The Highest Tide (26 page)
R
ACHEL CARSON WONDERED
aloud about the romantic links between sea life and the highest tides.
She wrote about European oysters, North African sea urchins and tropical worms whose spawning patterns are so synchronized with the tides that if you were shipwrecked you might eventually figure out the day of the year and the time of the day by tracking their sex lives. She also marveled at grunions, flashy little fish that somehow sense the instant when waves surge highest along California’s southern beaches.
Shortly after full moons between March and August, grunions gather to surf ashore. They wait for the highest tide of the month to splash as high as it can, then thousands of them ride the subsequent waves onto the beach where they lie momentarily shocked, unable to breathe. Then the female drops her eggs and the male fertilizes them in the time it takes for the next wave to arrive.
If you came across this ritual in the moonlight, it might look like thousands of distraught fish attempting suicide in unison before abruptly changing their minds and returning to sea. And chances are you wouldn’t notice their buried eggs, which enjoy two weeks of peace in the sand until the next highest tide of the month washes high enough to haul freshly hatched grunions away.
Rachel Carson puzzled over whether it was the pressure or movement of the water during the extreme tides, or perhaps the brightness of the moon that told grunions when to slam themselves into the beaches and make instant love in the sand.
See, even Rachel Carson didn’t understand everything.
I slept after the closing ceremonies, a dreamless, dead-boy’s sleep that wasn’t disturbed by the trespassers tromping to our door or by the little earthquake thirty-five miles southeast of Olympia. When I finally woke it was because all five feet ten inches of Kenny Phelps had banged his head into my slanted ceiling and was breaking his cussing record while his poncho dripped onto my filthy carpet.
“Get the fuck up,” he said, as if everything were my fault. “That big-ass tide of yours is coming in.”
I propped myself up and squinted out the window at broken madrone limbs surfing past our property. I checked the clock. High tide was more than two hours away, but the water was already high and swift, the wind rowdier than it had been in months and the rain still punishing gutters and manufacturing fog to the point that the steep forest across the bay was nothing more than a darker smudge between identical grays of water and sky.
Phelps told me about the three-point-two earthquake that he’d initially mistook for a Fort Lewis mortar round. “My butt is here to testify that the toilet seat shook,” he said, then told me that a big crowd had already gathered downtown to greet the rising storm. “My brother says it’s blowing three-footers straight down the inlet. Let’s go.”
I heard voices and glanced outside to see five chatty blobs of rain gear in the driveway. One knocked hard on our front door.
Phelps leaned over my bed, dripping onto my sheets, glaring out the window. “Your old man home?”
“He’s got a Sunday shift.”
Another one knocked harder. Then I saw the shape of a television camera bulging beneath a poncho.
“They don’t know you live up here, right?” Phelps asked. “Of course not. Who the fuck would live up here but trolls?”
I tried to overhear the trespassers while pulling on my army shorts and hunting for a sweater for the first time since spring. Halfway down the back steps I whispered that I was hungry. Without looking back, Phelps silently slipped me a green Starburst.
We rode downtown until we heard, then saw, the cheering mob on the finger of land pointing north past the marina and the log yard where steel-colored waves slapped the stilts beneath the offices of KOLY 1220 AM and shattered along the bouldered shoreline, spraying sheets twenty feet high.
Phelps and I slalomed through the crowd until it got too thick and we had to walk to the front where eleven soaked men in orange Public Works vests stacked white sacks of sand. A hundred people swirled behind them, the sort of crowd that gathered at Sylvester Park whenever there was a free concert or a bad war. As the men furiously built their barricade, it became clear by their expressions that they knew the mob wasn’t on their side, that people were rooting for the storm.
The second time the waves cleared the boulders they swooshed around the sandbags and across pavement toward the log yards and downtown. I saw a tattooed kid knocked off his skateboard, a lady with a camcorder washed off her feet and lots of people peeling seaweed off their faces and chests. Then a larger wave struck, cleared the sandbags and sloshed calf-deep through the crowd. Someone started shouting at us to stay the hell away from the high-voltage radio tower. People gaped up at the three-hundred-foot spire they hadn’t noticed until then, spilling backward into each other until a few tripped onto the flooded pavement, sending dozens more backpedaling and tumbling into each other again as another wave washed over those who hadn’t yet risen and swamped the base of the tower.
