J.M.J.
Author's note: Thank you for reading and reviewing! The next chapter is technically September 17, but I will be traveling over the weekend, so I'll be posting it on Friday instead. God bless!
September 13 – Wednesday
It was pouring rain, and Callie was making a dash for it to get inside the building as soon as possible. Monday and Wednesday mornings were her English literature class, which was her favorite class she had that semester, so a little rain didn't bother her too much. In fact, she liked walking in the rain, and she would have taken her time if she wasn't almost late for class. Besides, if anyone who knew her saw her strolling slowly through the rain, they'd think she was even weirder than they already thought her.
Such were her thoughts as she ran the last few yards to the door and darted inside it as it still stood open from another student going inside. She paused to brush her dripping hair out of her face, and so she was startled when a familiar voice said, "Hey, Callie. Wet out there, isn't it?"
"Just slightly," she replied with more irony than she would have if it had been most other people she knew. Somehow, she didn't think that Casey would understand the poetic value of walking in the rain.
He was perfectly dry, as if he had been inside for some time since he had had to brave the rain. He was holding a coffee and he had a friendly smile on his face. "I thought you might like something hot to drink on a day like this," he said holding the coffee out to her.
"Uh, thanks," Callie replied, a little confused. "How did you know I had a class in this building this morning?"
"You told me, remember?"
Callie didn't remember in particular, but she supposed she might have mentioned it and then forgotten. It was a small thing to remember, and she did appreciate the coffee. She took it gratefully and thanked Casey again. Then she started to continue on to class.
"Say, what about meeting up for lunch today?" Casey asked.
"Oh, sorry, but I'll be working then."
"Don't they let you eat lunch?" Casey asked with a pout.
"I eat early, beforehand," Callie replied. "When you work as part-time like I do, you don't always get lunch breaks, you know."
"Well, then, we could have lunch early. Please? I haven't gotten to talk to you much lately."
The assertion annoyed Callie, who had only just seen Casey the day before in class. "I won't have time to talk at lunch," she told him. "I barely have time to eat. It will just have to be another time."
Casey started to protest, and Callie's sense of manners didn't like blowing him off, but she was almost late for class and so she brushed past him. It wasn't until she was seated and had pulled her notebook out of her backpack that she began to feel sorry for the breach of politeness. After all, Casey was only trying to be a friend and look out for her, even if she would rather just be left alone sometimes. She eyed the coffee that she had set on the table in front of her. She almost felt too guilty to drink it, but letting it go to waste wouldn't help matters at all. It was straight black and more bitter than any coffee she had ever tried before. There was no way she could drink that, but she felt bad dumping it. Oh well, she reasoned after a few minutes; it wasn't like she had asked for it.
HBNDHBNDHB
The fishing was better on the west side of the island, where the castaways hadn't done so much of it. Lately, they had been going to that side more often, at least until the fish there learned to stay away. Fishing had long since come to be a dreaded task. It was relaxing enough to someone who had a busy life and looked forward to the chance to sit and think, but that wasn't the case on the island. Here, there was too much time to sit and think and too little that was cheerful to think about.
Phil was about the only one left who didn't mind. He would have minded a lot less if he could have gone by himself, or even just with Katina. She didn't say much, except when she was in an inquisitive mood and would incessantly ask, "What's this?" As long as she wasn't in one of those moods, she would allow Phil the time to think. He felt as if he was on the verge of sorting out all the questions that had been gnawing at him ever since landing on this island, but every time he almost had it, he would get interrupted and lose his train of thought. It appeared he once again wouldn't have that leisure as Tony accompanied him to the beach, and Katina followed after them.
Katina had developed a keen interest in fishing, and she was always asking through her gestures to use the fishing pole. There was only one pole left, not counting the homemade one, and so she was actually doing most of the fishing these days. Today was no different. Tony handed her the pole and Phil gave her the bowl which they used to carry the worms, and Katina went straight to work fishing, while her two companions tried to find ways to keep themselves occupied while they waited. There wasn't much to do on the beach, and even if there had been, neither of them felt like doing anything, so they simply sat in the sand and watched Katina.
