Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  “Cool shoes,” I said. She tucked them up. “Do you know who Margarita is?”

  The girl pointed solemnly at a group of women beside a lime-green tent.

  “It’s my mom,” she said.

  Margarita was sturdy and energetic. She launched into a spirited argument for the cultural centre she was trying to raise money for, and how it would house the many artifacts they were doggedly working to repatriate from museums across North America. I knew the fisheries biologist for the band; did she know Roger too? Of course she did; he was out fishing with the rest of the men. Margarita pointed out the church on the shore, and the network of trails her people were tending and expanding, and sent us on our way. We forgot about Estevan Point looming somewhere out there waiting for us and set off, skirting the happy scene in the meadow and entering a green corridor of salal that ran along behind the beach that finally, after a month and a half of fear, frustration, and fog, felt exactly the way I wanted a west coast beach to feel.

  “This is why we came,” I said to Hatsumi as Charley raced ahead. “And about time.”

  Never mind that we could have found something similar by just driving to Tofino; we’d gotten here the hard way, and that made it sweeter. We cut through to the beach and stumbled, half-running, down the pebble shelf to the hard-packed sand where we could walk easily. Pinnacled black rocks were sprinkled throughout the bay. Squinting at them into the sun, I decided they looked like a fleet of ships. Hatsumi looked at the rocks and shook her head.

  “Everything is pointed here,” she marvelled. “It’s just like Japan.”

  We walked. Charley harassed seagulls. To call them a flock seems inadequate; this was a sky-darkening mass, an airborne seagull division, yet a single schnauzer stage-managed them down the beach, running them aloft, waiting while they regrouped and settled a hundred metres farther down, then charging them again. If we’d been further south, someone would have taken us to task for allowing it. But there were no other people here. A sport-fishing boat buzzed the beach, cutting close to the toothy headland where the Spanish cannon had sat. Men in the back whooped and waved. They disappeared around the point in a cloud of exhaust.

  “Assholes,” I muttered. This time, when the seagulls rose, they didn’t come back. But we were back at the church, an unremarkable wooden building built, in 1956, by the Mowachaht/Muchalaht community and decommissioned as a Catholic church in the 1990s. Unremarkable outside, that is. Inside, the Church of St. Pius X was unlike any “house of God” I had ever seen. House of Gods was more like it because St. Pius X was no longer a place for monotheists. The Virgin had left the building.

  A carved killer whale on two stumps now blocked the path to the altar, whose alcove was taken over by two exuberant totems, too long to fit in the previous tenant’s space. The dais was still there, with a small, engraved cross and facing angels, but they kept to themselves, as though fearing to look up at the bears and ravens and wolves towering above them. As though to emphasize the point, the pews were all turned sideways now. No longer did people face a single symbol of devotion; now, they faced each other, along the axis of the building. The door we had tiptoed through, once we were inside and turned around to look, was itself flanked by more totems, in brilliant greens, reds, and blacks. A magnificent thunderbird spread its wings over them, and us.

  Every Christian church I have ever visited has had the same point to make: this is God’s house, here are his symbols and representatives, take your place and worship him. From the impossibly ornate Catholic cathedrals of South America to the stern stone of English High Anglican and the blandest of suburban Unitarian boxes, my reaction has always been the same: this is where you come for instruction, for guidance, for forgiveness, for solace. A kind of one-stop spiritual shopping, from one God.

  It was difficult, standing in the warm gloom of this place while children raced around outside staking out their territories in the sun, to miss the point that was being made by St. Pius X in Friendly Cove. I felt no less welcome than in a Christian place of worship, but the enormous feat of accommodation that native people had made in this country, here so plainly symbolized by building their own meeting place inside the walls of what had for so long been a Catholic church, was more humbling than the thunderings of a robed minister. Maybe it was as simple as realigning the pews — what better way to “love thy neighbour” than to have to look at him in church? There was a sense of calm here, surrounded by an entire crowd of animistic representations, and you felt part of them all, not just answerable to one or two. In its serenity and inclusiveness, the church was a little like being in a Japanese temple.

