The Wheelhouse

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 27: The Wheelhouse

The wheelhouse after the last crossing was the wheelhouse before the first crossing, which is to say: the same room, the same instruments, the same wheel, the same windows hazed with salt, the same shelf with the thermos in its ring, the same corkboard with the tide table pinned at eye level, the same compass pointing north, the same console with the same scratches and the same wear and the same arrangement that thirty-four years of one man's habits had produced, the arrangement that was not decoration but was function, every instrument in the place where the instrument had been placed not by design but by use, by the captain's determination over decades that this was where the thing should be, this was where the hand could reach it, this was where the eye could find it, and the finding and the reaching were the arrangement's justification, the arrangement the room's autobiography, the story of how one man organized his workspace and in organizing it organized his life.

The last 9:30 had docked twenty minutes ago. The passengers had disembarked. Tommy had made fast the lines and raised the ramp and swept the car deck and coiled the dock lines and performed the closing sequence that the closing required, the sequence that was the day's coda, the musical resolution, the final notes played after the last movement's last measure, and Tommy had gone, had walked down the dock and up the ramp and along the terminal road to the harbor, where Eddie Crane waited with the water taxi, and Tommy had crossed to Dunmore in the dark, eight minutes, the skiff's small engine the echo of the Constance's large engines, the crossing's miniature, and Harlan had watched the water taxi's light cross the harbor and disappear around the breakwater and he was alone.

He was alone in the wheelhouse. The aloneness was not loneliness. The aloneness was the wheelhouse's natural state, the state that the wheelhouse achieved when the crossing was over and the crew had gone and the passengers had gone and the engines were off and the instruments were off and the lights were on but were the only lights, the wheelhouse lit but unpopulated, the room belonging to no one because the room belonged to the man and the man was still there, the man's presence converting the room from empty to occupied, from unpopulated to inhabited, the inhabiting the man's gift to the room, the gift of being-there that the room received and held.

He stood at the wheel. The wheel was cold. The wheel was always cold when the engines were off, the wheel's steel losing the warmth that the hands' grip provided, the warmth departing the wheel the way the passengers departed the ferry, gradually, the steel's temperature declining toward the ambient, toward the air's temperature, toward the cold that the February night brought into the wheelhouse through the windows' imperfect seals and through the door's imperfect closure and through the steel structure itself, the steel conducting the cold from the outside to the inside with the same efficiency that it conducted the engines' vibration from below to above.

He put his hands on the wheel. The steel was cold but the wheel was familiar, was the most familiar thing in the room, the most familiar thing in his life, the thing his hands had touched more times than they had touched any other thing — more than the thermos, more than the dock lines, more than the kitchen counter, more than Janet's hand, the wheel touched and gripped and held and turned and released ten thousand times and ten thousand times again, and the touching had shaped the wheel and the wheel had shaped the hands, the mutual shaping that long contact produces, the wheel's surface worn smooth at ten and two by the hands' grip and the hands' calluses formed at the base of the fingers by the wheel's surface, the wheel and the hands each bearing the other's imprint, each carrying the evidence of the other's presence.

The wear at ten and two. The wear was visible as a brightening of the steel, a polishing, the surface at the grip positions shinier than the surface between them, the shininess the hands' record, the biography written in metal by skin, the biography that said: here, these hands, this many times, this many years, the grip repeated until the repetition was the record and the record was the wheel and the wheel was the crossing's physical document, the document that could not be filed or archived or digitized but that existed in the steel, in the molecular rearrangement that the hands' pressure had produced over thirty-four years, the molecules displaced, the surface altered, the alteration permanent, the hands' mark on the wheel as permanent as the wheel's mark on the hands.

He turned the wheel. He turned it to port, two degrees, the correction that the channel required on a building flood, the correction that was the crossing's signature move, the gesture that said: I know this water, I know this current, I know how the flood sets and how the Constance responds and how many degrees the wheel must turn to keep the ferry on the line between the departure marker and the arrival marker. Two degrees. The smallest correction. The correction that the passengers did not feel and that the channel required and that the captain provided, the providing the skill, the skill the thirty-four years, the thirty-four years the life.

