THE HIGHEST TIDE
a novel
By JIM LYNCH
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2005
Jim Lynch
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-58234-605-4
Chapter One
I LEARNED EARLY ON that if you tell people what you see at low
tide they'll think you're exaggerating or lying when you're
actually just explaining strange and wonderful things as clearly
as you can. Most of the time I understated what I saw because I
couldn't find words powerful enough, but that's the nature of
marine life and the inland bays I grew up on. You'd have to be
a scientist, a poet and a comedian to hope to describe it all
accurately, and even then you'd often fall short. The truth is I
sometimes lied about where or when I saw things, but take that
little misdirection away and I saw everything I said I saw and more.
Most people realize the sea covers two thirds of the planet, but
few take the time to understand even a gallon of it. Watch what
happens when you try to explain something as basic as the tides,
that the suction of the moon and the sun creates a bulge across the
ocean that turns into a slow and sneaky yet massive wave that covers
our salty beaches twice a day. People look at you as if you're making
it up as you go. Plus, tides aren't
news. They don't crash like floods
or exit like rivers. They operate beyond the fringe of most attention
spans. Anyone can tell you where the sun is, but ask where the tides
are, and only fishermen, oystermen and deep-keeled sailors will
know without looking. I grew up hearing seemingly intelligent
grown-ups say "what a beautiful lake," no matter how many times
we politely educated them it was a
bay, a briny backwater connected
to the world's largest ocean. We'd point to charts that showed the
Strait of Juan de Fuca inhaling the Pacific all the way down to our
shallow, muddy bays at the southern end of Puget Sound. It still
wouldn't stick. It was the same way with beach scavengers. There
was no way to make them understand they were tromping across the
roofs of clam condos. Most people don't want to invest a moment
contemplating something like that unless they happen to stroll low
tide alone at night with a flashlight and watch life bubble, skitter
and spit in the shallows. Then they'll have a hard time not thinking
about the beginnings of life itself and of an earth without pavement,
plastic or Man.
People usually take decades to sort out their view of the universe, if
they bother to sort at all. I did my sorting during one freakish
summer in which I was ambushed by science, fame and suggestions
of the divine. You may recall hearing pieces of it, or seeing that photo
of me looking like some bloodshot orphan on the mudflats. Maybe
you remember the ridiculous headline
USA Today pinned on me after
that crazy cult took an interest: KID MESSIAH? You could have seen
the same article recycled in the London
Times or the
Bangkok Post.
Then again, you might have been among the hundreds of rubber-neckers
who traveled to our bay to see things for yourself.
Part of the fuss had to be my appearance. I was a pink-skinned,
four-foot-eight, seventy-eight-pound soprano. I came off as an
innocent nine-year-old even though I was an increasingly horny,
speed-reading thirteen-year-old insomniac. Blame Rachel Carson
for the insomnia. She was long dead by the time I arrived but I
couldn't resist reading her books over and over. I even read
The Sea
Around Us aloud to make it stick.
"There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest
parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious
forces that create the tide."
How do you read that sentence, yawn and turn out the lights?
My family lived in a tiny, metal-roofed house on the soggy, fog-draped
bottom of the Sound where the Pacific Ocean came to relax.
Farther north, glassy dream homes loomed on rocky bluffs above
the splash, but once you reached Olympia's bays the rocks crumbled
to gravel, the beige bluffs flattened to green fields and the shoreside
mansions turned into remodeled summer cabins.
The front half of our house stood on stout pilings that got soaked
during the few extreme tides each year. Behind the house was a
detached garage, over which I lived in a makeshift storage room
with a closet toilet like you'd find in a sailboat. The best thing about
my room was that its low, slanted ceilings kept the adults away, and
its back stairway allowed me to step unnoticed into nights like the
one that set the summer of my life into motion.
I loaded up my kayak with a short shovel, a backpack and Ziploc
sacks and paddled north out of Skookumchuck Bay around Penrose
Point into Chatham Cove, a shallow, cedar-ringed half-circle of
gravelly flats that sprawled before me like an enormous glistening
disc. It was two-fifteen A.M., an hour before the lowest night tide of
the summer with an albino moon so close and bright it seemed to
give off heat. There was no wind, no voices, nothing but the
occasional whir of wings, the squirts of clams and the faint hiss of
retreating water draining through gravel. Mostly there were
odors-the fishy composting reek of living, dead and dying kelp,
sea lettuce, clams, crabs, sand dollars and starfish.
It was my first summer collecting marine specimens for money. I
sold stars, snails, hermit crabs, and other tidal creatures to public
aquariums. I also sold clams to an Olympia restaurant and assorted
sea life to a private aquarium dealer who made my throat tighten
every time he pulled up in his baby-blue El Camino. Almost
everything had a market, I was discovering, and collecting under a
bright moon was when I often made my best haul, which worsened
my insomnia and complicated my stories because I wasn't allowed
on the flats after dusk. The other part of it was that you see
less and
more at night. You also see things that turn out not to be real.
