by Brian Harvey
Allan Thackray wasn’t hard to find. He was still in Vancouver, a retired judge. We met at a cavernous Japanese restaurant across from the Vancouver courthouse. I was early and nervous. Stuffed in my back pocket was a five-page memo Thackray had sent me a week or so before. He’d written thirty-two numbered paragraphs, starting with Billy’s birth records and ending with a reminder that settlements do not constitute an admission of liability (“Indeed, to the contrary”). Here was the case in thirty-two devastating nutshells, which I suppose I could simply have asked for before I dove into the mass of records and testimony. Here were the first stirrings of fear for a gravely disadvantaged child; the first operation; the infection; the second operation; the emergency procedure to reduce pressure on the child’s brain; the final operation; the gradual dying down of incident and record until the knock on the seventy-four-year-old surgeon’s door so many years later.
It was a hell of a story, and I wanted more than ever to meet its author. But there were no lineman-sized retired barristers standing to attention in front of the garish colour photos of sushi and donburi, so I did a quick circuit of the block, teeming at the noon-hour with men and women in suits. One of them had to be Thackray, look for a big guy, perhaps moving slowly from an old rugby injury. But when I re-approached the restaurant ten minutes later, there was still nobody there — unless you counted the little man in a moss-coloured suit who’d been there the first time. This time, he stuck out a hand and grinned.
So much for imagination. Allan Thackray would not have towered over my father; he was even shorter than me. The green suit had a stain or two on the lapels, and the purple tie might have been chosen by someone who was colour-blind, the way my father was.
“My wife insisted I dress properly,” he laughed, pumping my right hand with short, knobby fingers and touching my left elbow, gently propelling me inside. “Come on, let’s eat, but you’re going to have to do the ordering. I don’t know a thing about Japanese food.”
We sat in a gloomy corner and ordered gluey tempura and colourless raw tuna from a binder of greasy plastic pictures. The food was bad, but I was too busy revising my image of Allan Thackray to care. I caught him peering at me and wondered, was he looking for similarities between father and son? Were there that many to find?
“You know, I often wished I’d been a doctor. Are you surprised?”
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” I said.
“I almost was, too, but I had a terrible education. My father ran a men’s clothing store in Moose Jaw, and when the new government came to power — I was sixteen — my dad refused to live under what he called a communist regime. He took me out of high school, and we moved to Victoria. I worked in the store.”
“So . . . what happened?”
Mr. Thackray grinned, something he did easily and often. He didn’t look stern, or watchful, or respectful, or even ironic, any of the things I’d imagined. He looked twinkly.
“I got a girlfriend. She thought a man should be professional.”
“So, you got married?”
“Nope. She married a doctor. I went back to school and became a lawyer. But I ended up defending a lot of doctors, some of them multiple times.”
“All malpractice suits?”
“Oh, yes. There was one neurosurgeon we dreaded, the guy was so combative in court you had to be really careful.”
“Like my father might have been?”
But Thackray wasn’t ready to go there yet. “Maybe,” he said. “One thing I learned in all those trials: maybe we lawyers weren’t sensitive enough to the effects of these lawsuits on some of the doctors. There was one surgeon, we brought him to Vancouver for the trial, put him up in the Four Seasons.”
“Like my parents.”
Thackray ignored that one too. I realized that he was doing most of the talking. That was okay, but there had to be a reason. Maybe he was working up to something.
“I waited for this surgeon in court, and he never showed up. Finally, we called his family. They got to him just before he went out the window.”
Thackray looked down at his sushi. He wasn’t twinkling now.
“Well, my father never got over it, you know. I think he kept preparing for the trial, in his mind. Until he died.”
Thackray looked as though he had just bitten into something unpleasant. He spoke slowly and carefully, as though he had gone over the words already in his mind. Judging from the memo in my back pocket, I knew he had.
