Category five, p.1
Category Five, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Porter Fox
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ISBN 9780316568210
LCCN 2024939462
E3-20240803-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part I 1. Planetary Wind
2. Point of Vanishing Stability
3. The Book of the Dead
Part II 4. The Arctic Summit
5. Doorstep of the Anthropocene
6. Ahab’s Hearses
7. A Multidimensional Wilderness
Part III 8. The Fifth Floor
9. The Statistician and the Dreamer
10. Divine Wind
11. The Zooniverse
12. Home
Part IV 13. The Planetary Boundary
14. Attack of the Drones
15. Black Hole of Data
16. Resolve
Part V 17. The Future
18. Great River of the Mountains
19. The Insular City of the Manhattoes
20. Fangtooth Fish and Wriggling Copepods
21. Poop Will Save Us All
22. The Solution
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Porter Fox
Suggested Reading
For Cro, both of them
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
Prologue
The storm hit like a breaking wave—a taut coil of energy that unleashed pulses of rain, wind, swell, and lightning across the sea. Gusts blew so hard they knocked the tops off waves, vaporizing seawater into salty clouds of spray that blinded the man standing at the helm. Wind pushed the boat over fifteen degrees and shrieked through stainless steel stays. When the rain came, it didn’t fall straight down; it flew horizontally, pelting his face. It didn’t matter. There was nothing to see. The gale had blotted out the coastline, the bay, the waves—everything but a sphere of roiling green water and gray sky a few hundred feet around him.
The storm was a line squall: compact, sudden, fierce. It was a meteorological paroxysm fueled by a thousand-mile-wide cold front, convection, precipitation, and friction. Wind bulldozed the ocean like a brush roll, flinging seawater into the air. There was still some blue sky far to the south, where a few foggy wisps hovered. But in the north and west, it was all gray and black, the light of day sapped by a thick woolen fog. He was scared, but he also saw some beauty in the storm—in the chaos, the potency of unmitigated nature, the force of an atmospheric shift, the inertia of trillions of molecules jostling and sifting through the sky. Wind moving that swiftly has weight and shape. It becomes a semisolid mass that can bend steel, uproot trees, or snap a boat’s mast in half. You can’t help but marvel in the middle of a blow. It’s often difficult to imagine that you will survive it either.
He watched as a line formed between what had been and what would be—a picturesque view of the New England coastline gone; a whorl of wind, rain, swells, and dark night descending. The lighthouse he’d been sailing toward, the beach behind him, and the quaint fishing towns crowded around the edge of the sea were all gone. Airborne sea spray hovered like ground fog over a meadow. He had not seen the squall coming. He should have, but there are too many tasks when sailing alone: steering, trimming sails, securing gear, fixing the engine, navigating, eating, inventing ways to relieve yourself. He simply didn’t look up in time.
His boat was twenty feet long and was better suited for lakes and rivers than the rough waters of northeastern America. It was a classic Marconi sloop. It didn’t have a deep keel or enough ballast to fight through heavy wind and chop. Rain had been a constant since he’d pushed off from the mainland a week ago. Patches of mold grew from the corners of the overhead below. The cabin was barely tall enough to sit up in, and the berth was not quite long enough to stretch out his legs and sleep on. He’d chosen this prison—partly out of ignorance, partly to see if he could do it. He had sailed his entire life but never on a journey this long and perilous.
Over the past week, a steady parade of pea-green four-foot swells rolling through the Gulf of Maine had pitched the boat so violently that he spent most nights at anchor, repairing the damage. His destination was far north, where America ends and Canada begins. That morning, he’d pushed off from York, Maine, and followed the York River out to sea, near Black Rocks and Millbury Ledge. The breeze picked up off East Point, where he unfurled the headsail and trimmed the main, setting a course for the tall white cylinder of Nubble Light on Cape Neddick.
The sky was blue then, with a few clouds gathering in the northeast. The sun splintered off ripples as a few fishing boats headed out to the banks. The air smelled of salt, seaweed, and bait. The thick evergreen shores of the Maine coast wrapped around granite headlands and capes. This postcard view of the Gulf of Maine had disintegrated in less than an hour. The boat appeared to be sailing well at first, but the man failed to notice that its poor seakeeping was pushing it sideways as fast as the wind drew it forward. Just minutes before the storm hit, he realized he was pinned deep in a bay that he couldn’t sail out of. Thick swells reared up in the shallow water just a few hundred yards away, then curled and crashed onto a long crescent beach. Mist rolled off the backs of the waves as the sound of two hundred tons of water collapsing reverberated across the ocean. The man tacked to get away from the shore, but the boat didn’t have enough momentum, and it stalled midway, pushed backward toward the beach. A better sailor would’ve noticed, would have known what to do. The man had worked on boats for most of his life, but it had been just work, not fun. He’d been paid to race sailboats, deliver yachts, captain private vessels for wealthy families. Working on boats helped him buy his first car and put him through college. As he had with most jobs, he learned how to do it on the fly.
