Green shingles

by Peter Svenson

Peter Svenson's house is perched high on a bluff, and its front windows survey the shipping lanes and western shore. It is from this perfect vantage point that Svenson scans sea, sky, land, and tidal zone, with a keen eye for the patterns of the human and the natural landscape. Traffic on and around the bay is constant, and captivating. The ships lure Svenson to hitch a ride on a Coast Guard cutter that deploys the nearby buoys, and then to sign on as a temporary crew member of a tugboat that pushes and pulls cargo barges up and down the long bay. On board these working vessels, he gains a new appreciation for the missions and mechanisms of the craft he has come to recognize from a distance. In other chapters, he conducts close-up examinations of the vagaries of the coastal ecosystem, the bayside community in which he lives, the history of a defunct local amusement park, the flotsam that washes up on his beach, the arcane art of canoe sailing, the difficult business of garage building,