Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  “Huh,” he said. “They only used it once. They left it in the water. It’s ruined.”

  I wondered who had ruined all the equipment littering his own property — the abandoned cement mixer and forklift rusting in the bushes, the boat trailer overgrown by blackberries, the collapsing large-vessel dock nearby, its walkway furred with lichen like an old man’s patchy beard. The loading area was littered with batteries and propellers and a couple of huge Mercury outboard motors, on their sides like dead hippos.

  One night in white Ahousaht was enough. We rowed across to the village of Marktosis in the evening, and my visit a few years before came slowly back: the desperate look of the houses, the graveyard of wooden fishing boats lining the shallows. On a rock at the entrance, a carved cedar representation of a man in a traditional conical hat raised one arm to the outside world; the low sun made the weathered cedar gleam. The salute seemed ambiguous to me because the arm was lifted only to waist level, like a person measuring off a child’s height. Surely it was a gesture of welcome, but, given the indignities being suffered in that unfortunate place, it might as easily have been farewell.

  The next morning, as we were preparing to untie and head for Tofino, an Indigenous family in a small runabout dropped by for fuel. An older man, who I guess was the patriarch, ambled along to where I was untying lines. He looked Vera up and down.

  “Nice boat,” he finally said. Was there a twinkle in those brown eyes? I’ve worked with enough Indigenous people to recognize their sense of irony, which, given their history, is highly developed.

  “Should put some trolling lines on it. Might catch some fish.”

  He was giving me a gentle dig. I didn’t mind.

  “It’s a good year?” I asked.

  “This year? Unbelievable. I don’t know what it is, I know we overfished in the past, but this year . . .”

  “What are you catching?”

  “Sockeye. Tons of ’em.”

  “But there aren’t that many strong stocks out here.” I’d worked with a neighbouring First Nation on the sockeye stocks near Tofino; they’d been depressed for years.

  “These ones aren’t local,” the man said.

  “Where are they from?”

  “Fraser River.”

  I thought back to the prediction of the woman in Sointula two weeks ago. “The sockeye are coming,” she’d said. “I can feel it.” I didn’t ask the man, “So why are we mounting a royal commission on the disappearance of Fraser sockeye if you’re getting a bumper crop?” But it certainly looked like the decision to bail out of my part in it was turning out to be the right one.

  “Have a good one,” he said. “I’m going fishing.”

  Sporties

  “Don’t dock in Tofino.”

  Many people told us this. We didn’t listen. We should have. We did dock in Tofino, multiple times. It was more like crash-landing.

  Tofino is a natural halfway stop between Ahousaht and Ucluelet; from Ucluelet, the run to Bamfield, in Barkley Sound, is manageable. So it makes sense to take a break there, but there are two problems. First, the approach from the north, which we would follow, becomes congested, confusing, and very shallow. Basically, you find your way around sandbars. There’s a lot of sand here, the pebble beaches of farther north having given way to smooth grey tourist-friendly curves.

  Second, currents run very strongly past Tofino, which sits on the end of the Esowista Peninsula exactly where water racing in and out of several major channels collides in the rush to enter the open Pacific. This means you have to time your arrival for near-slack if you don’t want to be suddenly playing catch-up with a dock. A friend who lives in Tofino says, “Nobody should come in here without a pilot!”

  And there’s a third reason, which probably just flows from the first two: Tofino isn’t set up for recreational boaters. It’s not boater-friendly. There aren’t enough spaces, so people end up cruising the fingers for a glimpse of someone doing the equivalent of opening a car door in a crowded parking lot. The land-based visitor to Tofino, of which there are zillions in the summer, never suspects any of this. Lots of little boats coming and going beneath a backdrop of sparkling sea and the Catface Range high above: “Hey, honey, that looks like fun!” Well, it isn’t.

