Uncharted

by Kim Brown Seely

  * * *

  The two great tidal streams of the Northwest coast meet just south of Desolation Sound: one of them flows around the northern tip of Vancouver Island and down Johnstone Strait; the other around the south end of the Strait of Georgia. This is what keeps the waters around Desolation Sound warm, warm enough in summer for swimming—a terrible idea (without a wetsuit) almost anywhere north of Portland, where the water hovers between a chilly fifty-two and fifty-four degrees. But even with the novelty of a Northwest swim—of being able to dive headfirst off Heron with Jeff and both boys, kick around her big blue hull in the bracing clean water, then float on our backs like otters—none of us can stay in for long. The water, about sixty-eight, just isn’t that warm.

  To prolong what I know will be one of our last family moments like this for a while, I gaze up at the sky while we’re sitting on the stern deck wrapped in towels, and I see great white cumulus clouds, like a fleet of puffed-out sails racing past. I love when the Northwest’s low clouds lift; on Heron, the sky feels like a vast room where the furniture is constantly changing—whether it’s scrolled clouds, or shreds of cloud, or feathered cirrus clouds, or searingly blue sky, the drama makes you feel very much like you’re on a planet, part of the larger universe.

  We share a dinner of grilled flank steak in the cockpit. Jeff opens a bottle of wine. The night is unusually mild, and as the sun dips behind the tops of the trees, a lantern is lit. It casts a warm glow over our long-limbed, permascruffed bunch, together again for one last week before Sam heads back to work in San Francisco and James leaves for college. We have our issues, God knows. But I want to drink it all in, inhale every atom of this moment anyway—the salty, sometimes sweet, other times foul-mouthed, milk-and beer-swilling, volatile but essentially good and warmhearted, and always funny gang that’s been for these last years, my crew—before we all go our separate ways and the day-to-day texture of what we’ve known together as a family is permanently altered.

  I make a vow to pay close attention, to not take any of it for granted while I’ve got it, even the moments I’d probably rather forget—our squabbling and inevitable screwups afloat. Then I do something I do sometimes when I want to remind myself where I am in my life: I look around and take a kind of basic metaphysical inventory:

  “Thank you for this planet,” I whisper to myself. “And for the sky.”

  “Thank you for this family, which is able to have dinner together tonight under the sky.”

  “Thank you for being—we are lucky to be here.”

  “Thank you for this time. I’m glad we were able to get ourselves here without drowning.”

  * * *

  Family has always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a group of individuals but a room we could retreat to, no matter how bad the day has been. A place where you can gather the wagons, so to speak, light a fire, have a drink, sit down to a meal, share a moment of the day, and where each of us can be who we really are. Part of what I love about being a parent is creating that place, and up until now that place had always been home. But the past seven days on Heron had changed that. Family wasn’t a room at home anymore, I realized, but anywhere we were all together in the whole wide world. And now we were exploring that world, inhabiting it together in an entirely new way.

  While the boys cleared the table, passing plates and forks down the steep companionway, I sat gazing up at the stars and thinking about how these would be our last family dinners for a while, just the four of us. I remembered James turning in his final assignment for AP Literature a few weeks earlier. The assignment had been to write an essay based on NPR’s This I Believe series. He’d been struggling to find his topic. “Start with a simple idea, something concrete,” I’d suggested.

  So he’d begun an essay with the title: “I Believe in Water.”

  “How’s your water essay coming?” I’d asked the next day. It seemed like such a natural for a surfing, sailing, kayaking, riverguiding kid.

  “I decided on a different topic.”

  “Really? You’re not writing about water?”

  “No. I came up with a better idea: ‘I Believe in Family Dinner.’”

  * * *

  There was a little pang. A quick, sharp stab in the soft part of the chest. You hadn’t seen it coming. It was one of those casual moments of parenting when your son or daughter does something out of the blue that let’s you know that somehow you have, by the grace of God, done an okay job. That maybe you weren’t such a terrible mom after all.

