UPDATED 2/26/2011

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On the Island of Lost and Found

by Kirk Hathaway

The tangible drama for items lost and then found is promoted as one facet of a diver’s world. Debbie Boyce, owner of Discovery Diving in Beaufort, North Carolina, shares with training classes how a boater at Beaufort’s waterfront once offered $200 to retrieve a gold watch that had broken loose and fallen between boat and pier, down into 30 foot waters at Beaufort’s waterfront docks.  Debbie’s suited up and dove.  Of course, as a Beaufort diver, she knows the strong waterfront currents there sweep the sea floor clean and leave the bottom a hard, white sand where a heavy gold watch would rest, as it was, lying on the bottom like a museum piece installed for display.  Moments later, Boyce returned: watch in hand.

As a professional diver myself, discoveries are not so simple.  With my clients in tributaries of North Carolina’s more turbid Neuse River, searches for lost items are impeded by poor visibility. The Neuse rarely provides more than three feet visibility and frequently has clarity to one foot or less.  Bottom silt ranges in consistency between old institutional pudding and fresh pancake batter, and the wretchedness of its decomposed make-up often requires reconditioning of regulators.  Additionally, the most powerful underwater lamp is made opaque by any disturbance of this soupy bottom.  So, discovery is a matter of moving in concentric circles on the end of a weighted rope tide to a dock, feeling blindly through muck to identify something that doesn’t feel like rotted wood, shells, broken glass, or rusted metal.  In such a mode, I have surfaced with a hatch cover, portable vacuum attachments, solar panels, two pairs of glasses, the bottom of a coffee press, sets of keys, a stainless steel railing, a Plexiglas window, a large carpenter’s clamp, a stainless steel wrench as well as my own weight belt and chain of boat zincs.  At the same time, into this murky void I have traded tools and hammers, and have lost both flashlight and mask to the mud. I have yet to recover a cell phone that works for any length of time, and I was at loss to come up with a titanium wedding band yet to be resized, which easily slipped off a groom’s finger while tying up at a dock following his wedding.

But while lost and found items have tangible rewards in the dive world, beyond that world the finding of things often provides intangible rewards.  And I was made to understand this in the compassionate recollection of another lost ring, one Simon Fullinwider of Sailing Vessel Emma, Annapolis, MD (photo at title) drew my attention to as he said, “See this, see this ring.”

From where he was seated in his Westsail 32’s salon, relaxed with drink in hand after a long crossing on Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke, he reached above his head and gently tapped a glob of metal hanging tied and knotted at the end of a line. “This is my father’s Naval Academy ring,” he said, “and, it has not always been here.”

Simon himself is a 1953 Naval Academy graduate. Serving as Chief Engineer aboard three WESTPAC vessels, his favorite was a WWII Fulton class Destroyer because it constantly challenged his talents toward problem solving.  Faced with and diagnosing systems lost to time, to wear, to outdated machinery, Fullinwider was forced to find solutions, to constantly cut and paste technology from one era into another just to keep his ship limping along. Possibly an engineer’s version of lost and found, this affinity toward problem and solution lingers in Fullinwider who half a century later lives aboard a classic double ended sloop with tiller steering. A retired philosophy professor from the University of Arizona most of his problem solving involves interpreting the writing of Hagel for a modern world.  But Simon’s Naval Academy nostalgia reaches beyond his world and into his father’s, himself an Academy graduate and officer who throughout WWII had served overseas and at many ports. “I don’t recall seeing my father’s Naval Academy ring as a child,” admits Fulinwider adding, as do many of his generation, “I didn’t see my father much.  He was deployed a lot.” 

In fact, one of his earliest memories regarding his father resulted from Simon (a.k.a Penny) palming a scoop of pebbles and throwing them at the side of a car.  The driver slammed his brakes, stopped immediately, and through a rolled down window asked sternly of seven year old Penny, “Where’s your father?”

Penny responded, “In the Philippines.”

The driver stared for a moment more then drove briskly away.  What could he do? Sure, pebbles had scratched the man’s vehicle, but what harsh punishment could match such a curt, honest reply. The strain between lost and found was a dilemma that Penny was facing every day his father did not walk through their door. Missing his father and loss were still oceans and years apart, but Simon recalled his first real feeling of loss as his sister charged into his bedroom one day shouting “Pearl Harbor’s been attacked by the Japanese!”

Earlier that year, their family stationed in Pearl Harbor, Penny had started school. For thoughts of friends and community, Penny had only a brief window of childhood opened to a tropical setting.  However, months earlier his father’s ship had been ordered from Hawaii to its new homeport out of Virginia, prior to its next deployment. So on December 3, 1942 seven year old Penny felt as deeply as a nation, for the loss of moving from his first friends and community was suddenly replaced with the bigger loss of not knowing if some of his recent community were even in this world.

Captain Fullinwider and his ship had dodged this disaster.  As an active duty officer he would be deployed and return again and again from voyages. Whether or not there was an Academy ring or when it went missing was hardly the item of Penny’s childhood attention.  When his father walked through the door, his father was there: lost temporarily and then found again.

Fondly he recalls, “Then, when my father was stationed to teach mathematics at Annapolis, we had a daily relationship for three whole years.”

Maybe the treasure we make of items lost and found is a mere transference of loss we feel toward others and emotions.  Consider the intangible suffering we experience when a relationship turns a corner and we know it won’t be the same again; that it is loss.  The emptiness we feel when we leave a job and don’t quite realize to what extent we have lost a community; that is loss. Our art of acceptance as we throw off a dock line and wave goodbye to neighbors with whom we have shared coffee and conversation in relative confidence; another relationship lost to loss.  Loss is something we know by heart.  The sense in “found” things is often little more than our glee for memories and experiences attached to those things that remind us of others.

