by Brian Harvey
Today, between the effects of Canada Day and the American July 4 weekend, the spit was a zoo. I swore I could smell suntan oil as we motored past the rafted-together cruisers and dodged the big speedboats booming across from the town of Sidney on the opposite shore. No thanks.
Portland Island is the next marine park to the north. We puttered around the dogleg that hides the entrance to Princess Bay and let the anchor go near the cluster of fifteen or so boats that had arrived before us. It was only 3 p.m.; anchorages filled up early these days. With no wind to align them, the boats faced every which way, as though waiting for instructions.
Portland Island is perennially popular. It’s close to several Canadian marinas and directly on the run north for boaters out of Seattle. A half-hour walk from the gentle crescent beach in Princess Bay takes you to the trickier anchorage on the other side of the island, at Royal Cove, past the arthritic apple and pear trees of a long-gone homestead. Charley would have given anything for a run around the stone foundations poking through the field like the stubs of long-gone teeth, but I had something else in mind.
We clambered into the dinghy and rowed away from Vera toward a small cut in the fringing rocks. A plastic screw-top container between my feet clunked back and forth with every stroke of the oars, and the late afternoon sun glanced off the glassy water and warmed our faces. The water was clear and shallow, maybe a dozen feet deep.
“Over there, I think. That little opening — there’ll be some current. I think they should drift around a little, don’t you?”
Hatsumi nodded and picked up the container of ashes. A cup or so from each of my parents, held back from the bulk of their remains after a struggle with the rightness of consigning my parents to two different deeps. Most of their ashes had already been released together into the ocean near Victoria. Oceanographically speaking, I told myself, the two locations were all part of the same basin; theoretically, some microscopic part of their ashes could even travel from one place to the other. Less scientifically, I figured that my parents simply wouldn’t mind, and Portland Island had special meaning because it was the last place they had travelled to together by boat. Among their papers I’d found the record my mother had kept.
“Powered to Portland Island,” it said in her microscopic handwriting. “Tide in Baynes Channel too strong.” They only stayed a day, but my mother, finding the silver lining as usual, called it “hot and heavenly.” She rowed around and sketched. My father apparently slept a lot. Then they powered back home. It was July 1982; the visit from the sheriff was still five years away.
I could picture her rowing to the spot where we were now. It felt right. I shipped the oars, and we both peered down at a dense bed of eelgrass, a forest of green ribbons leaning gently shoreward as Princess Bay filled on the rising tide. We sat there, going imperceptibly up, the water licking higher on the pebbly beach and Vera slowly rising behind us, pulling sand-shedding loops of chain off the bottom.
Hatsumi handed me the open jar. We leaned over as far as we dared and I submerged the container. A representative sample of my parents slid out and into the current, the two handfuls of ashes fanning into a twinkling curtain that drifted down to settle on the eelgrass. For a minute or so, the emerald fronds were white, and then the ashes were gone, washed away by the currents and my own tears.
***
Sitting in a busy anchorage is usually social. Most of the other boaters, even the annoying ones, have interesting stories, and it usually takes no more than a “Nice evening!” from the dinghy to initiate a conversation that can easily turn into days spent together exploring the next fifty miles of coastline. But this night was different. We ate late, sitting in the cockpit with a bottle of wine and listening to the mutter of small outboards propelling dinghies back and forth. When the trees began to merge with the darkening sky, we went to bed, and I lay listening to the anchor chain grumbling against the bottom. I’d forgotten the night noises a boat makes at anchor even when there’s no wind to push you around: the tick-tock of a bowl rolling in its cradle, squeaks from the dinghy tethered alongside, the pops and bubblings that herald a tide change.
