The Girl Who Drove the Drawbridge

• Chapter 1 The Island at the End of the Road
• Chapter 2 Iron, Grease, and Salt Air
• Chapter 3 The Bridgekeeper’s Tower
• Chapter 4 Morning Bells and Early Tides
• Chapter 5 Learning the Levers
• Chapter 6 The First Trawler Clears
• Chapter 7 A Line of Chrome and Glass
• Chapter 8 Reading the Wind
• Chapter 9 Secrets of the Counterweights
• Chapter 10 The Tour Bus Rush
• Chapter 11 Fog Over the Channel
• Chapter 12 Tangled Horns and Impatient Drivers
• Chapter 13 The Harbor Master's Warning
• Chapter 14 Stranded on the Span
• Chapter 15 A Storm Along the Coast
• Chapter 16 The Midnight Mayday
• Chapter 17 Hand-Cranking in the Dark
• Chapter 18 Safe Harbor for the Fleet
• Chapter 19 Morning After the Gale
• Chapter 20 An Unscheduled Crossing
• Chapter 21 The Rusted Gear
• Chapter 22 Voices from the Mainland
• Chapter 23 The Island’s Lifeline
• Chapter 24 The Master’s Test
• Chapter 25 Between Two Shores
• Chapter 26 The Keeper of the Span

The state highway did not so much end at Skiff Island as give up trying to be a highway. For forty miles through the low salt marsh, it ran straight and gray, smelling of sulfur mud and drying spartina grass, until it reached the narrow strip of water known as the Gut. There, the tarmac narrowed, shed its paved shoulders, and turned into a single causeway flanked by rotten creosote pilings and white wooden markers with their reflectors kicked off by bored teenagers. Beyond the Gut lay four square miles of wind-battered granite and stunted spruce trees, anchored to the continental shelf like a stubborn barnacle.

Pip was twelve years old, which was old enough to know that nothing of genuine importance ever happened quickly on the island, and young enough to believe that the world outside was largely composed of people who moved too fast for their own good. She sat on the seawall near the southern abutment of the bridge, her canvas sneakers dangling over the gray water, cracking dried kelp bladders between her thumb and forefinger. Each one let out a sharp, satisfying pop that carried through the damp morning air, competing with the rhythmic clatter of diesel exhausts coming from the commercial wharf down in the cove.

To look at Skiff Island on an oil-company roadmap, you would think it was an afterthought, a stray smudge of ink off the coast of Maine that the printer forgot to wipe away. The permanent population hovered around two hundred and ten people, depending on who had died over the winter and whether the young couples who went off to vocational school in Bangor decided to come back. Most people worked the water, hauling lobsters in the summer and raking scallops or dragging for winter flounder when the ice didn't lock the harbor in. The rest of the town lived by selling hardware to the fishermen, clerking at the post office, or cutting cordwood.

Then there was the bridge.

The bridge was a heel-trunnion bascule span, built in 1938 out of blackened structural steel, heavy rivets, and gray-painted machinery sheds. It carried the highway over the Gut, which was three hundred yards across at high tide and ran like a millrace whenever the moon was full. Without the bridge, the island was marooned. If an ambulance had to come from the mainland hospital in Ellsworth, it came across the steel deck with its sirens screaming, rattling the expansion plates until teeth vibrated in skulls three houses away. If the fuel truck came with heating oil, it crept across at five miles an hour, the driver praying silently that the town selectmen had kept up with the deck maintenance.

The bridge was also the only way boats with high wheelhouses or fixed masts could reach the back bay where the boatyards and the winter slips were sheltered from the open Atlantic. When a trawler came chugging in from the offshore grounds, low in the water with a hold full of crushed ice and redfish, it didn’t stop for the road. The road had to get out of the way.

"You're going to pop those weeds until your fingers turn green, Pip," a voice called down from the rocks above her.

Pip didn't turn around. She knew the voice by its gravelly pitch and the scrape of heavy leather boot soles against the granite ledge. It was her grandfather, Walter Berry, who had lived on Skiff Island since before the current bridge was built, and who possessed the rare distinction of being the only man within thirty miles who actually knew how to fix a bevel gear without calling an engineer from Portland.

