The Outer Harbour

by Wayde Compton

  There.

  Jean looks at the essay. They’ve turned it into a protected zone, a national site for research, she points out. Nobody can go there but scientists.

  Indian land, he says. Brand new land. Brand new colonization.

  Fletcher makes a gesture toward the kitchen window. He says, It’s worth some kind of intervention, occupation. Throw a monkey wrench in the data collection. Get in on the anti-colonial ground floor, like.

  She looks back at the essay. Hyaloclastite breccia. Opaque petrology. Co-ignimbrite plumes. The language sits there and stares back. The language of dirt. A hundred fancy words for dirt. Flaming dirt rising up out of the dirt spewing a mist of dirt all over the settled dirt. It is impossible for her not to think of the Bible, impossible for her not to think of clay, impossible for her not to think of a few huffs of breath and how that’s us—impossible for her not to think of how colonized her thinking is. Ground floor to glass ceiling.

  FLETCHER IS FROM Victoria, was adopted by whites, had a Snohomish mother from the US, and a local father from a band unknown to Fletcher or anyone else who might tell him. He’s never met any of his blood relatives. Jean, on the other hand, is pretty much black.

  At the first meeting, a copy of a book called Surtsey: Iceland’s Newest Island, with a photograph of an erupting volcano on the front, sits in the middle on the coffee table. Jean focuses on it during the planning.

  I’m not Native, Jean says, planting her non-sequitur in the air. Everyone turns to look at her, but nobody says anything. I don’t know if I should be here, she says. I mean, I figure I should say that right now. Should I be here?

  Fletcher rolls his eyes.

  Let me get this straight, Rob says to Fletcher, ignoring Jean. You want us to get in a little inflatable boat and go out to an active volcano in the middle of the salt chuck?

  The French did it. There. Fletcher points at the book. Journalists put a dinghy on that just a few days after it emerged, while it was still exploding on the other side. Then they claimed the island, half joking. Completely pissed off Iceland. But the cone on ours is barely active now. It’s very doable.

  Alison says, Should we do it, though?

  Jean stares at Marc’s uncrossed arms. He has a tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. Marc told her that he inked the image himself. The outline of a wing, raggedly drawn. Blue-green, freehanded. She imagines the pose required to hold a needle with one hand and draw steadily upon your own arm—to hold yourself in front of yourself like you would cradle a clipboard. She realizes the shaking evident in the image is the pain that looped between the art of one arm and the mark-making other.

  FLETCHER, JEAN, AND Rob study all they can of the island—books and news articles. They fill their home with words about that half-kilometre hill of ash just this side of the line between the Strait of Georgia and the Burrard Inlet. Fletcher muses that they are studying the history of the place: a country with a lessthan two-year timeline. Its ancient past was under the ocean, Fletcher muses, under the ocean floor even, sloshing around in the core of the Earth. A midden of magma, he says.

  They know that earlier, when Pauline Johnson Island first bubbled up out of the water, West Vancouver, often in the path of the prevailing winds, was carpeted with hot ash, and whole neighbourhoods had to be evacuated. A day later, when the winds shifted, the same happened to Point Grey. Then Bowen Island got its turn. There was no telling at first how large the volcano would get or how long it would continue erupting. Volcanologists observed it at careful distances as it blasted ejecta into the sky. Parliament declared the island a restricted ecological reserve, and named it after the Mohawk poet who had chosen Vancouver as her adopted home.

  When the island coughs up its vapours, Fletcher jokingly says to Jean and Rob, it is speaking Mohawk.

  After its first harrowing weeks above sea level, the volcano settled to a simmer. It is still technically erupting, but now only produces a slow series of wispy, grey exhalations. The residents of the shores of the Strait and the Outer Harbour cautiously returned, swept up, shovelled away the thick layer of tephra that coated everything they owned, and carried on.

  The little island is droplet-like. Its shape seems strangely unnatural, as if it had been designed rather than born, but scientists point out that tidal erosion will quickly re-sculpt its shorelines. Barring future eruptions, erosion might destroy the island altogether in a matter of years, they say. Nevertheless, the surface is already showing signs of plant and animal “colonization”—their word—is already becoming a part of the living systems of the coast.

