The Schoolchildren

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 14: The Schoolchildren

Sophie Ames was fourteen and played the cello and rode the 7:20 ferry from Dunmore to Port Clement five mornings a week, September through June, and Harlan had been watching her board since she was an infant, since her mother, Claire Ames, had carried her aboard in a car seat in the back of the blue Subaru that Claire drove and still drove, the same Subaru, twelve years old now, the paint faded, the rear bumper stickered with the accumulation of a life lived on an island — the Dunmore Island School sticker, the Penobscot Regional High School sticker, the sticker from the Rockland art museum, the sticker that said FERRY RIDERS DO IT 22 MINUTES AT A TIME, which was a joke that the island's parents had printed in a batch of fifty and distributed at the school fundraiser in 2019 and that still appeared on bumpers and water bottles and the bulletin board at Mere's store.

He had watched Sophie grow the way the channel watches the tide — by being present for every increment, by witnessing the change so gradually that the change was imperceptible on any given day and total over any given year, the infant becoming a toddler becoming a child becoming a girl becoming a young woman who carried a cello onto the ferry every morning with the matter-of-fact strength of someone for whom the carrying was not remarkable but routine, the cello case battered and heavy and as much a part of her as her backpack or her coat, the instrument inside the case the thing that defined her on the island, that made her Sophie-who-plays-cello rather than just Sophie, the way Carl was Carl-who-lobsters and Mere was Mere-who-runs-the-store, the island's identities constructed from the things its people did, the doing more durable than any other description.

Seven high school students rode the 7:20 this year. Sophie. Jake Haskell, sixteen, whose father lobstered and whose mother commuted to the bank in Port Clement. The Pelkey twins, Brian and Brendan, fifteen, identical, distinguishable to their mother and to Harlan and to no one else, the distinguishing a feat of accumulated observation that Harlan had managed because he had watched them board every morning for two years and had noticed that Brian always boarded first and that Brendan always looked back at the island as the ferry departed, the looking-back a habit or a tic or a temperamental difference that was the twin's own and that the twin probably did not know he performed. Anna Ouellette, Paul's niece, seventeen, the oldest of the island students, the one who would graduate in June and who had applied to the University of Maine at Orono, where Louise had gone, and the application was the island's business the way all applications and acceptances and departures were the island's business, known at the store and discussed on the porch.

Emma Walsh, fourteen, Sophie's friend, who sat beside Sophie on the ferry and who did not play an instrument but who listened to Sophie practice in the passenger cabin with the tolerant attention of a friend who understands that the practicing is not a performance but a conversation that Sophie is having with herself, with the cello, with the piece she is learning, and that the conversation is private even when it is audible, and the privacy is respected by the listening, by the not-interrupting, by the sitting-beside without comment.

And Tyler Crane, Eddie's grandson, thirteen, the youngest, a seventh-grader at the island school who did not yet ride the ferry for school but who rode it sometimes in the afternoon, after school, crossing to Port Clement for baseball practice or orthodontist appointments, the crossing a preview of the crossing he would make daily next year as a high school freshman, and the preview was what childhood is — a rehearsal for the crossings you will make when you are older, the small crossings preparing you for the larger ones, each one a practice, each one a lesson in what it means to leave one shore and arrive at another.

Harlan had watched all of them. He had watched them the way he watched the channel — not by deciding to watch but by being present, by standing in the wheelhouse while they boarded and while they sat and while they crossed and while they disembarked, the watching a function of his position, of his vantage, of the fact that the wheelhouse overlooked the car deck and the car deck was where the passengers appeared and the passengers included the children and the children were the island's future, its investment, its hope, and the hope was carried on the ferry five mornings a week because the island's school ended at eighth grade and the mainland's school began at ninth and the gap between eighth and ninth was the channel, was the 1.4 miles, was the twenty-two minutes that the children crossed every day, and the crossing was their education's cost, the price of living on an island and attending a school that was not on the island, and the price was paid in time — forty-four minutes a day, 220 minutes a week, nearly four hours a week on the water, the water a tax on their education, a surcharge on their learning.

The bridge would eliminate the surcharge. The bridge would convert the forty-four minutes to eight, the eight minutes by car or bus across a bridge that did not depend on tide or weather or schedule, that was always there, always open, always available, and the always-available was the bridge's argument for the children, the strongest argument, stronger than property values or emergency response or economic development, because the children were the island's most sympathetic constituency, the people whose needs were hardest to argue against, and their need was simple — to get to school efficiently, to arrive without the variables of fog and wind and tide and mechanical failure that the ferry introduced into their mornings, to have the same commute that mainland children had, the same reliability, the same ordinariness.

