More than mere survival
Fort Worth businesswoman teaches others how to thrive in near death situations
Deborah Scaling Kiley was rescued at sea in 1982 after five days of battling sharks and watching three crewmembers die. She had faced starvation, bitter cold and exposure. Afterward, she thought she knew everything about survival. In truth, she was just beginning to learn.
Kiley is the first to admit she was not prepared for the events that led to her rescue at sea. The basic facts of her story are this: In 1982, seeking to return to her motherÂ’s home in New Orleans, Kiley, then in New England and an experienced deckhand, agreed to be part of a crew that sailed a 58-foot yacht, the Trashman, from Bar Harbor, Maine to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. When the boat sailed into a 70-knot gale off the North Carolina coast, it went down quickly, leaving the five-person crew adrift in the Atlantic in a 12-foot inflatable dinghy with no food or water. Sharks quickly surrounded their craft. Five days and nights later, only two crewmembers, Kiley and Brad Cavanagh, remained alive. They were rescued by a Russian freighter.
That spare outline only begins the Flying Dutchman-like tale that would put Edgar Allen Poe to shame with equal elements of strangeness, gore, suspense and enchantment. During their days adrift in the Atlantic, two crewmembers drank seawater and, delirious, they dived into the ocean, one saying he was going to 7-Eleven. Both were attacked and killed by the sharks. One attack occurred underneath their boat, nearly capsizing the small craft.
Another woman on the crew had been injured during the sinking and died before they could be rescued. Before she died, however, she began to speak in tongues and moved about freely, without pain, despite her injuries.
“I recognized the speaking in tongues from growing up in Pentecostal churches. I will go to my grave believing she was speaking in the voice of God. I know that sounds strange to say, but anyone who was there would think the same thing,” she says.
Several things kept Kiley and her fellow survivor, Cavanagh, together during their ordeal. Unlike two other members of the crew, they had not been drinking heavily prior to the sinking.
“The other two were probably dehydrated before we even sank,” says Kiley.
Kiley, who had a troubled relationship with her mother, focused on being reunited with her.
“It was a way to keep going, to have a goal; and it’s very important to have a goal in a survival situation,” says Kiley. “I actually had a vision of a happy reunion with my mother and that helped keep me alive. The happy reunion didn’t actually happen, but, hey, it worked while I was in the boat.”
Anger also kept her focused on surviving. Kiley, correctly, as it turned out, knew they had been forgotten by the U.S. Coast Guard and used her anger to will herself to stay alive long enough to seek retribution. The Coast GuardÂ’s report said the Trashman was safely in port.
“Anger can be a very powerful emotion and you have to use what you have,” she says.
The two survivors also made a pact during the ordeal to watch out for each other.
“We were both the most able and most together people on the boat, so we made a pact to watch out for each other. It relieved a lot of the stress. [Stress,] in a survival situation, can kill you,” says Kiley.
Following their rescue, Cavanagh quickly went back sailing.
“He got back right on the horse,” says Kiley, who eventually sailed again also.
The first hint there was more to survival than being picked up by a Russian freighter occurred as Kiley recovered at her motherÂ’s home in New Orleans in the aftermath. Unsurprisingly, she began having nightmares of being adrift in the ocean, only there was not an ocean, but a black carpet full of pink-and-green cabbage roses. The carpet seemed familiar, but she couldnÂ’t place it until she related the nightmare to her mother.
“My mother said it sounded like the carpet at our ranch house and it hit home. That was the carpeting I’d stare at so intently and disappear into as I was being abused as a child. That was when I knew there was more to this than just survival at sea. I had been surviving all my life. I didn’t know what to do about it then, but it started the process in me,” she says.
Now a Fort Worth physical fitness trainer, motivational speaker and author, Kiley preaches the gospel of survival.
“I’m evangelical about survival. I think everyone has that primal survival instinct smoldering inside,” says Kiley. “When an event happens, like it happened to me, you realize it’s there. It may be just a spark, but it turns into a flame.”
Kiley’s latest book, “No Victims Only Survivors,” chronicles her survival story and others to cull sometimes brutal facts about getting into what Kiley calls a “survival mindset.”
“Survival is not just about what you’re carrying with you in a backpack, it’s also what you’re carrying around in your mind. You have to be prepared,” she says. “I really think you can enhance your life, along with your chances for survival, by going with your gut instinct, listening to that, to be aware, to adapt and to realize that every choice you make you will be held accountable for, as I am for the choices I made. And you have to realize, if you make the wrong choice, you can die.”
Kiley, 48, was raised in Fort Worth and attended Moning Middle School and Arlington Heights High School and learned to sail on Possum Kingdom Lake. Her mother had five marriages and, during one of them, Kiley was abused and began to suffer from bulimia.
After her shipwreck, Kiley eventually returned to New England, married and had two children: Marka and Quatro. Plagued by nightmares, she fought to exorcise the ghosts she carried with her from the ordeal at sea. In 1994, she wrote everything down in a book co-authored by Meg Noonan, first published as “Albatross” then reissued as “Untamed Seas.” It has now been reissued by Kiley’s own publishing firm as “The Sinking.” In 1997, the story was made into an ABC-TV movie, “Two Came Back,” starring Melissa Joan Hart.
Most recently the story was retold as an episode of the Discovery Channel series, “I Shouldn’t Be Alive.” Kiley and several other survivors profiled in that series are scheduled to appear on Larry King Live Thursday, April 27 on the Cable News Network at 8 p.m. A new series on the Discovery Channel, called “I Shouldn’t Be Alive: Science of Survival,” will air Friday, April 28 at 8 p.m. and uses Kiley’s experience to examine survival. She will have a book signing at the Border’s Book Store at Hulen and I-30 on Saturday, May 6 from 1 to 3 p.m.
