John Casey - Spartina

He pointed at the boat on the road.

A chief said, “It’s worse inside the harbor.”

“How long till low water?”

“It should’ve been slack now,” the chief said, “but that’s a lot of water in there.”

The tug was bigger than Spartina but her afterdeck lower, so when the chief ordered coffee for Dick, the seaman he sent to fetch the pot had to reach up to Spartina ’s rail to fill Dick’s mug.

The lieutenant and the chief told Dick that this was worse than ’54, but not so bad as ’38. So far as they knew, no one was killed, at least around here. They’d been in Wickford when it hit and just got to the harbor of refuge this morning. For the moment they were standing by for any distress signals, and after a bit they were going to help clear the channel.

Dick was grateful for the coffee and the news. But when they looked Spartina over and asked him where he’d been, he felt uncomfortable.

The chief noticed the bare patches on the wheelhouse, and some more along the hull. The lieutenant asked if his crew was below.

Dick said, “I took her out alone,” and was embarrassed. He saw himself standing there naked, stripped down to his folly. His affection for Spartina , his pride in her, his satisfaction that he’d done okay handling her, and his relief at being home were gone for the moment. He knew what he’d think of some damn fool who took a boat alone across the path of a hurricane. He’d admire his luck, but he wouldn’t admire him.

Without raising his eyes, he said, “I got sideswiped some by the other side. I’d hoped to get clear to the east.”

The lieutenant said, “How long have you been out?”

The chief said, “Looks like more than sideswiped.”

“Three days.”

“You must be tired,” the lieutenant said.

“You been on your radio?” the chief asked. “Let someone know you’re back?”

“The radio’s out.”

The chief said to the lieutenant, “Maybe we should contact the station, sir. They may have this vessel missing.” He turned to Dick. “At least we didn’t have to go look for you.”

The lieutenant ordered a seaman to get on the radio. He turned to Dick. “What’s the name of your vessel?”

“Spartina-May.”

“Is there anyone you’d like the station to call? Of course the phone lines may be down.”

“Eddie Wormsley. In Perryville. That’s where my wife and kids are.”

Dick started to ask what the damage was like at the top of the pond, but these men hadn’t been there, and Dick didn’t want to hear what they’d only heard.

He said, “I’m going to go take a look at something. I’ll be back when the tide turns.”

He cast off from the tug and headed out the west gap in the breakwater. It was less than two miles to the opening into Sawtooth Pond. It took him a minute to take in what was different about the beach. There wasn’t a single beach house. There had been two dozen, not to mention the trailer camp on the high ground of Matunuck Point. The old undermined seawall, a ruin for twenty-five years, was unmoved.

When he got just outside the cut to Sawtooth Pond he saw that the storm had torn it wide open. It had been fifteen yards across, now it was fifty.

Looking up the cut, he saw the Wedding Cake was still standing. He got out his binoculars. The fretwork on the front porch was smashed, some of the shutters were torn off, and the windows were broken. The paint was scoured even more than Spartina ’s. The wind would have picked up sand from the top of the dunes and blown it at the house like birdshot.

There wasn’t a tree or a bush upright on Sawtooth Island. Just a few pieces of wood wedged among the close-set rocks.

The tide was still running out of the cut in slow brown coils that were laced with grass and leaves and the occasional whiteness of a split branch bobbing just under the surface. A whole willow swam by looking like a giant jellyfish. Darker, heavier matter was moving too. Dick put Spartina in neutral and let the wind back her off the junk spewing and spreading in the slow coastwise current. Looking at the flow, Dick realized the sandbar had been cut by the storm — there seemed to be a sea-dredged channel through it.

The cottages which were set back up Sawtooth Point looked okay, but the ones right along the creek had taken a beating. Schuyler and Marie’s had a line of water stain and flecks of grass, seaweed, and silt up to the second story. The picture window was smashed and the waterfront porch was half torn away and sagging into the creek.

Dick wondered how far up the creek the surge had gone. Could be his house was flooded.

He looked beyond the flat shore up to the tangled growth covering the Matunuck Hills, then back along the dunes, where the low grasses had held on, and then to the confluence of Sawtooth Creek and Pierce Creek and the low table of spartina that spread out between them. His calculations of damage gave way, not to another thought, but to a rush of green. He lowered the binoculars. The air was scrubbed so clean, the wind had winnowed the dead brown away so completely, the green was so bright in the morning light that particular blades jumped across the water to his eyes. Green against the black muck of the marsh, green against the crystals of new-sifted sand, and green on the hills against the quick blue sky.

Just this place, the shore from Green Hill to Galilee, the upland from the beach to the Great Swamp, the Matunuck Hills, and Wakefield, just five miles wide and five miles deep, was just about all the land he knew. He hadn’t thought it could come on him like this. It was as if he’d been blown clean as the marsh grass, been scoured even more than Spartina ’s wheelhouse or the Wedding Cake. Each time he looked along the stretch of land, the green came into him like a stroke of paint on parched clean wood.

He saw a jeep coming along the bird-sanctuary beach. He let Spartina blow a little farther offshore, then put her in gear and made his way cautiously back through the breakwater.

H e followed the Coast Guard tug in through the breachway, keeping an eye on the tug’s wake and the water slipping by her hull for anything likely to foul his propeller or even just give it a good whack. He didn’t have time to take more than a quick look to port toward Joxer’s crab-processing plant. The roof was still on, the sandbags still piled against the walls and windows. The Lydia P. wasn’t home yet. There seemed to be some damage to the tightly clustered houses in Jerusalem. The bridge across the slough from Point Judith Pond to Potter Pond was out.

On the other side of the channel, the piers by Galilee were a shambles. The Co-op and George’s Restaurant were still standing, but all the smaller buildings and sheds were scattered in pieces all the way to the Escape Road. There were some trucks and bulldozers at work clearing the road and parking lot. The boats that had been hauled far back and tied down looked to have scraped through okay. One near the pier had a utility pole across her deck, her bulwarks smashed, but her hull intact. The boats left in the slips were better off the closer they were to the dock. The outermost boats must have provided some shelter, even after they sank. The innermost boats had been smashed around on top, but their hulls seemed to be tight. Mamzelle was on the bottom. Even at low tide Dick could only see a bit of her wheelhouse. The rest of her superstructure was gone.