The Tide

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 10: The Tide

The tide came in and the tide went out and the coming and the going were not events but conditions, not incidents but states of being, the channel's two moods, its systole and diastole, and the channel did not choose between them any more than a heart chooses between contraction and expansion but moved from one to the other with the muscular inevitability of a body performing its essential function, which was to move water, to pull it and release it, to fill the harbor and empty it, to cover the ledges and expose them, to rise eleven feet and fall eleven feet twice a day in a rhythm that was governed by the moon and modified by the sun and complicated by the shape of the coast and the depth of the bottom and the width of the channel and the particular bathymetry of this particular piece of Penobscot Bay, which was not the same as any other piece, which was specific, local, unique in the way that all tidal channels are unique, each one shaped by its own geography, each one producing its own currents and its own eddies and its own turbulences, each one requiring its own knowledge, its own thirty-four years.

Harlan stood in the wheelhouse on a Saturday morning in late September and watched the tide.

Saturday was a working day. The ferry ran six days. Sunday was the day off, the day when the Constance sat at the Dunmore dock and the channel was untrafficked and the island was most fully itself, and the Saturday before the Sunday was the day when the island prepared for the isolation, stocked up, finished errands, made the last crossing before the crossingless day, and the Saturday schedule was the same as the weekday schedule — nine round trips, 6:15 AM to 9:30 PM — and the sameness was the schedule's virtue, its reliability, its promise that Saturday was not different from Wednesday, that the crossing did not vary with the day, that the ferry ran when the schedule said it ran, and the saying was the keeping, and the keeping was the constancy.

Tommy was on the car deck. It was between crossings — the 8:30 had docked at Dunmore, the 10:00 departure was fifty minutes away — and Tommy was doing what Tommy did between crossings, which was maintenance, which was the continuous small work that the Constance required, the greasing and the checking and the tightening and the cleaning that kept the vessel in the condition that Harlan demanded, which was the condition that the vessel deserved, which was sound, which was ready, which was the condition of a thing that could be called upon at any moment to perform its function and that would perform it because the maintenance had been done, because the attention had been paid, because the readiness was not a state that the vessel achieved once and maintained passively but a state that required active preservation, daily effort, the kind of effort that is invisible when it succeeds and catastrophic when it fails.

"Come up," Harlan said. He said it through the wheelhouse window, leaning out, and Tommy looked up from the grease fitting he was working on and nodded and wiped his hands on his pants — the wiping a gesture that did not clean the hands but redistributed the grease, spreading it from the fingers to the thighs, the gesture of a man who works with his hands and who has stopped expecting his hands to be clean — and climbed the stairs.

The wheelhouse was warm. The sun had come through the windows all morning — the fog had lifted, a rare September gift, the sky blue in the way that Maine skies are blue when the fog releases them, a deep, washed blue that seems newer than other blues, seems freshly made, as though the fog had scoured the sky clean and the cleanness was the blue — and the warmth was welcome because the mornings were cold now, the September cold that was not winter cold but was winter's announcement, winter's advance scout, the cold that said: I am coming, I am not here yet but I am on my way, and the way is shorter than you think.

"Tide," Harlan said.

Tommy waited. He knew this mode, knew the single-word opening that meant instruction, that meant Harlan was going to teach him something, and the teaching was not frequent — Harlan was not a man who taught by talking but a man who taught by doing, by letting Tommy watch and letting the watching become the learning — but when the teaching came by words it came in single-word openings, in topics announced rather than explained, and the announcing was the invitation, the signal that Tommy should listen.

"What do you know?" Harlan said.

"The tide comes in and goes out," Tommy said. "Twelve hours and twenty-five minutes between highs. High water is forty-eight minutes later each day. Springs on the full and new moon. Neaps on the quarters. Range is eleven feet here, mean springs. Nine feet at neaps."

"That's the book," Harlan said. "What do you know?"

Tommy was quiet. He understood the question. The question was not about the tide's facts but about the tide's feel, not about what the tide table said but about what the channel said, and the channel said things that the tide table did not, things that could not be printed on a monthly NOAA sheet and pinned to a corkboard, things that existed only in the body's knowledge, in the hands and the feet and the inner ear's calibration to the hull.

