The Channel

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 1: The Channel

The channel at 6:10 in the morning in September is not dark so much as unfinished, as though the light has begun its work but abandoned it partway through, leaving the water a color that is not gray and not black but the absence of both, the non-color of a thing that exists primarily by sound and by temperature and by the faint sulfurous breath of exposed mudflat at the channel's eastern edge where the tide has pulled back to reveal what the water ordinarily conceals, which is rock and weed and the slow patient geology of a coast that has been composing itself for eleven thousand years and will continue to compose itself long after the ferry and the man who operates it have both been subtracted from the morning.

Harlan Goss stood in the wheelhouse of the Constance and watched the fog.

He did not check the radar. He did not check the GPS. He would check both in a moment, as procedure required, as the Coast Guard mandated, as the state of Maine's Bureau of Maritime Services expected of every licensed master holding a current credential against this particular channel, this particular crossing, this particular 1.4 miles of Penobscot Bay between the town pier at Port Clement and the ferry terminal at Dunmore Island. But first he watched the fog, because the fog told him things the instruments could not, things about the morning's weight, about the density of the air three feet above the waterline versus thirty, about whether this was fog that would burn off by eight or fog that would sit through noon, pressing itself against the wheelhouse glass like a hand held flat against a window from the outside, fingers spread, patient, unhurried, willing to wait.

This was the second kind. He knew by its color, which was not white but the particular ivory of fog that has been sitting on cold water for several hours, fog that has settled into itself, that has committed. September fog on the Maine coast arrives with a seriousness that the summer fogs lack. Summer fog is theatrical, performative, it rolls in and lifts and rolls in again as though uncertain of its purpose. September fog has decided.

He reached for the thermos on the console shelf. The thermos was stainless steel, double-walled, with a screw cap that doubled as a cup, manufactured by Stanley and purchased by Janet Goss from the hardware store in Rockland in the winter of 2004, and he had used it every morning since, filling it at 5:15 from the drip machine in his kitchen, carrying it down the hill from the clapboard house to the terminal in the dark or the almost-dark or the full dark of winter mornings when the stars were hard and close and the only light at the terminal was the sodium lamp above the ticket window that cast everything beneath it in that particular orange that is the color of waiting, the color of places where people come and go but no one stays.

The coffee was black, no sugar, and it had been black with no sugar for twenty years because that was how Janet had drunk it and somewhere in the first years of their marriage he had stopped adding sugar to his own, not because she asked him to and not because he preferred it but because the pot was the pot and the coffee was the coffee and it was simpler to drink what was poured and he had come to understand, only after she was gone, that this was one of the ways a marriage conducted its business, through small unspoken concessions that accumulated until the concession was no longer a concession but a preference, and the preference was no longer his or hers but theirs, and the theirs persisted even after the her had been subtracted, because preferences have more staying power than the people who form them.

He drank. The coffee was good. The coffee was always good because the routine was the same, the beans from the same bag Mere stocked at the store, the water from the same well, the drip machine the same GE model he had owned for eleven years, and the sameness of the coffee was part of the sameness of the morning which was part of the sameness of the crossing which was the thing he was, which was the thing he did, which were not, as some people believed, different things.

6:14. He set the thermos back on its shelf, in the ring-shaped indentation that thirty-four years of thermoses had worn into the wood. Not this thermos — the thermoses before it, his father's thermos before that, each one sitting in the same spot on the same shelf in the same wheelhouse while the Constance idled at the Port Clement terminal, waiting for the hour.

He checked the radar. The screen showed what the screen always showed at this hour in this weather: the coastline's familiar contour to the west, the bulk of Dunmore Island to the east, and between them the channel, 1.4 miles of water that the radar rendered as absence, as the space between solid things, which was accurate in one sense and wholly inaccurate in another, because the channel was not empty. The channel was full — full of current and tide and depth and bottom composition and the particular way the water moved over Halsey Ledge at the halfway point, and the set of the current as it ran northeast on the flood and southwest on the ebb, and the wind chop that built against the current on a southwest blow, and the swells that wrapped around the island's southern point and entered the channel as a confused secondary motion that could push the Constance sideways if you did not feel it coming and correct before it arrived.

