“I am!” I shouted, staring at the mess of lines.
Things went downhill from there…
* * *
It was a shit storm, exacerbated by Jeff’s adrenaline and his fearing how on the edge we were out here, with wolves and whales for company and the days shortening since it was now September, a month when most Northwest boaters were far south, safely past Klemtu and Bella Bella and Shearwater and Hakai Pass and Johnstone Strait and all the waters we’d need to navigate again on our long return home; how far from any other vessels or people or inhabited anything, and how out of control things could feel on this big boat on the rare occasion that we had enough wind to raise all the canvas. We were tired, which made everything worse. And it was clear that after two seasons, having learned so much and come so far, we still didn’t always know what we were doing.
This kind of trial-by-fire, berating, verbal shit not good for any marriage, I scribbled in my sailing journal. We were steaming along now, no longer speaking. Especially when you’re hundreds of miles from home, surrounded by fog, cold, and freezing water. And the deck isn’t a level playing field yet. Why would anyone sign up for this?? Our nerves are raw. We’re both ground down. Tired. Barely speaking. But I understand the mechanics of the jib now. It is up. All three sails are up…and they are fucking BEAUTIFUL.
* * *
I married my husband because he’s my favorite person in the world. When given the choice of where to spend my time, I will always, always choose to be with him. But what happens when you are three decades into a relationship and you reach a crossroads, a place where you realize you could, in fact, each choose different directions? What happens when you are physically exhausted and rip-shit mad and done with each other, but you can’t stomp off to the other end of the house because your home happens to be a goddamn sailboat? What happens when your children—who have been not only your planets and stars but also a distinct gravitational force buffering the differences between you—are suddenly launched into their own distant orbits?
I stared at my husband backlit by purple sky and angry clouds and huge white sails like the wings of a cormorant, which in that searing instant looked like a cross nailed to the sky, and thought: My marriage could end. It could end right here in the middle-of-nowhere Whale Channel. It could end with me saying: You’re my favorite person in the world but you’re impossible, you impatient jerk!
And my funny, practical, always-prepared-for-the-worst-case-scenario husband could, with very good reason, fling his own accusations back at me: If you spent even half as much time studying sail trim and knot-tying as you do watching for whales and bears and clouds and scribbling in that damn notebook, you might be a half-decent sailor!
But there wasn’t time for any of this because next, right then in the middle of Wright Sound, for no apparent reason, the wind died.
Skipper Jeff spat out a litany of curses. “God damn it! Why does the wind have to die when we finally get the sails up? Because it’s the friggin’ Pacific Northwest, that’s why!” The hollering continued, scattering flocks of gulls in our midst.
“Well, this is just great, Captain,” I hissed. “You can’t take it, can you? You can’t take it because you’re losing it, and you don’t have the emotional toughness to survive this far out on the edge!”
We floated in silence, sails flapping.
* * *
I couldn’t raise all the sails on my own at the time, but I vowed then and there to master each and every one of them. And I did. My heart felt like it was lifting out of my chest that day in Wright Sound. I felt everything on my face that afternoon, the salt and the wet wind, and the cry of birds, and the searing fingers of the sun in its furious indigo sky. I could see the steep green mountains rising up, topped by equally dramatic cumulus clouds: purple-gray beneath, sunlit above. The hulk of Gil Island to port loomed an angry black. Shafts of late-afternoon light, luminous with fall, hit the boat.
I realized Jeff had a point. I was an exceptional first mate, but I sucked at sailing. I had to become not only more proficient at sailing but more proficient at sailing Heron. It was a matter of survival, for both of us.
I sketched a picture in my notebook to remember the jib and labeled the parts: jib furler, jib sheets for windward and leeward, cleat for jib-furling line. And then I labeled the steps. I would refer to this sketch several more times until I had all of it down cold and could raise that jib solo. Or tack it twenty-two times in a single day, as we did a few years later in a race off the wild west coast of Vancouver Island. Or raise all three sails, harden them up, and soar for eight hours on a wild reach across forbidding Hecate Strait, as we’ve done en route to explore the archipelago of Haida Gwaii.
