On the Broken Shore

by James MacManus

  He had felt the same longing when teaching at St Andrews, where the sea constantly pounded the two shores lying north and south of the craggy outcrop on which the town stood. To be able to walk into that sea and vanish into a new world, to find truth in the old selkie myths about seals becoming human and then returning to their own world, leaving broken hearts behind in revenge for the slaughter inflicted on them by man since the dawn of time. That had always been his dream. It was the theme of a school essay he had written when he was 14. The subject was: My ambition in life.

  Every other boy in the class had chosen to become someone important or famous: scientists, fighter pilots, astronauts or test cricketers. The teacher had read out the list and commended them all for their high-flying ambitions. Then, to Leo’s acute embarrassment, he said, ‘But Kemp wants to become a seal!’

  The class had laughed, but the teacher had stopped them. Leo’s was the best essay, he said, because it was so different and so imaginatively argued. Anyway, what was so wrong with wanting to be a seal? The sniggering continued at the back, but the teacher quelled it with a stony stare.

  He asked Leo to come up in front of the class and read the essay out. Leo had refused, shaking his head, remaining stubbornly at his desk. So the teacher read it out himself. After a while Leo looked around shyly, and was surprised to find that the class was actually listening with interest.

  After he had finished reading, the teacher had asked him a question. ‘You want to walk into the sea and live the life of a mammal, a seal or dolphin. That’s wonderful. But you don’t tell us whether you want to come back. Do you?’

  ‘No,’ mumbled Leo, staring down at his desk: he wanted to stay out there, at sea, for ever, he said

  ‘But won’t that be rather sad? What about your family? They would miss you, and wouldn’t you miss them?’

  Leo nodded his head, still looking down. ‘I’d miss my mum and dad, yes, but I’d be a different person in a different life: I’d be free. I wouldn’t have to worry about anybody. I’d be gone.’ He looked up at his teacher. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’

  ‘I think I do’ said the teacher quietly.

  His essay won a prize. It was after that that his father arranged for him to go out with his uncle on the Saturday scallop-fishing expeditions.

  The launch was now widening its circles around the door, and Leo could clearly see the faces of the fisherman looking in every direction. He sank low into the water, breathed in deeply and dived again, this time swimming strongly in the direction of the shore. When he surfaced he saw the launch returning to the mother boat. There were half a dozen crewmen lined along the side of the vessel, all scanning the sea with binoculars. He dived again, deeper this time, and stayed under longer.

  When he surfaced for the third time the boat was heading out to sea. Fishing is about time and money, but had the captain thought there was a chance of picking up a survivor from the water, he would have stayed. Unlike his crew, he must have been convinced that if they had seen anything at all, it had been a corpse. And he was not going to waste valuable time looking for a drowned swimmer who had been carried away by a rip tide.

  He would report the possible sighting of a body on a piece of wreckage to the coastguard. If there were any vessels available the sea would be searched; and nothing would be found. The coastguard would conclude that the fishermen had been mistaken. Conditions in the heavy swell that had followed the storm made it easy to mistake a tangle of flotsam for a body. Anyway, they would know that nobody had been reported missing recently.

  Nobody except Leo Kemp, of course. But he had been officially declared dead, and his file had been closed.

  By the time Leo crawled ashore the fishing vessel had vanished over the horizon. He had no idea where he was. He walked unsteadily across a broad beach into thick dune grass, and collapsed.

  Buck had never lost a man in more than fifty years at sea. Since Leo’s disappearance he had shunned company, and had cancelled his contract with the Institute. He planned to put the Antoine up for sale, but in the Chatham boatyard they had told him he would be lucky to find a buyer at any price for an old, fuel-hungry tub at a time when gas prices were beginning to climb.

  If he could not sell the boat, he would have it broken up for scrap. There would be a few hundred dollars in that. And then, come the fall, he would leave for Hawaii, and settle for good on his smallholding. At 72 it was time to move on. He knew he wasn’t responsible for Leo’s death. But he had been the captain. Leo had been in his care, and that was enough for him. He felt guilty as hell, and as the weeks passed the feeling didn’t get any better. Could he, should he, have turned the Antoine faster? Should he have seen the wave earlier? The questions never stopped.