The radar could not show him any of this. The radar showed the absence. The channel itself — the living, moving, tidal thing that the crossing traversed — existed only in his hands and his feet and in the thirty-four years of mornings that had taught them.

He checked the GPS. He checked the VHF. He checked the engine gauges — port and starboard Caterpillar 3412s, twelve-cylinder diesels, 750 horsepower each, oil pressure steady, coolant temperature steady, the engines running at idle the way they had run at idle for thirty-four years because the Constance was the same age as Harlan's tenure on her, built at Bath Iron Works in 1988 when Harlan was twenty-six and had spent six years as deckhand under his father, James Goss, who had run the crossing before him and who had stood in this wheelhouse and drunk coffee from a thermos and watched the fog and known the channel by feel in the way that Harlan now knew it, in the way that could not be taught except by repetition, in the way that was not knowledge exactly but something closer to memory, the body's memory, the hands' memory, the inner ear's calibration to the specific frequency of this specific hull in this specific water, a calibration so precise and so deeply embedded that Harlan could stand in the wheelhouse with his eyes closed and know, by the Constance's motion alone, where he was in the channel, which quarter of the crossing, which phase of the tide, how far the bottom was below the keel.

6:15. He sounded the horn — one long blast, the departure signal, the sound that Port Clement had heard at 6:15 AM six days a week for longer than any living person in the town could remember, because the ferry had run before the Constance and before the Constance's predecessor and before the predecessor's predecessor, back to 1891 when the first Constance, a wooden-hulled steamer, had made the first crossing and the horn had sounded for the first time over the same water, the same channel, the same 1.4 miles.

Tommy appeared on the car deck below. Harlan could see him through the wheelhouse windows, moving along the port side toward the stern ramp, his orange vest bright against the gray of the deck and the gray of the fog and the gray of the morning. Tommy's hands were on the dock lines. He freed the stern line first, then walked forward — the protocol, always the same protocol, stern then bow, because the Constance's propellers were at the stern and you freed the stern first so that if the engines engaged unexpectedly the boat would swing away from the dock rather than into it, a precaution that had never been necessary in Harlan's tenure and had never been necessary in his father's tenure but was the protocol because the protocol existed for the one time it would be necessary, and the protocol did not know which time that would be, and so it was followed every time.

Tommy freed the bow line. He raised his hand — the signal, palm flat, arm straight up, visible from the wheelhouse. Clear. Harlan engaged the port engine, then the starboard, the Constance's stern swinging two degrees to port as the propellers bit the water, the swing so slight and so brief that only someone who had felt it ten thousand times would notice it, would know that two degrees to port at departure was correct, was the Constance's signature, her way of acknowledging the work.

They moved into the channel.

The fog closed behind them. This was always the strange part, the moment when the terminal disappeared and the island had not yet appeared and the Constance existed in a space that was neither here nor there, that was only the crossing itself, only the water and the fog and the sound of the engines and the faint vibration in the deck plates that meant the Constance was working, was under way, was doing the thing she had been built to do.

Harlan held the wheel. The wheel was stainless steel, thirty inches in diameter, worn smooth at the ten and two positions by his hands and his father's hands and the hands of the relief captains who had stood in this wheelhouse on Harlan's days off, though the wear pattern was primarily Harlan's because the relief captains held the wheel differently, held it at nine and three or with one hand at twelve, and the wear was a record of the holding, a document written in metal and sweat and salt that said: these hands, this wheel, this many times.

Three cars on the deck this morning. A green pickup that belonged to Paul Ouellette, who lobstered out of Dunmore Harbor and who had ridden the 6:15 every weekday morning for twelve years, since his wife had taken a job at the hospital in Port Clement and he dropped her at the terminal on his way to the boat. A white panel van from Maine Island Electric, the utility contractor that serviced Dunmore's power lines and that sent a crew over twice a month. A gray sedan he did not recognize, which meant a visitor or a real estate agent or, increasingly this fall, someone connected to the bridge.

