Interlude: The Mooring

The storm was due at four o’clock, and by two Nell had checked the weather app thirty-one times.

She was fourteen, and she was spending the summer with her great-uncle Brennan, who lived in a gray house on a hill above a small harbor. He was a retired harbor master with a white beard and a habit of saying very little. Nell had come because her parents thought the sea air would be good for her. What they meant, though nobody had said it, was that she needed a rest from her own head.

She stood on the porch holding her phone and watching the sky, which was a heavy, bruised yellow. The bay below was dotted with boats on their moorings, sixty or seventy of them, bobbing gently with their bows into the wind. Every few minutes the radar on her phone showed the green and orange mass sliding closer.

“It’s going to be really bad,” she said, to nobody in particular. “It says forty-knot gusts. All those boats are going to be smashed.”

Brennan was sitting in his wooden chair with a mug of tea, and he did not look at the phone. He looked at the boats.

“Come down to the water,” he said. “I’ll show you something.”

They walked down the path to the dock. The wind was picking up, and the halyards on the nearby masts were beginning to clink. Brennan stopped at the end of the dock and pointed at a blue-hulled sailboat swinging at its mooring about fifty yards out.

“What do you see?”

“A boat.”

“What’s it doing?”

Nell looked. “It’s... moving. Back and forth. And turning.”

“Aye. It’s swinging. And what’s it fastened to?”

“A rope? A chain?”

“A chain, to a block of granite on the bottom, with a bit of rope at the top. The length of the chain and the rope is what we call the scope. Do you know how much scope you need for a mooring?”

She shook her head.

“More than you’d think,” he said. “Three, four, five times the depth of the water. If you make it too short, the boat can’t move with the swell. It gets yanked at the end of its line, again and again, and in the end something breaks. The boat is not too weak. The line is too tight. A boat that’s allowed to move, to ride up and over and sideways and back, is held more securely than one that’s held tight.”

The first gust hit then, flattening the water in a long dark stripe, and the blue boat swung hard around on its chain and leaned, and then, quite calmly, righted itself and faced the wind.

“Will it hold?” Nell asked.

“It’s held for eleven years,” said Brennan. “We’ll see what the afternoon says.” He looked at her phone, which she was gripping so hard that her knuckles had gone pale. “How many times have you checked that?”

She was embarrassed. “Thirty-one.”

“And has it changed anything?”

“No.”

“No.” He nodded, as if she had given the right answer to a difficult question. “Most people in a storm tighten up. They grip everything. They check and recheck. What we teach the young ones is to let out more line.”

“How do you let out line on a thing in your head?” Nell said, before she could stop herself.

He laughed, a short crackle. “Well. You’ve said it yourself, so you must know already.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I’d say you stop holding the thought so tight. Let it swing. It’s only weather.”

The storm arrived at ten past four. They watched it from the porch, under the overhang, with the rain coming sideways across the harbor and the boats heaving at their chains. Brennan made another pot of tea. At one point a gust came that bent the trees on the headland nearly double, and Nell felt the old, familiar clench in her stomach. She thought, I’m noticing that I’m afraid. She did not know quite where the sentence had come from.

She put her phone in her back pocket.

By six the wind had dropped and the clouds had begun to split, and a long low band of gold light came across the bay. The boats rose and fell, quieter now. The blue one was where it had been that morning, swinging gently, its mast pointed at the clearing sky.

“There,” said Brennan, to nobody in particular. “All present.”

Nell thought about the chain, and the granite on the bottom, and the long loose line that let the boat move. She stayed on the porch until it was dark, and she did not check the app again.