* * *
After dinner (and a family come-to-Jesus meeting on how, “We all have to pull together, guys, figure this stuff out together!”), Sam dutifully did the dishes. James asked to be excused since he still wasn’t feeling well. Jeff and I sat down with Ports and Passes and attempted to calculate what time Greene Point Rapids, around the corner, and scary-sounding Whirlpool Rapids an hour beyond, turned slack. We figured that if we got up at five thirty the next morning, pushing off from the docks at six, we’d hit the first rapid at slack. Then we’d just have to take our chances on the next one, since we’d hit it after slack water. But from what Jeff had gleaned from his dockside intelligence gathering, Whirlpool wouldn’t be that bad.
But we were worried about James.
We tuned in the marine weather forecast to check conditions for Johnstone Strait, the long channel we’d enter after the rapids. You don’t want to be there in a summer swell.
“Winds twenty to thirty knots. Increasing to thirty to forty knots by late afternoon. Gale force warning in effect,” the disembodied voice of Environment Canada’s marine forecast intoned over the VHF radio.
“Having fun yet?” Jeff scowled.
“Yeah, in a sick kind of way,” I confessed with a shrug. Deep in my bones, I loved this. Being in nature. Traveling through it. Contending with all her moods. Even the extreme ones. Even when my husband morphed into whacko Skipper Jeff. What is wrong with me? I wondered.
* * *
The two of us awoke at five thirty in the morning, dressed in the dark, put on a pot of French press, and tuned in the marine forecast. With the challenge of a new adventure ahead, it was like we were somehow aligned again. Sails trimmed for the same tack. You can push them, stretch the canvas so far that every fiber is taut, but they won’t rip. Instead, they create forward motion—sometimes it’s only an imperceptible drift—but they’re moving you incrementally forward nonetheless.
With the boys still asleep, we pushed off from the dock in the dim morning light. The water was silvered. Lightly choppy with curlicues of current diminishing. We rode toward the slack. Small waves danced at the boat, lapping against the hull. The sky was filled with gunmetal-gray clouds, brightening to pearly luminescence with the rising sun. The air was bracing, fifty-five degrees. It felt crisp and clean and smelled like mint and cold. A flock of terns wheeled overhead, mewling and swooping. I felt the morning on my face, the dawn and the sharp wind and the swoop of birds, the warm fingers of the sun just beginning to break through high cloud. Everything felt polished by fresh air.
Gripping mugs of coffee, Jeff and I hit Greene Pointe Rapids just as the current was turning to flood and flew through at five knots. Heron was shooting over the bottom at eleven and a half knots. Sailing along like a sled.
“We’re flying!” Jeff said, impressed.
The boys were still asleep when we passed East and West Thurlow Islands just off the port beam, their humps rising up behind a thick curtain of vaulting fir trees. The trees grew right down to the water’s edge, where low branches were shaved straight across, as if by a giant razor blade. The ruler-sharp line spoke to one thing: water. The rise of it and fall of it. The current. Its tremendous force.
We also saw our first clear-cuts: bald patches so raw and bare against the green, the contrast was shocking. We stared. So few people passed through this wilderness without roads that there weren’t many witnesses. A tug pulled a long float of just-felled logs. Bark and splinter. The sad, rough brown load making its slow way south.
Eagles peered and swooped from the trees, soared elliptically through the sky.
“Many, many bald eagles,” Jeff pronounced, the breath from his words hanging in the opaque morning light.
We watched a lone eagle head up the strait. He flew northwest, his ample shadow sliding over the boat like a blanket.
We were gaining confidence as we swept along, making speed on the current, soaring past fir-green islands. Then we were through the last of the rapids and could hear the wind whipping down Johnstone Strait. We rounded a bend and the cold hit the boat, muscling its way into the cockpit. It was August, but nevertheless there was a deep chill in the air. A gang of gulls went by, all whirry and chatty. And then a flock of smaller white birds. Gulls? Terns? They looked unnaturally white, those birds, skittering low over the water.
