The Highest Tide (12 page)
The old man who answered the door later told me he thought he was losing his mind when he didn’t see anyone on his stoop until he looked down to find a kid in Fruit of the Loom briefs who couldn’t breathe well enough to speak.
Mr. Skugstad was one of those solemn, old live-alone Scandinavians with the deep cheek lines of a man who’d been large once but deflated with age. He looked so old I considered running to the next cabin, but after he calmed me enough to fill him in he phoned the sheriffs office, and we jogged toward the mud with a coil of rope and an inflatable raft he dragged behind us. He stopped repeatedly to bend over like a man about to hit a pool ball. His face was as red as a spawning sockeye, and his breath squealed like wind that’s trying to rip branches loose. It occurred to me that I might kill two people that night. Once we burst onto the beach, everything was easier to see, which made me worry I’d lost track of time.
It was impossible to tell by the peaceful water or the reassuring hint of a new sun that anything horrific was happening. That’s the thing about the earth: It doesn’t stop to acknowledge the daily disasters of the living. It just keeps on spinning and sucking. I think that’s what drives people toward faith, that unsettling realization that the physical world goes on without them, before them, after them, without recognition or sympathy.
The tide had returned faster than I’d expected. The truth is it rarely comes in evenly. Its initial retreat and final return are so sneaky-slow they fool you. It’s usually only after an hour drifting either way—when you’re paying the least attention—that it moves with conviction. It must have been hauling ass during the time it took me to get that old loner onto the flats because once we rounded the point and headed onto the beach where Phelps and I had begun clamming, I was in full side-aching panic: There was no break in the surface, no torso, no pipe.
Nothing.
I’d left Phelps alone with a long silvery creature, and now there was nothing but water.
Old man Skugstad looked across the cove, then wildly at me, as if I’d drowned his own son or pulled the cruelest hoax imaginable.
It took me a few swallows to remember that Phelps and I had roamed farther south on the beach, and another sickening moment to spot the narrow PVC pipe sticking up well beyond the shrinking beach line like one of those tall sticks marking old oyster farms.
On a second frantic look there also was the bulge of Phelps’s rock-star mop breaking the surface. I gasped, as if I’d been underwater too, then yelled that we were coming, which, of course, he couldn’t hear.
When we got close enough, a panting Mr. Skugstad shoved me out in his raft with the end of a rope tied in a loop. As I frantically hand-paddled out to Phelps, I could see his mouth slightly below the surface, his fist clenched around the pipe and his eyes bulging insanely. I followed the old man’s instructions and dropped the loop over the pipe and Phelps’s shoulders. He slowly grabbed it with his free hand. “Make sure it’s around his chest,” the old man yelled. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I said it was, then got out of the way as he coiled the slack, then turned and marched up the beach with the rope knotted around his hips. At first, Phelps didn’t move, then there was a slight pop, and I saw the PVC pipe moving like a fat snorkel, then Phelps himself emerging and coughing in the shallows like some stranded mammal. The old man repeatedly whacked Phelps’s back. He coughed violently. Nothing came out but drool.
“He’s gonna be fine,’’ Mr. Skugstad said. It didn’t look that way to me. Phelps’s lips were bruised purple and the skin around his neck was splotched orange as if he’d been hanged. We helped him out of his sweater and waders, then wrapped him in the old man’s coat and hugged him until his shivering slowed.
Finally, Phelps looked at me and stammered, “That s-s-sucked.”
He was laughing and crying by the time two women built like softball players jogged onto the beach with a stretcher slung between them. As they panted out to us, burrowed clams greeted them with a squirting finale that could have been set to music, and the sun crawled over the tree line and made the water dance.
If you live on the Sound you learn to store moments like these so that you can pull them out months later during the fifty-sixth straight day of stubborn rain and shrinking daylight. I saw a seal’s tail swirl and a school of tiny silver fish break the surface and then some brown and white duck with frayed wings vanish like an arrow into the sparkling cove.
I saw everything.
