Piano Tide: A Novel - Hardcover

KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE is best known for her books of nature-focused essays―Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water, winner of the 1995 Pacific Northwest Book Award; Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World, recipient of the 1999 Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award; The Pine Island Paradox, winner of the 2004 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction; Wild Comfort, finalist for the same award; and Great Tide Rising (Counterpoint, 2016).

PRELUDE
HEAVY OVERCAST. RAIN. Wind twenty knots from the southeast. The ferry plowed through the Fairweather Narrows, crowded on both sides by palisades of hemlocks and Sitka spruce. Their branches shredded the fog. A woman in a yellow slicker leaned over the rail, watching until the ship was safely past the buoy that marked a hidden shoal. Hard on the port side, so close it threw spray onto the deck, a creek poured over the broken face of a hanging glacier and twisted down an avalanche chute to the sea. In the black muck beside the creek mouth, skunk cabbage unfurled giant leaves. A bear had been through―probably night before last―trampling the skunk cabbage to dig around the roots, probing into sour mud with lips curled back and teeth reaching tentative as fingertips. Dark water had collected in the sinkholes of its front paws. To starboard, the mountains climbed up and up toward snowfields and granite crags. For three long hours, there was no evidence of humanity except for the buoys and range-markers that led the ferry along the silver sea-path between forested rocks.

So green as to be almost black at first, the forest eventually gave way to lighter green patches along the water, as if a shark had leapt up with pointed teeth to scrape away the trees, leaving only an understory of salmonberry thickets and Sitka alders―dog-hair alders, grown up thick as hairs on a dog's back after the forest was cut to stumps. Some of the cuts were bare to the mud. This, at last, was evidence of human industry. And now the town of Good River Harbor came into view at the base of the mountains.

From the distance, Good River Harbor looked like a string of gulls flying along the water below the mountain range, or a rim of barnacles just uncovered by the tide. One thing it did not look like was a town, but the town fathers could be forgiven for that. The wilderness was desperately steep; the only place to put a building was on a tidal flat that flooded twice a day. So the worthy fathers raised a boardwalk fifteen feet above high tide, a long wooden pier parallel to shore, and along its length, built their houses on pilings. Even the school and the post office were built on a rickety thicket of stilts and piers. The town couldn't be distinguished from the docks, or the docks from the town―almost everything was either tied to a dock or built on it, almost everything grew a thick beard of barnacles and blue mussels. The only structures on actual ground were the remains of an old cannery site on one end of town, the dump on the other, and a little empty cabin at Green Cove. There were no cars, but there were plenty of wheelbarrows and bikes, and a row of beached boats, some more deeply filled with greening rainwater than others, and fine skiffs and seiners nosing into the dock like suckling puppies.

The town of Good River Harbor did not have a real harbor. In fact, it didn't even have a river, and if it had, it wouldn't have been a good one, wandering through the intertidal muck. The town was named after Basil Everett Good, who arrived in 1910 with everything he owned under canvas tarps in a wooden canoe. He aimed to make a living digging clams and selling them to fishermen who happened by. He built a cabin over a stream that drained a ravine and made out all right, until he realized that the real money was not in clams after all, but in salmon. So he signed up to crew on a passing seiner and, for the proverbial bottle of whiskey, traded his cabin to a crew member who was sick of the North Pacific seas.

The town grew and shrank like the tides, as it sold and then exhausted the abundance of the land. In order of date expunged: (1) ancient yellow cedars draped in old-man's beard, (2) Sitka spruce trees six feet across, (3) sweet, feathery hemlocks three hundred years old, (4) king salmon a yard long and fat as dogs, (5) herring dripping yellow eggs, (6) cross-eyed halibut as big as the fishermen's skiffs. The sawmill closed after loggers high-graded the forest and clear-cut all the slopes accessible to logging barges. The cannery closed when the fish could not be counted on. Only forty to fifty people lived in Good River Harbor when the ferry pulled in, not counting the tourists and gunkholers, and a random seiner and his crew―maybe a dozen more souls a day.

The ferry bumped hard into the pilings, shifting the joints of the old timbers. The woman in the yellow raincoat gripped the railing. Deckhands grabbed the lines with boathooks and looped them over the bollards. Old winches cranked the boat to the dock, and the hands wrapped the lines tight over the drum. Bolts clanked and chains rumbled to lower the ferry ramp to the wharf. When the ramp hit the gangway, gulls squawked and shot into the air, as if they had been pinched.

