The boat continued on a different kind of Pacific work. The sea that had been Alvarenga’s prison for more than a year became, in a different vessel, the medium through which the people who rescued him conducted their daily lives.
Alvarenga, by the reports that followed him after his return, settled in a small town in El Salvador, away from the water. He developed a fear of water that doctors noted after his return. He had trouble sleeping. These are the traces of an experience that left marks that don’t disappear simply because the experience ended.
He wrote about it — or collaborated in writing about it, with Franklin’s assistance — and the book that resulted gave the account its most complete form. He spoke about it to journalists, to officials, to the family of the young man who didn’t come home. He carried the story because he was the only person who could tell it.
The Pacific Ocean that carried him from Mexico to the Marshall Islands doesn’t have a story. It has currents and trade winds and squalls and a temperature that’s warm enough to keep him alive in the water during the times he went in. It has turtles that surface to breathe and birds that land on floating objects at night and fish that can be caught with bare hands if you know how. It has approximately twenty container ships whose crews didn’t see a small open boat waving for help.
The Pacific gave him enough to survive and the distance necessary to drift for 438 days. It took his companion and most of a year of his life. What he came back with was the story itself — and the testimony, supported by ocean science and official records and one polygraph test, that what he said happened is what the currents and the biology and the timing all confirm was possible.