  Sooner or later, Fletcher says, a pop can will wash up on its shores and it will be officially globalized. On the grid, he says.

  They are neither scientists nor sailors nor strategists. Just students. But they borrow a Zodiac and buy a flare gun.

  For Jean there is within this crazy plan a kind of retort to the Vancouver she has known: the school teacher, whom she loved, who one day out of nowhere called her a golliwog; all the where-are-you-froms and all the where-are-you-really-froms; being looked at or looked through, depending, but being summed up, appraised, pre-emptively estranged. The plan they had was not books, not theories, but action, risk, transmutation, a half-suicidal whirlwind, something worth eruption. Something to capsize for.

  Fletcher, beyond the mundane planning, seems inordinately obsessed with the technical composition of the island. He is learning the jargon, acquiring the lingo. Jean gets about half of what he’s saying when he speaks the language of palagonitization and wind drift, allochthons and ferry wash. Fletcher almost preaches the Latin and Greek words, the science words, from the pages of the books he’s borrowed from the library, reading aloud to Jean and Rob. Fletcher is high on geology.

  But there’s also the moment he’s on the porch with her, night, wind, rain, the herbal tea he clings to, and he says, Words have to live outside as much as in, I think. Like children. If all your words are inside, their meanings will only go so far. Words need the air and weather to make things develop.

  The language nevertheless makes its way into Jean’s dreams, which are more and more about Pauline Johnson Island. In these dreams, she transforms into some class of life in the island’s ecological succession. She is seagrass. She is bracken fern. She is thimbleberry. She’s a starfish rotating in the untouched shallows, near, but not of, the rippled land, circling around and around it. At first, to her, as she and Fletcher and Rob and Alison and Marc plan, the beasts are only beasts and the plants are only plants. But now they are flora and fauna, a chain of creatures spreading north and south and east and west from all shores. A dandelion seed under the feathers of a gull. A pregnant spider in the deep dry knot of a driftwood branch. When Fletcher tells her that they call seeds that drift over on the wind “diaspores,” she makes him show her the book that says this. She re-reads the sentence five times over.

  She can’t think of a single person related to her by blood who knows how to swim.

  THEY KEEP A photograph of the island on their refrigerator door, a picture torn out of Maclean’s. When Alison and Rob are out on the back porch smoking, Dara, their four-year-old daughter, points at it and asks Jean, What’s that?

  It’s an island in the inlet.

  In what?

  Jean takes Dara by the hand to the living room, opens the atlas, and shows her. We’re here, Jean says. It’s there.

  Dara looks at the map and then up at Jean. The child’s eyes seem to darken as she thinks.

  That’s the inlet, Jean says, tracing it with her finger, and that’s the island. It doesn’t matter what they call these, though. They’re yours, whatever names they use. This new island is yours. You’ve never had it, but we’re going to give it back to you, Jean says.

  WHILE THEY ARE waiting for the summer, Fletcher takes Jean to the Museum of Anthropology at UBC on a fair day. But they don’t go in. He takes her behind it, to the site of the old Point Grey Battery, where guns waited for a Japanese invasion that
never came seventy years earlier. High ground. They look across the water toward the island, a small grey hump on the surface of the ocean. She sees a wisp of steam marking it like a flag, though the volcano’s cone is supposed to be inactive this week.

  Another day they drive out to Lighthouse Park, on the opposite side of the inlet, and look from there. They are a little further from the island on this side, but again the antenna of smoke ascending from its centre is there. When it’s time to go, she looks back and over her shoulder at Point Grey, where they were before. She imagines a resonance, an etch of her presence in the view from the previous week, a spiritual echo from across the body of water. A premature ghost of herself.

  Fletcher clasps her shoulder and points to the open sea, so she looks. He smiles, his eyes behind his sunglasses, and he says to Jean, That container ship there? It’s probably full of fucking televisions. Televisions on the water. Thousands of miles, yeah? You’d think teleportation machines existed until you really think about a thing like that. They talk about myths. A pile of rectangles on my ocean. That’s the real fucking myth.