“In the two years I knew your father, he aged a lot. I think now that we should have pushed harder. Your father did very well in the examination. Perhaps we . . . should not have settled.”
I thought about the memo in my pocket. The pressure-relieving procedure done on Billy, properly called a lumbar puncture but better known as a spinal tap, had proved indefensible. But my father hadn’t done the lumbar puncture; Billy’s pediatrician, Dr. Beamish, had. Whether my father had authorized it, nobody would ever know, but in his discussions with Thackray he’d had “great difficulty defending the puncture.” So, if he had taken the stand, he might have cleared his own name, but the suit would probably still have been lost, and a colleague fingered. This case was full of rocks and hard places. Whatever my grasp of this exquisite dilemma, Thackray’s was probably better.
“I just wanted to tell you that,” he said.
I didn’t push it. We went quickly over the main points. The judge trying the case was known to frequently find for the plaintiff, including in cases involving children. The settlement was big — “huge, even today.” But the real question, the one that had got me started on that rotting cardboard box in the first place, clearly still eluded both of us: “Why couldn’t my father get over it?”
Mr. Thackray paid for the meal, although it would have been fairer if we had shared. As we got up, he said, “One thing has always puzzled me about your father.”
“Only one?”
He laughed. “I’ve always wondered, why did he stay in Victoria? With the kind of training he had? I just don’t get it.”
It was a fair question. His training in Chicago was second to none, so why confine himself to a minor Canadian city? It was as puzzling as his inability to get over the trial. If I solved one problem, I’d probably have the answer to the other; for now, they were both unanswerable.
“I’m working on that one,” I said. We stood up, and Thackray winced. “Knee replacement,” he said. Back in the bright sunlight of Hornby Street, he told me one final story. “I did some lecturing, you know. To doctors about lawsuits — how to avoid them, how to prepare for them. One time I came over to Victoria to talk to a group of doctors but, you know, it was the oddest thing. They couldn’t seem to pay attention. I finally concluded it was something to do with Victoria.”
He had the twinkle back. I sensed a punch line.
“They kept looking at a bunch of snapshots, really getting their heads together over them.”
“Girlfriends,” I asked, playing along. “Houses?”
“Sailboats,” said Thackray. “I couldn’t believe it. But then, I’m from Moose Jaw.” He grabbed my hand, touched my elbow again, and was gone, limping back toward the courthouse.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Disorder is the natural state of the universe, and it’s expressed in the concept of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics is simple: entropy increases. Mechanisms that attempt to reduce entropy (a wristwatch, a water pump, the cerebrospinal fluid system of the human brain) require constant care and feeding in the form of external energy (a battery, food, the attentions of a surgeon). It’s the energy that keeps entropy at bay. But everything, eventually, breaks down.
A boat is a pretty good entropy machine, a floating collection of improbable mechanical and electrical contraptions that nature is ceaselessly doing her best to disassemble. But the best one, the most audacious anti-entropy devic
e of all, is the human body.
“I’m falling apart,” my father told me disgustedly, a few months before the end. He rose from his chair in the care home, pushing once, twice, three times before he came out in a wavering crouch. He was right, there wasn’t much left of him. The hands searching for the walker handles looked as though they belonged to a much bigger man. So much of him had already wasted away. For him, entropy was increasing with a vengeance. We could see it.
On a boat, you can practically hear it. After we’d owned Vera for a few months, I began to imagine a peevish, feeble chorus of nautical senior citizens silently thumping the table, trying to get attention.
“I’m going,” wheezes a hose clamp fastened around a seawater inlet. “What do you expect, I’m only nickel-plated. I’m supposed to be stainless steel! When I let go, this hose will slip off and down she’ll go. Cheapskate owner!”
“Don’t look at me,” croaks the automatic bilge pump switch. “I stopped working years ago. My contacts dissolved, and I’ve got algae in my joints. If this boat floods, I’m going down with it. They installed me before they even put the floorboards in, for God’s sake, how do you expect someone to fix me?”
