Solstice

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 19: Solstice

December 21. The sun rose at 7:04 and would set at 3:58 and the eight hours and fifty-four minutes between the rising and the setting were the fewest minutes of daylight the island would receive, the shortest day, the day that the earth's tilt had been preparing since June, the tilt incrementally subtracting light from each day, a minute here, two minutes there, the subtracting so gradual that no single day felt shorter than the day before but the accumulation was enormous, was five hours and forty-one minutes of light subtracted from the summer solstice's fourteen hours and thirty-five minutes, the subtraction the winter's arithmetic, the tilt's tax, the price that the northern hemisphere paid for the summer's extravagance.

Harlan stood in the wheelhouse in the dark. The 6:15 departed in the dark. The 6:15 had been departing in the dark since the first week of October, the dark mornings arriving gradually and then completely, the transition from dawn departures to dark departures a seasonal passage that the ferry marked by the wheelhouse lights' reflection in the windows, the lights reflected when the outside was dark and not reflected when the outside was light, and the reflection was the winter's mirror, the wheelhouse seeing itself in its own glass, the captain and the instruments and the thermos doubled in the window's surface, the doubled image the dark's gift to the winter crossings.

The channel in the dark was a different channel. The channel in the dark was the instruments' channel, the radar's channel, the GPS's channel, the channel rendered in electronics rather than in light, the channel visible as data rather than as water, and the data was accurate — the radar showed the shore, the GPS showed the position, the compass showed the heading — but the data was not the channel the way the visible channel was the channel, the data a translation, a conversion of the water's reality into the screen's representation, and the representation was useful and sufficient and was not the thing itself.

Harlan navigated the dark channel by feel. He navigated by the instruments and by the feel simultaneously, the instruments confirming what the feel detected, the feel detecting what the instruments displayed, the two systems — electronic and embodied — running in parallel, cross-referencing, each one checking the other, and the checking was the winter crossing's method, the method that the dark required, the method of redundancy, of double navigation, of the captain's body and the captain's instruments agreeing on the position and the heading and the distance to the dock.

The dark was not empty. The dark was full of sound — the engines' hum, the hull's interaction with the water, the wind if there was wind, the horn's blast at departure, the horn's echo returning from the shores — and the sounds were navigational, were the dark's substitute for sight, the sounds telling Harlan things that the dark concealed — the distance to the shore measured by the echo's delay, the sea state measured by the hull's sound, the wind speed measured by the wind's voice, the voice that the rigging produced, the antenna and the mast and the flag halyard vibrating in the wind, the vibration's pitch proportional to the wind's speed, the pitch a calibration that Harlan's ear had learned over thirty-four years, the ear knowing twenty knots from thirty by the pitch alone, the pitch the wind's confession of its force.

Three hundred and eighty people lived on Dunmore Island in winter. Three hundred and eighty year-round residents, the number reduced from the summer's population of approximately fourteen hundred by the departure of the seasonal residents, the summer people, the people who came in June and left in September and who experienced the island as a summer place, a warm place, a place of long light and calm water and the luxury of time, and the summer people's departure was the island's contraction, the island pulling itself inward the way the tide pulled itself from the shore, the pulling a retreat, a reduction, the island becoming smaller in population if not in acreage, the three hundred and eighty remaining like the water that remained in the harbor at low tide, the essential water, the water that did not leave.

The three hundred and eighty were the island. The three hundred and eighty were not a subset of the island's population but were the population, the real population, the population that experienced the island in its full annual cycle — the fog and the cold and the dark and the storms and the ice on the ramp and the frozen spray on the dock lines and the November gales and the December cold and the January isolation and the February endurance and the March emergence — and the experiencing was the qualification, the credential, the proof that the three hundred and eighty were of the island and not merely on it.

Mere knew them all. Mere knew all three hundred and eighty by name and by history and by preference and by account balance and by the particular pattern of their daily and weekly purchases at the store, the pattern that was the person's signature, the consumer fingerprint that said: this person buys milk on Mondays and bread on Wednesdays and wine on Fridays and the buying is the life, the buying is the eating, the buying is the sustaining of the body that lives on the island through the winter, and the store sustains the body the way the ferry sustains the store, the supply chain running from the mainland through the crossing to the store to the person, the chain's links the ferry and the truck and the shelf and the hand, and every link was necessary and every link was maintained by someone — the ferry by Harlan, the truck by the driver, the shelf by Mere, the hand by the person — and the maintaining was the winter's work, the work of keeping the chain intact through the months when the chain was hardest to maintain, the months when the storms disrupted the ferry and the ice thickened the roads and the cold tightened everything.

