Everyone knows what's wrong with the American middle class. In comparison to poor people, the third world and practically everyone else, we're too rich, too selfish, too greedy and too smug. Then every once in a while a situation comes along which puts our values to the test and we find to our relief and wonder we're not such pond scum after all.

On Sept. 6, 1985, after 21 days adrift in a small boat in the Indian Ocean with two Indonesian boatmen, two 27-year old Palos Verdes women, Judy Schwartz and Rickey Berkowitz, washed ashore in a remote fishing village in southern Sumatra. Although initially weak and malnourished, they recovered so quickly that, before returning to Los Angeles, they held a press conference at the American Embassy in Jakarta. "We thought it was kind of fun," Schwartz would later say. "We had no idea what all this publicity was going to lead to."

What it led to, Schwartz discovered, was a "madhouse." When their plane taxied up to Bradley International Terminal at LAX, they were practically attacked by the reporters. It was one media flash after another--"CBS Morning News," "Nightline," the "Today Show" and 12 minutes with Johnny Carson. The phones never stopped ringing. Everyone wanted an exclusive interview. "I was getting really tired," Schwartz says. "I was starting my job a week later. I was moving (to a new apartment). I just really got frustrated and was crying a lot."

On top of this, Reuters now sent out a wire-service report quoting Indonesian newspaper stories that cast a different light on what up to now everyone had reported as a heartwarming story of Yankee ingenuity and true grit. Although Schwartz and Berkowitz were practically back to normal after a decent meal and a good night's sleep, the two Indonesian boatmen needed hospitalization for dehydration and shock. The reason, the boatmen said, was that the women had hoarded all the food. And to keep themselves from dying of starvation, said one of the boatmen, they had to snatch food from the women's bag.

Although such charges left Schwartz and Berkowitz appalled and aghast-- "We behaved with a good deal of dignity," Berkowitz would later complain. "They were jerks"--the surprising thing was that neither side really disagreed on the basic facts. The real problem was rather one of assumptions. In matters of life and death, their deepest values were worlds apart.

Rickey Berkowitz has the compact physique and walnut-cracking smile of a Mary Lou Retton. Her personality is upbeat, confident and relentlessly enthusiastic. A jogger and player of tennis, racquetball and softball, she grew up in Palos Verdes where she was the only girl in the neighborhood to pack her own fielder's mitt. In years past, she has backpacked in the Canadian Rockies, gone bird watching in Mexico, traveled throughout Europe and lived for six months on an Israeli kibbutz where she studied Hebrew and installed irrigation pipes. Before quitting her job to vacation with Schwartz, she worked as a hospital planner for Kaiser (her major project: a $120 million hospital in Riverside). Since her return, she's re-entered graduate school to get credentialed as a school psychologist.

Judy Schwartz currently lives in a small apartment in Mountain View. A visitor who came to see her recently found her dressed in faded jeans and the same tennis shoes she wore during her 21 days at sea ("They're cleaner now," she says cheerfully). In conversation, Schwartz comes across as trusting, bubbly and innocently naive. A self-described "right brain person," she plays the guitar, makes stained glass windows and designs her own Christmas cards. Her father is a junior high school principal in San Pedro and her mother a registered nurse. Self-confident without being pushy, she was president of her high school senior class. Now she spends her spare time hiking, skiing and wind surfing. Since her return from Indonesia, she's been living with her fiancee in northern California where she teaches physical education to emotionally disturbed children.

It was at a party on New Year's Eve, 1984, that Schwartz and Berkowitz, who have known each ever since they played basketball together in seventh grade PE, decided to spend the summer traveling through Fiji, New Zealand, Australia and Bali. But just as they were about to leave the country, they saw an article in the June '85 National Geographic touting Ujung Kulon, an exotic and untamed wildlife refuge on the westernmost tip of Java near the infamous Krakatau volcano.

