Seasons' End by North Will

Author:North, Will [North, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2016-02-16T08:00:00+00:00

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YOUNG ADAM WANDERED along the beach beyond the boat ramp to the place where the sand gave way to crushed oyster shells he’d learned were ancient remnants from before the time of American settlers. It was a special place for him, a place that, on account of his discovery about it at the history museum, he liked to claim as his own. He came here often during the summer. He loved to skip oyster shells across the water and watch the boats swing out of the inner harbor where the yacht club was and beat for the open water of the outer harbor and the Sound beyond. He especially liked the sailboats—the sloops and ketches and yawls and schooner rigs. It was his older sister, Justine, who taught him how to tell one from the other and who also got him to recognize the difference between the snub-sterned newer fiberglass boats and the older wooden boats with their low, sleek cabins and graceful swan-tailed sterns arching out over the water like a second wake.

But he didn’t honestly expect to see many boats on Labor Day morning, despite the clear sky and light breeze from the north. The rich people, Justine told him, were the ones with the fancy yachts, and the rich people were leaving because the season was over. For the next ten months, those graceful boats would lay at anchor or in their berths at the club, bobbing like driftwood. It didn’t seem right to Adam; they were living things, in his mind, meant to race across the surface of the outer harbor, heeled over with the downwind rail buried in the water, sails taut and snapping, wakes frothy, like the whipped cream that came atop his hot chocolate at the Burton Coffee Stand. One day, Adam promised himself, he would have such a sailboat, and it would never be left like an orphan at a yacht club dock. He’d sail it all year. He’d call it, he decided, Silver Heels, for the froth it left behind.

In the absence of sailing craft on this Labor Day morning, young Adam attended instead to a gull busily poking among the mussels that encrusted the side of the concrete boat ramp. After a bit of jerky effort, the bird prized one mollusk free. Then, its find clutched in its beak, it rose high above the parking lot on its stiff white wings, hesitated a moment, and then dropped the shellfish to the pavement below. Immediately, it dove to the asphalt to yank the fresh meat from the shattered blue-gray shell. When it had finished, it returned to the boat dock and repeated the process.

At school, Adam’s favorite teacher had said that human beings were distinct from other living creatures because they alone made tools. But it seemed to him that the gulls on this island, at least, were clever enough to use the asphalt as a shell opener. That was pretty cool and way smart.

Much as he cherished this place, his special place, Adam knew he was hanging around here to avoid going home.

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