The store on the solstice was warm. Mere opened at 7:00, an hour before dawn in the old sense of dawn, the sense that meant light, the light not arriving until after 7:00 in December, the store's lights the first light that many islanders saw in the morning, the store's windows glowing on Harbor Road like a hearth's glow in a wall, the glow the warmth made visible, the warmth the woodstove's contribution, the stove in the store's back corner burning since 5:30 when Mere had come down from the apartment and had loaded it with the split oak that Carl brought from the woodlot behind the house, the oak dense and slow-burning, the oak's heat steady, the heat filling the store with the particular warmth that a woodstove produces, the warmth that is not the even, distributed warmth of a furnace but is radiant, directional, the warmth strongest near the stove and diminishing with distance, the diminishing creating zones — the hot zone within six feet of the stove where the old men sat in the morning and drank coffee, the warm zone from six to twelve feet where the shelves were and where the shopping was done, the cool zone near the door where the draft entered with every customer and where the vegetables lived, the vegetables preferring the cool, the lettuce and the apples and the potatoes arranged near the door not for display but for temperature.

The old men arrived at 7:15. Three of them this morning — Earl Pinkham and Frank Webber and Bill Alley, the three who came every morning, the three whose retirement had produced the morning's vacancy, the vacancy that the store filled, the store serving as the retired man's office, the retired man's workplace, the place where the retired man performed the work of being retired, which was the work of sitting and drinking coffee and talking about the weather and the channel and the bridge and the island and the past, the past the retired man's jurisdiction, the past the territory that the retired man governed with the authority of having been there, of having experienced the things that the past contained.

They sat near the stove. They held their mugs — ceramic mugs, the store's mugs, the mugs that Mere kept on the shelf above the coffee maker, the mugs mismatched, no two alike, the mugs accumulated over years from various sources, some purchased, some donated, some left behind by summer people who had drunk their coffee and departed and who had not returned for the mug, and the not-returning of the summer people for their mugs was a small abandonment, a trivial leaving, but the trivial leaving was the pattern, was the summer people's relationship to the island in miniature, the coming and the leaving and the not-returning, and the mugs that remained were the evidence of the pattern, the mugs on the shelf the orphans of the summer.

"Shortest day," Earl said.

"Gets longer tomorrow," Frank said.

"One minute," Bill said. "One minute longer. Takes until February before you can feel it."

This was the solstice's knowledge, the knowledge that the three old men shared, the knowledge of men who had lived through sixty winters and who understood the solstice not as an astronomical event but as a marker, a turning point, the point after which the light began to return, began to add itself back to the days, one minute at a time, the adding so slow as to be imperceptible, the perception delayed until February when the accumulated minutes — sixty, seventy, the adding compounding — produced a visible difference, a difference the eye could detect, the evening light lasting past 5:00, the morning dark retreating past 6:30, the retreat the light's advance, the advance the winter's yielding.

But the yielding was not yet. The yielding was two months away. The solstice was the bottom, the low point, the lowest tide of light, and the bottom had to be touched before the rising could begin, the way the low tide had to be reached before the flood could start, and the reaching of the bottom was the solstice's work, the day's singular contribution to the year, the contribution of minimum, of least, of the day that had the least light and that therefore proved that the light could go no lower, could subtract no further, and the proof was the comfort, the solstice's cold comfort, the assurance that the dark had reached its limit.

Harlan crossed the channel nine times on the solstice. Nine round trips, eighteen crossings, and of the eighteen crossings fourteen were made in the dark — the 6:15, the 7:20, and the first twenty minutes of the 8:30 in the morning dark, and the last ten minutes of the 3:00, the full 4:15, the 5:30, the 7:00, and the 9:30 in the evening dark — and the twelve dark crossings were the solstice's measure of the winter captain's work, the measure that said: this is what the winter crossing requires, this is the proportion of dark to light, this is the ratio of instruments to eyes, this is the dark's demand.

