The first thing I notice about a man are his hands, probably because mine seem so pitiful to me, their cracking blisters rarely turning into callouses. In winter I vainly try to toughen them by going gloveless. Yesterday morning, the wind blew out of the southwest – a clearing sign – but the sea was still a steely gray as I looked across the white caps to Cranberry Island in the early light. I thought of Harold Alley, an islander of legendary strength and endurance, who, it was said, once lifted a car back onto the ramp of a ferry and put a harpoon through the backbone of a great white shark.

Years ago, before plastic traps and motorized winches, he was lobstering well offshore on a winter day when a sudden storm knocked out his engine and left him stranded in the growing darkness. As the night came on, he knew that if he gave into his fatigue he would freeze to death, and so, in an effort to stay awake, he began to lower and raise a lobster pot.

In antiquity, some thought Sisyphus – who was condemned by the gods to push a rock forever up a hill – personified the waves rising and falling on a “treacherous sea.” For Albert Camus, Sisyphus’ “struggle toward the heights” gave his life meaning in an absurd world.

All through the night Harold Alley hauled up the rope and let it drop again, his bare and freezing hands his only sign of life.