I awoke the next morning to two loud noises. The first was a sort of whap, like someone snapping an enormous towel. The noise was quite loud, as though the towel were right outside the boat and whoever was doing it would wait a minute or so between whaps, just enough time for me to start the slide back into sleep. Finally, I got up on one elbow and peered out the porthole. Two boat lengths away, a seal flipper rose from the water, flexed, and descended, spinning off a crescent of sparkling water beads and coming down with an extra-loud clap that probably woke up half the anchorage. If he was trying to warn boats away from Princess Bay, he’d picked an odd time to do it; more likely the flipper-slap was meant to get the attention of an attractive female. If she was there, I couldn’t see her.
I lay back and began a satisfying early morning reverie about all the harbour seals undoubtedly cruising around the boats anchored in Princess Bay, what a spectacular view they had of all the things that caused the owners to lose sleep — rusty chain, anchors clinging by their fingernails, corroded thru-hull fittings about to cave in and let the ocean inside in a silent, insidious rush.
Then I heard the second sound. It wasn’t another seal. It was a sneeze. A human sneeze, loud enough and so much like a roar you might think the flipper-slapper had a terrible cold. The problem was, I knew the sneezer.
“I’m freezing,” said a voice from the cockpit.
“Well, I can’t do anything about that,” I said.
“Wha . . . ?” said Hatsumi. “What time?”
“Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll deal with it.” My feet hit the cold cabin sole, and I rummaged around for clothes. I always leave my clothes within easy reach in case I have to get up in the middle of the night and do something heroic.
“It’s warmer down here, you know,” I called up to the cockpit.
“I don’t want to come down,” said my father. “I like it fine up here.” He sneezed again. The sound bounced off the rocks at the head of the bay, as though there was some kind of early-morning sneezing contest going on.
“Except for it being freezing,” I said and started up the steps.
He was tucked in behind the steering wheel, under the dew-soaked Canadian ensign hanging limply from the backstay.
“You know you’re supposed to take the flag in at dusk,” he said. He was wearing the vile brown acrylic pants we’d tried so hard to steal and replace and the oversized fuzzy slippers we’d bought to keep his edematous feet warm in the care home. He clutched a blue hospital blanket around his small shoulders; peeking out from underneath was his favourite red-and-white woollen jacket. It went with the flag.
“Nobody seems to do that anymore,” I said, waving at the rest of the boats. Sodden flags were everywhere, a mass affront to nautical etiquette. “Things have changed since you were here last. Look at all those inflatable dinghies. Like bagels.”
“We never had an inflatable dinghy,” he said. “Or an outboard motor.” He ran his bony fingers through white hair that obviously hadn’t been cut since I’d seen him last.
“Sure we did,” I said. “Not that it ever seemed to work. Frou-Frou, remember? Sidney Spit? Near-death out by Zero Rock?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He began to pick slowly at the skin on the back of one hand. A few flakes drifted onto the cockpit floor. “How did you know we came here, your mother and I?” he asked finally.
“Because she wrote it up in a notebook. Apparently, you slept all day. And some people kept you awake at night, singing. It must have been awful.”
“I warned you about going through my things.”
“You died,” I reminded him. “What did you expect me to do, shred it all? Believe me, that would have taken weeks. And if you pay someone to do it, they read the stuff as they go.”<
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“Mm.” He picked some more at the hand holding the blanket.
“I’ve got some skin cream down below, you know. Do you want me to ask Hatsumi to dig it out?”
“Who are you talking to?” My wife was up now, puttering in the galley at the bottom of the steps.
“Just my dad,” I said.
“Say hi to him for me. And turn on the propane, okay?” She went back to fiddling with the stove.
“It’s horribly cold here,” said my father. “I can’t stand it much longer. What else did you find in my papers?”
“Oh . . . you know. Some letters. Your old LeCoultre watch. About a million boxes of negatives.”
“That’s it?”
“Maybe some stuff about, you know, the thing that happened.”
He stopped picking at his hand and looked at me hard. I thought his eyes looked a little red. He’d missed some places shaving. “That’s not your business,” he said.