Until then I hadn’t really paid attention, I thought. Hadn’t even known how fresh and alive the world could be until we were moving through it at eleven and a half knots an hour. Which by any other measure would be slow. But here, in the Real World, it was fast. And yet there was also the opposite of fast, the rare intimacy we’d begun to have with the wild landscape, and with one another, afloat.
At home time so often passed in a blur with things that, in the end, really didn’t matter. Racing through tasks each day without intention, or being stuck in traffic, could feel like death by annoyance. Like we weren’t making much progress—and even worse, like the world wasn’t making much progress. Like no matter how much we recycled and bought local, we’d still see trees being cut down, and fish being farmed, and beauty being destroyed, wiped out by greed. At the same time the world’s remaining beauty and humanity is the reason we have hope. And what comforts us, what allows us to breathe a little easier, are moments like these, when every so often we allow ourselves time to contemplate, briefly, just being here. Now.
We were only beginning to discover how powerful it could be, sharing these moments. Contending with nature, you begin to recognize there is flow everywhere in the natural world—that the deep channels are actually tracks left by glaciers that moved really, really slowly, or that even a murmuration of starlings is made up of a mass of single birds that are part of a dynamic system—and you also come to realize that this same flow is in each of us. It is centering and empowering. I realized we could do this. We could trust ourselves to do this crazy thing together.
The swells picked up in Johnstone Strait. They came at us from the northwest, lead-gray rollers cresting. It was blowing twenty-five knots. Gusting thirty into an outgoing northbound tide. The swells were two feet. Three off the bow. Those waves would be nothing on an open sea. Mere furrows. But in Johnstone Strait, where the waves rose up and met a ripping chop, they were plenty.
We saw no other boats (they were tucked in safe harbors). But Heron crushed the furlers. Her heavy hull was built for oceans, and she rode each swell, pounded through, greeted the next.
Being on the sea is, in many ways, like navigating real life, I thought as our boat bashed through the swells. You will always have the elements against you. You will always suffer and struggle. And then you will have moments of pleasure. Maybe that’s why people are drawn to the sea. To feel something both vast and intimate, something real. I was feeling the real acutely now: in the tips of my fingers. In my toes. Jeff and I hunkered down in the cockpit behind the windscreen. The cold was fierce. I’d been sitting so long that even the tips of my hair had begun to freeze in the raw cold.
Which is when I began dreaming of pleasure.
* * *
I vanished, dropping like a vole in a hole, out of sight into the main cabin. I turned on the gas, stepped down, and secured myself in the little galley. Lit a blue flame and stood warming my hands over the burner.
Somehow, the boys slept on, with Heron smashing through the swells, pitching up and over each one, the slap of the side swell reverberating like the blows of a sledgehammer. James was on the forward berth. Sam on the side bunk. I wedged myself into the galley, rummaged around in the half fridge, pulled out butter, bacon, milk, blueberries, syrup. Stepped up, took three steps, stepped down, reached into the pilot-berth pantry for pancake mix. Found it. Stepped up, stepped down again into the galley. By then James was up.
“Making breakfast, Mom?”
“Yep, thought I might,” I answered. “Feeling better?”
He disappeared to pull on jeans and his flannel shirt, then staggered across the pitching teak, where he l
anded on the settee a foot from the gimbaled stove, which was swinging like a monkey.
“Think so,” he yawned. “How ya gonna cook the bacon?”
“Um, in a pan?”
“You should try a pot. We did it that way on the river—it turns out great.”
Okay. I braced myself, dug out the big pot from the stacked pans that fit barely to the right of the swinging stove.
Together we set the bacon to fry. A delicious sizzle and pop filled the cabin. James had spent the previous summer working as a river guide, rowing a raft full of gear down the Salmon River in Idaho. He was, at seventeen, years younger than the rest of the crew. Needless to say, he learned a lot. Strange skills, like how to cook bacon in a pot, kept cropping up. It took teamwork to make that bacon on a boat; James took the lead.
