by Brian Harvey
We settled in for another pounding run, this time to an anchorage called Shoal Bay. The wind rose some more. In the confined space of Cordero Channel, the whitecaps were vertical, the low sun on the chaotic water forcing me to squint. On the mainland side, the mountains seemed close enough for me to lace on my hiking boots and step onto the trail. Suddenly we were in a sea of peaks and icefields. Mount Waddington, the highest in the Coast Range at 13,000 feet and one of the world’s most challenging climbs, was in there, beyond the head of Bute Inlet, the opening to which we’d passed as we went through the rapids. A horsefly the size of a raisin arrived in the cockpit and Charley made a few half-hearted lunges before settling down again.
We crashed along. I found myself wondering about salmon, whose route from the Fraser River to the Pacific we were more or less tracing. Did the migrating fish, especially the young ones heading out to the North Pacific for the first time, go through the rapids? Or did they all use Johnstone Strait? This would never had occurred to me if I hadn’t just done the rapids myself, but the answer might even be important, especially when people worried about the locations of salmon farms and whether they might spread diseases to young salmon wandering past. Could young salmon make it through Dent Rapids against the tide? Did they wait for slack, like boaters? How would you even study such a question, short of radio-tagging thousands of fish? I made a note, for when I returned to reality in the fall.
Shoal Bay’s come-as-you-are kind of dock is run by an affable American called Mark. You can anchor in Shoal Bay, if you don’t mind wind, or you can tie up, if you don’t mind shoe-horning into whatever space is left and can figure out what Mark’s vigorous semaphoring means. Like any other haven within a few hours of a tidal rapid, Shoal Bay gets its customers at highly predictable times. I imagine Mark sitting on the verandah of his cottage in the meadow behind the bay, the mountains with their abandoned gold mine above him, looking at the current tables for Dent Rapids and then at his watch. Another twenty minutes, he says to himself, adjusting his hat over his eyes, cowboy style, and going back to sleep.
Shoal Bay gets just enough protection from the northwest wind: the seas disappear, but gusts still get in around the corner to remind you that, eight miles away as the crow flies, Johnstone Strait is howling. We dropped anchor off the end of the already-jammed dock, tucking in between a kelp bed and another sailboat. Kelp meant a rocky bottom and iffy holding, but I was too tired to look for a better spot. The anchor bounced a few times, then grabbed.
At the end of the nineteenth century, there were over four hundred gold claims around Shoal Bay and the magnificent mountainous backdrop of Phillips Arm. In its heyday, Shoal Bay had everything: a school, a trading store, a hotel, shacks for the Indigenous prostitutes who serviced the loggers and miners. There was even a police officer, whose job must have been interesting: his beat ran from the Thurlow Islands south to Campbell River and across Georgia Strait to Lund. Now there was only Mark and his neat vegetable garden with kale and carrots and herbs. He served the yachties beer on his deck, where they sat next to a spray of red geraniums in a toilet bowl and looked up Phillips Arm to the ghost mines of the last century.
We had a terrible night, the swirling gusts relentless into the wee hours. Anchoring over a rocky bottom is never sleep-inducing, especially when the gusts are strong enough that you drag your anchor chain back and forth across the bottom, like the fetters of a monster. Vera snatched at her tether and the gusts moaned in the rigging. I kept telling myself that, yes, the anchor had caught solidly and, yes, we’d given it a good pull to set it before shutting down the engine. And, yes, we were far enough away from that other boat.
When I woke and dragged myself out to the cockpit, we had completely turned around. The kelp patch I’d been careful to avoid now caressed Vera’s flank, and the other sailboat was nowhere near us. Sanctum, I read on its transom, a comforting name. The man in her cockpit raised a hand in greeting, as though to say, “That was nothing special.”
I tried to do the same. Because he was right, it wasn’t so bad. Last year, Shoal Bay was where our trip had fallen apart. I’d returned from watching Charley dig for clams near the remains of an old logging skid to find Hatsumi down below, surrounded by charts and tide tables and books.
“This isn’t fun,” she said. “It was better when I didn’t know anything.” Her face was closed; she wouldn’t look up; these weren’t good signs.
