Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  Even if they were slightly crazed. The professor was back, “helping” some Indigenous men load a boat they were taking to Fair Harbour. They seemed to tolerate him; in a place like this, what was the alternative?

  “Have a good one,” he shouted as they motored off. “Bring me back a woman, okay? Dead or alive!” A couple of shirtless kids raced down the dock on skateboards, making a sound like thunder.

  Walters Cove was tantalizing. You had to be persistent. The place seemed literally to come and go with the fog. Sometimes the fog fell vertically, as though poured down over the trees; other times, the grey vapour seemed to be finding its way in through the natural openings to the cove. There was a tide-revealed reef near the western entrance to the harbour, guarded by a single basalt pinnacle like a twisted, rotten tooth. You could be sitting there, in the sun, when a wall of mist flooded silently in from the sea, enveloped the rock, obliterated the opening. In the evening, what might have been a brilliant sunset became weirdly transmuted by fog, the sinking sun first a pale disc, then an enormous pink ball.

  But the fog only obscured physical things. When it lifted, there wasn’t any doubt about what you saw: trees, houses, a rock you were about to steam straight into. Socially, Walters Cove revealed itself more slowly, and it was obvious that, as visitors for a few days, our impressions would be superficial — even wrong. Was I right in seeing a more than physical separation between the Indigenous village and the people on the side where we were tied up? Probably, and we would see the same thing, even more pronounced, in the two communities in Ahousaht, farther south. But beyond that single crude assumption, all we could do was snatch at impressions, the way Charley snapped at flies.

  The fishing lodge, for example, a hundred yards across the bay. This place wasn’t very old (five years, it turned out), and it made the lodges in Winter Harbour look like Super 8 motels. Someone had poured money into a land-based cedar building, with extensive docks and a fleet not only of the same aluminum twenty-footers we’d seen in Winter Harbour (one of which was still out there, still lost), but also some bigger fibreglass cabin boats with radar and twin 225hp Mercury outboard engines. These ones were all called Kyuqout Avenger, although what they might be avenging escaped me. The people with something to avenge lived across the way, in Houpsitas.

  We wandered over to the fancy lodge in the afternoon, past the collapsing shack where the professor appeared to live (“Keep Out!” said an unnecessary spray-painted sign). When we passed, he was standing at one end of a long rickety float, legs braced, rocking it violently from side to side. His little dog, way down at the other end, was barking and scrambling to keep its feet. It looked like a lot of fun. I never did get the chance to hear his story; maybe he was a retired neurosurgeon.

  We tramped down the gangplank to the Walters Cove Lodge. “Can we go in?” said Hatsumi, ever mindful of propriety.

  “Why not?” I said. “Everybody’s pretty laid-back out here.”

  But they weren’t, at least not when presented with two people off a sailboat and a dog with a beard, white eyebrows, and an attitude. A young First Nations guy was filleting a hefty halibut at a stainless steel cleaning table. He wore a West Coast Resorts ballcap and blue mirror shades.

  “Do something for you?” He drew the long knife along the backbone, and the halibut fell open like a book.

  “How far out do you go for a fish like that?” I was thinking of the missing boat in Brooks Bay. Maybe he was too.

  “Three miles? Sometimes ten. Maybe more.” He worked the fillet free and turned his back on us, hosing the blood away. I realized we were trespassing. We beat a retreat back up the gangplank.

  “Just a peek,” I said, pulling open the lodge’s massive cedar door.

  “But can we . . . ?”

  She was right. We couldn’t. A fire burned in the grate, leather chairs glowed, pastries glistened, but it was “Can I help you?” all over again. This time it was the manager who was pursing his lips.

  “You’re going to have to take the dog outside.”

  “I just wondered,” I said as Hatsumi winced, “what do you charge for a night? We thought we might, you know, try it out? Take a break from the boat?”

  “We don’t charge by the night,” he said, handing me a brochure. “Packages only. Five thousand for five days.”

  We took the hint. The company, I read in the brochure as we continued along the path, ran several lodges. Walters Cove was the most economical. We walked a little farther, following a narrow path through a forest that seemed to arise from the sea itself. “Coffee,” said a hand-lettered sign tacked to a tree.

