Uncharted

by Kim Brown Seely

  Copyright © 2019 by Kim Brown Seely

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  SASQUATCH BOOKS with colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Editor: Gary Luke | Production editor: Jill Saginario

  Design and cover illustration: Tony Ong

  Map illustrations: Elizabeth Person

  Interior photographs: Kim Brown Seely

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN: 9781632172556

  Ebook ISBN 9781632172563

  Sasquatch Books

  1904 Third Avenue, Suite 710

  Seattle, WA 98101

  SasquatchBooks.com

  v5.4

  a

  FOR JEFF

  and for our sons,

  Sam and James

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Maps

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Migrations

  Test Flights

  Floating Nest

  PART TWO

  Casting Off

  Taking the Helm

  Crossing Over

  Canada’s Amazon

  Tidal Time

  Etch-A-Sketched in Blind Bay

  Here’s to Fingers and Toes

  Boys

  Rapids

  The Real World

  The Luxury of Slowness

  The Big Drop-Off

  PART THREE

  True North

  Humpbacks

  Skull Cove

  Hakai

  Serpent Islands

  Shearwater

  Klemtu

  Meyers Narrows

  Looking for a Longhouse

  Black Bear

  Kent Inlet

  Princess Royal Island—At Last

  Clove Hitch

  Healing

  Into the Great Bear Rainforest

  Mooksgm’ol

  More Canvas!

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  To write this book I pulled out my sailing journals, researched history and facts when I could, compared notes with people who appear in the book, and called upon my own memory. I have tinkered with the chronology of a few events for the sake of narrative flow. I’ve changed the names of some, but not all, of the people because not everyone I’ve written about knew they were going to be characters in a book. That said, there are no composite characters in this book. These changes aside, this is a true story, constructed from memory.

  PROLOGUE

  The wind beat upon the white canvas, blowing an anthem like freedom. The sun was out, always a pleasant surprise in northern Canada; the sails were high, and we were higher, flying across a cold blue sea. Minutes before, we’d been enjoying a long crossing, the boat heeled over, humming along. Now it was time to start the engine, bring in the sails, and motor through a maze of small rock islands. But when we turned the key, nothing. There was no charge, no reassuring rumble of safety. I took a deep breath and held it.

  We hadn’t left time to tack, hadn’t planned on having to turn our big boat, and now we were barreling toward a rocky islet, me at the helm and my husband, Jeff, down below, banging a wrench on the starter. I stood at the sailboat’s wheel, twisting a tiny metal key in the ignition—praying that the solenoid he was hammering would engage.

  The key was pathetic. The island loomed closer. We weren’t going to make it.

  Jeff shot up, released a line, and we slammed the boat hard to windward, coming about. I let out my breath, stunned.

  We were alone together and had courted this chaos. We were grown-ups and people’s parents. We’d raised two sons together, battled cancer together, and lived on both coasts of North America together. When our sons left home, we’d found ourselves on one of those coasts with a window of time, and so we’d launched ourselves into it. But now, with a boat whose moods changed as mercurially as our own, we were wrestling with forces larger than ourselves, and sometimes, paying a price.

  We were immersed in a world that was brand-new for both of us—it felt immediate yet eternal. I loved the rhythm of waves lapping at our boat; it seemed like a long-lost friend. We all have ocean in our veins. Back home at our house just outside Seattle, we’d been dreaming of exploring this world for a while. I’d first heard of it from a sailor I’d met at a dinner; he was ferrying a well-known National Geographic photographer to a rarely visited part of British Columbia’s coast to shoot wildlife photos.

  When the story came out a year later, I was slayed: on the cover of National Geographic there was an image of a white bear. There was something strange about the bear: it had fur the color of a yellow Lab. Even though it was a white bear or so-called spirit bear, it wasn’t Arctic white like a polar bear, nor was it cinnamon brown like a grizzly. It was some weird vanilla-white in between. It reminded me of a mythical creature—like what you might get if you crossed a bear with a dog. Its snout was brown and its paws were brown, but its claws were translucent. Across its shoulder blades matted tufts of fur stood up like they’d been dipped in orange marmalade.

  “What’s that?”

  “A spirit bear,” I told my husband, when he found me that fateful day frozen in front of our coffee table, staring at the yellow-bordered cover. It trumpeted, “The Wildest Place in North America: Land of the Spirit Bear.”

  The spirit bear, I learned, was, in fact, a black bear born with a double-recessive gene causing white fur. It was a walking contradiction: a white black bear. Also known as the Kermode bear, it was rare—more rare than the giant panda. I pictured fur and forest, rain and sea; bold explorers sailing off to distant wilderness islands and hiking through giant trees; Paul Nicklen, the National Geographic photographer, waiting in the woods for days and then weeks until the singular moment when he came upon this strange creature climbing a cedar.

