Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  “Not mine,” she said.

  Two salmon farms slid by, one of them directly beneath an even more chaotic than usual clear-cut, and I couldn’t help wondering, which was the lesser of two evils? Salmon farms were under sustained assault from environmental groups, something I was familiar with as a fisheries biologist, and I kept trying to push away the unfashionable suspicion that the critics had simply changed horses. Funding was easy to get if you wanted to oppose salmon farms, while logging protest seemed to be on hiatus.

  The sun came out as we turned right into Wellbore Channel. As though following a hackneyed script, the clouds parted, four mountains revealed themselves alarmingly close on the north side of the channel, and a dolphin cut across our bows. The ebb tide emptying the channel picked us up and hurried us through Whirlpool Rapids. Just as Dave had assured us the night before, Whirlpool’s flow wasn’t especially turbulent, and going through felt like stepping onto the conveyor belt in an airport, with the billboards replaced by hills on vertiginous hills. We sprinted through at eleven knots, an all-time record, nearly twice Vera’s cruising speed. Then another hard right into Forward Harbour, following Dave’s lead to an overnight anchorage in Douglas Bay, a delicious scoop out of the peninsula connecting Forward Harbour with Bessborough Bay (named after the “noble house of Bessborough,” rather a disappointment after all those lord chancellors). It was only ten in the morning. One more early start and we’d be through Johnstone Strait and into the Broughtons. We anchored while three wolves patrolled the pebbled crescent of beach, long-legged and in no hurry.

  We spent the rest of the day exploring while the wind built to a gale around the corner in Johnstone Strait. The wisdom of waiting for a weather window was beginning to sink in, although it ran contrary to my nature, and there wasn’t any evidence of high winds where we were (which was, of course, the whole point). After lunch, when the wolves seemed to have moved on, we manhandled the dinghy into the water, persuaded Dave and his wife, Nancy, away from the books they were reading in Sanctum’s cockpit (they seemed to have no problem with the waiting thing), and went ashore.

  The incoming tide was filling the beach like a bowl. A notch in the trees opened into a trail flagged with marine detritus: faded net floats, unravelling lengths of hawser, lengths of PVC tube jammed in tree forks. We clambered over roots and under fallen trees. Charley stopped every few feet, riveted by the smells of strange animals. When the trail opened out onto the other side of the peninsula, the wind barrelling down Sunderland Channel hit me in the face. This was the weather from Johnstone Strait; this was what we weren’t seeing in our little bomb-proof haven in Douglas Bay.

  Back on the Douglas Bay side, only the tops of trees gave any sign of the gale a mile away. The bowl was now brimming, the beach obliterated, and Vera’s dinghy floating serenely at the end of its long yellow tether. We had to scuttle under cedar branches to get in.

  That evening, Hatsumi and I gorged ourselves on Dane Campbell’s crabs, sitting in the cockpit and tossing the remains overboard. We went through three of them, creating a slow-motion fountain of crab shards. Eating crab was one of those activities that always reminded me, “You’re not Japanese, and she is.” I dismantled my crustaceans using bone shears from the first aid kit and dug the sweet meat out with a knife; Hatsumi cracked the claws with her teeth and inhaled, making a whistling sound. We wiped our chins and agreed that tomorrow we would listen to the early forecast and decide whether to leave. I might even pop over to Sanctum for a word.

  Next morning: another gale forecast. If we left, we had to make it through the last, unavoidable ten miles of Johnstone Strait. We dithered. I rowed over to Sanctum, feeling weak-willed, and rapped on the cold hull. Dave emerged, sniffed, looked around.

  “We’ll likely just poke our noses around the corner, see how it goes.” I rowed quickly back.

  “We’re out of here,” I told Hatsumi. It was warm in the cabin but cold outside. Charley peered up beseechingly.

  “He’s going to have to hold it.”

  Sunderland Channel was gusty and cold, a working corridor of salmon farms and clear-cuts. Once, I did a double-take: a B.C. ferry, one of the big ones, sat tethered to the shore beneath a clear-cut. So that’s where the old ferries went — housing for loggers. It looked preferable to Aquatraz. The northwest wind was already peering around corners, looking for boats to harass. But Dave had been right, an early morning run would get us to safety, and we left Johnstone Strait for good to turn up Havannah Channel. Behind us, on the Vancouver Island side, Mount Palmerston looked as though it had risen straight out of the ocean. Which, geologically speaking, it had.