"I wonder if she ever tried fishing before we got here," Tony commented for lack of anything else to say. "It seems kind of strange that she'd know how to make tapa but she wouldn't have known how to fish. Of course, I suppose she might not have had a fishing pole and maybe she didn't have any way to cook them and she wasn't hungry enough to try them raw. She doesn't seem to know how to make a fire, and there is plenty of other food on the island."
"It's kind of weird what she knows and what she doesn't," Phil agreed. "She must not have had a very hard time surviving."
Tony leaned back on his hands and dug at the sand with his toe. "That's good news for us, I guess."
"Yeah, so we can keep on living on this island for years and years," Phil said glumly.
It was tempting for Tony to point out that they had been there a little less than three months. It might not be years at all, but then again, it could be. "Do you think anyone has any idea what happened to us?"
Phil shrugged. "I suppose Mr. Hardy probably tracked down those guys who tried to kill us by now."
"Wouldn't they have told him that they only tried to kill us and then they'd start searching for us?"
"I don't know. I doubt those guys think they only tried. I mean, they wouldn't have left us behind if they thought we had a chance of getting picked up or making it to land. From what we've seen, they were right about us getting picked up. This isn't exactly a well-traveled part of the ocean."
"Honestly, they should have been right about us making it to the island, too," Tony mused. "We could see the clouds over the island but not the island itself from where we got dumped off. It could have been…thirty miles away. We shouldn't have been able to row that far, not without any water along."
"Right. So they probably honestly thought that we were dead, they would have told Mr. Hardy that…What do you expect everyone at home to think? And even if they did search for us, what do you think the chances are that they'd find us? It's got to be a huge search area that they'd have to go over. How far do you think we came in that fishing boat?"
"Well, a cruiser like they had goes about twenty-five knots, comfortably, but they might have been pushing it," Tony said. "We were taken on board about ten o'clock in the morning. Sun sets about seven in Hawaii in June, and we were dumped off about an hour before sunset, so probably about six. That would put us on that boat for about eight hours."
"How fast is a knot?"
"One point fifteen miles per hour. Just call the cruising speed about thirty miles an hour."
"Okay, so at eight hours, that would be three hundred and sixty miles," Phil said. "Plus another thirty to the island, so let's just say four hundred miles for easy figuring. Of course, they wouldn't know which direction we went, so that would make a search area of about twenty-five hundred square miles, or roughly the size of Delaware."
"That's not too big," Tony commented
"Except we're forgetting a couple of things," Phil pointed out. "First off, those guys might have told approximately where they dumped us off. I think we can forget about that one, because it would have been pretty easy for a search party to find us then. So, if they didn't have that information, they would have to search in every direction, but they wouldn't know that we're about four hundred miles from Hawaii. Those guys could have been hauling us around on that boat for several days. For all anybody else knows, we could be a thousand miles away from Hawaii. Then, too, they might not know exactly what point we started out from. We were on the Big Island. They'd probably assume we started out from there, but it's a hundred miles across or so. That means that from the center of the Big Island, the search area is really about four hundred fifty miles in radius. And then, if that's not bad enough, we could have drifted a long way in that skiff."
"So basically, you're saying that if they just started searching for us without getting any specifics from Dain and that captain, they'd have to search practically the entire Pacific Ocean?" Tony asked.
"Maybe not all of it, but a very significant amount. I wouldn't know how to even start calculating it, but it would be a lot bigger than Delaware."
"Cool." Tony turned back to watching Katina, who hadn't had any luck yet in her fishing, but she was very focused.
There was a pause for several minutes as they thought over those disheartening calculations. They actually weren't as bad as Phil had been guessing, since he had been thinking about these things practically since they had arrived but he hadn't actually made any calculations about it. That made it easier to shove all that to the side quickly and begin thinking of other matters.
"Tony, I've got a problem," he broke the silence.
"It sounds like we've all got a big problem," Tony muttered. Then he recovered himself. "What is it?"