It wasn't just the haunting pictures of rare Javan rhinoceroses and river boats drifting through deep virgin jungle that made the place seem so mysterious. In 1883 Krakatau erupted with such vehemence that it stampeded sheep in Australia 1700 miles away and sent a 100 foot wall of water sweeping across the coastal villages of western Java and southern Sumatra. Altogether some 36,000 people died, including the entire population of Ujung Kulon. Except for a few park rangers, the place has been uninhabited ever since--if you don't count monkeys, crocodiles, leopards, leeches and great clouds of fruit-eating bats with five-foot wingspans. To Schwartz and Berkowitz, it seemed exactly the way to cap what would undoubtedly be their last summer- long vacation together before settling down to careers and motherhood.

Getting to the Ujung Kulon peninsula is not simply a matter of signing up for the tour bus in Jakarta. First you have to get a park permit from the Indonesian government (no small task in itself), travel to the west coast of Java and then, as the peninsula is separated from the mainland by an impenetrable marsh, find someone to take you there by boat.

Java's everyday weather is like New York City's worst ever heat wave, the kind that end with knife fights in the kitchen and riots in the street. The consolation is the lush green beauty of Java's west coast with its picture book rice paddies, coconut palm beaches and wandering water buffalo. The sands are white, the water like a warm bath and at night the breaking waves flash blue with phosphorescence.

While trying to arrange transportation to Ujung Kulon, Schwartz and Berkowitz stayed at the Carita Beach Krakatau Hotel. The word hotel is a bit of a misnomer. It isn't so much a hotel as a beach front array of shabby thatched cottages hidden under the coconut palms. If it weren't for the refrigerated beer coolers, the place could come right out of a novel by Joseph Conrad. Strings of coconuts serve as dividers in the open lobby and water buffalo skulls decorate the pillars. In the evenings, local women wander up and down the beaches offering massages to tourists, while off on the horizon looms the ominous hulk of Krakatau.

As there was no shortage of villagers eager to take tourists on boat trips, Schwartz and Berkowitz quickly made a deal with an enterprising villager named Amat, who for $150 agreed to take them and a new Australian friend, Paul Van Der Moezel, to Ujung Kulon for four days.

"Amat was a nice warm guy," Schwartz says. He had earlier taken the two women on a day-trip to Krakatau. And Schwartz "really felt confident with him." As a result she and Berkowitz were more than a little troubled when, on the morning of the trip, they discovered that Amat was sending them out in a 16-foot fiber-glass runabout with a semi-enclosed cabin, not the 40-foot ocean-going fishing boat he used for the Krakatau trips. Furthermore, Amat now told them he couldn't go in person and was sending two villagers in his place. The final blow, Schwartz says, was Van Der Moezel, who at the last minute announced that he was really "sorry, but he had a bad feeling about it and he just decided he didn't want to go." As a way of making it up to Schwartz and Berkowitz, Van Der Moezel promised to wait at Carita Beach until they came back.

From Carita Beach to Ujung Kulon was a five-hour boat trip across waters so clear and calm that Schwartz could have water-skied the entire way. Around two in the afternoon, just 10 miles from their destination, the engine suddenly quit. "We knew we were in trouble," Berkowitz says, "when the boatmen pulled out their tool kit and it consisted of a rusty pair of pliers, a couple of old spark plugs and a wrench that didn't fit." The boatmen, Jasman and Simin (Javanese usually only have one name), tried pulling the starter rope some 20 or 30 times and changing the spark plug but, according to Schwartz, their "mechanical ability was nil."

In an effort to keep the boat from drifting out to sea, Jasman and Simin dropped the anchor but the water was so deep it didn't touch bottom. Swimming was equally out of the question--even if you ignored the shark problem, the distance was too great. At one point, Schwartz even tried to tow the boat to shore by jumping in the water with a rope around her waist, a futile gesture she later took to calling her "bionic woman" mode.

Despite such efforts and the total lack of emergency equipment, neither Schwartz nor Berkowitz felt particularly worried. "We had just seen fishermen. We had the coast in view behind us and an island in front of us." The Park Rangers on Ujung Kulon expected them. And if they didn't return in four days, Van Der Moezel would notify the authorities who would start looking immediately, if Amat hadn't found them first. In the meantime, the sunsets were beautiful at sea and that night Schwartz and Berkowitz sat on the cabin roof, looked at the stars and sang songs.

