December

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 22: December

The cold came on December seventh and did not leave.

It came from the northwest, from Canada, from the continental interior that had been cooling since October and that had reached, by the first week of December, the temperature at which the cold becomes not a condition but an entity, a thing with weight and presence and intention, the intention to descend, to press southward, to reach the coast and the channel and the water and the ferry and the man who stood in the wheelhouse at 6:10 in the morning and felt the cold on the glass, the glass radiating the cold inward, the cold passing through the glass the way light passes through glass, by the physics of conduction, the inside of the wheelhouse colder near the windows than near the center, the temperature gradient measurable in inches, the difference between the glass and the heater the difference between December and the resistance to December.

Seven degrees at 6:10. The thermometer on the terminal building — a circular dial, analog, mounted beside the door, the thermometer as old as the building, installed by Leeman Brothers in 1953 or added shortly after, the thermometer's provenance uncertain but its function certain, the dial showing the temperature with the frank honesty of a device that has no opinion about what it measures — the thermometer said seven, and seven was cold, was the kind of cold that changes the work.

The ramp was iced. Tommy had sanded it — the sand from the barrel that the state kept at the terminal, the barrel filled in November, the sand coarse, marine sand, designed for traction on surfaces that ice had made treacherous — and the sanding was Tommy's first task every morning in December, before the dock lines, before the ramp's lowering, the sanding first because the ramp's surface was the first surface the cars touched when they drove aboard and the first surface the passengers walked on when they boarded on foot, and the first surface must be safe, must be gripped, must not betray the trust that the passengers placed in it when they stepped from the dock to the ramp.

The sand spread on the ice made a sound under Tommy's boots. A grating, a scraping, the sound of mineral on mineral, the sand's coarseness grinding against the ice's smoothness, and the sound was December's sound, the sound that said: the easy months are over, the months when the work was the work are over, now the work is the work plus the cold, and the plus is the surcharge, and the surcharge is paid by the body.

Tommy's hands. Tommy's hands in December were the subject of a daily negotiation between the need for dexterity and the need for warmth, the negotiation conducted through gloves — the gloves that Tommy wore, lobster-style gloves, rubber-palmed, insulated, the gloves that every deckhand and every fisherman and every dock worker on the Maine coast wore in winter, the gloves a compromise between protection and function, warm enough to prevent frostbite and thin enough to allow the handling of lines and the operation of equipment, the compromise always imperfect, the gloves always either too warm for the dexterity or too thin for the cold, and the imperfection was the winter's terms, the winter's insistence that comfort and competence cannot coexist fully in December.

His hands cracked. The skin at the base of his fingers, at the knuckles, at the web between thumb and forefinger, cracked the way that skin cracks when it is cold and wet and salt-exposed and repeatedly flexed, the cracking not a wound exactly but a splitting, the skin's surface opening along the lines of motion, the lines that the work had inscribed, the creases and the folds that the gripping and the pulling and the coiling had worn into the skin, and the cracking followed these lines the way a fault follows a geologic weakness, the path of least resistance, the crack opening where the skin was thinnest, where the use had thinned it.

The cracks bled. Not much. A seep, a weep, the blood appearing in the crack the way water appears in a fissure in rock, slowly, from below, the blood not flowing but emerging, and the emerging was painful in the way that salt in a cut is painful, which is to say sharply, specifically, the pain located precisely in the crack, the pain not radiating but concentrated, the concentration the pain's signature, its specificity, the pain saying: here, exactly here, this crack, this finger, this hand.

Harlan's hands had the same cracks. The same locations. The same splits along the same lines. The same blood in the same fissures. The same salt in the same wounds. His hands and Tommy's hands cracked in the same places because the work was the same work and the work inscribed the same lines and the lines cracked under the same conditions, and the sameness was the inheritance, the physical inheritance, the uncle's hands and the nephew's hands bearing the same marks because the marks were the work's marks and the work was the same work.

He noticed this — the sameness — on a morning in the second week of December, standing in the wheelhouse, looking at his hands on the wheel, the cracks visible in the console's light, the blood dried in the creases, the salt whitening the skin around the cracks, and he thought of Tommy's hands below, on the car deck, handling the lines in the cold, the same cracks, the same blood, the same salt, and the thinking was not sentimental but observational, the observation of a man who had been watching the crossing's effects on the human body for thirty-four years and who recognized in his nephew's hands the same effects that the crossing had produced in his own, the same damage, the same adaptation, the same testimony that the body gives when it is used hard and daily in cold salt air.

