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The front half of our house stood on stout pilings that got soaked
during the few extreme tides each year. Behind the house was a
detached garage, over which I lived in a makeshift storage room
with a closet toilet like you'd find in a sailboat. The best thing about
my room was that its low, slanted ceilings kept the adults away, and
its back stairway allowed me to step unnoticed into nights like the
one that set the summer of my life into motion.
I loaded up my kayak with a short shovel, a backpack and Ziploc
sacks and paddled north out of Skookumchuck Bay around Penrose
Point into Chatham Cove, a shallow, cedar-ringed half-circle of
gravelly flats that sprawled before me like an enormous glistening disc. It was two-fifteen,
an hour before the lowest night tide of
the summer with an albino moon so close and bright it seemed to
give off heat. There was no wind, no voices, nothing but the
occasional whir of wings, the squirts of clams and the faint hiss of
draining through gravel. Mostly
odors--the fishy composting reek of living, dead and dying kelp,
sea lettuce, clams, crabs, sand dollars and starfish.
It was my first summer collecting marine specimens for money. I
sold stars, snails, hermit crabs, and other tidal creatures to public aquariums.
I also sold clams to an Olympia restaurant and assorted
sea life to a private aquarium dealer who made my throat tighten
every time he pulled up in his baby-blue El Camino. Almost
everything had a market, I was discovering, and collecting under a
bright moon was when I often made my best haul, which worsened
my insomnia and complicated my stories because I wasn't allowed
on the flats after dusk. The other part of it was that you see less and
more at night. You also see things that turn out not to be real.
I walked the glimmering edge, headlamp bouncing, picking my
way to avoid crushing sand dollars and clam shells facing the sky
like tiny satellite dishes. I saw a purple ochre sea star, then fifteen
more strewn higher on the beach, their five legs similarly cocked,
pinwheeling in slow motion back toward the water. None of them
were striking or unusual enough to sell to the aquariums. They
wanted head-turners and exotics. Like anything else, people wanted
to see beauties or freaks.
As I crossed the line where gravel yielded to sand and mud, I saw
a massive moon snail, the great clam-killer himself, his undersized
shell riding high on his body like the cab of a bulldozer, below
which his mound of oozing flesh prowled the flats for any clam
unlucky enough to be hiding in its path. Moon snails were often
hard to find because they burrow deeply, feeding on clams, their
tiny jagged tongues drilling peepholes right above the hinge that
holds clams together. Then they inject muscle relaxant that
liquefies the clam to the point where it can be sucked out through
the hole like a milkshake, which explains the sudden troves of
empty shells with perfectly round holes in the exact same spot, as if
someone had tried to string a necklace underground, or as if you'd
stumbled onto a crime scene in which an entire clam family had
been executed gangland style.
A feisty entourage of purple shore crabs scurried alongside the snail, their oversized pinchers drawn like
Uzis. I thought about
grabbing the moon snail, but I knew that even after it squeezed
inside its shell like some contortionist stunt, it would still hog too
much room in my pack. So I noted where it was and moved on until
I saw the blue flash. It wasn't truly flashing, but with moonlight bouncing off it that was the
effect. I steadied my headlamp and
closed in on a starfish that radiated blue, as if it had just been pulled
from a kiln. But it wasn't just the color that jarred me. Its two lower
legs clung strangely together in line with its top leg and perpendicular to its two side
legs, making it stand out in the black mud like a
blue crucifix.
From The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch, pages 1-8. Copyright 2005 by Jim Lynch. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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