  This particular spirit bear had been photographed in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, part of planet Earth’s largest intact coastal temperate rainforest, at the far edge of the North American continent. More than thirteen thousand years before, humans lived alongside these bears. But now the region, which stretched from north of Vancouver Island to south of the Alaska Panhandle—a rugged and complex maze of islands and fjords where vast swaths of cedar and spruce met the North Pacific—was about as remote as you can get in this world.

  I have a weakness for remote. Never in my life have I wanted anything as much as I wanted to sail off in search of that spirit bear.

  Our sons were leaving the nest, the economy was in free fall, our jobs were stagnant, and it seemed my husband and I had come to the edge of something: we could live safe, small lives or try something totally new by launching into the unknown. And so, the year before our second son left for college, we bought a gently worn sailboat.

  The boat that turned out to be the best deal at the time was an enormous, fifty-four-foot, cutter-rigged sailboat—a ridiculous amount of boat for two people with no prior sailing experience together to learn how to sail. Our friends all thought we were nuts. No one we knew had ever been to Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest. And oh, by the way, didn’t we know it rained up there all the time?

  But our plan didn’t seem all that far-fetched to me. My husband and I had always dreamed of doing something like this. Up until then, we’d spent the majority of our lives together as many couples do: trying to be decent parents and good friends and engaged and informed citizens and thoughtful sons and daughters, all
while making a living. Now, with our boys leaving home, we had an opening.

  It was a time of transience: one son in college, another on his way; our small family, after years of intense and close living, was dispersing. Also, my husband had survived a recent cancer scare. We were suddenly acutely aware of the impermanence of things and imagined a sailing adventure would create space in which to share something true and lasting together. After a decade of the roller coaster of working hard and raising a family, my husband and I hoped we’d come to rest for a few weeks at sea. (How little did we know.)

  Here, we told ourselves, was where we would begin again.

  In setting off on our sailboat, first the four of us, then just the two of us, we’d pay attention to the shape of the journey. After we said goodbye to our sons, we’d embrace these weeks of adventure, putting all our chips on wildness. We figured a sailing expedition would allow us the time and distance to sort out our lives at this juncture, and we looked forward to the quiet and solitude of sailboat living over the modern world’s noise and clamor.

  Coming from a long line of campers and covered-wagon crossers, pilgrims, and pioneers, it was staying put in our home near Seattle and driving the same circles day after day—becoming prisoners to the known—that seemed unthinkable. If you want to create a larger life, I reasoned, you expand the size of your universe. That is, you come to the edge and step (or sail) over.

  I knew our boys, resilient and smart, would survive wherever they were. And I hoped they’d still like us enough by then to come sail around from time to time. I imagined a snug cabin caulked against storms. A teapot whistling on the stove. Shelves lined with the best books. Somewhere small to live well in a world filled with uncertainty. This is the story, then, about how my husband and I (and occasionally our kids) lived simply and boldly during that time in a place that was both immense and contained: immense in the sheer expansiveness of sea and possibility; contained in that our boat felt as compact as a shell, and we existed in a world of our own design, a world that stood outside time as we knew it.

  Returning home, our house felt strangely quiet, and another journey began. This is also the story of the interlude before that journey—of moving from one life to another, and the passages in between.

  PART ONE

  And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE

  Moby Dick

  MIGRATIONS

  I’d always known Empty-Nesting would be uncharted territory.

  My mother had told me how it had gone for her: “The house was so different when you left,” she confided one day out of the blue. I was practically thirty.

  “It was?” I said, startled. We were having lunch near my office in midtown Manhattan, where I’d worked for a decade. My mother was visiting from California. I was suddenly flooded with guilt: I’d never even thought about how it had been for my parents once I’d left for college.

  “You were away at school, and we missed you but didn’t want to bother you—you were a freshman!” my mom said, as if that explained everything. She took a sip of water, refolded her napkin. “But by the time your sister left for college, I realized I’d fallen into a kind of depression.”

  “You did? Why didn’t you ever say anything?!”

  “Well, that’s why I’m telling you now…in case you ever feel like you might be dealing with depression,” she said, smiling brightly.

  “Well, how are you? Are you okay now?” I was stunned. I had a hundred questions…Like many young girls growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, my sister and I had been encouraged to follow our dreams—to be whatever we wanted to be. Our parents had always pushed us to excel, to be independent, to venture as far from home as possible. Also, our parents were young. They were hip. I was proud of them, and it had never occurred to me, even remotely, that in pleasing them we were hurting them—and that my mom, especially, would so fiercely, deeply miss us. That she’d be sad once she’d launched us on our way.