  “Wow, that’s a great idea,” you said, trying not to sound overly enthusiastic. “I love it!”

  You were dying to read the essay, of course. But you never did get to see it.

  You wondered what it said about family, about family dinners. Was it about the food or the people gathering around the table? Was it about the conversation? The flare-ups and fights?

  In our family each of us always sat in the same spot until Sam left for college, and then there was the Empty Chair. I figured that was what James would have written about: “The Empty Chair.”

  The little pang had started its ache again, rising from your chest to your throat, where it lodged itself awhile. Then it occurred to you that as a parent you can’t expect to do everything well. To be effective you have to pick the few things you really care about—and then you realize that your son had somehow nailed it; he’d hit upon one of the things you most believe in, even though you’d never articulated it. You and your husband might have missed half the Little League games, you might have been lax in signing up for parent groups. Hell, you were a horrible volunteer, had been late to nine out of ten school pickups, but you rarely missed, in fact truly excelled at, Family Dinner.

  No matter how stressful things were, the bulk of your parenting had probably taken place around the dinner table. It was a place where you and your husband lingered most nights, and drank far too much wine. Maybe you should have encouraged the boys to eat faster, excuse themselves sooner, get back to their homework. Instead, you’d spent hours sitting and talking. Talking about books, music, movies, school, work, the world. Or sometimes it was just silly banter, the guys trying out new band names on each other, or telling off-color jokes.

  No, you weren’t at all disciplined, far from it. But no matter how terrible a day had been, or how sick of your jobs you and your husband were, or how boring or unfair a day at school might have seemed, the dinner table was the one place you’d come together for the feeling that everything would be all right, if only for a moment.

  “Chet,” I said, raising my now empty wineglass one more time on the boat, with the boys down below doing dishes, “here’s a toast to you and me and to the first of these last dinners with the boys. We should acknowledge how fleeting this time is, don’t you think?”

  “I do, Bug—we should be grateful. For our health, and for the guys even wanting to be on board with us.”

  I laughed. No doubt the boys would be counting down the days, eager to get back to their wheels, to their cell phones, to their friends and jobs and own lives. That’s what we’d been preparing them for all these years, after all. Our real work, any parent’s real work, is readying your kids for the world.

  The night air began to chill and a big harbor seal popped his head out of the water, looking for all the world like a bald bewhiskered uncle, his face round as the moon. Sending Sam and James off to college—where they’d wake in dorms with new roommates, make their own choices, have the opportunity to reinvent their stories—would give them space to be themselves. They’d find out more about who they were, and we’d do the same. We needed that for us, but we needed it more for them. They needed to know we could float on our own, and that when the time came, they really were free to go.

  “Hey, guys? Are you coming down to play Scrabble, or what?” came Sam’s nightly summons from below.

  Jeff poked his head down the main hatch and said heartily, as he dropped out of sight, “Ah, I see you’ve set up the b
oard so I can whip your asses again!”

  “Well, good luck with that, Dad,” I could hear Sam say. The year before, Sam had beaten us every time.

  “Can we try to use a few other words tonight, please?” I asked, descending. “Maybe clean it up a little?”

  “You’ve got it, Momma,” Sam said.

  “Make way for the queen,” Jeff said. And with that we all squeezed in together around the cabin’s teak table, and spread out the tiles.

  RAPIDS

  The Yuculta Rapids form a natural barrier, a sort of watery gauntlet guarding the BC coast’s wilder, less-traveled wilderness, and early the next morning we set off for our first time through. Jeff, Sam, and I were up just after dawn, pushing Heron off the dock, and by seven o’clock in the morning, Sam was back on the sleeping shelf, unconscious. James, who’d scored the front stateroom, hadn’t even woken up.