“These rapids, the wind, they’re driving me crazy.”
We’d lost our nerve the next day, ducking into Loughborough, the next major inlet, then slipping away early the next morning to head back downstream to calmer waters. Everything seemed to be against us: the endless gale warnings for Johnstone Strait; the careless timing that had landed us at the rapids at full moon, when tides and currents were at their peak; our own inexperience.
But Hatsumi was tougher now. We both were. Failure that’s no more than a breakdown of resolve is just an invitation to get it right the next time; we both felt that if there had to be a bailout on this trip, it would be in Bull Harbour, the last shelter before going over the Nahwitti Bar and around Cape Scott. Not here. We got the anchor up, festooned in slippery brown kelp blades and letting go without resistance; probably the only thing keeping us in place all night had been the weight of the chain strewn around the seabed.
***
Now our appointment was with Greene Point Rapids, which split the two Thurlow Islands. Then, still following the sheltered back-door route behind Johnstone Strait, we had to make Whirlpool Rapids in time to find a place to anchor before we finished off the last stretch of Johnstone Strait. We were like a fugitive darting through back alleys, parallel to the thoroughfare where we didn’t dare show our faces. I looked up Thurlow later in Captain Walbran’s book (he was another person with streets in Victoria and Vancouver named after him) and found that Captain Vancouver had named the Thurlows in 1762, after being turned back by rapids. “The tide made so powerfully against us as obliged us to become stationary,” Vancouver wrote. That made me feel better. Thurlow was lord chancellor at the time of Vancouver’s voyages, and a very unusual one: he was a commoner, not born to the peerage at all. He actually made it to the top through hard work. Maybe that’s why Vancouver gave him two islands, not one.
The current picked us up as soon as we left Shoal Bay and forced me to steer at a thirty-degree angle to our intended course. The walls of this channel were precipitous and green, with trees to the water, and the place felt empty. The crowds of boaters in Desolation Sound had evaporated, held back by the force field of the rapids, and the only signs of human life were clear-cuts and the occasional salmon farm.
The farms radiated corporate correctness. Each one had the same neat outbuildings painted dark green and mothering a network of metal catwalks picked out with bright yellow buoys. It all looked very anal-retentive, as though to say, “Look, we’re harmless! See how small our footprint is, how well we blend in. Let us stay!”
Every time I passed one of these farms, I grabbed the binoculars. I never saw anything happening there. The young Pacific salmon from the Fraser River would be swimming past these farms along with Vera while, inside the cages, their distant Atlantic cousins circled silently through the oxygen-rich currents, eating, shitting, growing, occasionally being rudely snatched through the mesh by a prowling seal. In a month or so, when my contract came through, I would have to buckle down and try to decide if the local fish were catching anything nasty from the imports. I didn’t look forward to it.
The clear-cuts, though, seemed to be everywhere you looked, and to me those vandalistic swipes at the hillsides said something different: “Look, we’ve been here for two hundred years, so you can just go and fuck yourself.” Some of them, above the remains of long-abandoned log skids, were old and nearly grown-in again, like a cancer survivor’s hair. Others were more recent, with purple fireweed just starting to come up through the slash. I saw on
e that could have come out of a textbook on the environmental effects of logging: above, the scalped hillside, immediately below, the caved-in cliff that had let go when heavy rains rolled straight off the treeless patch.
But many clear-cuts were still active. Across from the salmon farm in Bickley Bay, I watched the goings-on at a booming ground dominated by a barged-in bunkhouse whose side was spray-painted in letters ten feet tall. “AQUATRAZ,” it said. On the shore, two yellow machines the size of buses sorted logs into bundles and laid them behind a metal gate that overlooked the bay. They worried at the trees with crab-like pincers. In behind, fully loaded trucks inched down the switchback that wound into the clear-cut. Without warning, the gate fell open and the piled-up trees rumbled down the skid, sending up a geyser of water.
