I thought I was dreaming the sound of the jet helicopter’s insistent whine. But as the racket grew louder, I reluctantly lifted my sleepy head from the pillow and saw, a few hundred yards away from my window, a white spotlight methodically moving back and forth across the restless ocean.

Helicopter sounds still trigger the same adrenaline rush I first felt 34 years ago in Vietnam during the war. I also knew, in that instant when my mind shifted from groggy to alert, that a military ‘chopper flying a grid pattern meant one thing: somebody was lost.

Living beside the ocean carries a constant awareness of its hypnotic force, hidden depths, and mysterious currents. Its power simultaneously fascinates and terrifies me. I admire those who test themselves as sailors, surfers, divers and canoe paddlers. As a lifelong amateur swimmer, I love being in gentle salt seas; at the first crash of a wave, however, I’m headed for terra firma.

Watching the Coast Guard helicopter’s flashing lights recede down the coastline, I knew there’d be no more sleep for me. Sitting on the deck in the dark, listening to waves pound the lava cliffs, I mourned.

Who was it who was lost? Man? Woman? Child? Parent? Tragedy is always on our periphery; in this dawn, it had entered my bedroom, wakened me from a safe dream, and reminded me of the vulnerability of all living things.

Within an hour of dawn’s first pink streaks, the Day-Glo rescue aircraft was back, flying the same pattern with its nose slightly tipped so its pilots could see better through their Plexiglas cockpit.

Eating breakfast, my husband and I alternated bites of cereal with 180-degree binocular scans of the empty horizon. Knowing our efforts were probably hopeless – we could barely spot a neighbor’s orange boat plunging up and down on a bluebird day – we kept sweeping the waves. Nothing.

I ran a load of laundry, Dean gave the dog a bath, we both half-listened to the football game on television. But we remained acutely aware of the helicopter’s frequent low, slow passes over the rocks a two-minute walk below us.

By late afternoon the helicopter’s futile search had frayed nerves throughout the neighborhood. “Do you know who it is?” one friend called to ask. “How do you suppose it happened?” another wondered. Fed up with the suspense, I called the national park visitor’s center down the road.

A ranger confirmed a young man hiking with two friends 24 hours ago had either slipped or jumped into a stream during a downpour. Although nobody saw him fall, his friends heard a splash; they didn’t see him again. A sandal had been found where the river flowed into the sea.

Towards evening, I chopped lettuce, cut up fruit, wrote notes thanking distant friends for remembering my birthday. My husband mowed the lawn, his eyes raking the water with each turn of the mower. The helicopter came and went; was it on a rescue mission or a recovery operation?

That old chestnut, “Man plans, God laughs,” is normally far from my conscious thoughts, but I’ve lived long enough to know that I can fill up my calendar with doctors’ appointments, important meetings and exotic vacation plans only to have my tidy, orderly world blow up in a fateful instant.

Just last week, flying home from Montana to Maui, my husband and I were complaining about bad airline headsets when our jetliner suddenly bucked, plunged, then bucked again.

“Flight attendants take your seats,” the pilot ordered, punching on the “fasten seatbelt” sign.

I was gripped by fear and began to cry as I fastened a nail-puncturing grip on my husband’s arm. Normally a confident traveler, I was suddenly panicked as our plane shook from nose to tail. Was this to be the end of us? Halfway home, two-and-a-half-hours from land, would we spiral into the sea and be lost forever?

As a million-mile flyer and a reporter who’s covered many plane crashes, I know it happens. Anyone who boards a plane to cross an ocean – particularly an island dweller that commutes – worries about getting to the other side.

Throughout the flight, I couldn’t shake my foreboding that maybe this time we wouldn’t. Then someone looking out the window said “there it is,” and in moments the Boeing 767’s wheels kissed the runway. Normal life resumed.

But even the day before yesterday, when the now-missing man was living his ordinary life, my husband took the dog for a short walk and came back with bloodied knees and a goose egg on his head; a passing car had come so close he’d had to jump off the road to avoid being hit.

My father, a fighter pilot who’d lost his own father as an adolescent, raised me to believe that “the hardest thing to do in this life is survive.” I’ve often resented the foreshadowing his warning threw over my daily existence, but that awareness has kept me alive, particularly in moments of danger.

Like his aviation hero, Charles Lindbergh, my dad believed that “the unforeseen” poses the biggest threat to our existence; the passing car that comes too close, the clear air turbulence that pushes a plane into the sea, a slippery path above a raging river.

The Coast Guard helicopter gave up its ocean patrolling at dusk and swung north, toward its Honolulu base. The nightly TV news devoted 38 seconds to the search that had been called off for a missing 27-year-old man who was presumed to have fallen into a swollen stream and been swept out to sea.

One moment we frolic and laugh; the next we are gone. Those of us left behind to wonder what happened cannot puzzle our way through it. As the philosopher Aeschylus wrote in the fifth century before Christ:

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

We turned out the light and went to bed; listening to the roar of the sea. Listening to the roar of the sea, we did not fall sleep for a long time.

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