The Sounding Line

Naomi Hart learned, somewhere between retirement and her fifth draft of her first book, that the thing you dread rarely looks like a storm on the horizon. It’s quieter—more like fog that seeps in while you’re looking elsewhere, softening every outline until familiar landmarks vanish.

The fog arrived on a Tuesday.

It came disguised as two emails and a phone call.

The first: An email came from a platform that had changed its rules again—categories shuffled, keywords constrained, the path to readers narrowed like a channel at low tide.

The second: a mother describing how a white teacher had sung a cruel parody of “Happy Birthday” to her six-year-old son, who was Black, and now the boy wouldn’t go back to school.

The phone call was from Frank, who coordinated the pastors’ prayer fellowship. “We need someone steady to speak on Friday night. Community vigil. People are shaken, Naomi.”

She sat very still. The afternoon light glared off her computer screen like a sheet of water. She felt that old, crisp edge of unease—the kind that comes when you know the chart ends and the blank spaces begin.

She’d grown up a Navy brat, the daughter of a navigator who taught her early that uncharted didn’t mean empty. It meant unsounded. She’d taken a seamanship course years ago, back when her family was stationed in North Florida. However, the instructor used maps of Rhode Island’s coast, which had been second nature to her. She asked the instructor why he used those maps. He told her it was so no one would know the waters and would have to learn to read the maps instead of just intuitively knowing the answers to the problems of navigation. She confessed to the instructor that she felt like she was cheating. “Knowing the waters doesn’t necessarily make you a cheater,” he’d said. “It may just make you responsible. It depends on what you do with the knowledge and then whether or not you accept the teaching.”

That word—responsible—echoed now as she stared at the blinking cursor.

When you navigate literal water, you trust charts, yes—but you also trust your senses. Currents shift, sandbars move, buoys drift. A chart gives guidance, not a guarantee. But currents move sand. Hurricanes rearrange everything that was thought to be immovable. Buoys drift. Even lighthouses change their patterns. You learn to trust the chart, yes, but also your eyes, your ears, your gut, your sounding line—a simple cord with marks and a weight you drop down to learn what’s beneath you right now.

Naomi knew she would need a sounding line.

She closed the first email and answered the second gently, promising to be present on Friday night. Then she called Frank back and said yes. Her voice didn’t shake, but her hand lingered on the receiver as though steadying a tiller in a crosswind.

The lake behind her house glimmered under the late sun. At that hour, it always caught light in a thin blaze, like stained glass laid on water. Naomi pressed her palm to the glass, absorbing the day’s last warmth, and imagined the small skiff she used to borrow in her twenties, when her father was stationed on the coast. The boat had a motor that coughed like an old smoker and an aluminum hull that complained with every chop. Naomi had learned to read tide tables and the language of channel markers—“red right returning”—and how, if the wind is pushing you to a lee shore, you don’t argue; you change course or get stove-in.

He’d also said, “You don’t fear water, kid. You respect it. You learn to move with what is, not what you wish was beneath you.”

She whispered, “Aye,” to no one in particular.

That night, Naomi sat at her desk. She wrote three words in her notebook: Chart. Current. Soundings.

Chart. What does this harbor look like now? The city had weathered too many summers of simmering tension. This latest cruelty had only surfaced what was already swirling underneath.

Current. What’s moving unseen? Shame, anger, fatigue—all stirring a dangerous chop in the water. And beneath it, an ache so deep it felt tidal: people wanted to belong to one another again.

Soundings. Drop the line. Learn the depths where you stand. She texted the mother, called Pastor Jerome, and arranged coffee with two women—Melissa and Tonya—who hadn’t spoken civilly in months.

Wednesday morning came bright but heavy. Naomi walked the lakeside path before sunrise, listening to the hiss of ducks parting the still water. Every ripple carried memory: her father’s chart table, the pencil marks on tide tables, the stern warning, “You don’t fear water, kid. You respect it. You learn to move with what is, not what you wish was beneath you.” At the time, she thought he was talking about the bay. Now she understood he was talking about grief, and rules that change on you, and children who carry what you can’t fix.

By the time she reached the café patio with Melissa and Tonya, she knew she’d have to let their pain have air before she could say a word. The women agreed on nothing except that Friday’s vigil was necessary.

“Just don’t tell me to move on,” Tonya said, dabbing her eyes. “That phrase makes me feel like I tripped on something I should’ve seen.”

Naomi rested her hand on the table. “You don’t move on water,” she said softly. “You move with it. You respect the wind, but you don’t let it take the helm.”

They stared at her for a beat, then nodded. The metaphor had landed.

That night, she added to her notes: We do not move on. We move with.

When Jim wandered into her office, he grinned. “You’re giving the plotting-a-course look.”

“Friday,” she said. “I’m trying to find language that won’t split the hull.”

