Love On The Rocks

Unpredictable weather and unpredictable footing -- if they weren't careful, they'd end up in the lake.

A thick blanket of fog was rolling in, but she wanted to walk along the lakefront and he wasn't about to contradict her. He'd been trying to get her alone for weeks, to split with the group that went everywhere together. Hard to build up a relationship when you were one of eight, all competing for the center of attention. He wasn't even sure she was the least bit interested in him until she suggested that they come over here, to look at the Bahai Temple glowing like the moon. Look at the temple, and watch your step. Algae and seaweed coated the rocks along the shore, green slime that was more slippery than ice.

How's calculus, he thought he might ask, but she lurched against him. Slipped, didn't see that patch of wet weed. They were too close to the edge. Gingerly, he touched her elbow to steer her away from the water's edge and onto a dry path that he couldn't see in the misty darkness. All this way to walk, and they couldn't even make out the temple through the fog.

"Did you hear that?" she said, stopping dead in her tracks. "Someone screaming?"

He pricked up his ears, but only the soft hush of waves on tumbled concrete whispered. "Noises carry funny in weather like this," he said. Physics 305, Applied, Engineering. Then he heard it too.

A man was calling out, calling for help, his voice getting louder. Out of the mist he appeared, drenched to the bone, dripping wet, gasping with exhaustion and panic.
"Please, we need help," the stranger said.

From far away, the couple picked up the echoes of many people calling for help, women screaming, but the fog blinded them. There could be dozens of people in the water, or a boat may have crashed into a breakwater. Again, the stranger begged for help, their boat had gone down, the Lady Elgin, get help.

"Stay here," he said to her, don't move and don't fall in. "Call the cops."

"There's no service here," she said. The lakefront was cell phone tower free. "I'll go back up towards Sheridan Road. Will you be all right?"

He was the man, the protector of the weak, masculinity in all its glory, encased in the short, pudgy body of a brainy engineering major. All those years in the Boy Scouts had done him some good service, however.

The stranger grabbed his arm, please hurry, and the student put aside his reveries, ready to spring into action. Locate the site of the sinking, look for survivors who could be pulled out of Lake Michigan. For someone who had struggled to swim to shore, the victim had a powerful grip. He would get pulled into the lake himself if he wasn't careful.

The fog swallowed up the stranger. "Where are you?" he screamed out. "Can anyone hear me? Is anyone out there?"

Before long, flashlight beams bounced through the mist and a voice announced the presence of the Evanston police. The student hurried to give the officers the details, such as he had. A man had approached, said he was on a boat that had gone down, and they needed help. Shouldn't the Coast Guard be involved?

"What boat went down, did he say?" the policeman asked.

"He said it was the Lady Elgin," the student said. "He didn't say how many people were aboard."

The cop, who had been interested and intense, relaxed his shoulders. He turned his head and spoke into the radio that was clipped to his shirt. "Forget it, dispatch. College prank again."

"Officer, I saw the man and he was not pulling a prank," she said. People were dying in the lake and no one would believe the couple.

"Listen, buddy, you tell your frat brothers we fell for it again, okay? You can all have a good laugh," the policeman said.

"What about the Lady Elgin?" she shouted, outraged.

"The Lady Elgin went down in 1860," the cop said. "And we're getting pretty fed up with you college kids making these prank calls. Next time, we're not going to be so nice about it."

A shift in the wind sent the fog back out, to creep over the edge of Indiana, and the Bahai Temple came into brilliant white view. She looked at him, puzzled, confused, and put her hand on his arm.

"Oh my god," she gasped. "It's wet. Your sleeve's wet."