  Renee had told him over and again that it wasn’t his fault, but it didn’t help, nor did the rum, nor did the sleeping pills. He wanted to cut loose from the Cape, with its dying fishing industry and its daily reminders of Leo, and bury his memories in the warmth of the Pacific.

  So Buck was not pleased when he found Sandy Rowan waiting for him on board the Antoine at Chatham harbour. The interviews he had given after his successful conference speech to the Scripps Institute had softened his views on journalists, but not by much. And he didn’t like anyone on his boat without an invitation.

  ‘Want a coffee?’ asked Sandy, holding up a new jar of Nescafé.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Got a minute?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Buck, I just need a quick word – and not “nope”. Three nopes in a row would depress me.’

  Buck looked at him and said, ‘Nice piece you wrote.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘OK, I’ll take a coffee.’

  Sandy made the instant coffee in the tiny galley while Buck worked on his nets.

  ‘Another good warm morning,’ said Sandy as they sat on the rear deck.

  Buck fished a flask from his pocket and poured a generous slug into both their mugs.

  ‘Thanks. You’ve been fishing these waters for a long time.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You know them as well as any man alive, I guess.’

  ‘What do you want, Mr Rowan?’

  Sandy gave a sigh, swigged his coffee and grimaced.

  ‘How long could a man survive out there if he was stranded on some beach?’

  ‘Depends. Why?’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘No, I don’t know why.’

  ‘“Take nothing for granted”, remember. That was what he always said.’

  ‘Sure, but that doesn’t tell me why you’re asking these questions.’

  Sandy stood up and drained the remains of his coffee. He didn’t know whether he was more irritated by Buck’s play-it-dumb routine or by his own stupidity in pursuing a dead-end conversation.

  ‘Because you must have heard the rumours going round the fishermen’s bars.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well, maybe you haven’t heard that a birdwatcher says he saw a man swimming among the seals off Wellfleet. And that same night two kids with a gun out to shoot themselves a seal got the fright of their lives when they were chased by one; a seal with two legs. They swear it. I’ve talked to them.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘That’s enough, isn’t it? Enough to make you think?’

  Maybe it was the rum, or his guilt, or both, but Buck began to talk.

  ‘A man might live out there for weeks if he put his mind to it and the weather was warm. There’s plenty of food if you look: crab, mussels, clams, certain types of seaweed, fish if you can catch them, and birds’ eggs in the dunes. There are plenty of freshwater ponds just across the dune line and showers at sea, mostly at night.’

  ‘So he could be alive?’

  ‘Look, the sun’s going to go down tonight, and it will be up again tomorrow morning. Beyond that, I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ve been wrecked, haven’t you, Buck?’

  ‘That was in winter, a
nd we were picked up real quick. Sure, strange things happen out at sea. Men have survived on pieces of driftwood for days, far longer than you’d think possible. We’ve had a warm couple of months – in the shallows the water temperature won’t be bad.’

  ‘OK,’ said Sandy. ‘Just one last question, and then I’ll leave you in peace. Where is the biggest gathering of seals around here? Is there someplace they all go at this time of year?’

  Buck sighed. ‘Right now they’re on Atlantic Island. There was a storm two days ago, the wind shifted north-east and a lot of them will have gone with the wind and the tide rather than swim against them. It’s about ten miles beyond Nantucket, big bird sanctuary, birdwatchers go there sometimes.’ He got up, threw his coffee dregs into the harbour and walked up the steps to the cabin. ‘I’ve got work to do,’ he said, throwing the words over his shoulder to close the conversation.

  Margot called Buck that evening to charter the Antoine. She wanted him to work out the currents, tides and wind directions since Leo had gone overboard, and try to plot an area where his body might have washed up. She knew the coastguard had searched the shoreline, but she had to try again, she said. Leaving him in the sea to rot was not an option. If she left the Cape without finding him at least she wanted to do so feeling justified, feeling that she had tried everything.

