“Wish boats?” Kai lifted his marshmallow out of the fire.
“It’s a summer-camp thing,” Beck said, “for remembering a good time.” He handed Kai the last of the chocolate and graham crackers. Kai expertly slid the marshmallow off its stick like he’d been making s’mores all his life.
“We need candles,” Jet added.
She rooted around in the remains of the picnic supplies and scooped up three tea lights. They crossed under the Astoria Bridge and dropped down into a small sandy cove on the edge of the Columbia.
“There’s plenty of driftwood,” Jet said. She swept her flashlight over a tangle of weathered bark and branches. “This would make a good boat.” She handed a foot-long section of cedar bark to Kai and took a similar piece for herself. “And then you can decorate it however you want.”
Jet looked around until she found a beach rose to decorate her boat with. Kai took out a pocketknife to carve something. Beck wove a raft from sticks and sword ferns, then walked along the water looking for shells. When he was out of earshot, Jet went over and sat in the circle of light beside Kai. It was the first moment they’d had alone since the race that morning.
“Oliver said you’re going home.”
Kai nodded. He didn’t look up from his carving. Jet looked over his shoulder. He was carving words in Japanese. He didn’t pull away, so Jet leaned back and waited for him to talk. The constant rush of the river and the hum of the fish cannery gave them both a cover for saying nothing. There were things Jet wanted to say. And for once in her life, she wanted to say them carefully.
While she was still choosing words, Kai turned his wish boat toward her, tapped the first of the characters with the tip of his knife, and said, “Obā-san.”
Jet was going to say something about the race, but Kai’s single word stopped her in her tracks. She and Kai had poured all their energy into the race for a whole month. Sails every morning, practice with the GPS after lunch, study of the river charts at night. It’s good for him, she’d told herself. I’m helping him forget his troubles. But maybe, maybe all this time, he’d been wanting to remember.
“You’re going home for the funeral,” she said.
Kai kept carving, slowly, carefully. He paused from time to time to blow the little chips of bark away from his work. Jet wanted to hug him, but he’d hate that. All she knew of her own grandparents were pictures and stories. They’d died before her mom and dad got married. She couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to lose the people you’d gone to every day after school. It would be like losing the parents you knew better than your own parents. More than the night breeze made her shiver. Jet zipped up her jacket and stuffed her hands in her pockets.
The one image from their adventures of the day that wouldn’t leave her head was not crashing into the ship or making the jump. It was the moment she and Kai had pulled alongside the Blue Dolphin. The boy inside was so small—peanut-butter smear on his face, dinosaur on his life jacket, and complete terror in his eyes. And then Kai had said, “We’ll make it home.”
Home.
And just for a second, Jet saw hope light him up. Kai was busy boarding. He didn’t see. But she couldn’t shake the look of him. That boy had thought he was lost, and Kai had saved him. Jet wanted to do something for Kai. Say something. Shout something. Something like, Hey, you big dope! You saved somebody’s life!
That would be the wrong thing to say. She curled her arms around her knees and waited for something better to occur to her.
“He said run,” Kai said quietly. “But I wouldn’t do it. I was so sure I could save them. I thought I’d taken them far enough.” He looked at the lights across the river. “And then the water kept coming and coming, and Ojī-san said, ‘Don’t make her watch you die. Please.’ ”
Kai’s voice dropped to a whisper. “So I ran. I didn’t look back. Not one time.”
Jet stole a look at her cousin. He wasn’t crying. He was a person who’d run out of tears. Jet felt full of them, but she forced them back. It would only make him feel worse to see her cry. She waited until her voice was free from wobbles.
“Did they see you run?”
After a long silence, Kai nodded.
“So at least you gave him his last wish.”
Kai didn’t answer. Jet was in danger of hugging him, but just in time Beck’s flashlight came closer. Jet dug into her pocket for the candles.
“One for your grandma and one for your grandpa,” she whispered before Beck could hear.
Kai took both candles and set them gently on his wish boat.
Beck set his elaborately decorated raft on the sand and settled in beside Jet. His raft was loaded down with shells and leaves and twigs, as if the pile of them could equal the size of the wish Jet knew he would be making. Her own biggest wish seemed tiny compared to wanting your dad to walk again. Jet handed him the last candle. Beck lit them. He put one of his mussel shells and an empty crab claw onto Jet’s boat so it wouldn’t be so plain without a candle. They pushed their wish boats into the river, and the rising tide kept them turning in a slow circle in the cove at the edge of the river’s deeper currents.
“Well, Captain,” Beck said. “Speech?”
“Yeah,” Kai said, turning to Jet. “What do you have to say for yourself, Captain of the Saga?”
“Oh my gosh,” Jet said, burying her face in her hands. All the things she’d wanted to say before rushed back. “Our boat. Our dads’ boat! I’m so sorry, Kai.”
“Now how are we going to teach Oliver to sail?” Kai said.
“I know. I’m really, really sorry!”
“That’s pretty optimistic!” Beck said. “How many times do you think you can patch a boat that old?”
