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By Root 278 0

spend hours scraping fat off the skin with the edge of a spoon. I would soak the pelt in salt water multiple times, rinsing and draining, as I had read in one of the books, and then I’d tack it to a piece of plywood and lower it into the crawl space beneath the house where a small heater that kept the pipes from freezing would slowly dry the skin. But that night, as soon as it was dark enough so that no neighbors could see me, I loaded the skinned body back into the wheelbarrow. It was strangely lizardlike now—a bright red body with deep brown head, paws, and tail. The ribs and backbone protruded. I wheeled the carcass down the snowy path and over the cobbles to where the ice ended, freeing gentle waves, and dumped it at the edge of the surf.

In the morning, I walked down the beach to see what had become of the otter. The previous night’s high tide had rinsed the bay clean of ice. Already, I missed that blue-white moonscape. Eagles and crows had found the carcass, which had washed down the beach. As I approached, the eagles flew off but the crows stood firm, cawing irritably. When I got close, I saw that the birds had already taken the heart and guts; the otter lay empty.

Weeks later, when the skin dried, the fur was luminous. The longer guard hairs shone silver throughout the brown pelt. When stroked, the fur changed colors like the surface of the sea when wind blows against tide. For a long time, I kept it in a box beneath my bed. The pelt’s jagged edge, the nicks, remained a testament to the sense of necessity I had felt, that moment of urgent appropriation. I had taken hold, on my own, of this place.

13

TIDEPOOLS

LUMINOUS RANGE: n. The maximum distance at which a light can be seen under existing visibility conditions.

In June, when the tide dropped to its lowest level of the year, kelp fronds collapsed like dull tresses on the shoulders of the rocks. No longer suspended by water, they lay heavily heaped over one another, naked and entwined in the open air. Without water, the undersea world was suddenly subject to gravity, a force that seemed clumsy and coarse. Falling to the earth was such a mundane thing.

The sound of drying out drenched everything. It was the sound of the sea draining from rocky pools and crevices, the sound of limpets clamping down on rocks, the sound of barnacles closing up shop, like a thousand doors shutting one after another. It always seemed this world was never meant to be exposed. Never meant to feel the weight of sunlight directly upon it, never meant to be slapped open palmed by wind. Such was the exile of low tide. Forgotten for hours by the sea, this margin, this extraordinary edge—it was a coyote’s heaven, an oystercatcher’s dream.

When the moon and sun aligned with the Earth at new and full moons, they yanked on the sea in consort, tugging it out of bays and passes, snatching it from coves and shores. These minus tides came twice a month and were printed in the tide books in bright green ink. People scanned the pages for good clamming tides, generally daytime minus tides in the warm months. Green ink also signaled mediocre halibut fishing conditions, as it was harder to keep the bait on the bottom as the shifting tides dragged boats, leaving weights and lines trailing behind.

All week that month there were extremely low tides, while the moon had disappeared from a sliver to nothing. At the beach in town, a vast expanse of deliciously flat sand invited Frisbee and soccer games, gangs of dogs, a man driving golf balls from one end of the beach to the other and back again for hours. A few friends from work and I planned a short camping trip across the bay around the lowest tide at a site that was perfect for exploring rocky tidepools. There were Joel and Marla, the couple building a circular, two-story house in the hills behind town, and Dale and Sharon, who lived fifteen miles out of town. And there was Sue, a biologist who rented a small place not far from town where she lived with a gray cat that a friend had found abandoned in the woods.

We hired a boat that served