Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in The Salt Coast ·
About the Tide That Kneels
Once a year the estuary tide comes up in a kneeling shape and reads the flats for an hour, and the flats keep nothing written while she reads.
- status: disputed
They say once a year the tide comes up the salt estuary wrongways. Not in rolls, not in sheets, not the usual shove of the sea about its business, but shaped: a figure kneeling in the flat water, both knees down, back straight, head bowed along the mudflats the way a person bows to read a letter. She looks close, they say — closer than any of us has looked at anything in our lives — and she stays an hour, an hour to the minute, and then the water is water again and the flats are flats and the gulls pick up where they left off.
Nobody on the salt coast can tell you her day, and that arguing is half the legend. The samphire pickers say the first cold moon. The staithe folk say the equinox slack. The pilots say she is slant light on the mud and a tired eye after a long season, and the pilots are free to think it, and the samphire pickers are free to be polite about it, and neither lot will walk the flats on either of the two evenings in question, just in case, which tells you where the truth keeps house.
The flats have their rules for her evening, and the oldest of them is this: nothing written. No stakes cut, no lines laid, no names scratched in the mud with a stick, no tally marks, nothing that can be read. While she kneels, whatever is written on her is read as true, and the coast would rather not be legible. So we leave the flats plain and keep to the shingle, and the boats lie double-moored, and the staithe master takes the tally book indoors, and that is the whole observance: for one hour, we agree to be unread.
There was a man, back before the city's lights drew up-channel — a staithe master of the upper shore, old Wace — who cut his claim into the flats proper one autumn: a line and his initials, to settle a forty-year quarrel over digging ground, and he cut it the very evening she was due. She came. She knelt. She read. And in the morning the quarrel was over, quiet as you like, because the line was gone from the flats and standing coiled and dry in Wace's own yard, the initials rubbed off the wood; and the digging ground, which two families had argued since their grandfathers' time, was nobody's — for neither man would ever put a spade in it again, and it lies unwritten there now, the only ground on the coast that will neither be read nor read against.
What she reads for, nobody has it. The pickers say she is looking for what the sea dropped — some portion the estuary swallowed and mislaid, that the sea has been short of ever since. The staithe folk say she is taking the count of what we still hold, the way the port clerks count bales through a gate, an audit of ours done kneeling. Both sayings are old, and neither will drown the other, and the one thing safe to add is this: she has never once been seen to take anything. It is the looking that costs. You can ask the oldest pickers what a season of being looked at does to a coastline, and they will tell you to compare the flats against the charts, and then they will change the subject.
The samphire pickers tell it on the seawall of an evening, and the pilots' men tell it in the wheelhouse to be kind to the pickers, and both lots go quiet when a dusk comes up flat and glassy out of season. And the question they leave you with, the one the coast has never settled between seawall and wheelhouse, is this: is she reading the flats for what the sea has dropped, or checking the count of what we still hold — and if ever her tally comes out even, will she stay past her hour?