The Plover: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

apologizing, or waking slowly, naked in the perfect light, and stretching luxuriously, showing off its glorious parts, giving the spotless sky a half-hooded come-hither smile; the water grew bluer than the bluest blue, bluer than Oregon’s Crater Lake ever even imagined, a glittering translucent limpid lucid pristine generous blue that gave you the happy willies just staring at it, my God what a world, to dream up a color like that !
    The quietest and steadiest of breezes aft; sea ducks in meticulous geometric triangles and rhombi; flying fish fully a foot long sailing glittering for fifty yards and more; the first storm petrels he had seen, flying so low over the placid sea that they seemed to be running on it; the first shearwaters he had seen, sailing effortlessly along and suddenly slicing down for fish, and once for a bright orange squid, wriggling wildly for an instant before it was shredded, what in heaven’s name was a squid doing at the surface, did squid rise to savor such days also? And whales, taking turns as if their pods were on parade or procession; a raft of sperm whales and calves, sighing through the extraordinary water as big as buses; two humpback whales who slid along the sides of the Plover to port and starboard, lifting it inches higher for a moment, perhaps a quiet cetacean joke; and by far the biggest sunfish he had ever seen, easily seven feet long and a thousand pounds, dozing on the surface, and looking uncommonly like a small dance floor, or the wall of a cabin. The fisherman in Declan, which was a lot of him after long years of plowing the sea for meat, stared hungrily at all that placid toothless food, so easily caught as it basked; but something else rose in him to trump the hunter, and he hove to for a while alongside the creature, to simply gaze in wonder at the thing, until finally it woke with a start, snapping awake just like a child in the last row of math class first period on a muggy hot day, and slid effortlessly away into the deep.
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    If an ocean, thought Declan, is the sum of all the rivers pouring into it, then we are on various braided rivers, really, rather than the sea, and this thought occupied him for quite a while. He dug his charts out and counted the fattest rivers surrendering themselves to Pacifica—the Columbia, the mighty river of the West, the Father of Rivers; the Stickeen, the great Canadian river cloudy with the sperm of salmon in the old days; the roaring Fraser and Yukon and Skeena, all ice and silted melt from mountains so remote no one knew some of them; the poor Colorado, with so many names over the years, the River Red, the River of Embers, the River of Good Hope, draining the vast American desert, giving itself away to everyone, and finishing as an exhausted trickle; the Mekong, the Xi Jiang, the San Joaquin, the Shinano, the Rio Grande de Santiago, all diving headlong finally into the greatest of waters, losing their names as they joined their brothers and sisters in their mother and father, from which they would again rise into mist and cloud and be reborn as rain and river; and then there were the even larger rivers called seas bellying into Pacifica, noted Declan, checking them off with his nubbed pencil: the Sulu and the Coral, the Celebes and the Tasman, the Seas of Japan and China; not seas at all, really, but only fists and fingers of the mother of seas, poking and lapping and dissolving the placid land. Everything was in motion all the time, he thought, the water dissolving the land, the land rising and falling, the sky slurping the sea, the seas trading places, the rivers sprinting as fast as they could go to their wild dissolution; tall mountains were slowly melting as others were thrusting up to be born, and beings beyond count or calculation also arose and melted, were born and dissolved, their shells and husks sliding finally back into the ocean; so that everyone and everything was a boat, he thought; but none of them as dashing