The Highest Tide: A Novel

by Jim Lynch

  She squinted, as if attempting long division in her head, then looked away, bent over and freed every last one of those tiny squid.

  When I got home, my father sheepishly asked if I knew what day it was, then blew his nose so hard it sounded like someone shoveling snow.

  I knew it was six days from the BioBlitz, seven days from the stupid flood that Florence and I had predicted and eleven days before school started. And I knew that we were down to thirteen hours and nineteen minutes of daylight and that, of course, it was the first of September.

  I didn’t give my father any grief about all the successful runts in the world this time. I took off my shoes and straightened until my spine ached. He balanced some musty hardback that he’d never read on my skull, studied the broom closet door, then accused me of sneaking air beneath my feet.

  “Take a look yourself,” I said.

  He examined my heels, glanced at the top of my head then at my feet, then back up again before asking me to slouch and step away to verify the book was level, which I did.

  “Stand under there again.” His voice rumbled with excitement.

  I stood as straight as anyone ever stood. “It’s dead-on level right now,” he whispered, then instructed me to step away again and scratched a thin line beneath the book edge that was a whopping nine sixteenths of an inch above the prior one.

  We stared at the new line as if it were a comet.

  Dad later called one of the three Dons over to make double-sure the measurement was precise. There was no question about it. I was a sliver over four feet nine inches and growing like a goddamn blackberry vine, as Don Isaacson put it.

  Dad didn’t try to reach my mother. He didn’t want to hear that the book was probably sloped. No, he and big Don poured Crown Royal into water glasses, then laughed wildly at nothing in particular and called me their “main man” until I climbed the steps to my room, ducking slightly as I entered, to make double-sure that I didn’t whack my forehead on the top of the doorframe.

  Chapter 27

  The closer we inched to the BioBlitz the more it looked like some confusing festival assembling on Spencer Spit. On the south side, more than fifty people squatted near Hal’s cabin in dirty tents, cars and RVs with bug-splattered windshields. Meanwhile, Blue Moon Outfitters strung huge bright tents and canopies on the north side in meadows soon overrun by new strangers wearing sensible shoes, clean jeans and handy vests crammed with gauges, vials and pocket guides.

  As scientists congregated, local families loitered and snapped photos, as if something worth remembering was in the making. And curiosity usually pulled them toward the odd drone of prayers and singing around Hal’s cabin, where the sight of mud-covered bodies made children giggle or cry, depending on their age. I stayed away from Hal’s camp to avoid the creepy sound of people pointing at me or murmuring “there’s the boy,” even if they didn’t badger me with questions and often just smiled.

  It was hard to wander among the scientists without getting pointed out too, but that was fine because most of them were pals of Professor Kramer’s who simply wanted to say hello or ask about the flats. The professor, I was slow to realize, was in charge of the whole dang thing. And whatever problems he’d had with me had vanished, which came as such an unexpected gift I confused him by thanking him.

  The goal of the exercise, as the professor kept repeating, was a “snapshot census” of the animal and plant life of the Sound’s southernmost bays. Yet despite all the serious grown-up talk, it still sounded like a silly game designed by children because this so-called census had to be completed within twenty-four hours.

  Similar “snapshots” had been performed on Long Island Sound and Lake Superior, but as the professor reminded everyone, those exercises took much longer to set up. Ours was scheduled to begin nine-thirty Saturday morning because the next twenty-four hours included the lowest tide of the month. And the best part, from my vantage, was that everyone was so distracted by the scientists and the healers that nobody seemed to recall my ridiculous prediction that the highest tide in fifty years would blindside Olympia late that Sunday.

  As Chatham Cove filled with people in boots and waders carrying buckets, vials and nets, the flats greeted the mob of scientists and volunteers with a faster striptease than usual, the tide rushing out, stranding veils of glittering sea lettuce and purple Turkish towels beneath the cool, restless Saturday-morning sky.

