“I can see everything,” she tells me.
She guides me with such assurance that I believe her. We stay on the path by the house but soon take a turn into the untrodden depths of the woods. To our left, between the tree trunks, I see water—it must be Washington Harbor. If I have my bearings right, we’re heading farther west, to the tip of the island. We crunch over dead leaves, pine needles, twigs. Low shrubbery brushes against our legs, and we duck under branches. Anda seems to know this path well. Not once do we detour around any obstacles.
After a mile or so, I ask her, “Where are we going?”
She doesn’t respond.
“Say something.” Still nothing. “Anything,” I add. The only noise is the sound of our feet crunching on the ground. Normally, I live in silence. It’s a second skin to me. But after being so close to Anda these last few hours, the silence between us is alienating.
After what feels like five minutes, she starts to talk. “One-point-two billion years ago in the Precambrian Era, extrusive igneous rock formed when lava rapidly cooled after seeping up through the Superior Basin.” She waits for a second, as if the history of this land requires rest, respect, and space. “This basalt formed the bedrock of the area, and through geologic syncline, the rock layers folded, forming the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale.”
I reach for her hand, and she squeezes it. Her hand is remarkably strong. She goes on to talk about glaciers and pressure, melting ice and lake formation. Geology never sounded so epic as when it came from her lips. Plus, it’s calming. It isn’t about politics or human drama. It’s so beyond everything in my life, it’s soothing.
We walk on and on. Must be miles, and I’m growing tired. After all, we’ve been up all night long. Dawn starts to break on the horizon, and blue begins to seep into the indigo. The sound of water lapping on the shore is a little louder. Suddenly, the land ends. There’s no rocky beach here. The trees grow almost to the edge of a rounded point of land.
“There.” Anda points to the water.
In the growing light of dawn, a white cylinder sticks up out of the water, maybe two hundred feet from shore.
“What’s under there?” I ask.
“The America. Born in 1898. It was a steamship and sank in 1928.” She says this wistfully, as if it’s a long-lost friend or part of a memory that makes her happy.
“Wow. It’s pretty close.”
“Let’s get closer,” Anda says, squeezing my hand. She has a slightly feral look in her eye, like she’s suddenly very, very hungry.
She raises her foot, as if ready to step directly into the water, when I blurt out a protest. “Anda, we don’t have a boat.”
“Oh.” She plants her booted foot back on the damp shore. “Oh.”
I wonder how long we’ll stare at that cylinder—I guess it’s a buoy—when the water splashes a little louder far off to our right. There’s a walloping sound of water hitting water, like someone just emptied a barrelful into the lake.
“What was that?” Waves ripple toward our feet. Thirty feet away, there’s a big log by the shore that wasn’t there before. Or maybe I didn’t notice it. It has a smooth, pointy tip, and then I realize it’s probably not a log.
“Is that a…”
“Maybe it is.” She leads me along the shoreline. It turns out to be a really old rowboat. It looks like it used to be painted metal, but rust has taken over and it’s covered with algae. It’s dripping wet. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that the lake just spit it out onto the shore. Nearby, a single paddle floats in the water. The handle end is broken, and the shaft is shorter now.
“You don’t want to actually get in this thing, do you? It doesn’t look very seaworthy.” I’m trying to be all casual, but my spine has gone stiff with worry.
“It’s fine. I promise.”
“But—”
“We’re not going very far out. And the water is so calm.” She gestures out to the lake, and it’s true. It’s glassily serene. By the dim morning light, I can see where the lake bed goes from brown to green to blue as the water deepens farther from shore.
I figure we can go in the boat and if it’s not safe, we can jump out right away and only risk getting our legs drenched. I push it into the water and Anda sits in the middle, chin high and posture like a stately queen. The broken paddle is hard to use, but it works to get us closer to the little buoy. It’s ridiculously easy to paddle us forward. Anda must weigh nothing, and the boat has no drag. Soon, she’s able to tether a waterlogged rope from the boat to what I now realize is a shipwreck marker for divers. Painted on one side of the cylindrical buoy is the word “WRECK” with an orange diamond underneath.
“Here she is,” Anda says softly. “One hundred and eighty-four feet long, with a gross tonnage of four hundred and eighty-six tons. Rather accident-prone, she was.”
The morning light is stronger now. Without any turbulence in the water, we can see several feet down. A greenish bow is only a few feet below the surface, eerily receding into the depths beyond where the lake bed falls away. The surface of the boat is nubbly and irregular, with feathery algae attached, wafting in the mild current. It’s a big boat, which shouldn’t surprise me, but does.
I’ve never seen a shipwreck before. There was the St. Anne, but I hadn’t seen that one up close. I’ve only seen wrecks in pictures, and they’ve all been of the Titanic when we studied it in history class. But this one is so close, and seeing its bones beneath the water chills me. I think of the people on the ship and how they must have felt when it sank. My spine goes rigid once again, imagining swallowing and choking on gallons of water.
I stare at the hull. “What was the name of the ship again?”
“The America.” She smiles faintly.
“Did anyone die from the sinking?”
“No humans,” Anda tells me. “A dog was tied to the stern. They didn’t realize it until it was too late.”
How depressing. I should be happy that lives weren’t lost, but the dog’s death and the ship’s death make me want to crawl under a blanket and hide from everything.
“Why are you sad?” She climbs over her seat to sit next to me.
“I don’t know.”
“You wanted to see time stop.”
“I did. But this isn’t…” I can’t finish my thought.
“The ship is sad, too,” she says. “She misses her captain. She misses docking at Snug Harbor. She misses her duty.” Anda stops talking to chew on her hangnails. Her eyes are on the hull of the submerged ship. She seems on edge now.
I turn to her. “Are you clairvoyant or something?”
She stops biting and twists her head to stare at me. The hangnails on her right fingers are raw and smeared with pink. “If I was, would that be okay?”
“Fuck, yes.” I say it seriously, then grin widely.
“Really?”
“Sure.” I sigh. “I could dig a fairy tale right now. Lord knows I’ve never lived in one.”