By G. M. Donley
There was a hilltop in Turku, Finland, with signs at different points indicating where sea level had been at certain times, and the couple marveled that where they were standing now, at least 100 feet above the harbor, had been sea level at the birth of Christ. “So much for global warming and sea level rise,” Rosemary said.
“Did you actually read the sign?” replied Bob. “The land has been rising ever since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. With all the weight of the glaciers melted away, it rebounded like a mattress after a person gets off of it.”
“These rocks make a firm mattress. Hard to see that.”
“Whatever.” He continued down the path. “Let’s go catch our ferry.”
The ferry was many stories tall, with cars parked on decks below after rolling through a huge gaping mouth that opened at the end of the boat. Bob empathized as he watched a guy trying to get a little Opal up the steep ramp despite what looked to be sketchy manual transmission skills. Maybe not from around here. Fortunately for Bob and Rosemary, they didn’t have to worry about a car. They went up to the top deck. Rosemary discerned that the boat was full of Swedes, of two varieties: young ones who looked like the prototype models for fashion magazines, and cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking middle-aged ones with droopy eyes and pasty skin and pot bellies and shapeless clothes. Rosemary tried to connect the two populations in the logic of her mind but was having a hard time bridging the gap, so she looked out at the sea instead.
The ferry had cleared the mainland coast of Finland and was now making its way down the center of a marked channel among dozens of small rock islands. The brochure had mentioned this. She found it in her purse. She had brought this off-white canvas purse on their tenth-anniversary trip because it went well with the two sundresses she had packed, but until today it had been too cold to wear anything but the black leggings or the capri jeans and long sleeves. Leggings in Hamburg, jeans in Gdansk, leggings in Tallin, jeans in St. Petersburg, leggings in Helsinki. But today, the floral sundress.
“Hey Bobby, look at all these islands.”
Bob stood up from his deck chair and put his phone away. “Damn. That’s a shitload of islands.”
“That’s the Ålands archipelago. Pronounced Oh-lands. More than 6,000 islands, depending how you count. These are Swedish-speaking islands even though it’s still Finland, it says here.” Some kind of treaty 150 years ago, she surmised.
“How do you tell the difference between a Swedish-speaking rock and a Finnish-speaking rock?” Bob asked. “Does each island have a little lapel pin?”
“Some of them are so close together,” she said, “that you can take a chain ferry to get from one to the other, just pull yourself across. With maybe a dozen people and one car.” One person could stand at the center of each little island. She could stand on one, and Bobby could sit in his deck chair on the next one over. Not sure if there would be one of those chain ferries to connect them. You could swim over, but the water would be cold and there would be currents. So maybe be contented with an occasional wave and a shout across the gap.
Bob got out his phone and took a picture, then checked to see how it came out, shielding the screen from the sun with his hand. “Well, that doesn’t look like anything.” He sat back down.
She slid the brochure into her purse and looked again out over the water. Overnight tonight in Mariehamn, tomorrow Stockholm, then across to Denmark and Copenhagen, back to the starting point at the airport in Frankfurt. Circling the Baltic had seemed more interesting than two weeks in Cancun, and maybe it was. She’d never been to Cancun. Or to any place like that.
Was it Gilligan’s Island or Lost in Space that had the professor and the glamorous bombshell and the no-nonsense girl and the robot and the kid and the hothead guy? She never paid that much attention when she used to watch those reruns on the cheapo local TV channel after school, but now it seemed convenient in an unlikely way that the stranded group of people somehow included a useful range of skills and personalities. Somebody who could fix stuff, somebody who could lead the troops, somebody who could seduce people. What would happen if you had a shipwreck and it was just the seven people in her marketing department?
She pictured the seven people in the marketing department all deposited on one of those rocks out there. They might die of hypothermia or starve to death, but at least there would be calls to action. Act now! Doors closing forever! No reasonable offer refused!
A breeze was kicking up, but the sky was still clear and sunny. She wasn’t cold. An announcement on a loudspeaker informed the passengers that the duty-free shops would be opening in ten minutes.