He released the wheel. The wheel returned to center. The wheel always returned to center when the rudder was centered, the centering the steering system's default, the default that the naval architects had designed and that the hydraulics maintained, the centering the system's statement that the vessel wished to go straight, wished to track without correction, wished to be left alone, and the leaving-alone was what Harlan was doing now, was leaving the wheel alone for the last time, the hands releasing the steel, the steel releasing the hands, the mutual releasing the ending of the contact that had defined both.

The instruments. He looked at the instruments the way a person looks at the tools of a trade that has been practiced for decades and that is ending. The radar screen was dark, the screen turned off, the screen that had shown him the channel ten thousand times, the green sweep rotating, the shore and the markers and the islands rendered in phosphor, the channel's geography translated into light, and the screen was dark now and the geography was in the dark and the geography would remain in the dark because the screen would not be turned on again by these hands, by this captain, the screen's next illumination performed by someone else or by no one, the screen's future uncertain, the screen's future the Constance's future, the future of a vessel that would be decommissioned and sold or scrapped, the instruments' disposition determined by the buyer's intentions.

The GPS. The screen that had shown the Constance's position to the meter, the screen that had tracked every crossing, every approach, every departure, the position displayed as numbers — latitude, longitude, speed, heading — the numbers the electronic translation of the captain's position in the world, and the captain's position was here, was at the Port Clement dock, was at the coordinates that the GPS would show if the GPS were on, the coordinates that were the wheelhouse's address, the address that Harlan had occupied for thirty-four years, the address that was not a home but was the closest thing, the place where he had spent more waking hours than any other place, more than the house on Prospect Street, more than Mere's apartment, more than any room or building or location, the wheelhouse the place where the life had been lived, the place where the work had been done, the place where the crossing had been conducted.

The compass. The Ritchie, four-inch, in its binnacle. The binnacle that had been transferred from the Clara B., the binnacle that had been transferred from the Agnes before that, the binnacle's brass green with verdigris, the verdigris the patina that salt air produces on brass, the patina accumulated over seventy years of service on three vessels, seventy years of pointing north, seventy years of the compass card's insistence on its orientation, the insistence that was the compass's character, its personality, its refusal to point anywhere but north, the refusal the compass's integrity, the integrity the navigation's foundation.

He would take the binnacle. This was decided. The binnacle was not state property — the binnacle was Goss property, purchased by James from the breaker in Portland for forty dollars, the purchase documented nowhere, the provenance oral, the binnacle's chain of custody maintained by the family's memory rather than by the state's records, and the memory was Harlan's, and the memory said: this is ours, this has been ours since 1965, this binnacle has pointed north on three ferries and in two wheelhouses and the pointing will continue, the binnacle will come home, will stand on the shelf in the room on Prospect Street where the chart will hang, the binnacle and the chart together, the instruments reunited in the house, the house becoming the wheelhouse's annex, the place where the crossing's artifacts resided after the crossing's end.

The VHF radio. Channel 16. The hailing frequency. The frequency that Harlan had monitored for thirty-four years, the frequency that carried the Coast Guard's broadcasts and the fishermen's conversations and the harbor masters' directives and the occasional mayday, the mayday the frequency's most terrible word, the word that meant someone was in danger on the water, the word that activated every vessel within range, the word that converted the frequency from a monitoring channel to an emergency channel, and Harlan had heard the word five times in thirty-four years, five maydays, five boats in distress, and four of the five had been resolved — the boats found, the crews rescued, the distress ended — and one had not been resolved, had ended in the lost-at-sea that the cemetery's headstones recorded, a lobster boat out of Stonington, the boat found overturned, the crew of two not found, the not-finding the frequency's worst outcome, the silence that followed the mayday, the silence that meant the calling had stopped because the caller had stopped.

The radio was off. The frequency was silent. The silence was the wheelhouse's silence, the silence of a room that had been filled with sound for sixteen hours — the engine's hum transmitted through the structure, the radio's occasional chatter, the horn's blast at each departure, the weather's voice on the VHF, the passengers' conversations carried up through the deck from the cabin — and the silence was the absence of all of these sounds simultaneously, the absence enormous, the absence the size of the sounds it replaced.

