Survival Saturday; Sometimes You Have To Laugh

The strange things we find funny when absolutely nothing is going right.

In February 1982, Steven Callahan was alone in the Atlantic Ocean when something slammed into the side of his sailboat in the middle of the night. Water began pouring into the cabin, and within moments, he realized his boat was sinking. He scrambled to get his emergency equipment, inflate his life raft, and figure out how to keep himself from going down with the boat.

And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, he noticed something that struck him as funny.

A movie camera mounted on the back of his boat was still running. Somehow, despite everything happening around him, the camera was recording what was probably some spectacular footage of his boat being destroyed by the ocean.

The problem, of course, was that there was a pretty good chance nobody would ever see it.

Callahan later described being amused by the absurdity of that realization. Here he was, potentially minutes away from dying, and part of his brain was apparently appreciating the irony of capturing a dramatic scene for an audience that would never exist.

I find that absolutely fascinating.

Not because there was anything particularly funny about his situation. There wasn’t. His boat was sinking, he was alone in the Atlantic, and he had no idea whether he would survive. But somehow, in the middle of everything happening, his brain still managed to recognize something ridiculous.

And that wasn’t even close to the strangest part of his story.

Callahan was 29 years old and an experienced sailor who had spent much of his life around boats. He had designed and built his own sailboat, a 21-foot vessel named Napoleon Solo, and had been dreaming about sailing across the Atlantic since he was a child. By early 1982, he had already completed the eastbound crossing and was making his way back toward the Caribbean.

He wasn’t someone who had wandered into the ocean without understanding what he was doing. He knew boats, understood navigation, and had prepared for emergencies. But as anyone who has spent much time on the water will tell you, the ocean doesn’t particularly care how prepared you are.

Late one night, something struck his boat with tremendous force. Callahan believed it was probably a whale or another large marine animal, although he couldn’t know for certain. Whatever it was, it left a hole in the hull, and the boat began filling with water.

He managed to inflate his emergency life raft and retrieve some supplies before separating from the sinking vessel.

Then he was alone.

His entire world had been reduced to a small inflatable raft drifting across an enormous ocean.

He had limited food, limited drinking water, and no way to know exactly when, or even whether, someone would find him. The currents were carrying him westward, toward the Caribbean, but that was an awfully long way away.

I think this is where many survival stories become difficult to imagine. We can understand the initial emergency. Something terrible happens, adrenaline takes over, and people scramble to respond. But what happens after that? What happens when the immediate crisis has passed and you realize you’re still in trouble, except now there’s nobody around to help?

For Callahan, the answer involved an extraordinary amount of improvisation.

He needed fresh water, so he relied on solar stills designed to turn seawater into drinkable water. Unfortunately, the devices were temperamental and didn’t always work properly. He needed food, so he learned to catch fish using a spear gun. He needed to protect his raft, monitor his supplies, estimate his location, and deal with whatever new problem happened to appear.

And there were plenty of new problems.

His body developed painful sores from prolonged exposure to saltwater. He struggled with dehydration and hunger. The sun was relentless, and the ocean could turn violent without much warning. Several ships passed without rescuing him.

Then there were the fish.

Callahan described how fish initially seemed to learn the range of his spear gun and remain just beyond his reach. Imagine being desperately hungry, surrounded by an ocean full of fish, and having the fish apparently figure out exactly how close they could get without becoming dinner.

Eventually, some of those same fish began swimming close enough to bump against the bottom of his raft.

I realize fish aren’t sitting around developing elaborate plans to torment stranded sailors, but I can certainly appreciate how it might have felt that way.

And then, just when you think his circumstances couldn’t become much more complicated, Callahan accidentally punctured his own life raft while trying to catch food.

Yes, the raft.

The one thing keeping him out of the ocean.

He was already weeks into his ordeal when his spear damaged the inflatable raft. Now, in addition to worrying about food, water, weather, and rescue, he had to figure out how to repair the thing he was living in before it lost too much air.

I have to wonder what was going through his mind at that point. Here was a man who had managed to survive a sinking sailboat, learned to obtain food and water in the middle of the Atlantic, and endured weeks of isolation, only to accidentally put a hole in his own lifeboat.

I imagine there was some colorful language involved, although I have no evidence to support that particular theory.

Callahan managed to repair the raft, but the experience was terrifying. In a firsthand account published years later, he described realizing that he might die within hours if he couldn’t stop the leak. When he finally succeeded, the relief was enormous.

And still, he wasn’t home.

He continued drifting westward, surviving on the fish he caught and whatever fresh water he could produce or collect. He became increasingly weak, but he kept maintaining his equipment and doing what he could to stay alive.

After 76 days alone at sea, fishermen spotted his raft near the Caribbean island of Marie-Galante.

Seventy-six days.

More than two months of waking up every morning in a tiny inflatable raft, surrounded by water he couldn’t drink, trying to catch enough food to survive, and wondering whether anyone would ever find him.

By the time he was rescued on April 20, 1982, he had lost roughly a third of his body weight.

He survived, and his experience eventually became the subject of a bestselling memoir, Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea.

I’ve read and researched a lot of survival stories over the years, and one of the things I find most interesting is how differently people respond to extraordinary circumstances. Some become intensely focused on practical problems. Others describe moments of profound fear, anger, or despair. Many experience all of those things, sometimes within minutes of each other.