“You can fit the whole pack in one pot,” he explained. “Just stir all the strips together instead of laying them out one by one. It makes a ton more that way, see?”
“Momma is that bacon?” Sam called out from the side bunk.
Together in the pitching cabin, we cooked up the bacon, made pancake batter, pulled out the sauté pan, started the stove again, melted butter, ladled circles of batter. When the batter started to sizzle, we dropped on blueberries, then flipped the cakes.
I passed a plate up through the hatch to Jeff, who was still out there taking Mighty Heron through the pounding chill. Wisps of steam rose off the plate: hot blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, a stack of bacon, knife and fork wrapped in a napkin. You’d have thought the plate was piled with caviar.
“Get out of here!” Jeff exclaimed. “Pancakes and bacon?!”
“Better eat ‘em while they’re hot,” I grinned, climbing up with my own plate.
The salty warmth of the bacon, crisp in the brisk morning air, the surprise of the sweet blueberries, each an exploding delight with a forkful of cake, was a simple meal that, given its unlikely setting, stood out. You endure. And then life’s small pleasures leap out at you…Amidst the damp chill, we felt our spirits rising with the steam off the plates.
THE LUXURY OF SLOWNESS
You know you’ve settled into the luxury of slowness when, after lunch, everyone just finds a spot on the boat and drifts into a long afternoon nap. After making it through Johnstone Strait, we’d anchored in the Broughton Islands, a dreamlike archipelago of rockbound, forest-capped islands at the strait’s northern reaches. When I finally came to, James was stretched on the opposite settee, Sam was sprawled out on the forward berth, and Jeff was sitting in the cockpit, camera trained on a great blue heron.
The heron stood like a granite statue framed by funereal hemlock and spruce, its slate-blue feathers blown smooth. A wind stirred from the west, bearing salt off the sea.
“How long have you been sitting here?” I asked.
“Me?” my husband asked without turning his head, his eye melded to the camera perched on his knee. “About forty-five minutes. I’m waiting for this heron to fly so I can get an action shot,” he said sardonically.
I stifled a guffaw. My husband, who rarely sits still, had definitely crossed over. There’s a moment on any long journey when you can feel a physical change. If you’ve traveled far enough from home, and the journey has taken days—and especially if you stay away from the phone and the internet, which is not easy to do—there’s a moment when you can feel different: it’s the feeling of time expanding.
It’s not only time itself that’s different—the measurable fact that your hours are no longer defined by quantifiable calendar time—it’s the quality of the time. It’s richer, fuller, time you can taste. And if you pay attention, you’ll notice one day that you’re inhabiting that time. The heron peered at us with its tiny yellow eyes, not quizzically like a raven or a gull, but with a heron’s stoic silence. I imagined then that this bird too must know something about time that we don’t, and that our audience of trees and rocks and mosses and clouds know it—and that the sky, certainly, has always known it.
The heron opened its wings and lifted off, away from us. Its huge wings flapped like an old elephant’s ears, and its long sinewy legs trailed behind. We watched him until he faded into the sky, disappearing like smoke.
* * *
The next morning we docked in Port McNeill, a logging and fishing town on the northeast tip of Vancouver Island that’s so bare bones it makes Seattle look like Manhattan. We then packed our duffels and made one last boat breakfast. We toasted our last slices of bread as well as the two bagels at the bottom of the bag. We scrambled the last eight eggs, shredded and sautéed all the potatoes for hash browns, fried up the rest of the bacon and sausages, drank the last of the juice. We did all the dishes, wiped down the galley, put away the cups and plates one last time, made up the bunks, then lifted our duffels up and out the companionway and into the cockpit, latched Heron’s hatches, and locked the main hatch.
It seemed odd, leaving Heron all alone in Port McNeill on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. But it was time for Sam to return to San Francisco and for James to head to college in upstate New York. Jeff and I would fly east with him, then fly straight back to the boat to resume our journey and travel north hundreds of miles into the Great Bear Rainforest.