The bridge. He did not think about the bridge. He thought about the channel. The channel at this state of tide — two hours past low, the flood building, the current setting northeast at perhaps a knot and a half — required a course correction of four degrees to port to maintain the line between the departure marker, a green day mark on a piling two hundred yards off the Port Clement breakwater, and the arrival marker, a red nun buoy at the entrance to Dunmore Harbor. Four degrees to port on a building flood, six degrees on a full flood, two degrees at slack water, and on the ebb the correction reversed, four degrees to starboard on a building ebb, because the current set southwest on the ebb and the Constance would drift south if you held a straight course, and the southern edge of the channel was where Halsey Ledge waited, twelve feet of water at mean low tide, enough for the Constance's seven-foot draft but not enough for comfort and not enough for error, and the channel was not a place for insufficient comfort or insufficient margin for error because the channel was 1.4 miles of water that had opinions about what crossed it and when.

Seven minutes in. He could feel Halsey Ledge approaching, not by any change in the water — the depth was fifty-two feet here, more than sufficient — but by the way the current shifted over the ledge, a subtle acceleration that the hull transmitted through the deck plates to his feet, a quickening that was the water's response to the bottom rising from eighty feet to twelve feet in a lateral distance of less than a hundred yards. The water did not like this. The water bunched and shoved and created a turbulence that was invisible on a calm day but that the Constance could feel the way a hand feels a change in temperature, not by sight but by sensation.

He corrected. One degree to port. The correction was unnecessary in any navigational sense — the Constance was well clear of the ledge, five hundred yards to the north — but the correction was part of the crossing the way the coffee was part of the morning, a gesture of acknowledgment, a recognition that the ledge was there and had always been there and would be there after the crossing ended and the Constance was retired and the bridge stood where the water now stood, and the ledge would not care about the bridge any more than it cared about the ferry, because the ledge was granite and the granite was eleven thousand years old and it had been composing itself since the glacier retreated and it would continue to compose itself in the patient way that granite composes itself, which is to say by enduring.

Eleven minutes. Halfway. He knew this without checking the GPS, without looking at the radar, without consulting any instrument or reference point, because at the halfway point of the crossing the Constance entered a zone where the currents from the Port Clement side and the Dunmore side met and canceled each other and for approximately forty-five seconds the hull was still in a way it was not still at any other point in the crossing, a stillness that was not the absence of motion but the equilibrium of competing motions, and this equilibrium registered in the deck plates as a particular frequency, a hum that was lower than the engine hum and steadier than the engine hum and that Harlan felt in his sternum, in the bone, a vibration that said: here, this is the middle, this is the point equidistant from both shores, this is where you belong to neither side and both sides, this is the crossing's center of gravity.

He belonged to neither side. He belonged to the crossing.

This was not a thought he had articulated to himself in these words. It was not a thought at all. It was a fact of the same order as the tide tables or the channel depth or the Constance's draft — something that existed whether or not he attended to it, something that was true in the way that water is wet, which is to say obviously, fundamentally, and without requiring anyone's agreement.

The fog began to change. Not to lift — the fog would not lift today, he had known this since he first saw it at 5:30, pressing against the terminal windows — but to alter its texture ahead of the bow, to become grainier, to admit a darkness within its whiteness that was not the darkness of night but the darkness of substance, of land, of the island resolving itself from the fog the way a thought resolves itself from confusion, not all at once but in stages, first a suggestion, then a shape, then a certainty.

Dunmore Island appeared the way it always appeared.

Gradually, then completely.

The harbor breakwater first — a line of granite blocks that materialized as a darker stripe within the fog, then solidified into individual stones, each one placed by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1954 and not moved since, because granite placed against the sea does not move unless the sea decides to move it, and the sea had not yet decided. Then the harbor itself — the moorings, the lobster boats sitting on their lines in the slight chop, the harbor water calmer than the channel water because the breakwater did its job, which was to separate the harbor from the channel the way a sentence separates one thought from another.

Then the terminal. The Dunmore ferry terminal was smaller than its counterpart in Port Clement — a wooden building with a shingled roof and a covered waiting area with three benches that the island's public works department painted every other summer, green, always green, because the first benches had been green and the replacement benches had been green and to paint them any other color would be to admit that things changed, and the island's relationship to change was complicated, was a thing the novel would need to examine, but not yet, not in this first crossing, which was about the channel and the fog and the 22 minutes and the man.

