BEFORE EVERYTHING CHANGED (BEC)
HERE’S WHAT WAS STILL REAL on the last day, BEC (Before Everything Changed).
The calm, late summer waters. The glittery morning sunlight. Dad, fine tuning the rudder in that vigilant way of his—which you would expect from a guy who just quit his big career in emergency management. Me, working the sail and not fully awake. Both of us, gross from camping on the boat last night.
But Home, our small and very handmade wooden boat, is looking the way she always does—fresh, like new, totally loved up.
I shake off my sleepiness enough to trim Home’s sail and fasten the mainsheet. With a slow yawn, I settle myself in the cockpit, snap open the clip on my gear bag and pull out my sketchbook.
I count on my drawings. They’re signals, really, from the only part of me that has any clue about—yeah—what’s up with my life. They can be cryptic, and I’m used to that. But lately, I’ve been covering pages with jumbled scribbles—garbled messages about—I can’t tell what. It’s as if someone or some thing hacked into my sketchbook. Someone or something too messed up to make sense.
Thumbing through the drawings from the last few days is creeping me out. But I refuse to give up my hopes for this weekend, so I turn to a new page and dig through the gear bag for a marker. This is our last sail of the summer. In such a dazzling August dawn, how hard could it be, finally, to dream that dream? You know, the big future I’m supposed to be plotting a course for this year. My life’s purpose. The reason the new high school I just moved to is taking us on that five-college tour next week.
In a flash of optimism, I pull myself out of my sleepy funk, address the blank expanse of the pages in front of me, and let my hand go.
A line flows from the marker, curving up and then down across both pages, repeating the pattern. When my hand slows to a stop, I lift the pen and lean back against Home’s rail. Holding my breath, I take a stab at making sense of what I see.
At least there’s some order to it. At least it is not the tangled mess of yesterday’s drawings. Still, the longer I look at what I have drawn, the tighter I grip the marker.
I can feel Dad studying me from the helm seat as if I’m an emergency about to happen. I didn’t think it was that obvious. I shake out my cramped hand and force myself to refocus on the drawing. But just when I think I see something in the sweep of lines, whatever it might have been evaporates in the heat of Dad’s worried stare.
I flash him a what!? look. But he dodges it and pretends to examine Home’s sail.
Now my neck is tight. Because I’m not the only emergency about to happen—he has been keeping something from me for days.
Whatever it is, I can’t take it on right now. I’m under deadline. My drawings and I have three days to come up with a dream to take on that college tour.
Trying to ward off yet another bout of anxiety about big futures, and big family secrets, I release my shoulders and stretch my neck. Then, I look out across the bow at the dazzling water, and—yeah—at the last moments of life, BEC.
I snap awake. Something is coming. The sunlight, air, ocean—they feel like they’re turning inside out.
My eyes flash to the lines I drew minutes ago. It’s beyond obvious that they are waves—waves charging into and over one another. I sit bolt upright and scan the horizon for—I don’t know what.
At that very moment, Dad decides he has finally mustered up the required energy to start that father-daughter conversation he should have started days ago.
“Kally, I’ve been thinking, this might be a good time to—”
“Come about.” I gasp the words, like a person who is fighting to wake from a suffocating dream.
“What? Why?”
But I don't know what or why. I wish he could tell me what or why. As I turn from the sea to my dad, my eyes catch on what is forming behind him.
“What’s wrong?” Dad twists in his seat to look behind him.
And now, we are both gaping into the maw of one insanely huge wave. It is bearing down on us. It is growing.
In his best emergency management voice, Dad orders me to “ready to come about.”
I scramble to release the mainsheet. Dad shoves the rudder hard over. We duck. The boom and sail swing their long arc, grazing the tops of our heads. I give the sail a second to refill with air before I trim it and fasten the mainsheet.
Dad is steering us straight into the swelling bulge of ocean.
“Dad?”