The gale did not amp up over time. It arrived in minutes. The first gust almost capsized the boat. The man let the sheets go, but the little sloop didn’t right itself immediately. He rolled up the furling headsail but had not tied a reef into the main and was forced to let it flail. Where the sun once was, a circular rainbow glowed. Where land once stood, there was now only wind and cloud. The man managed to tack in the opposite direction, but he could tell by the height and steepness of the waves that he was drifting closer to the beach. The boat climbed over a monstrous crest, then surfed down its back side. The forward momentum was encouraging until it was halted by the next swell. He tied off the sheets and tossed a line off the stern in case he was knocked overboard. Water off the coast of Maine hovers around fifty degrees Fahrenheit, giving him a 50 percent chance of swimming fifty yards before hypothermia paralyzed him.
He tried one more time to trim the mainsail and muster forward momentum, but just as he did, a wave half as tall as the mast curled and broke over the deck. The next thirty seconds played out like a dream. The entire boat disappeared under the wave. The man instinctively stood and clung to the boom. Whitewater rushed around his thighs and poured into the cockpit. The deluge swept him off his feet, but he managed to hang on and scramble upright. When he looked down, he recognized the wavy outline of his boat, tinted aquamarine beneath three feet of water. The cream-colored decks were emerald. The cockpit was a tiny swimming pool. The foredeck looked like it was frozen in a block of ice. The boat held together as two thousand pounds of lead in the keel kept it from flipping. When it finally emerged, it shook off the water like a dog, then somehow continued sailing forward. The wind eased slightly and the mainsail filled. One tack, then two, and the little pocket cruiser sailed herself off the beach and back into the bay. It was a miracle—a resurrection. As the wind backed off and the seas calmed, the man spotted Nubble Light and angled the boat toward it.
You should know that this man is your author, albeit younger, stronger, and significantly more ignorant. I tell you this to make clear that I have a particular perspective into the world of seafaring—but I am not one of the salty mariners you will m
You may well want a flawed narrator, ignorant of the rules of the sea, on this quest, because those rules are changing now faster than at any other time in human history. Ocean chemistry, planetary currents, wave energy, food webs, trade winds, and storm dynamics are all evolving as petawatts of energy are trapped in the atmosphere and ocean. And as with most things climate related in this era, the worst is yet to come. All of which is to say that I did not choose to write this story. I did not bird-dog it or unearth it or brainstorm it with my editor. The story wrapped itself around me from a very young age, and the only way out was to tell it.
Part I
1
Planetary Wind
Mayan shamans knew this wind. Taino chiefs knew it. John Cabot, Amerigo Vespucci, and James Cook sailed before it. It shaped Bahamian pineyards and Hispaniola’s karst and limestone hills. Even sea life hovering in the depths knew the wind as it pushed billions of gallons of water from east to west, Dakar to Antigua, an invisible river of seawater coursing through the broken volcanic archipelago of the Lesser Antilles, the Barbados Ridge, the Venezuela Basin, the Old Bahama Channel, and the rockbound shoreline of Central America every second of every day for all time.
Lucayan voyagers—distant relatives of the Mayan—held up a wetted hand to the wind, then charted a course through reefs and cuts surrounding the Caribbean’s Windward Islands. Life itself rode the perennial breeze as seeds, eggs, and species blew from one hemisphere to another to settle and grow. Air is invisible, but it has mass: fourteen pounds per square inch of pressure on you, me, and all living things scattered across the earth. Atmospheric rivers, ridges, valleys, eddies, fronts, and waves of noble gases and molecules mix and swirl in constant motion. The sun’s heat, much of it stored deep in the ocean for eons, along with the rotation of the planet, creates these winds—which are so strong and constant they have carved ocean basins, formed island chains, transported ecospheres, created global climate and weather systems, and ferried destructive storms for thousands of miles.
John Kretschmer knew these “trade winds.” They had shuttled him all over the world and across the Atlantic thirty times. They are a planetary wind—one of the few weather elements on the water that captains can rely on. So, early on the morning of August 14, 1991, Kretschmer was unsurprised to see the trades pushing a line of cumulonimbus clouds over Compass Point above the shores of St. Thomas.
The trades blow northeast to southwest—Africa to the Caribbean—at fifteen to twenty knots, bending around land and ship before finding their way again like a marble tracking a crack. Whitecaps formed in Pillsbury Sound as Kretschmer approached the docks. The smells of salt and diesel fumes washed over the pier. It was eighty degrees onshore, but the trades made it feel like seventy on the water. A few dozen boats hung from moorings and anchors, their bows all pointed northeast, into the wind. Some vessels had sailed around the world; some were day-trippers. A few dozen fishing trawlers and mail boats bobbed among them. The anchorage, like most in the Caribbean, is set on the island’s southern shore, in the lee of trades and gales that hammer the windward coast.