The tide table on the corkboard. The February table, the last table, the table showing the month's tides — the highs and the lows, the springs and the neaps, the times calculated by NOAA and printed on the sheet and pinned to the board with the red pushpin that had held every monthly table since Harlan had installed the corkboard in 2003, the pushpin's hole in the board surrounded by the ghosts of previous holes, the ghost holes the evidence of previous tables, previous months, previous tides, the evidence that time had passed through this corkboard the way time passed through the channel, marked by its passage, the passage leaving traces.

The letter. The state's letter. The letter that announced the decommission date — March 1 — the letter that had arrived in November and that Harlan had pinned to the corkboard beside the tide table, the letter and the tide table sharing the board the way the ending and the continuing shared the crossing, the letter's bureaucratic language beside the tide's mathematical language, the two languages different in every way except in their certainty, both certain, both stating facts that would occur regardless of the reader's feelings about them, the tides arriving when the tides arrived and the decommission arriving when the decommission arrived, and the arriving was the fact and the fact was pinned to the board and the board was on the wall and the wall was in the wheelhouse and the wheelhouse was the room where Harlan stood, alone, at 10:30 on a February night, the night before the last day.

The chair. The steel-framed chair with the vinyl cushion, mounted on its pedestal, the chair that Harlan sat in during calm-weather crossings and that he did not sit in during storms, the chair the wheelhouse's only concession to comfort, the comfort minimal — the vinyl cracked, the cushion compressed by thirty-four years of intermittent sitting, the foam beneath the vinyl permanently deformed by the shape of the man who had sat in it, the deformation a mold, a negative impression, the chair's surface carrying the captain's shape the way the wheel carried the captain's grip — and the comfort was sufficient, was all the comfort the wheelhouse offered and all the comfort the captain required, because the wheelhouse was not a place of comfort but was a place of work, and the work's comfort was the work itself, the satisfaction of the doing, the doing's reward not comfort but competence.

He sat in the chair. He sat for the first time that day — the last day's crossings had been made standing, all eighteen crossings, the standing Harlan's choice, the choice to stand for the last crossings the way he had stood for the first crossings, the standing the captain's posture, the posture of a man who faces the channel and the water and the crossing on his feet — and the sitting was the release, the body's acceptance that the standing was over, the standing's purpose fulfilled, and the chair received him the way the chair had always received him, with the particular accommodation that a chair provides after long standing, the body's weight redistributed from the feet to the seat, the redistribution a relief, a physical gratitude.

He sat in the chair and he looked at the wheelhouse.

He looked at it the way a person looks at a room they are about to leave for the last time. The looking was not casual. The looking was inventorial, catalogical, the eyes moving from object to object, from surface to surface, recording, noting, memorizing — the wheel, the console, the radar, the GPS, the compass, the tide table, the letter, the thermos on the shelf, the ring in the wood, the chart on the wall, the chart's annotations, the chart's circle at the midpoint, the windows with their salt haze, the windows' view of the terminal and the harbor and the dark, the deck plates beneath his feet, the overhead with its light fixtures, the door to the exterior walkway, the walkway that led to the stairs that led to the car deck that led to the dock that led to the shore that led to the world — the wheelhouse's connection to everything else, the wheelhouse the center from which the connections radiated, the connections to the shore and the channel and the island and the passengers and the crew and the crossing and the life.

The life. The life had been lived here. Not entirely — the life had been lived in the house and on the island and in the marriage and in the grief and in the daily acts that the life comprised — but the life's center had been here, the life's gravitational center, the point around which everything else orbited, the wheelhouse the sun of the life's solar system, everything else — the house, the marriage, the grief, the store, the island, the cemetery — orbiting the wheelhouse, orbiting the crossing, the crossing the center, the center here.

The room was twelve feet by ten feet. The room was one hundred and twenty square feet. The room was smaller than the kitchen on Prospect Street, smaller than the living room, smaller than the bedroom, the room's smallness a fact of the vessel's design, the wheelhouse's dimensions determined by the naval architects who had drawn the Constance's plans at Bath Iron Works in 1987, the architects allocating to the wheelhouse the minimum space that the instruments and the captain required, the minimum because the ferry's purpose was not the wheelhouse but was the car deck, was the carrying of vehicles, and the car deck received the maximum and the wheelhouse received the minimum and the minimum was one hundred and twenty square feet, and the one hundred and twenty square feet had been sufficient, had been more than sufficient, had been the right amount of space for one man and one wheel and one set of instruments and one thermos and thirty-four years.