“We’re OK. We’re good.” I believe him because he’s the world’s best sailor. Then again, there is a heaving surge of Atlantic Ocean off of Home’s bow. It’s charging at us. The closer it gets, the more vertical it becomes. Soon, it fills the whole world. We are at the foot of a gigantic ramp of blue-grey salt water gone solid.
The mass rises under Home. It propels us skyward. Home twists and bends in ten directions at once, giving off tortured creaks and groans.
My stomach bottoms out like it’s in a violent high-speed elevator. The instant change of direction from forward to straight up spills all wind from our sail. It goes limp and pathetically useless.
I turn to make sure Dad is still inside the boat. He is. He’s struggling to gain control of the rudder and stop Home from wiping out as the monster wave builds to its crest, suspends us endlessly at its peak—then drops.
Home skids down the backside of the surge.
I take a death grip on the cockpit rail. My ability to process what is happening stutters into slow motion. Before I can scream or do something more useful, the wave—if you can call it that—barrels on toward the horizon. In seconds, the surrounding sea flattens.
Home sways violently, then droops, stunned and wrung out. She was born in these waters. She knows them intimately. What they did just now is beyond comprehension. Given the reality warp that rolled through a minute ago, the calm we are sitting in is outrageous. Laughable, even.
I’m not laughing. I’m shaking. Because—yeah—one second, it’s the most flawless morning ever for a late summer sail. And the next, it’s a trailer for a preposterous disaster movie.
Except, what passed under us was no computer animation.
Barely able to think or speak, I croak: “Where did it come from?”
Even though his face is as white as Home’s sail, Dad is fully functional and already in response mode. He points to the rocky island off starboard. “We should steer close to East Ledge Island. Ready to come about.”
I’m grateful for the call to do something within the realm of normal. Hands trembling, I rescue my sketchbook from the water sloshing at my feet, seal it in the dry bag and stow it in Home’s cabin. Returning to my position, I take hold of the mainsheet and try to sound ready when I say, “Ready.”
Dad thrusts the rudder hard over. The mainsheet runs through my hands and the boom swings past our heads. I close my grip, trim sail, and fasten the line.
As we beat windward toward East Ledge Island, my body continues to vibrate on high alert. That must be why, when I spot the clouds that have appeared at the horizon, I literally shudder. Those clouds are…wrong.
Dad pushes a life jacket into my hands.
Home settles into a solid and steady course toward East Ledge Island. It’s beyond me how she can do that after what she has been through, but it makes me love her more than ever.
The two humans on board are far from solid or steady. We do not speak about what just happened to us or the ocean, much less to the rules we thought our home planet was playing by. Dad has that look he gets when he is doing a situation assessment. And, like me, he keeps checking out those unrecognizable clouds behind us.
For my part, I’m awash in post-wave shock due to my inability to ignore how we almost died minutes ago. And, my alarm over the clouds that are closing in on us has just bumped up a level. At the rate they are moving, they’ll be overhead before we make it to the island.
Fear pounds in my chest. The sky is about to behave as insanely as the ocean did. Meanwhile, wind speed at sea level keeps dropping. And that is unnerving in a whole other way.
I look to the small island that Dad is steering toward for some hint of reassurance.
The bronzed cliffs of East Ledge Island shoot up from the water, then turn rolling and grassy at their tops. A veteran lighthouse, East Ledge Light, sits dangerously close to the brink of its sandy perch.
I retrieve a dry bag from inside Home’s cockpit, pull out our binoculars, and scan the island’s jagged outcroppings of rock. They jut out of the narrow beach in long lines before trailing into the ocean. Some of the boulders would dwarf a small house.
Looking for signs of people, I pan up the cliff, beyond a cluster of service buildings, and over to what must be the keeper’s house. East Ledge seems to be as deserted as it is remote. According to the map we memorized for this trip, it’s out here alone, 15.7 miles from the mainland.
I scan the binoculars down the wood stairs that connect the lighthouse grounds to a sandy cove. A twenty-foot long, high-speed aluminum workboat comes into view. It seesaws at a short wooden pier piled high with vacation gear worthy of the back of an oversized SUV. The pilot of the workboat unloads a boogie board and adds it to the line-up of coolers, duffels, grill, lawn chairs, and beach umbrellas.
