The Ebb Runner at anchor off Wewelsfleth, 05:12 — the hour the river stops pretending to be a road. Photograph by Tomás Ferreira for Slack Water.
Six days aboard a maintenance barge on the lower Elbe, where eleven hundred kilometres of bank are held in place by habit, concrete, and one retired lock-keeper's stubborn memory. What happens to a coastline when the people who knew it by feel are the last ones left?
Words Ingrid Halvorsen · Photographs Tomás Ferreira
Read the feature →Eight shorter pieces from this issue — reportage, field notes, listening. Roughly forty minutes in total, or one tide's turn. Hover a line to see where it goes.
Issue 14 · 214 pp · 11 contributors · 6 coastlines
We sent nine writers to nine estuaries on the same eleven days, with the same instruction: describe the water as though it were a person you had to be honest about. These are the overlaps — the parts where the estuaries agreed.
On the second morning, all nine of us wrote the same word. Not tide, which we might have expected, nor mud, which the tidal flats make unavoidable. The word was hush. It is what happens at the turn — a minute and a half in which a river with several thousand cubic metres a minute behind it simply stops arguing, and the surface goes to glass, and every bird on the bank looks up at once.
The Oykel writer described it as the sound of a held grudge. On the Ems, where the water arrives as a wave you can hear from a mile inland, the pause afterwards was called something closer to a change of subject. On the Exe it was not described at all, because that correspondent had gone to look at a heron and forgotten to write anything down for forty minutes, which we have decided to print in full rather than edit.
Above: the marsh at Brancaster, the turn at Loch Etive, and twenty-two minutes of rain on the Exe.
What the nine reports share, in the end, is a refusal of the word coastline — a word that implies a line, which is to say something you could walk if you had the week. Estuaries do not have edges. They have gradations: brackish in one field, salt in the next, and a ditch behind the sea wall that has been quietly tidal since 1744 and appears on no map the authorities will admit to.
“Every one of us, without confabulating, put the turn of the tide at the centre of the piece and then apologised for it in a footnote. Nobody wants to be the person who writes about the tide.”
Images mailed in by readers and contributors between issues. We print them slightly crooked, because that is how they arrive.
Every issue · in the same order · since No. 1
Our critic reads the season's estuary shelf — two memoirs, a Dutch translation, and a self-published masterpiece about drainage pumps that deserves better paper.
Review · 16 min →Ninety-one tides a month for a century, then scrapped in a sea-wall repair. We had it measured, photographed, and missed.
Our running register of small craft lost on the southern North Sea, compiled from receiver-of-wrecks returns readers have been posting us since 2013.
A comic serial, instalment three of five. Two editors. One sliding punt. No plan worth the name.
Index to Issue No. 14
“A coastline is not a place. It is an argument that never resolves, held twice a day in the same polite tone.”
Nan Shepherd, letter to the editors, 1962 — printed in Issue No. 1
One letter a week: a tide table for somewhere you have never been, an extract, a photograph mailed in by a reader, and three sentences on what the water has been doing. No offers, no “you might also like”, no unsubscribing gauntlet.
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The Bourne flow, the sound of a sluice, and a photograph of a horse swim off Canvey.
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The next letter goes out Thursday at 06:14, which is low water at Dunwich and a good hour to read it. Meanwhile, Issue No. 11 — Flood — is free in the archive for the next ten days.
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Slack Water is edited and set in Dunwich, in two rooms of a former lifeboat station with a tide line painted on the stair. Headlines are set in Bodoni Moda; text in Spectral; tables and everything tedious in IBM Plex Mono.
The print edition is letterpressed in two colours on Mohawk Superfine, bound in the Breckland, and posted by a man who has done it for nineteen years.
Editor
R. Fenella Doyle
Managing
Oskar Lund
Photo editor
Beatriz Nkemelu
Maps & data
T. Okonjo-Haas
Tide desk
Compiled from 41 stations
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