But what is there to find when you have lost your father at fourteen?  This is the question Penny had to wrestle with as a child.  For much of his life he had had a father who was away, and for three years here and two there Simon Fullinwider had a relationship with this man he love and cherished.  Then suddenly at fourteen and forever he had a father who went away on another mission would never return.

Of course, he is hardly alone. Recently, I asked a movement therapist about her relationship with her father to which she replied, “I didn’t know my father very well.  He traveled a lot in his business and died while I was a child.”  My wife informs me, “My father was a standard nine to five guy, but in the evenings he was in the shop or always working on something in the house.”  My own father divorced my mother when I was four; I can count on one hand the number of times I had seen him in my teenage years, and then only for hours each time.  We all feel the loss of those we care about when they are no longer available to us, and maybe that loss is some illogical regret at not being able to keep them close or even safe.  Maybe finding things provides us that sense of rescue, a hope that some of those losses might be found.

And this brings us back to the ring. Years after losing his father, Penny’s mother received a package in the mail. Within was Captain Fullinwider’s Naval Academy ring with an attached note informing Simon’s mother that the ring had been found in a pawn shop. With the cadet’s name inscribed within the band, the finder kindly located related parties and sent the ring home.  Eventually, the ring was passed on to Simon, who twice has lost it outdoors only to twice have it found by friends and neighbors.  “It is too small for all but a pinky finger,” says Simon holding up heavy hands accustomed to sea and salt water, “and for that, ironically, just a bit too large.”

“In any case,” Simon concludes his story, “that’s why it stays here tied to this string.” 

And there it hangs now, a morning after late night storytelling and rum, all its memories attached, as Simon sleeps below it on a settee birth, while I have been given his V-birth on a late fall voyage we have made to Ocracoke Island, the last fully habited island on the Outer Banks not connected by a bridge.  Ocracoke itself still feels like time and place lost in our modern world, always a pleasant find for boaters and visitors seeking little but the arts of relaxation. A change of breeze has woken me up, and with a note pad, I make my way up to a boardwalk bench, to sit and reflect a little on lives lost and found, with things merely the mirror to our memories. 

On the next dock, a crew slowly finds its way aboard Silver Lake, and readies a ferry in Ocracoke for Cedar Island.  Slowly light comes up in the sky and spill dimension across the water. It is a cooling October morning, one telling us that we have finally lost another summer behind us as the last of weekday vacationers and mainland commuters find their way into embarking lanes and the voice of a park officer carries over the water to a neighboring captain having a first cup of coffee on a back deck: “Good morning. How are you this morning?”

How are any of us, lost between people and place hoping to find something that attaches us a little more firmly to somewhere, some place, or someone else.  Next to our vessel people aboard the yacht American Dream are coming around.  Salon lights are on, a person or two have wandered up to the head and back already.  Ironically, they too have had a bit of excitement in the shadow of the lost and found theme, for as Simon and I returned to Emma yesterday afternoon, they had newly arrived and one of the passengers in tying up had slipped, his body striking a number of spots on the craft as he went overboard and then came up only to have his wallet lost somewhere on the bottom.

I had wrestled with the logic of bringing tanks, suit, flippers and all, but I had settled with a mask with the rationalization that a sail to Ocracoke was my idea of a vacation after readying the annual flotilla of vessels heading south following hurricane season.  The captain aboard American Dream provided me a set of flippers, and with weighted rope I located the bottom directly below the dock and moved in outward arches until four or so feet away I felt among the metal, glass, and sand of this turbid bottom the skin of wet leather.  In two or three snorkeled breaths I had managed to find it and to return it to its owner.  For his part, he rewarded me a bill too large to reject. When I told him he didn’t need to, he only responded with “Yes, I do.” 

Who am I to argue the price we will pay to find our things or the memories or assurance we retain by having those things.  For me, I would be just as grateful to be treasured as a member of the community of boaters, always caring for each other. This is why, I think, I leap to assist others or even why I have taken this career to dive for others where they cannot see or reach. Likely, had the wallet been dropped by the captain, he would have merely offered me a stiff drink, which maybe was all I was expecting to find in the first place…having come out of October water with nothing by a swimsuit on.  But, of course, it was a passenger.  A captain wouldn’t likely have his wallet in his back pocket in the first place and would be the last one to fall in the water while tying up.

At any rate, another day is coming on, Silver Lake’s generators are powering up, voices are carrying over the water, light is coming up east, over the island, and soon one boat or another will find its way here or on toward other docks.  For ourselves, I think we have one more day in Blackbeard’s Island of lost treasure, for what Blackbeard might have treasured most was lost here: his life.  Escaping one pirate adventure or another, Blackbeard would anchor in a backwater recess now known as Teach’s Cove.  In his short career he would lose ships and crew, and one night when Virginia’s Captain Maynard and crew slipped aboard, he lost his life to dozens of musket shots and saber slashes.  In defiance, Maynard would assure that the body would lose its head as it was posted high on a staff.

And yet we come to such island getaways to loose something of our lives, our own busy bodies of obligation.  We are, though, all always on some island of lost and found, a place and time where losing comes quite easy and finding is often a matter of looking a little further. On this island, we search to escape our lives, our labors and look for that paradise in which to find something of ourselves…or perhaps to simply find ourselves and all our memories intact.

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