Greene Point Rapids is at one end of Chancellor Channel (that’s Lord Thurlow to you); at the other end, an hour and a half further on, is Whirlpool. The plan was to shoot both in the same day, hole up for the night, then scoot down into Johnstone Strait early the next morning before the wind could get up. Even near slack, the water flowing past Greene Point was roiled and tangled-looking, the kind of place that can whip your boat around in the time it takes to let go of the wheel and take a swig from your water bottle. But it’s a short rapid, and we shuddered through it ahead of Sanctum, which seemed to have the same idea about where and when to go. And we’d picked up another sailboat somewhere, a dark green wooden vessel with a determined-looking, toqued individual at the tiller.
Our little train bucked along, and the lord chancellor funnelled the wind into our faces, and after five miles or so of this, we realized we’d seen this movie before. Too late, I watched Vera’s dinghy, which I had stupidly left on a long tether, begin to climb up and launch itself off the tops of the swells; in the gusts, which seemed to have come from nowhere, the dinghy darted sideways like an unruly dog. If one of those gusts flipped the dinghy over, there was no way we could get it back. We’d have to cut it loose.
“Forget this,” I yelled to Hatsumi. She was in the shelter of the dodger with Charley, a miserable bundle curled up next to her beneath a blanket. Vera reared, caught the next oncoming wave solidly, and I ducked a bucketful of water.
“I’m bailing out at Loughborough. Again. We can’t keep going into this mess.” Loughborough Inlet is one of the many blind alleys that extend up toward the Coast Mountains; Lord Loughborough was — well, he would have to wait. Once around the corner, we would escape the gale that was blowing down Johnstone Strait and spilling into Chancellor Channel.
But the corner before Loughborough Inlet wouldn’t be easy. It took forty-five minutes to make a turn that would have been simple in calm seas but had become a nail-biter in winds that would send us sideways once we let them onto Vera’s flank. Finally, we veered hard to starboard, and the dinghy took a heart-stopping run until it was right beside me, threatening to somersault. We wallowed around the foaming shore of the island guarding the entrance, and then we were in the lee of the mountains. The dinghy retreated.
“I hated that,” I said.
“No, we should celebrate,” said Hatsumi. “This is as far as we got last year, remember? From now on, everything is new.”
Had I been pushing too hard? Had we been in danger? If I wasn’t sure, what was my Tokyo-born wife to think? I shut the engine down and rolled out the jib, and we coasted silently up the inlet between vertical walls of green. That was the problem: no matter how much you thought you knew, there was always another situation to demonstrate that, really, you knew next to nothing. For the hundredth time, I wished I could have learned it all much earlier, that I had been raised in a truly seagoing family, not as a sometime crewmember on board an infrequently used family sailboat. I looked back at Sanctum, also sailing now behind us, and at the other boat. Were they feeling the same fears? Or was I the only person who would admit to such failings?
There aren’t many anchorages in Loughborough Inlet, the bottom falling away within metres of the shore. We tied up at the same place we’d ended our trip the year before, at Dane Campbell’s cobbled-together collection of docks across from his house in Sidney Bay. If I were asked to imagine the kind of person who could survive for twenty years in such isolation, pulling trees from his woodlot, tending a shellfish lease, running this little haven for freaked-out summer boaters, I’d probably come up with someone bearded, lumberjack-shirted, booted, and rough-edged.
That wasn’t Dane, who showed up later in the evening in his aluminum workboat, connecting up a few more overflow docks and accepting the absurdly low moorage we owed him as though it was the farthest thing from his mind. Not this slight, soft-spoken man in socks and sandals, straw hat and a neat beard; he looked as though he’d wandered out of a poetry reading. At least his jeans were dirty.
There were only the three sailboats this night. Last year, the place had been jammed with boaters waiting out an endless series of gales in Johnstone Strait, and we’d tied up to a dock that had been discarded by a salmon farm. It was littered with cables, bent-over nails, loose shackles, and worn hawsers that led somewhere far away, presumably tethering the whole thing in water that was over a hundred feet deep but still just a stone’s throw from the trees. You had to watch where you walked, stepping over gaps and clumps of Indian paintbrush sprouting from the weathered planks. Now, Charley and I sat on the corner of the same dock, listening to the wind in the trees and staring into the water. Charley seemed close to testing his theory that the dinner-plate-sized purple jellyfish pulsing slowly at the surface was in fact a stepping-stone.
