The Season of Open Water

by Dawn Tripp

  Bertrand T. Wood’s Noman’s Land Island is an exceptional tribute to that place.

  Finally, I am indebted to Clifford W. Ashley’s classic book The Yankee Whaler, which is nothing less than a treasure of an age gone by. In particular, Ashley’s moving description of the last days of whaling in New Bedford inspired the scene of Noel’s return to that city. Also, in the glossary of Ashley’s book, I came across several whaling terms that I have not found elsewhere.

  The brief passage on page 221 is paraphrased from Neil Philip’s retelling of the Norse Ragnarok. The following single line that has been set apart is from Sand and Foam by Kahlil Gibran. On page 222, the passage about swallows is from The Travels of Birds by Frank M. Chapman.

  The Season of

  Open Water

  Dawn Tripp

  A READER’S GUIDE

  a Conversation with

  Dawn Tripp

  Random House Reader’s Circle: What sparked the idea for The Season of Open Water?

  Dawn Tripp: In my first novel, Moon Tide, I had a character who was a rum-runner. Through his story, I briefly explored how the bootleg trade impacted the lives of the inhabitants of Westport. As I was doing that research, I came across a short passage in a book called The Black Ships that referenced a young woman, unnamed, who rode shotgun with a rum-runner. I immediately knew I wanted to build a novel about that girl.

  RHRC: What prompted you to narrate the novel with alternating perspectives?

  DT: Shifting point of view is a voice that works well for me. It gives me a certain freedom, and I find that I can write a more fully developed story, characters of more depth and dimension, when I allow myself to crawl into the thoughts of each. I can create more powerful tensions when I can pit the desires and fears, the secrets, ambitions and stakes, of one character against those of another.

  RHRC: How did you create your characters? How is each one unique to the story?

  DT: Bridge is a character I have always wanted to write—a willful young woman, boyish, independent, a thief no less, “able to divide her body from her heart, to let her thoughts drain and pool and splash, never getting too settled on any one person or thing.”

  In the course of the novel, Bridge begins to awaken, not only to her own desires but to a more complex understanding of the elements of her world. Her love for Henry, as beautiful and vulnerable as it is, is merely a shadow of the more essential, vital need she feels to move beyond the bounds of what she has always known.

  Although Bridge is the central character, her grandfather, Noel, is the seeing eye of the novel. His character is based on my own grandfather. The bond between Bridge and Noel is based on that relationship, as well as on my relationship with my son, who was a year old when I was writing the book.

  Toughened by his experiences as a whaleman in the Arctic, by years of living heaped on his shoulders, Noel has a level-minded understanding of human passions and greed, a clear view of the town and its dynamics, the lures and dangers of the rum-running trade. He also knows that his own life is a long-coiled line inside him, and he knows it is unwinding. Noel’s fierce love for Bridge, his hopes to build a better future for her, his awareness of the mistakes he has made in his past which have shaped his fate, lend a deeper, at times even sorrowful, resonance to the story.

  With Luce, I wanted to portray a young man, a local, whose ambition and hunger for risk draw him into the dark underworld of the rum-running trade. At the opening of the novel, there is an almost incestuous closeness between Luce and Bridge. As Bridge begins to move into her own life, the threads that bind them begin to fray. Luce has a gift for water. He knows the river the way Noel once knew the sea. But Luce has a streak in him—reckless, even cruel—which by the novel’s end will threaten to destroy those very things he once most loved.

  Sometimes, when I am writing, I will cut into a current, and that current will sweep over me—intellect is gone—words, emotions, images all flow and come together on the page, and I will emerge from that state and discover that I have written myself into a world, a psyche, I could not have otherwise imagined. This happened to me, over and over again, as I was writing the character of Cora. She is odd, by turns absent and mystical. Shattered by the loss of her oldest daughter who drowned when she fell through an eel hole axed in the ice, Cora, at first glance, appears to be the passive member of the family. However, she is the unspoken center, the hole in the wheel the rest of them revolve around. It is Cora who sees the other side of Luce, the broken side, the tender side. And it is Cora who first witnesses the sparks between her daughter, Bridge, and the young doctor who lives in “the big house down the beach,” Henry Vonniker.

  I first began to sketch out the character of Henry after a conversation I had with my husband when we debated the difference between destiny and dumb luck. Henry believes in destiny. He believes that a man’s fate is stitched into his everyday.

  Henry is markedly different from the other four main characters. He is not a local. He is a summer person, from a wealthy family, and although he now lives in the town year-round, he will always be a step removed.

  More importantly, whereas the lives and intuitions of the other characters are directly in tune with the workings of the natural world, Henry’s life has been primarily shaped by intellectual thought, and he has been emotionally leveled by his experiences in World War I.

  Henry’s passion for Bridge becomes the single impulse in him that is not intellectual, that cannot be subdued or contained or described in rational terms.

  RHRC: Is there a connection between the transient population of Westport, Massachusetts, and the major themes of the novel?