  While Heron slipped quietly out of Cortes Bay, Jeff and I sat hunched in the cockpit. The sky over Desolation Sound’s massive peaks glowed with a soft dawn light, all orange and silver-pink. But we were both heads down, checking and rechecking our calculations: the maze of channels above Desolation are notorious for their rapids and violent whirlpools; they’re the most powerful tidal rapids in the Northern Hemisphere. The first five rapids, known collectively as the Yucultas, lay dead ahead. They had our full attention.

  When you examine a map of this section of the BC coast, the Strait of Georgia and Queen Charlotte Strait resemble the ends of an hourglass squeezing in to form an elongated, mountain-clad, watery maze between them. The tidal currents of the Strait of Georgia (the vast inland strait we’d crossed a few days earlier) flow north, where they bump into Queen Charlotte Strait’s colder currents flowing south. The currents are like stationary waves, producing a maximum inflow and outflow three hours before high tide and three hours before low tide. They’re generally weak, except when they crash into one another in the intricate waterway’s long “waist” section, the web of passes and narrows you must thread your way through to reach the wild, remote places farther north where we longed to go. The trick is to time your passage so that you reach each of the half dozen rapids during slack tide, the thirty minutes or so twice a day when all the water pushing through goes still.

  It was day two of week two for us, well into summer—the second week of August—but Calendar Time suddenly seemed far less relevant than Tidal Time. With the help of other boaters we’d met on the docks at Cortes Bay, we’d worked through the August dates in Canadian Tide and Current Tables, Volume 6 and determined that if the Yucultas’ five sets of rapids—Yuculta Rapids, Gillard Passage Rapids, Dent Rapids, Greene Point Rapids, and Whirlpool Rapids—were turning to slack at ten thirty in the morning today, we’d better be well on our way by seven o’clock to reach the first rapids in time to ride through safely.

  “It’s hard to believe we were baking in swim trunks at Cortes yesterday,” Jeff said, revving the engine’s speed slightly as he looked out at the water. It was rippled with light winds from the southeast. The air temperature was cool, fifty-five degrees. He zipped his jacket.

  “I know,” I said, warming my hands on a metal cup of mint tea. I blew on it, let the steam drift up to warm my cheeks while we went over the times and tide tables again. Once we both agreed we’d done the right math and could do no more calculations, we pushed on, with plenty of time to reflect, nervously, on all the things that were new to us: In the miles between Georgia Strait and Queen Charlotte Strait, we’d need to pay close attention to not only the tides and currents but also the weather. Once we passed through the Yucultas’ gauntlet of rapids, we’d continue up Johnstone Strait, a tunnel-like wind funnel notorious for its pounding side swells when the weather picks up. But there would be time enough to watch the Weather. Meanwhile, the more interesting factor was the Tide, something we never considered in our hyperconnected modern lives.

  “Hey, did you know that on a worldwide scale, the tide typically rises and falls less than about three feet, each day?” I asked, reading aloud from a cruising guide. “But in the Pacific Northwest we’re talking tides of twelve to thirteen feet? That’s nuts!”

  “No shit,” Jeff said. “Why do you think we’re always checking the tide charts and watching our depth meter so closely?”

  “Yeah, I get that. But do you know what causes the tides?”

  “Of course I know what causes the tides—the pull of the moon.”

  “But I bet you’d sort of forgotten,” I said.

  “Never. It also has something to do with barometric pressure, since pressure changes also affect tides—and fishing.”

  It could be infuriating, sometimes, being with someone who was almost always right. And even when he wasn’t, wasn’t even close, Jeff had the confidence to assert he was. On the other hand, knowledge out here equaled survival; without my husband’s nautical baseline there was no way we’d consider cruising all the way to the Great Bear Rainforest on our own. I was proud to be out there, the two of us. Yet I still wished I could be a salty motherf*cker and dish it right back.

  “Oh, come on, Chet, admit it,” I pressed again. “The tides aren’t something you think about when you’re checking, say, Google Calendar.”

  “You’ve got that right, Starbuck.”

