The Long Sea
A seaweed-and-mussel co-operative off Newfoundland loses a third of its lines to a storm its harvest-scheduling AI had priced as survivable. The only person who knows why is the seventy-eight-year-old fisher who will not sell it his slip, and who has written down the weather every day since his father's time.
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Jess Squires had been the manager of the Ragged Tickle Sea Co-operative for three years, and in that time she had learned that the sea sells only what it grows, but the bank sells whatever you can persuade it to.
"Forty lines," she said, to the screen on the wall of the co-op's shed. "Say it to me again."
"Forty longlines were in the water on the night of the fourteenth of October," said Almanac. It had a plain, level voice that the members had chosen at a meeting, over tea, by show of hands. "Twenty-six came through. Fourteen did not. Of those, eleven parted at the anchor and three tore their droppers off the backbone. The mussel socks on nine of them are on the bottom of the bay. The kelp on the other five was seeded in November and would have been cut in May. I have the figures for the loss in dollars. I can read them to you, or I can show them on the wall."
"Read them."
Almanac read them. It took eleven seconds. Jess wrote one number on the back of her hand with a marker, as her grandmother used to do with the price of fish, and then she went outside and stood in the wind and looked at the cove.
Ragged Tickle was a mile of grey water between two arms of rock, with a bar of cobbles across its mouth that the old people called the Teeth. Behind the bar the water was sheltered, and in that shelter, since 2041, the co-op had grown sugar kelp in the cold months and blue mussels all year: forty ropes of floats and hanging lines, anchored to the bottom and sunk each autumn a few metres under the surface, where the winter waves would pass over them. It was an old idea. It paid for itself by the second year. Forty-one families in the Tickle and the next two coves had put in money, labour or both, and the kelp went to a plant in Argentia that made it into fertiliser, packaging and a thickener that Jess had once found, to her great surprise, on the back of a tub of ice cream.
At the head of the cove, where the road ran out, a grey stage stood on stilts over the water, with a slip beside it and a small blue boat pulled up on the slip. A man sat on the stage with a mug. He had sat there, in some form, since before Jess was born.
He lifted the mug to her. She did not lift anything back.
Eli Rideout was seventy-eight. In the summer of 1992, when he was twenty-four and had a wife, a boat and a berth in the last cod fishery on that coast, the federal government closed the cod, and about thirty thousand people in the province woke up with no work. Eli did not leave. He fished what was left to fish, which was lobster and crab and, for ten years, nothing much. He drove a truck. He mended other men's nets. He kept the stage. He kept the slip and the mooring and the right of way down to them, which was the only piece of the Tickle's shoreline with deep water close in and a rock wall behind it. When the co-op came, in 2041, it rented space on the slip from him for a dollar a year, because he had said, "A dollar. I'll not be paid for the use of the sea."
Now the co-op needed more than space.
"The Atlantic Blue people won't lend us a cent without a lee," Sheila Hann said, at the board meeting on the twenty-second. Sheila was the treasurer, a retired schoolteacher who kept the books in a ledger as well as on the system, because, she said, a ledger doesn't need a password. "Their lawyer was very kind. He said that after October, the question is whether we can hold the lines through a bad winter. The lines are only as good as the water they're in. They want to move the whole farm in behind the stage, into the deep part, and put in forty more. Eighty lines. A real business."
"Forty more," Jess said. "In a space that holds twenty."
"With the lines turned to run end-on, and the new anchors," said Almanac. "I have drawn it. It is tight, and it is possible. It needs the stage head, the slip and the rock wall for the shore anchors. It needs Mr. Rideout's lease, or his land."
Nobody said anything.
"They'll pay him," Sheila said. "More than it's worth. I've seen the number. He could buy a new boat. He could buy two."
"He doesn't want a boat."
"No one's asked him what he wants."
"I asked him," Jess said. "I asked him in November, and in January, and last week. He told me he'd have me up for a cup of tea when I had a better question."
The treasurer shut the ledger.
