A Short, Sharp Shock

14. Crossing the Bar

In the middle of that night Birsay crouched by their warm sand beds and roused them. “The brough comes clear soon.” They rose and ate more conch, and at Birsay’s instruction drank from a jug of fresh water until their stomachs were heavy and cold.

The star flood still lit the beach as they walked onto the wet sand. Birsay watched each wave closely, and as one ran up the sand he pointed. “Last high wave,” he said. “From now on they ebb.”

Then more and more of the beach was revealed as each wave sluiced back and hopped over the nonexistent rail where the water regrouped and turned again. A point emerged, wet tan sand with a crosshatched stippling of black. Then the waves fell back to left and right as they had the afternoon before, and the line of boiling white water appeared. The bar emerged, at first just as an extension of their point of sand, receding away from them at a walking pace: then, in the blue of dawn, the water simply ran away from them to right and left, and they walked on a sandbar that extended all the way to the horizon.

Struck silent at the uncanny sight, the three travelers strode quickly after Birsay, their ropes coiled and hung over their shoulders, their floats hanging on straps tied over their own backpacks and bags. The sun rose and cast long faint shadows ahead of them. The seas rolled up flat wet sand to right and left, the northern and southern seas separated only by their spit of wet sand.

They stepped through patches dense with crunching seashells, or squishy with living anemones. It was a blue day, the air clear as glass and the sea and sky darker and lighter shades of the same full blue. The sand and Birsay were a color composed of tan and black sand, mixed thoroughly. A handful of it washed thin by water revealed clear grains, smaller white and brown grains, and tiny floating black flecks.

Then the sand began to grow thin over bedrock of the same color, which broke through as if it were a little model of the spine, here worn to ankle-high knobs and nubs, split by the sea down its grain of stratification, running across the bar from sea to sea. Eventually they walked on bare rock, sharp ribs of brown that ran out under the white waves, which grumbled toward them to nothing in hundreds of parallel grooves. Little by little the shallow faults turned the brough into a stretch of pitted knife edges, set across their way. Walking over these edges would have devastated first sandals and then feet, but Birsay or his predecessors had rilled a rough narrow path through the faults with blocks of loose stone—an old path, it seemed, for the blocks were worn in their settings, and in places had been washed away.

They hurried over this low causeway, until when they looked behind they could see no sign of Birsay’s knob, or the low peninsula beyond it; ahead they saw no sign of the knob at the halfway point, nor the farther cape. The brough extended all the way to the horizon in both directions, a horizon nearly at eye level, so that it seemed they crossed the bottom of a flatfish bowl of ocean, which would sooner or later rush in on them. It was a strange sight.

In late midafternoon they came to Birsay’s knob, first seen as a bulge in the bar, a widening of the Whitewater to the sides. “We’ve made good time,” Birsay said, “but it’s always a close thing. By sunset we’ll be floating.”

Once on the knob it seemed not much different from the rest of the brough: slightly wider, minutely taller, pocked and runneled like all the rest of the rock they had traversed. In the largest potholes were big,blocks of rock that had had holes chiseled through them, and following Birsay’s instructions they tied the ends of their ropes through these holes. Birsay chose the anchor rocks very carefully, after observing the surging mush and the wind, and his charges’ bodies; he spread them out at intervals along the bar, Thel, Birsay, Garth, the swimmer. Their few possessions they placed in other potholes, with stones placed over them.

They sat on the damp rock, and waited. The tide began to come in.

It was impossible not to be frightened at the sight. Each broken wave rushed at them, at first as thick as the wave had been high, and boiling over the reef below; it thinned as it made its furious rush, until it was bubbling water trickling up the furrows in the rock, and then receding. But each final gurgle was closer than the last.

“Usually the south reaches us first,” Birsay said, “because that’s where the prevailing winds come from. But today—” he frowned, sniffing—“the wind is from the east. And the north side is closing faster.” He turned and turned again on the knob’s highest point, sniffing. “It may be windy tonight.”

Then, in the surge of just a few waves, the four of them were sitting on a tiny rock island in a sea of boiling white water, waves from the two seas running together and slapping up into the air, in lines of wind-tossed spray. Then a big wave from the north ran up the rock and right over their feet. Quicker than Thel would have believed possible, every wave rolled over the rock and their lower legs. They stood around Birsay on the peak, and then waves from the south sea piled in as well, and up and down the brough to the east and west they could see long sheets of Whitewater squirting up into the air, underneath them a chaos of wave and backwash, the sea white with foam, millions of bubbles hissing out their lives, sending a fine rain into the air and creating a tremendous loud roar, a roar made of glugs and hisses that individually would scarcely be heard across a room.