“It is now.” I thought about all the times we could have talked about the trial and didn’t. But that was the way he’d wanted it. “You might as well know,” I said. “I kept the lot. Not just the manuscript you wrote, but the hospital records, the examinations, the trial, everything.” I waited for the explosion, but he just stared at his hands and then slowly began picking at the dry spots again.
Finally, he said, “I helped a lot of people.”
“I know that. Maybe now you can help me. You’re the expert. I’m just a fish biologist. All that technical stuff — I’d hate to get it wrong.”
“I’ll need to think about it.” I could smell eggs frying and coffee. He was right, it was chilly out here with the seals and the dew. On the neighbouring boat, a hatch squeaked open, and my father turned sharply.
“I want to go,” he said.
“Well, you know where to find me.”
I peered over the side, where a school of young salmon was making its way past Vera’s mothering hull. I wondered if they were the Fraser River sockeye whose troubles would be keeping me solvent once this trip was over. The school moved in a series of shuffles, like an uncoordinated robot. But finally, it was gone. And so was my visitor.
“Breakfast,” said Hatsumi.
Vera
My wife and I got serious about buying a sailboat after we showed up to visit my father at the care home one afternoon and found him on the floor, his torso in the hallway but his legs still stubbornly in the bathroom. Another stroke, another nasty irony: his Ph.D., at the University of Chicago almost sixty years before, had been on blood flow in the brain, exactly the thing that had gone wonky and put him on the floor. Watching your father learning to crawl is a powerful argument for starting on your personal list of things to do before you die. It wasn’t his first fall; as it turned out, it was actually his last.
We bought Vera only partially because of my father’s decline and the warning it carried; the other reason was an exhausted border collie in Sointula, on Malcolm Island. This place lies a few miles off Port McNeill, at the northern end of the tricky passage between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia. Hatsumi and I had crossed on the car ferry from Port McNeill on a whim during a mid-summer week negotiated away from responsibilities in Victoria, where my father was now a tottering time bomb.
The border collie found us on the beach below the lighthouse at Pulteney Point, a crushed-shell spit where the wind that had barrelled up Johnstone Strait tore at your hat and whipped the sea white. Just looking at the water made my heart turn over. I’d never go out there. The dog ran a perfunctory circle around our feet, flopped down in the sand, and hung its tongue out. His owners waved at us and started walking over.
“I don’t know how to ask you this,” the man said. Curly hair stuck out from beneath a blue ball cap. “Is that by any chance your car in the parking lot?”
His name was Scott, his wife was Debbie, and they had walked all the way from Sointula, a distance of ten miles. We loaded the dog into the back. They were embarrassed and apologetic. The dog began to snore.
They had sailed up from Seattle. Today was too windy to leave Malcolm Island; a walk had been the obvious diversion. We fishtailed around a gravelly corner. I had no idea how windy was too windy. One look at Johnstone Strait from the lighthouse had been enough. I might as well have been out there under Frou-Frou’s foredeck.
“Can we see your boat?” I asked.
Their boat, Viva, was tied up at the marina, one of only a few pleasure craft, even at the height of summer. The dog woke up long enough to jump gracefully aboard and into the cockpit, where he curled up and went back to sleep. I wondered if I should take my shoes off. I hadn’t been on a sailboat for twenty-five years.
“Glass of wine?” Debbie asked. She went down below, and I looked around the cockpit.
Sailboats had changed. What on earth were all those gauges? Even the old-fashioned things, like the winches, looked different from the ones I had used to wrestle in the jib sheets on the family boat: they were bigger and shinier, with a crown of grooved teeth that completely baffled me. (I later learned they were self-tailing winches, a wonderful invention that lets you crank with both hands while the toothy bit grabs the rope.) When I peered below, I could see teak woodwork, carpet, an inviting settee, and a light-flooded galley where Debbie was doing something with cheeses. We sat in the cockpit and ate off a varnished table that folded out across from the enormous steering wheel. I had never touched a steering wheel in a sailboat; in my experience, sailboats had tillers. A tiller was the essence of sailing, the varnished wooden wand that connected you straight to the rudder and thus to the water. A tug on the tiller was like a tug to a horse’s reins, a communication with something living. What would a wheel feel like — driving a truck?