  By the time we entered the pinball-alley of navigation buoys that takes you through the sandbars into Tofino, neither Hatsumi nor I were in perfect mental shape. Ahousaht had gotten us down, and the prospect of playing bumper cars in a crowded approach weighed on us. Suddenly, with Tofino in sight, it was the rapids all over again, this time with the current behind us. Vera slipped sideways so fast that, even steering a course that was 45 degrees off our destination, we skidded around buoys so close I could have reached out to touch up their paint. And it was shallow — thirteen feet, eleven feet, ten — at one point, there was only four feet of water under Vera’s keel, a situation you don’t want to be in when you’re having trouble keeping your boat pointed in the right direction. Assuming there is a right direction.

  The current fired us at the fuel dock like a projectile, and I had to go hard in reverse to get the lines onto the wharf. After refuelling, we cruised along the docks available to visitors, finally settling on an open-looking spot at the Weigh West fishing lodge. Here, docking meant the equivalent of doing a U-turn in a river. When we were finally secured, our tempers were shot, and both of us were grabbing our shoulders and hoping we hadn’t done irreparable damage. I took a picture later: the ocean-river was cresting around Vera’s elegant stern as though she were forging along backward at six knots. All around us, the water boiled in angry whorls. We might have tied up in the middle of the Yuculta Rapids.

  And, of course, we were surrounded by sport fishermen, although the commercial fishery was still in evidence here. At the Lions Gate Fisheries’ dock next door, an aluminum vessel unloading its cargo of sardines was so low in the water that you could have sat on the rail and paddled your feet. But our dock was all sporties. Right behind us, an exuberant party just returned from the fishing grounds was celebrating in the cockpit of their shiny Trophy cruiser. Country music washed over Vera’s cockpit, “Got muh ass in the sand, a cold beer in muh hand.” We collared Charley and set out for the grocery store, breasting a tide of tourists.

  The sporties woke us up the next morning, gunning into the channel at top speed. We waited another hour until the current subsided, then worked our way through another sand-maze into deeper water for the five-hour run down to Ucluelet. The greasy swells came on the beam now, and Vera rolled in her own faint cloud of diesel stink as familiar landmarks came and went. Long Beach, the six-mile stretch of sand that lines Wickaninnish Bay, emerged obligingly from a grey bolster of late-lying fog as we crept past. As teenagers, my friends and I had viewed Long Beach as a rite of passage, struggling up the unpaved, muffler-eating road from Port Alberni to emerge, finally, at the gap in the trees where you left the road and high-tailed it down the hard-packed sand in your car. The beach was part of Pacific Rim National Park now, with proper parking lots, machines that took your money, interpretive signs, and no trace of the dozens of vehicles that had got stuck in the sand and sank slowly out of sight, back in the day.

  Ucluelet Inlet is the indentation that follows Amphitrite Point. Scientifically, Amphitrite is a genus of worm that burrows into mud or sand and waves its tentacles about to feed. We must have passed over billions of them, crooking their fingers at Vera’s keel. Amphitrite Point can wave its tentacles at the boater too if you’re not careful. The rocks glisten in the surge from breaking waves. If you can’t see the point, you listen for the dolorous groan of the fog signal (not too close, or you’re on the rocks) and the clanging bell that marks the inner boundary of the safe channel. If there’s any wind, this strange duet is joined by the keening of the whistle buoy a half mile further out. The whole effect is eerie, like being serenaded by a trio of idiots.

  With the
tone-deaf chorus behind us, I looked forward to Ucluelet, halfway down the inlet. Ucluelet has always been the “poor cousin” of Tofino. It’s the working harbour, blue-collar where Tofino, if not exactly white-collar, was popularly seen more as a no-collar-at-all kind of place. Of course, the stereotypes don’t hold, but I’ve always preferred Ucluelet anyway; if I really must have an espresso macchiato, I can drive the thirty miles. Certainly my preference held up when it came to visiting in a boat because the Ucluelet Boat Basin was everything such places should be: decent docks, shelter from the wind, bins to dump your garbage in, and a bellied, bearded Dane selling fresh shrimp off his boat.

  “I know you,” I said, digging for my wallet. “Cowichan Bay, right?”

  “Yeh, could be. Or Nanaimo. I get around.”