“Patch it!” Jet said. “Oh, come on, Oliver wouldn’t run it aground. He’s a better sailor than that.”
“He does like to engage pirates, though,” Kai said.
Jet imagined Oliver at the helm, mainsheet in one hand and cutlass in the other. It was a fair point. The boy was a shipwreck waiting to happen.
Beck laughed. “We’re going to have to make up some rules about pirates. But we’ll make good crew out of him, you’ll see.”
“He’s going to have a good teacher, anyway,” Kai said.
“You could teach a mollusk to sail,” Beck added.
“If only I had a boat,” Jet said.
“There’ll be other boats,” Beck said. “Better boats.”
“She was pretty, though,” Jet said wistfully. “Do you think it’s bad karma to sink your very first command?”
Beck nodded vigorously. “Very bad karma.”
“Your future at sea is doomed,” Kai said with a smile. “Unless you carry a very special good-luck charm with you at all times.”
“A charm?”
“I have just the thing.”
Kai dug in his pocket and put the charm in her hand. It was round and heavy. Jet didn’t have to look to know what it was.
“Kai, it’s yours. Dad wanted you to have it. Your father was saving it for you.”
“If it’s mine, then it’s mine to give.”
“But—”
“Please!” Kai closed her hand around their great-grandfather’s compass. “Just hold on to it until next summer. You can give it back to me then.”
“You’re coming back?” Jet said.
“Well, yes,” Kai said, a little flustered. “I mean, I didn’t ask my parents yet because they’re still kind of busy, but they’ll say yes…because…because I’ll figure out how to make them say yes. Because I want to be here just as much as I want to be there.”
He opened the lid of the compass that was still in Jet’s outstretched hand. The dial swung left and then right, settling with the gold arrow pointing across the Columbia.
“And in the meantime, I’ll be right…here.” He pointed to the mark on the dial. “Two hundred sixty degrees west by south.”
“But what about you?” Jet said. “Don’t you want this for
when you’re a captain, too? There are maritime academies in Japan, right?”
“Best ones in the world!” Kai grinned.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Jet said, warming up her arguments. Kai saw it coming and held up a hand in surrender.
“Take your maritime academy. I don’t want to command ships. I want to make them.”
“Really?” Beck said.
Kai nodded enthusiastically. “Sailing ships,” he said.
“Are you going to race them?” Jet said, plans already brewing.
“Maybe, if I can find a helmsman with a little more sense of responsibility. Respect for my handiwork.” He nudged her on the shoulder.
“Shut up!” Jet said, nudging him back. “That ship outweighed me by, like, eight million pounds! What was I supposed to do?”
The three of them launched into a heated argument about sailing tactics, and as they bickered and laughed and drew out strategy diagrams in the sand, the tide turned. Their wish boats caught the outgoing current, slipped out of the cove, and headed for the open ocean.
Detail left
Detail right
To go to sea is not for everyone, and in a profession dominated by men, it certainly seems like an unlikely career path for women. It is a lifestyle with long periods of time away from home and requires juggling family and a normal home life with work. But it is all possible now.
That was not always the case, however. We can thank a handful of brave women who were lighthouse keepers and rescued sailors in the 1860s, like Ida Lewis of Rhode Island. More recently, the women who attended the country’s maritime academies in the 1970s—when it was still considered “not a girl job”—paved the way for future women. Today it is normal to have women enrolled at the maritime academies and working aboard ship.
Going to sea can mean the wonder of visiting ports around the world, witnessing different cultures, and seeing countries as a working sailor rather than as a tourist. It can mean following your passion, living your love for being on the water, and finding your place. “Breaking the barrier” may at first seem impossible for Jet, but it is not so difficult anymore. Today the option is there for everyone.
The opportunity to follow your dreams and ambitions and to develop your own sea stories is important. You can “sail like a girl” and be successful. As Per says to his daughter, Jet, “Ambition is your true north.” What a wonderful vision! No one can fail when being true to themselves—when following their true north.
Captain Deborah Dempsey Columbia River Bar Pilot (1994–2012)
COLUMBIA BAR AND CAPTAIN DEMPSEY
The Columbia Bar is the most dangerous passage in the Pacific. More than two thousand vessels and seven hundred souls have been lost over the bar in recorded history. The first bar pilot was Comcomly, a chief of the Chinook tribe, which has lived at the mouth of the Columbia River for many centuries. In 1816, he began guiding sailing ships over the bar from a canoe. Members of the Hudson’s Bay Company also provided early pilotage. The current bar pilots’ association formed in 1846, making it one of the oldest continually operating businesses in Oregon. There are sixteen bar pilots, all with an unlimited Master Mariner’s license that qualifies them to captain any ship of any kind in the world. It takes decades of at-sea time to gain this qualification. These pilots take three thousand to four thousand ships over the bar every year, which bring approximately 40 million tons of cargo into the ports of Oregon and Washington.
