Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy by Michael J. Tougias, Douglas A. Campbell

local newspaper. Among his badges was one for canoeing.
    Nor were these years in Montpelier devoid of simple joy for the boy. In winter, he would climb the hill behind their home and ski down before school with his sisters. After supper, Anna Walbridge would read to her children. In the summer, during family picnics, one of the larger rocks on a hillside field served as the table. Everyone would sit and talk around a campfire. Anna quoted different poems, Howard quoted Shakespeare, Grandfather recited Longfellow, Milton, and Shelley, and Grandmother a little bit of everything.
    Robert and his sisters helped set the table; washed dishes; dusted; fed the farm animals—they raised their own cows and chickens, as well as vegetables; mowed lawns; weeded their assigned three rows of peas each day during the summer; drove the tractor for haying; assisted in canning the vegetables—anything their parents were doing, the Walbridge children did.
    In Boy Scouts, Robert learned to cook. One morning, Lucille started to cook eggs in the farmhouse kitchen. “He put his arm around me and gently shoved me aside and said, ‘Let me do that,’ ” Lucille recalled. “He took four eggs, two in each hand, and then simultaneously cracked all four of them and dumped the shells in the wastebasket in one smooth motion. Eggs went in the frying pan and shells went in the trash. He was thirteen. It was a few days after that that he got the job cooking at Howard Johnson’s.”
    Nor, Walbridge told his sister, did he ever stop cooking. Aboard Bounty , he said, he baked eight loaves of bread every other day. He said he taught bread-baking to his crew members.
    •  •  •  
    The Vietnam War was raging when Robert graduated from Montpelier High School. That summer, he took a job as a cook at a prestigious golf resort on Vermont’s Lake Morey. He wanted a truck but he wasn’t twenty-one yet, and the Lake Morey Inn was a move up from Howard Johnson.
    The resort provided its guests with small boats on which to sail the lake, where the pink summer evening clouds reflected majestically on the lake surface. Robert Walbridge borrowed a friend’s sailboat and sailed across the lake. He was hooked. The feel of the wind in the sails thrilled the teenager, who as a boy had seen lobster boats and lusted. But for a while, boats and sailing would have to wait.
    He applied for conscientious objector status and took a defense-industry job at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, Connecticut. During his time at the aircraft company, he was always busy but found time to enroll in art and algebra courses at a community college. His trucking plans were on hold, and he felt that in taking courses, he also was wasting his time. He told his sister that he had earned A’s in both courses but that he had learned all that college could teach him.
    On October 25, 1970, Walbridge turned twenty-one and was eligible to get a truck driver’s license. As soon as that was accomplished, he paid cash for a new semitractor—money from the egg routes and paper routes and car sales and restaurant jobs and even from the coins he’d accepted in his childhood “for my truck”—and hit the road as a long-haul trucker. He had planned for seventeen years for this moment and had made it happen.
    It would be another decade or more before Robert Walbridge turned away from the highways and toward the sea. Just before he did that, he made another move he had apparently been contemplating for some time.
    Few people outside the Walbridge family called him Robert. They seemed to feel that Bob or Bobby was a better name. This apparently grated on him, and in his midthirties he took action.
    In some court the date is recorded when Robert Walbridge officially changed his name to Robin. He was like that, headstrong and determined. These qualities would have grave consequences as Bounty headed toward Hurricane Sandy.

CHAPTER SEVEN
JOSHUA’S STORY
    Friday, October 26, 2012, was a good day at