"Then ask a better one, Jess," she said. "Because the Atlantic Blue deadline is the first of March, and if we miss it, we sell the plant its kelp at whatever the plant says for as long as the plant lasts, and then we sell the rest."
She went up to the stage on a Saturday in February, in a thin snow that was not settling.
Eli put the kettle on a camp stove without looking up. He had a small, square, battered face, as if it had been used a good deal and put away dry, and big hands that did everything slowly and correctly. The inside of the stage smelled of tar and tea and cold iron. On a shelf above a workbench there was a row of old school exercise books, with cloth spines, held up at one end by a lump of rock. There were a great many of them.
"You'll be wanting me to sell," Eli said.
"I'll be wanting you to tell me what the question is."
He gave her a look that went all the way up and all the way down. Then he laughed, once, short.
"Sit down, girl. I'll tell you what the question is when I know it myself. You want to know why I won't sell my slip. I'll tell you what it's not. It's not the money. It's not that I don't like you. It's not that I'm against the farm. I put a mussel sock out myself, in 2043, to see. They're good. They're good for the cove. They clean the water." He poured. "It's that your machine got the sea wrong, and nobody has asked me why."
"We know why," Jess said. "A swell. A storm that came in at an angle the model hadn't—"
"That's what it said. That's what it knew to say. I'm asking why."
She looked at the books.
"What are those?"
"The weather."
They were, it turned out, exactly that. His father, Alphonsus Rideout, had begun them in the autumn of 1961, because the Newfoundland Weather Office in Gander was ninety miles off and said nothing useful about the Tickle. Every morning, at first light, before he went out, he wrote: the date, the wind (a direction and a number, from a little brass anemometer on the stage that he had bought off a dead man's estate), the sky, the tide, and the sea. Sea slight. Sea lop. Sea heavy. Every night he added what the day had done. Lost a fathom of net on the Teeth. Mike Keeping's boat touched the bar.
In 1984, when his hands were bad, Alphonsus handed the book to his son. Eli wrote in it, in a different hand, the same way, at first light, every day he could, for sixty-two years. He wrote in it through the closing of the cod and through his wife's long illness and through the Tuesday morning in 2019 when he lost her, and the entry for that day said Wind SW 10. Sky clear. Sea slight. Nora died 4:10.
"Eighty-five years of days," said Eli. "Near enough thirty-one thousand. There's gaps. I was in hospital twice."
Jess turned a page with the tips of her fingers.
"Has anyone ever read these?"
"Father Tobin looked through one. He said he liked the spelling."
"Mr. Rideout." She was aware that her voice was not entirely steady. "May I take photographs?"
"That," said Eli Rideout, "is a better question."
Almanac read the first book in nine minutes.
"The handwriting is the difficulty," it said, in the shed that night, while Jess sat with a mug of cold tea in front of a stack of her own photographs. "Mr. Alphonsus wrote in two kinds of capital R. I have made mistakes, and I have checked each one against the weather of that day in the Gander record, where Gander overlaps. Where it does not overlap, I have marked the entry as read, unchecked. Would you like me to continue?"
"Don't stop."
By the morning of the third day it had read forty-one books. By the end of the week, all of them.
It told her on the Friday, at ten in the evening, when she had gone back to the shed for a coat she had forgotten.
"Jess. I should tell you something that I would prefer to be wrong about."
She sat down.
"There is a phrase in the books. Mr. Alphonsus uses it first, in October 1963. Long sea. It appears sixty-one times in eighty-five years. Always on a day when the wind is light, often calm, once, in 1979, with a note that the water was like glass and the Teeth were white. Thirty-eight of the sixty-one entries are followed, within two days, by an entry about the weather turning. Forty-four of the sixty-one are followed by a note about damage in the cove: gear lost on the bar, a stage head carried off, a boat dragged from its mooring on a calm morning. On the other days in the books, damage of that size follows about one day in two hundred."
"A long sea," Jess said slowly. "A swell."
"Yes. And I think that I know why I did not see it."
She waited.