That’s when I spot him, the guy whose name—I am destined to learn before long—is Stuart. Granted, this is one of the more significant events of this, the day Everything Changes—but me glimpsing Stuart is not what “changes everything.” He shows up as a mere blob in the binoculars, but he’s an impressively athletic blob. He’s grabbing assorted bags of vacation gear out of the workboat and swinging them up onto the pier in official naval maneuver fashion.
The man pacing the pier next to him, I am further destined to learn, is Mark Hart, Stuart’s dad. He holds a cellphone up to the sky in doomed attempts to find a signal. The woman who is supervising the activities with an anxious energy that I’m picking up from way out here is Jennifer Hart, Stuart’s mom.
Incoming waves slam into the back of the workboat and send it banging against the wooden pilings. Stuart makes a deft leap and pushes the boat clear.
At the end of the pier, Stuart’s little sister, Ollie, takes pictures of the sky. She begins to gesture excitedly, and that makes me remember—
I lower my binoculars and look overhead. Those clouds are pumped up, boiling, and coming at us fast. But here at sea level, the wind has slackened even more. Home is making little headway in the long swells that are growing beneath her.
I swing the binoculars back to the island, but everyone there is too busy to notice us. Stuart struggles against the waves that are crashing the workboat into the ocean rowboat tied alongside it. Finally, he muscles the workboat free of the pier. The pilot guns the motor, steers north along the shoreline, and disappears around the curve of the island.
I watch Stuart take a cap from his back pocket and pull it over his buzz cut. His mother looks like she’s shivering as she pulls her daughter to her side. Everyone grabs what they can carry and rushes up the steps to the top of the bluff.
When I lower the binoculars, I realize I’m shivering cold too. So is Dad. The temperature has gone from August to November in seconds. Surface winds have dropped to a dead calm. Still, the swells build. That line of clouds has morphed into squall cells, and they are writhing above us.
I stow the binoculars and break out our sweatshirts. We slip out of the lifejackets. Dad uses his knees to steady the rudder while he wrestles his sweatshirt on over his head. I zip up my hoodie and get back into position to work the mainsheet. Finally, we help each other back into our lifejackets and Dad breaks our nerve-wracked silence.
“Prepare to tack.”
“Ready,” I say.
Dad pushes the tiller to starboard. I haul in the mainsheet. The boom swings past our heads. Less than a minute later, he says again, “Prepare to tack.” I let out the mainsheet and duck under the boom.
“The currents out here should push us toward the island, but we’re getting nowhere,” I say.
Beneath us, the sea is acting nothing like it’s supposed to. Above us, the storm cells have tightened into raging, purple-black coils. Dad eyes the pier at East Ledge. I can tell he’s calculating how to put in there, as if there’s wind enough to put in anywhere.
“We’ll make way for that beach below the lighthouse,” he says, using his captain’s voice. “We can rest up for a couple hours. Let this weather pass. Then, we’ll head for home.”
I’m about to ask if he had seen the people landing on the island few minutes ago. But then, things go from being merely beyond strange to being—yeah—whatever word you would grasp for to describe The Day Everything Changed.
The wind strengthens and veers. Dad wrestles with the rudder as Home’s sail whips in one direction and then snaps in another. I let out the mainsheet, haul it back in, and let it out again.
“It’s coming from every direction. How can it even do that?” I shout, fighting the boom. Dad braces himself against the edge of the cockpit, trying to get more leverage on the tiller. Within seconds, we are fighting to stop Home from going into a death roll.
“Keep trimming!” Dad shouts.
“For what direction? Where is it coming from?”
“I don’t know. Everywhere. Just keep trimming.”
And that is where we’re at when life, BEC (Before Everything Changed) lets go and tips into life, AEC (After Everything Changed).
All the falling apart of what used to be real? All the erupting of new facts of existence that never before existed on Earth? It all starts now.