By the next morning, however, the swift currents of the Sunda Strait had carried them past the island and, by the third day, they had drifted so far into the Indian Ocean they'd lost sight of land altogether.

A 16-foot boat is small enough for four people under the best conditions, but after the motor died, Berkowitz says, Simin appropriated the only place on the boat where one could really lie down and stretch out. "He took the cabin. He took our blankets. He took the air mattress." He used to lie there with his arms folded behind his head while the women sat in the cramped stern of the boat under a boiling sun, trying to rest on the hard narrow benches. "We couldn't stretch out. We couldn't relax. We didn't really sleep for 21 days except in snatches."

Not that sleeping would have been that easy in any case. Although the water was sometimes calm and flat, on other occasions there would be smooth rolling swells. And occasionally they would get hit with huge booming waves that crashed over the boat and made the women's hearts pound. At first, Schwartz and Berkowitz didn't worry about the conspicuous absence of any rescue ships or search planes and rather spent their time swimming (to cool off and stretch their legs), working on the motor or trying to catch fish. For amusement, they sang songs, played cards, exchanged recipes and otherwise drove themselves mad thinking about food. Then in the evenings they watched for shooting stars and passing satellites.

As they envisioned the rescue scenario, no one would even realize they were missing for the first four days. On the fifth day, Van Der Moezel would no doubt assume they were having a splendid time and had decided to stay another day. The sixth day, it would dawn on him that he'd better go to Jakarta to notify the authorities. And finally, on the seventh day, Schwartz says, they'd send out the rescue fleet.

But when Friday, Aug. 23, came and went without a single ship on the horizon or plane in the sky, they began to wonder if maybe their earlier confidence had been misplaced; maybe Van Der Moezel hadn't bothered to wait the four days after all; maybe Amat just took the money and ran; maybe after all this time no one even knew they were missing. "That," Berkowitz says, "was when we decided to make a sail."

Using a Swiss Army knife and fishing line, Schwartz and Berkowitz sewed together a tent fly, rain poncho and two sarongs, fastened the result to a bamboo pole and, with the aid of a compass, pointed the bow toward Sumatra. "It wasn't like being in a Hobi Cat (catamaran)," Schwartz says. "There were times I wasn't sure we were moving at all." Still it felt good to do something, and they immediately felt better.

Although Java has ostensibly been an Islamic country since the 15th century, it's a mistake to confuse its brand of Islam with the kind practiced in the Middle East. Javanese Islam is riddled with strains from Hinduism, Buddhism and ancient animistic beliefs. Even in the highest levels of society, there is a widespread belief in magic, with some people carrying elaborate ceremonial knives which, they believe, have the power to befuddle robbers, extinguish fires and (of special importance in Java) divert lava flows. In metropolitan Jakarta, building contractors have difficulty getting workers if they haven't first appeased the local spirits by burying the head of a water buffalo under the foundation. And each year in Carita Beach, the villagers decorate the boats, take to the water and throw a water buffalo head overboard in the hopes that Loro Kidul, the Queen of the Indian Ocean, will accept that in place of her annual human sacrifice.

When, after 10 days, there still was no word about the missing boatmen, the families of Jasman and Simin assumed they were dead and said prayers for their souls in the village mosque. But in accordance with an even older tradition, Simin's wife, Rokaya, also took the precaution of sacrificing two white chickens to Loro Kidul and throwing their blood into the sea. Then when that didn't work, she sold five coconut trees and several other chickens to hire two witch doctors (dukun ), one local and the other the most famous (and expensive) one in west Java.

The results were vaguely hopeful, with one witch doctor claiming that all four people were alive and well, though he didn't know where, and the second saying he had a vision that Simin was now living in the village of Krui on the southwest coast of Sumatra. According to Amat, he sold his wife's jewelry to finance a subsequent bus-and-ferry trip to Sumatra. But if Simin was living there, Amat couldn't find him.