I walked the glimmering edge, headlamp bouncing, picking my
way to avoid crushing sand dollars and clam shells facing the sky
like tiny satellite dishes. I saw a purple ochre sea star, then fifteen
more strewn higher on the beach, their five legs similarly cocked,
pinwheeling in slow motion back toward the water. None of them
were striking or unusual enough to sell to the aquariums. They
wanted head-turners and exotics. Like anything else, people wanted
to see beauties or freaks.
As I crossed the line where gravel yielded to sand and mud, I saw
a massive moon snail, the great clam-killer himself, his undersized
shell riding high on his body like the cab of a bulldozer, below
which his mound of oozing flesh prowled the flats for any clam
unlucky enough to be hiding in its path. Moon snails were often
hard to find because they burrow deeply, feeding on clams, their
tiny jagged tongues drilling peepholes right above the hinge that
holds clams together. Then they inject a muscle relaxant that
liquefies the clam to the point where it can be sucked out through
the hole like a milkshake, which explains the sudden troves of
empty shells with perfectly round holes in the exact same spot, as if
someone had tried to string a necklace underground, or as if you'd
stumbled onto a crime scene in which an entire clam family had
been executed gangland style.
A feisty entourage of purple shore crabs scurried alongside the
snail, their oversized pinchers drawn like Uzis. I thought about
grabbing the moon snail, but I knew that even after it squeezed
inside its shell like some contortionist stunt, it would still hog too
much room in my pack. So I noted where it was and moved on until
I saw the blue flash. It wasn't truly flashing, but with moonlight
bouncing off it that was the effect. I steadied my headlamp and
closed in on a starfish that radiated blue, as if it had just been pulled
from a kiln. But it wasn't just the color that jarred me. Its two lower
legs clung strangely together in line with its top leg and perpendicular
to its two side legs, making it stand out in the black mud like a
blue crucifix.
Mottled sea stars were common, but I'd examined thousands of
stars and had never seen this same color or pose. I picked it up. Its
underside was as pale as a black man's palm, and its two bottom legs
appeared fused. I wondered how it moved well enough to hunt, but
it looked healthy, its hundreds of tiny suction-cup feet apparently
fully operable. I stuck it in a sack with some water and slipped it into
my backpack. I then waded up to my calves toward the mid-sized
oyster farm belonging to Judge Stegner.
That was my alibi if I was caught out there, that I was tending the
judge's oysters. He paid me twenty dollars a month to help maintain
them, though not at night, of course. Still, it was nice to have an
answer if someone asked what I was doing out there at that hour. I
had the words
Judge Stegner on my side, and I knew how everyone
felt about him. My father tucked his shirt in whenever he came
around. And when the judge spoke in his deep, easy rumble, nobody
interrupted.
Near the oyster farm something happened that never failed to
spook me in the dark. I saw a few dozen shore crabs scrambling near
the rectangular, foot-high mesh fence around the judge's oyster
beds. Crabs amused me in small crowds. It's when they clustered at
night that they unhinged me, especially when they were in water
where they moved twice as fast as on land. It was obvious there were
more crabs-and bigger crabs-than usual, so I tried not to expand
my range of vision too fast. It was no use. I saw hundreds, maybe
thousands, assembling like tank battalions. I stepped back and felt
their shells crunch beneath my feet and the wind pop out of me.
Once I steadied, I flashed my headlamp on the oyster fence that
three red rock crabs were aggressively scaling. It looked like a jail
break with the biggest ringleaders leading the escape. I suddenly
heard their clicking pinchers clasping holds in the fence, jimmying
their armored bodies higher. How had I missed that sound? The
judge's oysters were under siege, but I couldn't bring myself to
interfere. It felt like none of my business.
I picked my steps, knowing if I slipped and tumbled I'd feel them
skittering around me as cool water filled my boots. I rounded the
oyster beds, to the far side, relieved to find it relatively crab free. It
was low tide by then, and I saw the water hesitating at its apex,
neither leaving nor returning, patiently waiting for the gravitational
gears to shift. Dozens of anxious clams started squirting in unison
like they did whenever vibrating grains of sand warned them
predators were approaching. I stopped and waited with them, to
actually see the moment when the tide started returning with its
invisible buffet of plankton for the clams, oysters, mussels and other
filter feeders. It was right then, ankle deep in the Sound, feet
numbing, eyes relaxed, that I saw the nudibranch.
In all my time on the flats I'd never seen one before. I'd read
about them, sure. I'd handled them at aquariums but never in the
wild, and I'd never even seen a photo of one this stunning.
It was just three inches long but with dozens of fluorescent,
orange-tipped hornlike plumes jutting from the back of its see-through
body that appeared to be lit from within.