"I know the flood pushes us north," Tommy said. "I know the ebb pushes us south. I know the Constance handles differently on the flood — she's sluggish, she doesn't want to turn. On the ebb she's quicker, she responds faster."

"Why?" Harlan said.

"The current. On the flood the current is against the hull on the port side when we're heading to Dunmore. It resists the turn. On the ebb the current is with us, it helps the turn."

"That's the mechanics," Harlan said. "What do you feel?"

Tommy looked at the water. The water was moving — it was always moving, the channel's water was never still except at slack, and slack was a theory more than a reality, a moment so brief that it was less a state than a transition, the pause between the flood's last push and the ebb's first pull, and the pause was not stillness but the absence of direction, the water confused, uncertain, suspended between two intentions — and what Tommy felt, standing in the wheelhouse with his uncle, looking at the water that he had worked above for six years, was that the water was alive, was animated by forces that he understood intellectually and felt imperfectly, the way a beginning musician understands a piece intellectually but plays it imperfectly, the understanding in the head and the imperfection in the hands.

"I feel the change," Tommy said. "When the tide turns. The Constance — she settles. Not a lot. But there's a moment when the hull is between the currents and she sits differently. Lower, almost. Quieter."

Harlan looked at him. This was correct. This was more than correct — this was the beginning of the knowledge, the first evidence that Tommy's body was learning what Tommy's mind had already studied, and the gap between the mind's learning and the body's learning was the gap that thirty-four years closed, that thirty-four years of standing in this wheelhouse and feeling this hull on this water in this channel gradually, incrementally, imperceptibly closed, until the mind's knowledge and the body's knowledge were the same knowledge, were not two things but one thing, and the one thing was the crossing.

"The settling," Harlan said. "That's the slack. You can feel it before the tide table says it happens. The table says slack water at a specific time. The channel says slack water at a different time. The difference is four minutes, sometimes six. The table is calculated from a reference station in Rockland. The channel is not Rockland. The channel is here, and here the water does what the water does, and what the water does is not exactly what Rockland's water does, and the difference is four to six minutes, and the four to six minutes is the channel's signature, its local time, and the local time is the time that matters because the local time is the time the hull feels."

Tommy nodded. He was listening with the intensity of a man who knows that what he is hearing cannot be heard again, cannot be looked up, cannot be found in a manual or a textbook or a training course, because what he was hearing was one man's knowledge of one channel, accumulated over one lifetime, and the knowledge would end when the man ended or when the crossing ended, whichever came first, and the whichever-came-first was now the crossing, was now the bridge, was now the March date that the state had not yet announced but that everyone knew was coming, the date that would end the crossing and with it the context in which the knowledge had meaning.

"Feel the hull," Harlan said. "Not with your hands. With your feet. Stand on the deck and feel the hull through the deck plates. The plates are steel. Steel transmits vibration. The vibration is the hull's conversation with the water. The conversation changes with the tide."

"How?" Tommy said.

"On the flood, the water pushes against the hull from the northeast. The push is steady. It's a pressure, not a blow. The pressure produces a vibration — low, constant, like a hum. You can feel it in the plates under your feet. It comes up through your boots. On the ebb, the push is from the southwest. Same pressure, different direction. Different vibration. The ebb's vibration is higher. Not by much. You wouldn't hear it. But you can feel it. The difference between the flood's hum and the ebb's hum is the difference between — " He stopped. He looked at the water. He was searching for the comparison, for the analogy that would make the feel communicable, and the searching was itself an admission that the feel might not be communicable, that some knowledge is so deeply embodied that language cannot extract it, cannot lift it from the body and place it in the air between two people.

"You'll feel it," Harlan said. "You don't need me to describe it. You need to feel it. Stand in the wheelhouse. Stand on the car deck. Stand on the dock when the Constance is alongside and feel the dock, because the dock feels it too, the pilings feel the tide, the concrete apron feels it, everything in the water feels the tide because the tide is not in the water, the tide is the water, the water is not separate from the tide the way you are not separate from your breathing, and the not-separateness is the thing you need to understand, the fundamental thing, the thing that the tide table cannot tell you because the tide table presents the tide as data, as numbers, as predictions, and the predictions are accurate but the accuracy is not the truth, the truth is the feel, and the feel is in the deck plates."

