Kids Springtide

Originally written as an adult non-fiction short story, The Return of the Springtide continues to intrigue me. While working on other writing for middle readers (grade 5-7 or so), it occurred to me that the story could be rewritten for this audience. Naturally, it would need to be substantially reworked to provide an appropriate 10-12 year old protagonist. The following is the opening two chapters of the story.

I ran up the ramp from the dock to the shore, tears streaming down my face. “Bob, where are you?” I yelled hoping that he was just out of sight. “Why didn’t you say goodbye?”

Nobody answered, and I turned, shoulders slumped and headed back down the dock to my family’s boat, the Golden Vanity. We were leaving California today on a cruise that would take years. My friend Bob was the only one of my classmates from Mrs. Ross’s 5^th grade class that had come to see me off. But then he was gone.

“Where have you been?” I nearly shouted when I saw him again through my still teary eyes.

“Oh, we just went to breakfast,” he said, “we figured you wouldn’t be leaving for awhile.”

A smile spread across my face, and we crawled into my little cabin for him to give me my “mission briefing.” Bob had written secret documents from some imaginary agency of the government. They gave me all the rules to follow on my assignment, code phrases to use in my reports to him, his “secret” address, and all sorts of official sounding stuff. In all too short a time, my parents and their friends decided that it was time to go. Bob and I said our last goodbyes and, though we wrote to each other for another year or so (official mission orders, of course), I never saw him again.

* * * * *

“Chris, you just hang out here on the dock, and Wayne and I will row out to the Springtide and bring her in.”

“Ok, John, sound fine to me,” I said, sitting down my back against a piling. The salt smell of the ocean and the rotten egg smell of the exposed mudflats drew my mind back to the day we left on the Golden Vanity. The time alone gave me a chance to recall that Bob had come back. Now it was twenty years later and I was sitting on a dock on the coast of Maine about to take another cruise. No friend to send me off this time just my boss John, and two guys from the office, Dan and Wayne, that I didn’t know. But then again this cruise was for two days rather than two years.

I stepped aboard the Springtide, a 33 foot sloop, shortly after noon on Saturday. The taste of my fish-and-chips lunch lingered in my mouth. As we loaded supplies, I felt a bit awkward, not knowing quite where to stand or what to do.

“Hey Chris, would you get those jack-lines?” the captain said.

“Huh?” I thought. “Jack-lines? I haven't ever seen or heard of them before! Or have I just forgotten?”

“Um, it’s been a long time. Maybe you could show me,” I finally said after failing to recall anything of what might be involved.

“Well, alright, I’ll do that. Here, why don’t you tie this gas can down there on the aft deck?” John said, handing me the red, 5-gallon gasoline container.

My fingers didn't seem to know how to tie knots anymore. Even the simplest double-half-hitch ended up as a deviant of its intended form. I secretly hoped that John wouldn’t notice how bad a job I’d done. I fared no better with the task of helping secure the dingy to the foredeck.

”What are those, some kind of mutant square knots?” John asked.

“I dunno. I used to be able to do this in my sleep,” I said, a little red in the face and hoped he hadn’t noticed that too.

Had I not lived and breathed the boating life for two years? Had the intervening twenty years erased everything but some idealized notion of what it meant to be at sea? Was even that memory somehow distorted by time?