Read Safe from the Sea for Free Online

clearing up. This wind, though, it’s going to blow the high pressure right through.”
    When they reached Highway 61, Olaf turned left, away from town, and drove slowly in the middle of the road. After a few miles the lake unfolded before them. “Look at all that water,” Olaf said.
    “Those waves are huge. It looks like the ocean,” Noah said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this. The water was practically still yesterday.”
    Olaf stared out at the lake. The deep creases around his eyes and in the slack of his chin and neck seemed flexed all the time. His lips and nose crinkled in a constant grimace, and his mouth parted as he alternated between slow breaths and puffs on his cigar. Noah watched his father’s hands, too, one on the steering wheel with quivering white-haired knuckles, the other sitting on his leg as if helping to keep the accelerator constant. He drove thirty miles per hour.
    At the Cutface Creek wayside Olaf pulled into the lot and left the truck idling in one of the dozen parking spots.
    After a few quiet minutes Noah asked, “How far is it from, say, Silver Bay across the lake to Marquette?”
    “Well, I’d say it’s about a hundred and seventy-five miles as the gull flies. There’re eighty nautical miles—plus or minus a piece—from Silver Bay to the middle of the Keweenaw Peninsula, which makes it, what, ninety miles or so. Beyond that my best guess is another eighty or eighty-five miles, most of that across the Keweenaw, over the Huron Mountains, and only another ten or twenty nautical miles across Keweenaw Bay. Farther, of course, if you were getting there by ship. Why do you ask?”
    “On my way here yesterday I picked up a radio station from Marquette. It surprised me, that’s all.”
    By now they had gotten out, moved around to the front of the truck, and were leaning against the rusty bumper. Four-foot waves curled up onto the rocky shore in white explosions. They were facing the sharp wind that brought a delicate spray of lake water with it. Olaf said, “For some reason the big breakers always remind me of my mother.”
    “I wish I could remember her better.”
    “My mother was the single kindest person I ever knew. A saint she was. Never hit me once, never even raised her voice,” Olaf said, taking a long, satisfying puff on his cigar.
    “That’s how Mom was, too.”
    Olaf glared out at the water, toward a horizon resting somewhere in the middle of the lake. “My mother, she was faithful. She loved my father, God knows why. She was patient.”
    Noah interpreted his father’s words as a challenge, knew that if he wanted to he could have a fight. Enough forbidden history surrounded Noah’s mother to keep him and Olaf fighting for a while. Noah pictured Phil Hember—their neighbor across the street from the old house on High Street—his mother’s lover during Noah’s high school years. There was some forbidden history. Noah resisted the temptation to bring it up. They watched the lake churning.
    Olaf finally cleared his throat, spit, and stubbed out his cigar. “Solveig tells me you sell maps out in Boston.”
    Caught off guard by the change in topics, Noah stammered. “That’s right. Antique maps.”
    Olaf looked suspect. “Who needs an antique map?”
    Noah described the maps as works of art. He told his father how he’d come to own the shop.
    “What about teaching?” Olaf asked.
    “I wasn’t a very happy teacher. Not a very good one, either.”
    Olaf teased Noah about all those wasted semesters of college. Noah heard the good-natured timbre of the old man’s needling, so he spoke more of his own crash course in learning the business and of its strange and unexpected growth thanks to the Internet. He wondered whether his father knew what the Internet was. Noah told him about Ed, and of how the colonel reminded him of Olaf himself, of how when the mood to lecture struck him the colonel could not be stopped. Finally he said, “I have Natalie to