November Crossing

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 16: November Crossing

November arrived the way November arrives on the Maine coast, which is not gradually but decisively, the month announcing itself through temperature and light and wind and the particular quality of the air, which changed from October's translucent haze to November's hard clarity, the clarity that was not warmth but cold, the cold making the air denser, cleaner, more transparent, so that the channel was visible from shore to shore on clear November mornings with a sharpness that September and October did not allow, the shores closer-seeming, crisper, each tree on Dunmore's ridge individually legible from the Port Clement terminal, the individual legibility a gift of the cold air and a reminder that the fog would return, that the clarity was temporary, that November's clarity and November's fog alternated the way the tide alternated, each one the other's absence, each one the other's rest.

The passengers thinned. The thinning was seasonal, annual, expected — the summer people gone since September, the September tourists gone since October, the remaining passengers the year-round riders, the residents and the workers and the commuters whose crossing was not optional but structural, built into the architecture of their daily lives — and the thinning changed the crossings, changed their character, changed the Constance from a vessel carrying a crowd to a vessel carrying a few, and the few were different from the crowd the way a conversation is different from a lecture, more intimate, more specific, each passenger visible as an individual rather than as a member of a group.

Three cars on the 6:15. Some mornings, two. Once, in the third week of November, one — Paul Ouellette's green pickup alone on the car deck, the car deck vast around it, the single vehicle emphasizing the deck's emptiness the way a single piece of furniture emphasizes a room's size, and Paul sat in his truck and drank his gas-station coffee and the Constance crossed the channel with her deck nearly empty and her passenger cabin entirely empty and the crossing was the same crossing, twenty-five minutes now with the construction zone, and the sameness was the point, was the schedule's insistence that the crossing did not vary with the demand, that the ferry ran whether the cars numbered eighteen or one, that the service was not a business calculating its efficiency but a commitment honoring its obligation.

Harlan stood in the wheelhouse and watched November's channel.

November's channel was not September's channel. The water was different — colder, denser, the cold making the water heavier, slower to respond to the wind, the waves shorter and steeper in November than in September because the cold water's surface tension was higher and the waves broke rather than rolled, broke with a sharpness that the Constance felt in her hull as a succession of impacts rather than the gentle rise and fall of warmer seas. The color was different — November's water was not gray but was the particular dark green of cold North Atlantic water, the green that is the color of depth, of minerals, of the plankton that has died and sunk and turned the water the color of the turning it has undergone, the green of transformation, of organic matter becoming something else, something that is no longer life but is not yet sediment, something suspended in the water column the way November is suspended between autumn and winter, between the dying of the leaves and the arriving of the snow.

The wind was different. November wind on the Maine coast comes from the northwest. It comes from Canada, from the interior, from the landmass that has cooled faster than the ocean and that pushes its cold air south and east and over the coast with a force that is proportional to the temperature differential between the land and the sea, and the differential in November is large and increasing, and the force is correspondingly large and increasing, so that November winds are stronger than October winds and December winds will be stronger still, the winter building its forces the way an army builds its forces, incrementally, deliberately, each month's wind a rehearsal for the next month's greater wind.

The northwest wind hit the channel broadside. The Constance's track ran northeast-southwest, from Port Clement to Dunmore, and the northwest wind struck her beam at approximately forty-five degrees, pushing her southeast, pushing her toward Halsey Ledge, and the push required correction, required the wheel held to port, held against the wind's pressure, the correction constant through the entire crossing, Harlan's arms working against the wind's force transmitted through the rudder through the steering gear through the wheel to his hands, the force a conversation between the wind and the man, the wind saying I will push you and the man saying I will hold you and the holding was not effortless but was effort, was the physical labor of steering that the calm-weather crossings did not require, the labor that November demanded and that November's captain provided because the providing was the job, was the work, was the reason a captain stood at the wheel rather than setting the autopilot and sitting in the chair.

He did not sit. He had never sat during a November crossing. The chair was there — a steel frame with a vinyl-covered cushion, mounted on a pedestal that allowed rotation and height adjustment, the chair bolted to the wheelhouse deck beside the console — and the chair was used in summer, in calm weather, in the easy crossings when the channel was gentle and the wind was light and the autopilot could hold the course and the captain's presence at the wheel was supervisory rather than operational. But in November the captain's presence was operational, was hands-on, was the physical engagement with the vessel that foul weather required, the engagement that connected the man to the hull through the wheel and the steering gear and the rudder, the chain of connection that made the captain not a supervisor but a participant, not a manager but a worker, and the work was the steering and the steering was the crossing and the crossing, in November, was earned.

The storm came on the twenty-third.