  It was all too much for Charley, who vomited in the vestibule beneath an incongruous stained glass titled “Reunion de los Capitanes Bodega-Quadra y Vancouver.” Donated by the Government of Spain in 1957, the panel depicted the resplendent explorer-entrepreneurs inking their deal with their ships at anchor in the cove behind them. A few worried-looking natives watched from the sidelines.

  “Jesus, Charley, not in a church!” But was this still a church? Maybe the spirits of killer whale and bear wouldn’t be fussy about a little dog puke. I cleaned the mess up with handfuls of the grass that was trying to engulf St. Pius’s steps.

  ***

  I wish I could say that the church had a calming effect, but by this point in our trip, that was too much to expect. Friendly Cove, for all its revelations, was where you waited to go around Estevan Point, the last of the major obstacles on our circumnavigation. And as each of these obstacles had been fussed over and surmounted, something had been happening to us. The more spectacular the scenery got — and after a day in Friendly Cove, it was hard to imagine anything more beautiful — the more anxious and irritable we were becoming. As the wind rose and Vera began to twist uneasily on her chain, we realized that we needed to go. Get out, get around Estevan, hightail it south to Clayoquot Sound. We were familiar with Tofino and Ucluelet, the two main communities there; I’d been in Ahousaht before, and finally there was the “big reason” for boaters to visit.

  “Hot Springs Cove,” I reminded Hatsumi, who was glumly doctoring packaged ramen to look like a proper evening meal. “We’ll be there tomorrow, row in and soak in the pools. You’ll think you’re in Japan.”

  She frowned, stirred, winced at the moaning in the rigging. Seven o’clock, and the perverse wind was rising again. Just across the bay, with the Uchuck gone, the dock was empty. Hatsumi looked longingly at it through the porthole above the stove. I sighed, started the engine, got the anchor up, and moved the boat.

  But it wasn’t a good idea. As darkness fell, the dock came softly alive again. Now it was a place for teenage trysting, and for younger boys to try out rod and reel. For the first time, I felt like an interloper, even when the murmuring stopped and the fishing lines came in for the last time. Finally, it was quiet again, but I knew it couldn’t last. Margarita had mentioned that the men had all gone fishing. I hadn’t seen any of them yet.

  They started to straggle in around 10:30, one runabout after another. Men spilled out, happy, boastful, caustic, the usual result of hours on the water with a fishing rod and beer. I turned on the weather forecast, listening for conditions at Estevan Point.

  “Do we have to move?” whispered Hatsumi. She was in pyjamas, and she didn’t look as though she wanted to go anywhere. There was enough swell getting in around the corner to make Vera toss and turn against the metal dock.

  “Winds thirty knots northwest of Estevan Point,” said the voice on the radio. That was where we were — wasn’t it?

  Outside, the voices got closer. Then, knuckles on Vera’s hull.

  “I’ll deal with it.” I crawled outside into the cool night air. A man in sweatpants and a Tilley hat squatted on the dock.

  “Got a problem with your boat being here, buddy. I’ve got some guests showing up later for the cabins.”

  Guests showing up . . . when? Midni
ght?

  “Oh,” I said. There had to be a way out of this.

  “You work with Margarita, right? Managing the place? We had a great talk. And you know what? She said she knew Roger, the fisheries biologist.”

  This was sinking pretty low. The guy scratched his head. He had fine, aquiline features. Replace the canvas hat with a conical cedar one and he could have been the legendary Chief Maquinna, who unfortunately presided over the conversion of Friendly Cove to a European trading post. Maquinna probably didn’t sound like this, though.

  “Sure, he was out fishing with us. I think he went up to the camp already. You want me to try and find him?”

  This was better. I pressed on, disgusted with myself. “It’s okay, I’ll find him in the morning. Look, I’m really sorry about taking your space.” I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. His name was Albert.

  “Nah, we’ll make it work.”

  “See,” I said, getting off the boat so we could go eye to eye, “it’s the wife. Long story, but she’s, you know, a little freaked out. We’ve been having starter motor problems. I thought if I could get at it first thing in the morning . . .” We exchanged a conspiratorial, testosterone-fuelled look. If Hatsumi overheard any of this, I was dead.

