The Highest Tide (2 page)

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 2

O
NCE 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.

Another thing about them: They were always dead. That is unless you bought those old seafaring tales of two-hundred-foot squid attacking ships and wrestling whales. I knew most people preferred myths to science, especially when it came to sea monsters. It helped justify their fear of open water. I never wanted any part of that nonsense. Upon coming eyeball to eyeball with that animal on the flats, my impulse was to run from it, but my goal, before I’d reached shore, was to save it.

By the time Professor Kramer arrived, the mud glistened in the dawn, and the incoming tide created a boulevard of suds-and-algae-twirled water that sloshed through the gentle dark dunes but still fell several feet shy of the stranded squid. The professor didn’t come alone. He was tailed by the local whale rescue crew: three women and two ponytailed men who scrambled from their van onto the mud with towels, buckets and cameras.

They treated me like some irrelevant runaway until the professor explained that I was the one who’d called about “the creature.” He still called it a creature, which I took personally at the time, but understood in hindsight, and was flattered that he trusted me enough to not only come running himself but to roust the local rescue squad too. Plus, he hadn’t even seen it yet.

Professor Kramer was my favorite adult. When he took Mrs. Halverson’s class on a field trip, I asked so many questions he invited me to his lab. That’s where he showed me all the plants and animals that live in a thimble of seawater, creatures the size of pepper flakes feeding on even tinier plants. And I was hooked. He also taught me how to collect specimens, gave me a microscope, a twenty-gallon aquarium and, ultimately, the names and numbers of people who would buy whatever I gathered. He wasn’t a god like Rachel Carson, but someone with the right information in his head, which looked normal enough except for his kinky hair, which rose straight up from his scalp then flowered like the heads of those red tube worms that cling to dock pilings.

Once the professor arrived, I lost control of everything. The night I’d had to myself had surrendered to a bright morning that exposed the entire hourglass bay, pinched at its waist by the nearby Spencer Spit, which kept the Mud Bay Tavern, six rental cabins and the eastern end of the Heron Street Bridge just above the high water mark. And my discovery was definitely no longer mine.

Even in daylight, the squid didn’t look real. It came off like a unicorn or a jack lope or some other fantasy creature—an oversized octopus mixed with the back end of a porpoise or some other torpedo-shaped mammal. But what I couldn’t get over was how powerful and durable it looked. Its blotchy-purple skin reminded me of the thick rubber used for wet suits, and I noticed how the suckers along the inside of its ten arms shrank to the size of dimes near the tips.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Professor Kramer muttered after he’d walked around it twice. Most of the rescuers were unwilling to get very close. They winced and cussed as if it stank, which it didn’t. We all watched the professor examine and measure its head, its siphon, its arms and its nine-and-a-half-inch eyes, mumbling technical terms into a tiny recorder. What was clear to me was he didn’t have the slightest idea how to check its vitals or keep it alive. Finally, I couldn’t resist asking the obvious.

He replied, without looking up: “It’s as dead as it’s gonna get, Miles.”

Still, the rescuers continued pouring buckets of water on it, as if putting out a fire. “Who said it was still breathing?” one of them demanded.

The professor one-eyed me. “What did draw you out here in the dark, Miles?”

“I heard it.”

“What’d you hear?”

“Breathing.” I knew they were all staring at me now, but all I could see were tall silhouettes and the oversized sun flickering behind them. I looked away to where cedars and firs cascaded to the beach like long summer dresses.

“You woke up and came out here because you heard something
breathing?
” the pushy rescuer asked.

“Well, it squealed or something. It made some loud noise, and I put on my boots and came out here.”

It was one of those moments when your face can’t back up your mouth. I hoped none of them knew enough about beached squid to know whether they could squeal or make noises that could wake up a kid a few hundred yards away. What had I heard? A snort or a sigh? Did I imagine it altogether? Would an autopsy prove I was a liar, that it had been dead for seven hours?

Luckily, everyone forgot about me as a KING 5 van rolled onto the Heron bridge with its crew popping out military style. The rescuers resumed dumping buckets of seawater on the squid. At least they had a role. I didn’t even know where to stand as the television team splashed across the mud, and a short lady with hair that wind couldn’t rustle slipped to her knee and let loose a gasp topped only by the noise she made when she got close enough to see the squid’s huge cloudy-black eye. That’s when she turned around and puked on the mud. Four young mallards suddenly flapped in single file overhead, laughing at us. A grouchy blue heron glided by to give us hell too.