"Kelp keeps the bugs off," Pip said, squinting up at the overcast sky. A line of gulls was drifting low over the water, heading southwest ahead of the tide. "Wind’s coming around from the south. The ferry’s going to roll on the mid-day run."

"The ferry always rolls," Walter said, stepping down the rough stone steps until he was level with the bridge approach. He was a wide, spare man in his late sixties, dressed in dark denim overalls that bore permanent semicircles of black lubricating grease around the knees and pockets. His face had the weathered, polished texture of driftwood that had spent twenty years tumbling in the surf. In his right hand, he carried a heavy canvas tote bag containing a vacuum flask of black tea and three brass grease cups that needed cleaning. "Besides, the state boat doesn't touch the Gut anyway. It goes straight to the outer island. It’s the highway people we have to worry about today."

"Why the highway people?" Pip asked. She stood up, brushing gray lichen and dried salt from the seat of her jeans.

"It’s June the twentieth," Walter said simply, as if the date alone contained all the legal statutes of the county.

Pip understood immediately. June the twentieth was the unofficial beginning of what the islanders called the Haul. It was the week school let out across the lower forty-eight states, the week the first chrome-sided motorhomes began to drift north along Route 1, and the week the summer people returned to their cedar-shingle cottages along the high ridges overlooking the outer islands. It was also the week the big passenger cruisers from the resort towns further down the bay began offering their "Scenic Archipelago Excursions," which invariably required navigating the Gut at slack water.

For nine months of the year, the bridge stayed down for days at a time. The local scallopers knew Walter’s phone number, or they blew a single long blast on their air horns when they were five miles off, giving him plenty of time to walk down from his house on the rise, climb the iron ladder to the operator’s cab, and engage the gears. In the winter, Walter would sometimes leave the span seated on its locks for three weeks straight, only running the big electric motors once a week to circulate the gear oil and keep the ice from freezing the counterweight guides.

In the summer, the world went mad.

Pip walked beside her grandfather along the gravel shoulder toward the north pier. Her family had lived in the gray house at the edge of the bridge abutment for three generations. Her father had gone down on a scallop boat off the Grand Banks when she was five, a tragedy so common along the coast that it was regarded less as a unique sorrow than as a natural property of the sea, like the fog or the low-tide stink. Her mother ran the front desk at the island cooperative and managed the billing for the lobster pound, which meant she spent her days surrounded by receipts, invoices, and men who were always complaining about the price of fuel.

That left Pip with Walter.

Most girls her age spent their summers at the municipal beach in town, three miles to the east, or gathered on the steps of the variety store where the ice cream freezer hummed in the shade of the porch. Pip preferred the Gut. Down here, between the mainland shore and the island's steep granite roots, water moved with actual violence. You could throw a piece of spruce drift into the channel during the ebb, and by the time you counted to sixty, it would be two hundred yards out into the gray belly of the bay, spinning in the small, vicious whirlpools that formed around the bridge footings.

"The state inspector’s coming by Thursday," Walter said as they stopped before the heavy wire-mesh gate that guarded the staircase leading up to the machinery deck. He pulled a ring of brass keys from his pocket—heavy, thick-bladed keys that smelled of machine oil and brass polish. "He’s got new clipboards. Always has new clipboards when he comes out from Augusta. Plastic ones with little clear covers so the salt air doesn't get the yellow paper wet."

"Does he think the bridge is going to fall down?"

"Inspectors always think things are going to fall down," Walter said, unlocking the padlock with a sharp click. "That's how they stay employed. If they told the governor that everything was solid and tight, the governor would take their cars away and tell them to stay home." He swung the gate open, its steel hinges letting out a faint dry wheeze. "He’s going to look at the main trunnion pins again. He’s been looking at those pins since nineteen-and-eighty-four. Every year he writes down that they have surface pit marks. Every year I tell him those pins were forged out of Swedish steel before his mother was born, and that they'll be sitting here when his grandchildren are collecting their pensions."