They stood in the wheelhouse. The sun moved across the windows. The harbor was visible below — the moorings, the boats, the breakwater, the channel beyond — and the channel was in the process of turning, the flood nearing its peak, the water at its highest, the harbor full, the ledges covered, the mud invisible beneath eleven feet of water that had come in over six hours from the ocean to the south, through the bay, into the channel, and was now pausing, was now at the moment of slack that Harlan had described, the moment that the tide table said would happen at 10:14 and that the channel said was happening now, at 10:08, six minutes early, six minutes that were the channel's assertion of its own schedule, its own time.

"Feel it?" Harlan said.

Tommy was still. He was standing on the deck plates with his feet shoulder-width apart and his weight centered and his attention directed downward, into his feet, into the soles of his boots, into the steel beneath the boots, and he was listening with his body the way Harlan had taught him to listen, not with the ears but with the skeleton, with the bones that conducted vibration the way the hull conducted vibration, the body a resonating structure no less than the vessel, each one tuned to the water, each one receiving the water's signal and translating it into sensation.

"I think so," Tommy said.

"You'll know when you know," Harlan said. "It won't be a think. It will be a know."

The morning continued. The 10:00 crossing departed. Harlan navigated the channel on the turning tide, the water slowing, the current dying, the Constance moving through the slack as though the water had released her, had stopped pushing and pulling and had simply allowed her to pass, and the allowance was the slack's gift, the brief interval when the channel was neither coming nor going but was simply here, present, still in the way that still means not the absence of motion but the balance of motions, and the balance was the thing Harlan had tried to describe to Tommy, the equilibrium that the hull felt and that the tide table could not convey.

On the return crossing, the ebb had begun. The water was leaving. The channel was changing from full to emptying, the ledges beginning to emerge, Halsey's crown appearing as a darkening beneath the surface, not visible yet but almost visible, the rock announcing itself through the water the way a thought announces itself through confusion, by displacing the surface, by pushing upward from below.

"Now," Harlan said. "Feel the difference."

Tommy stood on the deck plates. The Constance was in the channel, midway, the place where the currents met, but the currents were different now — the ebb was pulling, the water moving southwest, the hull pushed in the opposite direction from the flood's push, and the hull's vibration was different, was the different that Harlan had described, higher, slightly, almost imperceptibly, the difference a matter of frequency rather than amplitude, a change in pitch rather than volume, and the change was there, was in the deck plates, was in the steel, was traveling up through Tommy's boots into his feet into his ankles into his legs into his body, and Tommy felt it or thought he felt it or was beginning to feel it, the beginning of the knowledge that would take years to complete if the years were available, if the crossing continued, if the channel remained a crossing rather than a distance spanned.

"I feel something," Tommy said.

"Something is the start," Harlan said.

They crossed. They crossed again. The ebb built, the current increasing, the water pulling harder, the channel narrowing as the tide fell and the margins shrank and the ledges rose and the channel became more itself, more demanding, more insistent on the precision that the captain owed it, and Harlan navigated the narrowing channel with the adjustments that the narrowing required, the small corrections, the degree or two of wheel that kept the Constance in the center, in the deep water, away from the ledges that the ebb was revealing.

"Watch the approach," Harlan said. They were on the 12:00, approaching Dunmore on a strong ebb, the current running across the harbor entrance, and the approach was different on the ebb than on the flood — on the flood the current pushed the Constance south, toward the breakwater, and the correction was north, to starboard; on the ebb the current pulled her north, away from the breakwater, and the correction was south, to port — and the difference was the tide's lesson, the daily demonstration that the same approach to the same dock in the same harbor required different actions depending on the water's state, and the different actions were not in the manual but were in the hands, were in the thirty-four years that had taught the hands what the manual could not teach them.