  DT: Tensions between locals and summer people tend to run along class lines. They are powerful, at times vicious, undercurrents in a small town such as Westport. They can shape not only the consciousness and fate of individuals, and the relationships between those individuals, but also the face of an entire town. They are tensions that existed in the twenties, and they are tensions that continue to exist today.

  When the summer months come, it is a time of intense beauty, opening, and growth. Vegetables are ripening, flowers are blooming, fish are running. But locals often feel a tremendous shift, not altogether pleasant, in the tone and texture of their day-to-day world when the sudden influx of summer people arrives.

  I wanted to explore these seasonal changes and the tensions they create in the context of a love story that is essentially a story of love and class. When Bridge and Henry start to fall for each other, they are smudging the line between their separate worlds. Bridge sees this line clearly. Henry, because he comes from a place of privilege, is more blind to it. As a result, the tight weave of Bridge’s world begins to unravel first. Henry’s does as well, but only later and in different ways.

  RHRC: The details you give of Luce’s rum-running excursions—processes involved, smuggling routes, common obstacles encountered—paint a vivid backdrop of 1920s Prohibition in New England. How did you do the research for The Season of Open Water?

  DT: This novel was a thrill to research, in part because there are so few books that have been written about the rum-running era. As a result, I had to speak with old-timers, locals, who remembered that era and could recall specific incidents that took place in Westport.

  There were a few I spoke with whose families were directly involved in the trade. Several in particular were incredibly generous with their time and stories. One man estimated that roughly half the town was in some way involved.

  For some, it was the lure of the adventure that drew them into rum-running. Others saw the government’s “noble experiment” as a ridiculous exercise of power and balked at the regulation. For most, however, the rum trade was simply a way to make a good dollar when working the river and the land was not enough. The fishermen had an obvious advantage because they knew the river and the outlying waters. Some farmers would rent the rummies their barns to load and unload, and help them transfer cases of liquor from the small b
oats to the trucks, which would move the cases overland. The hijacking that Luce gets involved in—one gang picking off another’s load—is an aspect of the bootleg trade that only began to take hold in the late twenties when the syndicates were controlling the larger markets and the trade turned more cutthroat.

  RHRC: What is the significance of the book’s title, The Season of Open Water?

  DT: “The season of open water” literally refers to a brief period of time during the Arctic summer when the snow melts and the leads in the ice open. It is a time of extended daylight, warmth, intense life. Birds arrive in the Arctic to mate and birth their young. The tundra blooms. Whales and other fish migrate north through the open channels. In the whaling era of the late 1800s, when Noel shipped on the Sarah Mar, the season of open water was the time when ships could venture higher up into the Arctic to hunt whales.

  Throughout the novel, Noel is haunted by his memory of that time. He sees clearly that beauty and violence are not separate, life and death cannot be unfolded from each other. It was the very opening of the water, the softening of the leads in the ice, that enabled the capture and slaughter of walrus and whales.

  This double-edged significance of the title comes to bear on Bridge’s story as well. As Bridge starts to open to her relationship with Henry, she and Noel begin to drift apart. They are still close, but she keeps her secrets. She is moving into her own life, and he can feel it. At one point, in the summer of 1929, he looks at her for a long moment and she realizes that he is telling her, without telling her in words, that this will be the season of her life that she looks back on—years from now—this will be the summer she remembers—brief, endless, full of youth and love and hope and joy.

  And it is not a warning—what he tells her—but what any grandfather would tell a granddaughter he loves. Still, for the reader, and perhaps for Noel as well, there is an inescapable sense of foreboding, a knowing that the season will change.

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1. The opening image of the novel, the slaughter of the walrus, is a vivid and violent image. Why do you think Tripp chose to open the novel with this incident? How did you react to it? How does it inform the story that unfolds?

  2. We first encounter nineteen-year-old Bridge Weld at her cousin Asa’s funeral. What do Bridge’s actions and observations in the crowded living room reveal about her character? Describe how her personality and values change during the course of the novel.

  3. Noel sees clearly how the dangerous rum-running trade is dividing his town, and yet he decides to take a job refitting a boat for Honey Lyons. Discuss Noel’s reasons for choosing this course, as well as his reservations. Explore how Noel’s past, and specifically the incident with the walrus, parallels events to come.

  4. Throughout the The Season of Open Water, Tripp creates a powerful sense of foreboding. You have a sense that something will happen, without knowing exactly what. Identify and explore points in the story where you feel this apprehension. How does it affect you as a reader?

  5. To what extent is it inevitable that Luce will become involved in rum-running? Consider the elements that draw him to the work. Is it simply in his nature, or are there social and economic forces at work in the town which impact his decision?

  6. Luce and Bridge have an unusually close relationship. What accounts for this intimacy, and how does it impact their own decisions and fates? How does their relationship change in the course of the novel?

