WIND AGAINST TIDE
“As bravely as we can!”
Jessica chanted the words to her painted oars, bright, talkative oars
that spoke through many vivid emblems painted on blade and handle by
herself and her Camp Fire Sisters.
A tongue of flame licked the dripping blade of one of them, mocking the
water in which it was dipped, where Sesooā had gaudily painted her Camp
Fire symbol, so characteristic of the little fire-witch who had mastered
the art of getting fire without matches.
“Dear little Sally! if I could love one girl of our Morning-Glory Camp
Fire better than another ’twould be Sally, next to Olive!” So said the
girl-rower to herself, answering the appeal of the spray-feathered
flame. “And ’twas so nice of her to go off and leave me to myself for a
little while after I’d told her all my story—what I was crying about—I
do feel a step happier for telling her!” smiling tremulously. “Her going
will give me time for just half-an-hour’s row, alone, before dinner. And
the water isn’t very rough near shore, though there’s a wild tumble of
tide out in the middle of the river. This sou’wester is a ripping
breeze!”
Thus the would-be designer of a painted window, enshrining the form of a
Camp Fire Girl and consecrated to her ideals, soliloquized as she,
Jessica Dee Holley, rowed briskly out from the Sugarloaf shore toward
the wild-looking water that foamed and leaped at the broad heart of the
tidal river.
The tide was still so low that she had difficulty in shoving off her
flat-bottomed dory which Captain Andy had put at the service of the
girls, but the feat was accomplished at last, at the cost of wet ankles.
“Never mind! I’ll change when I get back. I couldn’t have a row after
dinner; it’s going to ‘rain pitchforks,’” the girl had told herself as
she finally took her seat in the boat. “It’s breezing up for a good hard
blow, too—sou’westerly squall, maybe—a mighty bad squall when it blows
off the Sugarloaf, over a hundred acres of tall sand-hills, so Captain
Andy says. I sha’n’t go out far! But I love the sea when it gets an
angry rake on”—again mentally quoting the captain. “I like to feel
myself mistress of it in a boat—I suppose that’s my great-grandfather
coming alive in me!”
It would have been so much better if this one of her dead and gone
relatives who seemed to have been a power could have “come alive”
outside her, to smooth her way and steer her girlish course, so the
rower thought, and rowed on thinking about him, his adventures on the
deep, his life-saving achievements when he rescued the shipwrecked crews
of other vessels. In high school she had read about Ulysses—hero of the
greatest poem of antiquity—who was represented as being such a
strong-hearted sailor, but Ulysses played second fiddle to her
great-grandfather in her youthful imagination.
Thinking of the latter now, of the gallant shoulders in the blue coat,
the dimpled chin, the hair and eyes so like her own, as everybody
said—thinking of these as depicted in the old miniature which she had
left locked in her desk in the Deering Mansion for safety—lent a glamor
to the hard, short sea, wildly tipped with foam, that was springing up
about her boat.
It might well be termed the sea, that part of the tidal river on which
she was vaguely rowing, for the sand-bar at the river’s mouth where the
breakers combed and foamed and the brown, sandy point called the Neck,
on which those breakers threw their white bonnets aloft, was less than a
mile away.
And what Jessica did not realize while she spun romances about that
sailor-ancestor of hers and while she felt the daring drop of sea-blood
inherited from him revel in her veins, was that the strong sou’westerly
wind blowing offshore, gaining tremendous force as it drove across the
hundred acres of pale sand-hills that made up the Sugarloaf Peninsula,
was sweeping her steadily down nearer to where the white fangs of those
breakers were set in the brown throat of the Neck.
She felt comfortably safe, for the water upon which she had launched her
boat, and, indeed, for nearly half a mile offshore where she was
aimlessly rowing about, though choppy and white-capped, was not
dangerously rough, not so rough but that she could turn back and land
again when she chose, for the Sugarloaf sand-dunes whose highest peak
rose to two hundred feet above sea-level acted as a windbreak, so that
the tremendous, ever-increasing force of the squally gusts only struck
outside that half-mile belt of comparative calmness.
How hard they hit when they did strike, lashing the middle of the river
into a whirlpool, angered by the tide which had just turned and was
feebly opposing them, the dreaming Morning-Glory, exulting in being
mistress of them and of her boat, did not know.
She never meant to be foolhardy. She knew that to obey that stringent
point of the Camp Fire Law: “Hold on to Health!” she must not only care
for her body and steer clear of sickness when she could, but that over
and above that, _far more important_ still, she must avoid unnecessary
and aimless danger, for in the latter case, nine times out of ten, she
would imperil not her own life alone, but some other life more mature
and in the world’s estimate more valuable—as has sadly happened once
among Camp Fire ranks—a life that might be nobly given in trying to save
her.
