On the Broken Shore

by James MacManus

  Memorial Weekend, which turned May into June, had seen the start of the high season, when Cape Cod got down to the serious business of making money. In the next three months the hoteliers, bar owners and shopkeepers would expect to bring in most of their annual takings.

  The High Tide Motel in Wellfleet, like every similar establishment on the Cape, had brushed itself down and painted itself up for the summer. The bedrooms, whose big picture windows gave straight on to a boardwalk, were only feet from the sea. ‘If this motel was any closer to the ocean we’d be swimming’ was the slogan printed on the brochure.

  The motel provided a library of leaflets for the enquiring tourist: deep-sea fishing, sailing, whale-watching, hiking, biking, birdwatching, canoeing, guided visits to lighthouses, windmills, carefully preserved life stations and the old salt works that were a source of profit for generations of past Cape Codders. If the excursions failed to interest the visitor there were the secondary attractions: the beauty parlours, antique shops, art galleries, fitness studios, craft shops and one-of-a-kind boutiques.

  All this was laid before the half a million visitors who arrived from June onwards, but especially in the high season months of July and August.

  For some years the High Tide Motel’s owner had concentrated on attracting a particular group of visitors. What he grandly called his marketing strategy involved emailing birdwatching groups affiliated to the American Birding Association, on the grounds that they were mainly elderly people who made no trouble, had money to spend and liked a beer or two at the end of the day.

  Groups of birdwatchers were given special rates, and to make them feel welcome the motel stocked a range of books about the birds of the Cape. Handwritten notes about the latest sightings of rare avian visitors were distributed at breakfast.

  The motel was perfectly placed for birdwatching, since the dunes and marshland of the Wellfleet nature reserve, one of the largest on the Cape, were in plain view of the breakfast room. What ensured the motel a high level of return business from the birdwatching fraternity was the observation deck built out from the first floor and equipped with powerful telescopes that could scan the shoreline of the sanctuary and a large area of its reed beds and marshes.

  The motel made much of the claim that the Cape was the greatest place for birdwatchers on the whole east coast. Some birdwatchers might well have argued this point, not least because the claim emanated from the motel itself, but it is a fact that the Cape has long been a stopover for many migrant bird species travelling the Atlantic flyway from the Caribbean to northern climes. This brought a great variety of seasonal visitors, but it was the rare residents that the birdwatchers most hoped to see. The chief prize was the piping plover, a small, sand-coloured bird that had been placed on the threatened species list after a loss of habitat due to the huge increase in beach developments.

  It was on the observation deck of the motel one evening in the last week of June that an elderly gentleman from Wichita Falls, Texas, turned his binoculars from the foreshore of the Wellfleet sanctuary to a group of seals in the water about fifty yards out to sea.

  Mr Terry Krafinski, a retired postal engineer, had spent the afternoon with his wife and a group of twelve fellow enthusiasts tramping the paths through the sanctuary. Burdened with cameras, notebooks and a guide book to the various species of birds that could be seen in the region, and walking much of the time on sand-clogged paths, they had passed an exhausting few hours. The group was relaxing with a few beers and a rare daiquiri for Mrs Krafinski, who felt she deserved it, when her husband, who had been scanning the sea with his binoculars, gave a small exclamation.

  Among the seals he thought he saw – no, he was sure he saw – a human head, the bearded face of a man. He almost jumped out of his chair as he thrust his binoculars at his wife and rushed to one of the mounted telescopes. He swung it seaward, focused and swiftly found the seal group. He moved from one grey-whiskered head to another. The face had gone.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said, as he sat down and scratched his head.

  The image had been so strong, the light so clear and the sea so calm that there was no mistaking what he had seen. The group listened sceptically as Mr Krafinski repeated the description: a man with a dark, sunburnt face, a black beard and matted hair swimming in among the seals, very much part of the pod.