The daily floatplane landed at noon off the end of the Port McNeill fuel dock. We walked fifty feet from the boat to the plane, presented our passports to the pilot, lifted our duffels into the back seats, and climbed aboard. The floatplane, a sturdy ten-seater, was a yellow-and-white de Havilland Otter. The model is called the workhorse of the Northwest because it was instrumental in mapping and survey work from Alaska all the way south to Chile; in Alaska it is still the ultimate bush aircraft. We picked up a few more passengers, touching down at ramshackle floating fishing lodges in the Broughton Islands. (One woman climbed aboard with a yellow hound named Laila; the dog was such a frequent flier that she just sprawled on the aisle floor between the seats.) We then flew over all the islands and forests and channels and fjords and straits and seas we’d just sailed past and struggled through. It was utterly amazing to me, gazing down from the little plane, to see all those islands and channels and fir-and-spruce-clad mountains and fjords—then the harbors with more and more boats moored in them as we went south—and to realize, with pride, that we had come to know this geography. In less than two and a half hours we covered the distance it had taken us two weeks to travel by boat, and landed at the northern end of Lake Washington. Twenty miles from downtown Seattle we sat on the curb like castaways, surrounded by a mountain of gear, and waited for a cab.
THE BIG DROP-OFF
August 20—a date I’d both eagerly anticipated and dreaded. It was time for James to leave home for college in upstate New York. Jeff and I would both tag along for the Big Drop-Off, then celebrate our Empty Nesthood by heading straight back to Heron and resume sailing north to the Great Bear Rainforest. A taxi waited in front of our house to drive the three of us to the airport; a pile of duffel bags sat by the front door.
James’s room, upstairs, was the cleanest it had been in about eighteen years. It was strangely unsettling to walk past and see an expanse of oatmeal-colored Berber carpet where the erupted volcano of T-shirts, jeans, and hooded sweatshirts usually loomed over its messy landscape. A few days before, his last as the youngest son living at home, he’d washed and folded his shirts. He’d cleaned and packed his lacrosse gear. He’d straightened the stuff on his shelves and thrown away the spiral-bound notebooks and crumpled homework assignments that had been crammed in the dark corners of his desk for ages. Who are you? I felt like saying to this weirdly efficient new person.
I didn’t know it yet, not consciously, but I felt it: my son had begun to act himself into adulthood. Watching him, I couldn’t help but feel chagrined. (Hmmm? The kid had obviously been capable of putting his laundry away all along.) But I also felt a sense of pride. And this pride was inseparable from a piercing sense of loss. I understood suddenly that even though my youngest son was standing the
re in front of me—stuffing stacks of T-shirts into a duffel bag, familiar, mundane—he was also already leaving. The thought was frightening because as soon as it came to me, I knew it was true. Although the leaving was yet to begin in any actual way, we were moving toward it. It was inevitable.
I’d carefully not considered the prospect of saying goodbye, of launching our youngest into his own life. Returning from three weeks at sea (one of them with Sam and James), and preparing for another month, I had writing assignments to follow up on, and Jeff had a business to sell; we had bills to pay, pets to tend to, phone calls to make, goodbyes to say. The week was lost to errands and tying up loose ends.
But the significance of what was happening surfaced in other ways, without warning: a friend sending her youngest daughter off to college, and simultaneously struggling with an aging parent, blacked out driving home from Bed Bath & Beyond. The stress of so many conflicting emotions caused her to momentarily forget who and where she was while driving on the freeway. She picked up her cell phone and got her mother-in-law.
“I don’t know where I am!” she shouted. “I can’t remember how I got here!”
Her mother-in-law talked her off the road. Her husband rushed home from work. At the hospital they ran a battery of tests, the results of which were inconclusive. The ordeal was frightening. The doctors couldn’t explain it—but my friend’s sudden and total sense of dislocation, given the timing, made perfect sense to me. I wouldn’t have understood it, even a year before, but at the time I got it—completely.
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