  “That looks more like it,” I said. Charley was already out of sight. We followed a string of yips and growls, emerging at a clearing with a porch, some bemused looking men in deck chairs, and a boardwalk leading to three simple cottages.

  “Geez,” said one man. He was wearing an RCMP uniform. “Is this your dog? And haven’t I seen you before? McNeill, right?”

  He’d looked different wearing shorts and washing the deck of his boat. We’d chatted, in the normal way one does on docks (except, of course, at expensive fishing lodges, where chatting is only available as part of a package).

  “So, how was Cape Scott?” he asked. “And Brooks?”

  “Horrible,” I said.

  His name was Lee; he and his partner covered the top third of the island. Now I understood why he had seemed so happy just to squat on his deck and sluice soapy water over it; his workweek had him in and out of boats and helicopters dealing with everything from domestic violence to pot farming. You can read about these nasty everyday infractions in the local newspapers, which often publish a weekly account, a sort of criminal social page. There were a lot of what the RCMP termed “consensual fights”; a favourite weapon was the hurled beer can. I should have asked Lee about the axe murderer on Minstrel Island.

  The screen door banged open, and a perspiring, goateed man in an untucked shirt, jeans, and slippers threw up his hands and sat down heavily on the steps.

  “I ordered tomatoes, but we got cabbage instead. We’re running out of things to do with cabbage.”

  This was Eric Gorbman, and his place was called the Kyuquot Inn. Eric’s style was about as far from the fishing lodge’s as you could get. For one thing, he was positively delighted to talk to us, including in Japanese. It turned out his father, a fish endocrinologist, had been stationed in Japan after the war, part of a program meant to rebuild bridges between the conquered and their conquerors.

  Fish endocrinologist?

  “Your father was Aubrey Gorbman!” I said. “Small world or what! When I was a grad student, I used his textbook.”

  “Yeah, well, one of his students at Tokyo University was the emperor’s brother,” said Eric. “When I was five or something, we visited the emperor’s butterfly preserve. I took a swipe at the emperor with my butterfly net, put it over his head.” He let out a guffaw. “My God, those guards, they were fast! Hey, you want a coffee or something?”

  I looked at Charley, who was wrestling with Eric’s Jack Russell, Charlotte. “Deal with it,” I said. We went into the restaurant equivalent of a butterfly net on an emperor’s head. The room had the same million-dollar view as the Walters Cove Lodge, but there weren’t any leather chairs or fishing prints. A few oilcloth-covered tables ran along the windows, and three more had been pulled together for several Indigenous women and assorted grandchildren, who were working their way through large plates of fish and chips. A toddler in diapers spun past our table, lost his balance, and was scooped up by a long-suffering older girl. The queen squinted down on it all through the smoke from a wood stove on the end wall.

  “No cabbage, I promise.” Eric brought us our espresso and homemade apple pie. We’d ordered from a teenage girl with a sad, faraway look; now she was gone.

  “What happened to your waitress?” I asked between mou
thfuls. The pie was faultless. Eric rolled his eyes.

  “A personal problem.” It looked as though he was taking this one in stride; he probably got near-constant practice. He disappeared into the kitchen, and Hatsumi handed me a local newspaper she’d been flipping through.

  “Look at this.”

  “Do I have to?”

  I had forgotten about the sordid fight over salmon farms that I was supposed to dive back into when we returned to “civilization.” Other things — wind, weather, fear, my father — had seemed more important. But here it was again, in a long article lambasting the farms and sundry colluding governments. I put the paper down. The diapered toddler ricocheted off my chair, howled, was retrieved, and began spinning again.

  “Life’s too short,” I said. I could hear Charley defending the door. I might as well have been talking to him, for all the sense I was making, but I had to get it out. “Nobody’s going to win this battle, or if they do, it won’t have anything to do with science. So why am I getting involved again?”

  “Because they’re going to pay you?” said Hatsumi.

  “Well, however much it is, it won’t be enough.”