The four light crossings — the 10:00, the 11:30, the 1:00, and the 2:30 — were the solstice's gift, the eight hours and fifty-four minutes of daylight distributed across the schedule's midday crossings, and the light was precious in the way that scarce things are precious, the light's scarcity increasing its value, the value registered not in the mind but in the body, the body's response to the light different in December than in June, the body leaning toward the light in December the way a plant leans toward the light, the leaning involuntary, cellular, the body's ancient response to the sun's angle, the angle that said: I am low, I am far, I am at my farthest, and the farthest was the solstice and the solstice was today.

The channel at midday on the solstice was beautiful. The sun was low — twenty degrees above the horizon at its peak, the angle producing a light that was not the overhead light of summer but was the raking light of winter, the light coming from the side rather than from above, the light entering the channel at an angle that illuminated the water's surface texture, the surface's every ripple and chop and wavelet visible in the raking light, the texture that the overhead summer light erased, and the visible texture was the water's skin, the water's surface rendered in shadow and highlight the way an old face is rendered in raking light, every line visible, every crease defined, the water's age and character shown.

The light on the channel at the solstice was golden. Not the gold of summer's late afternoon but a different gold, a winter gold, a gold that was colder and deeper and more saturated, the gold of light that has traveled through more atmosphere because the sun is lower and the light's path through the air is longer and the longer path filters the light, removes the blue, concentrates the gold, and the concentrated gold fell on the water and the channel was gold and the shores were gold and the Constance's hull was gold and the bridge's towers were gold, the gold indiscriminate, the gold democratic, the gold falling on everything equally, on the beautiful and the industrial, on the water and the steel, on the crossing and the spanning.

The island in winter was the island. This was the tautology that the winter residents lived inside, the circular truth that the summer people did not experience, the truth that said: the island in winter is what the island is, the island stripped of the summer's decoration, the summer's visitors, the summer's businesses, the summer's pretense that the island was a destination, a resort, a place to which one came for pleasure, and the stripping revealed the island's structure, the way the winter's leafless trees revealed the trees' structure, the branches visible, the architecture exposed, the architecture that the leaves had concealed, and the island's architecture was the three hundred and eighty, was the store and the school and the church and the harbor and the ferry and the lobster boats and the cemetery and the roads and the houses, the houses dark in the morning and lit in the evening, the lights in the windows the island's vital signs, the lights saying: we are here, we are home, we are the three hundred and eighty who stay.

The staying was the identity. The staying through the solstice and through the dark and through the cold and through the storms and through the ice and through the isolation was the thing that made the year-round residents year-round, was the qualification, the credential, the test that the summer people did not take and could not pass, the test that was not a test but was a life, a life lived in the dark months, the dark months that were not the absence of the light months but were the other months, the complementary months, the months that completed the year and that completed the island and that completed the islander.

Harlan was a year-round resident in the way that the channel was a year-round channel. He did not leave. He did not take a winter vacation. He did not fly to Florida or to the Caribbean or to any of the warm places that the mainland's retirees fled to in December, the fleeing a surrender, a capitulation to the cold, and Harlan did not capitulate because the crossing did not capitulate, the ferry ran in December as it ran in June, the schedule indifferent to the season, the schedule's constancy the ferry's promise and the captain's obligation.

The solstice crossing at 3:00 was the last light crossing. The sun was at the horizon, the horizon a line of orange and pink to the southwest, the colors the sun's departure ceremony, the colors that the atmosphere produced when the sun was at its lowest angle, the colors that were visible from the wheelhouse as a band of warmth at the bottom of the sky, the warmth visual rather than thermal, the warmth of color in the cold air, the warmth of light leaving.

Harlan watched the light leave. He watched from the wheelhouse as the Constance crossed the channel at 3:15, the crossing carrying him from Port Clement toward Dunmore, toward the east, away from the setting sun, and the leaving of the light was behind him, the dark ahead of him, the Constance moving from the light into the dark, from the day into the night, from the shortest day's last light into the longest night's first dark.