  Jean watches the ship crawl across the flat blue until she sees what Fletcher sees.

  THEY WAIT FOR summer, for a long stretch of easy weather and warmth. Watery calm. Fletcher is studying boating books. But he doesn’t think it will be necessary to do a practice run. The presence of the island has killed a lot of the shipping traffic, so he thinks it’ll be simple. Rob likes to break the tension by messing with him, calling him Skipper. Or sometimes just Skip. When they’re arguing, they call him Captain Vancouver. Sometimes they even call him Captain Bligh.

  Most of the arguing is over the communiqué. At one meeting, Fletcher presents a long essay to the group, which he calls a draft, and he invites their intervention. But when the four of them start picking apart what he has written, correcting phrases and altering the wording, Fletcher shouts until he gets his way.

  Nevertheless, at the next meeting he’s entered the changes, giving them each a copy of the document titled “Liberation of the New Pan-Indigenous Territory.”

  Jean turns the word symmetry over and over in her mind until it sounds wrong, made-up, fabricated. Symmetry. Starfish. Symmetry. Sand dollars. Symmetry. Asymmetrical resistance. Fractals of bodies made out of bodies and carrying forth the bodies of the past.

  SHE CAN’T TELL whether or not they are together. They are planning and spending a lot of time with each other. But she’s not sure what all it is, what more it might be.

  Fletcher was bounced around a lot as a kid, Alison says when Jean asks. House to house, foster homes. I know a bit about that myself. There’s a quiet part to him. I don’t know what’s there.

  Dara interrupts, asks if she can be taken to the park. Alison tells her to go put on her shoes and the kid sprints for the front hall.

  Whatever it is you’re going to get from him, Alison says, you’re probably getting it now.

  Jean’s feelings hover.

  2

  Chiasmata. Synapomorphy. Mitosis. Clade. Chromatid. Uracil. Allele. Plasmid. Haplotype. Diploid. Nucleotide. Cline. Meiosis. Interkinesis. Holophyly. Thymine.

  Three months later, in the summer, on the Zodiac with Fletcher at the helm, on the sun-glazed water, Jean feels the first real rush of panic. They are navigating out of False Creek, with a hull full of minimal gear: a flat of bottled water, their rolled-up banner, a canary-yellow Grundig hand-crank radio. She doesn’t fear the police, to whom they’ll eventually surrender, as much as she does the ocean, now that they are actually skipping across its mask-like surface.

  Rob and Alison are sitting together in the middle of the boat, shouting through the noise of the motor at each other. Marc sits back with the gear, lounging in his seat with his shirt off, as if he’s on vacation.

  Jean catches Alison’s eyes. Her fear, she’s sure, is apparent. Alison breaks off her argument with Rob.

  We were just arguing about a spelling mistake, Alison says. A typo. That’s all. Alison holds up her phone, the only one they’ve brought, and she says, I just sent the communiqué off. It’s done. We’ll be there soon. Relax.

  Jean nods and picks up the yellow shortwave. Hugs it to her chest like it could be eased.

  THE LOW SLOPE on the horizon is there, but the thin tower of smoke that plumes upward and leans slightly in their direction is what finally holds their attention. The sight quiets them all. The island’s emanations are minimal, and have remained unchanged for quite some time, but still, the suggestion of fire causes them to turn mentally inward.

  What’s the correct verb, she wonders: land, beach, disembark? Whatever it is they’ll do, she thinks, they’ll do it upon an earthly fuse.

  THE ISLAND AIR seems to shift between cold and warm. Jean wonders if what she feels is only the heat of her imagination or if the island is venting. Standing there, on the solid ground, she feels a sudden pulse of nausea, and she coughs until everything in her stomach comes up and out on the ash.

  Waited till you were on dry land to be seasick, Marc says.

  Alison watches her, goes to her side, pats her back while Jean’s bent double.

  Afterward, Jean buries her bile with a few kicks, covering it with the island’s moonlike dust.