But for now, here we were: Skipper Jeff and me, his enthusiastic but appallingly green first mate. We’d made it this far, damn it. All this way, nearly seven hundred nautical miles of wilderness sailing—with no one but us handling everything on this too-big boat in our new world of two.
CLOVE HITCH
Docking the boat in the small harbor tucked behind the stone breakwater at Hartley Bay, a tiny aboriginal village that in addition to being the apex of our trip was home to Marven Robinson, didn’t go any better. The wooden docks were lined with fishing boats and aluminum outboards. Squinting through the binoculars, we tried to tell whether there might be an empty space at the fuel dock. It was full. We pulled out Ken’s napkin map: floatplane dock, fuel dock, shore, three finger piers.
“Everyone rafts in Hartley Bay,” Ken had said. “You can tie up to Marven’s dad’s purse seiner—it hasn’t moved in years.”
But the rusted hulk of Marven’s dad’s fishing boat, the Crystal-Gene, loomed five feet above our decks when we managed to move Heron alongside—way more than the two of us were ready to handle, with me as sole leaper and line tier.
With little room to maneuver Mighty Heron in the shallow harbor, we panicked.
A sturdy-looking couple cleaning fish on the back deck of a battered cabin cruiser called out, “We’ll move!” They dropped their fish knives and dragged their boat farther up the fuel dock.
Snapping at one another as violently as two crabs in a trap, we finally squeezed Heron in behind them, tied her up, and shut her down. The sun was starting to set. We were tired, cold, numb, short-tempered. Utterly spent, I was relieved we’d made it all the way to Hartley Bay, the northernmost point of our journey and a First Nations village so isolated it’s accessible only by air and water. But Jeff was still worked up about the stern line, which I hadn’t tied in a proper clove hitch, evidently.
I’d tied a half hitch. Not a clove hitch. Sigh.
So now he was redoing it and complaining loudly. I understood that he was doing this because he was exploding with nerves, having just half circumnavigated super-remote Princess Royal Island in a single shitty day and jockeyed ourselves into this tiny harbor. But this particular raw nerve, and my utter inability after all these weeks at sea to tie the proper knot, seemed emblematic of our strained relationship at this point: Was it coming untied as well?
“God damn it! This won’t hold. This will!”
* * *
Jeff had a point: it was ridiculous that I still hadn’t mastered the perfect clove hitch. But I happen to know many highly intelligent knot-challenged humans.
I could definitely have been way better at this, but instead I ignored him and walked back to thank the couple that had moved their boat for us. Clad in blood-streaked yellow storm bibs (him) and a dull blue apron (her), they were cleaning an enormous eighty-five-pound halibut and exuded good-natured capability. They explained in thick Russian accents that they lived in Kitimat, a fishing and logging town about fifty miles inland and northeast, toward the BC-Alaska border. It had taken them all day to reel in the fish, they said, beaming. I offered to take their picture, and they posed on either side of the huge dripping halibut as adoringly as if it were a child. Meanwhile, men aboard the sturdy powerboat tied off Heron’s stern took pity on us
and tossed a whole coho they’d caught down to the dock. “A small one!” they laughed, teasingly. “Just enough for two!”
It was embarrassing. Damn. We hadn’t caught a fish today or any other day. We were pathetic, but we weren’t complete idiots—we took the salmon.
Back on the boat we sidestepped one another in silence. I was numb with exhaustion, nerves long past frayed. It felt like my inner self had separated from my body and floated straight up out of the boat—a white tern hovering overhead or a dark raven sitting on one of the halyards, watching from a safe distance. As the evening chilled, the docks grew damp. A thick mist settled in over the harbor, enveloping the cedar pilings surrounded by metal crab traps and oblong buoys, plastic fishing buckets and thick rubber hoses. There was the sound of halyards slapping and ravens chortling, the smell of bird shit mixed with the sharp clean scent of the sea. Jeff was clearly pushed past his breaking point as well. Please, I thought, just let this day be over.
But instead I said: “I need a cocktail.”
