Six SHSAT Questions

Excerpt from The Highest Tide

by Jim Lynch

The narrator’s summer job is collecting marine specimens in Puget Sound, Washington. In this excerpt, he is looking for specimens in the mudflats before daybreak. Mudflats, or flats, are coastal landforms created when sediment and silt from tides are deposited as the tides recede.

I rounded the oyster beds, to the far side. . . . It was low tide by then, and I saw the water hesitating at its apex, neither leaving nor returning, patiently waiting for the gravitational gears to shift. Dozens of anxious clams started squirting in unison like they did whenever vibrating grains of sand warned them predators were approaching. I stopped and waited with them, to actually see the moment when the tide started returning with its invisible buffet of plankton for the clams, oysters, mussels and other filter feeders. It was right then, ankle deep in the Sound, feet numbing, eyes relaxed, that I saw the nudibranch.¹

In all my time on the flats I’d never seen one before. I’d read about them, sure. I’d handled them at aquariums but never in the wild, and I’d never even seen a photo of one this stunning. It was just three inches long but with dozens of fluorescent, orange-tipped hornlike plumes jutting from the back of its see-through body that appeared to be lit from within.

Nudibranchs are often called the butterflies of the sea, but even that understates their dazzle. Almost everything else in the northern Pacific is dressed to blend with pale surroundings. Nudibranchs don’t bother, in part because they taste so lousy they don’t need camouflage to survive. But also, I decided right then, because their beauty is so startling it earns them a free pass, the same way everyday life brakes for peacocks, parade floats. . . .

The dark mudflats loomed like wet, flattened dunes stretching deep into Skookumchuck Bay in front of our house. From a distance, they looked too barren to support sea life. Up close, they still did, unless you knew where to find the hearty clams, worms and tiny creatures that flourish in mud. . . . I’m not sure why I decided to take a look. It was still an hour before sunrise, and I knew exactly what the bars² looked like in the moonlight, but for some reason, I couldn’t resist.

I heard it long before I saw it. It was an exhale, a release of sorts, and I instantly wondered if a whale was stranded again. We had a young minke³ stuck out there two summers prior, and it made similar noises until the tide rose high enough for rescuers to help free it. . . . I looked for a hulking silhouette but couldn’t find one. I waited, but there were no more sounds. Still, I went toward what I thought I’d heard, avoiding stepping into the mud until I had to. I knew the flats well enough to know I could get stuck just about anywhere. The general rule was you didn’t venture out past the shells and gravel with an incoming tide. I sank up to my knees twice, and numbing water filled my boots.

. . . I kept stepping toward the one sound I’d heard, a growing part of me hoping I’d find nothing at all. When I stopped to rest and yank up my socks, my headlamp crossed it. My first thought? A giant octopus.

Puget Sound has some of the biggest octopi in the world. They often balloon to a hundred pounds. Even the great Jacques Cousteau⁴ himself came to study them. But when I saw the long tubular shape of its upper body and the tangle of tentacles below it, I knew it was more than an octopus. I came closer, within fifty feet, close enough to see its large cylindrical siphon⁵ quiver. I couldn’t tell if it was making any sounds at that point, because it was impossible to hear anything over the blood in my ears. . . .

The creature’s body came to a triangular point above narrow fins that lay flat on the mud like wings, but it was hard to be sure exactly where it all began or ended, or how long its tentacles truly were, because I was afraid to pry my eyes off its jumble of arms for more than half a second. I didn’t know whether I was within reach, and its arms were as big around as my ankle and lined with suckers the size of half-dollars. If they even twitched I would have run. So, I was looking at it and not looking at it while my heart spangled my vision. I saw fragments, pieces, and tried to fuse them in my mind but couldn’t be certain of the whole. I knew what it had to be, but I wouldn’t allow myself to even think the two words. Then I gradually realized the dark shiny disc in the middle of the rubbery mass was too perfectly round to be mud or a reflection.

It was too late to smother my scream. Its eye was the size of a hubcap.⁶

From THE HIGHEST TIDE by Jim Lynch. Copyright © 2005 by Jim Lynch. Used by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved.