But I keep coming back to Callahan noticing that camera.

Of all the things his mind could have focused on while his boat was sinking, part of him recognized the absurdity of recording footage that nobody might ever see.

I don’t know why I find that so interesting, except that I recognize something very human in it.

Have you ever noticed how some of the stories that make us laugh the hardest are about things that were absolutely miserable when they happened?

Think about family gatherings when someone starts telling the story of that vacation where everything went wrong. At the time, nobody was laughing. People were exhausted, frustrated, arguing, or wondering why they had ever thought the trip was a good idea. But years later, someone brings it up, and suddenly everyone is laughing so hard they can barely finish the story.

Or maybe you’ve been through something difficult with a friend or family member, and the two of you have a joke about it that nobody else would understand. To someone on the outside, it might not seem funny at all. But the two of you remember what happened, what it felt like, and just how ridiculous some part of the experience was.

I think there’s something interesting about the way humor and hardship can become intertwined in our memories.

Sometimes we laugh because enough time has passed that we can finally appreciate the absurdity of what happened. Other times, the laughter happens right in the middle of the experience, when things are still very much falling apart.

And sometimes, as Callahan’s story illustrates, we can be genuinely frightened and still find something amusing.

Those things don’t necessarily contradict each other.

I think we sometimes have a very narrow idea of how people are supposed to behave when life gets difficult. We expect fear, sadness, seriousness, or determination. Those responses make sense, of course, but human beings are a little more complicated than that.

I’ve sat with people during some incredibly painful moments in their lives, and every once in a while, something happens that makes us laugh. Not a polite little chuckle, either. Sometimes it’s genuine, unexpected laughter that catches everyone by surprise.

I’ve experienced it in my own life, too. There have been times when things were so overwhelming that one more ridiculous complication was enough to send me into a fit of laughter. It wasn’t that I suddenly felt better about what was happening. I was still frustrated, worried, or exhausted. But something about the absurdity of the moment got to me.

And I think that’s one of the things I appreciate most about people. We are capable of experiencing so many different things at once.

We can be scared and curious. We can be grieving and grateful. We can be angry about our circumstances and still find something funny about them.

Sometimes humor helps us feel connected to the people around us. Sometimes it gives us a little distance from something overwhelming. And sometimes I think we’re simply recognizing that life has taken such an unexpected turn that even we can’t quite believe what’s happening.

Of course, there’s a difference between finding humor in a difficult situation and using humor to avoid dealing with it. I’ve known plenty of people who can turn absolutely anything into a joke, especially when things start getting uncomfortable. Sometimes that works for them, and sometimes it keeps them from acknowledging what they’re actually experiencing.

But I don’t think every moment of laughter needs to be analyzed, either.

Sometimes something is funny.

Even when life isn’t.

What strikes me about Callahan is that his ability to recognize something absurd didn’t interfere with his ability to take the situation seriously. He still had to make difficult decisions, solve problems, and fight to stay alive. He experienced fear, exhaustion, and moments of despair. His survival required knowledge, ingenuity, persistence, and a tremendous amount of luck.

The fact that he found something amusing while his boat was sinking doesn’t make him less serious about surviving. It simply reminds me that our minds don’t always respond to extraordinary situations in the neat, predictable ways we might expect.

And maybe that’s part of why I love stories like this.

We often hear about survivors after the fact, when their experiences have been organized into a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. We know what happened, how they survived, and what they learned. But while they’re actually living through those experiences, they don’t know how the story ends.

Callahan didn’t know he’d eventually write a book. He didn’t know fishermen would find him after 76 days. He certainly didn’t know people would still be talking about his experience decades later.

He was just a man trying to keep himself alive in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

And somewhere in the middle of that, he noticed a camera recording what might have been the final moments of his life and found the situation strangely amusing.

I wonder how many moments like that happen during difficult experiences that never make it into the stories we tell afterward. The ridiculous conversations, the unexpected laughter, the sarcastic observations, and the things that seem completely inappropriate until you understand the circumstances.

Those moments might not be the reason someone survives, but they’re part of the experience, too.

And I think they’re worth remembering.

I don’t imagine Callahan would describe 76 days alone in the Atlantic as a particularly enjoyable experience. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a way to develop a sense of humor. But I appreciate that even in a situation as frightening as his, there were moments that revealed something wonderfully ordinary about being human.

Sometimes life is terrifying. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking. Sometimes it’s exhausting, frustrating, and completely unfair.

And sometimes, right in the middle of all of that, something happens that is just plain funny.

I don’t think we need to explain it away or feel guilty about it.

We can simply laugh.

And if we happen to be recording the whole disaster on a camera that nobody may ever see, well, I suppose that’s one more thing to add to the story.

A Little Reflection

Something to think about: What’s a difficult experience from your life that you can laugh about now? Was there anything funny about it while it was happening, or did the humor come later?

Something to try: The next time you’re sharing a story about something difficult you’ve experienced, pay attention to the unexpected details you remember. Not every memory has to be meaningful or profound. Sometimes the ridiculous little moments are the ones that remind us just how interesting, complicated, and occasionally absurd life can be.