Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

  Todd was at his laptop in the corner, in a chat room with some kids in Germany and Florida. They were discussing the pictures recently beamed down by the little rover thing creeping around Mars. Angeline was standing behind him trying to read the screen, fanning herself with an exquisite paper fan from Japan that this visitor had just given to her.

  “How long can you stay,Yoshi?”

  “Five days. Then I must go back. But I will return. Often.”

  “Maybe you could bring your wife.”

  Yoshi lit up.“Yes, I will bring Taeko.” Twenty hours or so on a plane and three more hours on ground and at sea did not seem so great an inconvenience if it meant coming back to a place like this.

  Elise wanted Yoshi to meet Sylvie.

  She hadn’t even seen Sylvie for a while and wondered why she was keeping to herself. Maybe she was sick. Worth checking to make sure she’s okay.

  Elise knocked at the door. No answer. Went in and discovered how quiet the house was. Everything in order. Door not locked. Dishes washed and stacked. Floors clean. No note on the table or anything. Nothing felt wrong. Since moving here, Elise had begun to trust her intuition more. That was Sylvie’s doing. She’d taught her this. Actually, Elise was relearning something she had once been good at. As a little girl, Elise had believed herself to be psychic, but later she convinced herself she was not. She just wanted it to be so. When she gave up on her metaphysical hopes, she had closed down her female intuitive skills. The island and Sylvie had helped bring them back. Once she was out of the loop of her smartass friends from the glitter sector back in northern New Jersey, it was amazing how much more perceptive she was.

  So she sat at Sylvie’s table and let her mind work at this. Had Sylvie moved ashore as some believed? It did not seem likely. What then? She felt like she was overstepping her bounds when she went into Sylvie’s bedroom and sat down on her bed. Again, nothing felt wrong. Elise plucked three strands of long, grey hair from the pillow and held them in her hand. On the small table by the bed was a glass of water, half full, not much to go on either. Beside the glass was a small guidebook to star constellations. The spine cracked as she opened it to a page with a bookmark made from what was locally called “fish leather.” On the open page were two maps, one of the dark side of the moon, one of the side of the moon that faced earth. With ink, Sylvie, or someone, had circled the designation “The Sea of Tranquility.” And someone had marked an exclamation mark after the name. Near sunset, Elise, Todd, Angie, and Bruce accompanied Yoshi Kojima to the seaward side of the island, where the sea had indented the land with the large basin known simply as Front Bay.“Front” because it faced out to the open sea. Angie pointed to the place on the headland where the sea cave was. Because the story had a happy ending, the cave was now a proud and exciting part of her personal history. Todd, however, always wished she wouldn’t repeat that story. He felt the stinging guilt of his bad judgement that had almost killed his sister, and it sobered him whenever it came up. Sometimes he still cried late at night, but he did it silently so no one would know. Todd reached down and picked up a starfish, still alive, that had been left high and dry by a retreating tide. He hobbled across a few slippery rocks and set the creature back into the waters of the bay.

  Yoshi watched the boy and his sister who followed him and felt a profound happiness for his friend at having a son and daughter. He also felt a searing ache in his heart that he had chosen career over family, as if the two could not coexist. But he would not dwell on anything negative. The bay was beautiful. Broad and deep, unspoiled, untouched. North Americans were virtually unaware of the richness of this place, the resources right beneath their noses. He brought that line of thinking to a dead end. Remembered going to the shrine at Nakamura to pay homage to the Big Buddha there that had survived typhoons and even tidal waves. He had thrown change into the grate for good luck, lit incense for good measure, and added his most sincere request to the prayer wheel. And Buddha had been kind to him, despite the fact that he was never a devoted follower of Buddhism. For he had travelled here, all the way to Nova Scotia, not really because he expected it to be profitable, but because his heart told him to do this thing. Now he was amazed to discover that he had something to offer the people who lived here. It would not be a matter of just taking. Balance would be achieved, yin and yang. Passive and active. And what was to be taken would be put back in some way. It would be restored. In his own way,Yoshi thought, he would become a kind of bodhisattva.

