The Highest Tide (27 page)
It was easy to pick Phelps out alongside his brother and a dozen others like him in identically faded jeans, rocking in unison, the water and the music rising together. As dueling guitars took off, Phelps stepped in front of the older boys, slung his imaginary strap behind his head and began to play air guitar with such convincing intensity a cheering section egged him on. Phelps couldn’t have noticed. His head was bouncing, his bangs swinging, his whole body committed to the electric crescendo blasting from his fingertips.
I intended to wait the song out before pulling him aside, but it refused to end, and there was way too much blood racing through me to just stand there. So I dashed back across our land in time to watch the tide clear the frontage of the Stegner property. It wasn’t a wave or two splashing over. The entire bay curled over the top, the way a bathtub will if you leave the water running, drowning dandelions and huckleberries and flat golden fields already drenched with rainwater just below where the cattle liked to graze. Two cows grunted and thudded toward higher ground. The others soon followed, except for the two fattest ones who kept eating as if grass were worth dying for.
I could tell the tide had cleared the bay’s eastern banks by the way the firs and cedars dragged in the water, and I ran south along the changing shoreline, splashing past the Ericksons’ horse fields where the tide was clearing that lip too, and on to the LeMays’ vacant pastureland where I ran high enough on the knoll to get a fill view of Sunset Estates. Five men were stacking sandbags, but it was obvious they were losing. Enough water had already pooled in the largest foundation to reflect the moody sky. I ran higher and looked wildly about, panting, doing my best to not let Florence flicker in my head.
Luckily there was so much to see. The bay looked half again as big as it ever did, with large branches and trees swirling toward its southern end along with two skiffs, three canoes and a floating dock ghosting toward the swamped estates. Why was the tide still coming?
I sprinted back to the Stegner house and tried their door and shouted Angie’s name even though I knew she wasn’t there. Then I saw their sun-bleached Coleman canoe wind-coasting in the flooded yard. I waded to it, found two paddles inside, dragged it toward deeper water and climbed carefully aboard without flipping it.
The wind slackened and the low gray sky began to rise and give way to blue. Even the rain turned to mist. I kneeled near the stern, with the bow aloft, paddling toward the bridge and the noise as the fatso moon cleared the eastern tree line, playing it cool, as if it were just another innocent cloud. I closed my eyes and tried to feel its pull. When that didn’t work, I howled at it. It wasn’t something I thought about. I just started howling.
I’d read that it was a myth that wolves howl
at
the moon. They howl before a hunt as a sign of togetherness and they howl out of loneliness, but the howling itself supposedly has nothing to do with the moon. I’d also read that some Indians think the howls of wolves are the lost souls of the dead trying to return to earth. Who knows? All I know is I howled at that moon, and I let it have it. It turned into more of a scream than a howl, and when I ran out of air I reloaded and did it again. Then again, and again, until my throat stopped me.
It was easy to see that the tide had risen well past the timbers bracing our floor beams, making the O’Malley home look like a sinking houseboat. But I paddled past it without caring about it or anything inside it and continued toward the bridge and the ruckus, battling the current with short quick strokes until I felt it surrender.
The tide, simply and finally, quit climbing.
T
HE BARTENDERS LET
everyone stroll outside the partially swamped tavern to gawk at the high water and loiter, cocktails in hand, near the bridge where the head-bobbing rockers blasted the same song yet again. Or maybe it had never ended, but Kenny Phelps was definitely still the bandleader, air-guitaring his way toward another neck sprain.
Up the shoreline, dozens, maybe hundreds, waded beyond the swamped cabins. I didn’t give any of it more than glances because I was pretty sure I’d seen Angie Stegner strutting across the Heron bridge with phony Frankie and my favorite dog.
I dragged the canoe into the high grass next to the nearly submerged bridge, then ran in the direction I’d seen her strut. I slammed into some lady reading a tide table and toppled a baby stroller that luckily was empty. I didn’t stop to say sorry. I felt the way you feel when you’re suddenly lost at a county fair and you realize the lousy odds of ever finding your parents again. I don’t know how many people I would’ve normally recognized, but everyone either looked strange or like Angie. I was so convinced I saw her twice that I actually felt relief in my chest both times, before giving up, bending over and gasping, unsure what to do next other than find something to drink. I was returning to the bridge to try to grab Phelps when I heard a bark from the far side of the tavern and found Frankie hurling an orange tennis ball into swirling suds.