  This was the guy who, spotting Hatsumi a few years ago, had deftly beheaded and peeled a couple of shrimp, popped one in his mouth raw, rolled his eyes, and passed the rest to us. His fingers looked like they’d recently been inside an engine. Hatsumi’s parents had been with us that time, from Tokyo, and they sampled too. Please, God, I thought, don’t let them get sick from raw Canadian fish. Of course we didn’t, and the shrimp were delicious. This time, the man didn’t peel me any shrimp, maybe because I was alone. But I bought a big bag anyway.

  People who live in Ucluelet don’t usually say “Ucluelet.” It’s either “U-kew-let” or, more commonly, “Ukee.” Steve, the hyperkinetic manager of the Ukee Boat Basin, was too busy to take my payment; I saw him briefly as he sped along the dock on a bicycle, balancing a courier package on the handlebars.

  “Gotta get this to one of the fishing boats before he leaves,” he shouted over his shoulder. Steve wore baggy shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. His shoulders were seared.

  “We’ll figure out the money later.”

  “You look busy,” I said. “But I mean, it seems pretty quiet. The place is only half full.” It was true, we could have had our choice of spaces.

  “Wait,” said Steve.

  I never saw him again and ended up calculating what we owed and slipping it under the door of his tiny office, where he never came to rest long enough for me to trap him. The thing he had told me to wait for was the annual fishing derby; we had arrived on the Friday afternoon before the big event. By seven o’clock, when Hatsumi was getting down to doing something with all those shrimp, the Boat Basin was jammed with sporties, most of them in twenty-footers they’d trailered from as far away as Washington State and were now loudly shoe-horning into Steve’s little kingdom. Some of the boats were rafted three deep. One dock was reserved for charter boats, and I walked past three skippers cleaning up after the day’s clients had wandered into town to get started on the evening’s partying. One fellow was washing dishes on the dock, humming.

  In behind the marina, the cluster of modest motels was solidly sold out, and a tent city had sprouted in a cleared area nearby. It was Winter Harbour all over again: pickups, trailers, sizzling meat, and a beery haze above clusters of deck chairs. In the basin, the commercial fishermen were having a gathering of their own, the sounds of merriment and clanking beer cans rising into air that was blue with diesel exhaust. Behind it all, Mount Izzard glowed purple in the rosy twilight.

  ***

  After my little meltdown in Hot Springs Cove, I felt able to finish up the final document, which was in another notebook my father had titled Epilogue. I’m glad I left it till last because in it was the draft of a long letter to his lawyer that, if he ever sent it, didn’t seem to have survived. I started to read and found myself back inside his head. Maybe this document held the answer to his long decline.

  It turned out not to be the simple answer one hopes for, the “all is revealed” that snaps everything into focus. But if there was a bright spot in the whole affair, this notebook seemed to be it, beginning with the fact that he was addressing his thoughts to the person who represented the process he felt had failed him — his lawyer. Respect for an individual trumped anger at a system.

  Why, he wrote, had they settled? That settlement rankled: was justice served merely by “appeasing the accuser with large amounts of money”? His reputation had been dragged through the mud, and he’d wanted to fight. Even though “you might have been the only person in that courtroom who believed me,” he still wanted to clear his name. If it really was the lumbar puncture that was the sticking point, well, he wasn’t the one who did the lumbar puncture.

  Maybe his total lack of recall had been the problem? Were they afraid he would cave in? “If so, your fears were groundless. I was sure of my position, and I believed in the power of truth.” That was what I had been looking for. He knew who he was, and that person wouldn’t have refused to get out of bed and attend to a sick child. In his world, that should have been enough, and if some people were suggesting he’d gotten the call, rolled over, and gone back to sleep, well, who were they? Who was he?

  He finished the letter with a few words about the book he was trying to write about the whole experience.

  “Sorry about the bits about the Mercedes and the black robes,” he said, and I remembered the clumsy pokes at the legal profession in an early draft of The Game. “I have been combating a tendency toward this sort of nonsense all my life, but sometimes I slip.” And there was a bright side: the trial had at least given him the opportunity to see a fine lawyer in action. “I wouldn’t have minded a little more of that.”

