The Chart

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 6: The Chart

The chart was NOAA 13309, Penobscot Bay, Western Part, scale 1:40,000, printed on heavy stock that had been white when Harlan's father bought it from the chandlery in Rockland in 1974 and that was now the color of old teeth, the color that paper achieves when it has been handled for fifty years, the oils from fifty years of fingers soaking into the fibers, the fibers absorbing the handling the way wood absorbs the polish, the surface darkening, softening, taking on the particular patina that is the evidence of use, of attention, of a thing that has been touched so many times that the touching has become part of the thing's composition.

The chart hung on the wall of the wheelhouse. It hung on two brass tacks that James Goss had driven into the wood paneling in 1974, the tacks still holding, the tacks' grip on the wood as reliable as the chart's grip on the channel, and the chart was not the navigation — the navigation was the radar and the GPS and the compass and the feel, the instruments and the body, the electronic and the embodied — but the chart was the record, the written record, the document that contained not the channel as it was at this moment but the channel as it had been over thirty-four years of mornings and crossings and tides and storms and calms, the channel's history written in pencil on government paper by two generations of Goss hands.

James Goss had started the annotations. The first marks were his — the small, precise pencil notations in the margins and along the channel's edges, the handwriting of a man who had been educated in the island school in the 1940s when the island school still taught penmanship, the letters small and even and clear, the clarity the penmanship's gift, each letter legible, each number distinct, the annotations readable fifty years later because the hand that made them had been trained to make them readable, trained by the teachers who believed that handwriting was not a skill but a discipline, not a convenience but a courtesy, the courtesy of making one's marks legible to the person who would read them next.

James's first annotation was a depth. He had written "14 ft MLW" beside a point on the chart's representation of Halsey Ledge, the notation contradicting the chart's printed depth of seventeen feet, and the contradiction was the annotation's purpose, was the reason the annotation existed — the chart was wrong, the chart's printed depth was the depth that the survey vessel had measured in 1971 when the chart was last surveyed, and the 1971 depth was accurate for 1971 but was not accurate for 1974, because the bottom had changed, because a winter storm had shifted the sediment on the ledge's crown, had scoured the sand that had been covering the granite and had revealed the granite beneath, and the revealed granite was three feet shallower than the sand-covered granite, and the three feet was the difference between the chart and the channel, between the printed and the actual, between the government's measurement and the captain's knowledge.

James had measured it himself. He had measured it with a lead line — a seven-pound lead weight on a braided nylon line marked in fathoms, the lead line the oldest depth-measuring instrument in maritime history, older than the sonar, older than the chart itself, the lead line a technology so simple and so reliable that it had survived every subsequent technology, survived the fathometer and the depth sounder and the multibeam sonar, survived because the lead line could not lie, could not malfunction, could not display a depth that was not the depth, the weight finding the bottom and the line measuring the distance with the same honesty that gravity brings to every measurement it participates in.

Fourteen feet. James wrote it on the chart. He wrote it in pencil because pencil could be erased, could be corrected, could be updated when the bottom changed again, as the bottom would change again, because the bottom was not static, was not the fixed surface that the chart implied, was instead a living thing, a thing that moved and shifted and scoured and deposited and changed with the storms and the tides and the currents and the seasons, and the changing required the annotations to change, required the pencil's erasure and rewriting, required the chart to be a living document, a document that breathed, that aged, that grew with the knowledge of the men who maintained it.

Harlan took over the chart's annotations in 1990. He took them over the way he took over the Constance, by inheritance, by the passing of the instrument from one pair of hands to another, and the taking-over was not a ceremony but a continuation, was the pencil picked up where the pencil had been set down, was the next notation following the previous notation the way the next crossing followed the previous crossing, without interruption, without formality, the continuation the thing itself.

His handwriting was different from his father's. Harlan's letters were larger, less precise, the handwriting of a man who had been educated in the 1970s when penmanship had been demoted from discipline to afterthought, the letters functional rather than elegant, readable but not beautiful, and the difference between James's handwriting and Harlan's handwriting was visible on the chart as a change in era, a shift in generation, the same information delivered in a different hand the way the same crossing was delivered by a different captain — the channel the same, the knowledge the same, the delivery altered by the deliverer's particulars.

