FOR JOHN PEYTON WARE

Born June 20, 1921. Crossed the bar, March 30, 1999.

All the tempestuous passions of mankind’s young days, the love of loot and the love of glory, the love of adventure and the love of danger, with the great love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power, have passed like images reflected from a mirror, leaving no record upon the mysterious face of the sea. Impenetrable and heartless, the sea has given nothing of itself to the suitors for its precarious favours. Unlike the earth, it cannot be subjugated at any cost of patience and toil. For all its fascination that has lured so many to a violent death, its immensity has never been loved as the mountains, the plains, the desert itself, have been loved.

JOSEPH CONRAD

Part One

THE BAYS OF MAINE

1

THE SEA was gray that morning, and as smooth as the surface of an eye. Eastward, the edge of the earth had been brought miles closer to shore by a fog that had drifted in during the night as far as the mouth of the bay. There it stopped, neither advancing nor retreating, and the out islands and all that lay around them and beyond them were held in a windowless dungeon of vapor. From the dock in front of his family’s house on the mainland, Nathaniel could not see even a suggestion of the islands’ spruce steeples; nor of the granite plinths and ledges that usually showed through the trees. Forest and rock seemed to have been dissolved, made one with the mist that also cloaked the lighthouses and the tall crucifixes of the stone drogers, waiting at anchor or at the quarry wharves for the fog to lift and a fair wind to bear them down the long roads of the ocean to Boston, with paving blocks or a carved hero’s pedestal, to Charleston with Corinthian pillars to glorify a city hall, to New York with polished slabs to face the new buildings rising into the skies of the new century. He knew the ships were there because he heard their bells, clanging five seconds each minute to mark their anchorages. Other sounds were mixed in with the bells, and he listened like a blind man at a discordant symphony, identifying each thing and its location by the noise it made. That shrill piping—the steam ferry that serviced the islands. That sad, lost bleat—a doryman cranking his handheld horn. That di-tonal moan far off—a lighthouse …