  Gulls swooped in the sunset. As they walked onto a small, sandy length of beach along the bay,Yoshi was astonished at the way the washed-up seaweed was splayed out on the delicate sand as if arranged by some artist. Swirls of angel hair, DNA twists of kelp, rockweed, and dulse arranged in some perfect, perfect pattern. The golden lighting of the setting sun gave everything an enhanced colour. Reds, browns, purple and yellow. Greens of sea lettuce almost explosive. If you weren’t careful you’d end up stepping on and ruining priceless art. But wasn’t that the way of the earth itself? He turned, and Bruce saw the curious, indecipherable expression on the face of his Japanese friend. Yoshi wanted very much to explain, but he discovered that he’d forgotten how to speak English. Perhaps he should at least utter something in Japanese, but even his native tongue failed him just then and so he remained silent as he watched Todd and Angeline remove their shoes and wade carefully into the shallows of the immaculate, darkening sea.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sylvie rowed the old dory until the sun had set and her arms ached badly. Her breathing was ragged, but all of the elements of her fatigue were pure pleasure. She had allowed the current to pull her far out into the Atlantic on a dropping tide. She watched the sun set over the waters to the west. There was absolutely nothing about being alone at sea this night that brought fear. There was not a whiff of loneliness about this venture. Purpose and pattern and something close to instinct. But it would not be examined deeper. All she knew was that she was doing a thing that would ultimately be good for the island and good for her. Some kind of pilgrimage. She was alone and would not have to explain to anyone what she was doing this for.

  She had supplies. Several gallons of fresh water. Bread. Some tins of herring for bait, a hand line to fish. Blankets for warmth, rain gear for foul weather. There was no life jacket, however. Even Sylvie laughed at the thought of an old woman, alone at sea, after some misadventure, falling into the drink and bobbing around for God knows how long with a floatation device. Like the stubborn fishermen before her on the island, she believed such a slow, malingering death in icy water would not be for her if it came to that. She’d rather go quickly.

  In the morning, the sky was grey but not threatening. If there was rain to spill from those pregnant clouds, it would not bring wind or waves. The sky had many soft layers of differing textures tending from palest grey to darker tones near blackness. Sylvie liked the fact that she could not distinguish the line between sea and sky in any direction. No land was in sight. She sat upright, afloat on a calm sea in the middle of a grey world.

  A lone gull landed on the bow of her dory before she woke. An old herring gull, large for his breed, with silvery wings and a white torso. A yellowish beak and alert eyes. A gull accustomed to following fishing boats to sea, no doubt. Fewer of those boats in the water these days. The bird made himself comfortable beside an old woman alone with her thoughts in a dory. Sylvie broke a loaf of dark pumpernickel bread that she had made and fed pieces to the gull, who wolfed down the bread with no sign of gratitude whatsoever. Yet the company was welcome, and even when she decided to quit feeding him and save the food for herself, the gull did not seem to mind, but closed one eye, lifted one leg, and appeared to have fallen asleep like that. Sylvie, too, closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the images of whales from her youth. She still believed she was in the current that would send her in the right direction, but there was no reference point out here and it was sometimes impossible to tell if she was moving anywhere or sta
nding still. She closed her eyes again and waited until she could feel it. Taking the oars into her blistered hands, she began to row very gently in long, smooth strokes and let the wood dip into the water so gracefully that it was as if the surface had been pierced by two very sharp, long knives.

  By the third day, she felt tired in her bones, and it was a lovely feeling. Sky and sea, sea and sky. The sun breaking through the clouds occasionally with a brilliant copper slash. Sunrise and sunset were explosive theatrical performances of light, but cloud covered up the sky through most of the days, sparing her from being baked by the sun like dark bread in an oven. She had dropped her fishing line several times, but there appeared to be no fish left in the sea. Or they had no taste for canned herring or soggy pieces of pumpernickel. Lots of water left, though, and some tinned meat. Somewhere up ahead, there would be fish.