Pip followed him through the gate, her hand trailing along the galvanized handrail. The rail was cold and sticky with the salt film that coated everything on the south side of the island.

To their left, the road stretched out across the span. The deck wasn't concrete; it was an open steel grid—an endless pattern of small, notched rectangles that hummed whenever a car crossed it. When you drove over it in a truck with the windows down, the tires made a high-pitched, singing whine that could be heard all the way up to the village church. If you looked straight down through the open grating while standing on the deck, you could see the green sea racing between your boots forty feet below, foaming white against the stone piers. Summer tourists hated it. They would hit the transition plate at forty miles an hour, hear that metallic shriek from their radials, see the ocean through the floor of their cars, and slam on the brakes, causing tailbacks that stretched all the way to the marsh turnoff.

"Come on," Walter said, gesturing with his greasy tote toward the narrow flight of open iron stairs that climbed along the side of the south tower. "The tide’s turned. High water was twenty minutes ago. Pete LeMay’s bringing the Agnes B. in with the morning catch before the current starts to rip, and he’s drawing ten feet if he’s drawing an inch. He won't wait for the tide to drop."

Pip didn't need to be told twice. She tucked her hair behind her ears, caught the cold iron of the stair rail, and began the climb into the belly of the machine.

The staircase clung to the masonry pier like an iron spider leg. It was narrow enough that an adult with broad shoulders had to climb at a slight angle, and every step was formed from a stamped plate of diamond-patterned tread that had worn slick from half a century of salt fog and fisherman's grease. Pip had scampered up these treads since she was tall enough to reach the handrails with both arms raised, but Walter always climbed with deliberate, measured pace. He set his boots down flat, planting his weight directly over the vertical stringers, never relying entirely on the bolts that pinned the framework into the granite blocks.

"Rust never sleeps, Pip," he liked to remark whenever he noticed her bounding two steps at a time. "It doesn't take lunch breaks, and it doesn't observe the Sabbath. It just sits here chewing on ten-gauge iron while you're busy dreaming."

Halfway up the climb, the wind caught them full in the chest. It was an easterly breeze coming off the open Gulf of Maine, smelling rich and heavy of rotting rockweed, diesel soot, and the clean, alkaline cold of deep brine. Thirty feet below, the water hissed through the narrows of the Gut. At this stage of the tide, the channel looked less like an arm of the sea than a swollen, muscle-bound river. The current bulged upward in long, oily slicks over the sunken ledge known as the Devil’s Ribs, then split into boiling white eddies where it struck the rounded noses of the bridge piers. If an engine died down there, a boat had about forty seconds before its planks met stone.

Walter reached the machinery landing first and took an old brass key from his ring to unlock the heavy plate-iron door of the gear shed. The lock gave way with a dry clunk that sounded like an axe striking hard maple. Inside, the wind died instantly, swallowed by an enclosure that smelled of half a century of warm mineral oil, tallow, damp felt, and cold steel. It was an unmistakable smell—one that lived in the seams of Walter’s winter jackets and lingered in the fleece lining of Pip’s gloves long after she went home to do her schoolwork.

The machinery deck sat directly beneath the roadway, nested inside the concrete counterweight pit that formed the landward anchor of the bascule span. High overhead, beneath a ceiling made of cross-braced steel girders, hung the great blocks of cast concrete—hundreds of tons of dead weight suspended in the gloom like hanging boulders. They were balanced so precisely on their rocker shafts that a single healthy man, if he knew where to put the crowbar, could lever the entire three-hundred-foot bridge off its nose plates without the electric motors running at all.

"First thing," Walter said, setting his tote down on a bench made from a sawed-off timber sleeper. "Look at the trays."

Pip knew the routine without being prompted. Beneath the main gear train ran long galvanized pans designed to catch the dripping lubricant before it could drop into the salt water below. The environmental wardens from the state capital got terrible heartburn over stray drops of petroleum falling into the lobster grounds, so Walter kept the catch-pans lined with fresh sawdust from the boatbuilder’s shop up the road. She bent down, ducking beneath the massive cast-iron bull gear whose teeth were as broad as cedar shingles, and peered into the darkness.