Leaking pumps, fading-out radar screens, fraying steering cables, weeping autopilot rams, corroding metal pins about to detach the boom from the mast without warning and turn it into a flailing twenty-foot metal club. All of these happened to us on Vera, and many more, so getting to know her had been a matter of singling out a voice, any voice, and doing your best to silence it. I felt like an attendant in my father’s care home, grabbing my pager with one hand while I poked applesauce at a grizzled face with the other. At least my marine seniors could be fixed, unlike the old people who were literally on their last legs, who might better have been allowed to let nature’s ineluctable prescription take effect rather than be subjected to the medical profession’s determination to keep them going with more spare parts, more medicines, more duct tape.
When I began the real process of getting to know Vera, I surprised myself. I folded myself into tendon-snapping positions to get at deeply buried batteries. I hung upside down, batlike, under the cockpit floor, working by feel to unscrew the faulty electronic compass that fed the autopilot, remove it from its obscure hiding place (why would anyone put it there?), and replace it with a half-price used one in a more sensible location. I took a saw to the three cantaloupe-sized aluminum pods that housed the obsolete depth sounder, knot meter, and wind direction indicator. I cut them off flush, carrying them away by their electrical wires, three severed heads dangling from a handful of arteries.
Little by little, I learned Vera’s smells and sounds and secrets, as one would a lover’s. I washed the previous owner’s blue coveralls and even wore them a few times, poring over his logbook. At every step, I pestered anyone who would listen, uncovering a community of like-minded sailors who believed that doing it the hard way was a form of insurance. The worst was when I lay on my back under the foredeck with my head in the chain locker, hands behind my head, working mostly by feel to disconnect the massive electric motor that ran the anchor windlass. When it finally loosened, the smooth shaft came down through the deck and the housing barely cleared my head to crash into a pile of rusted chain. It was like delivering an infant. I staggered out cradling my forty-pound baby, trailing a greasy umbilicus of electrical wiring.
***
From the moment they take delivery of their boat, middle-aged sailors find themselves in a never-ending game of catch-up. It’s unfair because the players are too old for it. Not the physical part — today’s sixty- and seventy-year-olds are as fit as their parents were at fifty. Mentally, though, the facility for learning is tapering off. Sailors begin to dream about Tahiti at about the time they catch themselves stock-still in the middle of a room, wondering how they got there. If you can’t even cross a room without getting lost, how are you going to cross an ocean?
One answer seems to be by going back to school. Week after week, through fall and winter, greying would-be voyagers get up from an early dinner, clutch their backs, and set out for whichever rented church basement or community hall is on their list. Converging slowly on the darkened doorways, they look like the undead.
Most of the boating courses available to me and Hatsumi were volunteer efforts, by more or less knowledgeable people who’d been there, done that, and wanted badly to talk about it. But there were so many courses to choose from! Heavy weather. Medical emergencies at sea. Radio communication. The psychology of cruising. There was even one for women only, to discuss the problem of overbearing skipper-husbands and how to deal with hot flashes in the tropics.
I was excused from that one, but I still managed to attend a few semesters’ worth of classes, beginning with the best known and most general, the Power and Sail Squadron basic level course. This three-month program covers all the basics any boater needs to know, short of actually getting out on the water. Hatsumi and I enrolled even before we took delivery of Vera, and my reasoning was faultlessly self-serving: Hatsumi, a complete novice, desperately needed some basic knowledge, and I, a seasoned sailor, would magnanimously sit alongside her, encouraging, translating where necessary, maintaining solidarity. There wasn’t much these squadron people could teach me, but my wife needed them.
