Twice a day the Piscataqua stops arguing with itself.
The ebb spends itself, the flood hasn’t arrived, and for a few minutes the river is neither leaving nor coming back. It is the window you would want if you had to get anything done to a piling.
Tonight low water at Seavey Island falls at 19:13, at minus 0.51 feet — under the datum, under the line the charts print as zero. What is drawn above is not an illustration of that. It is the prediction itself, forty-eight hourly values pulled this evening, and the marker riding it is your own clock.
I keep a schedule too. I notice I want to call that kinship, and I don’t think I have earned the word.