His chart had shown a series of locks close together but they didn’t show altitude and they didn’t show how confusing things could get when distances have been miscalculated and you are running late and are exhausted. It wasn’t until he was actually in the locks that danger was apparent as he tried to sort out green lights and red lights and white lights and lights of locktenders' houses and lights of other boats coming the other way and lights of bridges and abutments and God knows what else was out there in that black that he didn’t want to hit in the middle of the darkness or go aground either. He’d never seen them before and it was a tense experience, and it was amidst all this tension that he seemed to remember seeing her on another boat.
They were descending out of the sky. Not just thirty or forty or fifty feet but hundreds of feet. Their boats were coming down, down through the night out of the sky where they had been all this time without their knowing it. When the last gate opened up from the last lock they looked on a dark oily river. The river flowed by a huge construction of girders toward a loom of light in the distance. That was Troy and his boat moved toward it until the swirl of the confluence of the rivers caught it and the boat yawed quickly. Then with the engine at full throttle he angled against the current across the river to a floating dock on the far side.
We have four-foot tides here, the dock attendant said.
Tides! he had thought. That meant sea-level. It meant that all the inland man-made locks were gone. Now only the passage of the moon over the ocean controlled the rise and fall of the boat. All the way to Kingston this feeling of being connected without barriers to the ocean gave him a huge new feeling of space.
The space was really what this sailing was all about and this evening at a bar next to the dock he had tried to talk about it to Rigel and Capella. Rigel seemed tired and preoccupied and uninterested, but Bill Capella, who was his crewman, was full of enthusiasm and seemed to know.
Like at Oswego, Capella said, all that time we were waiting for the locks to open, crying about how terrible it was we couldn’t get going, we were having the time of our lives.
Phædrus had met Rigel and Capella when rain from a September hurricane caused floods to break through canal walls and submerge buoys and jam locks with debris so that the entire canal had to be closed for two weeks. Boats heading south from the Great Lakes were tied up and their crewmen had nothing to do. Suddenly a space was created in everyone’s lives. An unexpected gap of time had opened up. The reaction of everyone at first was frustration. To sit around and do nothing, that was just terrible. The yachtsmen had been busy about their own private cruises not really wanting very much to speak to anyone else, but now they had nothing better to do than sit around on their boats and talk to each other day after day after day. Not trivially. In depth. Soon everyone was visiting somebody on somebody else’s boat. Parties broke out everywhere, simultaneously, all night long. Townspeople took an interest in the jam-up of boats, and some of them became acquainted with the sailors. Not trivially. In depth. And more parties broke out.
And so this catastrophe, this disaster that everyone originally bewailed, turned out to be exactly as Capella described it. Everyone was actually having the time of their lives. The thing that was making them so happy was the space.
Except for Rigel and Capella and Phædrus the tavern had been almost empty. It was just a small place with a few pool tables at the far room, a bar in the center opposite the door and a lot of dingy tables at their own end. It omitted all appearances of style. And yet the feelings were good. It didn’t intrude on your space. That’s what did it. It was just a bar being a bar without any big ideas.
I think it’s the space that does it, he’d said to Rigel.
What do you mean? Rigel asked.
About the space?
Rigel was squinting at him. Despite Rigel’s jaunty striped shirt and knit sailor’s cap he seemed unhappy about something he wasn’t talking about. Maybe it was that his whole purpose for this trip was to sell his boat down in Connecticut.
So as not to get into an argument Phædrus had told Rigel carefully, I think what we’re buying with these boats is space, nothingness, emptiness… huge sweeps of open water… and sweeps of time with nothing to do… That’s worth a lot of money. You can’t hardly find that stuff any more.
Shut yourself up in a room and lock the door, Rigel had said.
That doesn’t work, he had answered. The phone rings.
Don’t answer.
UPS knocks at the front door.
How often? You don’t have to answer.
Rigel was just looking for something to argue about. Capella joined in for the fun of it. The neighbors will take it, Capella said.
Then the kids will come home and turn up the TV.
Tell them to turn it down, Capella said.
Then you’re out of the room.
OK, then just ignore them, Capella said.
OK, all right, fine. Now. What happens to someone who sits in a locked room and doesn’t answer the phone, and refuses to come out when someone is knocking at the front door, even when the kids are home and have turned up the TV?
They thought about it and finally smiled a little.
The bartender’s face, when they had come in, had been completely bored. He had hardly any business. But since they had arrived four or five more customers had come in. He was talking to two of them, old customers it looked like, relaxed and used to the place. Two others were holding pool cues, apparently from some tables in an adjoining room.
There isn’t any space, Rigel said. He still wanted to quarrel. If you were from here you’d know that.
What do you mean?
There’s no space here, Rigel repeated. It’s all crowded with history. It’s all dead now but if you knew this region you’d see there’s no space. It’s full of old secrets. Everyone covers up around here.
He asked Rigel, What secrets?
Nothing’s the way it seems, Rigel said. This little creek we’re on here, do you know where it leads? You wouldn’t think it goes back more than a few hundred yards after it completes that turn back there, would you? How far would you guess you could go, on this little tiny creek here, before it stops?
Phædrus guessed twenty miles.
Rigel smiled. In the old days, you’d go forever, he said. It goes all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. People don’t know that any more. It goes behind the whole state of New Jersey. It used to connect to a canal that went over the mountains and down into the Delaware. They used to run coal through here on barges all the way from Pennsylvania. My great-grandfather was in that business. He had money invested in all sorts of enterprises around here. Did well at it, too.
So your family comes from around here, Phædrus said.
Since just after the Revolution, Rigel said. They didn’t move from here until about thirty years ago.