"I'm pretty sure—I'm not completely certain because the date changes every year—but if I remember right then Rosh Hashanah is on September 16 this year. I know it's a Saturday, in any case."
Tony did some quick mental calculations. "Today's the thirteenth, so yeah. Saturday is the sixteenth. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year, right?"
"Right, and it's a very important holy day. The problem is…Well, we don't even have most of the things we would need to celebrate it. But even if we did, it doesn't really matter to any of you guys and as for me…" Phil didn't finish. Instead, all he said was, "Well, you know what's been going on with me."
Tony nodded and knit his brows. "I think you should still celebrate it, though."
"But why, when I'm not sure?"
Tony considered that for a few moments. "If I was having doubts and it was almost Easter, I'd still celebrate it as well as I could."
"Which wouldn't be too hard," Phil pointed out. "Most of society celebrates the major Christian holidays, which I'm not sure is always to the benefit of the holidays. They tend to get pretty secularized. I guess we're kind of lucky, in a way, that society as a whole doesn't celebrate our holidays."
"You might have a point there," Tony conceded. "A lot of Christmas and Easter celebrations do kind of miss the point, and some of them don't even come close to it. But that doesn't really have anything to do with what we're talking about. Celebrating a holiday even when you're not feeling it isn't the same as making it into something it's not."
"Isn't it? That seems like it's just making a religious holiday into more of a cultural holiday, which is how Christmas and Easter got into the position they are. A lot people just celebrate them because that's what their families did, and not because they care about what the holiday means. I don't want to do the same thing, going through the motions without actually believing any of it."
"You have to make that decision for yourself," Tony said finally. "But I will say that sometimes just going through the motions is the best you can do, and so that's what you've got to do then. I mean, we're all human, which is the same as saying we're terribly fickle. There's nothing—not religion or family or a career or a hobby or anything else that a person can care about—that you can feel passionate and excited about all the time. And when you hit one of those dry patches, they feel like they're going to last forever, that you really have lost all interest in whatever it is. But if it's something important, like religion or family, then you've got to keep holding on whether you feel like it or not."
"By that advice, most people would still be out there worshipping trees or the sun or whatever."
"That's a little different," Tony insisted. "Actually, it's completely different. The ancient pagans becoming convinced that there is someone greater than the sun to worship is completely different than throwing your hands in the air and saying, 'I personally don't understand this, and so it must be false.' The ancient pagans didn't give up their religions because they were simply tired of them. They did it because they found something better."
Phil smiled slightly. "Tell me the truth here, Tony: you wouldn't mind my having doubts about Judaism if it was because I was thinking about becoming a Christian."
"That's a fair question," Tony conceded. "That might be my reaction because I'm convinced that Christianity is true and because it's true, it's very important. But I think, in a cool-headed moment, I'd advise you that you should only become a Christian if you believe it's true. It's too serious a matter to make decisions one way the other lightly, and that's what I've been trying to say all along, although I suppose I haven't been doing it very well. Right now, when you're in a dry and dismal mood isn't a good time to be making big decisions of any kind, let alone ones that are going to affect the rest of your life and beyond that."
"But if it's such an important decision, is it really such a good idea to put it off?" Phil objected. "What if I never get a chance to think about it coolly?"
"That's why you have to hold onto what you believe now, or would believe in a better mood: namely, that God is good and wants people—including you, personally—to know Him and come to the truth. Then pray that you find the truth and study the matter thoroughly from both sides. Of course, our opportunities for studying and asking questions are pretty limited here, but that only makes it all the more important to pray about it. And that's the real reason why now is a bad time for you to be making up your mind one way or the other, because if you don't want to celebrate Rosh Hashanah because you're that unsure that there's any truth in any of this, I'd be willing to bet you don't see any point in praying to someone you're not sure you believe in."
Phil lightly traced his finger in the sand. "You really think praying is that important?"
"Uh, no," Tony replied. "It's definitely much more important than how I made it sound just now."
Phil grinned slightly. "You know, Rosh Hashanah is the start of ten days of prayer. Then it ends with Yom Kippur, which is a day of prayer and fasting. Maybe this would be a good time to try out your advice."