Ancient Shores

1

“If that ain’t the damnedest thing.” Tom Lasker had to raise his voice to be heard over the wind. Will paused with his spade full of black earth to see what had drawn his father’s attention.

A triangular plate, not unlike a shark’s fin, stuck out of the ground. It was tough. Metal, apparently, but not corroded.

They were on the low ridge that bordered the west side of the farm, working late under a string of light-bulbs, trying to put in a system that would pump water uphill from the well. Lasker played his flashlight over the object, and Will pushed at it with the tip of his boot. The night smelled of approaching winter. A cold wind chopped across the rise and shook the lights. Lasker knelt and brushed the soil away with gloved fingers. The object was bright red. Smooth and hard. When he pulled, it had no give.

The house was about a quarter-mile away, a two-story frame building set back in a thick growth of trees. Its lights were warm and cheerful.

The fin was attached to a rod of the same color and texture, all of a piece. It angled down into the soil at thirty degrees. Will wedged his spade under it, and they tried to lever it up. It wobbled but wouldn’t come loose. “On three,” said Lasker.

He did the count, and they yanked together, lost their balance, and fell laughing over each other. “That’s enough for tonight, Pop,” said Will. “Let’s go eat.”

The Pembina Escarpment was visible through the bedroom windows of Tom Lasker’s house. The escarpment consisted of a line of rounded hills and ridges and jutting rocks, a fairly impressive feature on land that was otherwise pool-table flat. Ten thousand years ago it had been the western shore of an inland sea that covered large areas of the Dakotas, Minnesota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. The spot where the house now stood would have been several hundred feet underwater.

Lasker was a big man: awkward, with thinning brown hair and wide shoulders. His features were sharp, raw-edged, carved by too many unforgiving winters. He’d lived his entire life in the Fort Moxie area. He thought of himself as basically uninteresting, just a farmer who worked hard, didn’t socialize too much, and took care of his family. He was happily married, his two sons seemed to be developing into reasonable adults, and he enjoyed flying. Like many of the local farmers, he had a pilot’s license, and he owned a Katana DV—20. He also owned a World War II—era Navy Avenger and was a member of the Confederate Air Force—a group of enthusiasts dedicated to restoring antique warbirds.

Shortly after dawn on the morning following the find, he and Will were back atop the slope. October on the northern plains tends to be bleak and cold. This day was typical. Lasker was half buried in his down jacket, not having yet worked up enough sweat to shed it.

The fin stuck several inches out of the ground, mounted on a support pole about two inches thick. Lasker was thinking about the damage it might have done had he run a tractor over it.

Will sank his spade into the earth. “Well,” he said, “let’s get rid of it.” He turned the soil over, and even this late in the season it was heavy and sweet.

The air was still. A blue jay sat on a fence rail, watching, and Lasker felt good about the world. The shark fin interested him. Hard to imagine what it was or how it had come to be buried on land his family had owned for sixty years. More important, it provided a temporary puzzle that bound him a little closer to his son.

How deep did the pole go? He measured off a few feet in a straight line from its point of entry and began throwing up soil in his methodical way. Will joined in, and after a while they struck metal. The pole was at least six feet long. They continued digging until Will had to leave for school. Then Lasker went into the house, had some coffee and toast, and came back for another go. He was still working on it when Ginny called him for lunch.

She came back with him afterward to see what the fuss was about. Ginny was tall, clever, a product of Chicago who had come to North Dakota as a customs inspector, with the primary objective of getting away from urban life. She’d fallen in love quickly with this guy, who in turn had started making trips to Canada, hoping she would clear him when he returned. Sometimes he’d even bought things, stuff he could pay duty on. She remembered the first time he’d tried that approach: He’d spent thirty dollars in a Winnipeg bookstore for a history of Canadian aviation and had clearly been disappointed when she’d waved him through because books were free of duty.

His friends had tried to warn him away from Ginny. She’ll get tired of the harsh winters, they’d said. And small-town life. Eventually she’ll go back to Chicago. They’d talked about Chicago more or less in the tone they’d have used for Pluto. But twenty years had passed, and she was still here. And she and Tom thrived on snowy nights and roaring fires.

“Is it creating a problem?” she asked, puzzled, standing over the trench that Lasker had dug around the thing. It was about six feet deep, and a ladder stuck out of it.