She tracked sailboats. Every time she looked, there were more of them. Most likely they were piloted by strappingly fit, attractively weathered Swedes wearing knit sweaters and caps that you could buy in the duty-free shop. Maybe that’s where all the young fashion-model Swedes ended up, on those sailboats, attractively weathered with sparkling blue eyes. And the rest of the schlubs were left behind on the ferry. Maybe she and Bobby should get a sailboat sometime before it was too late. The boats disappeared behind islands, emerged from behind islands, sailed between islands. One boat angled in ahead of the course of the ferry, crossed out of sight, then appeared on the other side. She walked over there to be sure. It looked like the people on the boat were laughing and exchanging high-fives way down there. That was the life, that down there. She looked farther ahead. Now she could see the top of a sail behind a little dome of rock that barely rose above the water.
Sometimes she’d see a not-quite-island, a crest of rock that got close but did not reach the air. It was a fine line between island and not-island, used-to-be-island or yet-to-be island. Who counted up the archipelago anyway? Maybe that’s what the sailboats were doing. She and Bobby could do that. Just get off this ferry at Mariehamn, the biggest of the Åland islands, and then skip the rest of the circuit. Skip going back to Charlotte. Procure a sailboat and begin counting archipelago. When you finished all 6,000, start again and see if the number changed. Would the rising water overtake the rising land or vice versa?
She imagined a rock submerged then breaking the surface as the land under it rebounded after the melting of the glacier. She imagined the sea level rising because of the melting of that glacier. The duty-free shop was open. She imagined she might take up smoking and get a beer.
Bobby consulted the book of navigation charts so they could safely navigate through the archipelago, while Rosemary took the helm as Bobby occasionally looked up and cranked winches that adjusted the sails. They had never sailed before, but it somehow came naturally. The wind was usually coming from the side, which made it easy. There was a little diagram taped to the cabin that showed how to adjust the sails depending on the wind direction. It also showed how to turn, and how you would need to zig-zag to go straight into the wind, as she had seen the sailboats doing when she’d been looking out from the ferry deck. So she tried that, and even went between some islands that were very close together.
After getting to number 37, it occurred to her that she had no way of knowing for sure if an archipelagum had already been counted. They all looked very similar. She got Bobby’s attention.
“No prob,” he said, glancing up with his sparkling blue eyes. Hadn’t they been brown before? “Been taking a picture of each one. 38. 39.”
There wasn’t a good way to land on most of these islands. She had yet to see one with a dock, and you couldn’t just pull a boat like this up on the rocks or tie it to a tree, if there were a tree. She was getting hungry. Maybe there was food in the cabin somewhere. Maybe there was a toilet. All these questions she hadn’t thought to ask the nice man who had set them up with the boat in exchange for the counting.
She spotted an island with a tiny red house on it. A house would mean a dock, probably. But it was straight upwind. She double-checked the diagram and planned a sequence of long zig-zags. A loud horn blasted and she looked up to see the giant wall of the ferry looming overhead. She did a quick mental calculation and determined they would clear it. Passengers up there at the railing waved frantically as if she didn’t know. The sailboat scooted across, comfortably ahead of the ferry’s bow, and she and Bobby shared a high-five. The wind had shifted and now they could fetch the island with the little red house without needing to tack any more. She headed a little closer to the wind and Bobby trimmed in the sails accordingly. She looked back and saw that, so far, they were outrunning the waves created by the passing ferry. The Baltic breeze—somewhere between lake air and sea air, just a little bit salty—tautened the sails and the boat healed more and they went a little faster.
The red house was getting close. The windows were trimmed in white. A tall couple in cable-knit sweaters stood on the dock, motioning her to head up into the wind and drift alongside.
This story appears in The Virtues of Alignment, a collection of short fiction available as a print paperback and ebook. See the Miscagon Publishing Project page for more information.
Contact: info@gmdonley.com