Good as his word, when Schwartz and Berkowitz didn't come back on the sixth day, Paul Van Der Moezel took a bus to Jakarta where, early Friday morning, Aug. 23, he informed American Embassy officials that his two American friends had gone on a boat trip on Aug. 17. "They haven't come back yet and I think they might be missing."

The embassy sent a cable to the State Department who in turn notified the families of Schwartz and Berkowitz that their daughters were missing in a remote and uninhabited region of Java. After waiting a sleepless night with no further news, they decided there was only one thing to do--go to Indonesia.

Arriving in Jakarta a bare 30 hours later, the parents awaited the embassy response with more than a little trepidation. They'd all seen the Jack Lemmon/Sissy Spacek movie "Missing" and as a result they half-expected to be treated with either indifference or contempt. Consequently, they were immensely grateful when Consul-General Susan Wood, a 37-year-old Rhodes scholar from Alabama, personally escorted them to West Java to oversee the search effort first hand.

After four days in West Java, however, they had all but lost hope. The Indonesian Coast Guard, Navy, police and park rangers all reported searching the entire Sunda Strait area up to and including southern Sumatra without result. The embassy had sent up its own inter-island plane, though with its limited range and poor search capability it hardly ventured out to sea. Finally, the embassy tracked down Amat at the local police station where he was nervously making a report on his role in the whole affair.

As Amat recounted the story, he had made two separate boat trips to Ujung Kulon to look for them, once losing a mast in the shrieking wind and pounding sea. But if the women and the boatmen were out there, he hadn't seen a trace.

Rickey's father, Marty Berkowitz, was frustrated at the lack of progress in finding his daughter and he took out his feelings on Amat for casually sending four people out into the Sunda Strait in a 16-foot runabout with no emergency gear. "Would you allow your own daughter to go out in a boat like that?" he demanded.

"Yes," Amat said.

Before leaving Carita Beach, the families had an emotional meeting with the two boatmen's wives, while the rest of the village gazed on in wonder. Jasman's wife was only 15 and cried the entire time. Simin's 3-year-old daughter kept asking when was her father coming back.

For Sue Wood, the three-hour trip back to Jakarta with the missing women's parents was the longest of her life. As Rickey and Judy had been missing now for nearly three weeks, it was more likely than not that their boat had overturned in the Indian Ocean's treacherous monsoons and 20 foot waves. About what might have happened after that, she didn't care to speculate. But when Japanese torpedoes sank a U.S. Navy ship the Java Sea during World War II, nearly 500 men died from thirst, exposure and repeated shark attacks.

In preparation for what they thought would be a short stay on Ujung Kulon, Schwartz and Berkowitz had bought enough food for four days: 15 slices of bread, a dozen hard-boiled eggs, 10 oranges, 5 apples, 2 pineapples, 2 bags of cookies, 2 packages of peanuts and 8 liters of water. As part of their agreement with Amat, they also provided six cups of rice and seven packs of clove cigarettes for the boatmen.

At first they just allowed anyone to eat or drink anything he wanted but, when after the third day at sea, it began to seem as if they might be out there a long time, they decided to ration the food and water. The difficulty was explaining the concept to Jasman and Simin.

The problem wasn't just the language barrier (the women communicated with the boatmen in gestures and pantomime)--it was the whole thrust of a South Seas island culture. Unlike mankind's experience in northern Europe, where if you didn't prepare for winter you simply didn't survive, on the equator, says Robert Althoff, a Peace Corps volunteer who organized Malaysian agricultural cooperatives in the early seventies, "life is bountiful. The rains come, the fruit grows, the volcanic soil is rich and fertile. You can grow double and triple crops year round. As a result, a mentality develops which says, you can live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself."

As far as Schwartz could tell, Jasman certainly gave no indication of worrying about tomorrow, and despite their critical water shortage, he helped himself to a drink every half hour. Worse yet, he didn't so much drink the water as swish it around in his mouth and then spit it out in the bottom of the boat. The women kept trying to tell him to swallow, but he just dismissed them with a "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." And spit it out anyway.