He annotated everything. He annotated the depths and the currents and the bottom composition and the ledge positions and the eddy locations and the wind effects and the tide variations and the seasonal changes, and the annotations accumulated over thirty-four years until the chart was more pencil than print, more Goss than NOAA, the government's chart colonized by the captain's knowledge the way the channel was colonized by the captain's presence, the colonizing not hostile but supplementary, the annotations not replacing the chart's information but adding to it, layering the personal onto the official, the experienced onto the measured, the felt onto the calculated.

The depths were the chart's skeleton. The depths structured the annotations the way the bottom structures the channel, providing the foundation on which everything else rested, and Harlan had annotated the depths throughout the crossing's track, writing the numbers in pencil beside the chart's printed soundings, each annotation a correction or a confirmation, each number a statement about the bottom's current state, the bottom as it was rather than the bottom as the chart said it was.

"52 ft" at the channel's center, halfway between Port Clement and Dunmore. The chart said fifty-four. The two-foot difference was the silt that thirty years of tidal current had deposited on the channel floor, the silt arriving from the rivers and the runoff and the coast's ongoing erosion, the silt settling in the channel's center where the current was slowest, two feet of accumulated sediment that was invisible from the surface and immaterial to the Constance's seven-foot draft but that Harlan recorded because the recording was the knowing and the knowing was the chart's purpose, the chart existing not to provide navigational safety — the radar and the GPS provided that — but to provide navigational truth, the truth of the channel as it actually was, measured and recorded and annotated by the man who crossed it.

"12 ft MLW" at Halsey Ledge's crown, the same number his father had written, the depth unchanged in fifty years, the granite refusing to cooperate with the sediment's accumulation, the granite too hard, too smooth, too tilted for the silt to settle on, the ledge's crown swept clean by every tide, scoured by the current that accelerated over the rising bottom, the scouring the current's housekeeping, the current keeping the ledge clean the way a broom keeps a floor clean, and the cleanliness was the ledge's constancy, the ledge's refusal to change, the twelve feet that had been twelve feet in 1974 and that would be twelve feet in 2074, the granite's time scale indifferent to the chart's time scale, indifferent to the annotations, indifferent to the men who made them.

"87 ft" at the channel's deepest point, three hundred yards south of the crossing track, in the depression that the chart marked with closely spaced contour lines, the depression a remnant of the glacial scouring that had carved the channel eleven thousand years ago, the glacier's blade cutting through the bedrock and leaving behind a trough that the sea had filled and that the tide maintained and that Harlan had measured with the depth sounder on a calm day in 2003, measuring not because he needed to know — the deepest point was south of his track, outside the crossing's path — but because the knowing was the chart's demand, the chart wanting to be complete, wanting every depth and every feature and every fact of the channel recorded on its surface, the surface that was the channel's mirror, the paper reflection of the water's reality.

The currents were the chart's circulatory system. Harlan had drawn them in pencil — small arrows indicating direction, small numbers indicating speed, the arrows and numbers scattered across the channel's representation like a diagram of blood flow, the tidal currents the channel's blood, the moving water that carried the nutrients and the sediment and the boats and the ferry across and through and along the channel, and the currents changed with the tide, changed their direction and their speed, and Harlan had annotated the changes with a system that was not scientific notation but was his own notation, his own shorthand, the shorthand of a man who needed to record the information quickly and clearly and who had developed over thirty-four years a set of symbols that were legible to him and to no one else, the symbols a private language, the chart's annotations a private text.

"F→NE 1.5k" meant flood current setting northeast at one and a half knots. "E→SW 2k" meant ebb current setting southwest at two knots. The arrows were small, the numbers smaller, and they were scattered across the channel at the points where Harlan had observed the current's behavior, observed it not with instruments — the Constance did not carry a current meter — but with his eyes and his hands and his feet, the current's direction visible in the water's surface and the current's speed measurable by the Constance's drift, the drift that the GPS displayed as a discrepancy between the vessel's heading and the vessel's track, and the discrepancy was the current, the current's effect on the hull rendered as a number on a screen, and Harlan transferred the number from the screen to the chart, from the electronic to the pencil, from the instrument to the hand.

The eddies were the chart's secrets. The eddies were the currents that the official chart did not show, the circulations that formed in the channel's margins where the main current met the shore and turned back on itself, creating rotations that were invisible from above and imperceptible from the wheelhouse but that the hull could feel, could detect as a slight yaw, a turning pressure, a push that came not from ahead or astern but from the side, from the eddy's rotation pulling the hull into its circle.

