The Edge of Maine Read Online Free Page A

everything, to give up, as with a hopeless puzzle…. I had the greatest difficulty not praying and finally I did, flying in the noisy darkness, desperate for the sight of a city or anything that would give me my position.
    Salter found in his map case a booklet, “What to Do if Lost,” which he tried to read by flashlight. A half dozen steps were listed, to be performed in sequence. Some he had already tried, he thought, and in the dark, running out of fuel, he lost faith in the procedure. This was not bobbing on a gray ocean. This would end sooner than later. And it did, with Salter crash-landing on a field and onto the front porch of a house in Great, Massachusetts. *
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    P RISCILLA HEARD SOMETHING FIRST. T HEN I IMAGINED I heard something and throttled back. We all cupped our ears, turning this way and that. Listening, Priscilla held her finger to her lips. Then we all heard it, a low moan, like the complaint of someone left alone with a bellyache. The resigned lament would come and go. For an hour we sought it, steering box courses as I tried for a change to follow some conventional navigational routine. This required discipline, or ignorance: Often the course I was running three minutes to each leg would seem to take us away from the breathy warning signal, or perhaps this was the effect of a slight wind shift, or of the buoy (if that’s what it was) ceasing to rock in those flat seas, or of an object—an oil tanker, let’s imagine—coming between the buoy and us, or … who knew? Then it appeared and once we saw it, we couldn’t imagine not having seen it. Reason told me that the whistle marked “SL” had not been placed to tell us where we were but to mark a hazard. Nick urged me to creep up on it and I did, because I was stalking the whistle, feared I’d spook it. But it stayed put, fifty feet off, anchored. I envied it. Now it groaned frankly, excessively.
    Justin took the helm and circled the mark while I went below to hail the Coast Guard on Channel 16. My voice did not reassure me. I had once had a bad stutter, and it had come back. Was there an “SL,” black and white, n-n-n-n-ear Mon-hee-hee-hah-heh-huh-hegan?
    That was a negative, skipper. We were circling a buoy on the Seal Ledges, a little east of Large Green Island, fourteen nautical miles east-northeast of Monhegan, which we had missed by a mile, exactly. We were in bad water, with a foot between our keel and a kelpy rock slab, and the Coast Guard suggested we get ourselves out of there, “with all due haste,” to Matinicus Island, three miles southeast. Looking back, I guess we should have felt rescued. But our least desired course that afternoon was a course to seaward that would leave behind us the one thing we knew, yonder whining whistle. The weather radio was undecided between thunderstorms and dense fog, growing denser. We went for Matinicus and its little sister a bit seaward—Ragged—trying to pick up a red nun buoy on the Foster Ledges, R10, 155 degrees, a mile and eight-tenths, twenty minutes or so distant. No bells or whistles enhanced R10, and we missed it; it could have been thirty feet from us and we’d have missed it. We should have been near Matinicus. Priscilla was reading: “The region should be approached with caution. There are no really snug harbors … unmarked dangers are frequent, and tides are swift. In fog or storm the careless or inexperienced can get into real trouble.”
    Justin was on the bowsprit, shouting, “Look at those thunderclouds!”
    I looked up, saw black, smelled Christmas. Pines on a cliff, trailing beards of gray mist. And then we were among rocks, and a rocky beach materialized yards ahead. I swung the wheel over while Nick yelled directions, and we didn’t grind out on a ledge or tear open the hull, or even stub our toe. It was high tide.
    We anchored. I got on the radio: “Anybody on Ragged Island or Matinicus.