The ordinariness. This was the thing. The bridge would make the children's commute ordinary, would strip it of the extraordinary quality that the ferry gave it — the quality of crossing water, of leaving an island, of being passengers rather than mere travelers, of experiencing the channel's daily lesson, which was that the world is not smooth, is not continuous, is not connected by pavement but is interrupted by water and the water must be crossed and the crossing is not nothing, is not a blank, is not dead time but is time alive with motion and weather and the specific beauty of a vessel on a tidal channel at 7:20 in the morning in October — and the stripping of this quality was not the bridge's intention but was its consequence, and consequences are what progress produces, the side effects of improvement, the costs of convenience.

Sophie boarded on a Thursday morning with her cello and her backpack and her coat, the coat a parka now, October's coat, heavier than September's, the season's progression legible in the clothing the way it was legible in the light and the temperature and the fog's increasing frequency and the channel's increasing severity. She boarded with Emma and the others and they descended to the passenger cabin and sat in their usual seats — the back row, the row farthest from the windows, the row that the high school students had claimed the way high school students claim the back row of any conveyance, bus or ferry or classroom, the back row being the teenagers' territory, the territory of the not-yet-adult, the people who are closer to childhood than to adulthood but who do not want to be close to childhood and who express this not-wanting by sitting as far from the front as possible, the front being where the adults sit, where the captain sits, where the authority resides.

They sat in the back and they looked at their phones and they talked to each other in the low murmur that is the teenagers' conversational register on early mornings, the murmur that is not whisper and not speech but something between, something that conserves energy, that acknowledges the hour, that says: we are here because we have to be here and we are speaking because we are human and humans speak, but we are not fully awake and the speaking is provisional, is a draft, is not the final version of what we will say today but the rough draft, the morning's first attempt at language.

Sophie took out the cello. She did not always take it out. Some mornings the cello stayed in its case, the morning too early or the mood too quiet or the piece she was working on too difficult to practice in a moving vessel with the engine's hum and the water's sound and the slight roll that the Constance exhibited in any sea state above flat calm. But this morning she took it out, unlatching the case with the practiced motion of someone who has unlatched the same case a thousand times, the latches clicking, the lid opening, the cello inside — amber-colored, the wood glowing even in the cabin's fluorescent light, the glow the instrument's beauty, its warmth — and she lifted it out and sat with it between her knees and tuned it, the pegs turning under her fingers, the strings finding their pitch.

She played. She played something slow, something that Harlan did not recognize but that he could hear through the wheelhouse floor, the sound traveling through the Constance's steel and wood the way all sound traveled through the Constance, by conduction, by vibration, the cello's low register resonating with the hull's own frequency so that the two sounds — the cello and the hull — merged, blended, became a single complex tone that was neither music nor engine but both, the ship singing along with the girl, the vessel and the passenger producing a sound that existed only here, only on this crossing, only in the space between the island and the mainland where the Constance was not at either shore but was in the channel, in transit, in the between that was Harlan's territory and that was, for twenty-two minutes, the children's territory too.

He listened. He steered and he listened and the listening was not a choice but a response, the body's response to beauty, to the sound that came through the deck plates and entered his feet and climbed his legs and reached his chest, where it sat, where it resonated, where it found the hollow space that the crossing had carved in him over thirty-four years, the hollow space that was not emptiness but capacity, the capacity to hold the crossing's sounds and to be moved by them, moved not emotionally — or not only emotionally — but physically, the vibration literal, the sound waves entering the body and moving its molecules, rearranging them, so that the body that heard the cello was not the same body that had existed before the hearing but was a body altered by the sound, the way a body is altered by the tide, by the crossing, by the daily accumulation of the channel's influence.

Sophie played for six minutes. Six minutes of the twenty-two. When she stopped, the cabin was quiet except for the engine and the water and the murmur of the other students, the murmur that had continued through the playing because the playing was not a performance that demanded silence but was a practice that coexisted with the morning, that was part of the morning rather than separate from it.

She put the cello away. She latched the case. She looked at her phone.

The crossing continued. The Constance docked at Port Clement. The students disembarked. They walked up the ramp and across the parking lot to the school bus, the yellow bus with PENOBSCOT REGIONAL painted on the side, and they boarded the bus the way they had boarded the ferry, without ceremony, without attention, the boarding another step in the morning's sequence, the sequence that began on the island and would end at the school and that was, in its entirety, their commute, their daily passage from home to education, from island to mainland, from the world they lived in to the world they were being prepared for, and the preparation was the school's work and the passage was the ferry's work and the two works were connected by the channel, by the 1.4 miles that the children crossed every day and that every day taught them, whether they knew it or not, that the world is not continuous, that there are gaps, that the gaps must be crossed, and that the crossing is not nothing.