The forecast had been accurate — the National Weather Service office in Gray had issued a gale warning for Penobscot Bay, winds northwest twenty-five to thirty-five knots gusting to forty-five, seas six to eight feet — and Harlan had read the forecast at 5:15 in his kitchen, standing at the counter with his coffee, reading the forecast on his phone because the phone had replaced the VHF weather broadcast as the morning's first source of information, the phone faster and more detailed and less crackling than the VHF, and the replacement was one of the small surrenders to technology that Harlan had made over the decades, each surrender a concession that the new way was better than the old way in some measurable respect and worse in some unmeasurable respect, the measurable being speed and clarity and the unmeasurable being the particular quality of the VHF's broadcast, the voice of the weather service's automated announcer speaking the conditions in the flat, affectless tone that was the sound of official weather, the sound of government informing the public, the sound that Harlan's father had listened to and that the captains before him had listened to and that the phone's screen could not replicate.

Gale warning. He made his calculations. The Constance was rated for seas to twelve feet. The forecast said six to eight. The margin was sufficient. The wind was strong but not unprecedented — forty-five-knot gusts were a November event, a thing that happened three or four times a season, a condition that the Constance had operated in many times and that Harlan had navigated many times and that the channel had presented many times, the channel's November self, its hard self, its self that tested the vessel and the captain and the crossing's infrastructure and that found them, each time, sufficient.

He would run the schedule. He would run all crossings. The decision was the captain's — the state's policy gave the captain discretion to cancel crossings when conditions exceeded the vessel's or the captain's or the passengers' safety limits, and the discretion was real, was not theoretical, was a judgment that Harlan had exercised eleven times in thirty-four years, eleven cancellations, eleven days when the channel's conditions exceeded the margin and the captain said no, and the no was respected, was not questioned, was the captain's right and the captain's responsibility, and the responsibility was the weight, the heaviness, the thing that sat on the captain's shoulders during every storm crossing, the knowledge that the decision to run was the decision to place the passengers in the conditions and that the conditions were the captain's risk and the passengers' trust and the trust was sacred, was the crossing's covenant, the agreement between the captain and the passengers that the captain would not run if the running was dangerous and that the passengers would ride if the captain was running, and the covenant was unspoken and unwritten and unbreakable.

The 6:15 departed into the storm.

The wind was immediate. The moment the Constance cleared the Port Clement breakwater the wind took her, took her beam with a force that was not a push but a blow, a continuous blow, the sustained pressure of thirty-knot wind hitting the ferry's broad side, the side that was thirty-eight feet tall from waterline to wheelhouse top and that presented to the wind a surface area of approximately four thousand square feet, four thousand square feet of steel sail that the wind pressed against and that the Constance's hull resisted and that Harlan's hands on the wheel corrected for, the correction not four degrees or six degrees but twelve, fifteen, the wheel held hard to port, his arms braced, his feet planted, his body leaning into the work the way a body leans into any work that requires force, the leaning a commitment, a physical statement that said: I am here, I am holding, I will not let the wind take us.

The seas were six feet. The forecast had been accurate. Six feet in the channel was not six feet in the open ocean — the channel's confined width and shallow margins compressed the waves, shortened them, steepened them, made them more violent per foot of height than open-ocean waves, the violence a function of the channel's geometry, the water's energy concentrated rather than dispersed — and the six-foot seas hit the Constance's hull with a regularity that was almost musical, the impacts spaced at intervals of four seconds, each impact a percussion, a drum beat, the hull's steel ringing with the strike, the ring traveling through the structure and reaching the wheelhouse as a shudder, a tremor, the tremor not dangerous but insistent, the water's insistence that its authority be acknowledged, that the vessel respect the conditions and the conditions respect no one.

The car deck was awash. Green water — not spray but solid water, the tops of the waves breaking over the car deck's low freeboard — rolled across the deck plates and drained through the scuppers, the water's passage across the deck a visual measure of the sea's force, the force made visible as a sheet of green that arrived and departed with each wave, and the two cars on the deck — Paul Ouellette's truck and a white SUV belonging to someone Harlan did not recognize — sat in the wash with their tires channeling the water, the water parting around the rubber and rejoining behind it, the flow a miniature river on the deck, a river that existed for three seconds and disappeared and reformed with the next wave.

Tommy was below. Tommy was in the passenger cabin, seated, because the car deck was not a place for a person during a storm crossing, the deck too exposed, too slippery, the wash too unpredictable, and the protocol — the same protocol that governed every aspect of the Constance's operation — required the deckhand to be secured in the cabin during heavy weather, secured meaning seated with the seatbelt fastened, the seatbelts installed in 2008 at the Coast Guard's recommendation, the recommendation prompted by an incident on the Vinalhaven ferry in which a deckhand had been injured by a fall on the car deck during a storm, and the recommendation became a requirement and the requirement became the protocol and the protocol was followed because the protocol was the thing that stood between the storm and the injury, between the wind and the person, between the sea's force and the body's fragility.