Harlan corrected to port. The Constance swung through the harbor entrance, the current pushing her bow north, and the port correction brought her back, brought her around, brought her alongside the dock in the motion that was smooth when it was done right and rough when it was done wrong, and the difference between smooth and rough was the difference between knowledge and inexperience, between thirty-four years and six years, between the captain and the deckhand.

"On the flood the correction is starboard," Harlan said. "On the ebb it's port. On the slack it's nothing. Three different approaches to the same dock. Three different sets of hands on the same wheel. And within each approach there are variations — spring tide ebb is harder than neap tide ebb, northeast wind on a flood changes everything, fog on a spring tide at night is the hardest combination, and the hardest combination is the one you need to know best because the hardest is the one that will test you, and the test is not whether you can do it but whether you can do it without thinking, whether the hands know before the mind knows, whether the correction is in the body before it is in the thought."

Tommy listened. He listened with the attention of a man who is receiving an inheritance, who understands that what is being given cannot be bought or earned or achieved through any effort other than time, and the time was the problem, the time was the thing that was running out, not Harlan's time — Harlan was sixty-two and healthy and could have captained for another ten years — but the crossing's time, the ferry's time, the channel's time as a crossing rather than a distance, and the running-out meant that the inheritance was truncated, was incomplete, was the knowledge of six years rather than thirty-four, and the difference between six and thirty-four was the difference between something and enough, and enough was the channel's standard, was the standard that the crossing demanded, was the level of knowledge below which the crossing became dangerous and above which it became art, and art was what Harlan practiced, was what thirty-four years had made of the routine, the crossing elevated by repetition into something finer than competence, something that did not have a name but that Tommy could see in his uncle's hands on the wheel, in the slight adjustments, in the corrections made before the need for correction was apparent, in the anticipation that was not foresight but embodiment, the body knowing what the water would do because the body had felt what the water had done ten thousand times before.

The afternoon crossings continued. The ebb deepened. The channel at low water was a different channel from the channel at high water — narrower, shallower, the ledges exposed, the mud revealed, the margins smaller, the tolerance tighter — and Harlan navigated the different channel with the adjustments that the difference required, and Tommy watched the adjustments and felt the deck plates and tried to learn the feel, tried to compress thirty-four years into the months that remained, and the compression was impossible, was the definition of impossible, because knowledge of this kind cannot be compressed, cannot be accelerated, cannot be taught in a seminar or downloaded from a file but can only be accumulated, can only be grown in the body the way a tree grows rings, one year at a time, each ring a record of the year's conditions, each ring different from every other ring, and the whole of the tree is the whole of the rings, and you cannot have the tree without every ring.

On the 7:00 crossing, in the dusk, Tommy stood on the car deck and looked at the channel and the channel was dark, the water reflecting the sky's last color, and the color was the color of ending, the color of the day pulling itself from the water the way the tide pulled itself from the shore, leaving behind the particular beauty of its going.

"Uncle Harlan," Tommy said.

Harlan was in the wheelhouse. Tommy was below. The intercom connected them — a simple system, a speaker and a microphone, installed in 1995, replacing the shouting that had previously served — and Tommy's voice came through the speaker with the slight distortion that all speakers add to human speech, the flattening of the voice's dimensions, the reduction of the voice from a three-dimensional thing to a two-dimensional thing.

"What am I supposed to do?" Tommy said.

The question was not about the docking. The question was not about the ropes or the ramp or the tide or the approach or the correction. The question was about the ending, about the bridge, about the decommission, about the fact that Tommy was twenty-eight years old and had been a deckhand for six years and had planned to be a deckhand for twenty more and then a captain for twenty after that and that the plan had been reasonable, had been the plan that his uncle had followed and his grandfather before that, and the plan's reasonableness had been destroyed not by any failure of Tommy's but by a decision made by people in Augusta who had looked at a feasibility study and seen numbers that supported a bridge and had approved the bridge because the numbers were sound, and the soundness of the numbers was the end of the plan and the end of the plan was the question and the question was: what am I supposed to do.

Harlan did not answer.