“Don’t even think about it,” I told him. “You can’t swim.”
I needed someone to talk to, someone who had been there, someone who wasn’t my wife or my dog. Suddenly Charley whirled and catapulted down the dock toward the other boats. A man had just stepped out of Sanctum, and in seconds Charley was literally bouncing in front of him, all four feet lifting off simultaneously, like a sputtering rocket with four jets.
“Quite the talker, isn’t he?” The man wore a floppy white hat and sandals, and he seemed to be smiling.
“Just ignore him, if that’s possible. Charley, Jesus, shut up!”
“That was getting a little ugly out there. Thirty-five, gusting forty.”
“No wonder I nearly lost the dinghy.”
“We were worried about that. There, that’s better. I seem to have been accepted.” Charley had his paws up on the man’s legs.
“Were you planning to come in here?”
“Nope, we wanted to get through Whirlpool. But we figured you had the right idea. So did he, I guess.” He pointed to the third sailboat. The owner of that one was ambling toward us. He still had his toque on. It seemed never to have been washed.
“Wind against a flooding tide, always seems to happen,” said the man. “So here we are.”
Laconic seemed to be Dave Young’s default mode. It took me half an hour to get out of him that he was the retired master of the Uchuck III, the coastal cargo ship that’s serviced the west coast of Vancouver Island, in several incarnations, for forty years. The guy scratching my dog behind the ears had been into every hole on the west coast, in every kind of weather, collecting people and dropping off cargo along a stretch from Kyuquot south to Barkley Sound. The Uchuck was an icon; there was nothing in the way of wind and wave and human behaviour he wouldn’t have seen.
“So,” I said, “you guys are heading north tomorrow?”
Dave contemplated the waving tree-tips. “That’s the general plan,” he said.
I threw myself at his feet and screamed, “Take me with you!” Actually, I didn’t, but my inner voice was rolling around, pounding its forehead on Dave’s sandals.
“Yeah, we were sort of tending that way too,” I said. I squinted appraisingly at the sky. “Depends. Maybe we’ll run into each other. In the morning.”
“Round about seven, I may take a loo
k.” I think he was onto me.
Later, Dave shared a ling cod he’d caught, and we took over a loaf of freshly baked bread. Dane Campbell reappeared late in the evening, with crabs for us to split. We shared them with the third sailor, the Ancient Mariner. He must have been seventy-five, with a big corrugated nose beneath mirrored shades.
Hatsumi and I passed the rest of the evening on the windy foredeck, trying to hoist the dinghy aboard. The dinghy was a charming thing, the same emerald green as Vera, but it weighed a ton. We wound it painfully aloft using the spinnaker halyard and an improvised harness, and our audience winced and maintained a diplomatic silence as it scraped and swung. At one point, it got loose and swept across the deck, pinning Hatsumi to the lifelines like a boxer on the ropes.
“We can do this,” I said. “Honey.”
Hatsumi crawled free and gave me a dirty look. “It’s impossible.”
“Well, I don’t know about . . .” I finished the job myself.
Tiptoeing North
We escaped Sidney Bay the next morning. The weather forecast was the same as it had been for a week: twenty knots in the morning, rising to a gale in the afternoon. Last year, we would probably have stayed put; this year, with Dave’s example to follow (I still couldn’t admit we were following him), getting up at 5:30 a.m. seemed the obvious solution.
Loughborough Inlet was calm. We turned right at Chancellor Channel and right again at the much narrower Wellbore Channel, closing in on Whirlpool Rapids. I wolfed down the fried eggs and toast passed up from the galley, warming myself against the cold wind.
“I had the dream again,” Hatsumi said, refilling my coffee cup from the comfort in the galley.
“The dead guy?”
“It’s like, the boat isn’t really moving. We’re just floating. The three of us.”
Now she had me worried. “You do realize,” I said, “dreams don’t have to mean something. They can just be dreams.”