“Not really.”

“Then why do we care? There isn’t any reason to tear it out of the ground, is there? Just cut it off and don’t worry about it.”

“Where’s your sense of romance?” he asked, playing back a line she used occasionally. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

She smiled. “I know what it is. It’s a pole.”

“How’d it get here?”

Ginny looked into the trench. “There’s something down there,” she said. “At the bottom.”

It was a piece of cloth. Lasker climbed down and dug around the fabric. Tried to free it. “It’s connected to the pole,” he said.

“This seems like more trouble than it’s worth.”

“It shouldn’t be here.”

“Okay. But we’ve got other things to do today.”

He scowled and chunked his spade into the soft earth.

It looked like a mast. Complete with sail.

Connected to a deck.

The Laskers invited their neighbors, and everybody dug.

The deck was part of a yacht. And the yacht was of not-inconsiderable size.

The revelation came gradually during a week’s work by a growing force of friends and high-school kids and even passers-by. The shark’s fin appeared to be a decorative piece atop one of two masts.

The yacht itself was a substantial piece of marine architecture, complete with pilothouse and cabins and full rigging. They hauled it out of the ground and laid it on its side, propping it up with stacks of cinder blocks. Lasker’s younger son, Jerry, played a hose on it. And as the muck washed away they saw bright scarlet paint and creamy white inboard paneling and lush pine-colored decks. The water created a fine spray where it struck the hull. Cables dangled from the starboard side, front and rear. Mooring cables, probably.

With every hour the crowd grew.

Betty Kausner touched the keel once or twice, tentatively, as though it might be hot.

“It’s fiberglass, I think,” said her husband, Phil.

Jack Wendell stood off to one side, hands on his hips, staring. “I don’t think so,” Jack said. He’d been in the Navy once. “It doesn’t feel like fiberglass,” he said.

“Tom.” Betty Kausner’s eyes found Lasker. “Whose boat is it?”

Lasker had no idea. The boat was gorgeous. It gleamed in the shrunken Dakota sun.

At least once every few minutes, someone asked whether it was a joke.

Lasker could think of only one reason someone would bury a boat like this, and that was that it had something to do with drugs. He fully expected to find bodies in it, and, when they went inside, he peeked reluctantly in each cabin.

He was gratified to find nothing amiss.

The boat looked different from anything Lasker had seen before, although he couldn’t have said why. It might have been, that first morning, the shifting texture of the light beneath dark passing clouds. It might have been the proportion of bow to stern, of tiller to mainmast. It might have been some subtle set of numbers in the geometry of the craft.

Will glanced toward the east, in the general direction of the Red River of the North. “It’s a long way to the water,” he said.

“It looks in good shape.” Ray Hammond, who owned the land to the east, along Route 11, scratched his head. “It looks like you could run her out tomorrow.” He touched the sails with the tip of his boot. “These might need a little soap and water, though.”

A car pulled into the driveway. Ed Patterson and his wife and five kids climbed out. Ed ran the Handy Hardware in Walhalla. He inspected the boat, shaking his head, and his wife looked at Lasker as if Lasker had family secrets that had just been exposed. The kids began chasing one another around the driveway.

Kausner had gone back to his station wagon. He returned with a tape measure. He made marks in the soil at stem and stern and measured it off. “Forty-seven feet, five inches,” he announced.

Had anyone been there with a nautical background, that person would have recognized the craft as a ketch. It had a full keel, a wide beam (just under seventeen feet), a full underbody, and a graceful turn to the bilge. Waist-high bulwarks surrounded the deck, tapering toward the bow. There were two steering stations, one in the cockpit and a secondary one inside the pilothouse, just aft of the beam. Air scoops opened out to port and starboard.

The only visible damage to the craft was a broken propeller shaft.

They took down the sails, washed them, and hung them in the basement to dry. Lasker removed the mooring cables, cleaned them, and put them in the barn.

It took two more days to clear out the belowdecks area.

There were two cabins, a galley, and a washroom.

The cabins were unremarkable. There was a table in each, a scattering of chairs, and two bunks. Several empty cabinets were built into rough-hewn bulkheads.

