The Highest Tide

by Jim Lynch

  As the evening cooled and the disheartening smell of autumn wafted past, Professor Kramer gave the last media briefing of the day just outside the main canopy.

  He admitted right off how surprised and excited everyone was, but he didn’t need to speak. His tall, kinky hair, which he kept tugging higher, said as much. “One thing’s for sure,” he said, “you don’t have to go to the Galipagos Islands to see exotic sea life.” People chuckled. “Just walk out on Chatham Cove,” he said, “and you might see something nobody else has. For example, despite all the biologists we have here, we still haven’t identified this tiny eel we accidentally netted near Whiskey Point.”

  By the time the professor got around to describing the European green crab, people started twitching and murmuring then suddenly abandoned him. I assumed it was out of disbelief or boredom, but then I saw cameramen and others hustling toward the Sanicans to huddle around a stout bald man with restless eyes who sounded the way people sound on the news after a tornado spins through their trailer park.

  “Like I said, I haven’t heard out of my left ear for seventeen years.” His scalp gleamed in the camera lights. “Ask my doctor if you want. I’ll give you his number here in a minute so you can call him yourselves. And you gotta understand that I’ve never tried anything like this before. Being a man of modest faith, I didn’t have high expectations about any so-called healing waters. But I heard some things were happening out here, so I drove up from Grants Pass to see for myself.”

  He had a singsong way of talking that pulled you close then punched you back with a mild roar. “I used to fly-fish, so I had these waders in the back of my truck, and I was just up to my knees, out past Hal’s cabin, about twenty minutes ago, maybe twenty-five, when this big wind stopped, and I suddenly heard out of both ears.” He covered one ear, then the next. “And I still can!” His teeth were the color of rust.

  He deflected questions with hairy hands, bobbing his head until everyone quieted, then said he’d already talked to people who swore the mud had cleared up their psoriasis. He also said a woman from Utah claimed the arthritis in her knee had vanished after wading for a half hour. He then confided, in his come-closer voice, that word was spreading—not that he necessarily believed it—that the bay’s healing powers were likely to peak at high tide the following day.

  He kept talking beneath the lights long after the scientists lost interest and returned, snickering, to their monotonous tally.

  Once darkness settled, the news crews left and rain fell hard and fast in marble-sized drops that made us stop counting to stare up at our thin plastic ceiling that had turned so noisy we had to shout species’ names to each other.

  Soon camp thinned to a couple dozen bloodshot scientists and volunteers sorting and counting while night teams continued dropping crab pots, dragging plankton nets and shining massive flashlights into black water. I helped dizzy biologists keep track of what they’d already counted. Nobody needed to point me out anymore, which was nice. Even my father, whose cold had dropped into his chest, urged me to stay as long as I wanted and just reminded me to eat, which I hadn’t.

  I took a break after eleven to call my mother. It’d been building in me for hours, this desire to share every last highlight of the day with her before she went to bed. I also intended to at least try to apologize for being ungrateful when she’d offered to help, knowing she’d hold on to that until I said something that helped her let it go.

  My cousin complained about me calling so late, then informed me that my mother and Aunt Janet had flown to Chicago for the weekend.

  Chicago.

  It’d come up that spring when my mother abruptly pointed out to my father that she never traveled anymore, that she hadn’t even gone to New York, Chicago or any real city since Miles was born.

  My father shuffled out in boxers, a toothbrush in his mouth. If he noticed the phone shaking in my hand, he didn’t say anything.

  “What’s their phone number in Chicago?” I asked my cousin.

  “What?”

  “I need their number.”

  “You can’t call them now. It’s two hours later back there.”

  “It’s an emergency.”

  “Yeah?”

  My voice rose. “My father is real sick.”

  Dad didn’t say anything as I dialed and told some lady my mother’s room number. It took a few rings until I heard Mom’s hushed voice and groggy Aunt Janet in the background demanding to know who was calling.

  “It’s Miles,” Mom whispered away from the phone, then to me, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Dad said you were gonna be here today,” I said. “Everybody else was.”

  There was a long pause in which I heard Aunt Janet’s muffled voice and Mom responding to her again, then to me: “That isn’t why you called at two in the morning, Miles.” There was worry in her voice. “You didn’t get hurt, did you? Is your father all right?”

  “Even Alice McDonald and Annette Rankin were there,” I almost shouted. “There were like seventy-three scientists and maybe a hundred volunteers on the flats, in the water and at base camp. And Professor Kramer had me tell everyone where to find everything.”