  That felt good, just saying it, but even as we got up to rescue Charley, the other thoughts came crowding in. Whatever I wrote on salmon farms, how many people would read it? How would my words be bent and re-formed to suit other peoples’ agendas? Why was it worth writing about at all when there were so many other things that people would rather read about, would enjoy reading about, would even, God forbid, actually pay to read about? From where I was sitting now, Eric Gorbman’s chaotic little restaurant was a lot more interesting than salmon farms, and probably not just to me.

  We said goodbye to Eric, detached Charley from the cops trying to drink their coffee on the stoop, and wandered down to the dock where the RCMP patrol boat was tied up. It was mid-afternoon, and the sport-fishing fleet was straggling in. The dock at the lodge began to fill up again with aluminum twenty-footers.

  “Shit boats,” said a man standing next to me. We watched the fleet come in together.

  “They don’t look very safe to me,” I said.

  “Get a big wave, split one of those things wide open.” The man spat into the bay.

  “They seem to be on a schedule,” I said. Another one was coming around the corner. Middle-aged men were clambering out of the earlier arrivals, whooping and high-fiving.

  “You got it,” said the man. “Eat, fish, get shitfaced; eat, fish, get shitfaced.” He spat again. “That one last week, they’ll never find the bodies.”

  The Coast Guard had upgraded the Qualicum Rivers Nine to “missing.” The search was widening. The Buffalo circled Walters Cove twice, and I’d heard the sound of helicopters on and off all day, sometimes muffled by the fog, sometimes, it seemed, right on top of us like gigantic yellow dragonflies. The mayhem of Brooks Peninsula seemed far away, and when we walked back down the boardwalk to the tidal reef, everything looked calm, even immutable. A soccer ball I’d seen the day before had gone through three tide cycles and was still in exactly the same place. In here, a body would stay put.

  Sometime during our exploration of Walters Cove, Conrad and Kate had arrived and tied up across from us. Later, we helped them eat a salmon they’d caught, and I found myself blurting out my quandary over doing the review of salmon farms. They were both successful, confident business people — what would they do? I laid it all out for them: the no-win subject, the inevitable wrangling and misquotes. Conrad wiped his trim grey beard and sat back.

  “How much they gonna pay per word?”

  I worked it out. Conrad whistled.

  “What’re you complaining about?” he said. “Do the minimum! Sub it out, even! Take the money and run!”

  “That settles it,” I told Hatsumi later, as we got ready for bed. “I quit.”

  The End of the Inlet

  The next day, we left Kyuquot Sound behind, unexplored, and threaded our way out through rivers of fog. Once again, the engine had been reluctant to start. At least it ran fine once it got going. In fog like this, a reliable engine was non-negotiable. I couldn’t ignore this problem much longer. We were heading south to Esperanza, the next big fjord. From there we could strike east, making a long detour up Esperanza Inlet, connect to Tahsis Inlet, and descend directly into Nootka Sound. That way, we would bypass some of the confused Pacific swell that made nearshore travel so uncomfortable along the coast, and we would get to visit the mill town of Tahsis. We left Walters Cove as we had entered, by stealth, so close to the fog-hidden rocks we could smell the bird shit.

  On this first leg, the view came in glimpses permitted by a break in the fog or snatched through binoculars between the drunken rolls Vera was making. When the fog did relent, the views were often startling, like Jurassic Point, where a shaft of sunlight suddenly spotlit a gentle curve of pebble beach, backed by rolling hills of an intense, golf-course green. Another wave, another roll, and the fog-curtain fell again.

  The Rolling Roadstead, a protected channel just before the entrance to Esperanza Inlet, was a gorgeous, shallow corridor of beaches where the swell finally abated. We could pick out brilliantly coloured kayakers’ tents that studded a sandy spit like beads. The beaches on this side of Vancouver Island were bites taken from black rock; behind them were salal and the wall of cedars. We hung a left through spectacular Birthday Channel, beneath an eagle riding high with wingtip feathers spread, as though gripping the air. “Many rocks!” my log entry says, in a jiggly hand. Then down past the Catholic church in the village of Chenahkint and into Queen Cove for the night.

  It was a clammy place in the fog, the only sounds the whine and crash of timber being torn from the surrounding hills. A school of young salmon flowed around Vera’s rudder, and I tried not to think about the job I had decided to walk away from. That night, we ate below with the propane heater purring, and I wondered how conditions were at the Brooks Peninsula. On the VHF, the search was now focusing on debris.

