16
Rescue Hero
The patter of drops on the canvas tarp covering my shivering, aching body curled in the boat’s bottom eventually lulls me to sleep. I don’t know how long I’m out—when I wake to scraping along the boat’s underside, I check my phone for the time only to find it wet, and thus dead. Of course. A thin fog has settled over the water’s surface and the rainclouds have obscured the stars, but the scraping, I’m relieved to find, is not another orca.
It’s the shore.
Land ho!
Somehow, during my slumber, the boat drifted east and the wooden bottom is rasping against a rocky shoreline. I’m so thrilled to not be in the middle of the inlet that I spring from under the tarp and hop one-footed into the holy-s**t-that’s-still-effing-cold water to pull the boat a few feet onto solid ground