PART ONE: PINK-SALMON TIDE
See here, the urgency of a pink salmon finally coming home. See here, salmon polished to such a sheen that even under an overcast sky the sun reflects on their flanks. They've been gone a year, chasing herring under storm-blue seas. Now they are almost home, so close they can taste it. As they circle at the mouth of the Kis'utch River, their backs darken and their tail stems flush pink. Their flanks streak with white, as if someone had grabbed them before the paint was dry. The backs of the big males grow humped. Their teeth grow long.
On the surge of the flood-tide, the fish throw themselves over the sandbar and press up the stream. In their eagerness to be home, they shoulder each other out of the way, flapping their bodies over gravel bars, swimming sometimes through water so shallow that their humps carve air. Bears wade into them. They toss fish out of the creek to eat later, or they bite out the hump or the fatty brain. More salmon press through bloodied water, like an invading army marching over its own dead.
June 15
HIGH TIDE
2:58 am 18.9
4:03 pm 16.6

LOW TIDE
9:28 am -4.0
9:47 pm 1.3

As the ferry pushed into the pilings, Lillian Mary Shaddy spread a plastic grocery bag on the bench at the top of the gangway and lowered herself to sitting. She elbowed a big-bearded man, who moved his bulk over to give her room.

"Who's the woman in the yellow raincoat?" she asked, not expecting an answer.

The woman at the rail of the ferry looked like everybody else in Good River Harbor―baseball cap, wet hair, slicker open in the rain, XtraTuf boots. But the way she was looking around, snapping her head to port, starboard―that would make her somebody new. She wasn't a tourist. A tourist would be running up and down the railing, taking pictures. She wasn't somebody's visitor, because she wasn't waving at anybody and nobody was waving at her. But she wasn't frantically checking her ticket either, so she had planned to come to odd little Good River Harbor.

Lillian tugged her raincoat closed and searched behind her for the belt. No yellow rain slicker for her. Lillian wore a regular department-store raincoat, the kind women wore in Seattle. Carefully, she tied the belt in a square knot that perched like a chipmunk in the cozy place between her bosom and her belly. She adjusted the clear plastic rain bonnet over her hair, which was that day a color called mahogany, and settled her back against the bench. On that damp morning, Lillian felt as groany-jointed as the old ferry, but it's not attractive to complain, and she didn't. She lit a cigarette instead. Smoking in the rain is one of the arts a lady acquires in Southeast Alaska, learning to hold the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger, while the rest of her fingers make a nice little tent. She leaned forward through the smoke to study the new arrival.

The woman's ponytail was knotted up and stuck through the hole in her baseball cap. Sticking out like that, it was as black and wind-smoothed as a crow's tail, and she was skittish as a crow, in fact. But she was tall and long-legged, more like a great blue heron. Whatever kind of bird she was, Lillian was not prepared to say. By this time, the new woman was down on the cargo deck, standing next to a big dog, a pile of totes, and an object wrapped in a blue tarp―a really big object, big enough to be a refrigerator or a shower stall. Lillian took a thoughtful drag on her cigarette and exhaled a long, slow river of smoke.

"The plot thickens," she said to the big man sitting next to her and elbowed him again. He scooted himself even farther away. "Hey, Tick, how about you wander down and introduce yourself. Pretend you're the chamber of commerce. Tell her welcome or something. Or pretend you're a moving company. That's good. Help her with that thing, whatever it is, and find out where's she's going." Honest to God, Lillian thought but did not say, you'd think some people had no sense of curiosity.

Tick McIver was big enough to be a moving company, but he didn't exactly look like a welcoming committee. Lillian had told him a dozen times that he should clean up a little bit―for his own good. Trim that awful orange beard. The thing looked like a stray cat sleeping on his chest. Get rid of those rubber overalls that come barely to the top of his boots. But he protested. He said he cut his overalls off because they're too short anyway, him so tall, and this way they're not always underwater, and he liked his beard, kept his chest warm and scared mice away. And that baseball cap, she'd told him, it looks like it spent the night in the bilge. Well, that's because it spent lots of nights in the bilge, he'd said back.

Tick sighed, hoisted himself to standing, and walked down the gangway to the cargo deck.