The bay scallopers leave in the dark these days.
“Let me go fetch the yacht,” Pennel says. I am tired, have not had any coffee for fear of being pointed towards the bucket as my bathroom. The adrenaline is keeping me awake.
Pennel disappears into the fog, rowing a small dingy towards his mooring. We are down at Old North Wharf, and one other boat is getting ready to leave. The boat he has had since 1978—the one he cut in half and added three feet to, the one my mother and Diane and Danny went out on back in 1981—slides quietly into the slip. The tide is high now, but it won’t be when we get back.
“Tie back your hair, and wear a hat you can wash,” Sharon tells me the night before.I am worried about the smell clinging to me.
I have watched Pennel and Sharon throughout the winter, occasionally they depart as I am leaving the island on the 6:30 ferry, dawn a long way off, then closer, then boom, we change the clocks and the farmers and fisherman are all back to where they started months ago.
Pennel kicks the engine into gear and we start moving fast, heading easterly into the upper harbor. The moon is out, a torch tangled in the fog.
“Looks like we’ll be flying on instruments today,” Pennel says. It’ll burn off by the time the rest of the world is awake. We keep moving past these land masses that I almost recognize but not quite. Good to know this place can still surprise me.
Slowly, the world comes into focus as dawn breaks and the sun climbs ever higher. It starts to feel almost warm, the wind is down today. I’m lucky, I know it, the nicest day of the season, not like in the middle of winter when boats had to push through harbor ice.
The dredges all go overboard and we tow for a while until, what, exactly? Pennel checks the instruments and looks at the depth and pulls on a rope and then another rope, and eventually something tells him that the dredges are ready to be pulled up. This quickly becomes my favorite part, waiting for each dredge to be pulled up by the winch.
“Sounds good,” Pennel says, as he empties the dredge and the sea floor is revealed to us. Sounds like scallops, shells jingling in the net, mixed in with all sorts of other things. This is my job, to help cull, but I cannot move as fast as he can. I spend a little too much time considering each scallop, looking for those of legal size, looking for a growth ring. It is difficult with the ones that are covered in mud, and you have to feel instead. Which is tricky with thick rubber gloves. I figure out a system, at least I think I do, at least, my work does not have to be double checked too much. The trick is to think a little less.
“Hard work doesn’t talk back,” Dale Rutherford once told me.
The scallops do, though. They chatter to one another, slowly opening and closing their shells. Their hundreds of blue eyes stare up at me.
“Maybe I’ll see you next year,” I say, to the seed scallops, who tumble happily overboard, spared.
