It was so strange. Allthe time he had been coming down the canal through lock after lock she had beenmaking the same journey but he didn’t know she was there. Maybe he had seenher in the locks at Troy, looked right at her in the dark but had not seen her.

His chart had shown aseries of locks close together but they didn’t show altitude and they didn’tshow how confusing things could get when distances have been miscalculated andyou are running late and are exhausted. It wasn’t until he was actually in thelocks that danger was apparent as he tried to sort out green lights and redlights and white lights and lights of locktenders' houses and lights of otherboats coming the other way and lights of bridges and abutments and God knowswhat else was out there in that black that he didn’t want to hit in the middleof the darkness or go aground either. He’d never seen them before and it was atense experience, and it was amidst all this tension that he seemed to rememberseeing her on another boat.

They were descending outof the sky. Not just thirty or forty or fifty feet but hundreds of feet. Theirboats were coming down, down through the night out of the sky where they hadbeen all this time without their knowing it. When the last gate opened up fromthe last lock they looked on a dark oily river. The river flowed by a hugeconstruction of girders toward a loom of light in the distance. That was Troyand his boat moved toward it until the swirl of the confluence of the riverscaught it and the boat yawed quickly. Then with the engine at full throttle heangled against the current across the river to a floating dock on the far side.

We have four-foot tideshere, the dock attendant said.

Tides! he had thought.That meant sea-level. It meant that all the inland man-made locks were gone.Now only the passage of the moon over the ocean controlled the rise and fall ofthe boat. All the way to Kingston this feeling of being connected withoutbarriers to the ocean gave him a huge new feeling of space.