Harlan had annotated four eddies. Four small circles drawn in pencil on the chart, each circle labeled with the tide state that produced it — "F only" for the eddies that formed only on the flood, "E only" for those that formed only on the ebb — and the circles were the chart's most valuable annotations, the information that no other source contained, the information that existed only in the chart's pencil marks and in Harlan's body, in the hands that corrected for the eddies and the feet that felt their pull and the thirty-four years that had taught the hands and the feet to respond.

The eddy south of the Dunmore breakwater was the largest. It formed on the flood tide, counterclockwise, a rotation approximately fifty yards in diameter that sat at the harbor entrance and that pushed the Constance south when she entered the harbor on a flood, pushed her toward the breakwater, and the push was the eddy's contribution to the approach, its complication, its test, and Harlan had annotated the eddy with the detail it deserved — the diameter, the direction of rotation, the tide state that produced it, the wind conditions that strengthened or weakened it — and the annotation was the eddy's biography, the record of its behavior as observed by one man over three decades, the biography that would die with the chart when the chart died with the crossing.

He had told Owen about this eddy. He had told Owen during Owen's first crossing, in the wheelhouse, when Owen was taking notes in his gridded notebook, and the telling was a gift, was the sharing of knowledge that Harlan did not need to share, knowledge that the bridge project did not require, knowledge that was not relevant to the pilings or the abutments or the cable tensions but that was relevant to the channel, to the channel's full character, and the sharing was Harlan's acknowledgment that Owen was building something in the channel and that the building should be done with full knowledge of the channel's behavior, even the behavior that the official charts did not show.

Owen had written it down. He had written it in his gridded notebook with his mechanical pencil, and the writing was the same act as Harlan's writing on the chart — the recording of knowledge in a durable form, the transfer from the body to the paper, the attempt to make the ephemeral permanent, to fix the known in a medium that would outlast the knower — and the two men's writings were parallel texts, two records of the same channel, one in a notebook that would go into a file cabinet in a state office in Augusta and one on a chart that hung on a wheelhouse wall that would be removed when the ferry was decommissioned, and the removing would be the chart's ending, the chart's death, the document's expiration.

The bottom composition was the chart's geology. Harlan had annotated the bottom throughout the channel — "sand/mud" in the center, "ledge" on the east side, "mud 40+ ft" on the west side — and the annotations were the record of the sonar's readings, the sonar showing the bottom's texture in the gray-scale images that the screen displayed, the bottom visible as a picture, a portrait, the channel's floor revealed in acoustic shadow and highlight, and Harlan had read the sonar the way a doctor reads an X-ray, interpreting the shadows, diagnosing the composition, noting the changes from one season to the next, from one year to the next, the bottom's slow evolution recorded in pencil on the chart.

"Fractures N-S" he had written beside the Halsey Ledge annotation, the fractures visible on the sonar as lines in the rock, the lines running north-south, the fractures the granite's weakness, the planes along which the rock would eventually break, eventually separate, eventually change the ledge's shape and depth, though the eventually was geological time, was the ten-thousand-year eventually that the granite measured itself by, and the ten-thousand-year time scale made the annotation seem premature, seemed like a man recording something that would not matter for millennia, but the recording was not premature because the recording was for now, was for the chart's present tense, was the channel's current state documented for the channel's current captain.

The wind annotations were the chart's weather. Small notes scattered across the channel's representation — "SW 20+ builds 4 ft chop here" at the midpoint, "NE gale — 6-8 ft, steep, breaking" at the construction zone's current location — and the notes were the record of the storms, the storms that Harlan had navigated and that the chart had survived, the storms' effects documented in the captain's pencil, the wind's force translated into wave height and wave steepness and the particular locations where the wind and the current and the bottom conspired to produce the worst conditions, the locations that Harlan avoided when the avoidance was possible and that he navigated with full attention when it was not.

The chart was an autobiography. This was the thing that Harlan did not say, did not articulate, but that the chart said for him, said in its annotations and its corrections and its pencil marks and its worn surface and its darkened paper and its brass-tack holes and its fifty years of handling, the chart saying: this is a life, this is a life lived on this water, this is the record of the crossings that the life comprised, and the record is not complete because the record cannot be complete, because the crossings are more than the annotations, the knowledge is more than the pencil marks, the channel is more than the chart, but the chart is what remains, is the physical evidence, is the document that will survive when the crossings end and the knowledge fades and the body that accumulated the knowledge stops accumulating, and the document says: he was here, he crossed here, he knew this water.