  Mrs Krafinski had rarely seen her husband so animated, and she told everyone that as a man of very few words, he must have seen something out there to cause his excitement. At this Mr Krafinski almost lost his temper. He had not seen just something. He had seen a human being, a man, out there among the seals.

  There was an embarrassed silence while the group variously looked deep into their drinks, hard at their shoes or far out to the horizon. Terry Krafinski was clearly getting too old for these trips.

  Then Mrs Krafinski came up with an explanation, and everything became clear. It must be some kind of new Cape diversion for tourists. After all, people went whale-watching and dolphin-spotting, and swimming with dolphins was very popular down in Florida, so maybe some tour operator was offering trips to swim with seals up here on the Cape.

  The group relaxed. Of course that’s what it must be. They probably called it something like the seal experience, hired out wetsuits to adventurous visitors and dropped them off near a rookery when the tide was right. But Terry Krafinski was not happy. He said he was going to call the local paper in the morning and ask if anyone was offering seal-swimming expeditions.

  Lewis Chadwick, the trainee reporter on the Cape Herald who took the call, said he would check it out, scribbled down a few notes and forgot about it.

  Two days later he was scrabbling to find his notes.

  Mary Maloney, the large, blustery lady who managed the coin-operated laundry in Hyannis, had appeared at the Herald’s office with a story. She wanted to talk to the chief reporter, and no one else. Her story was of such importance, she implied, that the paper might well wish to pay her for it.

  Sandy always took these interviews. Not because they yielded stories – that was rarely the case – but because among the human flotsam and jetsam that drifted into the Herald’s ornate front hall with what they supposed to be a front-page news story there was always a character or two. Misfits; underdogs; the lonely, lost and defeated; those done down by the council, the tax man, their spouses, the weather and local pickpockets: they all washed up in the Herald’s interview room.

  Sandy loved them all. It was, he realised, a very un-American trait, but failure fascinated him. The reason, as he pointed out to himself in moments of stern selfexamination, usually after a glass or two in the Dark Side, was that he too was a failure of heroic proportions; a man who had magnificently failed to fulfil both his own ambitions and the expectations of a loving family. How else to describe the career path of a brilliant student who had left NYU with a masters degree in history and a Ph.D. beckoning on the subject of Harry Hopkins’s influence on Roosevelt’s foreign policy, and wound up twenty-five years later writing stories in a local paper about proposed changes to the summer parking regulations?

  In his more masochistic moods Sandy would remind himself that he had once planned an academic career in such detail that he knew the first essay subject he would set his postgraduate students. On 1 December 1941 President Roosevelt was having lunch in the White House with his special adviser Harry Hopkins when Secretary Knox called to say that the Japanese were bombing Honolulu. His response was to continue lunch with Hopkins: Discuss

  He could have gone on to any of the top Ivy League universities. An academic career would have followed – and respectability, social status and a certain celebrity within learned circles.

  Instead, he fell in love with a young woman who thought foreign correspondents were the new rock stars. ‘Imagine Mick Jagger doing dangerous stuff,’ she had said. So he tore up his career plans and flew to London to join Reuters. ‘Come back when you’ve had some local paper experience,’ he was told. He had w
ritten to every local paper on the eastern seaboard, and finally landed a traineeship at the Cape Herald, where he had been – happily, he had to admit – ever since.

  Sandy and Chadwick saw Mrs Maloney in the sparsely furnished interview room which contained just a table, a few chairs, a carafe of water and a large poster of the Herald’s masthead over the slogan: ‘You Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Set You Free’. He told Mrs Maloney that he would decide whether payment was appropriate after he had heard the story. He always said this. The Herald never paid for stories, but Sandy had found that the prospect of payment always helped an interview along.

  Mrs Maloney drank from her glass of water, placed her large forearms on the table, leant forward, looking directly at Sandy with pale watery eyes – dead sea bass eyes, he thought – and began.

  Two nights ago, her 17-year-old son had been out at night with his .22 rifle – nothing illegal, you know, he’d gotten his licence. He and a friend had been walking through the dunes of the Wellfleet sanctuary…

  ‘With a gun?’ interrupted Sandy.