He did not answer because the answer was not a thing he had. The answer was not in the wheelhouse or the tide table or the engine controls or the thirty-four years. The answer was not in the channel. The answer was the thing that the question opened, the space that the question created, the void that the bridge was building into the center of Tommy's life and Harlan's life and the Constance's life, and the void did not have an answer because voids do not have answers, voids have only themselves, their emptiness, their demand to be filled, and the filling was the work that the future would require, the work of finding a purpose after the purpose has been removed, and the finding could not be done in advance, could not be planned or prepared for, could only be done in the moment of the need, in the moment when the crossing ended and the emptiness began and the emptiness said: fill me, fill me with something, fill me with whatever you can find, but fill me, because emptiness is not a sustainable condition, emptiness is a demand, and the demand will be met, and the meeting will be the next life, the post-crossing life, the life that neither Harlan nor Tommy could imagine because they were still inside the crossing, still performing it, still living in the 22 minutes that were all they knew and all they had been and all they had planned to be.

Harlan looked at the channel. The channel was dark. The tide was low, the mud exposed, the ledges visible as shapes in the water's surface, disturbances, interruptions of the smooth, and the interruptions were the channel's truth, the truth that the smooth surface concealed, which was that the channel was not smooth, was not simple, was not a distance but a terrain, a landscape of depth and shallowness and rock and mud and current, and the terrain required knowledge and the knowledge required time and the time was ending.

"I don't know, Tommy," Harlan said.

It was the truest thing he had said all day. It was the truest thing he had said in years. It was the answer that was not an answer, the admission that the captain who knew the channel and the tide and the hull and the dock and the approach and the correction in all conditions and at all states of tide — the captain who knew all of this did not know the one thing his nephew needed to know, which was what comes next, which was where to go when the going ends, which was how to be when the being has been the crossing and the crossing has been subtracted from the world.

The Constance docked at Dunmore. Tommy made fast the lines. The ramp lowered. The cars drove off.

The tide turned. The flood began. The water came back into the channel, filling it, covering the ledges, covering the mud, restoring the channel to its full self, its deep self, the self that concealed the truth beneath the smooth surface, and the concealing was not deception but was the tide's work, the daily work of covering and uncovering, of hiding and revealing, of filling and emptying, and the work was the same work it had always been and the sameness was the tide's teaching, the lesson that the tide taught every day to anyone who would learn it, which was that the coming and the going are not separate things but are the same thing, the same motion, the same force, the rising and the falling aspects of a single action, and the single action is the tide, and the tide is the water, and the water is the channel, and the channel is the crossing, and the crossing is ending, and the ending is a kind of low tide, a withdrawal, a going-out, and the going-out will be followed by — what? A coming-in? A new flood? A restoration?

Harlan did not know. The channel did not say. The tide table showed tomorrow's tides and next week's tides and next month's tides but did not show the tide that would come after the last crossing, the tide that would fill the channel after the Constance had crossed it for the last time, and that tide would be the first tide of the new era, the bridge era, the era in which the channel was spanned rather than crossed, and the spanning would change the meaning of the tide, would reduce the tide from a condition that governed the crossing to a phenomenon that happened beneath the bridge, visible but irrelevant, observable but inconsequential, the tide demoted from necessity to scenery, from the force that shaped the crossing to the backdrop against which the bridge stood.

The last crossing. The 9:30. Tommy at the ropes. Harlan at the wheel. The Constance in the dark channel, the markers blinking, the instruments glowing, the engines humming, the deck plates vibrating, and somewhere in the vibration, in the hum, in the hull's conversation with the water, the tide's lesson, still being taught, still being learned, still being felt by two men who stood on the steel and received the water's signal through their bodies, through their boots, through the bones that conducted the vibration from the deck to the feet to the center of the self, where the knowledge lived, where the crossing lived, where the thing that could not be named but could be felt resided, waiting.

Waiting to be named.

Waiting to be answered.

What am I supposed to do?

The channel did not say. The tide did not say. The Constance did not say. The fog, returning, settling on the harbor, pressing against the wheelhouse glass, did not say.

Nobody said.

The question remained, the way the channel remained — open, deep, dark, and moving.