Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [82]
The young white meandered west, winding around the mouths of creeks and rivers and harbors, hugging the tortuous shore, traveling farther from the life-giving sea. Familiar prey was gone, and the shark became further weakened. Sluggishness heightened its urgency to feed. Confusion or sluggishness was certain death.
The shark was neither the first nor last sea creature to become disoriented on the labyrinthine shore of Sandy Hook Bay. Seventy-eight summers later, in 1994, a pod of dolphins left the Atlantic side of Sandy Hook just as the shark had done, and, rounding into Sandy Hook Bay, instinctively following the coast, swam up the Shrewsbury River. All summer they frolicked and fed in the shallow waters of the river, but come January, as temperatures dropped to freezing on the Shrewsbury, three of the dolphins were trapped, desperately hurtling their gleaming gray bodies through the ice to make breathing holes. At last a Coast Guard vessel enticed them to swim to within two miles of the mouth of the river that led to the bay and then to the freedom of the sea. But the dolphins circled in confusion and, instinctively heading south, turned back up the ice-choked river, where they perished.
The great white swam west, instinctively trying to find its way back to the sea but traveling ever more distant from it. It passed the Shrewsbury River, the dolphin's downfall, and then Ware Creek and Belford Harbor and Pewes Creek as it sluiced from the marsh. The coast was swampy and quiet and strung with the small towns of Atlantic Highlands, Port Monmouth, and Keansburg. Two hundred feet above sea level, at Atlantic Highlands, shone the double lights of the Twin Light of Navesink, the country's most powerful lighthouse, beaming twenty miles across the bay.
Around the promontory of Point Comfort, the shark dropped south into a broad natural harbor of windswept marshland, climbed northerly out of the harbor past tiny Flat Creek and East Creek, and swam around another promontory, Conaskonk Point, into Raritan Bay. Conaskonk Point opened wide to Keyport Harbor approximately half a mile across, and the shark followed the line of the harbor south, past the town of Keyport, following the coast. But the coastline of Keyport Harbor did not sweep around seamlessly back to Raritan Bay. Keyport Harbor funneled into a cut some seven hundred and fifty feet wide, narrowing again to the mouth of Matawan Creek, a wide tidal creek, two hundred feet across. Matawan Creek was wide enough for a fish inclined to follow the coast to mistake it for the shoreline, and so on that morning, the great white shark hewed to the coast and turned into the creek, surely unaware it had left Raritan Bay.
The shark swept into the creek on the high tide, surging in on currents of saltwater. Yet not far from the mouth of the creek, the inland waterway dramatically narrowed like an inverted telescope, tapering down from two hundred feet across to a hundred to fifty to barely twenty. Within a few sweeps of its powerful tail the shark entered a diminishing world, murky and sluicing with fresh water, and it grew unsettled.
The big fish was forced to swim in the deeper middle of the creek, a narrow navigable channel, a tighter trap. The creek was only eight feet deep at high tide and sank to one foot at low tide, when the local farmers and fishermen went clamming. This was a situation it had never encountered before. The world it was born into had no walls or edges. The sea was forever. There were only two corners, two boundaries: the beach and the bottom. In brackish water, with the bottom and sides closing in, the shark may have experienced a kind of claustrophobia, shark biologists speculate. By the time the shark became aware of