  There were peculiar details that made me shake my head. In his first draft of The Game, he wrote to Thackray, he’d worried about using real names; once the newspapers had published everybody’s name, he’d dropped that scruple. But he’d chosen a pseudonym for his little patient, and what had he come up with? The same one I had dreamed up: Billy.

  He knew he was on shaky ground writing about the experience. He admitted that “my computer has taken the place of a psychoanalyst’s couch,” and that whatever he wrote was in danger of becoming “an exercise in self-pity.” I had The Game with me on Vera; before we returned to Victoria, I decided, I needed to complete the voyage with my father by reading it properly. Somewhere in Barkley Sound, where we were headed next, I would finally sit down and work my way through the story he could never bring himself to finish.

  But I already knew something important. His frustration, and probably his inability to get over it, really seemed to stem from being unable to defend himself publicly. His accusers stole his good name and, just like in Othello, that was infinitely worse than taking his money. I didn’t know how to feel about that because I’d never elected to spend my life on a highwire, doing something like neurosurgery. Growing up with a man who had, I’d probably heard enough dinner-table stories to make sure my own career would keep me well out of that danger zone. Immersing myself in his life and his troubles had at least got me to understand that the reason I had chosen not to live by the sword was because I was raised by someone who would die by it. At some level, I must always have known that.

  Barkley Sound

  The sporties turned the air blue the next morning, climbing stiffly into idling boats and peeling away from the dock by 5:30. By mid-morning, Ucluelet was hot and still. We’d done our provisioning at the Co-op up the hill. We were two days away from Victoria, even if one of those days would be a marathon seventy-two-miler, the first half completely exposed to the Pacific and the second a run down the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a long wind funnel that small boats were always relieved to be out of. But we were finally in Barkley Sound, where the Broken Group of islands offered weeks of cruising opportunities.

  “It’s up to you,” I said to Hatsumi as we lugged our shopping bags back down to the boat. “Go now, hang around here, whatever you like.” There was no point in pushing her, especially when I was ambivalent myself. Getting here had been hard work, and the near-daily business with my father had taken the stuffing out of me.

  We settled on motoring over to the Broken Islands, finding
somewhere interesting to stay, and then nipping into Bamfield Inlet the following day to wait for a favourable forecast. Dave and Nancy would be in Bamfield for a few hours, on a jaunt from Port Alberni aboard the Frances Barkley, the “other” coastal supply ship and ferry. We’d hook up, get reacquainted, and head home when the weather looked good.

  The Broken Islands were beautiful; if we’d hit them early in our trip, we might have stayed for weeks. But neither of us could settle down. We crept over a shallow bar into a deserted cove called Joe’s Bay and dropped the anchor for lunch. In the Gulf Islands, a place like this would be stuffed with boats; generators would be muttering, inflatable dinghies whining past like motorized bagels. All we had to do was — nothing. Relax. Read a book. Nap.

  Instead, we pulled up the anchor and moved to Effingham Bay, a few islands distant where, for the first time since the Gulf Islands, the anchorage was actually full. I was irritated with all those other boats, irritated with myself for making so little of such a remarkable place. We anchored within spitting distance of the shore, and by mid-afternoon the place wasn’t only popular with boaters, it had filled up with sardines. The water was brown with algae, and it simmered with fish. As they flowed around Vera, I caught the occasional flash of silver in the tarnished water and could see, just for an instant, a mass so dense I could have raked them from the sea. From the shore, where I rowed Charley and sat staring out into Effingham Bay and the lowering sun, the surface of the water became pointillistic. Each little puncture of the surface tension was a crystalline explosion.

  I picked a fistful of goosetongue to dress up our salad and rowed back toward the fiery ball of the sun. It set like a red-hot poker; I almost expected to hear the sizzle. By nine o’clock, when we went to bed, so many fish were breaking the surface, it sounded like a room full of people chewing. They kept it up all night.