Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [48]
There was good news, too: Phil had rallied.
Drifting west, beyond the air lanes, I adapted myself to my fate instead of resisting it. Rescue would be nice, but survival was most important.
TO LIVE, A man needs food, water, and a sharp mind.
We’d begun with eight half-pint tins of water in the survival kit, but we soon ran out. We were, of course, surrounded by water that never stopped moving, waves turning into new waves, rising and falling. If you’ve seen movies of men in our situation, one character, scruffy and burned by the sun, always says, “All this water and not a drop to drink!” as if facing down a great temptation. We never thought of it that way. You can’t. Drinking salt water is deadly, and we knew it. At best, I could wet my tongue occasionally. Otherwise, I pictured us adrift on a desert. No one in his right mind would drink sand. Soon, what water we had came only from afternoon squalls and single, low-hanging clouds that drifted across the sky. Sometimes the showers missed us, but when we got lucky we caught the rainwater in the canvas pump cover. It was about six inches wide and two feet long, and I’d ripped it open along one seam so it became a funnel-shaped container. Other times the cover doubled as a hood to shade us from the sun.
When it rained we’d drink first to quench our thirst. When our bellies were full we’d suck up any extra water from the hood and spit it into the empty cans. Sounds distasteful, but transferring water by mouth was the only way because who can pour water in a moving raft, on a rough sea, in a rainstorm? Even more important, this method protected the fresh water from being spoiled by the salty whitecaps that broke over the sides of the raft.
It didn’t always work. Sometimes we rode out a squall and never got more water than fell into our upturned and open mouths. At one point we went seven days without a drink. The clouds just seemed to know we were there and avoid us. Several times each day they would hover on the horizon, move toward the raft and then away and beyond us, leaving our lips to blister and swell and our throats to burn. Sometimes we’d chase clouds, rowing like mad, only to exhaust ourselves and still miss their life-giving bounty. As desperation set in, just to stay hydrated, two of us would keep the sharks away with the oars while the third hung in the water for a few minutes.
In the end, we resorted to prayer.
When I prayed, I meant it. I didn’t understand it, but I meant it. I knew from church that there was a God and that he’d made the heavens and the earth, but beyond that I wasn’t familiar with the Bible because in those days we Catholics, unlike the Protestants, weren’t encouraged to read it carefully—at least in my church we weren’t. Yet on the raft, I was like anybody else, from the native who lived thousands of years ago on a remote island to the atheist in a foxhole: when I got to the end of my rope, I looked up.
I said, “Fellows, we’ve been praying about everything else, so let’s just pray for water, and sit back and relax. Otherwise we’re going to kill ourselves.” I meditated and started speaking. My prayer sounded as if I wanted to strike a bargain with God: “Answer my prayers now, and I promise if I get home through all this and whatever is to come, I’ll serve You for the rest of my life.” What else could I say? What would anyone say? Given our miserable situation, devotion was all we had left to offer.
Before an hour had passed, I saw a squall heading our way. This time it did not veer, but slowly moved overhead. Based on our recent luck I didn’t expect a drop, but suddenly the cloud burst and it poured. I held up the hood to catch the water, drinking as it collected, sharing this gift with Phil and Mac. With the first taste I knew I was the wealthiest man in the world. I could have swallowed five gallons, but of course my shrunken stomach couldn