December's crossings were the hardest. This was not subjective, was not opinion, was measurable — the wind stronger, the seas higher, the cold more severe, the visibility more often reduced, the ice more frequent, the daylight shorter, every variable that made the crossing difficult reaching its most difficult value in December, the month that the channel used to test the ferry and the captain and the deckhand, the month that asked: are you still here, are you still willing, are you still capable, and the asking was not gentle but insistent, the channel's December self its most insistent self, its self that demanded the most and forgave the least.

The cold changed the Constance. The steel contracted — imperceptibly, fractionally, the contraction too small to measure with any instrument aboard but felt, felt in the hull's resonance, the hull's hum a slightly higher pitch in December than in September, the pitch change the steel's response to the cold, the steel's molecules closer together, the structure tighter, denser, the hull literally harder in December than in summer, the hardness a physical fact that the deck plates transmitted to Harlan's feet, the vibration sharper, clearer, the engine's hum arriving at his soles with a crispness that the warmer months softened, the softening the warmth's gift and the crispness the cold's.

The diesel thickened. The Caterpillars' fuel was winter-grade — No. 2 diesel with anti-gel additives — but the thickening was perceptible anyway, the engines starting harder on cold mornings, the starter motors grinding longer, the cylinders slower to fire, the combustion reluctant in the way that all combustion is reluctant in cold, the fuel less willing to vaporize, the air less willing to compress, the ignition less willing to occur, and the reluctance was overcome by the engineering, by the glow plugs that preheated the cylinders, by the block heaters that kept the coolant above freezing overnight, by the battery warmers that maintained the cranking amps, the technology fighting the cold, the technology winning, but winning harder, the winning requiring more effort, the effort the cold's tax, December's tithe.

Harlan started the engines at 6:05 every morning. He listened to them start. The starting was a sound he had heard ten thousand times and that he heard differently in December, heard with the attention that December's difficulty demanded, the attention that listened not for the sound of the starting but for the sound within the starting, the particular quality of the combustion, the particular roughness or smoothness of the first seconds, the engine's voice in the cold morning telling him whether the starting was healthy or troubled, whether the cylinders were firing evenly or unevenly, whether the fuel was flowing or hesitating, the listening a diagnostic, a reading, the captain reading the engine the way a doctor reads a pulse, by sound, by touch, by the accumulated experience of ten thousand previous readings.

The engines started. They always started. They started because the maintenance was done, because the preparation was made, because the attention was paid, because Harlan and Tommy maintained the Constance with the daily care that the daily use required, and the care was greater in December because the use was harder, because the cold demanded more of the vessel and the vessel could provide more only if the vessel was maintained more, and the more was the work within the work, the invisible labor of keeping the machine ready for the conditions that would test it.

The crossings in December carried the season's particular cargo. Not the summer people, not the tourists, not the school groups or the day-trippers or the visitors who came to see the island's beauty. December's cargo was the essential: the mail, the fuel oil for the island's furnaces, the groceries for Mere's store, the packages from the mainland, the medical supplies for the clinic, the diesel for the generators, the things without which the island could not sustain itself through the winter. The cargo was need itself, not want, not preference, not the optional but the required, and the required was the ferry's most essential function, the function that justified the crossing in December when the crossing was hardest and the passengers were fewest, the function that said: the island depends on this, the island cannot survive without this, the crossing is not a convenience in December but a lifeline.

Three cars on the morning crossing. Two on the afternoon. Sometimes one. Sometimes the Constance crossed with her car deck empty except for the mail and the deliveries, the deck vast and bare, the steel plates glazed with spray that froze on contact, the freezing instantaneous in the cold, the spray hitting the deck as water and becoming ice in the time it took to spread, the transformation fast, chemical, the water's molecules locking into their crystal arrangement with the snap of a thing finding its shape, and the ice on the deck was the crossing's December decoration, its unwanted ornament, its evidence that the conditions had exceeded the threshold at which water remains water and had entered the territory where water becomes something else, something harder, something that must be dealt with.

Tommy dealt with it. Tommy sanded the deck between crossings, the same sand from the same barrel, the sand spread with the same shovel, the spreading the same motion, and the motion was repeated and the repetition was the work and the work was December's work, harder than September's, colder, more demanding, more physical, the body used more intensely and more painfully, the cracked hands gripping the shovel and the shovel scraping the ice and the ice resisting and the resistance overcome and the sand spread and the traction restored.

The crossing was hardest when it was about to end. This was the paradox. This was December's revelation. The crossing in December was harder than the crossing in September — harder physically, harder operationally, harder in every measurable way — and the hardness made the crossing more present, more felt, more experienced, the difficulty heightening the awareness the way pain heightens awareness, the cold and the ice and the wind and the short days and the cracked hands making every crossing a thing that could not be ignored, could not be taken for granted, could not become the background against which other things were seen, because the difficulty was the foreground, was the thing seen, was the crossing itself made vivid by the conditions that made it hard.

