS tapes, and now I actually get to do it.
And I've done my research. I know that North Atlantic right whales are critically endangered. That they come to the Florida and Georgia coast to have babies and that they're vulnerable to things like fishing lines and ship strikes. I’m here to participate in the early warning system, a network of organizations of scientists and airplanes that fly this part of the coastline in order to warn ships that whales are in the area to help them avoid collision and also to take photographs to send to the scientific database.
Lindsay and her colleague Terri, pictured here with the twin engine Cessna Skymaster, don their flight suits and life jackets that became required in 2004 in order to participate in the Early Warning System surveys for North Atlantic Right Whales.
But what I did not know or understand is what it actually takes to physically fly in these very small, hot airplanes. I had never even heard of a Cessna Skymaster before I arrived here, and I did not know that I would get really motion sick in these very hot airplanes.
But it’s so worth it. It’s so worth it to buy a three-month supply of Dramamine and get in that plane and fly a mere 500 feet above the water and see baby right whale calves nursing with their moms in the warm safe waters of the coast of Florida.
Lindsay and her colleague looking out the windows for right whales from the twin engine Cessna Skymaster.
About six weeks or so after we've been flying, we return to our field house one day, our field station base for the season and my supervisor meets us there. She says, “So I have to let you guys know something that’s going on right now. One of the other survey planes is missing.”
Missing. I don't even understand. What does that even mean?
And she says, “Well, actually, the last we heard from them they radioed in right off the coast, a latitude line right off of our beach house. They had actually found whales and radioed the men their location but that’s the last anyone has heard from them.”
“Okay. So what’s happening now?”
And she says, “Well, the coast guard is looking. I’m leaving messages on Emily, the lead observer’s voice mail in case she happens to get service.”
She goes on to say it’s very possible that they had to land at Cumberland Island. They have a really experienced pilot and he would know that, if they had engine trouble, they could land there, but they may not have cellphone service. She also says it’s very possible that they’ve had to make an emergency landing in the water and they're in a lifeboat or their lifejackets.
I just immediately start to think about the observers, the ones that sit in the exact same seats that I had just been sitting in, like Emily. And I wonder if her family is calling her and leaving her messages also. And I think about Jackie who I know was an incredible teammate and just from years of working with my colleagues and that she actually didn’t like flying very much but she loved working on whales and so she continued to do it.
And I think about my own airplane and I think about the safety precautions that our pilots have taught us about. But I had never even tried to lift my lifeboat. I heard it was heavy and I know it sits in the seat behind where I usually sit, but I had never really given it a second thought.
There starts to be talk about whether or not our team might become needed or might be able to be of service. That maybe we could use one of our airplanes and maybe me or another observer could go and fly and search the area.
North Atlantic Right Whales (NAWR) migrate from their calving ground off of Florida and Georgia up to the cold and nutrient rich waters off of the Northeast US and Canada. Lindsay and her colleagues surveyed those areas via boat, collecting data and photographs to contribute to the NARW catalog.
I try to sleep that night but I’m weirdly scared of the dark. I actually put the news on, the drone of the sound helps or maybe I think they might break good news or something.
That morning, the next morning I call my parents at home to let them know what’s going on. I can picture them each on their landline, one in the upstairs and one in the kitchen, and I fill them in on everything.
My mom says, “You know, you don’t have to keep flying.” She's obviously nervous for my wellbeing and lets me know that it’s okay to come home if that’s how I feel, what I feel I need to do.
My dad says, “Linds, if you go to help search, it’s very possible that you could find or see something that maybe you're not quite ready to see.”
And I realize we don’t talk about it very much but he's been to Vietnam and I start to get a very uncomfortable picture of what he's trying to warn me about.
“So will you go if they ask you to go? Will you go and help?”
“Yes, I will definitely go. If I can do something other than sit here and feel helpless listening to the local news then I will go.”
The next day, word starts to trickle in that a debris field has been found. And I stand on my deck outside staring at the ocean, the deck of this beautiful beach house that just a few weeks earlier I had pulled up to and thought, “Oh, my God, I get to live here and do my dream job.” And now I’m sitting in a deck chair wondering what exactly do they mean by debris field?
Maybe that’s a mistake. They found just a floating patch of trash or something. But we get more and more details that, in fact, it’s things that we all recognize, like a backpack or camera equipment or safety equipment from the airplane.
Soon after, side-scanning sonar locates the aircraft 65 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean, right off the beach from our house. In fact, it’s so close that I can actually stand on that deck and watch the barge that’s been deployed. I can see the crane that will lift that airplane off the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. And I can see the vessels that carry the recovery divers that will be used to recover the bodies of those scientists and the pilot that went down in this terrible accident.