When they were down to their last two water bottles, Schwartz and Berkowitz decided it was time to start thinking of their own welfare. They gave one to the boatmen and kept the other for themselves. Jasman and Simin drank theirs the first day (spilling half of it in their haste). The next day, Simin asked the women to share the water. When they said no, he waited until they were sleeping, then took three swallows from their water bottle, leaving only the smallest sip.

Rickey was so furious when she woke up that she angrily accused the boatmen. "My god! They're stealing my water. I can't even sleep." Jasman acted horrified that anyone would steal water and, smiling broadly, he pointed to Simin.

In Java, direct confrontations are deeply mortifying. And, even though he had taken the water, Simin felt both humiliated and unjustly accused. After all, he would later say, he asked for water first and they had told him no.

Although she and Berkowitz were perfectly willing to share the food and water, the one thing they reserved for themselves, Schwartz says, was their small tube of Colgate toothpaste. "It tasted sweet and it made our mouths feel good and it felt like we were eating." To make it last longer, they only used it once a day at what they called their evening Happy Hour. "And as soon as we opened it up, Jasman came over with his finger out because he could smell it."

Jasman apparently thought the toothpaste was some sort of energy food (it had no calories at all). And one day, when the day pack was missing, Schwartz saw Jasman with a sarong over his head rifling through the pockets. Schwartz was so angry she just ripped the sarong off his head.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Schwartz says, Jasman was convinced that the women "had steaks in their backpacks or a bag of M&Ms." For one thing, whenever they took their malaria pills, Jasman would rush over with his hand out. Using pantomime they tried to make noises like a mosquito and otherwise explain that the pills would make him sick. But still convinced that they were energy pills, Jasman stole them to eat whenever he could.

In spite of this and Jasman's wasteful water habits, Schwartz felt kindly toward Jasman. He was the quieter and more competent of the pair and when she was sick at the beginning of the trip he had massaged her neck in a kindly way. In build he was short and muscular with a good knowledge of seamanship.

Simin, in contrast, was tall, thin and, in Schwartz's opinion, "just someone who took up space." After barely three days adrift, he had completely given up, gone into the cabin, lay down (on Schwartz's air mattress) and for the next 18 days virtually not come out again. When they weren't sleeping, Jasman and Simin passed the time rocking back and forth and praying to Gusti (Allah). It used to drive her half- daffy, Schwartz says. Every time she'd go in the cabin to try and sleep on the benches, Jasman would come and pray right beside her: "Ah Gusti, oh Gusti."

The women wouldn't have minded the praying so much if Jasman and Simin hadn't been so maddeningly passive in every other respect. They would work on the motor for five minutes and then give up. Or they'd try fishing one time. Jasman and Simin, of course, were operating under some radically different assumptions. Unlike Americans, for whom the notion of taking action in a crisis is practically ingrained at birth and who, despite much evidence to the contrary, sometimes act as if changing one's life is no more difficult than making a decision to do so, much of the Third World believes, not without good reason, that certain things are beyond its control.

Even more importantly, Jasman and Simin subscribed to the Islamic notion that whatever happened was part of God's plan. So when they found themselves stranded in an open boat in the Indian ocean without food or water, the only proper conclusion was that Allah had willed their deaths. As it would be the height of futility, not to mention a blatant heresy, to struggle against the will of Allah, the two boatmen rather devoted their time to what did make sense under the circumstances--preparing for the hereafter.

To Schwartz and Berkowitz, who were busy rigging sails, taking compass headings, and rationing supplies, their passivity appeared as a character flaw. "They didn't even try," Schwartz would later say. "They just laid down and moaned and groaned and let somebody take care of them--Gusti, whoever that was."

When the women rigged the sail on the seventh day, they had stood the makeshift mast in a 5 gallon gas can filled with water. The problem was the lack of a rudder. When the boat got off course, the only way to turn the boat back toward Sumatra was to move the mast. Because Jasman was the strongest, the task usually fell to him.

As Jasman saw it, it was both unfair and demeaning to be ordered about by the two women as if he were a servant. He was feeling weak, and the fact that the women had a compass didn't make it any less galling.

For their part, Schwartz and Berkowitz had tried to include the boatmen in all the decisions. But it seemed to the two women that the Indonesians didn't want to be treated as equals. For one thing, the boatmen wouldn't use their names and always called them Misses in a deferential whine--Hello, Misses.

