Hope is, under some conditions, harder than despair. Despair is at least stable. Hope that gets repeatedly and cruelly cancelled is a continuous source of fresh pain.
## The Knowledge He Had That Others Would Not Have Had
One of the most important questions in understanding how Alvarenga survived is: what specific knowledge did he bring to this situation that an inexperienced person would not have had?
The answer is not a short list.
He knew, from years of deep-water fishing, that the ocean is not empty of food even when there is no equipment for catching it in conventional ways. He knew that sea turtles surface and breathe, and that a calm approach could get a person close enough to capture one. He knew which parts of a turtle were edible and which were not, and he knew that the blood, while unusual as a beverage, was a meaningful source of fluid. He knew how birds behaved around floating objects in the open ocean — that at night, tired birds would land on anything that provided a resting surface, and that a patient, still approach could result in capture. He knew how to open a fish quickly and efficiently, and which organs provided the most nutritional value relative to the others.
He knew how to read weather from the sky. He knew what formations of clouds meant rain was coming, and he knew how long ahead of a squall he needed to prepare his collection containers. He knew the difference between a squall — a brief, localized rain event — and a sustained weather system, and he knew what each meant for his immediate situation. He was not reading the sky with a fisherman’s full navigational toolkit — he had no instruments, no charts, no radio weather reports — but he was reading it with the accumulated experience of years of making decisions based on it.