  It had been a long time since I’d stepped on the Chatham flats when I wasn’t the expert. Now there were biologists of every flavor, including people who could name all forty Puget Sound jellyfish or explain the sex lives of nemertid worms or the odd-couple, home-sharing relationship between horse clams and tiny soft-shelled pea crabs. Still, nobody was as familiar with those flats as I was, so in the minutes before the exercise officially began, Professor Kramer asked me to give an overview of what was likely to be seen where.

  When I started to speak, I recognized all sorts of volunteers I never thought I’d see on the mud, including my second- and fifth-grade teachers and friends of my mother’s who’d asked with wrinkled noses about that “rotten-egg smell” outside our house. Blister, Bugeyes and the Collins brothers were out there too, looking thrilled to help count sea plants. If you’d asked them to do that a month earlier they would have spat and cussed, but now, for some reason, it was an honor. Even my father and two of the Dons volunteered to barbecue burgers and brew coffee around base camp. And my father had assured me twice that morning that he expected my mother to be there by lunch.

  As many times as I’d been out on the cove, I’d forgotten parts of it. I knew which clams lived where, but I didn’t know where everything was the way I thought I did, especially seeing how rapidly the tidal life was changing. And I got so excited trying to explain what I knew for sure that I wasn’t clear about anything other than that I was excited. Plus my voice wasn’t strong enough to reach more than half the crowd, but nobody seemed to mind.

  Twenty minutes after we spread out across the flats, everyone gathered to listen to a mollusk biologist rave about a piddocks colony.

  Piddocks are clams, but what you usually see looks more like rubbery plants waving in shallows, or like half-buried human hearts with their aortas sticking straight up. I’d seen a few in deep pools near the clay banks before, but this patch covered an area half the size of a tennis court.

  It’s not that piddocks were all that rare or valuable, but this freckled, pigtailed scientist picked her words as if she were lecturing in some grand hall where only piddocks were discussed. Just as she was about to call it the largest documented piddock colony in Puget Sound, the leader of the porifera team couldn’t resist interjecting that the nearby purple sponge—an animal that resembles fake rubber puke—was as shockingly bright as any he’d seen.

  Scientists rubbed beards and hyperchewed gum, and everyone talked and worked faster as if the stakes had risen, as if the piddock discovery needed to be topped.

  The annelid team drew the next crowd when its leader gushed over a nereid brandti she’d found. She had flatworms and ribbon worms in her bucket too, but she couldn’t get over this green and blue worm that was the size of a skinny ruler and writhing like an eel.

  “I didn’t know they grew this large in the Sound,” she said, backhanding frayed bangs from her narrow face. We edged closer. “It’s really quite spectacular.”

  I waited for an opening to say, “I’ve seen bigger ones than that out here.”

  Voices rattled to a stop, and the annelid lady squinted suspiciously at me. “Are you sure they were nereid brandtis?”

  “I saw a bunch of them warming at night.” I felt their stares and saw Phelps trying to distract me by sucking on bull kelp. “It was mid-July,” I said, “and there were so many convulsing on the surface that they actually created phosphorescent waves, which made me notice them in the first place. I couldn’t tell what was going on until I got close enough to shine my headlamp on them, and then I kinda wished I hadn’t.�
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  People chattered in hushed tones about headlamps and giant squid and “he’s only thirteen” until the team leader said something about it being easy to confuse worms with eels, to which I responded that all I knew was that I saw larger versions of the exact same blue and green creature wiggling in her bucket. After answering a few more questions, I returned to my assignment—to count and catalogue as much life as I could find in one square yard of tidal flats.

  I framed a particularly lively patch with four PVC pipes, then counted seven pink and white anemones, twenty-six hermit crabs (most of them in periwinkle shells), 109 barnacles, thirty-six mussels, twelve clam chimneys (three squirting), four snails (two dire whelks) and a blue-gray troscheli sea star slowly separating a mossy chiton from its shell.

