Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

We walk to the boathouse in our dripping wetsuits. I suddenly feel aware of the tight-fitting neoprene. It’s the two people who aren’t wearing dive suits who make me self-conscious. I shake Vincent’s hand as we meet on the boardwalk, and then he heads over to retrieve our duffel bags, tanks, BCs, and the rest of our gear.

“Hey Monique, this is the reporter from the Times I told you about.”

I shake Monique’s hand, noting that Ness has mentioned me before and that I’m “the reporter.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she says. A hint of a French accent. Another detail I would choose to leave out, but I’ve already decided to edit Monique out of the story altogether. I tell myself it’s for the sake of believability.

“Your favorite sandwiches,” she says to Ness. “Fruit. A salad. I put a selection of drinks in the cooler, wasn’t sure what your friend would want.” She smiles at me.

I try to smile back. The annoyance I feel is hard to place—might just be the infernal cattiness I sometimes sink into around women when we first meet, which usually dissipates once we get to know each other. I worry for a moment that my attempt at a smile looks more like a sneer. I’m trying, I swear.

“Sounds delicious,” Ness says, studying the supplies. “You know how famished I get after a dive.”

“Of course,” Monique says. And to me: “Nice to meet you. Good shelling.”

I’d forgotten we were going after shells. The diving and the boat and the introductions have me scattered. I try to remember that this is going to be a perfect day. Not a day for dying. Or being murdered.

Vincent arrives with the gear, and I jump in the boat to take the tanks from him. The smell of the gas engine, the vinyl seats, the rot on the low-tide pilings, the gurgle of the idling outboards, all remind me of days out on the water with my dad. He kept our boat on the grass beside the driveway, and the salt water from the bilge kept a patch of the yard brown and lifeless.

Surprisingly, Ness’s boat isn’t much nicer than the one we grew up with. There’s a small cuddy cabin up front. A bait well in the floor. Dad kept our bait well full of closed cell foam for nestling the shells in. When the shelling was bad, we’d cast nets for bait and come home with fish instead. We weren’t allowed to come home empty-handed. It sometimes meant staying out after dark, which was when he taught me to recognize the lights of the boats on the water. Green over white for trawling. Red over white for fishing. All those twinkling, colorful constellations meant something to my father. The amount of time a buoy flashed—long, short, short—and he knew right where he was.

I miss him powerfully in that moment, standing aboard Ness’s boat, packing away the gear, all these things I did when I was eight that I do now at thirty-two. So much like Dad’s boat that I almost expect to turn and see him there, standing behind the wheel, telling me to cast off the lines, but it’s Ness saying it. He’s as old as my father was when he used to take me out. So young in retrospect, but Dad seemed impossibly ancient to me at the time. I thought I’d never be as old as he was, and yet here I am. And here he isn’t.

“You’re all clear,” I tell Ness, taking the last of the dock lines from Vincent. The mechanic pulls the dangling cigarette from his lips, smiles, and waves bon voyage. Pilings and the walls of the boathouse slide by, and then the low sun hits us again, and we are in the bay, pulling away. Monique and Vincent watch us with shielded eyes before they turn to tidy up.

“Sunscreen,” Ness reminds me. He hands me a bottle, and I start applying it to my face and neck. The wind picks up, and I lean with Ness against the wide bench seat behind the console. I watch him navigate the breakers, and I enjoy the thrum of the deck and the rise and fall of the bow as the sea reaches around the rocks and we race out to meet her head-on.

“That sandbar makes a nice break,” I say, raising my voice over the blat of the outboards and the hiss of the hull against the waves. I gesture toward the beach as we round the seawall; the backs of curling breakers can be seen as they topple and race toward the shore.

“You surf?” he asks.

I nod. “I took it up about ten years ago. It changed the way I shell.”

“Totally,” Ness says. “I’ve always said surfers make the best shellers. No one watches the sea and gets to know her rhythms like surfers do. When you study the breaks, you get to know what the world is like beneath all that water—”

“You can see where the pockets are,” I say, finishing his thought. “You can picture what the reef looks like. Where the crags are and how the shells tumble in and get caught up. If it were me, I’d snorkel right out behind that point—” I gesture toward the natural jetty to the south.

“It’s a good spot,” Ness says. “If we weren’t skipping snorkeling, I would’ve taken you there.” He leans back, steering with just two fingers on the wheel, the lightest of touches. “This is the progression of my journey, really. As shells get harder and harder to find, we have to chase them back to the source. We can’t rely on them to wash up the beach. This is the path that led me to your shells—”

“The murex?” I ask. “Is that where we’re going today?”

“No,” Ness says. “Today is about showing you a phase of my journey. Trust me. You want to write your piece in installments, allow me to do the same.”

I feel like he’s punishing me, drawing it out like this. Getting back at me for my series of planned articles about his family.

“Diving is different than snorkeling, anyway. It’s too deep to read the swell. So we rely on instruments.” He indicates the depth meter and fish finder. The latter reveals the depths in a jagged line that must mean more to him than it does to me. “Knowing where to dive is the hard part,” he says. “In a lot of places, the sand moves under there. It’s different every day. And each year, we have to go deeper and deeper to get the good shells before someone else does. We have to fight over what few shells remain.”

“Soon we’ll be finding the loves of our lives in grade school,” I say.

Ness turns and studies me, his brow wrinkled in confusion, and I realize that I spoke out loud.

“Do what?” he asks.

“It’s… I have this thing about shelling and relationships,” I say. I imagine Michael up at the bow, looking back at me and rolling his eyes. But the analogy is too good to leave be. “What you just said, about getting to the shells early, it made me think of another way that shelling is like love. Shelling along the beach, grabbing the remnants, that’s like dating people our age, you know? People in their thirties and forties. They’re all roughed up. Late catches.”

Ness laughs. Really laughs. He slaps the steering wheel. “So snorkeling would be like dating in college,” he says.

“Or maybe at work,” I offer. “Diving would be like dating in college. If you don’t find someone early, all the good ones are gone. Just like with shells.”

Ness nods. I make a mental note of this metaphor. Michael would absolutely loathe it. I’ll have to email it to him.

“Shelling is like relationships,” Ness says. He turns away from me and scans the beach, makes an adjustment with the wheel. “I can see that.” He nods to himself. “Yeah, I can totally see that.”

I watch the shore recede until it becomes a thin, dark line. Only the lighthouse remains distinct, a finger of black jutting up from an outcrop not far from Ness’s estate. There is a gentle undulation to the sea, a rhythmic swell. The outboards roar. We pass patches of drifting seagrass. In the distance, a handful of birds trace lazy circles against the sky, signs of sporadic life in this watery wilderness.