We all sat at long tables in a church hall, like a collection of couples awaiting counselling. A succession of volunteer lecturers ranging from the highly competent (a Brit engineer who covered sailing theory with dry humour and diagrams) to the very annoying (a bubbly lady who did buoys by showing endless slides of her own boat: “There I am, next to a port-hand day beacon!”). A husband-and-wife team seemed fixated on death by explosion and noxious gases. Their presentations featured grainy Coast Guard footage from the 1970s of flaming hulks and masts receding beneath oil-slicked waters. One gloomy video was a re-enactment of the death of an entire family from CO2 inhalation: the actors rolled their eyes and went down like tenpins. I still check reflexively for this couple’s boat each time we drop anchor, in case one of them rows over and demands a description of the main classes of distress flares.
For the first two weeks, Hatsumi had to be dragged into class. Then ganbatte, the Japanese version of “never say die” kicked in, and she agreed to continue. But she refused to write the final exam. In the end, she stuck that out too, emerging last from the examination room but with a 92% score. A week later, we all attended a graduation ceremony in a rented golf clubhouse, where we ate tiny triangular sandwiches and marched up to receive diplomas from the commodore, a determined, grey-haired lady wearing a meter maid’s hat.
The Power and Sail Squadron course convinced me to eat my words. Thirty years of so-called experience might have made me comfortable around boats and even pretty good at boat handling and seamanship, but it had left me with no more than a sketchy knowledge of things that really mattered: weather forecasting, navigation, safety. I’m not sure how our family cruises ever got from point A to point B because I never saw my father laying out a course with protractor and compass. No weather forecasts either — no wonder we ran aground on Sidney Spit. It was an odd sort of lapse because in all other things he was meticulous and left nothing to chance.
***
The Squadron course was just the beginning. There were plenty of other courses that homed in on a single facet of long-distance sailing, which was what we planned ultimately to do. Medical Emergencies was presented by a doctor who’d been cruising for decades. From her, we learned about water-mixable fibreglass splints, how to re-set a dislocated finger, and the care and treatment of butt boils, which you develop from lazing around naked on sunny, salt-soaked decks.
The Sail Repair course was practical too, and we got to go to a real sail loft. Its owner, Rick McBride, wore a ball cap and faded jeans and spoke slowly, as though thirty years of punching a needle through heavy sailcloth had turned his thoughts into a thread that was collected on one side of the
sail, pushed through with a gloved fist, then pulled clear on the other side. His words seemed hand-stitched.
“My number one piece of advice?” said Rick, settling himself on one of the sailmakers’ benches that occupied strategic positions around the sail loft’s hardwood floor. There were four such stations, each with a sewing machine pit in which the sailmaker sat, half-submerged before the tide of sailcloth that would flow through his machine.
“Use your imagination. You can repair most sail disasters without any of the equipment we have here, and anyway, you’re not going to have it with you. Look around.”
He gestured. We pivoted obediently on our stools. There was a gallery above us where the patterns for new sails were created. Down here on the main floor was where assembly took place, and the walls were hung with spools of rope, prewaxed thread, seam tape called “insignia cloth.” Staplers, drills, and tape measures in orange-handled spools dangled from the ceiling, along with wire cutters and an assortment of thrashed knee pads. Long slabs of batten material — the flexible plastic stiffeners that help the sail hold its shape — drooped over racks above our heads.
“You don’t need any of this stuff. Well, some of it — thread, needle, a bit of seam tape. But look.”
He grabbed a sail, pulled out a pair of nightmarish scissors, and ripped a three-foot gash. Several of us groaned.
“Not to worry, this one’s already toast. But you can fix it, on board, good enough to get you to Hawaii and back.” And he proceeded to patch the rend, duct-taping the edges together, double-taping the patch around the cut, fencing the whole thing off with insignia tape, and hand-sewing around it, twice. We all came up to try out the stitch; I could barely get the needle through the sandwich of sailcloth that Rick had been methodically perforating.
The difficulty of sail repair didn’t worry me because I knew in my bones that if anything went wrong with Vera, it would be something mechanical and would probably involve the engine. And I was right.