  After a pause, she whispered, “Tell me what happened, but softly. I’m right here.”

  I listed off as much as I could remember. It must have taken five minutes. And I didn’t quiet down or apologize for anything. Every sentence rang like a pounded nail.

  When I ran out of air, she said, “Sorry I missed it.” She wasn’t whispering anymore. “And sorry for leaving the way I did. It was something I had to do, Miles, but it wasn’t fair to you.”

  I was so startled I wanted to ask her to repeat herself. I felt the way fish must feel when they jump from heavy water into ridiculously light air, but all that came out was: “Me too.” When she didn’t say anything, I added, “Dad’s got a bad cold. I think he needs your magic soup.”

  By the time I returned to base camp, the scientists who weren’t insomniacs had already peeled away for naps. So there were just six of us at the end, counting to the rhythm of rain determined to make up for its two-month absence in a single night.

  Olympia rain rarely calls for hats, much less umbrellas, but this was a waterfall. And by one forty-five in the morning I saw the auras of the remaining biologists, or maybe it was just backlit mist. What I do know is that I saw a blue light around every one of their heads. And Florence had taught me that people with blue auras are relaxed and ready for anything, which suited these people perfectly.

  Professor Kramer ordered me home an hour later. I took the long way, splashing past our house and Angie’s dark window, through the deep puddles and all the way to Florence’s cabin.

  I had to duck out of the rain beneath an eave to see her, mouth open, in her chair behind the curtains. It relieved me to see her chest rise. I thought about waking her and helping her to bed, but decided against it. I didn’t want to scare her, or lift her. Plus, I knew she preferred to sleep in her chair.

  My boots felt so heavy climbing my stairs that I wondered what Florence’s feet felt like on a bad day. I tried to imagine her as a cartwheeling young woman resembling some beauty with a musical name like Sophia Loren. It was impossible.

  I left my clothes in damp clumps and collapsed, but, of course, I couldn’t sleep.

  Images of my mother played on my eyelids. I tried to see her in our house. I saw her frowning at her weedy garden. I saw her in Aunt Janet’s huge recliner. I marched her apology back through my head so many times I couldn’t remember the differences between what she’d said and what I’d hoped to hear. But I still couldn’t put her inside our little house. And I still couldn’t sleep.

  So I read about the deepest canyons in the Pacific, about trenches so vast you could hide Mount Everest in them, about scalding vents on the floor of the abyss where, amazingly, life thrived.

  Diagonal rain kept the crowd small for the closing ceremony the next morning when Professor Kramer rattled
off the final species tallies: 314 invertebrates, 32 fish, 7 mammals and 186 plants for a total of 539 species of tidal and subtidal life. He also listed thirteen invasive species, another eleven rarely found so far north and mentioned that we still had no idea what to call a two-inch translucent eel with lime-green eyes.

  About fifty scientists, volunteers and spectators applauded the findings, or maybe it was an ovation for life itself—or for the record-breaking rain, which continued falling so hard it knocked pinecones loose, ripped leaves off madrones and made it hard to hear the professor.

  “As much as anything,” he told us, “this exercise serves as a reminder that we are just one of hundreds, and actually thousands, of species who call South Sound home. And I also hope it teaches us that we need to keep better track of invasives or risk further jeopardizing our waters.”

  When his hooded eyes found me, he waved me forward until I sheepishly obeyed and climbed onto the table in my mother’s huge yellow raincoat. He then wrapped his long arm across my back and shouted, “None of this would have been possible if Miles O’Malley hadn’t put his love for sea life into action. If Miles hadn’t spent his summer trying to see what’s out here, there would have been no reason for us all to . . .”

  His words didn’t sound or feel real. What the exercise had proved to me was that what went on that summer had nothing to do with me. Not a little. Nothing. What I’d seen was just a sliver of the new life bubbling in our waters, and the only reason I’d seen more than most was because I was the only one looking.

  It was a huge relief, in a way, to know that I hadn’t actually been selected for anything, but I admit being disappointed to know, for certain, that I was as ordinary as I felt.

  I was too tired to concentrate on the professor’s voice and the rain at the same time, so I just listened to rain until applause hammered me from all sides. Then either the professor bumped me or I mindlessly shuffled because I lost my footing on that wet tabletop and skated slightly, then somehow miraculously righted myself in mid-swoon and managed to smile, which sparked even more ridiculous applause.

  CHAPTER 29

  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.