He laughed. “Remember what your dad said about dead reckoning?”

“That it gets you lost slowly?”

“That it gets you lost with conviction,” he said. “Take a fix often—stars, shoreline, anything that doesn’t lie.”

Naomi smiled. Stars, shoreline, anything that doesn’t lie.

Meanwhile, the mother texted back that the child had woken from nightmares twice. Naomi did what she could from a distance. She called Pastor Jerome again and asked him to read a blessing. She reminded Frank to bring extra lights for the field. She checked the weather like a sailor planning a crossing.

Thursday blurred. She drafted her remarks, crossed out half of them, and hoped the rest would hold water. When she finally slept, it was fitful but peaceful enough.

Friday arrived with a brightness that made even cracked sidewalks gleam. She chose the blue blouse, which, according to Jim, made her look like she belonged near water.

The vigil was scheduled for 7. At 6:30, the field behind the old library filled slowly—families with folding chairs, teens with candles, pastors in worn shoes. Naomi watched the movement, the way people unconsciously turned their faces toward each other like boats adjusting to the wind.

Frank introduced her. “Our sister Naomi Hart will share a few words.”

She stepped to the mic, heart steady as a compass rose.

“Thank you for coming,” she began. “I’ll start with a confession. I don’t know these waters as well as I wish I did.”

A small ripple of laughter—nervous, but open.

“I grew up on Navy bases,” she continued. “My father taught me seamanship on the waters off Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Out there, you learn that charts can’t keep up with storms. Sand shifts, markers move. So, sailors use a sounding line—a simple rope and weight—to learn their depth. When fog rolls in, you move slow, you take soundings, and you find one fixed light to steer by.”

She paused, feeling the crowd lean closer.

“This week feels like fog,” she said. “Not because we can’t see what happened—it’s painfully clear—but because everything around it blurs. Anger blurs it. Fear thickens it. History complicates it. Tonight, I’m not asking anyone to move on. On the water, we move with it. We account for the wind and give each other room so our anchors don’t foul.”

Heads nodded. Shoulders loosened.

A small boy near the front, bored already, tugged on his father’s sleeve. Naomi smiled at him. “I’m here to ask us to do what good navigators do: sound the depth, mark the hazards honestly, and keep an eye on a trustworthy light. Not the light of denial. Not the light of superiority. I mean the light we all wish would find us when we are out past the jetty—mercy, dignity, the stubborn refusal to let a child bear what they did not ask to carry.”

She felt the crowd lean in just a little. In a boat, you can feel when the hull stops fighting and settles into the water. This felt like that.

“I believe the same God who calls us to truth also calls us to steady hands. The question isn’t whether we’ll face uncharted waters. It’s whether we’ll face them together. When a channel silts in, you don’t pretend it hasn’t. You dredge—or you find another way around. Either way, you keep the faith that there’s still a safe harbor ahead.”

A child in the front row smiled at Naomi; She smiled back. “I met a mother this week whose little boy didn’t want to go back to school after being mocked. He said tonight might be like a lighthouse. He’s six. Maybe he’s right. Maybe that’s what we’re doing here—keeping the light on for one another.”

The crowd exhaled as one.

“When charts fail,” she said quietly, “sailors look up. They find their bearings by the stars—truths that don’t shift with the tide. So, we look up, too. For mercy. For courage. For love wide enough to steer by.”

She let silence sit, a living thing among them.

Pastor Jerome came forward to read a blessing, voice low and rhythmic as the lap of water. When he finished, people didn’t rush to leave. They lingered—talking softly, crossing old lines in small, tentative steps. A sparkler hissed somewhere, its light brief but brave.

. The mother who had emailed came and hugged her. “He still doesn’t want to go back,” the woman whispered. “But he wanted to come tonight. He said it might be like a lighthouse. He’s six. I don’t know where he got that.”

“Maybe from the water in us,” Naomi said.

They laughed at their own clumsiness, and then they didn’t. They simply let the moment sit, like a boat that had ceased pitching.

Jim found her. He didn’t ask how it went. He took her elbow and they walked the perimeter together, as if inspecting a dock after a storm.

At home later, she set her folded notes beneath the ceramic compass rose on her desk. The lake outside was fogged again, honest fog this time. She poured decaf, and the cat wound around her ankles like a tide.

In the mist, two egrets lifted—long legs trailing like quiet punctuation. Naomi thought of the boy, of the women at the café, of the neighbors who’d stood together in the field.

Her father had always said you never really know a body of water; it rewrites itself nightly. You learn to pay attention, to measure often, to trust the tools that tell the truth even when the horizon doesn’t.

She opened a new document.

Title: The Sounding Line.

She typed the first line: Uncharted doesn’t mean empty. It just means someone hasn’t sounded it yet.

She smiled. Somewhere deep inside, the fog began to lift.