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dry on the rocks. Crawling on hands and knees under the float over the seaweed-covered ledges, I crouched to avoid the beam I’d found earlier. I slowly made my way to the last elliptical piece of daylight that streamed through the gap between two of the newly secured pieces of Styrofoam I had pilfered from a float even more derelict than the one I was now under and trying so hard to resurrect. Come to think of it, I had more or less borrowed without permission this entire raft onto which my herring crew and I had hastily bailed nearly four hundred fathoms of seine gear last fall. I had been in a hurry to wrap up the business of catching herring for lobster bait (or not catching, as it turned out) to jump aboard a sword boat and head east for a quick trip. I’d declared the abandoned float on the beach next to the town landing “mine,” launched it, piled it full of twine, and secured it to a summer person’s mooring. Now I was paying for my haste. And now it was February. The float full of my investment had chaffed its bridle and swum with wind and current under the cover of darkness right out of the thoroughfare and onto the rocky shore below the Dices’ summer cottage where the tide had left it high and dry four nights ago.
    Barnacles had taken their toll on my hands. Thin, crooked lines of blood were much like reflections of the crow’s-feet at the corners of my eyes that were most noticeable at 5:30 that morning when I’d rushed by the bathroom mirror in a yank to reach the shore while the tide was out. My hands were too cold to feel the sting. I imagine I looked somewhat seallike, slithering on the slippery ledges out from beneath the float on my belly. The tiniest snowflakes drifted in on the northwest breeze, adding a note of chill to the already frigid scene. A distinct, white stripe of frozen salt water ringed the shore at the high-water mark, and lily pad ice dallied on the surface of the cove north of us. The “us” I refer to wasn’t the group I would have expected. My herring crew, or Omega Four, as we had named ourselves last spring when we were all so proud and excited to launch the new business, were now as scattered as the fish had been all season. Dave Hiltz and Bill Clark and his son Nate were nowhere to be found. The “us” present here now and assisting with labor and advice in this potential disaster consisted of perhaps the most unlikely group of guys to band together, even in the face of adversity. But that’s the island way. Bad things happen. The results are sometimes good. Good and bad actions and what lies in their wake do a dance of fleeting and lingering here on the island. Grudges are held dear and hatchets are seldom buried. That said, there’s an overlying sentiment of “love the one you’re with.”
    And those whom I was with right now included Howard Blatchford, fellow island fisherman, and Simon and his son Todd, who had come from their permanent homes in Vermont for a winter weekend of torching burn piles they had stacked up in the drier, unsafe burning months. Simon is the guy with whom I had been in a more or less romantic relationship over the last eight years. Little did father and son (retired orthopedic surgeon and brand-new dermatologist) know that they would end up helping me with the disaster that had been left by a particularly high tide. Whether Simon and Todd had come to offer assistance out of loyalty or pity, I wasn’t sure. My uncertainty about my future with Simon was on my mind, but my current time of need was hardly the moment to sever my relationship with him, I reasoned with myself.
    Howard extended a calloused hand to help me to my feet. I stretched out straight, both hands on my lower back, and groaned a little. “I don’t know what more we can do. That’s all the Styrofoam,” I said to the three men who shifted uneasily on weed-covered rocks and looked as cold as I felt.