Over the next few months there's a lot of discussion between organizations and scientists, funders about if this work should continue. The answer is a resounding yes. That we really do make a difference. We've diverted ships, even submarines, away from collisions with an endangered species and it has allowed these calves to then make their way up the coast and become thriving members of a struggling population.
But we do need to take some more safety precautions, and part of that is now going to be attending ditch training, learning how to get out of an airplane if it does go in the water.
So that fall, I find myself staring at a makeshift fuselage, the people part of the airplane, as it dangles over a crystal clear pool in a warehouse in Connecticut. I am sweating, nervous, freaking out and I’m actually angry, a little bit angry that I’m even there, because to me it seems like a futile effort. Because I was there. I saw that airplane being taken away on a flatbed truck. I could see where my seat might have been. I was there when those family members flew back out over the water to disperse their family’s ashes.
And I know that if my airplane goes in the water, it is not a crystal clear pool with rescue divers waiting to pull us out. But this is what I agreed to do. This is my job and I want to be a part of this effort to help a struggling population. I want to be a good teammate to my other team members and scientists.
The modular egress training simulator at Survival Systems USA, Inc. used for the aviation safety and egress (ditch) training course.
On the last simulation of the day, the sixth one, I climb back into the fuselage and give a little longing look back at the rescue divers in the hope maybe they'll let me out of this. The loudspeaker comes on and they yell, “Ditching, ditching, ditching,” and the fuselage slowly lowers into the water.
I can feel the water soaking into my flight suit creeping up. I put my hand on my seatbelt and when the water reaches my chin I take that last breath and I curl myself into the fetal position and wait.
The plane jostles around a little bit and comes to settle at the bottom of the pool. Just like I’m taught, I take my fist and I bang the window open as hard as I can. I unbuckle and I pull myself out and I go to swim out like I had on the last five, but I can’t. There's something above me.
Against what I've been taught, I open my eyes to see what’s going on and I can see that I’m now underneath the fuselage. That on that last simulation, it had tipped so that my window was actually facing the bottom of the pool and I had to swim actually down to get out and now I’m underneath. My heavy, sopping wet flight suit is weighing me down and I just kick and kick out as fast as I can. My lungs are burning and I break the surface and take a deep breath, only to realize that there's a rescue diver waiting, watching me this whole time.
I pull myself out of the pool and collect my certificate and head for home. That night I’m so exhausted. My mind just feels painful and my eyes burn from chlorine. I’m just so tired. I climb into bed and I set that certificate down and I think to myself, “Wow. I can’t believe I get to do this job.”
Story 2: Rachel Cassandra
So I'm on a boat in the middle of the mountainous archipelago of Southeast Alaska and I'm cleaning a fish. I take the belly of the fish, slit it open, stick my hand in and pull out its guts. In the back of its throat, its heart is hanging there and it’s still beating. I pull this out and I can feel it pulsing in my hand and I swallow it whole, because this is what I heard you have to do to become a real fisherman.
Rachel Cassandra cleans some fish.
I have this romantic idea about fishing. You know, life on the sea, working really hard, making a lot of money and it feels really different from what I was doing in San Francisco, which is just working catering jobs and serving. So I'd gone to small town Alaska, walked the docks, talked to everyone I knew until I found a captain who was looking for a deckhand. That was Dave.
He's sort of this older man in like his late 60s, kind of hunched over and he has these giant brown eyes which always just look a little sad. And he talks really slowly, like really big pauses between all of his words.
And he tells me, “I've never had a woman on the boat so I'll have to get used to it,” but he's willing to take me on even though I have no experience and I'm super grateful. It'll be just the two of us on his 40-foot wooden troller.
So we go out on his boat and I sleep in a little bunk there. Everything smells kind of like mildewy and moldy and it's just full of crap like fishing lures, just piles of junk everywhere. I have to climb over stuff to get in my bed at night. And the boat's really teeny.
And Dave teaches me how to fish, how to put down the lines, how to put lures on, how to hook the fish and hit them on the head so they die. He's always really kind and patient and he's sort of a gentle man. We don't talk about anything too personal. We're kind of distant. A lot of the time when things are slow, I just read books in the cabin and wait for the lines to ring when there's a fish.
The moments when I'm in the back of the boat killing the fish, I have to hit them on the head and the kindest thing to do is to kill them really fast so they're not suffering. And there's a couple ways to figure out if they're dead but the main one that I use is when you kill them, if you look at their eyes their pupils dilate. It's really sort of this instant reaction and I have this moment over and over with all these fish.
It is sad. It feels heavy that I'm killing all these fish but it also makes me feel like I'm connected to this really beautiful cycle of life and death. And for the first time that the way my job fits in with society, feeding people, killing so that we can survive, it just feels like this really clear relationship. I feel connected to my job in a way that I'd never felt before and it's really exciting.
