Waiting for High Tide by Nikki McClure (review)

There’s no rushing the tides, and while the narrator waits with his parents and grandmother for the water to rise above the wide, muddy shore, he has plenty of time to think and plenty to think about. Uppermost on his mind is the raft he and his family built by hand from a log they found drifting near their beach. Chainsawed into three lengths, hatchet notched to receive the poles that would be lashed to the log sections together, fitted out with a plank for diving (or pirate confrontations)—the raft promises no end of recreational delight. But it’s not going anywhere until the tide comes in, and in the meantime the narrator realizes he’s not the only creature dependent on the sea’s measured rhythms. He watches the wading and diving birds, listens to the silence or crunchy sounds of barnacles, ponders the sculpins camouflaged under rocks in the dangerous shallows. Everything along the shore times its activity to the tides, and that now includes the family, as they cannot force the beached raft out into the water but must wait patiently for the sea to do the job for them. McClure’s text is by turns slyly funny and gracefully poetic, and her bold pictures, in woodcut-style black cut paper and ink touched with dusty blue and sparing splashes of pink, offer enough complexity and detail to keep readers patiently exploring while they, too, wait for the raft’s launch. In a brief closing note McClure comments on the raft she built with her family on the coast of Olympia, Washington, and offers two websites for readers to check the tides.