I was almost there when I was thrown to the ground. I landed with a thud on the deck, the wind knocked out of me. I thought at first I’d been hit and looked around defensively as I gasped for breath. But when I tried to stand up, I realized the deck was shuddering underneath me. Almost everyone else had been flung from their feet as well by some gigantic shock.

The head cook was teetering at the edge of the rocking ship, groping for the steel cables. I wanted to go to her to help, but the deck was too unstable; I tried to move to her and was thrown to the ground again. I watched in horror as she lost her balance and fell over the side. Her screams were drowned in a roaring that blocked out all other sound.

We were rising again. We didn’t have the buoyancy of a ship in water, but rocked as if balanced on the air itself. Sheridan’s comment at breakfast came back to me: the Fitzgerald being held in the air and snapped in two. I didn’t understand what was happening, why were we rising, why there was no water pushing up, but I felt vilely sick.

Bledsoe was standing near me, his face gray. I clung to the self-unloader for support and pulled myself up for the second time. The crew were crawling away from the open sides of the ship toward the pilothouse, but we could not help one another. The ship was too unstable.

As we rose, sheets of water rushed up like giant geysers between the sides of the ship and the lock. They towered skyward in a thick curtain cutting us off from the land, and then from the sky. A hundred feet above us the water rushed before falling in a pounding torrent onto the deck, knocking me over again, knocking everyone over. I could hear some of the men near me screaming.

I peered stupidly at the curtain of water, trying to see through it to the men at the sides with their cables. They couldn’t be holding them, couldn’t be restraining the ship as she rose lurchingly upward, lashing forward and backward in her concrete confines.

Holding the self-unloader, I struggled to my knees. A wall of water was pounding the forward gate, ripping panels from it. Great logs spewed into the air and disappeared through the sheets of water which still rose on either side of the ship.

I wanted to shut my eyes, shut out the disaster, but I couldn’t stop staring, horror-stricken. It was like watching through a marijuana high. Pieces of the lock broke off in slow motion. I could see each one, each separate fragment, each drop of water spraying loose, knowing all the time that the scene was moving very quickly.