  We stopped for lunch in Port Harvey, a place that, despite its name, I took a dislike to. The bay itself was clotted with logging equipment, barges, a collection of salvaged salmon cages. The ridge above it all was an old-man stubble of stumps — yet another clear-cut. Someone was trying to make a go of a new marina at the head of the bay, with a floating store, a small restaurant, and invitingly empty docks. If you wanted a corn popper or a fish bonker, maybe some Kraft Dinner or a watermelon, Port Harvey was the place.

  Most such places on Vancouver Island, once away from the cities, are laid-back and casual, and the really small ones, like Port Harvey, usually have an owner whose story alone is worth the moorage fee. But this one’s docking instructions seemed strangely anal-retentive for a person with two hundred feet of unused space. Maybe he didn’t like Charley, who leapt ashore to bark at anything that moved, including the horseflies. Whatever the reason, I didn’t want to hear this guy’s story. Ex-fisherman, failed stockbroker, axe murderer, I didn’t care. We followed Dave and Nancy out.

  “Let’s try Boogie Bay, around the corner,” Dave said, and that was fine with me. It also told me how to pronounce “Boughey,” the name on the chart. Speaking of names, I couldn’t resist looking up the Harvey who’d had this place named after him. At first, it seemed too good to be true: Captain John Harvey, Walbran informed me, was master of HMS Brunswick in the battle of the “Glorious First of June,” 1794, in which Harvey’s ship grappled with the French frigate Vengeur and sent her to the bottom. Captain Harvey received his death wound during hand-to-hand fighting, dying after being relieved by another ship captained by his brother. What a glorious career — and the same name as my father! Unfortunately, Walbran’s book had several historic Harveys, and this was the wrong one. John Harvey did have a mountain named after him, but Port Harvey, it turned out, commemorated the less remarkable commodore of the British South Pacific Fleet.

  We rolled out the big genoa jib and followed Sanctum up Havannah Channel, the rising northeaster catching Vera perfectly on the beam so that she gambolled past all the other landmarks named for the survey ship’s officers: Mist Bluff, Malone Point, Bockett Islets. Boughey was the Havannah’s first lieutenant, but his bay was taking the wind dead-on, so we turned north and found shelter in Burial Cove, from where we would have access to the Broughton Archipelago by any number of passages.

  Burial Cove was pleasant enough, but the name cast a pall over the place for me, and the trees sighed all night. Vera dragged her chain to and fro across the bottom, and I came awake repeatedly to the grumble of metal on rock and the moan of wind in the rigging. I wondered when the dead man would step out of Hatsumi’s sleep and silently take his place on the cabin floor.

  Sanctum motored past us early the next morning, heading for Malcolm Island, where a daughter worked in the Co-op store in Sointula. The night before, saying goodbye, I realized that, in four days, Dave had told me nothing specific about how to comport myself on this coast — about wind direction and weather forecasts and waiting. But, in his own self-deprecating way, Dave was such a potent mixture of confidence and humility that some of it, if only the faintest smear, had already worn off on me. And that was a good feeling. This coast was so pockmarked, so hazard-riddled, I desperately needed to kick-start my own competence.

&nb
sp; “By the way,” I said, as the dinghy drifted away from Sanctum, “yesterday, when we were coming up Chancellor Channel, you stopped for a while. What was all that about?”

  “One of those clumps of floating kelp,” Dave laughed. “I ran straight into it. Couldn’t have done it better if I’d actually been aiming for it. Nearly seized the engine.”

  I was paranoid about floating kelp myself. And now this paragon of seamanship had hit some. That meant I had the right idea, but sooner or later, I was still going to screw up. Somehow, that made me feel better.

  With Sanctum gone, Burial Cove seemed even colder and emptier. It was still early, and neither of us felt like going anywhere. Hatsumi was still in bed; Charley’s ears poked out from under the covers beside her. Sometimes I wondered if I was being displaced.