Time hopped around on me, but soon almost everyone was on the mud, including my parents, whom I’d never seen that far out on the flats before. My mother stayed as far away from the squid as possible without standing in water. My father kept checking his watch to make sure he wasn’t late for his early shift at the brewery. From a distance they looked alike, short and rounded in identical sweat jackets, but they stood paces apart, like neighbors who didn’t get along.

A cheerful Judge Stegner arrived with two hot thermoses, as if it were a scheduled event he’d agreed to host. He also brought a flotilla of inflatable rafts and canoes, thinking ahead as usual, considering the flats we’d all crossed were sinking.

Another van arrived, then another and still another. The entire bridge filled with shiny white news vans, their satellite dishes telescoping into the new sky. The judge greeted and shuttled them to our shrinking island of mud. I’d never seen so many people who looked like mannequins before, or so many so afraid of a dead animal. Soon they competed to see who could ask Professor Kramer the loudest question. Finally, he asked them to be quiet and just listen to him for a few minutes.

“It’s too soon to be certain,” he said, “but it appears that this squid is too big to be a
Moroteuthis robusta
, the large Pacific squid that occasionally washes up on Washington beaches. No, this indeed appears to be an
Architeuthis
, better known as simply the giant squid.” He spelled
Architeuthis
for them, then said, “Unofficially, this one measures out at thirty-seven feet from the top of its mantle to the end of its longest tentacle. That would not only make it a bona fide
Architeuthis
but perhaps the biggest one ever found in the Pacific and one of the largest found
anywhere
in years.”

The professor’s voice always changed slightly when he lectured, but this was different. This was the sound of bottled excitement, as if he were strugglingto resist shouting. “What astonishes me at this point is that the giant squid is a deep-ocean creature,” he continued. “How this one wound up down here in shallow South Sound in such amazingly good condition is . . .”He hesitated, searching for the perfect words. “A mystery of colossal proportions.”

The air pressure changed after he said all that. Granted, this revelation involved a beached squid, not a moon landing or a Kennedy assassination, but anyone who was on the mud that morning when the professor put that marooned creature into perspective felt as if they were witnessing a moment that mattered.

He then explained that the giant squid is the world’s largest invertebrate with the biggest eyes of any earthling. “Little is known about the giant squid because it has never been studied in its own habitat. We don’t even know what colors it comes in, although it can probably change hues on a whim.” He took a breath before predicting that scientists from across the nation would likely rush to study this specimen.

One of the ponytailed rescuers filled the lull that followed with a rant about pollutants endangering mammals in the Sound, which I suspected had little to do with this wrong-way squid. The judge then spontaneously interjected the history and geology of the bay with the authority of someone describing how he built his house. I tired of listening to everybody and was trying to figure out how to get a ride to shore without my parents when I heard the question resurface as to who found the squid.

Professor Kramer said my name, somehow spotted me and smiled warmly, as if the squid were my gift to him. Cameras swiveled toward me.

“What did you see, Miles?” asked the mannequin who’d puked earlier.

“The same thing you’re seeing,” I said, “except that I think it was breathing.”

“Please speak up, Miles,” she said in a voice so designed to relax me it alarmed me. “So, it was alive, Miles?”

“It made a noise.” I wished people would stop saying my name. I turned to Professor Kramer, hoping he would take over, but his eyes were on the squid.

“Did you have any idea what it was?” she asked.

I squinted. “Well, I could tell it was a cephalopod, and as soon as I saw the eye, I was sure it was a squid and probably a giant.”

More people and equipment crowded me, blocking the low sun. I could see the urgency and excitement in their faces, which scared me all the more.

“You called it a ‘sifla-what’?” she asked.

I could already discuss phyla, hydroids, mollusks and crustaceans as easily as most kids chatted about bands and movies. The catch was nobody my age was interested in hearing any of it. Neither were my parents. So it churned inside me like a secret language and whenever it slipped out, people bug-eyed me like I’d shifted into Portuguese. “A cephalopod,” I corrected, “which basically means its arms spring from its head.”

“Was it dark when you came out here?” she asked.