15 August

15 August marks one year since the USS Independence sank. In the epilogue, Samantha Crowe turns the anniversary into both a record of loss and a beginning: she starts a diary, using the date as a marker from which to look back and try to keep memory from shifting. The day also brings her into conversation with Leon Anawak, whose rescue of her links the anniversary’s act of remembrance to the people who survived.

The anniversary and the diary

Crowe begins her diary on 15 August because the sinking took place on that date a year earlier. She recognizes the human need to use dates as symbols for beginnings and endings. Others, she expects, will chronicle the events of the preceding months, but they will not preserve her own thoughts. The diary is therefore a private record alongside the public account, and a way for her to check in the future whether memory has altered what she experienced.

The anniversary gives that effort a specific temporal anchor. Rather than treating the disaster as a closed past, Crowe chooses its date to revisit it; the act of writing begins at the same point in the calendar where the catastrophe returns to view. The diary’s purpose is not simply to document events, but to hold onto her perspective as time passes.

Survival remembered

In the early hours of the anniversary, Crowe calls Leon Anawak. She recalls that during their escape they faced the possibilities of burning, drowning, or freezing, and that Anawak saved her life twice. After the USS Independence went down, she was soaked in Arctic water, had a broken ankle, and saw little chance of being rescued. The Zodiac carried a survival kit, but she would not have been able to use it alone.

Crowe blacked out soon after they escaped. Her memory of the final sequence remains incomplete: she remembers tumbling down the ramp and seeing water, then waking in hospital with hypothermia, pneumonia, and concussion. The diary’s promise to guard against misremembering sits beside this gap. She can set down what she recalls, but the last moments before unconsciousness remain beyond her reach.

The dead and the living

Crowe and Anawak talk about those who did not return: Sigur Johanson, who never made it back to Norway and his house by the lake; Sue Oliviera; Murray Shankar; Alicia Delaware; and Jack Greywolf. Anawak misses his friends, and the anniversary makes that absence immediate. Crowe reflects that even in mourning people rely on fixed dates as places to deposit grief. When pain is revisited, she observes, it can seem smaller than it did before; the thought gives the anniversary a double meaning, as a return to sorrow and a measure of distance from it.

The conversation eventually turns from the dead to those still living. Crowe has recently met Gerhard Bohrmann, who is relaxed and affable despite his own experience. Although Crowe is unsure she would ever want to go near the water again, Bohrmann believes that nothing could surpass what happened off La Palma. He is making repeated dive trips to assess damage to the continental slopes. His work makes the anniversary more than a memorial: it also marks the possibility of human return to the water.