W
HEN SOMETHING TURNS
out well everyone dwells on what went right. It’s like reading about a ball game you saw. If a team wins, it’s all about what they did well, even though defeat was just a weird bounce or a bad call away. It’s the same way with almost everything. Who highlights the bums and thieves in their family tree? Everyone dwells on the doctors and mayors and the others who fit into some show-dog lineage that makes us feel more significant. It’s the way we are.
So, of course, the sheriffs rescue team focused on my brainstorm to get Phelps that PVC pipe. Only later did they ask why we were out on the mudflats before dawn in the first place, and only after that did they wonder if we were aware of the dangers of the mud, and only then did they call our folks to ask if they knew where the hell their boys were. Luckily, none of it made the newspaper, which I was learning was primarily reserved for scary crimes, boring politics and cute animals.
It took two days to find the guts to call Professor Kramer to ask him about the fish I thought I’d seen that night, but I couldn’t get a call back. Meanwhile, I read up on turtles, eels and barracudas, and every other long silvery fish I could find, including a rare skinny deepwater creature the Chinese mimicked at festivals. When the professor finally did call back, I told him I thought I’d seen an oarfish in Chatham Cove.
He snorted, then lectured me on how easy it is to be fooled at night.
I let his words hang out there to see if he realized how silly they sounded considering all that I’d already seen after dark. “I saw it lift its head,” I said.
“Did you see an eye?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was probably a fin or a tail or even a branch,” he said vaguely. “You were under a lot of pressure.”
Something had snapped between us, and I had no idea how to glue it back together.
Phelps suffered a tiny bit of hypothermia, which worked out perfectly. It landed him loads of attention from his brother, who taught him how to play the opening riff to “Smoke on the Water.” And he watched tons of TV while grounded, which is why he was the first to warn me that Channel 7 was airing a special feature on a
remarkable
Olympia boy.
The mannequin sashayed onto a beach near the tavern explaining how she first met little Mies O’Malley at dawn on the first day of July on these exact same mudflats along Puget Sound’s southernmost bay.
“This is where the smallest boy heading into eighth grade at Griffin Middle School discovered the largest squid ever found on the West Coast.” The camera closed in on her wide-set eyes. “What has transpired since then has left marine professors and state fisheries biologists shaking their heads. Amazingly, the giant squid is just one of Miles O’Malley’s recent discoveries. Others include a mysterious deepwater fish
never
seen before in our waters, as well as the unsettling invasion of some Asian crabs, which may already threaten dozens of seaside houses near here.
“How has this little Olympia boy stumbled onto some of the most dramatic marine discoveries in the history of Puget Sound? Who is Miles O’Malley? And what does this thirteen-year-old make of all this?”
The next image was the stranded squid. She fired off its length, weight and other stats and let Professor Kramer put it into historical perspective. Then she showed me calling it a cephalopod—to set up the book-smart kid—and aired that comment I regretted about the earth trying to tell us something.
“Less than three weeks later, Miles O’Malley came up with yet another discovery near dawn while kayaking alongside the beaches of Evergreen State College.”
At first I didn’t recognize that bizarre ragfish—indoors on a long metal table with some state biologist I’d never seen before explaining how it’d been considered possibly extinct. He then used a pointer to note how the circular welts on its side were indeed similar in size and shape to some of the suckers on the giant squid.
Chatham Cove was the next twinkling backdrop with distant silhouettes of me and Phelps on the flats. I couldn’t believe it, but there I was, slapping him on television. From a distance, it looked like horseplay.
Kids
. Her voice-over explained that after hearing about the ragfish discovery, she decided to get to know Miles O’Malley. “I truly had no idea,” she teased, “where this story would lead.”
She explained in far more detail than I thought she knew how I’d created my own summer business by selling clams to a local restaurant and collecting tidal life for Tacoma, Seattle and Port Townsend aquariums.
“Not only has this precocious scientist-slash-entrepreneur found a market for his beach finds, but he has even convinced his buyers to drive to his home to do business—seeing how he’s much too young, and probably too short, to drive.”
She had an uncomfortable-looking Professor Kramer explain my “gifis,” and showed Phelps furiously digging up a geoduck as if that stationary clam were a runaway mole. “What’s different about your friend Miles?” she asked him.
