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trough, then suddenly vaulted starward only to be temporarily blinded by that distant strobe. I found the prospects of trying to make such a swim scary as hell. Janet was a novice diver and an average swimmer. For her, it had to have been an existential nightmare—not the first living nightmare of her tough, tough life.
    An Olympic ski racer once told me that the most frightening aspect of the sport was pointing her skis downhill. As a waterman, I had had to scan awhile to find the empathic equivalent. I decided that pointing a small boat offshore, out of sight of land, was similar. Both acts were expeditionary; both were a kind of voluntary untethering. I described for her how the wheel torques at the hands, trying to veer shoreward. She said, “Yes, yes—it’s the same with skis.” We might have been discussing mountains: Hers was white, mine gray.
    Dread of the abyss is communal among outdoor people. It is not the fear that unites us, but the potential that anything, absolutely anything, can happen. It creates a kind of congenial freemasonry—perhaps because feelings of dread, like nightmares, usually vanish when exposed to light.
    For Janet, though—if she survived it—enduring such a night would not have been mitigated by the first pale streaks of a windy dawn. The Gulf of Mexico had been slowly killing her, killing her without conscience, and she would certainly have been aware that there was no escape.
    I now knew some of the sensory components she had experienced. But rolling there on a black sea, beneath a black sky, I found myself troubled on a deeper level. The phenomenon that is human existence can be described in a number of ways, and one of those ways is chemical. There are ninety-two elements found in nature, and sixty-six of those are found in seawater. Blood and human protoplasm, the salty components that are the source of life, contain many of those elements in the same precise proportions as our major oceans.
    As I drifted, I felt reduced. I felt clinically defined, though not insignificant because the word significant implies a judgment of worth, and I had no worth. Nor did the life and death of Janet Mueller. Nor the horror she had endured. I was hydrogen, sodium, chlorine, sulfur, potassium, and carbon. I was a soup of electrolytes that fired a brain that, inexplicably and absurdly, had evolved beyond the requirements of base survival and reproduction. I was skin over a scaffolding of lime-hardened skeleton that I’d inherited from the calcium-dense oceans of Cambrian time.
    Perhaps Tomlinson was right. Perhaps humans are no better, of no more value, than dogs or a fish or manatees. For reasons I cannot comprehend, he seems to find that philosophy freeing. I meet more and more people who feel similarly. They apparently find some level of peaceful, spiritual equity by viewing all life as homogeneous and equal.
    Not me.
    My view of existence is neither romantic nor sentimental. But on this night, adrift and mourning the loss of my friend, Tomlinson’s judgment seemed, at once, valid and terrible. Eons ago, the first one-celled animal developed a circulatory system in which its lifeblood was pure seawater. I was not that much different, nor, it seemed in this moment, were the best of the many good men and women I’ve known.
    I’d put myself in Janet’s place, and I’d learned a little. But I also knew that I would never understand intellectually or emotionally what she’d felt that night. It was impossible, because the circumstances were so different and we were such dissimilar people. A few months back, to celebrate a birthday, I’d swum four miles of open water, St. Petersburg to Tampa. When I’d told Janet, she’d marveled: “My God, I’ve driven across the Sunshine Skyway, and that bay is huge! You actually swam across it?” Now I was still tethered to a floating boat that had a bed and blanket waiting for me. Aboard were people who would answer if I called for help. Aboard the boat were VHF and single