  Buck spent the evening poring over charts, occasionally tapping information into a laptop. After a while he rolled the charts up and put the laptop away. He knew where they would go in the morning. Three hours there, four hours onshore and three hours back. A full day’s trip.

  The Antoine left Coldharbor soon after eight o’clock the next morning. Margot had not had breakfast, but she did not feel like the sausages Buck produced from the small galley. The smell of fried food made her queasy, and the feeling grew worse as the first swell lifted the Antoine and it settled into the long, rolling ride out to Atlantic Island.

  She had left Sam asleep at home. They had agreed that there was little point in her coming on what Margot had been careful to describe as just a sea trip to clear her head and blow away the cobwebs. Sam was happy to let her go. If she was eventually going to be hauled off to Scotland, the land of darkness and horrible haggis as she called it, she didn’t want to waste time chugging around the Cape in a tug.

  Atlantic Island is a crescent-shaped sandbar ten miles long and a mile wide at its greatest width. Emerging from the continental shelf twenty miles north-east of Cape Cod, it sits on a north-east–south-west axis astride the shipping lanes from North America to Europe. Sailors have cursed it over the centuries, and 350 wrecks recorded since the early nineteenth century provide the grim reason why. Surrounded by shifting sandbars, treacherous currents and thick, swirling fog, which descends without warning when tentacles of the cold Labrador current meet those of the Gulf Stream in the surrounding sea, the island has all too often proved a trap for ships blown off course or making small navigational errors.

  Atlantic Island is not a place that any sailor would choose to go. There are no reliable charts, because even more than the Cape, shifting shoals and sandbars create fresh navigational hazards every year.

  When they reached the island Buck steered cautiously towards the old stone pier which was the only landing point. The early French settlers had shipped the stones over from the mainland, piled them up between iron pilings and then poured a cement mix over them to create a crude L-shaped harbour wall.

  Buck and Margot had not talked much on the crossing. Buck busied himself with charts and checking the weather reports on the radio. Margot felt seasick, and was beginning to think she should never have changed her mind and extended her stay on the Cape.

  On the face of it, it was a crazy journey. Atlantic Island was fifteen miles from where Leo had been washed overboard. Even allowing for the vagaries of tide and current, there was no reason why his body should have been washed up there. Buck told himself he was doing this as much for Leo as for Margot. Leo had never made it to Atlantic Island. He had always wanted to do a seal count there, but time and again trips had been cancelled because the weather had closed in. Eventually he said there must be a jinx on the idea, and dropped it. And since Leo was the only person who had ever wanted to go to the island, Buck had never been either. Still, at least it would give Margot a chance to exorcise whatever demons had driven her there, he thought.

  He gave her the wheel as the Antoine nosed up to the old pier, and jumped ashore to secure a line to a rusting bollard. The tug’s draft of nine feet just cleared the bottom, but the tide had begun to turn, and he would have to push out in a matter of minutes.

  He had given Margot a map of the island, and marked the footpath running along the central ridge, which forked after three miles, with the left-hand path turning down into a broad bay about a mile long.

  ‘That’s where the seals mostly are,’ he told her. ‘There are about 250,000 on the island so you won’t miss them.’

  Then he told her about the horses. There was a herd of 300 feral ponies on the island, which ranged wild, feeding on grassland and watering at several freshwater ponds. The herd had grown from a few animals brought to the island in the late eighteenth century by a community of French-speaking farmers who had been exiled there by the British after the conquest of Canada. Although the horses were completely wild, they were considered harmless by the birdwatching parties and naturalists who made occasional visits to the island.

  Here I am, thought Margot, on an island in the middle of the Atlantic with a quarter of a million seals and a herd of wild horses for company. I must be mad. She watched as Buck traced her route along the path with his index finger. As for a body, he said, it could have washed up anywhere. Trying to plot the tide and the wind direction was hopeless in this lonely place. Too many currents swirled around the island, creating skerries where none had existed for years, shifting sand and rock to carve out new bays in a matter of weeks.