In what followed she was largely the victim of ignorance—because the
word-pictures to which she had listened, painting squalls upon the tidal
river near its mouth, fell so short of the reality—and of the absence of
Captain Andy who had taken a party of other campers up the river in his
motor-boat, as well as of her desire to work off, in rowing, the
grieving depression which had clung to her on the beach.
She did fling it overboard; as the choppy waves belabored the dory’s
nose she presently laughed aloud as she chastised them with her painted
oars, feeling that theirs was just rough play, the wild, boisterous
sport of a young dog, proud of his strength, who shows all his teeth in
his gambols, but will never close them upon his friends.
She laughed and chanted exultantly a line of some old sea-song while the
gusts tore at the green pompon of her woolen Tam O’Shanter and tried to
snatch the jaunty, tight-fitting cap itself off her head.
“Ouch!
“‘The wind she blow a hurricane,
By ’n’ by she blow some more!’
I’m having lots of fun with you!” she sang to them. “And now I guess
it’s high time for me to turn back; it must be almost dinner-hour;
Gheezies, our Guardian, and the girls may be getting anxious about me!
Goodness! how the wind is whipping up the fine sand of the dunes; it’s
hovering like pale clouds over the Sugarloaf.”
This sand-fog spreading its storm-wings above the white hills that
formed the background of Camp Morning-Glory looked ominous. She caught
her breath; it tickled her throat, suddenly, with a feather of fear. She
wished she had not come out so far.
“‘It’s a long, long way to yonder shore now!
But my heart’s _right_ there!’”
she sang, all in a flutter, determined to keep her courage up, gazing
shoreward toward the distant camp under whose sheltering roof her Camp
Fire Sisters must be even now gathering for the midday meal.
“Whew! I must be getting into the really rough water, out toward the
middle of the river. This—this is no joke!” she cried aloud wildly the
next minute as a larger wave than any she had encountered yet not only
boisterously showed its teeth, but seemed to fasten them cruelly in the
dory, shaking the little boat until its planks creaked as she tried to
turn it and drenching her from pompon to shoe-tip with spray.
“Never mind:
“‘When perils gather round,
All sense of danger’s drowned,
We despise it to a man!
We sing a little and laugh a little....’”
And even while she tried to sing and laugh the Peril was upon her.
A raving, squalling gust swooped out from that sand-fog swirling over
the pale hills of the Sugarloaf; it seemed to mount in delirium to the
lowering sky—from which all the sun-rays had fled to hide—and kick over
a bucket of fresh water there. Then it roared as it shook its wet wings
over the sea; its dripping tail struck the puny dory, just far enough
out to be so struck with overwhelming force—and not all the strength of
girl or boy, either, could stand or make headway against it.
“Oh-h! there goes my green Tam.” It was such a heart-broken wail, such a
sob, that the wild, wet gust must have had the heart of a fiend to
withstand it and sweep the green Tam O’Shanter, which depended for
safety upon the clinging fit of its woven wool, mockingly away from the
boat’s side.
It was beyond girl-nature not to make a frantic attempt to recover it—to
row after it for a few battling strokes.
But those wheeling strokes were the death-knell of safety, of safety’s
last chance.
The now terrified rower saw the pretty, warm head-gear, which she had
bought out of the little pocket-money given her from time to time by
Cousin Anne, dance upon the wave for a moment—a green blossom upon a
white tendril of foam—just beyond her reach.
She did not see its soaked collapse; she lost sight of it, of everything
without and within her, except a blinding aching terror, for, all in a
moment, the dory and she were whirling at the heart of a water-spout.
The rain let loose by that last fierce gust drenched her sweater and
short skirt.
A second gust blowing with equal ferocity offshore, and yet another,
turned loose by the descending squall, spun her boat out toward the
whirlpool heart of the river where the baby tide, like a lion’s whelp,
fought the tiger gusts.
A reeling minute, the spray as well as the rain soaking and blinding
her, the wind tearing loose her drenched hair, driving it across her
face as if it would steal that, too, and whipping the breath out of her
body, while the decorated oars wavered in her wet grasp that desperately
tried to hold on to them, slipping between the racked row-locks which
shook like chattering teeth!
Then those mad gusts rushed on to continue their fight with the incoming
tide nearer to the mouth of the river, dragging the dory in their train,
or brother-gusts, following, spun and drove it, really it mattered not
which—nothing mattered now—for the fierce, wet onslaught of wind had
taken, not a girl’s streaming hair, indeed, but something far more
precious at the moment—one of her painted oars.