That’s when I recognized Blister, of all people, babbling to someone in a blue King 5 rain jacket. He leveled a hand at his chin and scanned the hysterical mob, still yapping nonstop. I felt it coming, but it still chilled me to see him jab his finger at me, as if pointing out a bank robber.
As the cameraman and his color-coordinated sidekicks scurried my way, I got on my bike, and yelled, “Excuse me!” five straight times until I splashed through enough puddles and around enough panicked people to break free.
Phelps later said he never saw me ride any better on that oversized three-speed than when I wove through that mob, then pumped past the logs to Marine Drive and around a pileup of smoking cars, past the Farmer’s Market, up Capitol Way to Fourth and across the bridge to the west side.
By the time we’d pedaled back to Skookumchuck, steam wafted off us like smoke and the storm eased slightly, the rain still falling with conviction but not showing off anymore. Even the wind relaxed, although it still heaved occasional rollers over the bay’s lowest borders.
Spencer Spit had never looked so small. The rising tide had shrunk the meadows around the tavern and pulled the cabins to the fringe of the bay. And even without the scientists and volunteers there were more people on the spit than ever.
Phelps and I walked our bikes through the swarm, dazed by how swiftly so many people had congregated. A small group prayed beneath Hal’s cross while dozens more lined up shoulder to shoulder along the water’s edge the way fishermen did when the salmon ran-but without poles.
One had an eye patch. Two had crutches. I watched a lady cast aside her black cane and inch into the bay on legs so white and veiny they could have been used to teach anatomy. I saw another lady dunk her bald head, and a young mother in a denim skirt haul her crying baby into the bay. Still others waded back to shore with buckets of mud.
As we rolled toward the bridge, we saw a tall, bearded man practicing slow-motion karate, and behind him a pretty lady selling “self-opening miracle umbrellas” and telling everyone that it was less than an hour to high tide, which reminded me of the local oddity that the tide peaked eighteen minutes later in Skookum-chuck Bay than it did downtown.
We pushed ahead. The atmosphere changed entirely near the Heron bridge where the tavern crowd overflowed into the street and older teenagers blasted Phelps-like rock just off the east side of the bridge, which hovered slightly more than a foot above the aggressive incoming current.
Phelps spotted his brother and stopped to worship the music with him, leaving me on my own to check on my house and Florence.
The tallest waves whacked the top of our stilts, but I didn’t bother to go inside. If the water was that high, Florence’s floor was already soaked.
I sprinted until I had to jog, then sprinted again once I saw that standing water had almost encircled Florence’s cabin. I splashed to her door and burst through it without knocking.
It took me longer than usual to adjust to the gloom. I heard water sloshing against floorboards and smelled the sea as clearly as if we were rafting. Yet the floor, amazingly, looked
dry.
When I finally made out Florence, it was comforting to see her safe in her chair, not waiting for me to pull her off the toilet, or worse.
I apologized for not checking in earlier as I crossed the room, panting, moving from one pool of dust-twirled light to another, until I saw her new forehead gash and noticed her nose was larger than ever.
“Ahhhh Florence.” Guilt flooded me. “I’ll get some ice.” Her closed eyes didn’t worry me. She often rested them. And I’d seen a crusty film on the corner of her lips many times. It was the set of her mouth that shook me. Had she fallen so hard that she broke her jaw?
“Florence? You okay?”
The instant I realized she was dead my stomach burned and my throat clogged, then everything slowed way down.
I don’t know exactly what I did for the next few minutes other than that I eventually stopped looking at her and began lifting books off the floor and onto tables and counters.
I think I was waiting for my mind to catch up with my eyes and tell me what to do. Slowly, it occurred to me that I should’ve already called 911 to see if someone could revive her. Maybe she isn’t dead! Yet I was too scared to touch her, and I’d seen enough dead fish and seals and birds to know what death looked like.
