He thought it curious how the fog held in one place, as if an invisible wall were blocking it from coming ashore. Over his head was a cloudless sky and sunlight, out there murk. The division between the realms of the clear and the obscured was as sharp as the bifurcation in a half-moon, and he wondered what caused it. A sudden change in water temperature? In air temperature? In both? It was hard to tell the difference between air and water, what with the two elements merging seamlessly into the whiteness that erased the horizon, and the sky the same color as the dead calm sea. His father’s two-masted schooner, moored offshore near an exposed ledge, made a vivid, perfect copy of itself in the polished plane of water, only upside down. Nathaniel pulled his oilskin from his seabag, folded it to make a cushion, then squatted, braced his elbows inside his spread knees, and turned himself and the world topsy-turvy. Now the sea became the heavens and the heavens a waveless sea, while the schooner and the ledge and the cormorants perched atop the ledge appeared as reflections of their reflections. Topsy-turvy he and the world remained, until the illusion was spoiled by two harbor seals that surfaced astern of the schooner and sent ripples shoreward in sleek undulations, like the luffing of a satin sail. The reflections of rock, birds, and boat swayed and shuddered, testifying to what was object and what was image, to what was sky and what was ocean. Gravity, that most unambiguous of the world’s forces, also would not be deceived; blood rushed to Nathaniel’s head and told him which way was up.

He lowered his legs slowly and stood and laid his hand against a piling to steady himself. The water below, with the reflections of snail-encrusted pilings angling off into the depths, wasn’t gray, as in the distance, but adamant green, and as cold as it looked. Cold enough even in early summer to kill a man in no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. His father, that nearly infallible authority on all things maritime, had seen it happen years ago, when a sailor on his ship fell from a yardarm and was plucked out less than a quarter of an hour later, bluefaced and as dead as Julius Caesar. Nathaniel watched the seals swimming along in their blubbery insulation, dark heads throwing off sparkles of pearlescent light. Then, in a synchronized arching of glossy backs, they dove out of sight. He put the oilskin back into the seabag, which had his first name inked on it to distinguish it from his brothers’, and sat down and dropped it into the dory. She was twelve feet long, with white lapstrake, and her rail, oars, and thwarts gleamed under new coats of varnish.