And the vividness was the gift. The gift that only December gave. The gift that only the ending revealed.

Because the ending made every difficulty precious. The ice on the ramp was precious. The cracked hands were precious. The cold in the wheelhouse was precious. The wind on the beam was precious. The spray on the deck was precious. The twenty-eight minutes in the construction zone were precious. The sanding and the scraping and the starting of the engines in the cold were precious. All of it precious because all of it was ending, all of it was the last December, the last time the ramp would ice, the last time the hands would crack, the last time the engines would start hard in the cold, and the lastness was the preciousness, the lastness transforming the difficulty from a burden into a treasure.

This was not nostalgia. Nostalgia looks backward. This looked at the present and saw the present as the future's past, saw the now as the thing that would be remembered, saw the difficulty as the thing that would be missed, and the seeing was the December gift, the hard gift, the gift that said: you cannot appreciate the crossing until the crossing is ending, you cannot love the difficulty until the difficulty is about to be taken from you, and the love that the ending reveals is not new love but old love, love that has been there all along, love that has been present in every crossing for thirty-four years but that the routine concealed, the routine's dailiness hiding the love beneath the habit, the habit obscuring the love the way fog obscures the island, and the ending is the clearing, the ending is the fog lifting, the ending is the moment when the love is visible, fully, finally, and the visibility is the ending's gift, the only gift the ending gives.

Harlan stood in the wheelhouse in December and loved the crossing.

He loved it the way he had always loved it — by doing it, by standing at the wheel and holding the course and feeling the tide and reading the water and navigating the channel — but the doing was now accompanied by the knowing, the knowing that the doing was ending, and the knowing made the doing fuller, richer, more complete, the doing and the knowing together producing an experience that neither could produce alone, the experience of performing an act that you love while knowing that the performance is nearly over, the experience that is the last season's singular experience, the experience that cannot be had at any other time, in any other month, in any other year.

The preciousness of difficulty. The phrase came to him on a morning crossing in the third week of December, a crossing in which the wind was thirty knots and the seas were five feet and the temperature was four degrees and the spray was freezing on the windows and the wipers were icing and the visibility was two hundred yards and the channel was demanding everything he had, every degree of skill, every ounce of strength, every increment of knowledge, the channel asking: are you still here, are you still capable, and Harlan answering yes with his hands and his feet and his body's thirty-four-year education, answering yes the way the Constance answered yes, by crossing, by continuing, by performing the act.

The preciousness of difficulty is a thing that only the ending reveals.

He wrote it in the notebook. He wrote it in the observations column, the column where his father had written "good hands" and "H. on deck learning ropes" and "first crossing of Clara B.," the column that was the log's space for the unofficial, the personal, the things that the crossing produced in the captain that the captain chose to record. He wrote: December 19. The preciousness of difficulty.

He did not explain the phrase. The notebook did not require explanation. The notebook was not for an audience but for the record, and the record did not need to understand itself but only to exist, and the existing was the purpose, and the phrase existed on the page in blue ink in Harlan's hand, and the existing was enough.

December continued. The cold continued. The crossings continued. Each one hard. Each one precious. Each one a passage through the channel that was harder and colder and darker than the channel had been in September, and the harder and colder and darker were the gifts, the unwanted gifts, the gifts that the ending gave to the man who was ending, the gifts that said: here, this is what you are losing, this is what the bridge will take, not the easy crossings, not the calm days, not the gentle channel, but this — the difficulty, the cold, the ice, the wind, the cracked hands, the frozen spray, the twenty-eight minutes of hard work in hard conditions, this is what the bridge will take, this is what the bridge cannot replace, because the bridge does not know difficulty, the bridge does not feel the cold, the bridge does not crack its hands, the bridge stands and the standing is not work, the standing is structure, and structure is not the same as crossing, and crossing is not the same as standing, and the difference is the difficulty, and the difficulty is precious.

The difficulty was precious.

December knew this. The channel knew this. The Constance knew this. The captain knew this.

The bridge did not know this. The bridge, rising in the channel, its towers now complete, its cables beginning to arc from tower to deck, the cables bright against the gray sky, the bridge beautiful in its engineering and blind to the difficulty it was eliminating, the bridge did not know the preciousness because the bridge did not know the difficulty because the bridge did not cross the channel but spanned it, and spanning is not crossing, and crossing is the act, and the act is the difficulty, and the difficulty is the gift.

December gave the gift. Harlan received it. The receiving was the crossing. The crossing was the work. The work was the love.

The love was December. December was cold. The cold was the gift.