  JEAN LOOKS TOWARD the centre, at the spire of smoke coming out of the cone. It’s steadily rising, but there’s no lava. No danger that she can see. But being this close to the smoke itself, a few city blocks distance, is alarming. They gather their matériel together—their tents, the cooler, and the banner—and march through the tephra. By the time they are seated at the top of the little slope, their clothes are powdered with grey. The air smells like sulphur and saltwater. It’s humid, but every few moments, as the breeze shifts, the wind flanks Jean and turns oven-dry. She is inside an elixir, a potion in the form of territory.

  The point now is to wait for the communiqué to work its way through the channels of reportage and security, all the way to where they are, to the place that makes them illegal by being there—standing, walking, waiting, thinking, peopling it. Being people where they shouldn’t be. Waiting for time to bring them in.

  THEY EXPECT HELICOPTERS eventually, and each of them at different times steals a furtive look into the sky, at the eastern horizon, in the direction of the city. Police helicopters. News helicopters. The former will come to take them away, the latter to take their images from here to put on screens everywhere else. That’s how big the plan is, how expansive, yet how small.

  Their banner reads UNCEDED NATIVE LAND. Red spray paint on Fletcher’s repurposed bed sheet. A couple poles. Holes so the wind doesn’t belly it, lift it, set it sailing.

  JEAN NOTICES A pocked boulder the size of a newspaper box that rests half buried in the ash several metres down the shore. It occurs to her that at some point, months earlier, that great chunk of stone flew out of the volcano and landed there. It is painted over with white bird shit, she sees, but there are no sea-birds on the island. She spots a gull out there above the water, but it just glides past. Passes them up like it knows something.

  The column of smoke is in the centre, like an axis, at this moment leaning nowhere.

  ALISON TAKES A piece of paper out of her back pocket and unfolds it. Dara drew this, she says, holding it with both hands. Jean looks at the crayon drawing of the island and notices that Dara has drawn six human figures on the beach. She’s got them all in different shades of brown and gold, under a cream-coloured sun. Dara has put herself there, alongside them on the island, the smallest of the smiling stick-people, though Jean knows she is with Alison’s mom.

  Alison finishes drinking from her plastic water bottle and tips it upside down, draining out the last drops. She kneels down and scoops aside some of the ashy ground, digs out a hole. She re-folds Dara’s drawing, then rolls it into a scroll and slips it into the container. She caps it and drops the bottle in the hole, covers it over. Maybe one of those scientists will come across it, she says, smiling. My girl will end up in the Muse
um of Anthropology. Authentic First Nations glyphs from one of the lesser coastal islands.

  Jean laughs, and then she tells Alison.

  THE BEAT OF the surf intensifies, or maybe Jean has just noticed it. It’s crashing faster, even though the tide is receding. She looks to the shoreline, but turning her head makes her dizzy, nauseous. It’s either her sickness or the sound, but something is bending, then she realizes that what she’s hearing is not the tide but the thrum of blades.

  On the horizon they can now clearly see the shapes of two boats and a helicopter above, closing in from the east. The chopper’s windscreen is lit by rays of orange.

  The helicopter moves ferociously fast. They can only stand and watch it.

  It flies over them. Terrifyingly low. They all instinctively dive to the ground, lie on their bellies as it roars past. A rain of paper comes down upon them.

  Leaflets. The same text over and over. It begins: HOW TO SURRENDER.

  THEY TURN ON the radio. Not a word about them yet.

  Then Alison’s cell phone goes off.

  They are all quiet as she takes it out and looks at it until it stops. Then it rings again.

  She throws it into the surf, sidearm. It skips beautifully three times.

  THE ARGUMENT:

  It’s so far been all police, all the boats and aircraft. They have obviously grounded the media. The island’s relative inaccessibility is the cause of this flaw in their plan. No media, no point. They must at least rate a single photograph.

  Fletcher says they need time. Someone will break through, some telephoto lens will bust the cordon and get their image. It’s inevitable. Cops can’t police the whole ocean. You can practically windsurf your way here. They need to buy time.

  They need to delay the takedown that is on its way.

  But no one is sure how to do it.