The Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book is like a Farmers’ Almanac
for...
The Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book is like a Farmers’ Almanac
for East Coast sailors. An annual guide, it’s full of tables, charts, and lists
of lighthouses, buoys, currents, tides. Short articles and stories discuss
maritime history, nautical astronomy, fishing tips. Its cover is every year an
unmistakable yellow, a yellow that speaks to a beam of light through fog, of the
first lick of sun rising over the horizon. I’ve heard my friend Jenny, who
recently took helm of the book along with her husband Peter, describe the color of an old farmhouse as
Eldridge yellow.
I spent some hours yesterday helping Jenny with the book. We
sat at her dining room table as fans hummed and a tired air conditioner clicked
and cooled in the window. Her two dogs lay splayed, bellies up, on pillows
nearby, and her small daughter ate cantaloupe in the kitchen with a sitter.
Hottest day of summer so far, and you could feel the heat accumulating outside.
I don’t know much about the ocean. I swim in it, poorly,
enthusiastically. It is, as a close friend said the other night on the phone, a
guaranteed re-setter: impossible to see it, be in it, and not be altered for it.
Last summer, which was so bad, I would go north to the beach and sit and watch the
water move. The waves don’t care, I
thought and felt, and it was one of the few things that helped get me through. The waves don’t care. Sweat, tears, and
the sea: I’m a believer in those cures.
Jenny read times outloud, of moonrises and moonsets, of
sunrises and sunsets, and I verified that what she read from the official
government listings matched up with the version I had in front of me. I felt
the days lengthen and shorten as we moved through the months. I saw the moon swell
and vanish. The way light moves across the year! It felt like secret knowledge,
ancient, sacred. Grounding and thrilling at once. The way it feels to grow a
tomato, maybe, or have a sense of which way the wind blows. To hold this guide
is to feel in possession of something powerful, essential, and true. Shifting
planets, the sun’s sweep across the sky, the rise and fall of seas – it’s
possible to find our way by the stars, this yellow book reminds us. Lie easy
with the tide, and the waves will bring you home.
[Vincent van Gogh, Fishing Boats]