  Tired, tired, tired. Eighty years tired and sleep was her soul-mate on this voyage. A monarch butterfly passed by on the third day, alighted on the gunwale, resting. The wonder of it all, a thing like this so far at sea, making its way back to land, knowing which way to go. Geese high up in the sky in a ragged V, or W sometimes, heading west along the coat before turning south. Something zipped by her face one day when her eyes were closed so she missed it, but she thought it was a hummingbird, departing for South America from Nova Scotia. She was out here on the wide, wide sea among many other travellers.

  The sea and sky became all the things of her life to her. She could look up into the muted ripples of clouds and see herself as a little girl, see her dreams, see the faces of the men she loved. It was quite a crowd really. Talk filled her head. Men’s talk. Their ambitions, their shared wisdom, their own fears. Philosophy crowded the boat for awhile and then simpler things. What was real and what was not real seemed entirely irrelevant. Not once did she regret having taken up the oars and leaving the island for this journey. Her head was filled with a pattern. Something like patches of lives all being unified together into a big, grand quilt. Each patch was colourful and had its own pattern, yet, when stitched in with the next one, it seemed even grander. Sylvie saw each patch as the life of someone who had been part of her life, and she was the old, widowed quilt-maker. Without her doing the stitching, all those lives would not make the unity. Each would be important unto itself, but she was the one who had the task of completion.

  The quilt in her mind was simply the lives of people on the island. And in order to restore what was once the island, she must do this thing. She must row out to sea and search. Search and think. Let the current take her where it must until something is restored, until something is achieved. That’s where her thoughts would stop. She knew this was not logical or rational, and she would not try to explain it to anyone. If, that is, she ever saw anyone again. The motivation came from deep within her. And it was a form of knowledge, not unlike her ability at dowsing. Things she knew. She knew it was wrong to try to hammer it into place with fences made of words.

  By the fourth day, she had renamed the North Atlantic several times: the Sea of Love, the Sea of Clouds, the Sea of Serenity, the Sea of Fertility, the Sea of Nectar, the Lake of Dreams, then the Sea of Crosses, the Sea of Cold, and finally, yet again, the Sea of Tranquility. She felt herself drowning in all that sky around her and treasured the small irony of the emotions that went along with it. And when the first real taste of wind came up, she began to row into it. But her effort did not last long.

  On her fifth day at sea, Sylvie felt light-headed. There was not a sign of a fish for food or a whale for companionship. Her food had run out. She had been less cautious than she thought. There was still some water left. Sylvie was stunned at her bad luck. Maybe the news stories were right. The sea itself was dying.

  Sky and sea. Sea and sky. As if it was all she ever knew. She guessed she was twenty miles out, maybe more. Nothing to be afraid of, really. The worst that could happen was, well, not so bad. Some act of completion was what this was all about. Time to start rowing again.

  She fit the oars into her hands. The wood felt good against her palms, despite the blisters, despite the fact that she had no idea exactly where she was going. She knew that something in her brain, in her thoughts, in the sum total of the memory of who she was — that was what was driving her to do this. She tested many words to see if they fit: madness, divine intervention, instinct, whimsy. The word “suicide” surfaced and she worried over it for a while, slowing her pace at the oars. Did she believe this was some kind of useful sacrifice for the island? Would her exodus, her demise, appease the bad luck gods of sea and government and restore hope for the island? Maybe that was somehow part of it, but she did not feel motivated by self-destruction.

  Sylvie looked up at the grey sky and searched in vain yet again for the line that was the horizon. Sky and sea were all the same. She had rowed herself into some serene, pleasant limbo world, neither earth nor heaven. A watery halfway universe. She would continue to test other words. It was search, yes. That was certainly part of it. She had expectations. She would find the whales. Perhaps she could persuade them to return. Someday they would visit the island again, as they had in her childhood. Maybe that alone was the single, necessary act of completion. But what good would it do? She knew she was too far to sea to ever row herself back home and even now she was still probably rowing away from land. Only a fierce blast of wind from the east and south would send her back home, and she was sure she could not handle the dory in a such a rough sea.