And I just start dreaming about getting my own boat one day and having this dual life where I spend half my time in the city working on art and half my time out in this beautiful mysterious land. It's cool. I learned a lot about fishing in Southeast Alaska. That region of Alaska in particular has really strict fishing limits. They're really careful about it so everything they do, all these regulations are meant to protect the salmon population.
The fishermen I meet are some of the biggest environmentalists I've ever met before. They're really dedicated to preserving the salmon ecosystem so that they'll have a job indefinitely. They're in it for the long term.
About halfway through the season, we have engine problems. This is always happening with these old boats. This is kind of part of the territory. We go to the nearest town where we can find a mechanic where we know one is and we pull in there.
Dave tells me it might be sometimes it's like a week or two that we have to wait for the mechanic. It's in this tiny town called Pelican which has like one store, one cannery, one restaurant. There are a lot of boat stock there, though, some of them for the same reason, because there's this mechanic.
And Dave talks with the mechanic. He's not sure when the mechanic will get around to it and so he just says, “Well, we're kind of stuck here.”
So we're eating breakfast in the one restaurant that exists there and I meet Spencer. Again, he's this older man. I think he's 70 when I meet him and maybe like an inch shorter than me, like 5’9” and has this sort of gray scraggly hair that he wears. It's long and he wears it in a ponytail down his back and he dresses like in all fleece. He's really cool. I connect with him on a deeper level than I'd found with a lot of the other people especially fishermen I'd met. We just like each other a lot. He's cool. He's sort of like a free spirit type. Used to dive when he was younger.
He asked me if while I'm stuck here if I want to fish with him, just go out for like a couple days or whatever. I tell them that'd be really cool. I need to check with my captain. Dave gives me the go ahead. He's like, “That's totally great. We're just going to be stuck here anyway.”
So I go out with Spencer. He has a sailing troller so there's actually sails on the boat and we kind of tack back and forth while we're fishing. Yeah, we catch a bunch of fish sort of like a medium couple days. I'd agreed to check in with Dave every day on the phone while I'm out.
So I am in the cabin and I use Spencer's cell phone and call Dave. He answers the phone and he's really terse with me. It's sort of like a whole attitude shift. He's only ever been like really gentle and kind.
He tells me if I don't want to come back he can just leave my suitcases on the dock. And I'm like, “What are you talking about? I wasn't even thinking about leaving the boat.” It feels like it's coming out of nowhere and I'm really confused.
I hang up the phone and tell Spencer what happened and Spencer's like, “Well, of course he's jealous. Pretty girl deckhand, you're the feather in his cap. It's like a status thing or something.”
And I get the sinking feeling in my stomach and I feel kind of anxious. It feels like one of those times when, for me, when I was in high school as a girl this coming of age, I had this relatively sudden realization that there was this other element laced through all my interactions with people that was sex. This desire, sexuality. It was really disappointing to find that that was laced through all these friendships I'd had, especially with guys that I thought were totally platonic. And at that time and this time too, it just felt like there's this whole other layer that's happening and that people aren't being fully honest.
So I go back to Dave and I get up in the morning and he is slamming his shovel around the hold, like really aggressively. It's clear to me that he's super angry.
I'm like, “What's happening?”
And he says, “You should have cleaned out the hold before. You're not being a good deckhand. You should have been doing all these things before I asked you.” And he's like, “There's moss all over the boat. You should have been cleaning that.”
And I'm like, “I'm so sorry. I'm trying to be a good deckhand. I don't know what I need to do. You're teaching me and I'll do better.” And I tell him I'll clean out the hold and that I'll clean off the moss.
That afternoon I get on the moss and I've got this tiny little scrub brush and I'm going just inch by inch. I realize this is a much bigger job than I thought.
He interrupts me and says, “Oh, don't worry about the moss. We'll just powerwash it off when we're in a bigger town.”
And I'm so frustrated. It's clear that when we were talking before he was just grasping for straws for things that I'd done wrong and it was all about him being butt-hurt over me going to fish with Spencer.
But I also realize, like I think about it and it's like he's this older man. he's never been married. He works on the boat all the time alone. He used to go out with his dog but last year his dog died. I see that it's a pretty lonely life and I can't really fault him for wanting some company. It doesn't make me feel better about his sort of weird feelings, possessiveness over me but I just kind of let it go.
I'm like, “Okay. I'm going to finish up the season and then I don't need to worry about him anymore.”
So I finish up the season with him and all the time while I'm on that tiny little boat with him it reminds me of when I was a teenager living with my parents. Anytime they would even just graze my arm I would kind of like shudder from the touch. Just everything, I wanted to be so far away from that place. Everything they did annoyed me and that's how I felt with Dave until the end of the season.