  My mother, a fine-boned woman—with chic bobbed hair, china-blue eyes, and the metabolism of a hummingbird—said she was better. And anyway, she didn’t want to dwell on the past. Since then, her career as a photographer had taken off, had given her new purpose. Indeed, she’d go on to create a serious artist’s life in the space after kids, with her work hanging in major museum collections and several critically acclaimed photography books to her name. As we were leaving the restaurant, however, she said, “I’m taking some medication now—it helps.” And then, “Do I seem any different to you?”

  * * *

  Another thing I’d noticed, watching my parents’ generation, was divorce. It was as if kids had been magnets holding these couples together—almost like they’d mostly stayed together because of their kids. But once children no longer factored into the equation, legions of seventies parents woke up and discovered they didn’t have that much in common. You could count the couples splitting up along the Southern California cul-de-sacs where we’d grown up. Sproing! Sproing! Sproing! They bounced apart like atoms released from ionic bonds; without those kid-fusing electrons, there wasn’t much to fuse them in place. But my parents stayed together, supportive of each other.

  I suppose it was with this in mind then—wary of depression, watching divorces still springing up, as rampant as gray hairs, hearing girlfriends say, “I feel like everyone’s leaving! Our kids are leaving, our parents are leaving!”—that I’d hit on the vague idea of some kind of shared project, something my husband and I could take up together as novice empty nesters.

  We’d had shared projects before. My husband, Jeff, worked on Wall Street when we first met, but he lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Shortly after I fell in love with him and agreed to give up my downtown artist-garret to move uptown to his place, he bought an old farmhouse in Connecticut. And so we began spending weekends there, fixing it up. In retrospect, the project was ideal training for the enormous, irrational leap of faith required to take on a sailboat years later. The difference, however, was that in Connecticut we’d also inherited several wooded acres, fruit trees, a two-hundred-year-old house in need of a new furnace, and a tumbledown barn.

  We couldn’t afford to fix the furnace or hire any kind of help, so we wore multiple layers of clothing inside the house and worked like dogs outside. If we had weekend guests, we’d con them into a group project like tarpapering the roof of the shed or whitewashing the fence. Then we’d cook up a big dinner—mixed grill with flank steak and sausage, or herb-crusted lamb with roast potatoes and a green salad with the garlicky vinaigrette out of The Silver Palate Cookbook—strip the sheets off the beds the next morning, drive all the laundry back to our apartment, wash the sheets in the basement, go to work all week, and do it all over again the next weekend.

  We were married in the backyard of that house in a late-September wedding with about a hundred friends, our families, and a Jersey Shore band that drove up from Asbury Park. Two years later, when our first son, Sam, was born, we retreated to the farm when he was only three days old. The quiet and solitude of those Connecticut weekends held us together as a fledgling family. But there were also lonely days. Days when I experienced the paralyzing isolation that comes from feeling trapped, as a young mother, in a house with a white picket fence.

  More than once I found myself alone in that house on a Saturday afternoon, with a baby in one arm and a flower vase in the other. And I understood viscerally what Betty Friedan had so brilliantly warned middle-class white women of more than twenty years before. I felt overwhelmed, isolated, and stuck. To be clear, this was a first world kind of stuck, and yet there I was—standing on two-hundred-year-old tulip-wood floors on a bright spring weekend, wanting to wing a ceramic vase through a plateglass window and break out of there. A house is a haven. But it can also be a cage.

  Decades later my understanding would shift, part of growing i
nto adulthood, and I’d remember the farm as a key chapter, but an odd chapter for someone who craved a less settled existence. I’d think of all the choices that go into making a life—the decisions people make, individual and combined. Drops of water, incalculable, collecting in a pool. It takes years sometimes to recognize when it’s time to make a few ripples.

  My husband loved the house. But we were also trapped by it and could never afford to do the things needed to maintain it. When a job opportunity in Seattle offered to move us all west in the dot-com 1990s, we packed up our apartment, sold the farm, and threw a massive goodbye party for our friends. We knew almost no one in Seattle but started a new chapter there. One of the art directors at the magazine where I worked in Midtown Manhattan said to me on my way out the door: “It’s a healthy thing to repot yourself every few years.”

  I prayed he was right.

  * * *

  Twenty years later: We had worked all our lives and had never taken more than two weeks off to travel—even though I was a professional travel writer, having spent decades working in publishing. Jeff had simultaneously built up a company in Seattle and sold it, agreed to run another and sold it—the last while battling prostate cancer. Now he was a cancer survivor, and our kids would soon be heading off. We had diligently squirreled away savings since our first jobs, setting money aside for years.

  Also, we’d been lucky. There was paying for college, but somehow our boys had both been awarded academic scholarships, which helped. What were we waiting for? we wondered. True, we loved to work, but the world, its oceans and continents, lay right outside the front door. Life in all its complexity—and even more so with this window of good health—seemed worth celebrating.

  We were in this dangerously vulnerable state then, looking for some sort of project, a new shared adventure, when my husband came up with the idea of buying a used boat off the internet.