"Sawdust is dry under the pinions," Pip reported, her voice echoing hollowly against the curved steel vaulting. "A little shiny on the south journal, though. Looks like the oil seal wept when you ran the morning test."

"It always weeps when the air gets muggy," Walter replied, unscrewing the lid of his vacuum flask and pouring three fingers of scalding tea into the plastic cup. "Cast iron breathes. When the humidity hits ninety percent, the metal sweats under the grease, and the seal lets go a drop or two. If it doesn't leak a thimbleful every fortnight, that means it’s dry, and if it’s dry, you’re about three minutes away from a seizure that’ll warp the shaft. You want it damp, Pip. Never dry."

He set his tea on the corner of the tool chest and pulled a square wooden paddle from his pocket. The paddle had a rounded horn handle and a broad, flat tip worn smooth by decades of scraping down grease troughs. Beside the chest stood a fifty-gallon steel drum with its top cut away, filled to within six inches of the rim with Marfak Number Three—a heavy, amber-colored grease so thick and tacky that a wooden spoon stood straight up in it without leaning.

"Give the rack a swipe," Walter instructed, gesturing toward the curving row of teeth bolted to the underside of the bascule leaf. "The fog’s going to hang low all afternoon. If the salt sets on those teeth before Pete gets through with the trawler, we’ll hear it grinding like a bucket of gravel when we trip the clutch."

Pip took the paddle. It was heavy, turned from dense white oak by her great-uncle who had run the barrel mill before the war. She dipped it into the drum, leaning her weight over the rim to carve out a generous scoop of the stiff, golden paste. It had the scent of warm paraffin and petroleum jelly, with an undertone of sharp chemical sulfur that made the back of her throat prickle.

She stepped up onto the catwalk that flanked the main gear train. Here, the floor was open steel mesh, and the Gut churned beneath her feet, a dark, churning floor forty feet down. A tourist might have gripped the rail until their knuckles turned white, but Pip barely looked through the grate. Her eyes were fixed on the steel teeth above her head.

The rack was an enormous arc of machined steel, six inches thick, with teeth cut three inches deep. It was along these teeth that the small pinion gear crawled, dragging the immense counterweight down into the pit and tilting the long bascule deck into the sky. Every tooth bore the scrape of thousands of lifts, polished to a mirror-bright silver where the faces met, but coated in crusty, blackened grease along the roots.

With two hands on the oak paddle, she slapped a ribbon of grease against the face of each tooth, spreading it with smooth, upward strokes like a baker frosting an enormous, cold cake. It took muscle. The grease resisted, clinging to the wood in long, elastic strings that threatened to drop into her hair if she didn't twist the blade quickly at the end of each stroke.

"Don't leave ridges on the crowns," Walter warned from the workbench, where he had begun disassembling one of the brass grease cups with an adjustable wrench. "A ridge doesn't do a thing except collect grit from the coal-ash trucks. Work it into the root. That's where the pressure lands when the deck breaks free from the abutment."

Pip leaned into the stroke, feeling the strain in the small of her back. The iron smelled cold and indifferent. It was impossible to look at this forest of gray-painted beams, heavy hex bolts, and grease-caked shafts without realizing that the machine didn't care about anything. It had no opinion about whether the trawlers made it to market in Portland on time, or whether the tourists in their shiny station wagons missed their dinner reservations at the inn. If you treated the gears with respect, kept them fed with oil, and cleared the salt crust from the rockers, they would lift ten thousand tons of steel with a smooth, rhythmic sigh. If you forgot a cotter pin or let a trunnion run dry until the bronze bushing melted into the steel, the whole affair would tear itself apart without a second thought.

"Grandpa?" she asked, pausing with the paddle held aloft, a glob of yellow lubricant dangling from its tip.

"Aye?"