Angie was looking the other way, staring intently at the overwhelmed bay. She looked remarkably ordinary from that distance, in her baseball cap and cutoffs. When I came up on her and she slowly recognized me, her hands flew off her hips and encircled me.
“Miles,” she said. “My sweet Miles.” She hugged me so hard tears popped out of me. Once that started I couldn’t stop. It was like the worst case of hiccups, or a laugh that you can’t stop even if someone crams a BB gun up your nose. I cried so hard I sounded like a sea lion with a sore throat. Angie rocked me like she used to until I could tell her about Florence, which got me going again until I was empty.
The next thing I remember was hearing Frankie tell someone to beat it.
When I looked up, I saw a blurry couple about twenty feet from us. “Have some decency,” Frankie yelled. “Back ofl”
“Miles?” said the lady next to what I slowly realized was a cameraman pointing a lens at me. She sounded familiar, but looked out of focus. “Will you please talk to me about this amazing flood you predicted?”
Frankie ordered them to beat it again, and the cameraman started yelling back, warning Frankie to stop telling them what the fuck to do. It wasn’t until splashed ashore with the ball and shook the bay onto everyone that I placed the lady’s voice and wide-set eyes. But by then Angie was pulling me, then running me around the wet side of the tavern toward the bridge where the highest tide in fifty-three years still hovered.
After I pointed out her canoe, Angie said we’d ride it out. I didn’t understand what she meant until we were hauling it across the bridge, then paddling north, with me in the stern, even though balance wise it made sense for her to be back there.
Once we glided around Penrose Point everything quieted, and Angie kept my mind off Florence, pointing out the clusters of moon jellyfish pulsing through brown plankton blooms and the eight cormorants breaking formation, as if disoriented by the way the high water swallowed their roosts. “Look at that larch,” she said, aiming her paddle at the lone yellow tree in the green hillside. “It’s so bright it looks like it’s on fire.”
Angie left most of the paddling to me and yakked nonstop about how she’d been jamming that afternoon with a friend who played tenor sax, and how they were conspiring to pull together an all-girl band. She also mentioned that she’d decided to bag Carolina and go to Evergreen instead, for at least a semester. “My father needs me,” she said, then raved about some new antidepressant called Pixie or Pixil, or something like that, which let her feel like herself even if it did make her sleepy. “For better or worse,” she said, tapping her forehead, “it’s all Angie in here again.”
She saluted the bowling-ball head of the harbor seal that popped up to study us, then congratulated an early-returning chum salmon and giggled at the five mallards skid-landing nearby like off-balance seaplanes as the tide turned and began to pull us out.
Half-submerged logs, blackberry bushes and random shrubs followed us, as did two empty canoes ghosting along the far shoreline and a green kayak that the tide was stealing too. I saw a long narrow flash near the surface that reminded me of my oarfish obsession. It turned out to be an innocent reflection, another trickery of light, but believe me when I tell you that a real oarfish did show up two weeks later in the newspaper. It measured out at thirteen feet three inches, and took three oystermen to hold it for the photo, above which loomed an unflattering picture of Judge Stegner and an article about an investigation into some favor he gave an old roommate.
Angie stopped paddling and asked if my mother had told me when she was coming back home.
“‘In a while,’ is all she said. Dad keeps saying she’ll be back any day, but I doubt it.”
Angie didn’t try to talk me out of that, probably because she knew I was right, but maybe because she could tell that in the space of a summer I’d learned that everything was changing, including me. I grew six inches during the next ten months, then my voice dropped and tiny Miles O’Malley slipped away.
Angie turned halfway around in the bow so that she could look at me when she asked how the hell I knew the tide would come up so high. “Florence,” I said.
“How’d she know?”