Kretschmer passed a few easy-up tents shrouded in smoke where vendors served johnnycakes and pot fish. Sun reflecting off the rippled water was so bright you couldn’t look at it without sunglasses. It was Saturday, “flip day” in the islands, when charters began and ended, cruise ships pushed off, and Kretschmer welcomed a new crew of students eager to learn the art of offshore sailing.
He ferried a dozen grocery bags filled with provisions onto a forty-four-foot sloop named Southern Light. Kretschmer and Caribbean Yacht Charters had recently hatched a plan: Kretschmer would deliver the yacht 850 miles to Nassau while teaching the course and retracing possible landfall scenarios of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World. It was a profitable and alluring arrangement for both. Kretschmer had been a self-described “ferryman” for nearly two decades, delivering sailboats across oceans for their owners. At forty-two years old he had already sailed more miles than most captains, including one of the fastest east-west roundings of Cape Horn on possibly the smallest boat ever to do it—accomplished when he was only twenty-five.
The plan for that week’s “training passage,” as Kretschmer called it, was a series of impromptu classes on celestial navigation and offshore sailing techniques. He is an easy man to listen to—a stocky six-foot Midwesterner as affable as he is confident. His deep appreciation and understanding of the sea is matched only by his geniality. He is a humanist in every sense—not coincidentally, as many captains and explorers of the Golden Age of Sail were—eschewing the divine for a belief in the value and goodness of people. He casually cites authors from Nietzsche to Steinbeck to Chaucer when chatting about life at sea. He invokes Hilaire Belloc regarding the confessionary instinct triggered by offshore sailing passages (“The sea drives truth into a man like salt”). He defers to English philosopher John Stuart Mill when discussing ornery crew members (“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it”). On seasickness, he quotes Mark Twain, who traveled the world on steamers (“At first you are so sick that you’re afraid you might die, then you are so sick you are afraid you won’t”).
Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek and the fearful sirocco wind that has downed ships in the Mediterranean for thousands of years is one of Kretschmer’s favorite subjects. He has read the book a dozen times and quotes from it often. On a sailing journey around Malta, he cross-referenced ancient texts with prevailing winds and storm seasons to try to locate the site where Odysseus, and later St. Paul, allegedly shipwrecked. Off the Pillars of Hercules, on the Strait of Gibraltar, he likes to remind students that Roman sailors voyaged to the Canary Islands on their triremes. He calls shipmates “brother,” even those he just met, and often substitutes the deity Neptune for God. He is an athenaeum of maritime literature, meteorological science, oceanography, boat design, sail shape, ocean currents, worldwide sailing routes, and the names of marina managers, sailmakers, and shipyards from Sri Lanka to Labrador—the latter he often shares with former students in their quest to sail around the world.
Kretschmer tucked groceries into Southern Light’s lockers and gear nets as he reviewed a mental checklist. He had calculated how much water, fuel, and food they needed. He had plotted the route, recorded compass courses, accounted for currents and prevailing winds, and glanced at the long-range weather forecast. Besides a stubborn low-pressure trough situated a few hundred miles east of the Bahamas, the coast looked clear for the six-day passage to Nassau. But things were rarely as they appeared on the ocean. In three decades of near-constant blue-water cruising, Kretschmer had seen plenty of surprises. He’d survived a Force 13 midwinter gale1 in the northern reaches of the Atlantic, been knocked overboard on a capsized thirty-two-foot cutter off Bermuda, survived seventy-foot breaking waves while crossing the Gulf Stream, and sailed through eighty-knot squalls—more than the threshold of a hurricane.
These numbers do not do justice to the power and violence of an open-ocean storm. With no topography, forests, buildings, or obstructions of any kind to slow a tempest, a large storm releases unfettered energy across a one-dimensional seascape. Quantifying and depicting a maelstrom involves physics, meteorology, sounds, and images that are not from this world. The horizon turns on its side. Day becomes night. The temperature plummets as columns of freezing air, rain, and hail fall from the troposphere. Waves no longer undulate beneath you; they stand directly above you as tall as seven-story apartment buildings—then tip over in a deluge of whitewater, often onto the boat, one after another. Steering in heavy seas requires precision; just a few degrees off on a single wave and a boat can skid, jibe, capsize, roll, lose its mast, or, worse, pitchpole end over end for a quarter mile. Waves with a ten-second period hit a boat 6 times in a minute, 360 times an hour, or 8,640 times a day, wearing crews and boats down as the swell grows larger and more menacing.
