The Great Offshore Grounds

1

The Wedding
 
Fifteen miles south of Seattle and halfway across Puget Sound to the west is Maury Island. Shaped like an arrowhead aimed at the mainland, green as the inner fold of a grass blade, it can be seen from the air cradled in the crook of an elbow of water. Tourists ride over on ferries to watch for whales and UFOs. Jets turn around overhead on their final approach to the airport. Even on days when there is no rain, mist filters through the evergreens until it pulls apart like threadbare cloth and burns off.
 
The wedding was to be held in the afternoon at Point Robinson, the site of an old fog-signal station that once housed a steam whistle fed by coal fire and water to warn away ships. In 1897, at the dawn of massive capital expansion and speculation, the whistle sounded for five hundred and twenty-eight hours, nearly killing the man who had to shovel the thirty-five tons of coal. The cargo had to be kept from the rocks, but who can halt the lumbering desires of the world?
 
In 1915, the lighthouse with its state-of-the-art, fifth-order Fresnel lens was built. Powered initially by oil vapor lamps, its beacon could be seen for twelve miles. The lens was the perfect manifestation of Victorian technology, replacing simple flat lenses with faceted, crystal domes, prisms cut into tiers that made it both astonishingly beautiful and a breakthrough in optics. The Fresnel lens had a theoretically infinite capacity to capture diffuse light and, by way of internal reflection, cast it like a spear through darkness. It lit stages and celluloid, Polaroid shots and retinas for ID scans, and on Point Robinson, it lit Puget Sound.
 
These days, every modern ship has a GPS and the little lighthouse is just a decoration on a brochure, a destination for a grade-school field trip. The mechanisms that rotated the original lantern remain on the first floor, which is now a tiny museum of technology with gauges and wheels and iron bolted into the

Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and ZYZZYVA, and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist Magazine, and was included in The Best American Essays and the anthology Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train hopper, a waitress, and a mother. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: VULTURE, INSIDEHOOK, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY WINNER OF THE OREGON BOOK AWARDS' KEN KESEY AWARD FOR FICTION

Epic. . . . A magnificent beast of a novel.   Roxane Gay, via Goodreads

Veselka traces [her characters ] arcs with empathy and an earthy sense of humor but also with a ruthless eye. She is a remarkable writer. Los Angeles Times

Vivid. . . . Unflinching. . . . The portrayal of . . . late capitalist America is realistic and devastating. The Seattle Times
 
A brilliant and fearless book. Nathan Hill, author of The Nix

I was riveted by every line, the humor of being alive, the pathos of this deeply American narrative, and the energy of the prose, which contains everything from the blunt and stunning grammar of history to the personal language of the heart. Hilary Leichter, Oregon Book Awards judges' citation

The Great Offshore Grounds reminded me of what a great novel can do Veselka s seafaring epic has the forward momentum of a grand adventure and the spiraling depth of a new myth. Karen Russell, author of Sleep Donation

[The characters ] misadventures are compelling in and of themselves, irrespective of whether they serve to highlight the rapacity of unchecked neoliberalism or the growing hole in America s social safety net. Rather than subordinate her protagonists experiences to a larger narrative, Veselka patiently waits for a chance to make a connection between one and the other. The Boston Globe

Veselka blends fascinating details of seamanship, cab driving, and boot camp with intimate, spot-on descriptions of contemporary American poverty. . . . This gritty and unsentimental work is compassionate, funny, and deeply human. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Points of view shift kaleidoscopically, passages of history and politics are woven into