All the characters in this book are fictional except for Captain Deborah Dempsey. She was the first woman to graduate from a U.S. maritime academy, the first to carry a Master Mariner’s license and command cargo ships in international waters, and in 1994 the first woman ever to pilot the Columbia Bar. She retired from her pilotage after eighteen years and now teaches part-time at a maritime academy and shares her love of small-craft sailing at the Community Boating Center in Bellingham, Washington. She is a masterful teller of sea stories.
SAILING
The Astoria Regatta has been a regular summer festival in Oregon since 1894. It features many boating events, but the Treasure Island Race is my own invention. As far as I know, nobody runs a sailboat race that uses geocaching. As I’ve imagined it, the race takes place upriver, away from the very dangerous conditions over the Columbia Bar in the more sheltered waters of the Lewis and Clark National Wildlife Refuge. The course I’ve laid out on the map would likely take a little longer than it does in the story. Throughout the book I’ve tried to be accurate to the local conditions and true to the sailing terms without being overly technical. Everything Jet and Kai do on the water is possible, but some of it would take an extra helping of both skill and luck. If you’re curious about how sailing works, there is a terrific sailing simulator by National Geographic that shows how the wind and sails interact to make a boat move: nationalgeographic.com/volvooceanrace/interactives/sailing/index.html.
GLOSSARY OF SAILING TERMS
beat: to sail upwind, which requires zigzagging back and forth
catamaran: a racing sailboat with twin hulls and usually a cloth deck
cleat: a device for securing a line
course: the direction in which the boat is pointed
dinghy: a small open boat that can be sailed or rowed
downwind: the direction the wind is going
helms alee: a warning to the crew that the boat is making a tack
helmsman: the crew member who steers
port: the left side of the boat looking forward
ready about: a command to the crew to get ready to make a tack
rig: to prepare a boat for sailing by raising the mast and readying the sails
run: to sail downwind, which can be done without zigzagging
shackle: a device for attaching a sheet to a sail
ship oars: a command to the crew to stop rowing and secure the oars
starboard: the right side of the boat looking forward
tack: to turn the nose of the boat through the wind in order to make a zigzag course; as the bow turns, the mainsail swings across the boat, which means the crew must duck to avoid being hit by the boom
trim the sail: to adjust the sail’s angle for maximum speed
upwind: the direction the wind is coming from
wing and wing: to sail downwind with the mainsail and jib sail on opposite sides of the boat
TSUNAMIS
The tsunami at the beginning of the story is a fictional event, although a similar, larger earthquake and tsunami struck the northern coast of Japan on March 11, 2010. A tsunami forms when an underwater volcanic eruption, landslide, or earthquake sends massive amounts of energy through the ocean. As this flow of energy approaches the shallow water along a shore, the energy becomes concentrated, and a powerful wave is created. Tsunami waves can be as tall as one hundred feet and move as quickly as six hundred miles per hour. A tsunami has incredible destructive power, crushing and sweeping away everything in its path. Fortunately, NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) runs the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which detects underwater earthquakes and spreads the warning to communities in the path of dangerous waves.
GEOCACHING
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a network of satellites that orbit the earth and beam down signals, which can be used to pinpoint position, speed, and time. On May 2, 2000, GPS became available to the public, and one day later a man from Oregon decided to test how well the system worked by hiding a box of “treasures” near his home in Beaver Creek. He posted the coordinates of the box so that fellow GPS enthusiasts could find it using a GPS tracker. Dozens did, and a new sport was born. Anyone can play; all you need is a sense of adventure and a GPS device (which can be loaded as an app on many phones). There is a website for logging treasures that you’ve hidden and for getting the coordinates for treasures to find. More than six million people are geocachers, and hidden treasures can be found in hundreds of countries all over the world. There’s probably one ne
ar you right now. You can learn lots more about geocaching on geocaching.com.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
If you enjoyed this story, you will love the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, about four siblings who spend their summers sailing in England’s Lake District.
Graham Salisbury wrote a story about a Boy Scout troop that survives an earthquake and tsunami on the Big Island of Hawaii. Night of the Howling Dogs is a gripping read and is based on a true story.
Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories is a collection of stories about being a Japanese or bicultural teenager in the midst of the tragic events of the 2011 Sendai earthquake. It was edited by Holly Thompson, and a portion of the proceeds go to relief for children displaced by the tsunami.
For more information about bar pilots, read “Steering Ships Through a Treacherous Waterway” by Matt Jenkins, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2009. If you are looking for an introduction to sailing, The Complete Sailor by David Seidman is a comprehensive and readable guide with lots of useful illustrations.
RECOMMENDED POEMS
There are many poems about the sea. Here are four that I read while working on this story.
Emily Dickinson never went to sea but beautifully captured in eight brief lines the longing of a landsman for open water in her poem “Exultation is the going.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote “Crossing the Bar,” a poem that many seafarers can quote from memory and whose last lines are sometimes found on a sailor’s grave.
Robert Louis Stevenson is best known for his novel Treasure Island, but he also wrote poetry, including a ballad about a sailor struggling with bad weather and rough seas between two headlands much like the Columbia Bar. It’s called “Christmas at Sea.”
The Turn of the Tide Page 16