  We had both had enough of playing pinball with rocks. Fog or no fog, the next few days would be in protected waters that were free of the sentinels that guarded the west coast. This was territory that Dave — had he fixed that water pump yet? — had known like the back of his hand as he took the Uchuck III in and out of the inlets between Kyuquot and Port Alberni. And when we left the next morning and I turned to look behind us, there she was, entering Birthday Channel not ten minutes after we’d gone through.

  The Uchuck III caught up to us less than an hour later, as we passed the ancient, abandoned Indigenous settlement of Ehatisaht. We watched through the binoculars as she came on astern. She seemed to float above the water, her two long lifting booms angled out from the mast on her foredeck like the antennae of a shiny black moth. As she passed us, I saw red fuel barrels on the foredeck and passengers taking in the sun. Ehatisaht, even overgrown and obliterated, was a lovely site, the hills opening to a symmetrical valley through which the creek emptied into the sea. I peered hard, trying to imagine the village, and for a moment thought I caught something leaning in the trees. A totem? I took a picture, but when I blew it up there was nothing, just the stern of the Uchuck III slipping away.

  There was plenty of evidence of more recent human activity, though. The scars left by clear-cut logging are notorious; viewed from a low-flying plane, the scale of tree-scalping on these mountainsides is profoundly depressing. But even here, chugging along at sea level, we saw many patches, maybe a few dozen acres each, where crews had moved in, taken everything, and dumped it down skids into the sea. Centre Island, where I could just make out the remains of the skids, looked hollowed out. The loggers weren’t lacking in derring-do; one old swath snaked like a ribbon along the hillside above Hecate Channel at what seemed an impossible angle. Directly beneath, a salmon farm lay fallow, the smooth galvanized decking, yellow buoys, and bright blue flotation blocks making it look for all th
e world like something from IKEA.

  Again I wondered, which was worse, the clear-cut or the farm? So often we saw them together, and every time, I found myself asking that question. At least you could tow an offending farm somewhere else or close it down. The clear-cuts, and the havoc they wreaked on streams and hillsides, weren’t going anywhere. I decided that comparisons were a distraction. Both fish farming and logging needed to clean up their act.

  Once past the farms (there were three of them in Hecate Channel, all apparently fallow), we went through the back door of Tahsis Narrows, the shortcut that would dump us practically at the landward end of Tahsis Inlet. We throttled down to find our way through, so slow that a silent squadron of kayaks actually overtook us. A lone sea otter watched us pass, toasting its toes in the sun. I took comfort in the reassuring Rorschach of the radar: old technology, stolid and simple, so unlike the gorgeous “you are exactly here!” images of the electronic charts, which I still couldn’t bring myself to trust. Radar’s shadowy pictures form and re-form with every sweep, in a way that says to me, “You can trust me. I’m working.”

  Once around the corner and into Tahsis Inlet, we did the last five miles under sail, the warm wind filling in strongly behind us. By now, I was so worried about the starter button that I left the engine running in neutral while we surfed past vast log dumps to Westview Marina in Tahsis. The marina was barely distinguishable from the strung-out remnants of the lumber mill and what remained of the town centre. We followed a big RCMP cruiser through a gap in the “breakwater” that was no more than a chained-together corridor of logs and tied up at yet another version of sport-fishing nirvana.

  Tahsis used to be a mill town. It had two mills, in fact. The remains of the “old” mill, now little more than a bit of pier and parking lot, sat next to the marina; the “new” mill, at the end of the estuary, had closed down ten years ago. A large section of the bay was marked “booms” and “submerged anchors and cables” on the chart, but all of that seemed to be history. Tahsis the town was still emptying. There weren’t many businesses left, although the family running the only food store was going flat out to get their new gas bar operation running. The young owner rang up our groceries while stage-directing his dubious-looking mother on which buttons to push. Their lone fuel customer, a geezer in ill-fitting jeans and a cowboy hat, waited patiently by the shiny new tanks. At the local building supply store, where we lugged our propane bottles, the owner filled me in on the town’s pulse.