Over the next few weeks, we all learned a lot about what caused our crazy flood. Oceanographers admitted the original tidal prediction could have been off by a foot or two. Maybe the moon swung closer than 216,000 miles from the earth. Who knows? Plus, the tide tables couldn’t take weather into consideration, and in our case, low pressure raised the sea, as did six inches of rain. Seismologists also pointed out that the same earthquake Phelps felt through his toilet seat likely squeezed even more rainwater from the soil that spilled into streams and rivers that lifted our bays too. Then, of course, the guilty wind played its part. And climatologists were quick to warn that the Sound was rising an inch a year anyway, and that Olympia would eventually struggle to fend off the sea without pumps and dikes. But even if you bought all that, it still didn’t add up to water as high as we experienced, or make it any less remarkable.
What also followed was a complicated scientific explanation for all the strange sea life and debris that showed up that summer. El Nino had warmed the Pacific more than people realized, which pushed black dolphins, oarfish, Mola molas and other sea life farther north. We also learned that the huge north Pacific whirlpool, which often traps trash for decades, got ripped wide open by some timely westerlies that blew garbage and sea life into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. And the timing was perfect yet again for brisk northerlies and the strongest currents of the year to blow and suck glass floats, a Japanese street sign, a lost cargo load of hockey gloves and perhaps an ailing ragfish and an enormous squid down the Sound’s narrow plumbing into our shallow harbors.
Humans were likely responsible for the rest of it. The killer algae probably got its foothold when a careless aquarium owner dumped it into the bay. And the Australian jelly and the Chinese crabs most likely hitched rides as babies in ballast water that Korean freighters sucked up in foreign ports and spat out in South Sound.
People lost interest once the explanations rolled in. Some even got angry, as if scientists were determined to squeeze the magic out of everything. But I saw gaps between what the scientists said and what actually happened, and I heard the astonishment behind their words. But by then, most of the people seeking miracles had stopped coming around anyway, especially after that bald crowd-pleaser who’d claimed to have spontaneously regained his hearing was written up as a serial hoaxer with a fake doctor and perfectly fine ears.
Yet none of that answers Angie’s question.
How had Florence known the tidal predications would fall so short on this one freaky day? My guess is the old lady who was ultimately called the flood’s lone casualty
didn’t
know. It would take quite a while to recount all the predictions Florence told me that turned out dead wrong. My answer to Angie was that I had no idea how Florence knew.
The sun had only been gone for two days, but it already felt like a friendly stranger on my back as we paddled past Chatham Cove. Amazingly, I felt the way you feel after you’ve had a head cold for so long you forget how terrific it is to just feel
normal.
“You realize that they had eleven hotshot scientists study that squid I found?” I asked Angie. “Well, they still didn’t learn a dang thing from it—not even what it eats or how fast it swims or what its natural color is. Isn’t that awesome? People seem to think we already know everything, that science is about what’s already known. It isn’t!” I watched the back of her head nod, but could tell I was losing her. “I mean we’re just now getting around to dropping tiny, one-man submarines into the deepest ocean trenches. And they’re finding all kinds of things we didn’t know existed, including all these deepwater freaks that hang out next to hot vents.” I shared some explorer’s descriptions I’d read of six-foot tube worms, orange frogfish, viper sharks and colorful unnamed creatures that looked like hand puppets.
She kept nodding, but when she turned to sweep bangs off her face I could see her eyes were closed.
“Even a few years ago they didn’t expect to find any life way down there,” I continued. “And now all this crazy stuff is showing up. It’s as if we’d finally got to the top of Everest and found blue owls and winged leopards enjoying the thin air. I mean they’re discovering hundreds of new fish species
every year
now, which is terrific, but I kinda hope the ocean doesn’t give up all of its secrets before I can maybe help discover some of them. I know that sounds selfish, but do you know what I mean?”
The more I talked the stronger I felt. Or maybe I talked out of a fear of being cornered with my thoughts. Regardless, I overflowed with words and I eventually—big surprise—rattled on about Rachel Carson. “Her brothers and sisters were so much older than her that she was basically an only child like me. But get this: She grew up near
Pittsburgh
and didn’t even see the ocean or a tidal pool until she was twenty-two. Can you believe that? The lady who became the voice of the ocean didn’t even see salt water until she was older than you. And you know one of the coolest things about her? She wasn’t intimidated by time. Most people’s imagination doesn’t extend beyond a hundred years. Rachel Carson could imagine billions of years without blinking. At the end of
The Sea Around Us
, she summed up the entire history and role of the ocean in two sentences: ‘In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.’”