The transition was visible from the wheelhouse. The transition from light to dark was not a switch but a gradient, the light fading, the dark increasing, the two meeting at the horizon behind the ferry and at the island ahead, the island already in shadow, the island's eastern face in the dark while the western face still held the sun's last light, the light on the western shore a stripe of gold, a band of warmth, the last light on the island, the light that would be gone in minutes.

The passengers on the 3:00 were few. Three cars. Seven passengers. The seven passengers were islanders, year-round residents returning from the mainland, returning from the errands and the appointments and the shopping that the mainland provided and that the island did not, and the returning was the solstice's homecoming, the return to the island on the shortest day, the return to the dark.

Among the passengers was Sophie Ames. Fourteen years old, riding the ferry home from the mainland high school, riding with the cello case in the seat beside her, the cello that she played and that she carried across the channel twice a day, the cello's daily crossing the music's crossing, the instrument's transit between the mainland's instruction and the island's practice, and Sophie sat in the cabin with the cello and looked out the window at the dark and the water and the island approaching, and the looking was the looking of a girl who had grown up on the ferry, who had ridden the crossing since she was carried aboard in her mother's arms, who knew the twenty-two minutes the way she knew the cello's fingerboard, by feel, by the body's accumulated experience.

The Constance docked at Dunmore at 3:22. The light was gone. The light had been gone for four minutes, the sun below the horizon since 3:18, the solstice's sunset earlier than the previous day's by thirteen seconds, thirteen seconds that were the last subtraction, the solstice's final taking, and after the taking the adding would begin, one minute tomorrow, the minute the first deposit in the account that would accrue through January and February and March until the light was long again and the summer was possible again and the island was full again.

But the full was six months away. The full was the summer and the summer was distant and the distance was the winter and the winter was now, was the dark at 3:22, was the cold at fifteen degrees, was the wind from the northwest at twelve knots, was the ice forming on the dock lines, the ice the water's transition from liquid to solid, from the flowing state to the fixed state, from the state that moved to the state that held, and the ice on the lines was the cold's grip, the cold's claim on the ferry's equipment, the cold saying: I am here, I am the condition, I am the winter.

Tommy chipped the ice from the lines. He chipped with the wooden mallet that hung on the hook beside the deck locker, the mallet's head scarred by the chipping, the wood dented by the contact with the ice and the cleats and the steel, the mallet the winter's tool, the tool that had no purpose in summer and that was essential in winter, the mallet's seasonal employment the mirror of the island's seasonal population, present when needed, absent when not.

The solstice evening was the darkest evening. The evening that followed the shortest day was the longest evening, and the longest evening on Dunmore Island was an evening spent in the particular dark of an island that had no streetlights and no highway lights and no commercial neon and no ambient glow from adjacent towns, the island's dark a true dark, an unmitigated dark, the dark that the mainland had not experienced since the invention of electric light, the dark that was the night's original condition, the condition that the stars could penetrate but that nothing else could, and the stars on the solstice were bright, were the brightest stars of the year because the air was cold and the cold air was clear and the clear air was transparent and the transparent air allowed the stars' light to reach the island without the scattering that humid air or warm air produced, the scattering that softened and dimmed the stars, and the winter stars were not soft and not dim but were hard and bright and close, the stars seeming closer in winter because the stars were brighter and the brightness was proximity's illusion, the illusion that bright things are near things.

Harlan made the 9:30 crossing in the starlight. The starlight was not sufficient for navigation — the starlight illuminated nothing on the water, nothing on the shore, the starlight's contribution to the crossing purely aesthetic, the stars above the channel beautiful and useless, beautiful because useless, beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they do not serve a purpose, when their existence is not justified by their function but is justified by their being, the stars being there the way the channel was there, permanently, indifferently, the stars and the channel sharing the quality of not caring whether they were observed, the quality of existing without an audience, and the existing-without-audience was the solstice's deepest teaching, the teaching that the island and the channel and the crossing existed whether or not they were witnessed, whether or not they were valued, whether or not the bridge replaced the ferry and the summer people returned and the three hundred and eighty became three hundred and seventy and then three hundred and sixty and then the number that the bridge's economics would eventually produce, the number that was the island's future population, the population that would live on the island after the crossing ended and the bridge opened and the island was no longer an island in the maritime sense but was a peninsula, a connected thing, a thing whose separateness had been engineered away.