“Why do you think sailors drink?” Jeff said with a sigh. “It’s the only way they stay sane.”
“What happened out there?!” I said. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” Jeff said, scowling. “I found myself in a pretty dark place all of a sudden. I’m sick of things breaking on this boat. I’m sick of having to fix everything by myself. When I realized you had to literally stop and think about putting the jib up, that you couldn’t do it second nature, I frickin’ lost it.”
I considered this, how my husband—a kind and extremely competent man who likes a well-oiled machine—was navigating slippery docks right now, how even our beautiful Heron could be fickle and infuriating, how frustrating that must be.
“I just thought you’d be better at everything by now,” he said with a sigh.
“You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for my wanting to be here!” I hurled back.
“And my getting you here,” he countered. “I need you to be more than a passenger. You’re a very nice passenger, don’t get me wrong. But for now? You’re a passenger.”
This was crushing. But there was truth in it. Aside from being able to navigate using the chart plotter, and carefully watching our depths, and not getting seasick, and putting in long solo hours at the helm, and considering myself a kick-ass helmswoman…I really didn’t know what I was doing yet when it came to sailing.
* * *
I sat and stewed. Was this current state of affairs something that required tweaking? I wondered. All long-term relationships have their dark times, their hard passages, their unforeseen difficulties. I got that. What was out of alignment—and unfair—on the boat was that these first seasons afloat, Jeff was the only one aboard with the seafaring skills (not to mention mechanical and electrical) to get us out of tricky spots. And there were a lot of tricky spots. Plus, the farther we went the more infuriating they became.
As in any relationship, though, we each brought our strengths and weaknesses to this rocky vessel. Jeff’s superpower was his many aptitudes, shadowed by moodiness and a lovable pessimism. He’s the kind of man who approaches most things with Eeyore’s point of view. But my superpower was calm inner strength, along with a big soft spot for this particular Eeyore. And this, I hoped, was one of the reasons we’d always worked and would work—even way up here on the slick wooden docks of Hartley Bay, where halyards were clanging, and ravens were cawing, and rain was pounding like battle drums on Heron’s cabin roof.
An hour or so later, like a missive from another world, a strange sound echoed through the cabin. Ping! Then a few seconds later, Ping! A text? Here?
“We must be back within cell range!” Jeff exclaimed, brightening. “Or at least, within text range.” He picked up the phone.
“Hey—it’s James!” he said, handing it over.
“Hey, where are u guys now? How’s life on Heron?”
It was like a lifeline: this simple text, winging its way from our son in upstate New York to the two of us trying to get used to our new world as well, barely making it through another day.
“Well, we can tell him that at least we haven’t killed one another yet,” I quipped, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s not over till it’s over,” Jeff said. But just hearing from James back East, adjusting to school at the exact moment we were struggling with realigning our own voluble compass, somehow put everything in perspective. We poured two glasses of pinot and shot back a signal flag.
“Mom still working on the clove hitch,” it read.
HEALING
The rain was incessant on this gray morning in the village of Hartley Bay. Time in the cockpit was wearing on us. We’d started to joke about “tiny hands”—my sneaking up on Jeff during long watery crossings and “accidentally” bumping him overboard. “If you ever feel those tiny hands on your back, don’t be surprised!” I’d said.
But despite our frayed nerves, we’d reached the northernmost point of our journey. Here, at least, we could get off the boat and stretch our legs. Sturdy cedar-plank boardwalks snaked across the boggy land, linking the modest dwellings—all of which faced the sea—to the small harbor. Exploring town, we counted sixty or seventy mostly one-story clapboard and aluminum-sided houses connected by the wooden boardwalks. The community was anchored by a whitewashed wooden church topped with a weathered red steeple, a K–12 school clad entirely in cedar, a brand-new cultural center modeled on a cedar longhouse, a First Nations band office, and a two-nurse clinic. Tendrils of wood smoke curled up from the houses in the rain, and small First Nation boys and girls played along the boardwalks, oblivious to the drizzle, as ravens’ croaks echoed.
