Page 91 of The Love Haters

Hutch thought about it. “Your fins are your power and your control. So you don’t want to lose that. Especially in a stormy ocean.”

Was the ocean below us stormy?

It definitely seemed a little worked up about something.

It was astonishing how calm everybody was. I could hear the crew talking through the headsets. The pilots were serenely discussing procedures and positioning. The flight mechanic was adjusting equipmentin the back. And Hutch was waiting in position for the moment when he would drop himself into the ocean.

For me, this was utterly surreal.

For these guys, it was just another day at the office.

Below us, there was a small fishing boat on its side. It had been knocked over by one of these enormous waves. A survivor bobbed in the water close by with an orange life jacket on.

The pilots positioned us over him, and the wind from our rotor rippled the water, making it spray. Hutch had switched his flight helmet out for his yellow swim helmet and put his fins on over his swim shoes. As we hovered in position, Vanessa opened the door and slid it back, and Hutch moved toward the opening, dropping his feet over the side.

“Is it scary?” I had asked him, back in that same interview. “Jumping out of helicopters?”

“Nah,” Hutch had said—a light in his eyes confirming his words. “It’s fun.”

“But there are so many ways you could die,” I said.

“If you’re a person who thinks about it that way,” Hutch said, “you wouldn’t be here. You’d never have made it through swim school.”

It was pretty clear before, and possiblyextraclear now, that I never would have made it through swim school. Even just watching Hutch sit there gave me a dropped-stomach feeling.

And then he did exactly the thing my stomach was afraid of.

He shoved off and went over.

I got a very cool shot. Splash and all.

As soon as Hutch was in the water, he was swimming in the direction of the survivor—pumping his arms and shoulders hard in a type of swimming he calledsprinting. I zoomed in close and watched him work through the spray. He reached the soul, as they called him, and within a few minutes, Hutch was giving the signal for a basket. Vanessa lowered it down and I filmed that, too. As the basket descended, Hutch clamped the survivor into a cross-chest carry to maneuver closer to meet it.

The basket reached the surface and disappeared under the water. Hutch grabbed its wire and helped the survivor get positioned inside.When Hutch gave the signal, Vanessa raised the basket with the survivor inside. The winch for the hoisting cable was on a hinged metal arm, and when the survivor reached the right height, Vanessa rotated the arm to bring the basket inside the cabin. Hutch was next. She lowered a clip to him, he attached it to his harness, and she raised him up, too.

The survivor was a fifty-something guy in a Hawaiian shirt—looking very much like he hadn’t anticipated that his day might end up this way. He didn’t have any visible injuries that I could see, but he was definitely wide-eyed, like his brain was still trying to catch up to what was happening. Hutch got him settled, and the pilots got us moving to return to base, and I put my camera away.

For something so extraordinary, they really made it look easy.

Just another life-saving sortie, I guess.

But maybe not for everyone. I snuck a glance at the survivor just before we landed, and saw that he was crying.

BACK AT THEhangar, before Hutch headed off to the locker room to clean up, I stopped him and said, “Do they always cry like that?”

Hutch turned and met my eyes for the first time all day—that sad frown of his back in full force. “People do a lot of strange things.”

I felt like that was supposed to mean something.

Enough was enough.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.

Hutch considered how to answer before he sighed and said, “No. I’m the one who was wrong.”

“Wrong about what?” I said, a tinge of frustration in my voice.

Hutch looked down, then back up. “I talked to Cole on the phone last night. For the first time in a year.”

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