  “I got plenty of tools in my cabin,” Albert said. We got to talking; that is, he did. Albert, once he was your friend, couldn’t stop talking. I learned, variously, that he was a concrete contractor, born and raised in Gold River, that his business in Vancouver got skunked by the recession, and that he was now back home, running the Friendly Cove operation with Margarita. And doing it vigorously, I could see.

  “I’m relentless,” he said. “No patience at all! Today, out fishing? Got lost in the fucking fog, can you believe it?”

  “You don’t have GPS?”

  “Fuck, no. But here we are!” Together, we shuttled Vera forward twenty feet, tiptoeing out onto the steel hoop that rode up and down the last piling so that we could tie her up as far along as possible. Albert talked the whole time. It was better than listening to the weather.

  Early the next morning, the forecast was the same. I climbed with Charley up the winding steps and over the aluminum catwalk to the lighthouse buildings perched on the hill above us. A cedar helicopter pad shone wetly. Yesterday, the keeper’s house and the light had been brilliant, red-roofed gems in the sun; now they were hidden in fog. I knocked on the back door while Charley nosed around in the geraniums, looking for somewhere to pee. A flustered woman answered.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was just filing our weather report.”

  “Then maybe you can explain the forecast.”

  “Forecast? Haven’t listened to that part yet.”

  Hmm. “Well, they’re calling for high winds ‘northwest of Estevan.’ What does that actually mean?”

  “Northwest of Estevan? Well, I guess it could mean . . . hmm. Bajo Reefs? Up there?” She waved vaguely. “The thing is, we’re in a tricky spot for forecasting. You know what the word Yuquot means, don’t you?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “It means, ‘place where wind comes from all directions.’”

  “We’re thinking of going around Estevan Point today,” I said.

  The woman watched Charley rooting around in her potted plants. Behind us, a precipitous trolley-way led all the way down to the dock where the two Coast Guard Zodiacs waited for someone to have a maritime emergency. Except that they were hidden by fog.

  “What a cute dog,” she said. “Is he friendly?” Charley barked at her. “Estevan? Ah, you’ll be fine.”

  A Little Piece of Japan

  We escaped before Albert could wander down for more conversation and a spot of fixing the starter motor that I’d already fixed. Vague or not, the lighthouse lady had been right, the wind must all have happened somewhere “over there.” We never saw a breath of it. But there was plenty of ugly swell, lumpy and short, that bedevilled us for the three hours it took to crawl around the rocky defences of the Hesquiat Peninsula. Off Estevan Point itself, the hitchhiking thumb of the peninsula, the sea coarsened like reptile skin as the waves caught on the bottom and began to break. It didn’t last long. Once we’d completed our long turn, the swells lengthened and moved accommodatingly in behind us, and we rode them to the lights that mark the narrow entrance to Hot Springs Cove. We didn’t really need the lights to find our way in; we could just have followed the water taxis from Tofino.

  “We won’t exactly be alone,” I said. There were two water taxis tied up at the dock that services Maquinna Park, along with a fifty-foot power yacht registered in Montana. We hadn’t seen one of those since leaving Port Hardy. We headed further into the inlet, looking for a spot to anchor, and a Tofino Air float plane materialized at the end of the cove, dropping fast and heading straight for us. It whacked the water three boat lengths away, throttled back, and chortled on to the dock.

  “Let’s get close to the edge,” said Hatsumi.

  Over the months we’d cruised together, my wife had carved out, not without some spirited back and forth, a number of niches where she indisputably excelled. Navigation was the big one; an offshoot was a knack for choosing a good anchoring spot. This isn’t easy, because “anchoring spot” means not only the place where you begin to release your anchor but also the place where the anchor actually hits the bottom, the place where it finally digs in and holds, and all the other places where your boat is likely to roam at the end of whatever length of chain you pay out. The paying out of chain I was allowed to keep doing, and I still got to give Hatsumi polite arm signals from the bow that told her when to reverse (to set the anchor) and when to go forward (in case the damn thing hadn’t grabbed). But calculating where our boat would actually end up, given wind, current, distance to land and other boats, was her responsibility. As to my hand signals, she ignored half of them.