  Then, since the boys were sound asleep, I punched him lightly and said with affection, “You’re such an asshole, Ahab.”

  There are so many ways we manage, through all our differences, throughout all our years together, to say: I’m crazy about you, just crazy about you.

  * * *

  Even on the first weekday of the second week of August, we could feel a new edge of cool in the air. Fall comes early along the Pacific Northwest Coast. We were motoring only a few miles north of Desolation Sound’s tall summits and deep fjords, but we could already sense how their steep-shouldered, long-fingered topography held the water, warming it. Masses of mist and cloud hugged Desolation’s peaks, shouldering up behind us in the receding distance. Within an hour it was raining softly. We zipped Heron’s canvas and heavy plastic rain shield over the cockpit, then pulled on our ski caps. The air temperature was fifty-eight degrees, the wind from the southeast light, the water rippled. But it felt colder, way colder, on the water.

  In one of the wettest parts of the world—ranging from 60 inches of rain each year in Desolation Sound to as much as 180 inches annually in the northern reaches of the Great Bear Rainforest—the indigenous people spoke of two broad categories of rain: male and female. “A ‘she rain’ is gentle, caressing, clinging, persistent,” the American photographer Edward S. Curtis explained in a letter to his daughter Florence in 1914, while he was documenting the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. “A ‘he rain’ is quite the opposite in all ways but that of persistence.” I thought about that as I watched our first real rain. It was a “she rain,” and we’d better get used to it.

  “I think I’ll put on my foul-weather gear,” Jeff said.

  “Really,” I said. This was a first. “Okay, then. I’ve got the wheel.”

  Within the hour we’d both pulled on our foul-weather gear: stiff bright red jumpsuits over fleece sweaters, and red Gore-Tex jackets on top of that. Shortly after we’d agreed to buy the boat and ship her across country, Jeff had also talked me into joining him on a Saturday afternoon “date” at a place called Fisheries Supply in the thick of Seattle’s maritime industry. Picture a hardware store on steroids. When I said I’d go along, he was as delighted as I’d have been if he’d agreed to go shoe shopping at Bergdorf’s with me. Wisely, he’d steered me away from the shelves of fasteners, lines, pumps, and epoxies (one with the worrisome name Gluzilla!) and straight for the racks of rubber-soled boat shoes and, um, clothes. It had been a long road from my years as a downtown New York City girl dressed in leather and vintage, to Seattle jeans, boots, and cozy sweaters—but you have to draw the line somewhere: Sperry Top-Siders and yachtclub logo-wear was a place I never, ever wanted to go.


  Fortunately, my husband had other ideas. So we tried on foul-weather gear: bright red bib overalls with matching hooded Gore-Tex storm jackets that secured with so many Velcro strips you’d be more likely to succumb from suffocation before rain, wind, or weather. Velcroed and zipped into my Musto offshore foul-weather gear, I felt like an America’s Cup racer. Or an astronaut. Small and fierce. Impermeable. Sexy and kind of badass.

  Even better were the Xtratuf boots: black rubber, with thick-tread soles topped by a red stripe, rounded toes, and neoprene liners. You could wear them beneath your foul-weather gear or pull them on over jeans for an adventure-chic look that was also practical when clambering across slippery decks.

  * * *

  At around nine thirty, new acquaintances from the Cortes docks passed us in their big motor yacht. They looked annoyingly comfortable inside.

  We waved. We could see their silhouettes and then their hands inside the toasty-looking, wind- and rainproof capsule, waving back.

  “I hate them,” I grumbled.

  The VHF radio crackled to life: “It looks like you’re making good time there, Heron.”

  Jeff picked up the receiver and switched to a local channel. “Thanks, Overstory, bet you guys are a little warmer than we are.”

  “Don’t worry…we’ll save you a spot at the docks!”

  Gee thanks, I thought, watching them round the forested bend ahead of us, leave a frothy white wake, and disappear from sight.

  * * *