The camera crowded Phelps’s face. He took a breath. “The better question is, what’s normal about him?”
She asked if I amazed him with my knowledge of marine life.
“Ask him anything.” Phelps swept his bangs aside and smiled. I hated to admit it, but even with brown kelp caught in his eyetooth he looked like a dang movie star.
“I think Miles even knows more about all this stuff than the people who write all those books he reads,” Phelps said. “What cracks me up is that he’s clueless about just about everything else.”
What a friend, huh?
Then came the sunflower star. It didn’t look as stunning on television, but it still startled me. She pointed out how unusual it was to find such a big sea star that high on the beach. Then it was all me, talking fast and excited, face pinkening, nose peeling, answering her big questions and telling her about the new crabs at Whiskey Point and the new seaweed in Flapjack Bay and exactly where to find everything.
“We received a very interesting response,” she said, “when we asked state fish and wildlife officials about the strange crabs and seaweed that Miles told us about:
They hadn’t heard about them.
“So we asked if they’d be willing to take a look with us, and this is what we discovered: The crabs are called ‘Chinese mitten crabs,’ and they are
not
native to this area. They’re what biologists call an ‘invasive species.’”
Then came the close-up of the tiny crabs. “They look harmless enough, right?” She awkwardly held one in her hand. “They only grow to about three inches across, and their hairy pinchers aren’t big or intimidating. So how could a little crab like this be of much concern? Well, for starters, it bullies native crabs, and more importantly to locals perched above this beach, it
tunnels
.”
The next footage showed hundreds of four-inch-wide holes I’d never noticed bored into the base of the sandy bluff. “If enough tunnels are dug they create instability, erosion and landslides,” she said. “As unlikely as it sounds, these little crabs may have been responsible for the mysterious bluff collapse earlier this month just around the point here, which destroyed Joe and Edna Stevenson’s four-hundred-thousand-dollar retirement home.”
She then cornered two shy biologists to explain why the state had been unaware of the invasion of the Chinese crabs if it was already common knowledge among thirteen-year-old beachcombers. “We can’t be everywhere at once,” one of them explained. “This is actually an example of the system working. We rely on the public to keep us informed. And we appreciate the help.” That’s what he said, but it looked like the subject gave him a sunburn.
Then Wide-eyes was out on Flapjack with a handful of that strange seaweed. “The proliferation of this
Caulerpa
, which Miles had pointed out to us, also was not known by the state. And it appears the weed is already spreading across the channel toward tribal shellfish grounds. The same seaweed reportedly took over portions of the northern Mediterranean where it grew so fast it threatened
all
marine life.”
Then she showed me giddy again with that sunflower star, head backlit, hair glowing, eyes sparkling. It’s not being melodramatic to say that I looked possessed, maybe even holy.
“Why is it that you always seem to find amazing things in these bays?” she asked.
“Because I’m always looking,” I said, “and there are so many things to see.”
“But you keep seeing things that people shouldn’t normally be able to see, right?”
I rambled.
“SO, maybe,” she continued, “like you said the other day when you found that squid, ‘maybe the earth is trying to tell us something.’ And if so, what do you think it’s saying?”
“It’s probably saying, ‘Pay attention.’”
“Professor Kramer
agrees
,” she said dramatically, noting that he’d told her that it was obviously
high
time for a fresh inventory of sea life in South Sound. “In fact, the professor says he intends to push for something he called a ‘
BioBlitz
,’ in which a variety of scientists would team up to perform an animal census of sorts in the Sound’s southern bays.”
The feature ended with me talking about Rachel Carson, followed by that phony chitchat in which one of the anchors congratulated the mannequin for her
amazing
story and mentioned that he found it fascinating that a thirteen-year-old was a huge fan of Rachel Carson.
She nodded so vigorously it looked like whiplash. “His sidekick Kenny Phelps told me that Miles can quote long passages from Rachel Carson’s oceanography books—
from memory
. And when he was given the honor of naming that giant squid still being examined at the University of Washington, I’m told Miles didn’t hesitate to call her Rachel.”