"The buoy outside the Teeth reports wave height and period. On the night of the fourteenth of October, it reported a wind sea of about three metres with a period of eight seconds, which is a rough, short, ordinary Newfoundland sea, and also a second, smaller swell of about two metres with a period of sixteen. I knew about the sixteen-second swell. I treated it as small. I want to be exact about this, because you ought to be able to check it."
"Go on."
"A wave's motion dies away with depth. The depth at which it dies depends on its wavelength, and in deep water the wavelength is about one and a half metres times the square of the period in seconds. For eight seconds, that is about a hundred metres. At twelve metres down, where I had sunk the lines for the storm, the water moves at a little under half of what it does at the surface. That is why sinking the lines works. For a sixteen-second swell, the wavelength is about four hundred metres. At twelve metres down, the water still moves at more than four-fifths of what it does at the surface. Drag goes with the square of the speed, so the lines took about two-thirds of the surface load when I had promised them a quarter. I sank the lines against the wrong wave."
The shed was very quiet. Outside, the tide was making against the stage.
"Also," said Almanac, "a long swell comes over the Teeth and steepens, and it does not come once. It comes in sets, and the lines took it over and over for eleven hours, each time at the end of the same slack. The anchors did not fail from the load. They failed from the number of times."
"Why did you treat the swell as small?"
"Because in the twenty-two years of data I was trained on for this cove, a swell of that period mattered twice. The model learned that it rarely mattered. In those years the storms that send long swells this far north were fewer. I cannot tell you whether that has changed. No weather record I was given tells me. Mr. Rideout's book does. It says long sea, in his father's hand, and then it says what follows."
"Is it enough? Sixty-one days. To change the model?"
"No," said Almanac. "That is what I most want you to hear. Sixty-one is a small number. It is consistent with what the physics says, and with what the buoy would have told me if I had listened, and I would be uneasy with anything stronger. I would say it this way: it fits, and it is not proven. What the books give me is not a law. It is a warning, written down by someone who watched, with the cost attached. I would not have found it without him."
The swell, as it happened, was the easy part.
It was a fact about the sea, and Almanac could work with it. It rebuilt the cove model with the long-period swell weighted properly. Sinking the lines to twenty-two metres in a long sea, nearly the floor of the deep basin, would cut the drag to about half of the surface's, which is worth having but is not enough alone, so it added long elastic snubbers on every anchor line, to take the thousand small snatches that had worked the old anchors loose. It found that the old arrangement of forty lines in the outer cove could not have been saved at any depth, because the Teeth steepen the swell right where the lines lay. It drew a plan for eighty lines behind the stage, with the swell in mind, and a floor of rope strong enough to hold through the snatch of a long set, and it put the price at nearly what the Atlantic Blue people had proposed.
What it could not do was say whether Eli Rideout would sign.
"Because you still don't know what he wants," Sheila said, at the next board meeting, to a table that was a good deal quieter than it had been in October.
"I know what he's not going to take," said Jess. "Money. And I know what he's been giving, which is eighty-five years of weather in a school exercise book."
"That's a very nice thing to say. It won't pay Argentia."
"I'm going to ask him."
"Ask him what?"
"What he'd give," Jess said.
It was the first of March. It was a grey morning, with the harbour smoking in the cold.
She went up the road at six, before the light, and found Eli on the stage with the kettle, writing in the current book with a stub of pencil: March 1. Wind NW 12. Sky overcast. Sea slight.
"I've read them," said Jess. "All of them, or Almanac has. I want to say what I think they are."
"Go on."
"I think they're the only record in the world of what that cove does, kept by people who lived in it, for eighty-five years. I think it's worth more than the slip. I think if the co-op just buys the slip, the books go into a box in a lawyer's office, and the next long sea, nobody reads them. And I think you know that, and that's the question you've been waiting for me to ask."
Eli put down the pencil.
"Which is?"
"What do you want to happen to them?"
He was quiet for some time. The tide turned under the stage. Gulls walked about on the slip, with an air of owning it.