  Everything seemed quicker and brighter than usual, as if the flats were performing for us. Even the snails were quick, the whelks lunging their gleaming white bodies ahead of their spiraled shells, moving almost as fast as the hermits. The gravel shook and sprayed with the restless jostling and squirts of manilas, and the ochre sea stars glided along the browse line at speeds they usually only managed underwater. Gulls and herons swooped lower than usual too, their wing thrusts making us all look up and wonder what they saw that we didn’t. Even the weather added to the drama, delivering the coldest morning we’d felt since June as the retreating bay darkened with northerly gusts and hunkered toward low tide.

  I was close enough to watch Phelps show off the variety of mollusks he could uncover in one modest hole and noticed afterward how he coaxed half of the bivalve team into a smoke break and had three of them leaning on shovels, puffing his mother’s Kents, laughing at his story about being stuck in the mud and breathing through a PVC pipe “like some motherfucking clam.”

  By eleven-thirty the crustacean team boasted it’d already found every brand of Puget Sound shore crab and even a few baby Dungeness they assumed never roamed this far south. But what they corralled us to announce was that they’d found a green crab. Not the ho-hum green shore crab I often saw—although it was easy to confuse the two—but the dreaded European green itself. At least that’s what this owl-eyed biologist said at least six times when people badgered him to be certain he was sure.

  The crab looked harmless, just three inches across the back, but to listen to this scientist describe its powers you would’ve thought that we should’ve taken three steps back and drawn pistols. Its pinchers were as sharp as can openers. It ate three oysters and thirty mussels a day. It dug down six inches to murder clams. It even ate other crabs! It sounded like some over-the-top cartoon villain—a Mighty Mouse who’d gone so bad he’d even turned on other mice.

  Suddenly this fun snapshot census had turned into a grave mission to save the Sound from evil crabs. The crustaceans team leader reassigned half of us counters to hunt exclusively for the greens. But after twenty minutes of searching, I admit that I lost focus and watched hermits fight over shells.

  There must have been a shell shortage going on that morning because everywhere I looked some hermit was hauling around an extra shell or bullying another hermit out of its home. And two of the biggest bullies, a hairy hermit and a blue-handed hermit, faced off in a tug-of-war over a lurid rocksnail shell, which at the time was the shiny castle of a smaller hermit who’d been minding its own business. I played God and lifted it away from the bullies, but they found it again and resumed their duel. Finally, blue-hand grabbed the victim and slammed it facedown into the poisonous flower of a large sea anemone, then held it there, smothering the poor hermit in the anemone’s poison. I snuck back fifteen minutes later, and blue-hand was still applying the pressure, waiting for the trapped hermit to surrender its shell. I didn’t get to witness the ending, with the anemone, no doubt, swallowing the poisoned hermit and the bully moving into its new shell. Unfortunately, there was way too much going on, and it was killing me to not be everywhere at once.

  The cnidaria team finally pulled us way out on the flats after one of its biologists waded to his knees to examine what he proclaimed was an Australian jellyfish. Either he couldn’t remember or didn’t know its species, but he kept repeating in a voice twice as loud as it needed to be that it was indeed an Australian jelly. He was so worked up spit whistled in and out of the corners of his mouth, and his belly looked like microwave popcorn about to burst. The jelly was definitely unusual, with a spotted white bell the size of a basketball and long frilly tentacles. I’d seen at least fifteen different jellies that summer, but never one so large, so ball-like or so fast.

  It struck me that perhaps we were the victims of some crappy prank, that some jerk like B.J. the Drywaller had stocked the cove with exotics the night before.

  Professor Kramer must have heard about our findings, because he returned from base camp to long-step it out onto the flats, first studying the piddocks, then the green crab, then wading out to us, volunteers and scientists dragging behind him.

  “A boat team in Budd Inlet just identified three black dolphins,” he announced before he even saw the Aussie jellyfish.

  “Black dolphins?” someone asked. “Aren’t they southern hemisphere?”

  “Indeed,” the professor said. “They’re usually only seen off Chile, and they’re not seen much period, especially not around here.”