Besides, the women were disgusted with Simin who seemed to have a phobia about getting wet, refused to wash, and smelled awful. In retaliation, they took to calling him "Seamy."

By their 10th day at sea, the boatmen were out of food and the women were down to their last three peanuts. Feeling as if he couldn't take it any more, Jasman leapt onto the roof of the cabin, assume a wide-legged Bruce Lee stance and, screaming "Huah, huah," furiously began to chop at the boat with a rusty machete. A piece of Plexiglas from the spray shield flew off and hit Berkowitz in the face. "No, no, no!" Schwartz screamed. "You want my peanuts? I'll give you my peanuts."

From her teaching experience with emotionally disturbed children, Schwartz knew the best way to deal with a temper tantrum was to act calm, avoid confrontation and let the crisis pass. After about ten minutes, during which time Jasman smashed the front window and wrecked the sleeping benches in the cabin, he put down the knife, hung his head in shame and promptly fell asleep.

In an effort to keep peace in the family, Schwartz patted Jasman on the shoulder, But even so, Schwartz was frightened from that day on. "I hated that knife. You never knew what was going to happen. 'What if they are cannibals?'"

Unlike the two women, who at least had a compass to point to Sumatra, Jasman and Simin were totally lost once the current swept them into the Indian Ocean. "Slowly we felt more and more weak and in a panic," says Simin. "My thinking was I am going to die." But just in case Gusti decided to rescue him, he promised to sacrifice "three goats" the instant he reached dry land.

In the meantime, it was a relief to discover that the two American women didn't blame him and Jasman for having stranded them out there. "They were very understanding of what was happening," Simin says. "The engine is broken. 'Oh, yes, yes.' We have no water. 'Oh, yes, yes.' Now, we will die. 'Oh, yes, yes, yes.'"

Although the two Americans went swimming at least once a day, Jasman and Simin recoiled when water splashed on them through the broken window. And together they made a pact--if one of them should die then the other would promise not throw the body into the sea.

"And if the corpse started to stink?"

Well, then, in that case, "Yes."

Because Indonesians have a much different sense of personal space than Americans do, the kind of buttock-to-thigh contact that makes Americans so uneasy on buses and subways isn't even noticed in Indonesia. Boys hold hands with no one looking askance. People happily jam three people in a seat only meant for two. People even stand closer when conversing. As a result, it seemed to Simin that the American women over reacted to even the most inconsequential contact. Once when he and Schwartz were asleep together in the cabin, he inadvertently put his leg over hers and was "punched awake" in a most "unfriendly" fashion.

The Americans were "very strange," Simin would later say, and not at all like the women he was used to.

On the 12th day afloat, having had no food or water for the past 48 hours, Jasman asked the women to pray with him in the name of Gusti Allah. "Suddenly," says Simin, "the miracle started--a drizzling rain." Everyone was licking the water from his hands and arms, the windows and bulkheads. But when the drizzle refused to turn into real rain, Simin began to wonder if the voices of the infidels had somehow soured his pipeline to Gusti. This time, he says, he and Jasman prayed alone, whereupon the rain poured down torrentially. As they filled up their water bottles, Schwartz was so grateful she kissed Jasman on the cheek.

Despite the intermittent rainfall, Schwartz says, water was always short, but if the women ever asked the boatmen to restrain themselves, "Simin would groan and hold out his hand and Jasman would cater to this shlump." "I was angry the way they ordered Judy around," Berkowitz says.

Whenever Simin wanted someone to bring him water in the cabin, he would "hold the knife to his neck and shake it in a threatening way at Judy. They could tell she was afraid of it."

Unlike Berkowitz, who at this point refused to have anything more to do with the boatmen, Schwartz would bring him water in an effort to keep the peace. She knew "the knife was a scare tactic," Schwartz would later say. But it scared her all the same.

It's a sobering experience to find yourself adrift in the Indian Ocean with hardly any food or water. And Schwartz and Berkowitz, having both just read Shirley McLain's book on reincarnation (Out on a Limb), wondered how the end would come--would they just lie down? Fall asleep? Or be eaten by sharks?