One hundred and twenty square feet. Thirty-four years. The arithmetic produced a ratio — 3.5 square feet per year, if the arithmetic meant anything, which it did not, the arithmetic a game, a distraction, the mind's way of processing the ending by converting the ending into numbers, the numbers the mind's language for the things the heart cannot say.

The heart could not say what the wheelhouse meant. The heart could not articulate the room's significance in the vocabulary that the heart had available, the vocabulary of feeling, of body-knowledge, of the accumulated sensation of thirty-four years of standing in this room and holding this wheel and looking through these windows at this water, the vocabulary that was not words but was the grip and the stance and the gaze, the three things that the wheelhouse had taught the body and that the body had performed and that the performing had made into the life.

He reached for the thermos. The thermos was on the shelf. The thermos was in the ring. The ring received the thermos and the thermos sat in the ring and the sitting was the same sitting, the last sitting, the thermos in its place for the last time, the place that the thermos had occupied every working day for twenty years, the place that Janet had made when she bought the thermos and that Harlan had maintained when he set the thermos on the shelf each morning, the setting a devotion, the devotion a memory, the memory a keeping, the keeping the constancy.

He picked up the thermos. The thermos was light. The thermos was empty. The coffee was gone, drunk hours ago, the thermos emptied by the day's crossings, the eighteen crossings consuming the coffee the way they consumed the time, steadily, sip by sip, crossing by crossing, and the empty thermos was the day's conclusion, the day fully consumed, the day's fuel fully burned, the thermos the day's gauge, the gauge reading empty.

He held the thermos. The holding was the last holding. The holding was the thing the hands did when the hands had nothing else to hold, when the wheel had been released and the throttles had been pulled to stop and the instruments had been turned off and the log had been closed and the checking and the doing and the navigating were done, and the hands held the thermos because the thermos was Janet's and the holding was Harlan's and the two were the marriage and the marriage was the holding, had always been the holding, the holding of the thermos and the holding of the wheel and the holding of the crossing and the holding of the life, the hands' purpose to hold, the holding the purpose's expression.

He stood. He picked up the notebook from the shelf. He unpinned the chart from the wall. He unbolted the binnacle from the console — four bolts, brass, the bolts loosened with the wrench from the wheelhouse toolkit, the loosening slow, the bolts corroded by salt and by years, the corrosion the bond between the binnacle and the console, the bond that the wrench broke, the breaking the separation, the separation the last disassembly, the console releasing the binnacle the way the dock released the vessel, by the unfastening of the connections that held them together.

He held the things. The thermos, the notebook, the chart rolled tight, the binnacle heavy in his arms, the binnacle's weight the weight of brass and history and seventy years of pointing north. He held them and he stood in the wheelhouse and the wheelhouse was empty now, was emptied, was the room without its captain and without its instruments and without the things that had made it the wheelhouse, and the room without these things was not the wheelhouse but was a room, was one hundred and twenty square feet of steel and glass and wood, the room stripped, the room reduced to its structure.

He looked at the wheel. The wheel remained. The wheel was the vessel's, was bolted to the steering column, was part of the Constance's equipment, and the wheel would go with the Constance wherever the Constance went — to the buyer, to the breaker, to the scrapyard, to wherever the decommissioning sent her — and the wheel's going was the wheel's fate, the wheel's future, and the future was not Harlan's to determine, the wheel not his to take, the wheel belonging to the vessel and the vessel belonging to the state and the state belonging to the process that would dispose of the ferry and the ferry's equipment according to the regulations and the procedures that the state had established for the disposition of surplus marine assets.

The wheel would go. The wheel's wear — the smooth places at ten and two, the places where his hands had been, the places where his father's hands had been — the wear would go with the wheel, the biography would go with the wheel, and the buyer or the breaker or the scrapper would not know what the wear meant, would not read the biography, would see only a worn wheel, a used wheel, a wheel that had been turned many times by hands that the wheel remembered and that the buyer did not know.

He touched the wheel. One last time. The fingers on the steel, the steel cold, the cold the night's cold and the ending's cold. The fingers at ten and two, in the worn places, the fingers finding the smooth surfaces that the fingers had made, the fingers returning to the places that the fingers had created, the homecoming that is the hand's return to its own mark.