  “Over there,” she said, pointing to a section of shore where the angle of the rocks suggested a drop-off. So did the chart.

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “There.”

  She took us in to within two boat lengths, watching the sounder, then put Vera into reverse while I paid out the chain. When she shut the engine down, Hatsumi had a big grin on her face. To me, it looked as though I could reach out and pick a fir cone. At night, I knew, the shore would appear frighteningly close. But there would be no float planes in here.

  “I guess I have to wear a bathing suit,” she said. “In the onsen.” We could see the dock clearly; another taxi-load of tourists from Tofino stumbled ashore and set off along the boardwalk to the hot springs.

  “Alas, yes. This isn’t Japan. You’ll probably be sitting next to a software developer from Seattle. But we can’t go yet. The hot springs will be packed with tourists all afternoon. Once they leave, we’ll be in there.”

  ***

  Waiting was fine with me. I’d left my father dangling after the confusing truncation of his trial, and I knew there had to be more. Above all, I needed to know why the trial was cut short. I wanted to get his story over with just as badly as we both wanted to stop worrying about rocks and fog. I sat myself down again.

  Was that really all there had been? Two days, one mauled witness, then poof? I went back over the correspondence file, where there were still some odds and ends I hadn’t yet looked at. It was time for some detective work.

  First, I found a carbon copy of my father’s expenses for three trips to Vancouver ($207.75). Frugal as always, he had taken the bus. Above the little invoice he’d reproduced a poem, “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost. The return date was five days later than the last trial transcript I had; something must have kept him in Vancouver.

  Next, I found a copy of one of the newspaper stories, the one with Billy’s mom defiantly staring down the camera beside the big, bold quote, “I got so upset, I told him if anything happened to my boy, I’d be at his back do
or with a shotgun.” (Next to which he’d scribbled, “Then I would have called the police!”) Sure enough, the story was written during the trial, so she’d had her day in court after all — I just didn’t have the transcript. The date of the final disgraceful story (“Doctor Offered Mother New Son to Replace Brain-Damaged Boy”) tallied with his bus ride back to Victoria. Later in the story, the writer listed the expert witnesses heard; all were for the plaintiff.

  So there had been more than two days of trial, and it had all been from the plaintiff’s side. My father had sat through at least five days of accusations and lurid media reports and then his defenders had pulled the plug. Maybe, somewhere in the B.C. Supreme Court archives, those missing transcripts are interred as yellowing microfilm, but I haven’t had the heart to exhume them. Maybe he’d had copies after all but had destroyed them. I wondered if, as he sat on the ferry back to Victoria, he had looked at Portland Island gliding past and thought back to the last weekend he’d spent there, relaxed enough to sleep away the day while my mother read and painted.

  Missing transcripts or not, what mattered to me was his state of mind. I was trying to understand his reaction to the trial, short or long, documented or not. And he had left some clues. Here were his notes, made at the trial. Many were on Four Seasons notepaper, or in a cheap spiral notebook with a colour photo of two gaudy parrots side by side on a branch. One of them was confiding in the other’s crested ear. He’d labelled that one “Laxton” (the plaintiff’s lawyer) and drawn a balloon with the words, “Let’s go for $4 million!”

  A lot of these jottings were immediate reaction to testimony. I read them several times, and it began to sink in that here at last were the answers to the questions I should have been asking when he was still alive. These notes were as close as I was going to get to his feelings as the accusations emerged and he fought to refute them.

  They ran from mundane to moral. Some were just technical: “He’s wrong about the choice of shunt type.” “He described a pneumo!” More important to me was his reaction to the charge of “failure to monitor”: “Presumably Dr. Beamish was called at 0015. He wouldn’t just wander in. Why him instead of me?” This, I thought, was the kind of thing he was itching to say in court, if he’d had the chance.