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and get some rest.
    It was coming on to dark, and the wind and waves, if anything, had increased. I went below into the dank hold of the cabin to find everything wet and the water up to the floorboards. There was a little hand bilge-pump affair with a hose that extended into the cockpit and I pumped for half an hour until the intake sucked dry.
    My sleeping bag was soaked but I crawled into the forward V-bunk and pulled it over me and used a seat cushion for a pillow, and even with the wet bag, my cuts and bruises and a huge quantity of fear, as soon as my eyes closed I was asleep. I was so tired it was difficult to breathe, and I had every intention of sleeping until it was over.
    It was not to be.
    After maybe two hours the boat was hit by what seemed like a freight train. The blow slammed me over to the side against the hull and woke me up in pitch darkness to sense/see a huge quantity of water coming in the companionway.
    I had just sat up and it drove me back down. I was sure we were sinking. I sputtered and came up and saw that water had once again covered the floor boards. I manned my little bilge pump in the darkness and pumped for hours, until it sucked dry.
    Outside it was madness. I had heard wind make a sound in the rigging before—in the marina, where ten or fifteen knots made a keening sound. Now it shrieked deafeningly, and the waves hit the boat again and again, driving her back so hard that the low cockpit filled and the drains couldn’t keep up and the water ran out of the low scuppers in a flood.
    In my misery and panic I’d forgotten the three boards that closed the companionway. They were lying on the floor and I found them in the dark by feel. And about the dark: There must have been clouds hiding the moon, because there was a complete absence of light. I had once been deep in the Carlsbad Caverns when they killed the light and this darkness, like that, was total. My eyes would not get used to it, and even when I stuck my head up into the ripping madness outside I could not see, only sense, the towering waves.
    I had been frightened before, panicked. But now the darkness and the increase in the strength of the storm combined to terrify me. It did not seem possible to survive.
    And yet . . .
    The boat rose on each wave, rose and hung and lived and slid backward to fill her little cockpit, to hang there, back heavy, while the water drained, to rise again and hang and live. To live.
    I came to love the boat. Not over time, not over long days of beautiful sailing, not over a period of learning, but
right then
I came to love her and thought of her as “she” and the two of us as “we” and knew where the thinking came from, knew that it was not silliness but an honest and logical truth: Had she not been alive, had she not risen and held and worked with the sea, I would have been dead. She must be a living thing to act so, and I would never again make fun of anybody who called a boat “she.” (Twenty years later, when I ran the Iditarod with a lead dog named Cookie who saved me not once but several times, I came to love her so much that I always thought of us as “we.”)
    The boat had a light, a bulb in the ceiling fed by a single twelve-volt battery. The battery was really for the running lights but the boat designer had thrown in a ceiling connection as well. Along with many things I had forgotten about the ceiling bulb and the battery, and I now turned on the power switch, hit the bulb switch and to my complete amazement the inside of the boat was flooded with light.
    This accomplished two distinctly opposite things: First, it made me feel good because I could see. Second, it made me feel horrible because I could see. The inside of the boat was a total shambles and would require hours to clean up. Worse, the light shining out of the companionway lit up the area behind the boat just as she slid backward down a wave, and I could see the enormous swell ready to descend on us.
    I actually closed my