He released the wheel.

He turned off the wheelhouse lights. The wheelhouse was dark. The wheelhouse was dark for the last time under this captain's hand, the switch thrown, the lights extinguished, the room given back to the dark from which the morning's lights had taken it, the dark the room's resting state, the state the room would occupy from now on, the dark permanent, the dark the decommissioning's first act, the lights off, the room dark, the captain gone.

He descended the stairs. He carried the thermos and the notebook and the chart and the binnacle. He carried them down the stairs and across the car deck and down the ramp and across the dock, the carrying awkward, the binnacle heavy, the chart slipping, the notebook wedged under his arm, and the awkwardness was the carrying's condition, the condition of a man who is carrying too much and who will not make two trips because the two trips would require returning to the wheelhouse and the returning was the thing he could not do, the returning impossible because the leaving had been done and the done thing could not be undone and the wheelhouse had been left and the leaving was the leaving and the leaving was final.

He walked across the parking lot. His truck was there, the only vehicle in the lot, the truck waiting the way the Constance had waited, with the patience of machines, the mechanical patience that does not tire and does not complain and does not grieve, the truck simply there, simply ready, simply waiting for the man to arrive and to open the door and to place the things on the seat and to start the engine and to drive.

He placed the things on the passenger seat. The thermos, the notebook, the chart, the binnacle. The four things that he was carrying from the wheelhouse to the house, from the crossing to the after-crossing, from the life that was ending to the life that would follow. The four things that were the crossing's relics, the crossing's artifacts, the physical evidence that the crossing had been made and that the captain had made it and that the making had lasted thirty-four years and that the thirty-four years were in the things, were in the thermos's dents and the notebook's pages and the chart's annotations and the binnacle's verdigris, the years stored in the objects the way the years were stored in the body, in the hands and the feet and the inner ear's calibration, the years not gone but held, not finished but carried, the carrying the continuation, the continuation the constancy.

He started the truck. He drove out of the lot. He did not look at the Constance. He did not look at the wheelhouse. He did not look at the dark windows that he had darkened, the dark that he had made by throwing the switch, the dark that was now the wheelhouse's permanent condition.

He drove up the hill to Prospect Street. He drove to the house. He carried the things inside. He set the thermos on the kitchen counter. He set the notebook on the desk. He set the chart against the wall, still rolled, the unrolling for tomorrow, the hanging for tomorrow, the tomorrow that would be the first day of the after-crossing, the first day of the life that did not include the wheelhouse, the first day of the life in which the one hundred and twenty square feet of steel and glass and wood on the Constance's upper deck were no longer his, no longer occupied, no longer the center.

He set the binnacle on the kitchen table. The binnacle sat on the table, the brass heavy on the wood, the compass card visible through the glass dome, the card still oriented, the card still pointing north. The compass did not know that it had been removed from the wheelhouse. The compass did not know that the crossing had ended. The compass knew only north, knew only the magnetic pole's direction, knew only the thing it had been built to know, and the knowing was unchanged by the removal, unchanged by the ending, the compass pointing north in the kitchen the way it had pointed north in the wheelhouse, the pointing the same, the direction the same, the constancy the same.

North. The compass pointed north. The compass would always point north. The compass's constancy was the only constancy that the ending could not end, the only direction that the decommissioning could not alter, the only truth that the bridge could not replace. The compass pointed north and the pointing was the promise and the promise was the name and the name was the constancy and the constancy was the compass and the compass pointed north.

Harlan stood in the kitchen. The binnacle on the table. The thermos on the counter. The night outside the window. The channel below the hill. The Constance at her dock, dark, still, the engines silent, the wheelhouse dark, the wheel cold, the wheel waiting in the dark for the hands that would not come, the hands that were here now, in the kitchen, holding a mug, the mug filled with the last of the coffee from the thermos, the coffee black, no sugar, the coffee that Janet drank and that Harlan drank and that the marriage drank and that the crossing drank and that the morning would not drink because the morning would not come to the wheelhouse, the morning would come to the kitchen, and the kitchen was where the man would be, and the man was here, and the compass pointed north, and the coffee was good.