  “Neither is this,” said the fat biologist, gesturing toward the large pulsing jelly. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  We waited, but the professor didn’t come up with an answer before a member of the cephalopod team suddenly showed us an old Rainier bottle with a baby octopus crammed inside it. Then he reached down and held up another Rainier, home to a second tiny octopus.

  We all quit talking and quietly looked for beer bottles around our feet.

  Chapter 28

  Base camp overflowed that afternoon with scientists, volunteers, reporters and waves of spectators including the governor, the sheriff, the middle school principal and people dressed in nothing but shorts and mud. Specimens of every worm, jellyfish, anemone, clam, crab, isopod and other invertebrates cluttered five conference tables in tubs, pans and jars alongside three tables buried with rockweed, eelgrass, feather boa algae and other plants. Scientists sorted specimens and hunched over microscopes studying tiny and invisible creatures while two speedy typists catalogued everything we’d collected below the high tide lines.

  So many people packed onto the spit that afternoon that five Olympia bicycle cops showed up to monitor the swarm, and lines to the Sanicans grew so long that men stood shoulder to shoulder behind the tavern as if the blackberry bushes were urinals. Almost everyone was there except my mother and Angie, who I feared had already left for North Carolina.

  I saw plenty of Eleusinians, including Carolyn, who obviously wanted to hug me, but wanted it to be my idea. I saw Pansing shuffle past the specimen tables, hands respectfully behind his back, until I called his name and he smiled longer than I thought he could. I watched Judge Stegner greet everyone with firm, gracious handshakes, as if they’d come solely to show their support for him. And I watched astonished locals stare at sea life for the first time. Most of them had no idea what this was all building toward, but they saw the scientists’ excitement and they sensed the crescendo.

  Word had already leaked about some of the discoveries, but after Professor Kramer stood on a picnic table to give the four-thirty P.M. status report, our findings became national news. Two hours later there was more to report. Divers found Caleurpa seaweed—“killer algae,” as the newspapers called it—along the bottom of Squaxin Cove across from Flapjack Bay where I’d first seen it. And the Chinese crabs that I’d noticed near Whiskey Point were caught tunneling in cliffs near Altman and Japhet creeks too. Then a boating team spotted what it assumed was a sick shark off Cooper Point. It had the signature dorsal fin, but divers swiftly confirmed it was something altogether different.

  Mola molas look like ugly whales cut in half. And their behavior is just as bizarre: They like to munch on jell
yfish while drifting on their sides out in the ocean. I boated out with Professor Kramer and two other biologists to see it ourselves. This time the freak was netted, weighed—672 pounds—and photographed, before being freed. Even then it clung to the side of the boat like some confused alien and smelled like it had already died.

  Our census also turned up exotic litter, including two softball-sized glass floats Japanese fishermen once used to hold up nets, a forty-three-year-old sake bottle with a smeared message inside, two mannequin heads, a violin and three barnacled hockey gloves like the two I found in Skookumchuck.

  And at dusk, a kayaking botanist noticed a flotilla of what she assumed were leaves surfing past Penrose Point. A closer look revealed shiny blue bodies with clear, saillike protrusions and dangling tentacles. She collected them in jars and paddled back to surprise the cnidaria team.

  The five Velellas were an instant hit, examined beneath lamps and gawked at by people who’d never even heard of them. Strong westerlies often beached thousands of Velellas along Washington’s sandy coast. But these little jellies—which looked like miniature spinnaker-flying yachts—had apparently crossed the Pacific and sailed all the way to the very entrance of Skookumchuck Bay, making them navigational wonders.

  Classmates who considered science the most boring subject of all lined up to see them. And kids I’d never spoken to, including the owner of Phelps’s favorite chest, surprised me with smiles, hand-slaps and big howdys. I’d never even seen Christy Decker’s lips move other than to chew gum in a lazy, sexy way before she swiveled up to me and spoke in clear English, like anyone else might, about how cool the little jellies were. She got close enough for me to smell her spearmint gum, then asked if we’d ever know the whole story behind that blurred message in the sake bottle.