After days lost at sea, they needed a pastrami sandwich

Who knew that the harrowing, near-death tale of scuba divers Nathan and Kim Maker would end in the embrace of a good Jewish deli?

The Oklahoma couple, who spent nearly two days floating lost in the Gulf of Mexico last week, had planned to hit Kenny & Ziggy’s Delicatessen Restaurant & Bakery, in Houston, once they finished a day on the water with a group of other divers.

The Makers are the kind of people who plan trips around meals. They even booked a hotel half a mile from the deli.

“Where we’re from, we just don’t have that kind of food,” Nathan Maker said.

Ziggy Gruber is a third-generation deli man. His grandfather Max opened the Rialto Deli, likely the first Jewish delicatessen on Broadway in New York City, in 1927. Gruber, the breakout star of the 2014 documentary “Deli Man,” opened his restaurant in Houston 25 years ago with Kenny Friedman.

The Makers, who live in Edmond, Oklahoma, a suburb north of Oklahoma City, didn’t know about Gruber’s outsize reputation when they found the place last year. They didn’t even know much about Jewish deli food.

“This is going to sound kind of silly, but I wanted a black-and-white cookie like ‘Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,’” said Kim Maker, a special-education teacher. But they both fell in love with the place. Nathan Maker, a retired firefighter, in particular became smitten with the “Fiddler on the Roof of Your Mouth,” a triple-deck sandwich with corned beef and pastrami on double-baked rye with Russian dressing and coleslaw.

“The whole vibe of the place was just so freaking cool,” he said.

But this trip, the sandwich would have to wait. Early in the day Wednesday, an unusually strong current overtook the group of divers while they were under the water. In the scramble to get back on board, the pair — both experienced divers — lost sight of the line that would have guided them back to the boat. They floated to the surface, but severe weather was moving in. The people on the boat lost them in the swells and called the Coast Guard.

For the next 39 hours, the Makers bobbed in the Gulf of Mexico more than 20 miles offshore. They got stung by jellyfish and pried sucker fish from their legs. They watched search planes fly overhead, each one too far away to see them. Exhausted, they forced themselves to swim to fight off hypothermia. They sang songs and made up goofy games to lift their spirits.

At this point, it would be a nice twist to say that the thought of that pastrami sandwich kept them going, an idea that the deli itself put forward on social media. “While they were floating in the water, with no protection all they could think about was how they wanted to eat at Kenny & Ziggy’s!,” Gruber posted on Instagram.

Indeed, fantasies of food can offer distraction in times of crisis. But the Makers longed for gallons of cold water and the elaborate cocktails they invented as they floated.

“All we were thinking about was what we were going to drink when we got rescued,” Nathan Maker said.

Very early Friday morning, when they were beginning to accept that death was perhaps near, a plane made one more pass before rescuers were going to call off the search. Kim Maker flashed SOS with her diving light. They were saved.

He was almost in a diabetic coma. She was fighting an infection. Her mouth and tongue were badly swollen from the salt water. But for two people who had been adrift in the gulf for nearly two days, they were by and large OK.

They were cleared to leave the hospital Sunday and drove directly to Ziggy’s.

A waiter recognized them from news stories and tipped off Gruber, who couldn’t believe they survived, let alone decided to come to his restaurant.

“I’m a New Yorker from the Lower East Side and a paranoid Jew,” said Gruber, who couldn’t stop thinking about all the sharks in the gulf. “Let me tell you something, I would be scared to death to be in the ocean all night.”

The Makers knew exactly what they wanted: matzo ball soup, that triple-decker sandwich and cheesecake. And plenty of pickles, of course.

Sunday also happened to be their 12-year wedding anniversary.

“It was the greatest anniversary ever,” Nathan Maker said. “You know when you have a good meal and are with good friends and everything is just perfect? It was just like that.”

When the meal was over, the waiter tore up the check.

“They wanted to pay, but I wouldn’t take any money from them,” Gruber said. “Listen, if you’ve gone through that, you deserve a sandwich.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.