The galley had a refrigerator, a bank of devices that might have been microwave ovens, and liquid dispensers. But symbols on the microwaves and in the refrigerator were unfamiliar. The washroom had a shower and a washbasin and the oddest-looking toilet Lasker had ever seen: It was low and squat and had neither a seat nor a cover. Again, they found writing no one could identify.

“It’s spooky,” he told Ginny that first evening after they’d looked belowdecks. The small crowd had broken up after a while and drifted away, leaving Lasker wondering how the boat had got into the hillside. What had Will said? It’s a long way to the water.

After dinner he looked at the yacht through the windows over the kitchen sink. It gleamed in the moonlight.

“You okay?” Ginny asked.

“I wish I knew what it was. Where it came from.”

She offered him a piece of lemon meringue pie. “Must have been your father,” she said. “Who else could it have been?”

Later, while she read, he put on his jacket and went out.

Fort Moxie lent itself to timelessness. There were no major renovation projects, no vast cultural shifts imposed by changing technology, no influxes of strangers, no social engineering. The town and the broad prairie in which it rested were caught in a kind of time warp. It was a place where Harry Truman was still president. Where people still liked one another, and crime was virtually unknown. The last felony in Fort Moxie had occurred in 1934, when Bugsy Moran shot his way through the border station.

In all, it was a stable place to live, a good place to rear kids.

The plain stretched out forever. It had been the basin for Lake Agassiz, the inland sea whose surface area had been broader than that of the modern Great Lakes combined.

Agassiz.

Long gone now. He looked west toward the ridge at its old coastline. Not much more than a wrinkle in the plain. An inglorious end. He’d flown over it many times, pointing it out to his boys. He wanted them to love the place as he did.

Ben at Ten, KLMR-TV, Grand Forks, 10:26 P.M., October 18.

Markey: We’ve got a strange story out of Fort Moxie tonight, Julie. They’ve found a yacht in a wheat patch.

Hawkins: (Smiling) A yacht in a wheat patch?

(Cut to long shot of Fort Moxie; pan out across prairie, close in on windbreak and farm buildings)

Markey: Anybody out there misplace a sailboat? There’s a farmer up near the border who’s scratching his head tonight. Carole Jensen reports.

(Cut to long shot of yacht and spectators; close-up on Jensen)

Jensen: Ben, this is Carole Jensen at the Tom Lasker farm in Cavalier County.

(Cut to Lasker)

That is a beautiful yacht, Mr. Lasker. Are you really trying to tell us somebody buried this on your farm?

Lasker: Yes, I am, Carole. Right up there. (Pointing)That’s land I’d held out through the last planting season. We’re going to plant wheat in the spring. But I needed a system that would pump water uphill. So we were burying pipes, and there it was.

Jensen: The yacht?

Lasker: Yes.

(Angle shot to emphasize the dimensions of the boat)

Jensen: Was it all buried? Or just part of it?

Lasker: All of it.

Jensen: Mr. Lasker, who would leave something like this on your land?

Lasker: Carole, I haven’t a clue.

Jensen: (Turning full face) Well, there you have it, Ben. I wonder what else is lying around the Red River Valley. We might want to pay a little more attention when we put the begonias in next spring. This is Carole Jensen reporting from the Lasker farm near Fort Moxie.

(Stage shot)

Markey: And that’s a wrap for your news team. Good night, Julie.

Hawkins: Good night, Ben. (Full face to camera) Good night, folks. We’ll see you tomorrow at ten. Late Edition is next.

The number of visitors swelled considerably the day after Lasker’s boat made Ben at Ten, which is to say there were seldom fewer than a half-dozen people and sometimes as many as twenty. The kids took to selling coffee and sweet rolls and turned a nice profit right from the beginning.

Hal Riordan, who owned the Fort Moxie lumberyard, showed up. He wandered through the cabins, where the Laskers had installed a battery-powered heater. He peered closely at the hull and at the masts, and he finally arrived at Lasker’s front door. “Something you got to see,” he said, leading the way back to the boat. Hal had been old when Lasker was in school; his hair, gray in those days, was now silver. He was tall and methodical, a man who would not go to the bathroom without careful consideration. “This is very odd, Tom,” he said.

“What’s the matter?” asked Lasker.

“Take a look where the mast is joined to the cabin roof.”

Lasker did. “What about it?”

