Advanced Listening Practice

I kept logs for forty-one years. Every vessel that entered this harbour, I wrote it down. Name, tonnage, draught, time of arrival, time of departure, cargo if I knew it, captain's name if I could get it. I did this in hardbound notebooks, one per year, black covers, lined pages, and I kept them on the shelf behind my desk in the harbourmaster's office in chronological order. Forty-one notebooks. Not a single gap.

I should tell you where this is. Goderich, Ontario. Lake Huron. If you've never been, it's a small town on a bluff overlooking the lake, and the harbour sits at the bottom of a steep road that drops from the main street down to the water. The grain elevators are the first thing you see from the highway. Or they were, anyway. One of them came down in the tornado of 2011. But the harbour is still there. The harbour is always there. That's something I used to say to my wife, and she'd roll her eyes, but she understood what I meant by it. The harbour was the fixed point around which everything else in the town moved.

I started in 1971. I was twenty-three. My father had been the harbourmaster before me, and his father before him, which I realize sounds like something out of a folk song, but it's just what happened. My grandfather came over from Scotland in 1919 and settled on the lake because, as he put it, he needed to be near water or he'd dry up and blow away. He wasn't a poetic man in other respects. He was practical, methodical, and he kept meticulous records of everything that passed through the harbour mouth, a habit my father continued and that I, without ever consciously deciding to, continued after him. The lake was our entire frame of reference. We understood weather as it related to the lake, understood seasons by what the lake was doing, and we understood time, or so it seemed to me, primarily as a record of what had come in and what had gone out.

I inherited that. The logging. It wasn't required. The port authority kept its own records, of course, computerized eventually, and I filed the official paperwork like everyone else. But the notebooks were mine. Personal. A habit that became a discipline that became, if I'm being honest about it, something closer to a compulsion. I couldn't not do it. A ship would round the breakwater and I'd have the notebook open before the lines were thrown. I could identify most of the regulars by their silhouette against the sky, and the ones I didn't recognize I'd study with a kind of hunger, cataloguing every detail I could see from the dock or from the window of my office.

Two years ago, the town decided to digitize its municipal archives. They'd got a grant from the province, hired a company out of Kitchener, and they were scanning everything: meeting minutes, building permits, fire reports, the lot. Someone in the municipal office remembered my notebooks and asked if I'd donate them. I said yes. They weren't doing anyone any good on my shelf. I'd been retired for six years by then. The notebooks were gathering dust, and I suppose I thought that putting them into a database might give them a kind of permanence that paper, eventually, can't offer.

The company scanned them, ran optical character recognition on the handwriting, which apparently mine was legible enough for, and built a searchable database. Very thorough. And then someone, I don't know who exactly, had the idea to cross-reference my personal logs against the official port authority records. A completeness check, they called it.

They didn't match. Not remotely.

I should be precise about this because the imprecise version sounds like the kind of story you tell at a dinner party to make yourself interesting, and that's not what this is. The official port authority records for Goderich harbour, from 1971 to 2012, list a total of just over fourteen thousand vessel arrivals. My notebooks, for the same period, list fourteen thousand, two hundred and thirty-seven. The difference is two hundred and nine entries. Two hundred and nine ships that I logged, with dates, with tonnage, with descriptions, that do not appear in the official record. They were never registered. They were never cleared. According to the port authority, they were never here.

Now. The first explanation, the obvious one, is that I made them up. Or that I was confused. Misidentified vessels, double-counted arrivals, got dates wrong. Forty-one years is a long time, and memory plays tricks, everyone knows that. I would accept that explanation if it applied to a handful of entries. But two hundred and nine is not a handful, and my descriptions are not vague. I recorded hull colours. I recorded registration numbers. I noted distinguishing features: a patch of rust below the waterline, a repainted funnel, a cracked wheelhouse window. These are not the kind of details you invent, and they are not the kind you confuse with another vessel.

The second explanation, the one the digitization company politely suggested, is that the port authority records are incomplete. Paperwork lost, filing errors, the transition from paper to computer in the 1990s. Possible. Certainly possible. But the port authority conducted its own audit after this discrepancy came to light, and they stand by their records. They are, in their words, confident in the integrity of their data. I spoke to the current harbourmaster about it, a woman I've known for fifteen years, and she was sympathetic but clear: whatever I saw, it didn't come through official channels.

Which leaves the third possibility, which is the one I've been carrying around for two years now and which I still don't know what to do with.

Seventeen of the two hundred and nine vessels in my logs, seventeen of them, match descriptions of ships that sank in other parts of the Great Lakes. Not approximately. Precisely. Hull dimensions, registration numbers, names. The Alexander Mitchell, a bulk carrier that went down in Lake Superior in November of 1958, appears in my log on the fourteenth of November, 1983. I recorded her arrival at 0340. I described her as riding low, minimal deck cargo, no visible crew. I noted that her hull was in poor condition, heavy corrosion along the waterline, which is consistent with a vessel that had been sitting on the bottom of Lake Superior for twenty-five years, though of course I didn't know that at the time. I just wrote what I saw.

The Edmund Grey. The Bannockburn. The W. H. Gilcher. Ships that went down in the 1880s, the 1920s, the 1950s. Ships that are documented losses. Ships whose wrecks, in some cases, have been located and surveyed on the lake bed. I have entries for all of them. Dates, times, conditions. Written in my hand, in ink, in notebooks that have been verified as authentic by the digitization company's document analysts. The entries sit among ordinary, verifiable arrivals, surrounded by grain ships and tankers and lakers whose comings and goings are confirmed in both records without discrepancy.

I want to be clear that I am not a superstitious person. I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe that dead ships sail into harbours in the middle of the night and then sail out again, leaving no trace except a line in an old man's notebook. I don't believe that because it doesn't make any sense, and I have spent my entire life in a profession that depends on things making sense, on the record matching reality. But I also don't have a better explanation, and I've had two years to look for one. I've been through every entry. I've compared every detail. And the details hold up, which is the part that doesn't let me sleep.

My wife, before she died, used to say that the lake has its own memory. She meant it metaphorically, I think, or perhaps not entirely. She grew up on the shore, same as me, and she had a relationship with the water that was less about observation and more about intuition. She'd know when a storm was coming before the weather service did. She'd know when the ice was going to break up in spring, sometimes to the day. I used to tease her about it. I'm not teasing anymore.

I go down to the harbour most mornings, still. Force of habit. I sit on the bench by the old grain elevator and I watch the lake. It's not the same as working, obviously. There's no notebook in my hand. But I watch, and sometimes, usually in the early hours when the light is flat and the water is very still, I see something on the horizon. A shape. Low in the water. Moving slowly, if it's moving at all. And I know, in the way that you know things you can't justify and can't quite dismiss, that if I had my notebook, and if I walked down to the dock and waited, something would come through the harbour mouth. Something that isn't supposed to be there. Something that, according to every official record and every reasonable explanation, doesn't exist.

I don't go down to the dock anymore. I stay on the bench. And the shape, if it was ever there, moves on.