When the water got waist high they were shoved hard this way and that, and Birsay told them in a loud voice to hang on—that this was the only tricky part—and that they should soon cast off and get away from the knob, trusting to their floats and anchors. When the waves were chest high they were forced to take his advice, and they swam off after him to the south, floating easily on their miniature rafts and spreading out as they were pushed straight out from their anchors.

As the tide rose the water grew calmer, until the only signs of the brough were long, snaking lines of crusty foam floating away to the south, and an occasional brief mushy break at the top of the largest waves as they crossed the bar. The waves, and the current that pushed them, were from the northwest. So they floated to the southeast of the knob, connected to it like kites flying in the wind of the tidal current. If they rested they were some thirty feet from each other, and they were about two hundred feet from the submerged knob, so that Thel and the swimmer, on the outsides, could easily paddle over to talk to the middle two. Garth’s shoulder tree looked odd indeed sticking up out of the water, like the last remnant of a deluged land. Garth’s face was sputtering and apprehensive beside it; he couldn’t swim and had to trust his float, clearly a difficult act of faith.

It was a strange sunset. Now the horizon was closer and higher than ever, the dome of the sky taller: all as blue as they had been at dawn. The sun dropped through the air yellow as a daisy and sunk without fanfare, turning green at the end as if the last rays had shone through water. During the long dusk a line of puffy white clouds appeared to the northwest, so tall they redefined the height of the sky. These clouds eventually took on copper and iron hues, and cast their color over everything else, so that the sea took on a coppery sheen, and the air was dark and metallic.

Birsay watched this development nervously, and when the wind shifted and picked up suddenly, he swam to Thel’s side and said, “It may be a cold night. The northerlies are hard.”

Thel swallowed salt and nodded. Already the water felt warmer than the air, so that his head was cold, and it was warming to duck it into the brine. Birsay said the southern current was warmer still; Thel was content with the northern one, which felt just a touch below body temperature.

But the northwest wind was cold, and the swells rolling by began to steam a little. In the last light of the dusk they saw the line of tall clouds approaching, blocking out the stars that were just popping into salt-blurred existence. The travelers rose and fell on dark swells that steamed whitely. They rose and fell, rose and fell.

The wind strengthened and waves began to break on the bar, emerging from the dark several hundred feet away from them, on the northern shallows. There low dark surges in the sea’s surface reared up and toppled over in a white roar, water shattered and tumbling chaotically, in a line as far as they could see. The broken waves rolled over the bar in a low continuous thunder, but as the water deepened again each wave would reconstitute itself out of its own mush, the Whitewater shrinking back up the side of the swell until it was only a whitecap; and then it was only a ground swell again, on which they rose and fell, rose and fell, crest to trough and back again.

But the wind got stronger, and the waves bigger. A ground swell breaks when the depth of water below it is equal to the height of the swell, trough to crest; now the swells were as high as the water beneath their feet, and they were at the ends of their ropes, they couldn’t get any farther out onto the south sea. The wind picked up again, and now each time they rose on a swell there was broken water at the crest, so that they had to plunge under it and hold their breath until their floats pulled through the wave and out into the air again.

It was raining, Thel noticed once when he came up, a cold rain that roiled the ocean surface and threw up more steam. Now the wind howled, and the waves became big rolling walls of broken white mush, wild and powerful. It was all Thel could do to hold his breath as he was thrashed up and down under these broken waves; he held his float to him, waited grimly each time for it to pull him back up into the roaring black night. When it did he gasped in huge breaths, and looked to his right where the others were, but could see little through the spray. Then another wave would lift him and he would duck under the Whitewater, endure its tumbling, come up again. Efforts to swim sideways to Birsay were useless, and getting to Garth and the swimmer unthinkable: and yet she was only ninety feet away.

He could only concentrate on getting under each wave with a full breath, and on staying upright in his float. The night fell into an endless pattern of rising, ducking under Whitewater, holding on with lungs bursting, popping back out into the shrieking wind, resting against the float’s restraint. Then again. And again. It went on until at one point he got so tired it seemed he couldn’t go on, and he considered cutting the rope and floating off to the south on the ground swell. But then a sort of second wind came to him, a stubbornness suffusing every cell of his muscles and lungs, and he worked to make each forced plunge as streamlined and efficient as he could, grimly trying to relax and be at ease as the broken water threw him about, as loose as a rag on a clothesline in a stiff wind. He fell into a rhythm. Nothing marked the passing of time, it seemed he had been breathing in a pattern of submergence in the sea for years. The water began to feel cool, then cold. His head and arms were frigid in the wind’s rip.

Then as he floated, waiting for the next rise, lightning forked down to his left. By the fey snap of light he glimpsed dots on the water, heads and floats—and then he was under again. The lightning struck again when he was underwater, he saw the flash and opened his closed eyes and saw a field of bubbles, white in green—then black. Three or four more times lightning struck, but always when he was submerged. He wondered if they would be electrocuted.