After exploring the village, we hunkered down, waiting for Marven Robinson to return on the ferry that ran every fortnight. We moved Heron away from our spot on the fuel dock. It was a good thing we did—at noon a small navy-hulled ferry charged around the corner, sped into the cove, and tied up in the spot we’d just vacated. It seemed half of Hartley Bay was waiting for it; people crowded on the dock: bristly-black-haired men and frizzy-gray-haired women, young First Nations mothers with tiny, round daughters wearing fuchsia parkas.
Younger men and women with olive skin and round faces stepped off the ferry, pulling wheeled duffels, and walked up the gangway into the crowd—a man pushing a small refrigerator; a five-year-old boy in pajama bottoms and a red parka leading a white toy poodle on a leash. “Hi, Nelson!” a woman in the crowd called out to him, and I realized that of course everyone knew everyone in a place as tight-knit as Hartley Bay. We watched while the group formed a chain and unloaded boxes of produce, dry goods, parts, supplies. The rain fell harder. Although a few outliers carried umbrellas, most everyone seemed oblivious to the downpour, motoring ATVs along the wooden boardwalks in jeans and sweatshirts, the men’s ravenblack hair shiny wet.
* * *
Ken, the biologist we’d met in Shearwater, had also printed on a scrap of paper: HARTLEY BAY, WALLY BOLTON.
“Just look him up,” he’d said. “He’s great.”
But in a place like Hartley Bay, where everything revolves around the sea, we didn’t have to look far. Moving Heron out of the way of the incoming ferry, I’d noticed a man motoring a small skiff toward me. The neon orange floats in his bow were labeled: WALTER BOLTON.
I walked over and introduced myself, saying Ken had told us to look him up. He seemed surprised. Maybe Wally Bolton didn’t remember Ken? Topping off his oil on the dock, he appeared robust and forthright, dressed in a Helly Hansen rain slicker and rain pants. He was heading out to pull in halibut, he said with bravado, as Jeff walked up. Then, with a hearty laugh, he raised his eyebrows beneath his orange-brimmed rain hat and said, “Yep, I’m long-lining—twenty-four hundred feet down—and I pull it all in by hand. Sixty-one years old. Not bad, eh?”
“You pull those lines in by hand?” Jeff and I both said at once, stunned, trying to picture all that dead weight and the brutal simplicity of fishing the old-fas
hioned way.
Wally Bolton peered out to sea. “Sure do. This young guy? Six-foot-six. Came out with me last year,” he continued. “After ten minutes, he was dead.”
* * *
As Jeff and I settled into the pace of Hartley Bay, our raw nerves healed. It was as if the place itself, with its tight-knit community and proud, largely self-sufficient First Nations culture was a balm. We brewed tea, read, caught up on boat chores. We pulled rain jackets and boots on over our jeans and hopped down from the boat to explore. We strolled the boardwalks and peeked in the windows of the school. We walked up the trail to the salmon hatchery, a two-mile-long elevated cedar-plank walkway that wound over thick green devil’s club, fern, and salmonberry.
That afternoon there was a knock on the hull. Wally Bolton stood on the dock.
“Want two crabs?” he said, pointing a meaty thumb at his boat.
He’d caught six red snappers, and insisted on handing over two ginormous Dungeness crabs.
“Those are the biggest crabs I’ve ever seen,” Jeff said, grinning.
We slipped Wally twenty bucks. He protested, then showed me how to hold the huge crabs by their pincers. When I lifted one up, its shell was nearly as wide as I was.
An hour later when we were walking the cedar boardwalk, a teenaged boy followed. What does he want? we both wondered, looking over our shoulders. He came up behind us.
“Hey, Wally wants you guys to stop by his house later,” the boy said.
“He does?”
“Yep, told me to tell you.”
We laughed at ourselves, feeling like a team again.
When we found Wally’s place, he opened the aluminum-clad door, leaned out, and said almost apologetically, “From my deep freeze.” He then handed over a gorgeous ling cod fillet. It was two feet long, had spots like a leopard’s, and even encased in plastic wrap, its scales glinted gold in the sun.
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