Outside the marina, the wind whipped Johnstone Strait, but you couldn’t feel much where we were sitting. I liked Scott and Debbie, their openness and the way they didn’t allow the grandness of their boat to rub off on them. They gave us a business card with their names and a little picture of their boat, a practice I would later learn was de rigueur among serious cruisers. The dog didn’t look up when we left. When we got to the top of the ramp, I caught Hatsumi’s sleeve, and we turned to look out over the marina.
“We should get a boat too,” I said. “To go with all my dad’s stuff.”
“Sure,” she said.
Neither of us dreamed we would be back — in our own boat.
***
Hatsumi grew up in Tokyo, in what she calls her “hometown” of Kugayama. As far as I can make out, there are about a thousand of these hometowns in the city. If you walk one train stop from Kugayama, dodging bicycles on the path that follows the concretized banks of the Kandagawa River, you come to Inokashira Park. It’s one of the livelier parks in Tokyo, especially in the spring when people line up hours in advance to claim a spot to spread their blankets, open hampers, and consume staggering amounts of alcohol to welcome the sakura — Japan’s spectacular cherry trees — back into bloom. Inokashira is one of the best places in Tokyo to get sozzled and serenade the cherry blossoms. If you’re watching a movie filmed in Tokyo, chances are pretty good there’ll be a scene in Inokashira Park.
The closest ocean is Tokyo Bay, another hour by train. There are few pleasure boats in Tokyo Bay, but Inokashira Park has two kinds on its little manmade lake. Courting couples giggle and flail in clunky rowboats, occasionally colliding beneath the overhanging branches of willows, and the dock at one end of the elegant curved bridge corrals a gaggle of blinding white pedal boats in the shape of swans. You and your partner sit in the swan’s fat body and pedal like maniacs, as though climbing an impossibly steep hill, and the swan goes around in slow circles, an icebreaker in a sea of cherry petals.
So, my wife’s entire nautical experience, until our glass of wine on Scott and Debbie’s yacht, was aboard a large mechanical bird.
“Do
n’t worry,” I told her, “in our family, we boated. I know all about sailing.”
A few months after our visit to Sointula, I called Hatsumi over to my computer. “Look at this,”
She glanced at the screen. “It’s a boat,” she said. “So?”
“You agreed. That we should buy one. You don’t remember?”
“I thought you were kidding.”
“So did I,” I said. “Until I saw this one.”
***
We drove out to the sales dock the next day. It was raining and cold and Jade Myst looked miserable, the lines led aft along her deck gone green with algae and a deflating rubber dinghy draped over the dock like a Dali watch. But even neglected and in the drizzle, she was beautiful: dark green with massive bronze portholes, lots of teak, and a serious, seagoing flare to her bows.
“Big,” said Hatsumi.
“Thirty-four feet,” I read off the description printed on the brokerage card that dangled crookedly from a lifeline. “Same size as our family’s last boat. No problem. But that name has to go. Jade Myst? Sounds like a stripper.” The broker’s write-up trumpeted the name of the boat’s designer and builder but neither meant any more to me than the white radar dome twenty feet above my head. Everything was above my head. The asking price was astronomical, which probably explained the algae on the deck.
“I’m cold,” said Hatsumi. A seagull landed on the radar dome and went “Buk-buk-buk.”
We remortgaged our home and made an offer. “Subject to survey,” the broker, Allan James, had insisted. “And sea trial, of course.” Allan was about my age, a worried-looking New Zealander in sweatpants, running shoes, and a blue toque. I liked him; his black humour and perpetual air of martyrdom over the inanities of the boat-buying public appealed to me immediately.