¹nudibranch: type of sea slug

²bars: sandbars

³minke: species of small whale

⁴Jacques Cousteau: renowned French oceanographer

⁵siphon: tube-like organ that is used for drawing in or removing fluids

⁶hubcap: removable cap over the end of a wheel axle

Massachusetts: Lowell National Historical Park

During the first half of the 19th century, Lowell, Massachusetts, quickly transformed itself from a farm town to a bustling industrial city. In time, Lowell became a model of industry, gaining global recognition for its state-of-the-art technology, innovative canal and dam system, mill architecture, boardinghouses, churches, and ethnic neighborhoods. Young Yankee women, immigrant families, and European tourists all flocked to Lowell to find work at one of the many textile mills, or visit the industrious city that was becoming a popular tourist destination. As one Scottish traveler observed during his visit to America, “Niagara and Lowell are the two objects I will longest remember in my American journey, the one the glory of American scenery, the other of American industry.” Today, Lowell National Historical Park welcomes visitors to enjoy the sights of Lowell and learn about the history of one of America’s most significant industrial cities.

The Boston merchants who founded Lowell in 1821 and named it after Francis Cabot Lowell chose to locate the town along Massachusetts’s Merrimack River to take advantage of the kinetic energy offered by the Pawtucket waterfalls. Over six miles of canals powered the waterwheels of Lowell’s mills, whose massive five- and six-story brick buildings dominated the city’s landscape. . . . The most recognized of these buildings are the Lowell Manufacturing Company chartered in 1821, the Suffolk or Wannalancit Mill completed around the 1880s, the Boott Mill Company established in 1835, and the Boott Mill Boardinghouse that opened in 1838. By the 1850s, 40 textile mills employing over 10,000 workers stretched for about a mile along the river. . . .

The city’s female workforce was significant in the history of Lowell. From the early to mid-1800s, women left the constricted lifestyle of small rural towns and rural areas for independent industrial city life. Most were young single Yankee girls, who were tired of the limited opportunities offered by their domestic work. Women found that Lowell’s mills offered monthly wages for their services and provided them room and board. Although these women gained economic independence in Lowell, the mill boardinghouse keepers constantly supervised their social activities, for which they hardly had any time, considering their daily 12- to 14-hour work schedules. At the end of the day, the factory bell signaled the “mill girls” to return to their boardinghouses. They were expected to adhere to the strict code of conduct respecting curfew and attending church.

Yankee “mill girls” continued to dominate the Lowell workforce until the 1840s, when the city began to find it difficult to compete with the growing industrial development in other New England communities. As profits fell, the mill industry cut wages. These wage cuts, deteriorating working conditions, and long workdays led the “mill girls” to protest and organize strikes. When their demands went unheard, the women left Lowell, and immigrant groups replaced them in the workforce. Despite the low wages and unhealthy work conditions, immigrants were eager to find work.

The immigrants replacing the Yankee “mill girls” during the 1840s were predominantly Irish Catholics, who traveled to America during the Great Potato Famine. Although Lowell received an influx of Irish families during this time, the Irish were a part of the city’s history from its birth, and before the “mill girls” arrived, they built Lowell’s historic canals, mills, and boardinghouses. Initially, Lowell’s Protestant community was slow to welcome Irish immigrants, but the hostility between Yankee Protestants and Irish Catholics eventually disappeared. Irish immigrants dominated the industrial scene until the Civil War, when other immigrant groups began to work in the city mills.

Like the Irish, the French-Canadians, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese, Russian Jews, and Armenians who came to work in Lowell’s mills faced long work hours, low wages, and poor living conditions in the city’s crowded tenements. By the time Lowell’s industry declined, the city had become an ethnic melting pot, where each group claimed its own distinct neighborhood, like the Irish immigrants’ “New Dublin” or “Acre,” and the French-Canadians’ “Little Canada.” The city officially began to close down its mills in the 1920s and ’30s after Lowell’s outdated mills could no longer compete against the state-of-the-art cotton mills in other communities and working conditions continued to decline as Lowell’s companies stopped reinvesting in their mills. . . . Despite a brief resurgence during World War II, the city shut down its last surviving mill by the mid-1950s.

From “Massachusetts: Lowell National Historical Park”—Public Domain/National Park Service

Yankee: native to New England
Niagara: a town in northwestern New York State well known as the location of Niagara Falls, a series of waterfalls on the Canadian border
domestic work: household duties like cooking and cleaning

Samuel Morse, an American inventor, is credited with creating the electronic telegraph, a communication device that allows users to send messages using a system of short and long pulses that represent letters, numbers, and punctuation. In 1843 the United States Congress passed the Telegraph Bill, which provided Morse with the funds to build an electric telegraph system.

