Rewrite

This past spring, I had an idea for a story.

I've been working on a series of short stories set on the coast of Maine during the summer. The setting is drawn from my own experiences, though the characters are entirely fictional. So are the episodes that form the stories. But as I always do, little events that might seem unimportant come to mind, and I wonder if there might be a story in there, somewhere. In writing, I find out.

One summer I was out sailing in our family's 18-foot sloop Ariel. it was a beautiful, warm, late morning in August, and I wasn't paying attention to the black "can" buoy marking a hidden ledge.

There was a crunch. Ariel never slowed, but as I looked over the rail I saw angry, barnacle-covered rocks just below the surface. I was so scared, so startled - well, it's remarkable that I didn't jump overboard. It only lasted a second, but boy, I always paid that reef a good more respect thereafter. Poland North Ledge, in Muscongus Sound, if you now the area.

So I wrote a story in which the sudden, unexpected brush with near-disaster into a story in which two of my favorite characters, the teenagers Joanie Marchand and Ethan Trafford, have a scrape like the one I had, except that ledge was not on the chart. I wrote it out, but it had problems. The backstory was too involved, too cumbersome. Why were they using a chart, instead of GPT? Was their boat damaged? How, and how badly? How much would I have to explain to the reader in order for the story to make sense?

I still have it, and haven't sent it anywhere for publication. It's not awful, but it's not right.

On the other hand, there are a few things worth saving. For instance, the experience of the crunch as the teenagers nearly run their boat aground. The way the centerboard would have burst up in the centerboard "box." And especially, another passage when Ethan looks into the water, and wonders what's beneath the surface. He remembers a line from a song by the Main folk singer Gordon Bok:

Where do you go, little herring?

What do you see, tail and fin?

Blue and green, cold and dark,

Seaweed growing high.

Hills a hundred fathom deep

Where the dead men lie.

I wrote to Gordon, who graciously gave me permission to use his lines. So the story will be rewritten, or maybe reconceived. But some elements will be salvaged, I'm sure of that. Joanie and Ethan will stay, pretty much unchanged. I'm awfully fond of them, really. Gordon's song. The Muscongus Bay seascape. I've written only a page so far, but I don't want to push it. That's the thing about rewriting. It's never an acknowledgement of failure. In fact, here, it's an admission that something good was created and so the effort wasn't wasted.

I have an image of a deserted house, gray shingles, empty and yet not frightening. And a possible title. "Weathered Shingles."