After her first marriage disintegrated, Kiley returned to Fort Worth and set up shop as a fitness instructor at Fit For Life at 5117 Pershing. She is a master fitness specialist, certified by the Cooper Institute, and is also a yoga instructor.
When she first went to sea in 1980, she had started her studies at The University of Texas at Austin, so she enrolled at The University of Texas at Arlington to finish, eventually creating her own interdisciplinary degree in media dynamics, graduating in 1999. She is currently pursuing a degree in Nutritional Sciences from Texas Christian University.
She continued speaking out about survival, raising her children and continuing her fitness business. She was not really interested in dating anyone seriously when a friend insisted she meet Greg Blackmon, chief operating officer for the firm co-founded by his father, Blackmon-Mooring.
And it was – not love at first sight.
“We weren’t really all that fond of each other at first, to tell you the truth,” she says.
Blackmon agrees.
“That’s true. At first we weren’t that fired up about each other. It took awhile. There was something there, but it took awhile,” he says.
Kiley has an explanation.
“We’re not really comfortable with things we don’t know. I grew up in a household full of alcoholics and abusers. When I met this man who had it all together, I didn’t like him because I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t seem familiar to me. I had to get past that,” she says.
Greg and his two brothers, Kirk and Bill, still run Blackmon-Mooring, which has morphed from a two-man operation started by GregÂ’s father, W.G. Blackmon, who still comes into the office, and Scott Mooring, who died in 2004. The company, known simply as Blackmon Mooring, grew into a worldwide company that developed a patented steam-cleaning process and has since morphed into a major player in the post-catastrophe restoration business.
Kiley and Blackmon find it ironic that both of their lives are in some ways tied to disasters.
“Whenever there is a disaster, I’m off and running, the house is topsy-turvy,” he says.
Blackmon says he has learned to live with KileyÂ’s quasi-celebrity status.
“We were leaving the Nashville airport recently, and right there at scanning station, this man rushes up to us and says, ‘Are you Debbie Kiley of the Trashman?’ She said she was and the guy just talked and talked about what an inspiration she was for him. I introduce myself and he’s polite to me, but obviously the focus is on Debbie. That’s the way it is. I’m the guy they politely turn to and say, ‘Nice to meet you’ and then they turn back to talk to Debbie,” he says.
KileyÂ’s goal is not to become well known, but to give people strength by understanding the techniques of survival.
“That’s her whole goal. She’s driven to do that. She’s putting all the profits of the books back into her organization, No Victims Only Survivors, because she believes in it and she’s lived it,” he says.
For all her strength, Blackmon says her new book, “No Victims Only Survivors,” was difficult.
“She had agonized and agonized over this because she had all these things she wanted to say and she wanted to explore – not just the sinking, but also her life before the sinking that was nearly as hair-raising. Finally I said to do it,” says Blackmon. “And she finally decided that survival is survival even it’s a failed marriage or child abuse or other incidents that aren’t as dramatic as being lost at sea. Writing the book has not just helped her, it’s helped a lot of other people as well.”
The book includes a list for a basic survival kit she developed with help from Backwoods, a sporting goods store at 3212 Camp Bowie Blvd. But, Kiley says, more important than having a survival kit, however, is developing the mental toughness required to survive, whether it be earthquakes, the weather, terrorist attacks, child abuse, neglect, bulimia, drugs, rejection or loneliness.
“My goal is to create fewer victims and more survivors. That’s the purpose of the book and of the organization,” says Kiley.
The organizationÂ’s Web site is www.novictimsonlysurvivors.com.
In her new book, published this month, Kiley summarizes the lessons of survival into 10 points: awareness, intuition, luck and timing, preparation, adaptability, vision, will, accountability, forgiveness and grace.
“We all need to listen to our gut more: Intuition. My brain was screaming at me not to sail with these people on the Trashman. The captain didn’t even like to sail, one of the crewmembers was drunk all the time, but I didn’t listen. That was normal to me. That’s what I grew up with, so I went,” she says.
Some of those points may have seemed lacking, given the harrowing, even grisly, events Kiley faced at sea, but they werenÂ’t, she says. Luck, for instance. Despite all their misfortune, Kiley says they actually did have luck.
“We sank in the 55-mile wide patch of the Gulf Stream, where the water was warm. If we had sunk outside of that narrow band, we’d have been in water with temperatures in the 50s. We’d have been dead in no time,” says Kiley. “When the Russian freighter rescued us, we were drifting out of the Gulf Stream. Another couple of hours and that would have been it for us. We were also lucky that we drifted into a seaweed bed and we used the seaweed to cover ourselves from the elements.
“That was more luck. I call it gifts of grace wrapped in funky paper. Life gives you little breaks like that, but in survival situations, it’s usually slim, little advantages, not sudden victories. You have to take advantage of that.”
The last lesson Kiley learned was forgiveness.
“I knew there was something missing from my list and I didn’t know what it was until I was watching the television coverage of the Katrina victims and I saw the Coast Guard risking life and limb to pull people off the rooftops, wherever,” says Kiley. “I really carried a grudge against the Coast Guard. They had abandoned us, left us there to die. I really carried it with me. But when I saw the Coast Guard rescuing those people, I just let go. It took a couple of decades, but I let go and you have to. That really completed my book.”
Looking back over the last few years of the new century, Kiley sees more need for her message than ever.
“Look at the survivor stories from 9-11, look at Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami. We still need those innate survival skills that were born and bred in us many, many years ago. Without the instinct for survival, none of us would be here. We all have it in us,” she says.
Contact Francis at rfrancis@bizpress.net.