“Oh! what’s to become of me? I can’t row—I couldn’t, anyway! Will
anybody see me from shore? Captain Andy might put off in a boat to save
me, but he’s away up the river! The Boy Scouts! Their camp is far over
among those other dunes, near the open sea, on the farther side of
them!” Wildly Jessica’s gaze swept the pale beach and dunes lining the
opposite shore of the river from the Sugarloaf as she drew in her second
symbol-painted oar, now helpless, while the wind gnashed at its emblems
and the foam hissed Sally’s flame.
Nowhere along the drab, rain-pelted line of beach, sands-pit and tall
dune on either side of her was there a sign of a boat putting off—any
indication that somebody saw her plight and would make an attempt, at
least, to rescue her.
Indeed, along the whole coast of Massachusetts, north and south, no
wilder or more lonely spot could be picked out than the mouth of this
tidal river, left for nearly two-thirds of the year entirely to the
harbor-seals and an occasional sportsman or professional gunner!
“Oh, I’ll be swept down—down—among the breakers on the bar!” The girl’s
fingers interlocked convulsively as she cowered upon the middle
thwart-seat of the boat, her eyes blindfolded by spray, her face
working, discolored by fear, her wet knees groveling at the swollen roar
of those breakers, heard even when they were farther off and invisible,
among the crystalline sand-mounds of the Sugarloaf.
They crisped and curled and reared themselves through transparent sheets
of rain like a pale wall between her and another world. Beyond them,
even if by a miracle she should be swept past and through them alive,
was the foamy vastness of the open sea where such frail things as a girl
and a dory must surely be swallowed up in the tumult and tumble.
“Oh! I _can’t_ be drowned. I can’t be _drowned_.” Frightened to a
frenzy, her bent knees stiffened, she made a movement to stand up in the
wildly rocking boat, to shout, scream, shriek for help to one shore, or
both—shriek her loudest against the roar of wind, rain and spray.
The fatal impulse almost overcame her. She was stumbling, staggering to
her feet, when like a wave from nowhere, flooding her agonized
consciousness, came a memory of Captain Andy’s instructions to her and
her Camp Fire Sisters, how to act if ever, by any most unlikely chance,
they should be caught in such a peril.
“Lie flat,” he said. “Flat as a flounder! Slip down under the
thwart-seats, make yourself one with the dory’s bottom. In such a
‘fearsome fix’ a girl who couldn’t keep a grip of herself would stand up
and holler! A Camp Fire Girl, with presence of mind, would know enough
to lie flat!”
Trembling, this Camp Fire Girl sank back upon the shaking thwart. She
closed her eyelids tight, the bursting tears mingling with the spray
behind them. And the roar of the breakers was lost in the voice of
prayer crying passionately in her own young heart.
As on one July day, nearly two months before, she had prayed desperately
for physical strength to carry the dripping, bowing weight of a
deaf-and-dumb child out of a playground pool, so now she prayed for
soul-strength to carry her torch of presence of mind through these
swirling, drowning waters—for self-grip!
And self-control came to her.
Down she slipped, down, until her shuddering body pressed the boat’s
bottom, until she lay on her back, flattened out under the dripping,
shiny cross-seats.
And with the obedient action came a gleam of hope, like a play of
lightning through the rain, for Captain Andy had given a reason for his
advice: that the dory being flat-bottomed the waves by themselves would
never capsize her; neither was it likely that she would ship enough
water even among the breakers to swamp her; that a girl in her—even
though carried out to sea—would stand a fair chance, if she could only
“hold on to herself,” of being picked up when the squall was over.
So Morning-Glory, flattened to a flounder—and wet as ever was
flounder-fish yet—“held on to herself” and prayed and thought of her
Camp Fire Sisters.
“I wonder if they miss me—they must—and whether they see the boat
drifting down to the breakers on the bar?” she questioned as the roar of
those breakers swelled to a crash in her ears, as she could see the
white wave-tops rising furiously on either side of the boat, plucking
off their ghastly head-feathers of spray and tossing them in upon her
like a watery coverlet, while she lay on her back in her cradle, the
boat’s bottom.
That was just before a change came.
Yes, her Camp Fire Sisters and their Guardian did see the driven dory,
were at this moment plucking their hearts out in anguish.
They were rending the streaming heavens with their cries, scouring the
sodden Sugarloaf to find another boat and somebody strong to go after
her while the dearest girl in their camp was being swept in a curtained
drive of rain, upon a roaring bed of waves, out toward the mouth of the
roar, the Bar, where the breakers curled in an ecstasy, piling white on
white, pale as climbing death.