But the separateness was here tonight. The separateness was the dark and the stars and the cold and the ferry crossing the channel at 9:30 on the solstice, the crossing made by the instruments and the feel and the thirty-four years and the captain at the wheel, the crossing that was the island's separateness in motion, the separateness performed, the separateness enacted in the twenty-two minutes of water between the shores, and the enactment was the identity, was the thing that the bridge would end, the thing that the three hundred and eighty carried inside them, the knowledge that they were islanders because they crossed water to be where they were, and the crossing was the proof.

The Constance docked at Dunmore for the last time that day. The solstice was over. The shortest day was done. The longest night was beginning. Tomorrow the light would add one minute to the day and the minute would be the turning, the beginning of the return, the promise that the dark had limits and that the light would come back.

Harlan shut down the engines. The silence filled the wheelhouse. The silence of the solstice night, the silence of the longest dark, the silence that was not empty but was full, full of the stars and the cold and the island and the three hundred and eighty and the harbor and the boats on their moorings and the cemetery on the hill and the store with its woodstove cooling and the houses with their lights and the lives inside the lights, the lives that were the island, the lives that stayed.

He stood in the silence. He stood in the dark. He stood in the solstice's bottom, the lowest point, the minimum, and the minimum was not despair but was the foundation, was the base on which the adding would be built, one minute at a time, one day at a time, the adding that would restore the light the way the flood restores the water, gradually, patiently, by the physics of the tilt and the orbit and the ancient reliable mechanics of the earth's relationship to the sun, the relationship that produced the seasons and the solstices and the dark and the light and the crossing and the constancy and the three hundred and eighty and the island and the life.

The life. The life on the solstice was the same life as the life on any other day. The coffee was the same. The thermos was the same. The channel was the same. The twenty-two minutes were the same. The sameness was the constancy and the constancy was the life and the life did not vary with the light, did not shorten with the day, did not diminish with the dark, the life the same length on the solstice as on the equinox as on the longest day of summer, the life measured not by light but by crossings, not by minutes of daylight but by minutes on the water, and the minutes on the water were the same, were always the same, were the twenty-two minutes that the channel required and that the captain provided and that the ferry performed, the twenty-two minutes that were the crossing's constant, the ferry's constant, the life's constant, the constant that the solstice could not alter and that the dark could not diminish and that the bridge would end.

But not tonight. Tonight the constant held. Tonight the crossing was made. Tonight the Constance crossed the dark channel on the shortest day and the captain stood at the wheel and the deckhand stood at the lines and the passengers rode in the cabin and the engines hummed and the hull moved through the water and the water held the hull and the dark held the stars and the stars held the light and the light, far away and hard and bright and cold, held the promise of the return, the promise that the tilt would reverse and the days would lengthen and the dark would retreat, the retreat gradual, one minute at a time, the minutes the light's deposits in the account that the winter had depleted, the deposits that would accumulate until the account was full again, until the summer was here again, until the island was full again.

But the full island would not have the ferry. The full island's summer, the next summer, would be the bridge's first summer, the summer of driving rather than crossing, the summer of four minutes rather than twenty-two, and the four minutes would not include the solstice's dark crossing or the solstice's starlight or the solstice's silence in the wheelhouse after the engines shut down, and the not-including was the loss, the loss that the bridge's convenience could not compensate, the loss of the dark and the stars and the silence and the crossing's daily proof that the island was an island and that the crossing was the price and the price was worth paying.

The stars turned above the harbor. The longest night continued. The three hundred and eighty slept. The Constance sat at her dock in the dark, in the cold, in the solstice, in the silence, waiting for the morning, waiting for the light's return, waiting for the crossing that would come with the light, the crossing that was the constancy, the crossing that was the name, the crossing that was, tonight, the darkest crossing, the crossing made in the least light, the crossing that proved that the ferry crossed in any light, in all light, in no light, the crossing indifferent to the dark the way it was indifferent to the season, the crossing the same crossing, twenty-two minutes, 1.4 miles, the constant, the name, the promise.

The promise kept in the dark.