  Buck squinted at the sky, gauging the weather as Margot hitched on a backpack. As agreed, he would pick her up on the next tide, at 3 p.m. If for any reason either of them missed the pick-up, he would be back on the next daylight tide, at six o’clock the following morning.

  ‘What are you going to do for the next four hours?’ she asked.

  ‘I won’t be far away.’ He pointed out to sea. ‘Out there, this side of the horizon.’

  ‘You’ll stay in sight, won’t you?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll be watching you.’ He tapped his binoculars.

  ‘There’s no one living on the island, is there?’

  It was a silly question, because she knew the island had been deserted for years, but now she was actually there, and about to step off into bleak and unknown territory, she felt a need for reassurance.

  He laughed. No, there hadn’t been anyone living there for years.

  ‘And the horses? Where are they?’

  ‘God knows. They’re wild, but they shouldn’t bother you,’ he said.

  She unhitched her backpack and checked it again. Binoculars, flask of coffee, bottle of water, packet of sandwiches, chocolate bar and a banana. Feels like I’m back in a Girl Guides’ camp, she thought. She smiled, but he knew she was nervous.

  ‘See ya soon,’ she said, jumped down on to the pier and began to walk along what looked like an old sheep path through gorse and scrub. She turned back to see Buck reversing the tug out of the bay and into open sea. She wanted to keep him in view. The Antoine, with its familiar top-heavy superstructure, was a comforting sight. Buck blew a couple of blasts on the siren and waved through the cabin window.

  The path meandered along the spine of the island. On either side the ground sloped away to small cliffs which broke into bays, tidal pools and long stretches of sand. There was a strong breeze which bent the grasses, but the day was warm. Margot told herself she was there because her husband was missing at sea, believed drowned, and that because his body had never been found there was a chance, just a chance, that it might have been washed up i
n this desolate place.

  But she was also there because in that small corner of her mind where imagination made the fantastic possible, she thought, or rather dreamt, that maybe he had migrated to another life, and had become one of those mythical creatures of Celtic legend whose stories he had woven so elegantly into his lectures.

  ‘Oh, what bloody nonsense,’ she said out loud.

  She looked at the miles of low-lying scrub ahead of her and the endless tidal beaches that framed the crescent of land. Feeling ridiculous and a little ashamed, she turned to go back, and then remembered that Buck would not be able to bring the boat in until the tide had risen again. She looked at her watch. It was noon. She had been on the island an hour. Another three hours. On a bay down to her right she saw a couple of semi-derelict buildings with brick walls and rusting corrugated-iron roofs, probably the remnants of the old weather station. She walked down an overgrown path to take a look. Inside were signs of human habitation: a table, chairs, some old newspapers and a paraffin stove. The glass had long gone from the windows. She looked at the papers, browning copies of the Boston Herald dated five years previously.

  She ate her sandwiches looking out over the sea, with her back to a sun-warmed brick wall. The tide had pulled back to reveal a hard white beach. A few birds hung in the wind over the low cliffs at either end of the bay, seemingly motionless as they slid from one updraft to the next. Otherwise she seemed to have the island to herself. Buck’s map told her it was still about twenty minutes’ walk to the seal beach.

  She walked back to the ridge top, and saw the Antoine slowly making its way up the coast parallel to her own route. The path dropped away on the other side of the ridge, and she left the comforting sight of Buck and his tug and walked quickly until she came to the summit of a small hillock. Breathless, and thinking that if nothing else this was a good day’s exercise, she stopped. There, several hundreds yards away in a long bay, thousands of seals were beached up on rocks, along the sand and among the dunes. She had never seen so many seals. They covered every square yard of the beach, a sleek, black-grey, almost motionless mass. In the calm shallows there were more seals, their heads moving through the water, swimming without apparent purpose.