Then one wave thumped him down onto rock. The air burst from his lungs and he nearly blacked out before resurfacing. It was still dark night up there, the storm raging, rain coming down harder than ever: he could get a refreshing swallow of fresh water merely by turning his open mouth to the northwest. Submerged again, he kept his feet down and hit the rock bottom more gently. But it got harder as the tide ebbed, and the broken waves swept across the brough more wildly; often they knocked him down against the bottom and thumped him against it repeatedly, until he ached with the battering, and it seemed that after all the night’s labors he might be killed by his landing.

Eventually he stood chest high in the waves’ troughs, then waist high; but it was too much work to stand, and too cold. He crouched down in the water and let the float and rope hold him, peering through the blackness for the next onrushing wall of Whitewater.

Finally the broken waves themselves were low enough that he could float over them, his head clear; and in the troughs the Whitewater only sluiced over his knees. He hauled himself up the rope toward the knob, where it was shallower still; he could sit, and turn his back to the waves and the wind. Relaxing his stomach muscles made him retch. When he had gathered some strength he hauled himself up onto the knob, and found the other anchors, and slogged down the length of Garth’s rope; out in the murk he could see Garth bobbing.

But it was only his float. “No,” Thel said. Rather than return to the knob he just swung on his rope sideways, and bumped into Birsay unexpectedly; but Birsay hung in his float, head back, mouth and eyes wide open to the waves. He had drowned.

Stomache spasming, Thel swung back the other way, stepping on sharp rock. No sign of the swimmer. Back, forth, up, back: nothing. He had to walk back to the knob and find her anchor. The rope hung loose in the water, trailing out to sea, and he hauled it in feeling like Death the Fisherman, afraid and sick at heart. Its end came to him, frayed. In the first predawn blue he peered at the ends of the fibers; it looked like she had chewed through the rope, bitten her way free. The swimmer. He kneeled on the rock, collapsing around his cramped stomach. The swimmer. She had freed herself but kept the float, smart woman. Perhaps she had swum over and pulled Garth from his float, yes. Took them both off the bar, offto where the ground swell would pose no challenge to her swimming powers. Yes. She would come back. Or else swim to the cape in the west.

When dawn illuminated the seascape the tide had ebbed and the brough had returned, though it was often overrun by the storm surf. Everything today was green, the sea a light jade color, the clouds a heavy dark gray tinged with green, the bar brown, but greenish as if with algae.

Thel untied the float from his chest and tossed it aside. Angrily he kicked Birsay’s anchor, left him bobbing in the waves. He put his bags over his shoulder, the mirror like a heavy plate in its wet sack. He took off along the bar, squish squish.

Itwas hard to walk. Often he got off Birsay’s path and fell in knee-deep transverse crevices, cracking his shins so hard that the world itself burst with pain, as it had when he was shoved through the mirror. The wind keened across the brough, in his ear and cold. It rained intermittently and clouds rushed overhead like the horses of the face-women. Several times he heard the swimmer and Garth calling to him from the surf to his left, but he never saw them. The current in the southern sea was running swiftly toward the cape to the west, which now appeared as a dark hill in the clouds. A good sign, it would help them along. He drank seawater, he was so thirsty; he drank the blood from his shins for food, cupping it in a palm and getting a good mouthful after every fall. Its taste reminded him of Garth’s fruit. Blindly he kicked on, and then the brough was sand. He ate some of it. The mirror was heavy on his back, he wanted to toss it aside but didn’t.

He lay on the cape beach, in wet sand. Sand crabs hopped around him, tried to eat him and he ate them in return. Along the southern side of the cape, that was where they would land. A beach stream, fresh water cutting through the shingle. He lay in it and drank. When he woke again he was stronger, and could bury himself in the sand and sleep properly. The next day he found abalone studding a beach reef like geodes, and he broke them with rocks and ate the muscles after pounding them tender. That and the beach stream infused him with strength, and he began walking the cape’s broad southern beach, under the steep green prow of the reemerging peninsula. The beach was dotted with pools of water blue as the sky, and with driftwood logs from what,had been immense trees, and with shell fragments that were sometimes big enough to sit in. All kinds of debris, on fine tawny sand, loose underfoot so that he often stumbled, and sometimes fell. All kinds of debris: and yet when he came across one piece of driftwood, he knew it instantly. It was the remains of a shrub, stripped of leaves and bark—a thin trunk dividing into thinner branches, their broken ends rounded and smooth as if rolled in the waves for years. Just a sand-colored piece of driftwood, a splay of branches like a hand reaching out. He sat on the sand and wept.