Cape Porpoise by Sarah Phillips Pellet
I had the occasion to visit my family in Maine over the summer and took this picture. While I love the dramatic clouds and the sun hitting the houses to the left, I admit I was somewhat disappointed I couldn’t take the shot at high tide. At high tide, the docks and boats are floating and everything looks picturesque. Like a postcard. Perfect. It’s the way the most people want to see it. In fact, while I was taking this picture a tourist was standing nearby with her camera, she shrugged and yelled over to where I stood, “Shame it’s low tide.” I get it. Low tide is just, well, low tide. It smells dank and musty (or worse), flies and mosquitoes buzz about the sea grass, little dead crabs and other ocean cast-offs cling to the glistening muck, and as you can see, pleasure boats tilt to their sides, waiting for high tide to come so they can go out to play in the sea.
But then I thought about what’s really going on in this picture and decided that I love it, low tide and all. In fact, I think I like it better than the high tide pictures I’ve taken over the years. Why? Because it tells the real story of the place.
Sometimes you need the tide to go out in order to reveal things – like peeling back a layer of a facade. This can be figuratively or literally, as in the case of this picture. Low tide here reveals a dredged harbor. It separates the pleasure boats from the working boats. The pleasure boats (a fair number of them), lie useless on the seabed for several hours twice a day, while the working boats, they can maneuver out to sea no matter the tide level. This isn’t just a pretty place on the coast of Maine. It’s a working fishing village. There’s a story here. It says something about the people who work here and their way of life. Low tide also reveals boulders and other boating hazards that lie beneath the surface during high tide. If you don’t know they’re there, you’ll hit them and damage your boat or perhaps capsize and get hurt. Peeling back the facade shows what you need to look out for when things change.
So now I’m thinking hard about my setting in my next book. What’s the high tide story – the picture perfect story? What does that look like? What happens there, when everything is peachy-keen? Conversely, what happens at low tide, when night falls, the weather changes, or when the perfect facade is peeled back? What does it reveal? How does the landscape change? What – or who – comes out when things change? What hazards are exposed? How do the characters discover them?
This picture has taught me to really think about setting in a dynamic way. I like it.