"Why didn't they just build a high bridge? Like the one over the river at Bucksport?"

Walter snorted, the sound dry as beach gravel. He tapped the brass housing of the grease cup against the edge of the bench, knocking out a cake of dried, blackened residue. "Bucksport has two high granite bluffs on either side of the narrows. You can throw a suspension bridge between two mountains without asking the water for permission. Out here, what do you have?" He waved his wrench toward the small square window that looked out over the salt marsh. "Ten miles of mud flats on the mainland side, and a granite shelf on this side that isn't twenty feet above high water. To get a high bridge out here that would clear the masts of a three-masted schooner, you’d have to start the road back in the middle of the blueberry barrens and build an earthen ramp three miles long. State didn't have that kind of money in thirty-eight. Still doesn't."

He wiped the threads of the brass cup with a scrap of red flannel. "Besides, a fixed bridge is a stupid thing. It just sits there, taking whatever the weather throws at it, waiting for the salt to eat the rebars. A drawbridge has to work for its living. It moves. It has a pulse."

Pip scraped the last of the grease onto the final tooth of the sector gear, wiped the paddle clean against the inner lip of the drum, and climbed down off the catwalk. Her hands were gray with iron dust, and a smudge of Marfak Number Three decorated the forearm of her denim shirt. She felt a quiet, hard pride in that smudge. The girls in her class at the consolidation school in town wore clean windbreakers with pictures of horses embroidered on the chests, and their hands were soft and pale from doing nothing more strenuous than turning pages in library books. Their fathers worked in banks or sold insurance to summer residents, but her grandfather held the lifeline of the whole county in the palm of his grease-stained hand.

Walter stood up, stretching his spine until his vertebrae gave off three distinct clicks like a ratchet wrench. He set the reassembled grease cup down on the bench and glanced at the wall clock—an ancient Seth Thomas marine clock housed in a screw-down brass case that had been salvaged from a wrecked coal schooner in nineteen-and-forty-two. The hands read ten minutes to eleven.

"Winds are freshening from the southeast," he said, turning his head slightly to listen to the drone of the air against the louvers on the shed's seaward wall. "The tide’s beginning to drop in the Gut. You hear that sucking sound around the base of the pier?"

Pip listened. Beneath the low, constant hum of the wind and the distant rattle of an old truck crossing the steel grid overhead, there was a heavy, hollow slosh—the sound of millions of gallons of water trying to squeeze through a opening sixty feet wide. It was a thick, wet, rhythmic thump that vibrated through the stone floor of the machinery house.

"Pete'll be at the outer buoy now," she said.

"Just about," Walter agreed. He walked to the corner of the shed, where a pair of heavy rubber boots stood beside an oilskin coat that had turned nearly black from years of salt spray. "He won't want to fight that rip if he can help it. If he misses slack water by more than twenty minutes, he’ll have to burn forty dollars' worth of fuel just to keep the Agnes B. from sliding sideways into the fender pilings."

He reached for the brass handle of the inner door, the one that opened onto the spiral iron stair leading up through the hollow core of the bascule pier to the control cabin perched high above the roadway.

"Leave the tote here," Walter said, his eyes flicking over her grease-smudged sleeve with a faint, almost imperceptible nod of approval. "Wipe your boots on the hemp mat. You don't track Marfak onto the cabin floor. The floorboards are fir, and if you get mineral oil into fir, it turns black and slippery as an eel, and your grandmother will hear about it before sunset."

Pip took the dry rag from the hook by the door and thoroughly scrubbed the soles of her sneakers, feeling the stiff bristles of the coir mat scrape the dirt from the treads. High above them, faint but clear through the heavy timbers and iron girders of the span, came the sharp, twin-tone blast of a marine horn—one long, two short.

"That's Pete," Pip said, her heart giving a small, eager jump.

"Aye," Walter said, pulling the door open to reveal the dark vertical tunnel of the stairwell, lit only by small, circular glass deck prisms set into the masonry at ten-foot intervals. "That's Pete. Now we go up and see who’s paying attention on the road."