Tides surround us. Most know they have something to do with the moon. But it’s more complicated than that. Fifteen years ago I dedicated my life to demystifying what I had taken for granted all my life.
Having grown up surfing, diving, and sailing on the Pacific coast, I always had a tide chart in my back pocket. I often consulted it to know the best time to go out. My favorite surf breaks worked better at the right tide (sometimes low and sometimes high) and certain dive locations were inaccessible when tidal currents were running strong. When I launched my first sailboat, one I had built in my early twenties in Portland, Oregon, I studied the tides carefully before crossing the Columbia River bar and heading offshore. I had never crossed the bar before, but I knew its reputation as a boat-eater if caught on the wrong tide.
For most my life, watching the tide was as routine as eating or brushing my teeth. But all that changed about fifteen years ago.
In my mid-twenties, I bought a 65-foot schooner, Crusader. She was slathered in orange paint and leaked about 50 gallons a day when I found her. Perfect, I thought. I cleaned her up, filled the galley with the smell of good coffee, and started a non-profit educational organization. We were based in Seattle, and each summer sailed north to Hadai Gwaii and SE Alaska. We hired artists, scientists, photographers, and writers to come aboard and teach weeklong seminars. Among them were Peter Matthiessen, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, Gretel Ehrlich, Lynn Margulis, James Hillman, and Art Wolfe. In our heyday, between 1984 and 1991, we had back-to-back seminars seven months of the year.
In the late summer of 1990 we were returning from the outer coast of Chichigof Island, where anthropologist and writer Richard Nelson was teaching a seminar called “Nature, Culture and World View.” We had anchored for the night in Kalinin Bay, on the north tip of Kruzof Island. The next day we planned to sail into Sitka to finish the trip. But a gale blew up in the night. Awakened, I pulled on my rubber boots and climbed on deck to make sure everything was okay. It wasn’t. We had dragged anchor across the bay and were aground in the mud. With a lump in my throat, I grabbed the tide chart. If the tide was low and about to turn, I’d be in luck. The boat would re-float easily with the flood. But if the tide was high and on its way down, it’d be disastrous. With the large Alaskan tides, the water could literally disappear and leave Crusader stuck in the mud.
I read the chart five or six times in disbelief. Really? It was the worst possible timing. We were at the top of the flood, near slack water. In the next six hours, the tide would drop 12 feet.
I woke the crew and within an hour we had everyone off the boat, huddling under a tarp in a very cold, stormy, Alaskan morning. Richard Nelson kept a loaded rifle on hand in case of bears.
In the next six hours the boat went down like a fatally wounded animal, first to her knees, then all fours, and finally rolling onto her side. She burrowed so deeply into the mud that she didn’t want to re-float with the incoming tide. She filled with water, to the point where my crew and I were swimming inside the cabins, hopelessly trying to salvage valuables. The engine was a tractor-size red diesel. I watched the tide lap at its oil pan, imagining how, once the water was gone, I could drain the contaminated oil and refill with new. But then the tide rose over the batteries, the injectors, and finally swallowed the whole red mass.
Food and books, once dry and neatly in place, swelled and floated. As the morning wore on, I watched bananas, plums, and apples float by, and rice, like herring balls, swirling near the quarter births. And books — Jesus the books! — swollen to double size, drifting here and there. I’ll never forget the titles that floated by: Ed Rickett’s Between Pacific Tides; Robert Bly’s When Sleepers Awake; Ram Dass’s How Can I Help? At one point one of our crew, Lela Hilton, managed a smile as she held up a soaked copy of Maxine Cumin’s In Deep.
Crusader did eventually float with the incoming tide, and we miraculously got her back in shape to sail off on the next seminar a few day’s later.
I had bailed the tide out of Crusader’s cabins, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. I wanted to know more than what the tide chart told me. What accounted for the variations in height from one bay to another or the fact that some places have two tides a day and some have six? Like most people, I knew the moon had something to do with it, but what exactly? I figured I’d learn what there was to know by reading a book or two. But the more I read, the more complex, mysterious, and poetic the tides became. One book turned into ten, and ten turned into three hundred. I wrote a piece on NW coast tides for Orion Magazine in the mid-nineties, then went to China under contract with Natural History Magazine to write about the Qiantang tidal bore, a tide that charges upriver in the form of a wave (this one reaching twenty-five feet!). I stopped writing for a while. Got married and had a child. But the tide still wasn’t out of my head.
About ten years ago I committed to writing Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean. I took another dive into the research, this time following my nose into subjects like astrology, chronobiology (the study of internal clocks), the history of science and philosophy and sailing. I read biographies of the great science thinkers — Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Haley, Newton, and others. I even read books on the social life of London during the 17th century (Newton’s time), the history of coffee houses, book printing, and coal. And I traveled. In the Arctic, I shimmied under the ice with an Inuit elder, hunting for mussels in the womblike cavities left behind by a low tide. In France, I interviewed the monks that live in the tide-wrapped monastery of Mont St. Michel. I went to Panama, Italy, Chile, the Bay of Fundy, Scotland, England, and British Columbia – all to see the world’s most dramatic tides at play. I wrote the book and still – still – the tide’s not out of my head.
Adapted from Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean (Trinity University Press; February 2017) © Jonathan White