  “I’ll just do a little reading,” I said.

  Spinal Tap

  I was now into my second day of the scientific papers I’d gotten waylaid by in Refuge Cove, trying to make sense of the shunting hardware my father had installed in Billy. I had to finish them, here in Burial Cove, because they furnished the technical argument he was counting on to clear his name. Then I could pick up the second act of Billy’s story, where everything went wrong.

  Unfortunately, what I had expected to be an easy breeze-through of the science had turned into a time-trip that visited every one of the medical issues in Billy’s case. There was no excitement here, just the dry language of clinical science stuttering slowly forward. Important, yes, but maybe a tiny bit boring.

  I turned to the Perinatal Anoxia folder. In English, this means “lack of oxygen around the time of birth.” Billy was very slow to take his first breath, and after he did, he remained in “acute respiratory distress,” tubed and incubated, for weeks. A 1976 chapter on pediatric neurology told me anoxia was the single most important neurological problem for a newborn, causing “mental retardation” (now termed intellectual disability), seizures, and cerebral palsy. Premature infants seemed to be most at risk, and the consequences were often insidious. Intellectual disability was one, along with various dyslexic syndromes and “perceptual disturbances” that surfaced at school age. I already knew that lack of oxygen fries your brain. But it was still a shock to see so many of Billy’s problems (especially his cerebral palsy) explainable by lack of oxygen immediately after birth. Anyway, that was enough on anoxia; I got the point.

  On to meningitis, always bad news for any infant, and especially so for a hydrocephalic baby that had been shunted. I found several articles. Mortality from bacterial meningitis in infants was in the 30 to 40 percent range. If you had a feverish, vomiting, shunted infant on your hands, you had to check for meningitis, and there was only one way to do that in 1976: withdraw and examine some cerebrospinal fluid. How did you do this?

  With a lumbar puncture.

  When I saw those words, I knew the 1970s-era science was critical to my father’s case. It would be another week at least before I could start to piece together the blow-by-blow drama of what happened to Billy after the shunt had first been put in, but I already knew “lumbar puncture” was the reason the case was settled before my father could take the stand.

  What did I know about lumbar punctures? I knew that doctors abbreviated the name to LP (I will too), that most people knew their more gruesome and descriptive name spinal tap, and that they hurt. How you did one, and especially the dos and don’ts that seemed such a big issue with Billy’s case, were mysteries to me. But there was a folder here, labelled “Lumbar Puncture,” so I opened it up.

  In the mid-’70s, the use of an LP in diagnosing neurological disorders — especially meningitis — was still high, even given the knowledge that an LP itself could actually cause meningitis! But the big problem occurs when pressure inside the brain is already high — major causes are injuries to the brain, tumours, and untreated hydrocephalus — because a lumbar puncture can make things worse. Elevated pressure does some gruesome things to the brain, especially where it joins the spinal cord; it’s called herniation or “coning.” I learned that, yes, an LP can reduce pressure on the brain, but if it was performed when pressure was too high you risked eliminating the back-pressure normally provided by the presence of spinal fluid. Top-down pressure from the brain would win out, and down would bulge the base of the brain.

  My head was spinning. Lumbar puncture, on which the lawyers had caved in and settled the lawsuit, looked to me like the Devil’s Pool in Dent Rapids: you can get close to it, but stay away when the current is really running. I needed more up-to-date information, and that meant the Internet. In Burial Cove? I did a quick check on my phone. There was a weak telephone signal, enough to patch my phone to my computer and use it as a router. I would have to be fast because the data charge would be astronomical. But I really needed to know what doctors were thinking today about the risk of doing an LP when intracranial pressure was already high. Did the LP cause herniation (the dangerous bulging of the brain) or didn’t it? Could we even say? If the LP that was eventually done on Billy was so crucial, I had to understand why.