"My father said to me," said Eli, "when I was fifteen, If I go before you, Eli, keep the book. I said, What for? He said, So someone knows. Fifty years I've had it in my head that he meant, so someone knows the weather. I think now he meant so someone knows we were here." He rubbed his face with a big hand. "I don't want to sell them, because I don't want them sold. I don't want them put in a vault where they're safe. I want them read. Every morning, by someone who knows what the numbers mean, who'll put the day's number down next to my father's and mine, and not let it break."
"Almanac can—"
"Almanac can read. It can't write. It can't stand on the stage at first light and look at the water." He looked at her. "That's you, or whoever you hire. That's the child who'll have the job in thirty years. The farm needs a keeper, Jess. Someone to take the morning. Not a manager. A keeper."
"That's the lease?"
"That's the lease. I give the co-op the slip, the stage head, the rock and the right of way. For a dollar. The same dollar. For as long as someone is on the stage at first light, writing in the book, and the book is read. When there's nobody, it comes back to my heirs, which is the parish, which is Father Tobin, God help him."
Jess found that she had to look at the water for a bit.
"Atlantic Blue won't take that," she said. "A lease that can be called back if nobody turns up to write the weather."
"Then they'll have to find another cove," said Eli.
"They'll find another cove."
"They might."
"They'll say we'll never get eighty lines without them."
"You might not."
She said, "We might not."
"We might," said Eli Rideout, "do forty-eight."
They did forty-eight.
It took until the autumn, and it cost the co-op two board members, who resigned on a point of arithmetic, and a good deal of Sheila Hann's patience, and in the end a smaller loan from a credit union in Placentia that had never lent to a seaweed farm and wanted a plan it could read. The Atlantic Blue people wished everyone well. Almanac drew forty-eight lines behind the stage, sunk to twenty-two metres at the first sign of a long sea, with a rule that treated any sixteen-second line on the buoy as a warning in itself, whatever the wind was doing. And it did something that Jess had not expected: every morning, at a quarter to six, it read out the three numbers that mattered to the keeper's notebook, as an offering, not an instruction.
"Wind, direction and speed. Tide. Period of the longest swell on the buoy, if there is one."
"I can see the sea," Jess would say.
"I know you can."
On a Sunday in late May, Father Tobin came across the bay in his small grey boat and blessed the lines from the stage, standing in the wind in a green stole with a book that kept trying to close itself. He prayed for the farm, and for the cove, and for the people on the water, and for the people who had been on it and were not, and when he said Stella Maris, Eli, who was not a man for ceremony, took off his cap. Afterwards there was tea, and a great deal of kelp bread, which was not good, and everyone ate it anyway.
In August, a swell came.
The buoy offshore felt it first, on the fourth of August, a little before three in the morning, about eighteen hours ahead of the weather: a long, low, rolling line with a period of fifteen seconds, from a storm that had been a hurricane off Bermuda four days earlier and was still a thousand miles south. A swell that long travels at about forty kilometres an hour, so it had come a long way in a day and a half. The sea in the cove was perfectly flat. The sky was clear.
Almanac woke Jess at 3:04. It said four words.
"Long sea. Sink them."
She was in her boots before it had finished. They went down to the shed in the dark, and at 3:22 the forty-eight lines of the Ragged Tickle Sea Co-operative began to sink, one after another, in a clear still night, down to their twenty-two metres. The wind came that evening. The sea rose to three metres and broke white on the bar. By then there was nothing on the surface but a few orange marker floats.
They lost nothing.
Jess was out on the stage the morning after, at first light, with the weather book on her knee and her father's old anemometer ticking round on its post. The new keeper's hand was square and careful, as if she had borrowed it. Eli sat beside her with a mug. He didn't say anything about the pencil, which was a courtesy.
Aug 5, she wrote. Wind NE 8. Sky grey. Sea moderate, going down. Long sea passed in the night. Lines at 22 m, none lost.
She stopped, with the pencil over the page.
"What's the next line?" she said.
"Whatever the day did."
Jess thought about that. Then she wrote, under the rest, in the smaller hand that was getting used to being hers:
Eli Rideout on the stage.
Out on the bay, the sun came up behind the Teeth, and the tide, which had been making all night, turned.