Invention of the Telegraph

Earlier Signal Systems

Long before Samuel F. B. Morse electrically transmitted his famous message “What hath God wrought?” from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844, there were signaling systems that enabled people to communicate over distances. Most were visual or “semaphore” systems using flags or lights. In the eighteenth century, such systems used an observer who would decipher a signal from a high tower on a distant hill and then send it on to the next station. The young American republic wanted just such a system along its entire Atlantic coast and offered a prize of $30,000 for a workable proposal. The framers of this legislation$^1$ had no way of knowing that when they used the word “telegraph” to refer to this visual semaphore system, they would be offered an entirely new and revolutionary means of communication—electricity.

The Growth of an Idea

The idea of using electricity to communicate over distance is said to have occurred to Morse during a conversation aboard ship when he was returning from Europe in 1832. Michael Faraday’s recently invented electromagnet was much discussed by the ship’s passengers, and when Morse came to understand how it worked, he speculated that it might be possible to send a coded message over a wire. While a student at Yale College years before, he had written his parents a letter about how interesting he found the lectures on electricity. Despite what he had learned at Yale, Morse found when he began to develop his idea that he had little real understanding of the nature of electricity, and after sporadic attempts to work with batteries, magnets, and wires, he finally turned for help to a colleague at the University of the City of New York, Leonard D. Gale.

Gale was a professor of chemistry and familiar with the electrical work of Princeton’s Joseph Henry, a true pioneer in the new field. Well before Morse had his shipboard idea about a telegraph, Henry rang a bell at a distance by opening and closing an electric circuit. In 1831, he had published an article, of which Morse was unaware, that contained details suggesting the idea of an electric telegraph. Gale’s help and his knowledge of this article proved crucial to Morse’s telegraph system because Gale not only pointed out flaws in the system but showed Morse how he could regularly boost the strength of a signal and overcome the distance problems he had encountered by using a relay system Henry had invented. Henry’s experiments, Gale’s assistance, and, soon after, hiring the young technician Alfred Vail were keys to Morse’s success.

Obstacles and Opportunities

By December 1837, Morse had enough confidence in his new system to apply for the federal government’s appropriation, and during the next year he conducted demonstrations of his telegraph both in New York and Washington.

However, when the economic disaster known as the Panic of 1837 took hold of the nation and caused a long depression, Morse was forced to wait for better times. It was during this period that Morse visited Europe again and tried not only to secure patent protection overseas but to examine competing telegraph systems in England. . . .

By 1843, the country was beginning to recover economically, and Morse again asked Congress for the $30,000 that would allow him to build a telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, forty miles away. The House of Representatives eventually passed the bill containing the Morse appropriation, and the Senate approved it in the final hours of that Congress’s last session. With President Tyler’s signature, Morse received the cash he needed and began to carry out plans for an underground telegraph line.

Realizing a Great Invention

Morse had hired the ingenious construction engineer Ezra Cornell to lay the pipe carrying the wire, and although Cornell did his job superbly, one of Morse’s partners, Congressman F. O. J. Smith, had purchased wire with defective insulation. Too much time had been wasted laying bad wire, and with the project on a rigid deadline, something had to be done quickly. Cornell suggested that the fastest and cheapest way of connecting Washington and Baltimore was to string wires overhead on trees and poles. The desperate Morse gave the go-ahead, and the line was completed in time for the dramatic and spectacularly successful link between the Supreme Court chamber of the Capitol building and the railroad station in Baltimore.

Soon, as overhead wires connected cities up and down the Atlantic coast, the dots-and-dashes method$^2$ that recorded messages on a long moving strip of paper was replaced by the operator’s ability to interpret the code in real time. . . . Telegraph lines soon extended westward, and within Morse’s own lifetime they connected the continents of Europe and America.

“Invention of the Telegraph”—Public Domain/Library of Congress

$^1$legislation: Telegraph Bill

$^2$dots-and-dashes method: the short and long pulses of Morse code that are sent and received by telegraph operators

The first transatlantic electric telegraph message was sent in 1858, and by 1902 the British All-Red Line connected most of the world.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, Part 2. Washington, D.C., 1975.