Although Berkowitz neither wanted nor expected to die, she was, she says, fully ready to accept death, her main regret being that she'd now never get the chance to raise a family. For Schwartz, the darkest moment was Aug. 31. That was the day their return flight was supposed to land at LAX and she could just picture her fiancee standing at the end of the ramp, frightened and bewildered when she didn't get off the plane.

Compared to the two American women who after two-and-a-half months on the road were both in good physical condition and who like most American women had ample reserves of subcutaneous fat in their breasts and thighs, the two Indonesian males were thin and wiry with no reserves at all. Jasman was in better shape to begin with than Simin but after the 10th day the flesh just fell from his bones overnight. "I'm sure he just looked at himself and said, 'I am destined to die,' Schwartz says. 'And he just let it all go.'"

As for Simin, he was skinny to begin with. And now after two weeks, he was positively cadaverous.

On the 16th day, Schwartz and Berkowitz sighted land to the northeast. But despite the stiff wind in their sail, it was hard to tell if they were making any progress. Schwartz kept asking, "Are we moving?" And Berkowitz would invariably announce that yes, they were, though, in truth, she couldn't tell either.

Once she saw land, Berkowitz was obsessed with it. The problem was, after five days, it didn't seem to be getting any closer. "Is this how it is going to end," she wondered, "sitting here staring at the land?"

Three days later, all four people were in the cabin together when Berkowitz noticed the machete lying under a shattered bench. As she was wondering what to do, Schwartz stood up and blocked Simin's view, whereupon Berkowitz wrapped the knife in a blanket, got up and walked out. When Simin saw that the knife was missing, he began to search frantically. Thinking that he might as well know now that his days of threatening people were over, Berkowitz waggled the knife between her two fingers and smiled at him.

Simin was furious. He picked up a board from the bench and came toward Berkowitz. Although Schwartz and Jasman were too stunned to move, Berkowitz glared at him with the most wild eyed look she could muster.

For several seconds, it was a standoff, with Simin holding the board and Berkowitz, knife in hand, glaring back at him. "At that point," says Berkowitz, "I was stronger than him, both mentally and physically. I stared him down." And eventually, he just put down the board and slunk back to his pallet.

"I was so proud of Rickey," Schwartz would later say. "That was the first time that I felt free."

On the evening of Sept. 6, their 21st day adrift, it suddenly dawned on Berkowitz that landfall was imminent. Schwartz was asleep in the cabin with Jasman and Simin. "Around 10 o'clock," Berkowitz says, "I said, 'Judy come out. We are going to hit land in half-an-hour.'"

Although it was a dark, calm moonless night, they could still see the mass of the land against the sky. Schwartz sat on one side of the boat and Berkowitz on the other, staring quietly at the land. Neither of them saw the wave that picked up the boat, flipped it over and smashed it against a coral reef.

It felt to Berkowitz as if she was in "a washing machine." Still, she was too angry to be afraid. "My feeling was, 'If I was going to drown, why wasn't I drowned on the second day? I went 21 days and now you're going to drown me?'"

Berkowitz kept getting sucked under as three or four waves hit her in quick succession. "Finally I felt land underneath me." And she knew that she could make it.

Schwartz tried to stand up but she had no better luck than Berkowitz. More than anything, she says, she felt like someone in a movie, crawling ashore, collapsing on the beach and dragging his fingers through the sand. Jasman and Simin, in the meantime, were struggling for Schwartz's air mattress. "Two is too much," said Jasman.

"Together safe or together dead," answered Simin.

Having no alternative, they together rode the mattress to shore. Then when Berkowitz came washing in, they helped to pull her out of the surf. Soon afterward, it started to thunder and lightning, so they all huddled under a tree and waited for morning. For Berkowitz it was the first decent sleep she'd had in 21 days. Schwartz was cold and buried her legs in the sand, only to discover the next morning that sand fleas had left her legs a mass of welts.

