Free Sea of Tranquility by Lesley Choyce

sky, rubber boots keeping the feet afloat, his face down, as if something is of extraordinary interest on the bottom of the ocean.

C
hapter
S
even
    Todd Sanger, twelve years old, from Upper Montclair, New Jersey, peered over the side of the steaming ferry boat. “Diatoms,” he said to his little sister,Angeline.“I bet there’s millions and millions of diatoms in there.” Todd was a smart kid who loved science; anything that had to do with science was very dear to him. His father had nicknamed him Beaver after an old TV show, but the kids at Upper Montclair Elementary had shifted it to Beavis.
    â€œDo they all have names?” Angeline asked.
    â€œThere are quite a few different subspecies, and yes, they all have names. Scientific names in Latin.”
    â€œWow.”
    â€œSome of them glow at night.”
    â€œI’d like to meet them.”
    Todd just gave her that big-brother look. Girls, what did they know?
    Actually Angeline knew a lot. She knew they were going to a magic island where fairy-tale people lived in gingerbread houses. She knew they were going to see whales. Whales and fishermen, and now they were sailing over a bay of diatoms, several million of them with Latin names and a lot of them friends with her brother. This is what Angeline knew and she perceived she was in a happily-ever-after story because that’s the way that all her mother’s stories ended for her.
    It was a day like no other she had ever experienced. Sun, sea, gulls like gravity-free dancers in the sky. Angeline’s mother and father by the railing, arms about each other. Angeline had only been on one other ferry before in her life— the Staten Island Ferry, where people spit over the side and ground cigarettes into the floor. Everyone on the Staten Island Ferry coughed and so did she when she traversed the dark waters of New York.
    No one was coughing on the ferry to Ragged Island. There were maybe twelve other people on board, and they all looked interesting to her for she knew they must be island people, all torn from the pages of a story book.
    â€œGod, smell that fresh air,” Angeline’s father, Bruce, said. The air wasn’t really fresh at all but permeated with diesel exhaust from the big engine turning the propeller that churned the harbour waters beneath them.
    â€œDo you think there’s much poverty on the island?” Bruce Sanger’s wife, Elise, asked him.
    â€œI don’t think they have poverty here in Canada, at least not in the same way as in the States. People in rural areas might be poor but they tend to be self-sufficient.”
    Elise gave him that dubious look wives give their husbands when husbands pretend to know things that they really don’t. Elise was very concerned with social issues and volunteered her time to various organizations to stop child labour in Pakistan, to end cruelty to lab animals in Switzerland, and to alleviate educational deficiencies in the inner city in places like Newark and Paterson, New Jersey.“We’ll see,” she said. She knew that if there was any genuine poverty to be found on Ragged Island, she would sniff it out and rub Bruce’s nose in it. It wasn’t that she was cruel. She just liked being right.
    â€œThis is going to be extremely educational for the kids,” Bruce said.“I think it was worth the long drive.”
    â€œI wanted to tell the manager of that motel in Maine that the moose head on the wall wasn’t appreciated.”
    â€œIt was kind of spooky. But I’m sure it was just an artifact of days gone by.”
    â€œStill. It wasn’t appreciated. Killing animals for sport — that’s not a matter to be taken lightly.”
    â€œI agree.” Bruce hadn’t told Elise yet about every aspect of this curious eco-tour that the Chicago Internet tour agency had lined up for them. She knew about the whales and the island but not about Phonse Doucette’s