Harlan watched the bus pull away. He watched it turn onto Route 1 and disappear toward the school, carrying the seven children who were the island's current offering to the mainland's educational system, the seven who would be educated and graduated and who would then face the question that every island child faces, which is: do I return, and the do-I-return was the island's essential question, its existential question, the question on which its future depended, because an island that its children do not return to is an island that is dying, is an island whose population is declining by the arithmetic of departure, each unreturned child a subtraction from the total, and the total was 380 and the total was shrinking.

Anna Ouellette would graduate in June. She had applied to Orono. She would probably go. She would probably not return. This was not a prediction based on Anna's character or her ambitions but a prediction based on statistics, on the data that the island school board reviewed each year with the grim attention of actuaries studying mortality tables — of the island children who graduated from the mainland high school, fewer than one in five returned to live on the island, and the fewer-than-one-in-five was the ratio of loss, the leakage rate, the speed at which the island was bleeding its young.

The bridge would change this. Perhaps. The argument was that the bridge would make the island more attractive to young people, would make it possible to live on the island and commute to the mainland for work, would eliminate the ferry's schedule as a constraint on the island's habitability, and the argument was sound in theory and unproven in practice, and the unproven was the honest condition of all arguments about the future, which is that the future has not happened and cannot be known and can only be predicted, and predictions are models and models are not the channel.

On the afternoon return — the 3:30 from Port Clement — the students boarded with the different energy, the after-school energy, the energy of release, and they sat in the back row and they talked louder and they looked at their phones and they did not look at the channel or the island approaching or the fog that was settling on the harbor, because the channel and the island and the fog were the background, the setting, the scenery of their commute, and scenery is not seen by people who see it every day, scenery is seen by visitors, by people for whom the scenery is new, and the newness is the seeing, and the students' commute was not new, was the opposite of new, was the oldest thing in their young lives, the thing they had been doing since ninth grade, the crossing that had bracketed their school days, the morning crossing and the afternoon crossing framing the day's education the way bookends frame the books between them.

But the scenery was being seen. Not by the students — by Harlan. Harlan saw it. Harlan saw the channel and the island and the fog and the students and the cello case and the yellow bus and the backpacks and the phones and the coats that changed with the seasons and the faces that changed with the years, the faces that had been children's faces and were now young adults' faces, the faces that he had watched change the way he watched the tide change, by increments so small that the change was invisible on any given day and undeniable over any given year.

He had watched Sophie Ames since she was an infant. He had watched her in a car seat in the back of the blue Subaru on the car deck of the Constance. He had watched her at three, holding her mother's hand as they walked from the car to the passenger cabin. He had watched her at five, climbing the stairs to the passenger cabin alone for the first time, the climbing a small act of independence that the ferry witnessed and that the ferry made possible, because the ferry was the stage on which the island's children performed their growing up, the public space where the private milestones occurred — the first unaccompanied crossing, the first crossing without a parent waiting at the other terminal, the first crossing with friends, the first crossing with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, the first crossing to the mainland for a job interview, the first crossing away.

The ferry had measured their lives. The crossings were the intervals — regular, equal, twenty-two minutes each — and the intervals were the clock's ticks, and the ticks measured the time, and the time was the children's growth, their progression from infancy to adolescence to adulthood, the progression marked not by birthdays or school years but by crossings, by the daily repetition that accumulated into a life, the way the tide's daily repetition accumulated into a channel, each repetition the same and each different, each day's crossing carrying a different child — the same child, technically, but different, grown, changed by a day's worth of living, by a day's worth of education, by a day's worth of the mainland's influence, and the difference was imperceptible and it was everything.

When the bridge opened, the children would drive. Or their parents would drive them. Or they would take a bus. The bus would cross the bridge in four minutes and the four minutes would not be a crossing but a commute and the commute would not be measured in the children's bodies the way the crossing was measured, would not be felt in the way the ferry's motion was felt, the roll and the vibration and the engine's hum and the salt spray on the windows and the fog and the arrival, the island appearing from the fog, the home appearing, and the appearing was the crossing's gift to the children, the daily gift of seeing home materialize, of watching the familiar emerge from the unfamiliar, and the gift would be replaced by the bridge's gift, which was speed and reliability and the absence of weather as a variable, and the bridge's gift was practical and the ferry's gift was not practical, was something else, something that did not have a name in the vocabulary of transportation planning but that had a name in the vocabulary of the human experience, and the name was wonder, or the name was ritual, or the name was the thing that happens when you cross water every day for years and the crossing becomes part of you, becomes structural, becomes the framework on which your days are built, and the framework, when removed, leaves not nothing but absence, and absence is not nothing, absence is the shape of the thing that was there.