Harlan held the wheel. He held it with both hands, the hands white at the knuckles, the knuckles white not from cold — the wheelhouse was heated, the small electric heater mounted under the console providing the minimal warmth that the wheelhouse required — but from force, from the grip's intensity, from the effort of holding the Constance on course against a wind that wanted to push her southeast and waves that wanted to roll her and a current — the ebb, running southwest, two knots — that wanted to carry her, and the three forces — wind, wave, current — combined into a single resultant that Harlan felt in the wheel as a constant pull to starboard, a pull that he countered with the constant hold to port, and the pull and the hold were the storm crossing's dynamics, its physics, its contest between the forces that moved the vessel and the will that directed it.

The crossing took twenty-eight minutes. Three minutes added by the construction zone, three more by the storm, the storm's addition a function of the reduced speed that the conditions required — seven knots rather than nine, the reduction a judgment, the captain's judgment that seven knots was fast enough to maintain steerage and slow enough to reduce the hull's impact with the waves, the speed a balance between control and comfort, between the need to cross and the need to cross safely, and the balance was the skill, was the thing that thirty-four years had taught Harlan, the skill of finding the speed that was right for these conditions, this wind, this sea, this tide, this vessel, this morning.

Twenty-eight minutes. Six minutes longer than the canonical twenty-two. Six stolen minutes. Three by the bridge, three by the storm, and the stealing was the season's arithmetic, the accounting of the crossing's remaining time, the subtraction of minutes from a total that was already declining.

The Constance docked at Dunmore. The docking was hard — the wind hit the harbor entrance at the worst angle, northwest, pushing the Constance south as she turned into the harbor, pushing her toward the breakwater, and Harlan countered with power, with the engines at full ahead and the wheel hard over and the stern swinging and the bow coming around and the fenders meeting the dock with a force that was greater than the calm-weather docking's gentle press, the force the storm's signature on the docking, the storm saying: I am here, I am part of this, I am involved — and the dock lines went over and Tommy, released from the cabin, made fast the bow and then the stern, his hands on the ropes in the wind, his body braced against the wind's push, his orange vest bright against the gray of the morning and the gray of the water and the gray of the sky.

The passengers disembarked. Paul Ouellette drove off the car deck through the wash, through the water that still ran across the deck from the last wave's contribution, and his tires sprayed the water sideways and the spray caught the wind and the wind carried it across the deck and against the wheelhouse windows, the spray adding its contribution to the salt that already hazed the glass, the salt of this storm added to the salt of previous storms, the accumulation that was the Constance's patina, her record of the weather she had endured.

Harlan stood in the wheelhouse and looked at the harbor.

The harbor in a November gale was a different harbor. The moorings strained. The lobster boats pulled at their lines, their bows into the wind, their sterns swinging, the boats performing the anxious dance of tethered things in high wind, each one testing its restraint, each one discovering, with each gust, whether the mooring held, and the holding was not guaranteed, was not certain, was the product of the mooring's condition and the anchor's bite and the chain's strength and the shackle's integrity, and any one of these could fail, and the failure would be the boat's freedom, the freedom that was not freedom but disaster, the freed boat driven by the wind onto the shore or onto another boat or onto the breakwater, the freedom a form of destruction.

But the moorings held. They always held, or nearly always — one failure every three or four years, one boat adrift, one salvage operation, and the near-always was the harbor's record, its batting average, and the average was high enough to sustain the confidence that the average sustained, the confidence that the moorings would hold, that the harbor would protect, that the infrastructure would serve.

The storm continued through the day. Harlan crossed nine times — nine round trips, eighteen crossings, each one a negotiation with the wind and the waves and the current, each one requiring the full engagement of the captain's body and the captain's knowledge and the captain's judgment, and the engagement was exhausting, was the kind of exhaustion that accumulates not in the muscles alone but in the attention, in the concentration, in the sustained alertness that storm crossings require, the alertness that does not relax for twenty-eight minutes, that does not blink for twenty-eight minutes, that holds the wheel and watches the water and feels the hull and listens to the engine and monitors the instruments and does all of these simultaneously, continuously, without interruption, for twenty-eight minutes, and then does it again, and again, and again, eighteen times.

By the 9:30, the last crossing, Harlan's arms ached. Not the ache of injury but the ache of use, the deep fatigue of muscles that have worked against resistance for fourteen hours, the resistance of the wheel, of the wind, of the sea's insistence on its own direction, and the ache was familiar, was a November ache, was the ache he felt three or four times each November and five or six times each December and that he treated with ibuprofen and with sleep and with the knowledge that the ache would fade by morning and that the morning would bring another crossing and the crossing would bring the ache again if the wind was there, and the wind's presence was not his to control, was the weather's decision, and the weather decided without consulting the captain.

