Best of the Decade: #12 Tad Friend's "Thicker Than Water"

Jason Mleczko (Photo by Grant Cornett)

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favorite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I’ll pick a piece and try to express why I’m drawn to it. Today, I begin with my #12 choice – Tad Friend’s superb “Thicker Than Water” (February 10, 2014).

“Thicker Than Water” tells about a Nantucket nautical nightmare: a huge wave overturns a boat carrying five young sport-fishermen. The piece puts you squarely there with the men in the churning water as they fight for survival. Of its many vivid images, the one that sticks in my mind is of the twenty-three-foot boat, named Jabb, hanging in the air and then beginning to flip:

The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds—their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air—as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull.

That “as if time were taking a breath” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired, from its opening sentence (“The stripers weren’t biting”) to the concluding words of Tom Mleczko, who rescued the five men: “What if I hadn’t seen that little movement? What if I’d been looking two degrees to the left? The ocean—it turns out it’s pretty impersonal. It doesn’t care.”

The names of the five guys are Jason Mleczko, Andrew Curren, Joe Coveney, Kent McClintock, and Alex Cameron. Jason is the skipper. Friend says of him: “A strapping six-foot-five fisherman with dirty-blond hair, Jason had the candid, boisterous manner of a golden retriever.” The other main “character” in the piece is Jason’s father, Tom, “whose four boats constituted the island’s largest fleet.” Friend describes Tom as “a taciturn, gravel-voiced man who loved to combat the elements.” When Jabb capsizes, Jason knows that his father is likely their only hope of being saved. But he also knows that his father will be disappointed in him for allowing Jabb to flip (“His mind went to his father. I’m an idiot, he thought. We don’t capsize”). 

The action of “Thicker Than Water” is the rescue, with a psychological undertow flowing from the conflicted father-son relationship. This conflict surfaces dramatically during the rescue when Tom coldly refuses to help Jason secure Jabb:

Up top, Jason threw his arms around his father, who gave him a preoccupied pat and said, “What are we going to do about that boat?” Jason stared, hoping his father would say, “You take the wheel, and I’ll go anchor Jabb,” but he didn’t. Tom knew he was behaving stiffly, and he later said, “I felt that, as Jason’s employer and his father, I should make this whole thing better—only I didn’t know how.” Jason unspooled the line attached to Purple Water’s anchor, cut a hundred and fifty feet, and threw the anchor overboard. Then, reluctantly, he followed the anchor into the water and swam the line to Jabb. As he began making clumsy half hitches, tethering the line to Jabb’s bow with numb fingers, the passengers came on deck, astonished that Tom wasn’t immediately taking Alex to the hospital, and even more astonished to see Jason back in the water. When the task was done, Jason swam to Purple Water’s bow, but couldn’t pull himself onto it. Tom looked over, askance, and Jason said, “Cap, I’ve been in the water for four hours—I’m at about ten per cent.” He finally crabbed himself aboard.

It’s an astounding moment in an astounding piece. I read it six years ago when it first appeared; I’ve never forgotten it.