The 3:30 docked at Dunmore. The students disembarked. Sophie carried her cello down the ramp and across the parking lot to the road, where she walked — she walked, did not drive, fourteen was too young to drive, and the walking was the island's scale, everything walkable, everything reachable on foot, the store a ten-minute walk from the school, the harbor a five-minute walk from the store, the cemetery a fifteen-minute walk from the harbor, the island small enough to be contained by the body's own locomotion, and the containment was the island's intimacy, its human scale, the scale that the bridge might alter by bringing cars, by bringing traffic, by bringing the mainland's assumption that distance is measured in car-minutes rather than walking-minutes, and the assumption would change the scale and the scale would change the island.

Sophie walked up Island Road. The cello case was on her back, the strap across her chest, the case's weight familiar, balanced, the carrying so practiced that it was not effort but posture, not burden but identity. She walked past Mere's store, past the gas pumps, past the stop sign at the intersection, and she turned onto Harbor Road and walked toward her house, and Harlan watched her from the wheelhouse the way he had watched Louise, the way he watched everyone who disembarked, the watching a form of escort, a visual accompaniment that carried the passenger from the ferry to the shore, from the crossing to the land, from his care to their own.

She disappeared around the curve. The cello case was the last thing visible, the case's dark shape against the road's gray surface, and then the curve took her and she was gone, and Harlan stood in the wheelhouse and looked at the harbor and the island and the afternoon light and the construction towers rising in the north and the channel between them, the channel that had carried Sophie to school and home again, the channel that had measured her life in twenty-two-minute intervals since she was an infant in a car seat, the channel that would soon carry her for the last time.

The last crossing of the schoolchildren. It would come. It would come in the spring, probably, when the bridge opened and the ferry ceased, and the last crossing would be the last morning of the old commute, the old measurement, the old rhythm, and Sophie would cross it and the twins would cross it and Jake and Anna and Emma and Tyler would cross it, and they would cross it the way they had crossed every other crossing — without ceremony, without attention, with their phones in their hands and their backpacks on the floor and their murmur in the air — because the young do not mark endings the way the old mark them, the young do not feel the last time as the last time because the young are oriented toward the first time, toward the next time, toward the time that has not yet come, and the not-yet-come is the young person's habitat, the future their native country, and the future does not mourn the past because the future does not know the past, does not carry it, does not feel its weight.

Harlan felt its weight. He felt it in the wheelhouse, in the wheel, in the deck plates, in the thermos on the shelf, in the tide table on the corkboard, in the salt on the windows. He felt the weight of every crossing he had witnessed, every child he had carried, every infant who had become a student who had become a graduate who had left or stayed, every life that had been measured by the crossing's intervals, and the weight was not heavy — it was not the weight of burden but the weight of substance, the weight of a thing that has mattered, that has been real, that has existed in the world and made a difference, the difference not dramatic, not heroic, not the difference of grand events but the difference of daily acts, of twenty-two-minute passages, of a man standing at a wheel and a girl carrying a cello and a channel between an island and a mainland and a crossing that connected them.

The crossing connected them. The bridge would replace the connection. The replacement would be stronger, more reliable, more permanent. The replacement would carry more traffic, enable more access, eliminate more inconvenience.

But the replacement would not carry cello music through its deck plates. The replacement would not feel the tide in its pilings. The replacement would not know the names of the children who crossed it, would not have watched them grow, would not have measured their lives in its own intervals, because a bridge does not have intervals, a bridge is continuous, a bridge is always, and the always is the bridge's virtue and the ferry's loss, and the loss is not a thing that the bridge can compensate for, because the loss is not access or convenience or reliability but is the particular quality of a crossing, the quality of an act performed in time, an act that takes twenty-two minutes and that fills those twenty-two minutes with motion and weather and sound and the specific beauty of water traveled over, and the beauty is not preserved by the bridge but is ended by it, the way a song is ended by its last note, cleanly, completely, the silence after the note the silence of completion, the silence that says: it is done, it was beautiful, it will not come again.