So I continued stacking books and listening to the tide splash beneath me until it hissed through the boards near the fridge, and I finally noticed the blue pills next to her chair.
I stuffed them into my raincoat. I don’t know if Florence wanted me to do that, but I did it. Then I dialed 911 and told a busy lady that Florence Dalessandro had died.
When she asked for an address, I gave her mine and told her that Florence was two driveways over. Then I splashed back out into the rejuvenated storm to feed the rest of the sleeping pills to the blackberries.
I ran back inside, planted the empty pill vial in the middle of the kitchen garbage and flung the bag outside beyond the growing puddle. When I shut the door behind me again, I realized I was panting. I drank straight from the faucet. It felt like a selfish act. Where were the sirens? Should I call again?
The floor was noisier than ever, wheezing and gurgling like some slurping monster. Yet it was still mostly
dry,
except for the kitchen, where it had seeped all the way from the fridge to the tiny dinner table. Then I noticed the floor was actually damp all the way back to the bathroom, and beyond that to the bedroom door.
Florence had always kept it shut, as if hiding or preserving something. I’d never more than glanced in there, and when I stepped inside now what I saw didn’t fit. The rest of the cabin felt like Florence, but her bedroom could have been anybody’s—simple green curtains, matching bedside tables, a green and gold bedspread fitted at the corners and three identically framed photos perfectly spaced on the far wall.
I assumed the old man with the familiar lips was her father. The other two black-and-whites were of a younger Florence alongside two similar-looking women who had to be her older sisters. Florence still looked like herself back then, but her eyes fit comfortably in her face. They still looked oversized, but in a pretty and unintimidating way. It hit me looking at her sisters that shuffling old Florence was the last in a line, the baby of her family just like me.
A louder splash struck beneath me and snorted through planks in the living room. I burst out to see the oval rug darkening in front of Florence’s chair, water beading and draining along its edges. I glanced guiltily at Florence, as if she might wake long enough to scold me for snooping in her bedroom while her house sank.
I felt as if I’d been given a test I couldn’t possibly pass. I knew that I should wash her face and set her jaw straight, but I was afraid I’d make her look worse, and what if her dentures popped out? I considered trying to carry her outside, but didn’t know if I could lift her without her help, and feared I’d end up dragging her across the wet floor. And what would I do once I got her outside?
The next wave shook the cabin just as I hoisted the last of her books off the floor and watched two countertop stacks collapse. I restacked at hyperspeed, knowing it was futile, but at least it kept me in motion. When I looked around again, I saw the entire floor was soaked and pooling, a couple inches deep near the fridge.
I slid the footrest toward Florence, without looking at her face, and lifted her wet heels off the floor, holding my breath, afraid of what I might smell. Her legs were heavy, as if they’d gained weight in death. I scooted the stool beneath them and heard more water spitting through floor cracks as I lowered her feet.
After another wave hissed beneath me and squirted a loud foot-high fountain in the kitchen, I burst outside for air and stumble-waded into the gravel where I waited like a mindless guard dog until I finally heard a siren.
The nodding ambulance man and his blank-faced sidekick listened to me breathlessly explain how often Florence fell, and how she’d apparently had another big tumble earlier that day. The last thing the man said to me was, “Are
you
okay?”
He probably saw guilt, not pain.
After the ambulance rolled away, I went into the world to tell someone that my best friend was dead.
Of course, there was nobody to tell.
The Stegner house was empty and my father was still at work. The only other people I saw were trespassing strangers loping up and down driveways to get closer looks at the still-rising tide.
I ran home and called my father’s work number, but hung up once his recorder kicked on. I did the same with Aunt Janet’s after I discovered my mother had checked out of Chicago. It surprised me to want her the most, but I’d never been miserable without her.
Being alone in our house spooked me, especially with water hissing beneath me again, so I ran toward the bridge and the music, trying not to think, kicking any images of Florence from my head before they had a chance to root, proving to my mother, even if she wasn’t around to witness it, that I could handle even this without crying.