  ‘They weren’t hunting, or anything illegal,’ said Mrs Maloney. ‘They were just walking; you know what boys are like. Anyway, they saw a whole bunch of seals.’

  ‘That’s what they were looking for, seals? Perhaps a seal trophy or a bit of target practice?’ said Sandy.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Mrs Maloney, who did not like being interrupted, and wanted to get on with the story, so she wouldn’t forget her carefully rehearsed narrative. ‘Anyway, they crept up through the dune grass to see how close they could get…you know what boys are.’

  ‘I do, Mrs Maloney.’

  ‘And…well…’

  ‘The gun went off?’

  ‘It was an accident, my boy tripped.’

  ‘Anyone hurt?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘What happened was an accident, and would the paper please print the fact that my son has a licence?’

  Sandy reminded her that seal-hunting was illegal.

  ‘I know, I know, but you know what boys are.’

  ‘What actually happened, Mrs Maloney?’

  ‘I think a seal was hit; certainly it rolled over.’

  ‘That’s the story? Your boy shot a seal?’

  ‘No.’ Mrs Maloney took a noisy gulp from her glass, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and fixed her watery eyes on Sandy again. ‘One of the seals got up and ran at the boys, shouting its head off.’

  Mrs Maloney sat back, crossed her plump arms and looked at them triumphantly.

  ‘Could you repeat that, Mrs Maloney?’

  ‘What I said. A seal ran at them shouting – actually swearing, swearing real bad – well, that’s what they said.’

  Be patient, Sandy told himself. She’s a disturbed woman, so hear her out and then get her out. He looked at Chadwick, who was writing something down.

  ‘Seals don’t have legs, Mrs Maloney,’ said Sandy. ‘They don’t shout and swear.’

  Mrs Maloney was unmoved by this observation. Her boy was telling the truth. She knew that, because she knew he wouldn’t and couldn’t make it up. He didn’t have the imagination. Her boy was telling the truth. He’d been chased off a beach in the middle of the night by a seal that got up and ran at him and his friend. And it swore real badly.

  ‘Are you sure the boys didn’t make this up to cover up the shooting of a seal?’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Because someone heard the shot, didn’t they, and called the police?’

  ‘The police came, yes.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Maloney.’

  ‘You’re not going to do a story?’

  ‘We’ll think about it, Mrs Maloney.’

  Sandy saw her out, brushed off another suggestion that the Herald might care to pay for this information, and went back to the interview room.

  He asked Chadwick what he thought. Chadwick looked a little awkward.

  ‘I got a call a couple of days ago from a guy with a group of birdwatchers at Wellfleet. He claimed to have seen a man’s head among a pod of seals when he was scanning the foreshore with binocs for birds. He asked whether it was a new tourist thing, swimming with seals.’

  ‘You get his name?’

  ‘’Fraid not.’

  ‘Idiot.’

  If you look at a large-scale map of the mid Cape, as Sandy did that night, you will see that the distance from the point where Leo Kemp disappeared off Monomoy Island to the Wellfleet sanctuary is twenty-five miles as the crow flies. An easy distance to cover for a seal, and not entirely impossible for a human being to swim.

  Except, as Sandy told himself, it was completely impossible, because Kemp had been missing for twentyseven days. He was dead.

  On the other hand, as his late friend had advised him so often, take nothing for granted.

  Nothing.

  Sandy began at the Squire in Chatham, and worked his way down the coast. He knew where the fishermen drank, although he didn’t often choose to drink with them. He was well known on the Cape, though, and that made his task much easier. He would buy a few drinks, commiserate with them on the state of the fishing industry, maybe offer to pay good money to be taken out on an overnight trip, and then let the booze do the talking. The fishermen drank beer mainly, with Jack Daniel’s chasers. Sandy stuck to wine. He had managed to persuade most bars he frequented to stock what he liked to call his own creation, the blended Viognier, and he reckoned he must have drunk a good bottle of the stuff by the time he got to the fourth bar in Hyannisport. Aware that he was well over the limit, he drove carefully.