Nudibranchs are often called the butterflies of the sea, but even
that understates their dazzle. Almost everything else in the northern
Pacific is dressed to blend with pale surroundings. Nudibranchs
don't bother, in part because they taste so lousy they don't need
camouflage to survive. But also, I decided right then, because their
beauty is so startling it earns them a free pass, the same way
everyday life brakes for peacocks, parade floats and supermodels.
I bagged that sea slug-it weighed nothing-and set it in my
backpack next to the Jesus star. Then I gave the crabs a wide berth,
found the moon snail, poked him in the belly until he contracted,
bagged him and paddled south toward home beneath the almost-full
moon.
And that's where it happened.
The dark mudflats loomed like wet, flattened dunes stretching
deep into Skookumchuck Bay in front of our house. From a
distance, they looked too barren to support sea life. Up close, they
still did, unless you knew where to find the hearty clams, worms and
tiny creatures that flourish in mud so fine that at least two Evergreen
State College grads get stuck every June during their naked
graduation prance across the bay's shallowest neck. I'm not sure why
I decided to take a look. It was still an hour before sunrise, and I
knew exactly what the bars looked like in the moonlight, but for
some reason, I couldn't resist.
I heard it long before I saw it. It was an exhale, a release of sorts,
and I instantly wondered if a whale was stranded again. We had a
young minke stuck out there two summers prior, and it made
similar noises until the tide rose high enough for rescuers to help
free it. You would have thought the whole city had a baby, the pride
people showed in guiding that little whale to deeper water. I looked
for a hulking silhouette but couldn't find one. I waited, but there
were no more sounds. Still, I went toward what I thought I'd heard,
avoiding stepping into the mud until I had to. I knew the flats well
enough to know I could get stuck just about anywhere. The general
rule was you didn't venture out past the shells and gravel with an
incoming tide. I sank up to my knees twice, and numbing water
filled my boots.
South Sound is the warm end of the fjord because most of its bays
are no deeper than forty feet and Skookumchuck is shallower still,
but even in August the water rarely climbs much above fifty-five
degrees and it can still take your breath. I kept stepping toward the
one sound I'd heard, a growing part of me hoping I'd find nothing
at all.
When I stopped to rest and yank up my socks, my headlamp
crossed it. My first thought? A giant octopus.
Puget Sound has some of the biggest octopi in the world. They
often balloon to a hundred pounds. Even the great Jacques Cousteau
himself came to study them. But when I saw the long tubular
shape of its upper body and the tangle of tentacles below it, I knew
it was more than an octopus. I came closer, within fifty feet, close
enough to see its large cylindrical siphon quiver. I couldn't tell if it
was making any sounds at that point because it was impossible to
hear anything over the blood in my ears. My mother once told me
that she had an oversized heart. I took her literally and assumed I
was similarly designed because there were moments when mine
sounded way too loud for a boy my size.
The creature's body came to a triangular point above narrow fins
that lay flat on the mud like wings, but it was hard to be sure exactly
where it all began or ended, or how long its tentacles truly were
because I was afraid to pry my eyes off its jumble of arms for more
than half a second. I didn't know whether I was within reach, and
its arms were as big around as my ankle and lined with suckers the
size of half dollars. If they even twitched I would have run. So, I was
looking at it and not looking at it while my heart spangled my
vision. I saw fragments, pieces, and tried to fuse them in my mind
but couldn't be certain of the whole. I knew what it had to be, but I
wouldn't allow myself to even think the two words. Then I
gradually realized the dark shiny disc in the middle of the rubbery
mass was too perfectly round to be mud or a reflection.
It was too late to smother my scream. Its eye was the size of a
hubcap.
Chapter Two
ONCE PROFESSOR KRAMER'S home answering machine
clicked on, I couldn't control my voice, and my mother
shuffled out in a long MARINERS shirt, a finger on her lips, as if
the most important thing at that moment was not waking my
father. I fended her off with one hand and ignored her teeth-clenched
cussing after she spotted the growing puddle beneath me
on the kitchen floor. She stormed into the laundry room just as I
finished my frantic message and the professor himself picked up for
real. I told him the same stuff, only louder, then heard myself yell,
"It's a giant squid!"
Not
I think it is a giant squid, or
It might be a giant squid. I stated
it as fact in the cool dawn and my mother suspended her furious
mopping to squint at me through puffy, nearsighted eyes as if her
son were speaking in tongues.
I'd read enough about giant squid to know the most remarkable
thing about this one wasn't its size, but its location. They didn't
show up just anywhere, especially not in shallow, dead-end inlets
within a few hundred yards of a tavern and a couple miles from a
bowling alley, a golf course and a state capitol dome. Not
rarely.
Never. Most giant squid were found, if they were found at all, in the
bellies of sperm whales or sprawled on the beaches of New Zealand,
Norway and Newfoundland.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE HIGHEST TIDE
by JIM LYNCH
Copyright © 2005 by Jim Lynch.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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