At the end he was like, “You can always fish with me again.”
Of course I knew I wouldn't but I thanked him and we ended on good terms.
So the next part of the season was king salmon season. It's much bigger fish. They sell for a lot more money and the season's a lot slower. I know I want to fish, not with Dave, so I find Robert. I know that he's looking for a deckhand and before I even think about fishing with him, I ask around on all the docks.
I do sort of like a reference check and say, “How does he work with people? Has he worked with women before? How successful is he at fishing?”
And everyone tells me he's a great fisherman. He makes a ton of money. He's really good at what he does. He has a wife and family at home and he's worked with women before. Everything has always been super professional and he's great to work for. Basically like 100% amazing to work for. You should totally do it.
So I decided to go on the boat with him just for king season and it's cool. Fishing kings is much slower and so we have a lot of downtime. We play Scrabble and cribbage and it's cool because we talk about poetry too. He said he used to write poetry and we're both super into words and have a lot of intellectual discussions. Dave was really sweet but we didn't really connect in that way.
He says he used to write poetry and so I encourage him to get back into that. I'm always doing this with writers when people say they used to write. I encourage them to get back into it because writing is cool and writing poetry is cool.
We fish really hard. The first part of the season was slow and we get into this patch of kings and we're just pulling up and pulling up and pulling up, over and over knowing that we're going to be selling these kings for a lot of money. It's really good money.
And we're catching so many kings that I even changed my plane ticket I think twice so I can stay longer and catch more fish with him. The vibe on the boat is just like we're both full of energy. I think he's always like this when he's fishing. He's just super stoked on fishing.
And I am so excited. It's like this new passion and I just think how much I'm loving it and how cool it would be if I keep fishing and maybe someday get my own boat and that this could be my life. I could have like this life where I go between San Francisco and Alaska. And when I'm in San Francisco I make art and when I'm in Alaska I make a hell of money.
Yeah, so just really great vibe on the boat. One of the last nights I'm there, he just says, “I'm really going to miss this.” And I say I am too, because I really am. At that point it was really hard to imagine going back to San Francisco and that city life and all the disconnection that goes with I guess the urban environment.
The morning of my flight. My flight's in the evening. We wake up on the boat and we've got like seven or eight hours of time on the boat just getting back to the small town that I was based out of. Robert is up when I get up and he says, “I didn't sleep at all last night but I wrote a poem.”
I'm like, “Oh, that's really cool.”
And he's like, “But I'm really scared to share it with you.”
And I just get this really bad feeling. I'm like, “Uh-oh.”
I tell him it's really good idea not to share writing before you've edited it and sat on it and I really don't think you should share it with me.
He says he really wants to. And he says, “Remember how I said I would miss this? Well, this is a poem about staying faithful to my wife,” and he starts out the poem.
He says, “I wanted you last night. I wonder if you knew.” And it's this raw poem about being torn between two women and my stomach sinks. First of all, my cheeks get hot. I'm so angry. I'm so angry that he felt like he needed to share his stupid poem with me, that he would risk our professional relationship, all the work we'd done together and all the work we could do for next season and seasons to come. That he'd just risked all of this just to tell me his stupid feelings when he had a wife and I just don't really know what he was thinking.
If he thought I'd be like, “Oh, cool, like you have feelings about me? I have them too. Like let's cheat on your wife.” Or whether he just felt like he needed to express his emotions and he just didn't really care what impact they had on me.
I'm totally silent for the whole boat ride back and I'm just thinking about all the women I've met fishing. There aren't really a lot of them. It was probably like less than… I'd met less than five. But I thought about all of them.
Another was this deckhand named Rayne who I'd gotten close to and her captain abandoned her on the dock halfway through the season because he confessed that he was in love with her and she didn't return his feelings.
And I had met this older woman, older fisherwoman who had her own boat and she said when she was getting into it everyone told her, “Oh, you'd better find a captain you'd like to fuck.” And she said, “I didn't find anyone I wanted to fuck so I got my own boat.”
And it's sort of this repeating story that happens over and over, like all different forms of it but just this weirdness. Then I get really angry because I realize that Robert doesn't need me. He never needed me. There's a dozen other deckhands who would want to work with him. He's really successful and makes people a lot of money, but then I need him. That that is a main reason why all this bad behavior goes unchecked and all these captains are just not held accountable for what they do and there's no consequences.
And there won't be. There will never be. It's just this industry run by 70-plus-year-old men at this point and that's just how it's going to stay. They grew up with a really different idea of who women were and what they could be.
Finally, we get to the dock and I say my goodbyes. I walk off and I'm so relieved to just get the fuck out of there. I don't know what I'm going to do about next season but I don't need to think about it. I just want to get away from him.
I fly back home and I never fish again.