The last crossing was dark. November dark. The dark of a month that has taken the light and not given it back, the dark that starts at 4:30 and does not end until 6:30 and that fills the channel with a blackness that is not the romantic darkness of summer nights but the operational darkness of winter seas, the darkness in which the work continues, the darkness that does not excuse the captain from his duties but intensifies them, because in the dark the instruments matter more and the feel matters more and the knowledge matters most, the knowledge of where the bottom is and where the ledges are and where the markers should be, the markers' lights blinking in the dark — green to starboard, red to port on the way to Dunmore, reversed on the return — the lights the channel's code, its Morse, its way of saying: here, here is the edge, here is the limit, do not go beyond.

He did not go beyond. He never went beyond. The limits were the limits and the limits were known and the knowing of the limits was the knowledge, was the skill, was the thirty-four years' contribution to the crossing's safety, and the safety was not guaranteed — no captain can guarantee safety, safety is a probability, a likelihood, a state that the captain's skill makes more probable but never certain — but the probability was high, was as high as human skill and mechanical maintenance and navigational precision could make it, and the high probability was the covenant, the trust, the agreement between the captain and the passengers and the channel.

The Constance docked at Dunmore for the last time that day. Tommy made fast the lines. The ramp lowered. One car drove off. The car deck was empty. The deck was wet, the storm's water still draining through the scuppers, the deck plates gleaming in the terminal's lights, the gleam the water's reflection, the water that had crossed the deck all day, that had washed over the steel sixteen times, that had been the storm's ambassador, its envoy, its physical representative on the ferry's surface.

Harlan shut down the engines. The Caterpillars fell silent, the silence sudden, enormous, the silence of two engines that have run for sixteen hours and have stopped, the silence that was not silence but was the absence of sound, and the absence was louder than the sound, was more present than the hum, because the hum had been continuous and the continuous is invisible and the invisible, when removed, becomes the most visible thing, the most audible thing, the most felt thing.

He stood in the wheelhouse in the silence. His arms ached. His hands were stiff. The salt was thick on the windows. The wind still blew outside, pressing against the glass, the wind that had been his opponent all day, that he had fought for eighteen crossings, that he had held against with his hands and his arms and his body and his knowledge, and the wind had not won and he had not won, because the crossing was not a contest but a collaboration, not a fight but a negotiation, the captain and the weather negotiating the terms of the crossing, the terms being: I will cross if you will let me, and the letting was the weather's contribution and the crossing was the captain's, and together they produced the day's eighteen passages, each one safe, each one completed, each one a demonstration that the crossing could withstand the storm, that the ferry and the captain and the channel were sufficient to the conditions, were adequate, were up to the task.

The task. The task was ending. The storms would continue — November would have more storms, December would have more, the winter's weather escalating through January and February until March, when the ferry would cease and the bridge would open and the storms would continue but the crossings would not, the storms spending their force on a channel that no ferry crossed, the wind pushing against a bridge that did not feel it the way a hull feels it, the bridge's cables singing in the wind but the singing not the singing of a vessel under way, not the hull's conversation with the water, but the bridge's conversation with the air, a different conversation, a stationary conversation, the conversation of a thing that stays rather than a thing that crosses.

Harlan descended from the wheelhouse. He walked the dock. The wind pushed at his back. His coat — a Carhartt, like Owen's, because the Carhartt was the coast's coat, the working coat, the coat that everyone who worked outdoors on the Maine coast wore because the Carhartt was warm and durable and did not pretend to be anything other than what it was, which was a coat for work, a coat for wind, a coat for salt — his coat was wet with spray and the wet was cold and the cold was November's cold, the cold that would deepen into December's cold and January's cold and February's cold, the cold that was the crossing's final test, the last examiner, the cold that asked: are you still here, are you still crossing, are you still holding the wheel and feeling the hull and reading the water, and the answer was yes, the answer was still yes, the answer would be yes until March, until the last crossing, until the answer was no longer yes but was instead the silence that follows the last answer, the silence of a question that is no longer asked because the questioner has left, because the crossing has ended, because the November gale and the December gale and the January gale blow across a channel that no ferry crosses, the wind's question addressed to an empty wheelhouse, an idle engine, a captain who stands on the shore and listens to the wind and does not answer because the answer was the crossing and the crossing is done.

The storm blew itself out overnight. The morning was calm, the channel flat, the air cold and still, the stillness the storm's aftermath, the exhaustion that follows violence, the world catching its breath after the exertion, and Harlan stood in the wheelhouse at 6:15 and sounded the horn and the horn's note went out across the flat water and the flat water carried it to both shores, to Port Clement behind and Dunmore ahead, the note traveling farther in the calm than it traveled in the storm, the calm giving the horn its full range, its full reach, and the reach was the horn's ambition, its desire to be heard, to announce the crossing, to say: we are here, we are crossing, we have crossed through the storm and we are crossing still.

Still crossing.