  But why was she not afraid?

  It was the middle of the day when she first felt nauseous and dizzy. She pulled once more upon the oars and then set them at rest, propped against the gunwales. She felt her vision blur and then darkness began to beckon her. At first she thought it was mere exhaustion. She was falling asleep. But then her mind flooded with confusion. It didn’t feel right. Then she felt her right leg losing feeling, and then her arm. For the first time on her voyage, fear overpowered her. She was losing her ability to control her arm. She slipped sideways, falling into the bottom of the boat as she curled up into a fetal position. Holding onto the briefest fragment of consciousness, Sylvie tried to convince herself this was all a dream. All of it. In the morning she would wake and she would be young again. David would be asleep beside her in the bed. There would be mist on the panes of glass by her bedroom window. Outside on the lawn, the spiderwebs would be laden with jewels of morning dew.

  By nightfall, an extended family of right whales that had travelled thousands of miles in the Atlantic Ocean arrived at where the dory floated upon the dark mirror of the sea. There was no great hurry to move on to any other place than this. Deep below were krill and small fishes to feed upon. Here was this boat afloat upon the water with a woman asleep. A tug at something deep inside a sea creature’s consciousness may have acknowledged something familiar about the person inside and quickly become aware of her vulnerability.

  When the phone rang in Brian Gullett’s little cubbyhole of an office at the Herald, he let it ring three times before he picked it up. Nothing was going to surprise him. What was the hurry? But it was a pleasant surprise. The PR person at the Sea Guardian headquarters in New York said they had some of Gullett’s stories in their clipping file. One of their research vessels was leaving Boston at six that evening. They wondered if he wanted to go along on the twelve-day cruise.

  Brian was ready to jump and wanted to know how high but he contained himself.“Some kind of confrontation at sea?” The Sea Guardian Society was world famous for its fearless confrontations with the Norwegians, the Japanese, and the Russians over whale killing. For Gullett, sullen and shackled to a desk in Halifax, this was a dream come true.

  “’Fraid it’s not that glamorous. We’ve been doing some independent research about fish stocks and about whales, right whales in particular — their migration habits. We’re going out to verify what’s going on. The American and Canadian governments are lying. We want to get at the bottom of the things. Are you in?”

&
nbsp; “Yes.”

  He’d simply insist that his boss let him do this. Let the chips fall where they may. He left e-mail messages for the editor and a couple of other people, said nothing to anybody, grabbed his laptop, and, realizing he had no time to go home to shave, pack, or feed his budgie (he’d call his neighbour to take care of that), he split for the airport and caught the afternoon flight to Boston.

  Gullett was licking his chops when he found out he was the only Canadian news guy on board the Belize. Three Yanks were on hand. Steve Neffler from the New York Times, Mary Soucoup from the Boston Globe, and a sole PBS reporter with a Betacam. Gullett was hoping that the Sea Guardian PR guy had lied to him and that a real at-sea faceoff was in the brew.

  At an informal briefing in a sparsely appointed but expensive-looking stateroom, the legendary Gale Jardine, current CEO of Sea Guardian, offered them all a Heineken and gave a low-key lowdown. “We’re certain it’s mostly global warming. But there’s more. We’ve been shovelling data, hard data, into a computer at MIT for about a year now. It’s indisputable. Toxic concentrations distributed by the Gulf Stream into critical areas. That plus the obvious: overfishing. Overfishing has been a nightmare. Up and down the food chain it’s a mess. And it’s a mess worldwide. We’ve been going for the emotional appeal of nailing Norwegians in their bloody torture fest and harassing the Japanese with their drift nets choking the dolphins, but some of us finally woke up one morning and realized that it’s bigger than all that and more deadly. Trouble is, on paper it all sounds a little too boring.