Response: “The Wreck of the Lady Mary”

As a person who has been moved to tears by Deadliest Catch, I totally dug the subject matter of this serial—as well as the structure, for that matter. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I like stories that “begin with the end,” and the story’s denouement is right there in the title: “The Wreck of the Lady Mary.”

We know from the beginning that this vessel is going to end up on the bottom of the ocean. It’s up to the writer to show us how it happened—and why.

And here’s my favorite feature of nonfiction at work: A writer taking a situation and drawing out its intricacies, making its full complexity apparent to the reader. In this case, Nutt presents the wreck of the Lady Mary and the loss of her crew as an accumulation of many factors. Some are human errors, while others are just matters of fate:

The EPIRB registration number being poorly transcribed, and then entered incorrectly into the system. The delay of the low-orbiting satellite. The ship’s back hatch being open. The UMIB operator only sending the alert out on one frequency instead of two.

For me, this “accumulation” of circumstances makes the situation all the more real and heart-wrenching to read about. (I literally groaned aloud when I read this about the UMIB operator’s mistake: “The radio message disappears some 40 miles short of the two dozen fishing boats working near the stricken Lady Mary.”) It makes the reader consider the “what-ifs” of the situation... What if the EPIRB had been functioning correctly? What if that low-orbiting satellite had been just overhead when it went off? What if—if the Cap Beatrice was indeed the culprit—the Lady Mary had been floating a few hundred feet further away, within the larger ship's line of sight?

An EPIRB. (Source.)

Choice of Detail

Something I hear of more frequently in fiction than nonfiction is the concept of “info-dumping”, or the excessive piling on of unnecessary information. In “The Wreck of the Lady Mary” there were a number of places where I was left wondering about the relevance of what I had just read.

Consider the part in Chapter 2 where the rescuer grabs a chocolate protein shake before he left. That totally tore me out of the story for some reason. I mean, what’s the relevance of the protein shake? Unless something happens like… I don’t know… he gets dropped into the ocean and the only thing keeping his muscles from seizing up is the fact that he DRANK THAT PROTEIN SHAKE, does that detail matter?

In the morgue, we are told: “The doorknob-less entry is key-card only.”

After the rescue: “When someone dies during transport, or a body is recovered at sea, the helicopter must be specially cleansed.”

At these moments, it felt like these details were included because they caught Nutt’s attention, not because they especially added to the scene or pushed the narrative forward. On the other hand, I didn’t mind passages like these:

“The fastest way up into the helicopter is the harness, or lifting strop, since it’s secured under the arms and legs, but when someone has been in cold water for any length of time, it’s also more dangerous. […] Saved from hypothermia, the victim could easily go into cardiac arrest before reaching the helicopter door.”

And later: “Cadaveric spasm—the rigidity of the arms and legs—is a kind of flash-freezing that occurs almost instantaneously when a victim drowns this way. The more Bobo battled to breathe, the less likely he was to live.”

Immediate relevance is definitely the key here!


Graphics

I loved the inclusion of photos, videos, and other "functional" visuals in this piece. The image that offered a historical perspective of New Jersey shipwrecks in Chapter 3 did great work for the piece, as did “The Lady Mary’s Tragic End”, with its decription of the ship’s parts and the sailors' locations. Same goes for "A Detailed Look at Each Possible Cause" and the photocopy of the EPIRB registration form—it was just so great to actually see the "C" that was mistaken for a "0". I thought this essay was a great example of how media can extend and enhance a piece of writing.

By the end, though, I wonder what this article might have looked like outside of this rigid format . . . Perhaps on a site where more customization was allowed, and the images could have flowed more naturally with the text. Still, I give them props for the great visual aids.

Images like this one -- not a functional "visual aid", exactly -- worked well for the mood of the piece.

Random Notes

- Would it be right to call the plank a "Chekhov's gun" in this piece? Nutt introduces this seemingly innocuous object at the beginning, and later, it plays a big role in saving Arias' life.

- Nutt uses the helicopter's diminishing gas supply as a way to inject tension into the piece and push the narrative along. Not sure how effective this was, considering the structure—we kind of know they're going to make it back to shore, after all.

- While I really liked the "Coping" section of the fifth installment, I just didn't connect with the sailors' families very well otherwise. I don't think we spend quite enough time with them for me to really attach to their stories. I did find this line very powerful, though: “Most fishermen understand and accept [the loss of fellow sailors], but not their families, who for centuries have waited on shores for men who never came home.”

- I wish there had been a more persistent presence of the Cap Beatrice, which sort of disappears in the middle sections of the story. Then again, I suppose the ship wasn't sending out any location signals for a while there... But I still wish there had been some mention of it, even if it was to say that "the Cap Beatrice had not sent out a signal for [however many] hours by this point" or "at this moment, the Cap Beatrice reported its location [wherever]." Guess I kind of wanted a sense of this big ship lurking around in the background.

- Occasionally there were odd "blocks" of dates/measurements in this story that made me reread passages. Example: “On April 14, 2009, in heavy rain and fog, the 85-foot scalloper Dictator was hit by the 965-foot container Florida, 21 days after the Lady Mary went down and in the same fishing ground. On July 30 of this year the 72-foot Atlantic Queen, fishing 11 miles off Long Island, was hit by the 625-foot cargo ship Baldor, which sheered off 15 feet of the Atlantic Queen’s bow.”

- Interesting that the third and fourth installments of this piece were published on the same day. I wonder why they didn't continue with a day-to-day posting schedule... Installment length, perhaps?