Shortly after daybreak, they spotted lobster fishermen who took them to a nearby village. There, the local women, who along with the rest of Indonesia had heard all about the two missing Americans, served them an elaborate meal of shellfish and hot spicy rice.

Owing to the remoteness of the region, they didn't reach a town with a telephone until the following day. Then just as the police were preparing to drive them to the provincial capital, someone came running out to the jeep to tell Schwartz there was a phone call for her. It was Susan Wood, calling from Jakarta. "Is this Judy Schwartz?" she screamed. "Is this really Judy Schwartz?" Sunday evening, Sept. 8, was Marty and Doris Berkowitz's 30th wedding anniversary. When the phone rang, Doris Berkowitz didn't feel like talking, so Marty Berkowitz picked it up and heard the voice of Susan Wood--"They're OK. They washed up in Sumatra. I talked to Judy and they're OK."

After that, all Susan Wood could hear was screaming, crying and general pandemonium for 10 minutes. "They were incoherent with happiness." When Schwartz and Berkowitz arrived at the American Embassy in Jakarta, they learned from Susan Wood that their parents had given her $500 to distribute to Jasman's and Simin's widows. But once she heard how Jasman and Simin had treated them on the boat, Wood asked if they still wanted her to send the cash.

"The last thing we wanted was to give them any money," Berkowitz says. Instead, they used the money to buy a change of clothes (they'd lost everything) and help pay for the long flight home. Although Judy Schwartz and Rickey Berkowitz were back in Los Angeles appearing on talk shows within a week of washing ashore, Jasman and Simin were stuck in Sumatra for two weeks. At first they stayed in a hospital. After that, they were questioned for three days by the Sumatra police who, on the assumption that no could survive 21 days in the Indian Ocean in an open boat, at first thought they were smuggling drugs.

At the end of September, Simin and Jasman finally hitchhiked back to Carita Beach where they were surprised to discover that everyone thought they were dead. Jasman's young wife had even returned to her own village where, to help her over her sorrow, her parents had arranged another marriage. The largest employer and most important man in Carita Beach was the owner of the Carita Beach Krakatau Hotel, Axel Ridder, an iconoclastic German expatriate with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Cologne. When Ridder heard that the men had returned, he invited them up to his restaurant, ordered them a meal and then, as the staff stood around, talked with them all night. "They laughed a lot," says Ridder. "They looked real skinny. They really had a hard time."

According to Ridder, most of the conversation dealt mainly with sex. Just as Westerners tend to fantasize about making love to South Seas native women, Indonesian men fantasize about making love to white women, which was one reason the story of two American women on a boat with the two Indonesians made front page news all over Java. As a result, the one thing everyone wanted to know at the welcome-back dinner was whether Jasman and Simin had made love to the Americans. When they answered, "No, no, no," Ridder teased them unmercifully. "'Simin,' I said to him, 'Why do you not go to the states and have a nice life?' And they were laughing about it. It was also going on in their minds that they had missed the big chance of their lives. Especially Jasman, because his wife had left him already. I said, 'Marry Judy and you are a rich man. Why should you bother about an old wife?'"

According to Ridder, the men claimed they never would have actually hurt the women with the knife. They just wanted some of the food. "Before Jasman threatened them with the knife," says Ridder, "the girls said, 'No, no, no.'" Then he pounded on the boat with the knife. "And the girls said, 'Yes, yes, yes.' He was laughing when he told the story."

Today, Simin says he feels very sorry about the machete. "I would like to ask for forgiveness. But in fact the girls did wrong. They did not share [the food] which was available at that time."

Berkowitz says the trip "was a horrible experience for the four of us. I'm glad we all survived and I really don't care ever to see them again."

After Judy Schwartz's and Rickey Berkowitz's media flash, they received several book and movie offers. And that following December, NBC optioned the story for a TV movie. As to who would play whom, Judy Schwartz says, "My dad said he wants Paul Newman. Marty Berkowitz wants Jack Lemmon. Doris Berkowitz would be Ellen Burston. My mom would be Carol Burnett." To play herself, Schwartz would love to have Deborah Winger, but realistically, she says, "it will probably be a no-name."