  7. In many respects, The Season of Open Water is a story about a family. Describe the other dynamics in the Weld family: How would you characterize the relationship between Noel and Bridge? What tensions exist between Luce and Noel? Finally, how is Cora the central figure for home and family, or, as Tripp says, the “absent center the rest of them revolve around.”

  8. Describe Henry Vonniker. How is the mysterious veteran different from the other inhabitants of Westport? What draws him to Bridge so strongly and how do their differences weigh upon the relationship? Turn to the scene where Bridge visits Henry’s house while he is changing the oil in his car. What does the teacup signify? To him? To her?

  9. Discuss the issue of social status and how these strict divisions operate in Westport. In what ways does class become increasingly important as the novel progresses?

  10. Both The Season of Open Water and Tripp’s first novel, Moon Tide, are set in Westport, Massachusetts. Many of Tripp’s images suggest the beauty and impersonality of nature. Explore the ways in which the elements of the natural world shape and pervade the lives of her characters.

  11. Discuss the tension between the locals and the “summer people” in Westport. How does the presence of out-of-towners alter the world of the novel?

  12. Evaluate the title metaphor of the novel, the “season of open water.” How are elements of beauty, violence, and innocence balanced in this image? Next, discuss how this season in Bridge’s life, this summer she spends in love with Henry, relates to the Arctic season of open water described in the prologue.

  13. How is the novel’s climax at once surprising and inevitable? Do you think Luce’s action was intentional, or an act of passion?

  14. At the end of the novel, Bridge is getting ready to leave her home, her family, the world that she has always known. Why do you think she has made this decision? In what ways has her relationship with Henry set her free into a new kind of life? Do you think she has a specific sense of where she is going?

  Here’s a preview of

  Dawn Tripp’s newest novel,

  Game of Secrets

  Tinder

  Luce

  October 1957

  —Tell me, she says.

  He glances toward the wall, the grimed pane of the window, a cracked sky.

  He can smell her breath, can smell wet leather from the collar of his coat spread down on the floor underneath her, he can feel her eyes on his face, waiting.

  —Day’s getting on, he remarks.

  —Tell me, she says again.

  And he thinks of the fish he saw that morning in the creek running down off Drift Road, the long pale body of that fish, below the overhang of the bank, slow like shadow itself, slipping home.

  He felt a kick of recognition. Even with his hand on the baited line, he did not drop it down. Something in the movement of thatfish, the boneless slow of it, reminded him of her. He could tell her this. Or some other tin-can story.

  —You got that polecat look, she says, a taunt in her voice—Is there some new tattooed bird you’ve got your eye on to pinch?

  He scowls, and she laughs.

  —Good enough for you, Luce Weld.

  —Good enough for you, Ada.

  She is stretched beside him, one arm flung over her head; he can see the fluted lines of her ribs through the pale of her skin, the black spill of her hair. A pause, then she says,

  —Silas is wise to it. Said the other night, if he ever caught up with us, he’d blow your brains out, hang me by my ankles, cut me open throat-to-clit, gut me like a deer.

  Her eyes swing toward him as she says this, her voice level. She watches for the flinch. It gives her a thrill.

  —Getting soft on me, are you, old man? She laughs.

  Again he glances toward the window. The sun, lower now, scrapes his eyes, but the sky out there, the blue is still and clean and pure, like some hand has wrung the color from it.

  He replays her words in his head—her husband, the threat, her tone of voice. He could tell her that this dinge of a room where they meet, this brief occasional time, an hour or two at most, this stolen time, is where he lives. With perhaps the exception of the Saturday-afternoon drives he takes with his daughter, Jane, every other minute, hour, day, of the week is just time spent.

  He rolls a cigarette, lights it. She holds out her hand, he passes it to her, clouds of smoke drift, collide. She flicks the ashes to the floor.

  Not long and she will leave. Stand up, put herself together, rake a hand through her h
air, go off. But he will stay. Long after she has left, and his body is empty, everything missing, except that vague scent of her still on him, the glittering residual, he will sit with his back against the wall in the corner, smoke one cigarette after another, as the sky darks up and the night comes down. He will feel the night come as it drops like a creature through the window and moves toward where he sits on the floor. It will lap at his boots and rise, over his feet, his knees, his hands, he will close his eyes and feel it smooth and cool on his skull. His thoughts of her go wild in that night.

  She is studying him now, her elbow bent, her head propped on the length of her hand, a smudge of light on her body. It feels vulgar to him, marred, like her body is a globe and that light’s been painted on. He can see the scant dark stubble in the hollow of her armpit, the curve of it pressed near his coat, and her eyes are still on him, that certain look he has never seen in anyone but her.

  Earlier, he had leaned toward her. Took a pearled button on her blouse between his teeth and bit it off. It was a cheap thing, flimsy. But she was furious and snapped it away.

  He touches her face now, the flared bone near her eye, runs his finger slowly over it.

  —Tell me, she says again now, her voice impatient, that faint edge not altogether kind.

  His hand drops. She’s past angry. Too late. It’s a thing he’ll never say.