“It’s all one piece. The mast should have been manufactured separately, I would think. And then bolted down. Everything here looks as if it came out of a single mold.”

Riordan was right: there were no fittings, no screws, nothing. Lasker grunted, not knowing what to say.

In the morning Lasker leased a trailer and brought in a contractor from Grand Forks to lift the yacht onto it and move it close to the barn.

The crowd was growing every day. “You ought to charge admission,” suggested Frank Moll, an ex-mayor and retired customs officer. “You got people coming in all the way from Fargo.” Moll was easygoing, bearded, short, strongly built. He was one of Lasker’s old drinking buddies.

“What do you make of it, Frank?” he asked. They were standing in the driveway, watching Ginny and Moll’s wife, Peg, try to direct traffic.

Moll looked at him, looked at the boat. “You really don’t know how this got here, Tom?” There was an accusation in his tone.

“No.” With exasperation. “I really don’t.”

Moll shook his head. “Anybody else, Tom,” he said, “I’d say it’s a hoax.”

“No hoax.”

“Okay. I don’t know where that leaves you. The boat looks to be in good shape. So it was buried recently. When could that have happened?”

“I don’t know. They couldn’t have done it without tearing up the area.” He was squinting at the ridge, shielding his eyes. “I don’t see how it could have happened.”

“Thing that baffles me,” said Moll, “is why. Why would anyone put a boat like this in the ground? That thing must be worth half a million dollars.” He folded his arms and let his gaze rest on the yacht. It was close to the house now, just off the driveway, mounted on the trailer. “It’s a homebuilt job, by the way.”

“How do you know?”

“Easy.” He pointed at the stern. “No hull identification number. It would be in raised lettering, like the VIN on your car.” He shrugged. “It’s not there.”

“Maybe this was built before hull numbers were required.”

“They’ve been mandatory for a long time.”

They hosed off the sails, which now hung just inside the barn door. They were white, the kind of white that hurts your eyes when the sun hits it. They did not look as if they’d ever been in the ground.

Lasker stood inside, out of the wind, hands in his pockets, looking at them. And it struck him for the first time that he had a serviceable boat. He’d assumed all along that someone was going to step forward and claim the thing. But on that quiet, bleak, cold Sunday, almost two weeks since they’d pulled it out of the ground, it seemed to be his. For better or worse.

Lasker had never done any sailing, except once or twice with someone else at the tiller. He squeezed his eyes shut and saw himself and Ginny gliding past the low hills of Winnipeg’s shoreline in summer, a dying sun streaking the sky.

But when he climbed the rise and looked down into the hole from which they’d taken it, peered into that open wound on the west side of his property and wondered who had put it there, a cold wind blew through his soul.

No use denying it. He was spooked.

The taffrail was supported by a series of stanchions. These also seemed not to be bolted or joined to the deck, but were rather an integral part of the whole. When, on the day before Halloween, a souvenir hunter decided to steal one, he had to saw it off. Nobody saw it happen, but Lasker responded by moving the boat into the main barn after dark each night and padlocking the door.

In mid-November Lasker was scheduled to fly the Avenger to Oklahoma City for an air show. Ginny usually went along on these occasions, riding in the gunner’s seat. But she’d had enough action for a while and announced her intention to stay home this time. Anyway, she knew the yacht was worth some money, and she didn’t like just leaving it in the barn. “Everybody in the world knows it’s here,” she told her husband.

Lasker laughed and pointed out that yachts were parked in driveways all the time and nobody ever stole one. “It’s not like a car, you know.”

She watched him fly overhead Friday afternoon. He dipped his wings, and she waved (although she knew he couldn’t see her) and went inside to tackle the laundry.

Six hours later she was relaxing in the den, watching an old Columbo, listening to the wind bleat around the house. Will was out, and Jerry was in his room playing with his computer. The occasional beeps and the rattling of the leaves were soothing, not unlike the sound of kids sleeping or the blender making milk shakes after school.

She got up during a commercial to get some popcorn. And looked out the window.

The night was moonless, but there was too much light in the curtains. She moved closer to the glass, which was permanently shut against the North Dakota climate and never opened, not even during the brief summer. The barn was slightly downhill from the house.

A soft green glow leaked through its weathered walls.

Someone was inside.