High Tide

An Orchard Point Legend

The morning of The Leaving, Petra watched her new neighbors load their cars with efficiency. This was a rehearsed ritual.

No one spoke. No one made eye contact. They moved with a quiet choreography. Coolers into trunks, dogs leashed, and their children lifted into backseats still in their pajamas. By seven a.m., half of Orchard Point was gone.

Petra moved here in February. Off-season and charmed by the gray light. The way the sea came right up to the edge of town held an old world enchantment. Right out of a storybook.

She'd asked around about The Leaving when she first heard it mentioned, casually, at the hardware store. Her curiosity was met with the same mild deflection every time.

Old custom.

Town tradition.

You don't have to worry about it.

She was worrying now.

By noon, Orchard Point belonged to the gulls and the old-timers. She could see Elspeth Wilson on her porch across the road. Shelling beans into a colander with an unhurried posture. Elspeth was eighty-something and had lived in Orchard Point her entire life. Her family had fished these waters for four generations. Certainly she knew about this tradition?

Petra crossed the road.

“You could still go,” Elspeth said, before Petra reached the steps.

“I want to understand why.”

“That's a different thing.”

“I know.”

Elspeth looked at her for a long moment. Then she set the colander on the porch rail. “Sit down. I'll only say it once.”

She looked at Petra with indifference on her face.

“The people who first settled this coast found tidepools full of things that didn't belong. Formations of mineral and organism so tangled together that no one could say where the rock ended and the living began. The water ran warmer than it should. The kelp grew in shapes that the older settlers' grandmothers called by the hair of something sleeping.

They fished the bay anyway. The bay was generous. The bay gave and gave.

And every year, on the longest tide of August, the bay asked for the quiet of an empty shore. That was all.

Vacate the coast by sunrise, return after dark. Leave the beach to itself for one day.

The first settlers tried to stay, once. Ignoring the request.”

Elspeth picked up a bean pod, split it with her thumbnail. “There were nine of them. Come morning, there were six. But they weren't — right. Couldn't say what they'd seen. Couldn't say much of anything.” She dropped the beans into the colander one by one, soft as a counted prayer. “We don't ask what happens on the beach. We just leave.”

Petra went back to her cottage. She told herself she was packing a bag. In case. This was a silly ritual & folklore. Right?

She sat on her porch instead. Watched the tide come in. It was coming in fast. Faster than the charts said it would. The water crept up the shingle with a purposefulness. Less like physics and more like intention. The color of it was deep. The water heavier. Bearing something suspended in it that caught the light sideways.

The aroma hit around two o'clock. The smell of deep biological processes running beneath notice for ten thousand years. She remembered how the deep ocean held mysteries scientists still marveled over. Then the tidepools. She'd explored them in May, delighted by their miniature worlds. She'd taken photos of mysterious anemones. The tiny crabs and the strange coral-like formations she couldn't identify. She'd looked them up later and found nothing matching in any field guide. Had emailed a photo to a marine biologist friend in Seattle who'd written back: where did you say this was? Can I come out?

At four o'clock she heard it.

A long, slow exhalation. Almost geological in its patience. The tide had reached the high-water mark. It was simply sitting there.

Holding.

Waiting.

Petra picked up her bag and her keys and did not look at the water as she drove inland. She did not look in her rearview mirror. This felt important. In the way grandmother tossed salt over her shoulder.

You leave. You do not look back. You come home after dark and you do not ask what happened to the shore.

She was back at ten.

The tidepools were wet and rearranged. The beach smelled clean? Aggressively so.

Elspeth was on her porch, a cup of tea in hand. Indifference faded.

“Good girl,” she said, as Petra got out of her car.

Some negotiations happen below the threshold. The best thing you can do is honor the terms and not ask to see the contract.

The tide went out after midnight. Lower than predicted. Twelve feet farther. Petra could swear the tidepools looked like prints. But knew it was her brain organizing the chaos.

The bay was generous. The bay had always been generous in Orchard Point.

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Written for Macabre Monday

Summer Drive-In Community Event