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Cruising through Collapse: A Family's Story of Survival

By Roy Timpe

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Chapter 1: The Adversary

With the wind off the right side of the boat, the twelve-foot dinghy was on a nice starboard beam reach. The turquoise water was becoming clearer as it approached the sand spit adjacent to the tidal flat. Harold began to pinch the dinghy off, transforming from a beam-reach to close-hauled. As he approached the sand spit there was the scrape of the dagger-board brushing the sand. He pulled the dagger-board halfway up and gained a little more momentum. He finally turned into the wind and allowed the sail to luff. The water was knee-deep and a little cold as he jumped over the gunwale. He then loosened the halyard to drop the yard and the sail and walked the boat onto the sand spit. He unfolded the little anchor and buried it in the sand. He was here to look for conch and check the fish traps he had placed about the tidal flat. This was a weekly chore to help feed his family, a supplement to the food stored on the boat, which had to last as long as possible in this post-collapse world.

As he walked from the sand spit onto the tidal flat, he noticed that the first fish trap had been destroyed. Perhaps a barracuda or other predator damaged the trap getting at a captured fish, but this had never happened before. He looked up and saw a man smashing a trap with a stick. The man had salt and pepper hair and a dark suntan made more obvious by his light gray, formerly white, short sleeve fishing shirt. Harold’s family depended upon the conch and fish gathered off this tidal flat and others like it for their survival. He called to the man, “Hey! Stop that! Stop! Stop Now!”

The man shouted with anger in some foreign language and began to approach. This time Harold shouted, “Halt!” As the stranger drew near he produced a fixed blade knife and held it like a weapon. It looked like a dive knife with a sharp point. The man’s movements exuded confidence and training. The knife was in his right hand. His right arm was back and his thumb was lined up with the blade. His left arm was protecting his body. His left forearm was vertical while his hand held the middle of the stick parallel to the ground with a clenched fist. He placed his right foot back at an angle. His left foot was pointed at Harold. His knees were bent slightly. He deftly changed his grip on the knife to an ice pick grip with the point down and the edge toward Harold, and then back again to having his thumb inline with the blade. The man continued to advance. Harold began to step backward, being ever so careful on the irregular surface. He briefly thought about running for the dinghy, but realized he would be dead or injured before he ever got it off the beach. He reached into his right pocket where he kept a five-shot 22 caliber mini-revolver. It was stainless steel and had held up well since the collapse, but he was not certain about the ammunition. He knew it had been exposed to both the oil that protected the revolver and the humid salt-water environment. He had not been periodically cycling the ammunition in the revolver the way he would have before the collapse. Pristine ammunition had considerable trading value in this new world. He also knew that even a small knife wound would likely be fatal in the current situation. Producing the revolver only caused his adversary to sneer slightly and increase his pace closing the distance. The revolver’s diminutive size gave it an undeserved diminutive deterrence effect. The small caliber and short barrel demanded that the shot be very well placed. That same short barrel made precise shot placement difficult. Harold focused on the front sight and aimed at the man’s left hip. He knew from experience with paper targets that the smooth bird’s head grips would cause the point of impact to be high and to the left. He squeezed. With a click, the little revolver announced to the world that the ammunition had been compromised. The adversary, now about fifteen feet away, grinned a little, and Harold thumbed the hammer back to expose the next round. Hard focus on the front sight; he squeezed the trigger again keeping the same aim point. The revolver barked, and the smooth grips slid back a little in his hand. The man flinched a bit, and some red shown on his fishing shirt. The shot was in the middle of the torso near the diaphragm. It was unclear if it was above or below the diaphragm.

He thumbed the hammer and squeezed again. This time there was no recoil, a poof sound, and some smoke wafted between the little revolver’s cylinder and barrel. Harold knew he had a squib load. Attempted thumbing of the hammer again confirmed this. The cylinder would not rotate. The round had a fouled powder charge, and the bullet was jamming the cylinder. Perhaps it was just as well. Had the bullet gone completely into the barrel, it would have been dangerous to follow it with a good round. With a now angrier knife-wielding opponent, perhaps not following the squib load with a good round was also dangerous.

His adversary smiled and rapidly approached with the knife. Harold pocketed the revolver and turned for a full run back onto the sand spit. “Distance is your friend,” he thought to himself. Harold produced his own lockback folding knife. His adversary was wounded. All he had to do was not get killed or wounded while his adversary bled out. If the wound was above the diaphragm it would even progress more quickly. At this point, Harold was trapped on the beach and could not gain more room to maneuver without getting wet. He could go to the tidal flat and wade in potential muck, or he could go on to the other side of the spit where it rapidly got deep. Swimming on the deep side might allow his attacker to keep him at bay treading water. He went for the tidal flat. He waded into knee-deep water. He managed to get past his adversary and onto the main part of the little island with only losing one sandal into a patch of mucky sand. The main part of the island had the remains of a cinder block building. The slab had a tile floor. Cinder blocks from the walls were scattered around. The roof and roof trusses were totally gone, most likely washed away in the hurricane that destroyed the structure. The tile floor looked sound. It looked like you could rebuild the building on the slab without replacing the floor. His adversary was catching up but moving more slowly than he had at the start of their encounter. Harold encountered sand spurs in the wispy grass on the sand. These little burrs dug into his sandalless foot. His adversary was moving slower with the red stain growing on his shirt. He just had to keep the man moving to keep his blood pumping, without exposing himself to injury. His adversary started to eye Harold’s dinghy. This caused two immediate thoughts. First: How had this man arrived here? Second: If his adversary loosed his dinghy from the shore, it would blow into deep water, and Harold would be stuck here. His family, some ten miles away, has no second boat to mount a search for him. Harold ran back to the sand spit, grabbed the anchor, and pushed the dinghy off the sand. He scrambled into it and grabbed an oar to fend off his adversary. The wind pushed the dinghy out to deeper water. Harold hauled the halyard, lifting the sail and pointed the dinghy near the wind. The dinghy just hovered over the deeper water. His adversary ran in waist-deep but went no further. “Perhaps he decided not to swim with his wound,” Harold thought to himself.

This waiting game lasted quite a while. He had to tack occasionally to keep the dinghy roughly hovering. Finally, his adversary sank to the ground. He waited another half hour and returned to the beach. Using one of the seven-foot oars, he poked his adversary hard to gauge for a response. There was no response. Harold had no desire to be killed by a man playing possum. He used the oar to knock the knife away from his adversary's hand. A few more pokes convinced him that his adversary had passed. He stared at the man he had killed, a man created in God’s image. Harold was both sad and angry. He was sad that he had killed for the first time, and he was angry at the stranger for putting him in this position. Why had the man responded with hostility when he just wanted him to stop destroying the fish traps? Wouldn’t everyone understand at least one of the words “stop” or “halt?” Why did he produce the knife? What was he doing here? Was he just looking for food and did not understand how to open the traps? Did he think he had a property right to the tidal flats and Harold was intruding? Did he know the fish traps belonged to Harold? Was he irrational from dehydration? He was Caucasian but did not speak English. It is doubtful he was Bahamian. Perhaps he was French Canadian or from some part of Europe? It then occurred to him that the man may have been part of a clan, or at least a family. If that was the case they would be missing him. Harold scouted the area and found a green plastic kayak. This accounted for how the man arrived. The boat was small enough not to be noticed. The kayak had a paddle, some mesh bags for collecting things, and a small plastic bottle with a little freshwater in it. There was no food, or tent, or bedding. This suggested a larger boat or base camp somewhere.

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