  It was in the Dawn Trader down by the harbour that he heard the first rumour. He found the fishermen in a corner of the bar, playing cards. They didn’t welcome the intrusion, but he told them he was writing a piece about old sea myths, the stories about seals in human form and how they came ashore in remote islands shedding their skin to become beautiful women who trapped fishermen into marriage.

  In the other bars he had been told with varying degrees of civility to get lost, beat it, lie down in a darkened room and – the one he liked best – buy us all a drink and then beat it.

  His reception in the Dawn Trader was different. The men looked shy, uneasy, and asked to see his press card. Then one nodded to another.

  ‘Jack, you seen something, right?’

  And so it turned out. Nothing substantial, just a blur among the seals in the sea off Wellfleet a few days ago. The blur of a face, a human face that ducked under the water quickly and then resurfaced; a strong, bearded, dark brown face framed by a mat of long straggly hair.

  ‘Could it have been a seal?’

  ‘Could have been, but it wasn’t.’

  ‘Must have been a fucking mermaid,’ said one of the other fishermen, and they all laughed and Sandy bought another round of drinks.

  They were embarrassed, yet seemed pleased by the attention they were getting from this persistent reporter. Sandy had deliberately not produced a notebook or tape recorder. But when he laid a map on the table and asked the man to pinpoint the spot where he had made the sighting, he suddenly became reluctant.

  ‘You say you’re from the Herald?’

  ‘You saw my press card.’

  ‘Why all the questions?’

  ‘I told you, I’m doing a feature.’

  ‘What else have you heard? You said you talked to others up the coast.’

  ‘Just rumours,’ said Sandy. But he had lost them. They bunched up at the far end of the table and began whispering among themselves. In the end he gave them his card and asked them to call him. He knew they wouldn’t.

  The late spring run of herring and an abundance of bass and mackerel made feeding easy for the seals off the Cape coast that June. But it was cod that had made the Cape famous, and had shaped its history as much as the whale. The Cape had been given its name in 1602 by the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, who had been amazed by the shoals of cod that surrounded his ship, the Concord, s
o thickly that, as he wrote in his diary, ‘I could well have walked across the sea upon their backs.’

  But there were no cod in the waters off the Cape that June. As he moved with his pod up the coast, Leo saw the seals feed off mackerel, herring and squid, swallowing the smaller fish whole and crunching their bones with strong, sharp teeth. With larger fish such as hake and halibut they simply ripped out the stomach and left the rest. Fishermen hated them for the waste, but in practice they did exactly the same.

  Leo knew that the seals would not find cod here in the offshore waters of the Cape where they had once been so plentiful. The deep-water fishermen had given up on cod for almost ten years and sought other fish.

  The collapse of cod stocks actually posed a greater danger to the seal population than the occasional forays by killer whales. At least with the orcas there was a balance of power, a test of skill on either side, a chance for the hunted to outwit the hunter. But there would be no escaping the cull that was successfully being urged on the Canadian Department of Fisheries by the fishing lobby. This year, 2008, it would be 275,000 harp seals, 12,000 greys and 8,000 hooded seals, a slaughter perpetrated in the name of restoring cod stocks.

  Various reasons had been advanced for the disappearance of the once-abundant cod, but the only conclusion that was backed by impeccable science and supported by independently audited statistics tied it purely and simply to over-fishing.

  Man the predator had eaten too many fish suppers.

  Leo’s pod of seals, now twenty strong, took their food as they found it while moving slowly up the coast pausing only to investigate a line of lobster pots on the seabed or the remnants of an old wreck. These creatures were driven by curiosity rather than hunger, Leo realised, as he watched them dive down and circle the well-filled pots, pushing their faces close to the wire mesh and rattling the cages of the trapped crustaceans inside.