There was a mark on the chart that was not an annotation. A small circle, drawn in pencil, not at a navigational feature but at the midpoint of the channel, at the halfway point, at the place where the equilibrium lived, where the currents balanced and the hull was still. The circle was small, perhaps a quarter-inch in diameter, drawn freehand, not labeled, not explained, not annotated with a depth or a current or a bottom composition. Just a circle. A mark. A point.

Harlan had drawn it in October of 2017. He had drawn it the week after Janet died, the first week of crossings after the funeral, the first week of standing at the wheel without the knowledge that Janet was alive on the island or alive in the house or alive anywhere, the first week of the crossing's new arithmetic, the arithmetic that subtracted Janet from the total and left the remainder, and the remainder was the crossing, the crossing was what remained, and at the halfway point of the first crossing of the first morning of the remainder, Harlan had felt the equilibrium, the stillness, the balance, and he had reached for the pencil — the same pencil that had annotated the depths and the currents and the eddies and the bottom — and he had drawn the circle, the small circle at the channel's center, at the crossing's heart, and the circle was not an annotation but was a mark, a private mark, the mark of a man saying: here, this is where I am, this is where I belong, this is the center, and the center holds.

The circle remained. The circle was the chart's most recent mark, the last annotation, the final pencil stroke, and the circle was the only mark on the chart that was not information, was not data, was not the channel's fact but was the captain's fact, the captain's statement, the captain's declaration that the center existed and that the center was his, his and Janet's, his and the channel's, his and the crossing's, the center that was the place between the shores where the man belonged to neither and both, the center that was the marriage's geography, the place where the husband and the wife and the ferry and the channel and the crossing all converged, all met, all balanced, and the balance was the stillness and the stillness was the grief and the grief was the love and the love was the circle, small, penciled, unmarked, on a chart that hung on a wheelhouse wall in a ferry that would soon be decommissioned, the circle the last thing the chart would say.

The chart would go with Harlan. This was understood. The chart was not state property — the chart was Harlan's, was his father's before him, purchased with private money from a private chandlery, and the state had no claim to it, no authority over it, no right to include it in the decommissioning inventory that would catalog the Constance's equipment and fixtures and furnishings and that would assign each item a disposition — retained, sold, scrapped, transferred — and the chart's disposition was already determined, was already decided, was the captain's decision that the chart would come off the wall on the last day and would be rolled and would be carried and would go home with the captain, the chart and the thermos and the notebook, the three things that the captain would carry from the wheelhouse to the house, from the crossing to the after-crossing.

The chart would hang in the house on Prospect Street. It would hang on the wall of the room that had been Janet's study, the room where Janet had graded papers and planned lessons and read the books that filled the shelves, the books that were still on the shelves because Harlan had not removed them, had not changed the room, had kept the room as Janet had kept it, the room a preservation, a museum, a space where time had been asked to stop and had not stopped but had been kept from showing its passage, the room the same room, the books the same books, the chair the same chair, and the chart would hang on the wall above Janet's desk, the chart's annotations facing the room, the depths and the currents and the eddies and the circle facing the books and the chair and the absence, the chart in the room the way Janet had been in the room, present, attentive, recording the world with the clarity that was her instrument.

The chart was the crossing's memory. The chart remembered what the instruments could not remember — not the position, not the depth as measured at this moment, not the current speed as calculated by this algorithm, but the position as it had been and the depth as it had changed and the current as it had varied over thirty-four years of observation, the memory that was not data but was history, not a snapshot but a film, not a measurement but a narrative, the narrative of the channel as told by the men who crossed it, the narrative written in pencil because pencil is the medium of the provisional, of the correctable, of the truth that might change, and the truth did change, and the chart changed with it, and the changing was the chart's life, and the chart's life was ending because the crossing was ending, and the ending would fix the chart's last state, would freeze the annotations at their final values, would make the provisional permanent, the pencil marks no longer subject to erasure and correction but fixed, final, the chart's last word on the channel's depths and currents and eddies and bottom.

The last word was the circle. The small penciled circle at the channel's center. The mark that was not data but was the captain's heart, drawn on the chart the way a name is carved in a tree, not to inform but to declare, not to measure but to claim, the claim that says: I was here, I crossed here, I knew this water, I loved the woman who understood this water, and the knowing and the loving are the same mark, the same circle, the same pencil on the same paper in the same wheelhouse on the same ferry in the same channel, and the sameness is the constancy, and the constancy is the chart's last word, and the last word is enough.