The boat had broken free and drifted into a small cove that lay before the jetty, the last stop before crushing waves spat out whatever escaped to the open sea.
At low tide there was a crescent shaped beach where the sea lions sometimes came to sleep off a successful lunch. Black waves now lapped against a rocky slope. The beach was gone. When Ann was younger she would spend hours watching sea lions slog around on their bellies. Belching and barking, trading stories and frequently acting out slapstick scenes. Like the elk, they also had a presence about them that drew her in, although to entirely different places. She’d decided long ago that they must have given us their sense of humor.
As she got to the end of the bank she noticed the boat was being circled by driftwood and plastic bottles. From a distance it had looked much closer to shore.
You can’t get back in the water again. You just got dry.
She combed the shore for anything that might be useful, couldn’t find any rope or wire to make a catch-line. It was looking hopeless. Either she waded out into the cold water or she walked back the way she’d just come.
What are you going to do now?
She sat on a rock and studied the boat for several minutes, noticing how it had come closer to shore and then circled back around along the edge of a ridge-backed current moving swiftly past. While she watched, several driftwood logs spun off from the boat-nucleus and got swept up by a stronger current, the bay’s conduit to the open sea. It would only be a matter of time, she realized, before the boat would also complete a final circuit in the cove before escaping.
If she made it inside the boat, there wouldn’t be a lot of time for her get the motor started. Assuming that the motor would start. She never trusted gas engines much, had never developed a knack for them.
Because her leg burned so much from the saltwater, she almost welcomed the cold. She waded out toward the boat, afraid the next step could be a drop off into far deeper water. Her breath quickened and she began to shiver. She thought she saw some seals raise their heads to watch her.
This is suicide and you know it.
When the water reached chest height, she could no longer feel her feet, didn’t even know if she was drifting over deeper water or not. Then all of a sudden she felt as if something were pulling her straight out to the main current.
This is it. This is how you’re going to die. You’ll become one of those fog ghosts for sure.
The boat was behind her now, closer to shore than she was. She breast stroked as hard as she could to go back, but her arms went numb. And then she remembered she wasn’t alone, that she was accompanied by an entourage of circling drift wood. When she kicked toward one log to grab hold of it, her eddy sent it out into the main current where it abruptly turned and floated out of sight.