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underpressure · 7 years

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Local Man Among Crew Lost At Sea Storm Swamps Crab Boat In Bering Sea, 7 Presumed Dead

I talk to my mother sporadically; not as often as she would like and more often than I would. She takes those opportunities to worry about my life and tell me the goings-on of everyone I have ever known. As she grows older, both her and my father have started to sound more like my grandmother, who uses the segue of adding a brief pause and a leading “well..” as an ending to each of her sentences. Like each thought meanders into another and she never wanted the conversation to end. That is how these conversations go; they weave between introspection and the meticulously crafted stories regaling the humdrum existence of relatives and people I might have known from my hometown.

During one of these lengthy, circuitous narratives, she changed the subject to something unexpected. She said, “Do you remember Bryon Koesterman, who you went to grade school with? He died.” I was surprised by the statement of fact. My mother loves more than anything to tell me of people who have died, who were sick or any other such tragedy befell. My family has a tendency to dwell and fixate on the morose. This was different though. This was the first person my age who I had died.

Well, that isn’t true. There was that one kid in high school who had been crushed to death after being thrown from an overturning vehicle driven by another kid at my school. I didn’t know him well, but I knew the girl driving that day. She was with a group of their friends, the popular kids, and had been drinking and drove off the road. Everyone was sad for the kid, but I didn’t know him well enough to really care. The girl though, she was a different person when she came back and faded out of my memory. Her flicker dimmed and status diminished as myself and those around her pushed her lingering taint of death out of our memories. It was as if the collective consciousness decided it was easier to just forget him and the incident. It wasn’t real; it was just “one of those things that happens in every high school.”

I asked her how it happened, and she told me, “he was on a fishing ship in Alaska, it sank.”

I did know him. I thought back, and I could see him in my head, but he wasn’t really a friend at any time. I went to a small grade school in a small town filled with small people whose ambitions and desires were in-line with the scant people and ideas that abounded. There were only 400 or-so people at Woodrow Wilson Elementary. 25-30 kids in each class, two in each grade and a few overlapping with mixed grades when the numbers were too great or small. I knew all of the kids in my grade and most in those preceding or ahead. I was in every class or the other while I was in the school. I couldn’t have not known him.

He was a curly-haired, golden-hued boy, who had always seemed nice. I didn’t know him well enough to say what he did or what group he ran with in high school. I don’t even know if we went to the same middle school. He was the type of acquaintance that elicited a “Hi” if I ran into him on the street, and the memory that we went to the same small school, so there was a bit of a shared connection.

I continued my conversation with my mother, as she wanted to continue telling me the quotidian details she had been compiling to tell me in this infrequent communique. I am sure I said something or another about it before moving on, but it was just a thing to say for her. As I was talking, I was more detached from the conversation than my usual reluctant engagement. I kept thinking about the absence of this person, the same age as me and coming from the same place, slipping into the water and ceasing to exist.

As I alluded to, I have a tendency to focus on the darker aspects of life. The myriad of terrible fates, real and imagined, that could befall me and those I hold dear. One of these fates had taken ahold of this boy and wrested him intently into the dark fathoms, never to be seen again.

I don’t know how I came upon this, but I found his obituary. Perhaps my mother saved it for me or I looked for it on the internet later in life. The details of his passing were filed in the back of my subconscious memories as a shadow with dark intrigue, so my reading it was an inevitability.

In putting this to paper, I found it again. I searched for “Bryan Kosterman,” “Brian Kosterman” and other such spellings with the details I remembered. “Ship,” “sink,” “boat,” “fish,” “Spokane,” etc. Eventually, I remembered there was an “e” in his last name, and I was rewarded with what I was looking for” “Bryon Koesterman obituary.” The title of the obituary was Local Man Among Crew Lost At Sea Storm Swamps Crab Boat In Bering Sea, 7 Presumed Dead.

As I could not remember the spelling of his name, neither could the article. It began “Byron Koesterman bragged about his job on a crab boat.” The subsequent times it was written correctly as “Bryon,” but the misspelling in the obituary insinuates the insignificance of his life to society at large. Perhaps his insignificance to me as well. The obituary is just a story due to his being a person from this small town; young enough to have died after he left it that propriety required it.

Reading through it, I found that we had gone to the same high school; the one that I moved across the street from when I was eighteen and stopped going to one day when the walk across the street, unmonitored by my parents who I had moved out from, became too great of a distance to undertake. I don’t ever remember seeing him after grade school, and very little during that time, other than that one day.

The reason that this memory stuck with me for so long, was the details of his passing.

Koesterman, 19, who grew up in Spokane, was one of seven fishermen lost in the Bering Sea Saturday night when their 127-foot boat capsized during a violent storm. It sank in 2,400 feet of icy water.

