# A Life at the Water Line — from the memoirs of Maren Aldervane (1991)

I was born within sound of the Brann, and I have spent my whole life measuring things that most
people are content to look at. If there is a single thread in what follows, it is that: the sea
gave me my first ruler, and I never learned to put it down.

My father kept the light on Little Moriny, and a lighthouse is a good school for a measurer. The
oil was measured, the wicks were measured, the visibility was guessed at dawn and dusk and written
in a book that nobody, as far as I ever discovered, read. I read it. I read all of it, back
through three keepers and forty years, and I found that the guesses of careful men, laid end to
end, become something better than guesses. I was eleven. In a manner of speaking the Institute was
founded that afternoon, in the lamp room, though it took me another quarter of a century to get it
down the stairs.

The university on the mainland took me in 1934, tolerated me, and in 1938 accepted my doctoral
thesis on the capillary rise of seawater in basalt sands — a subject I chose because it required a
great deal of standing on beaches, which I regarded then and regard now as the correct posture for
a scientist of the islands. The examiners called the work "narrow." I have had a long life in
which to observe what became of the broad.

The war years I spent on the mainland doing work I still may not describe, except to say that it
taught me what a national standards laboratory is worth, and what it costs a small country not to
have one. I came home when it ended with a trunk of instruments, a head full of resolve, and no
money whatever.

What I had instead of money was the Old Customs House. The harbour board of Port Ilvess owned it,
could not heat it, and let me have the two driest rooms on a handshake. In the spring of 1949 I
carried my trunk up its stairs, screwed a brass plate to the door, and the Institute existed. I
have heard grander founding stories, and I have never believed one of them either. There was no
ceremony. There was a plate on a door, a barometer on a wall, and a woman with a kettle, and for
the first year that was the whole of natural measurement in the Republic of Kelvarra.

The charter came that summer, and I wrote it in an evening at the kitchen table. Most of it was
the ordinary furniture of such documents — a council, an audit, a provision for winding up that I
enjoyed writing least — but I put three things into it that were my own. That the Institute should
answer for its numbers to nobody but the numbers. That any islander might walk in and have a
weight or a watch proved for the price of the tea they drank while waiting. And a clause, which I
have never once regretted, forbidding the Institute for all time from taking a patent on any
instrument it makes; a standard you may not freely copy is not a standard, it is a toll gate. The
lawyers told me the clause would ruin us. The lawyers are wound up; the Institute is not.

Tomas Ferrick came to me in 1958, a harbour clockmaker's son with burnt thumbs and the steadiest
hands I have ever watched work. I could not pay him what the mainland yards offered. I showed him
the tide tables instead, and the gap between what they promised and what the harbour did, and told
him a man who closed that gap would be remembered when the yards were rust. He took the bench by
the window and stayed the rest of his working life, and the clock in the harbour tower is his
answer to the tide tables. People say I built the Institute. I signed for it. Tomas and the others built
it, at benches, slowly, while I argued with the council about coal.

Of the middle years I will say little here, because the work is written up properly elsewhere and
a memoir is a poor place for numbers. But I will set down one evening that the reader will not
find in the transactions. In July of 1974 — the geraniums were out on the sill, I remember, and
the harbour was flat as a proving table — the wireless carried the news that human beings had set
foot on the Moon for the first time. The whole staff crowded into the long room to hear it. I
stood by the barometer with a cup going cold in my hand and thought of my father's logbook, the
guesses of careful men laid end to end, and how they had ended here: a footprint in dust that no
tide of ours would ever smooth. Ferrick, who did not waste words, said the only fitting thing
anyone said that night. "Somebody," he said, "had to prove the clocks for that." And we drank our
cold tea to whoever had.

I retired from the directorship when the climb to the door grew longer than the day's work at the
top of it, and I have watched with a founder's usual mixture of pride and indignation as the
Institute grew past my imagining of it. They have built new walls since; the numbers inside them
are the same. That is all the continuity I ever asked for.

They will tell you in Port Ilvess that I am difficult. I have measured the claim, and it holds.
But the water line does not negotiate, and I learned my manners from the water line.
