How to read tide tables, badly

Anh Phạm has been wrong twice in seventeen years. Both times, he says, the sea was showing off — and both times he still got the boat home before the rain.

His method is not in any table. It involves the colour of the far headland, the way the herons stand, and a feeling he keeps somewhere behind his left ear. Guests ask him to teach it. He tells them to come back in seventeen years.

The printed tables live by the kitchen door, mostly for the tourists. The real one lives in a man who has watched the same water every single morning and still finds it interesting.