“They didn’t even (have time to) hit their mayday button,” said Merri Jayne Koesterman, the teenager’s mother.

When my mother told me how he had died, I had imagined it as lonely and terrifying; the floundering for air and grasping for something to stay afloat, but the details added to its mystique. I was able to easily visualize his last moments. I don’t see the violent seas or sinking ship, but him alone with the painful chill from the icy waters lapping against his face and rushing over his head. The panic as the water churned around him and his searching for up and down; both indistinguishable as the sea and the sky were dark and absent of any identifying characteristic. Finding no respite from his fate, he just gasps, and grabs at the sky as he inevitably can no longer resist the pull of the waters below. He sinks into the darkness, chokes and splutters until his still open eyes no longer send any signals to his brain and Bryon is no more than a piece of meat whirling with the other detritus in the surrounding water.

I started to drown once as a child. I had been swimming underwater, and as I came up for a breath of air, one of my friends pushed me under the water. I sucked in a lungful of water and began to panic. I was four feet underwater and couldn’t touch the ground to push up to the surface. I waved my arms around unsuccessfully in a vain attempt to reach the surface. My friend pulled me back up, and I was able to muddle back to shore, coughing up the water that had filled my lungs. I kneeled on the shore, trying to recover, but it took days to regain my feeling of normalcy. I can viscerally remember the initial impotent, terrified feeling I had and the eventual serene hopelessness, as I gazed up towards the surface. I can easily imagine the pain, fear and eventual surrender that he must have felt just prior to his flame being extinguished.

I don’t usually read obituaries. They are often a narrative created by a writer to commemorate a person who they don’t know with details people tell them that fit the story they want to tell. This one has many such dubious quotes and statements of opinion, such as this especially poignant, prescient and all-too appropriate remembrance from his mother:

“Bryon had a passion for what he was doing,” said Merri Jayne Koesterman.

“He knew the risks. He told me, ‘Mom, if I have to die, it will be OK,”’ she said. “He knew what was ahead of him.”

If that doesn’t give her and those that knew him closure, nothing will.

Reading this, I thought of what I knew of Bryon again, and I realized that, other than being from a small town and a small school, we were connected by an incident years ago that we alone shared when he broke open his skull and scarred his face.

Bryon had an electric smile; that was the thing that everyone would remember first. The second would be the pale red, three-inch horizontal scar that crossed the middle of his forehead. I am sure it faded in time, but it never did in my memory.

During the second grade, I was out on the smaller of the two playgrounds in the back of Wilson Elementary. This one had a bit of sawdust under the metal pipe and wood play structure, unlike the menacing blacktop that cruelly covered the rest of the playground.

There were two permanent portable buildings from the 70s that were behind the school. “Temporarily” replacing the burned section of the school that was torched by an arsonist years before. They were covered by pebbles affixed to the side. These pebbles were rather sharp, as a scar above the lip on a kid I pushed into them would attest. To be fair, he had bit me and broke through my skin, even while I was wearing multiple layers under the winter coat into which he bit. I pushed him away and he slid across the ice into the jagged façade. It was not intentional, but the scar doesn’t care.

This playground and school was not safe. I couldn’t count the scrapes, cuts and bruises the seven years “playing” on the “playground” inflicted upon me. How much of my blood and flesh it drank when its sharp edges, sprawling black concrete, uncovered metal, and sandpaper-like surfaces assailed me.

In front of the portable, there were two sharp-edged concrete steps, naturally, to get to the door. These led to the second grade classrooms, which inhabited these spaces. Kids would sit on these as they watched other kids play. That day, in the second grade, Bryon was sitting there.

I was walking towards him, probably to sit on the steps as well, and he stood up and looked at me. As he was getting up, the light in his eyes left his body, and he crumpled over towards the steps and the middle of his forehead cracked into the lip of the steps. The sound was a deep, meaty thud as the edge opened up his skull and blood began to stream from his face. I didn’t move; I just stared at the expanding pool around him. He didn’t move from his crumpled position, with his face affixed to the concrete supporting his kneeling body.

Somebody around me screamed, and half of the kids drew closer and half averted their eyes. I watched as the playground aid brought brown paper towels to cover his wound and tried unsuccessfully to sop up the surrounding blood. Eventually, more adults came and carried him away.

I don’t know how long he was gone, but he came back one day with his forehead stapled shut, and I can’t remember ever talking to him again. I am sure I did, but we just weren’t friends. He was one of those people whose relationship was not really anything positive or negative.

That being said, I felt a bit of kinship with him as I was likely the only witness to the moment he gained his defining physical characteristic.

For some reason, I think of his death often. The lonely death of a cipher, along with my vivid memory of his bloody fall hold a romantic sway.

#drowning #writingexercise #obituary

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