Twenty minutes. He began the approach. The approach to the Dunmore terminal was more demanding than the departure from Port Clement because the harbor entrance was narrower and the current ran across the entrance on a flood tide, pushing the Constance south toward the breakwater, and the correction required was not a matter of degrees but of feel, of knowing how much power to carry into the turn and how much to bleed off and when to reverse the port engine to swing the stern and bring the Constance alongside the dock in a motion that was, when executed properly, as smooth and inevitable as a sentence arriving at its period.

He carried power through the turn. He bled it off. He reversed the port engine. The Constance's stern swung to starboard, her bow came around, and she settled against the dock with a sound that was not a collision but a greeting, the fenders compressing, the hull touching the pilings the way a hand touches a familiar surface, with recognition, with the muscle memory of ten thousand arrivals.

Tommy was on the dock. The dock lines were in his hands before the Constance had fully stopped, because Tommy understood the choreography in the way that Harlan understood the channel, not by instruction but by repetition, by the body's education, by the six years of mornings that had taught his hands where the cleats were and how the lines ran and how much tension to hold and when to slack and when to make fast, and all of this happened without speech, without signal, without any communication other than the communication of two people performing the same act at the same time in the same place for the thousandth time, which is its own language, which requires no words because the words would be slower than the hands.

The ramp lowered. The hydraulics groaned — the same groan, the same pitch, the same complaint that the Constance had voiced at every docking since the hydraulic system was overhauled in 2011 by Pendleton Marine Services out of Stonington, a company that serviced the ferries and the fishing fleet and that knew the Constance the way a family doctor knows a patient, by history, by the accumulation of service records and repair logs and the particular knowledge of which systems were sound and which were aging and which would need attention next.

Paul Ouellette drove off first. He raised one finger from the steering wheel as he passed the wheelhouse — the greeting, the only greeting, sufficient between two men who had shared this crossing a thousand times. The electric van followed. The gray sedan followed the electric van, and Harlan watched it drive up the ramp and onto Island Road and he wondered if it was a real estate agent because the real estate agents had been coming more frequently since the bridge was announced, because the bridge meant access and access meant value and value meant people who did not live on the island would buy property on the island and would build houses on the island and would drive across the bridge to sleep in the houses on weekends and would not ride the ferry because there would be no ferry, and the houses they built would face the water but the water they faced would not be the water they crossed, and the difference between facing water and crossing water was the difference between tourism and habitation, between viewing a place and being of it.

6:37. Twenty-two minutes. The crossing complete.

He poured more coffee. He stood in the wheelhouse and drank it and looked at the fog and the harbor and the island and the morning, and the morning was the same morning it had always been, the same fog and the same harbor and the same island and the same coffee in the same thermos from the same shelf with the same ring worn into the same wood, and the sameness was not monotony, was not repetition for its own sake, was not the dullness of a life lived in 22-minute intervals, but was instead the thing itself, the crossing itself, the act of moving between two fixed points over water that was never the same water because the tide changed and the current changed and the wind changed and the fog changed and the season changed, and within all of this changing the crossing remained, the 22 minutes remained, and the man in the wheelhouse remained, and the remaining was the work, and the work was the life, and the life was not something that happened between crossings but something that happened during them, and he was not waiting for the life to begin or the life to end but was living it in the 22-minute intervals that were not intervals at all but were the thing itself, whole and complete and sufficient.

The Constance idled at the dock. In forty-three minutes, at 7:20, the next crossing would begin. The return to Port Clement. Then back to Dunmore. Then back to Port Clement. Nine round trips. Eighteen crossings. Three hundred and ninety-six minutes on the water. Six hours and thirty-six minutes of the day spent in the channel, in the space between, in the neither-here-nor-there that was, for Harlan, the only here, the only there.

The fog sat on the harbor. Tommy coiled lines on the car deck. The morning continued.

It had always continued. It would not always continue. But this morning it continued, and the continuation was enough, and the enough was everything, and the everything was 22 minutes long and 1.4 miles wide and as deep as the channel, which was, at its deepest, eighty-seven feet, which was deeper than most people imagined and exactly as deep as Harlan knew.