  But the Internet, usually so eager to throw information at me, was stingy on this one (and spectacularly slow). There didn’t seem to be much solid evidence that an LP could actually cause herniation, but what if you had elevated pressure to begin with? It began to look as though I wouldn’t get a clear answer about lumbar punctures and herniation. Back and forth the opinions went. Don’t do an LP. Go ahead, but do a CT scan first. Depends on the kind of hydrocephalus the patient has. Finally, I gave up. It was like asking three boaters about the best paint to use on your hull, or how to fix a leaking hose, or what to do if your engine started smoking. Three different answers, guaranteed.

  But I did turn up something interesting: the Lumbar Puncture Simulator Mark II, made by the Australian company Limbs & Things. For around $3,600, novice puncturers got the ultimate pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game: a “lifelike lower torso” with a removable skin flap that hid the “puncture block,” a plastic chunk of lower spine plumbed with fluid from an external reservoir. You filled the reservoir and poked away through the skin flap, trying to get in between the vertebrae and puncture the cerebrospinal space.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” my father said.

  “Yeah, but look.” I angled the laptop and pointed. “You can even buy different kinds of puncture block. See, they’ve got ‘normal,’ but you can order ‘obese,’ and ‘elderly,’ even ‘elderly obese.’”

  “I hated doing back operations on obese people,” he said. “Like cutting into a whale.”

  “Well, then, can I ask you about lumbar punctures in general? Risks and all that?”

  “I’m not in the mood,” said my father

  “Are you finished with the computer?” called Hatsumi. “And Charley wants to go ashore.”

  I said good night to the lumbar simulator and handed Hatsumi the computer; she handed me a small dog with a bursting bladder. It seemed like a good exchange.

  Murderers and Marijuana

  Even after I’d spent two hours confusing myself about intracranial pressure and lumbar punctures, Burial Cove was still as cold as the grave. I rowed Charley to the single, gritty beach. At low tide, it was littered with old logging cables and a rusted-out fuel tank. Getting ashore was messy, and clams launched silver spurts in protest as I picked my way across the mud. I could hear the persistent whine of a large saw in the woods, somewhere in behind a weathered cedar house. Maybe there was a mill in behind. Small-scale logging; perhaps a second job with a salmon farm; subsistence.

  Chatham Channel, just around the corner and the quickest route to the Broughtons, woke us up. It separates the two Cracroft Islands (East and West) but not by much, as though someone started to scratch a pathway and gave up when it was half-done. Chatham Channel really wants to be deeper. It’s a mile long, only a quarter-mile wide and twenty-odd feet deep, and a couple of
rocks a metre under the surface pretty much eliminate any margin for error. The chart shows you how to get through the old-fashioned way: a single straight line connects two range markers, red-painted posts about a hundred feet apart on the shore at either end. All you have to do is line up your boat with the first set of markers, keep it that way until you can see the second set, line yourself up with those, and keep on trucking. I found that a mile is a long way to walk an imaginary line and that when you drift off course, which way do you turn to get back on track?

  We poked our noses into Cutter Cove, but it seemed a desolate place, shallow for most of its length and topped with a vast estuary overlooked by forbidding cliffs. Plus it was too windy, no place to spend a night alone at anchor.

  “What about this place?” I said to Hatsumi as we turned back and began to buck our way out again. “Minstrel Island. Look, there’s even a public dock. And a resort. You’d like that.”

  She studied the guidebook carefully, something she had never done in our first few years of cruising. Perhaps she had learned not to accept my recommendations so quickly.

  “It says the resort is closed.”

  “Give me that.” I looked. “Okay, it’s closed. But you can still tie up there, apparently. And it’s free!”

  “I don’t know.” She frowned. A wave caught Vera on the quarter and sent a splatter of water across the windscreen.

  “See? Too late to dick around. And look, Charley really has to go.” Charley drove his nose even further under his blanket. “It’ll be great!”

  And that was how we met the axe murderer.

  There wasn’t much choice, really. It was either the free dock at Minstrel Island or squeeze through a little constriction called the Blow Hole to get into the marina at Lagoon Cove. Everybody went to Lagoon Cove; according to the glowing write-ups in the guidebooks, Lagoon Cove had showers and a store, charming hosts and daily happy-hour potlucks with marshmallow roasts. Marshmallow roasts? Singalongs? Versus a free, and probably empty, dock? I knew which one John Harvey would have chosen.