Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  The opinions fed into the next category, the “examinations for discovery.” These are when plaintiff and defendant sit down with the opposing lawyer for a good grilling while their own lawyer hovers, ready to dart to the rescue at the first sign of weakness. Finding weakness is what examinations are about, and cases are won or lost in discovery. There were six examinations in the pile. My father’s was by far the thickest. I packed them all.

  Next were the trial transcripts. What people said in the trial was probably even less believable than the examinations, and these records were a long way from the black and white of the hospital records. Thinner too, because this trial only lasted a few days before a deal was struck and everyone went home. I could bring the trial transcripts along without sinking Vera.

  The final category was my father’s writings about the trial. Unlike all the others, this one was open-ended. It started soon after the writ of summons was served, and he added to it until he could no longer operate a computer or even a pen. It was to be the story of his experience, a diary expanded into a book, a “stream of thought record” describing his encounter with what he called “the armoured tanks of the law.” The project was never finished, fading out like his handwriting and finally wandering off the page. I selected the latest draft and added it to the “take” pile which, I now realized, dwarfed what I would leave behind.

  In all, I had about ten inches of paper to go cruising with us. My father’s life, wedged under the floorboards. But there was one folder that didn’t seem to sort with anything else, portentously labelled “Truth.” I decided to get truth out of the way before we left. There was only one thing in there, but it said everything about my father’s values. It was a long essay called “The Search for Truth,” by Justice Marvin E. Frankel, a bulldog who seized truth in his jaws and never let go. It must have been heady reading for my father, and his orange highlighter had squeaked across nearly every page. Here was the way to trump incompetence, criticism, and calumny: truth was what mattered!

  Except that, according to Justice Frankel, an advocate’s main loyalty was not to truth but to his client. So, the conventional skills of adversaries include the techniques of truth-bending. Few lawyers, Frankel wrote, believe their clients tell them the unvarnished truth.

  For my father, this was just what the doctor ordered. Frankel’s description of judges as “passive moderators” viewing the case from a “peak of Olympian ignorance” must have made his heart turn; it certainly brought his orange highlighter out. Maybe this was what he had been up to, all those bleak years after the trial, downstairs in his study with the curtains drawn and the heat cranked up, pouncing on high-minded sentiments as though they could somehow justify what had happened to him. Psychologists talk about “confirmation bias” when people seek out information that confirms what they already believe. Well, here was the textbook example, and it didn’t do him much good.

  Hospital records, media stories, expert opinions, and the unimportance of truth: these were the murky waters that closed over my father’s head. All that was left of his naïveté was a page of Four Seasons Hotel notepaper floating on the surface. On it was written, “Did A.T. believe me? Would anyone have believed me?” A.T. was Allan Thackray, his lawyer, who we will meet later. My father probably wrote these words on the way back to Victoria, while the skyline of Vancouver and his aborted trial receded in the widening V of the ferry’s wake. They weren’t the words of someone who had been planning to lie.

  The Lasqueti Triangle

  It was still windy in Mark Bay the next morning, but the wind now came from the southeast. When I poked my head through the companionway, everything had changed, as though a completely new fleet had snuck into the anchorage in the dead of night. The James Island Belle and its banshee windmill hung way off in the other direction; now we threatened to tangle anchors with a forty-foot powerboat I had hardly noticed the day before. A wind shift had rearranged everything. Southeasters were a mixed blessing: going north, as we were, they came from behind and made for easy sailing, but they could also be storm winds, accompanied by several days of blustery, rainy weather.

  But we weren’t going to get to the Nahwitti Bar by sitting in Mark Bay and fretting about a southeaster. I listened to the weather forecast while Hatsumi made breakfast.

  “Looks like a couple days of this,” I said, scribbling down the long-range prognosis.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Twenty-five knots late this afternoon.”

  “Charley needs to be fed.”

  “And Whiskey Golf is active today.”

  That got her attention.

  “Today?”

  Whiskey Golf (Area WG, on the chart) is a modified parallelogram dropped over a ten-by-fifteen mile stretch of the Strait of Georgia, like a haphazardly surveyed building lot in the middle of an uninhabited forest. It’s one of two military exercise areas off Vancouver Island — the other one, Whiskey Hotel, on the west coast not far from Victoria, was almost two months away. By some arcane political arrangement I couldn’t even begin to fathom, both were shared with the United States. Whiskey Golf, the bigger of the two, is used by the U.S. Navy for testing torpedoes, which could be fired from submarines, airplanes, or boats, and whose movements were tracked by an underwater cat’s cradle of sensors. When Whiskey Golf was active, you had to go around it.

  And that wasn’t always easy, especially in a sailboat. I imagine the joint committee who decided the boundary of Whiskey Golf where it runs close to the shore, defining what the Canadian Department of National Defence calls the “transit area.” Uniformed men circle a chart table, pondering the route Vera will have to take. Ash drops from cigarettes glued between thin lips, and the harsh overhead glare bounces off crewcut scalps. Finally, a retired U.S. admiral leans forward, brushing cookie crumbs off the coffee-stained chart. He taps the chain of nasty reefs that follows the Vancouver Island shoreline for five miles north of Nanoose Bay, where the naval base is.

  “How about right here, gentlemen?” He inks a wavering line, following the prickly shore. “Send ’em past those big ol’ rocks, turn ’em up here, past those, whaddaya call them, Ballenas Islands. Let’s leave those boaters, what, a thousand yards of sea room? Hell, that’s ten football fields! Whadda y’all think?”

  “Sounds good to us,” say the Canadians, in unison.

  And it is, on a fine day, but today might be ugly.

  “Shikata ga nai,” said Hatsumi. It can’t be helped.

  The wind rounded in after us as soon as we cleared Departure Bay. We got the jib out with a minimum of clattering and cursing and settled into the long downwind run.

  “Not so bad,” I said. “We’ll be at Lasqueti Island in four hours.”

  But I was wrong. We made good time along the western edge of Whiskey Golf under jib alone, passing the surveillance dishes and domes that encrust Winchelsea Island by noon. But the southeaster behaved as advertised, building under darkening skies until, by the time we were nearing the final turn at Ballenas Island, where my resentment toward all that military hardware whirring and clicking deep inside Whiskey Golf builds to a peak, the incessant roll and lurch of a downwind passage was turning Charley green.

  “I’m taking him below,” said Hatsumi. “He’s scared, look.”

  “Don’t do it.” Charley did look miserable, wedged in a corner, his ears laid back. “You’ll get sick. Really.” Vera slewed violently, Charley scrabbled at the seat, and Hatsumi scooped him up and disappeared with him down the companionway. I brought Vera around ninety degrees just as Lasqueti and Texada Islands, the landmarks that mattered, began to dissolve behind curtains of rain. The change in course brought the wind onto our beam, and it felt twice as strong as it did when it was behind us. We started to roll, a slovenly wallow that put one rail in the water and then the other. I heard a bang from below, followed by a moan: a cabin locker had burst open, dumping shoes and bottles over the two forms
curled up on the floor.

  “Gotta get the main up,” I called down. “We’re going sideways.” By then it was clear that whatever could go wrong, would. The main halyard got away from me just enough to snag around one of the steps that run up the mast. I managed to get twenty feet of sail up before it refused to move further in either direction. I secured what I could, and Vera began to move forward again, but by now the rain had arrived in earnest. The coast of Lasqueti Island, which I knew had only one opening where we could find shelter, became a grey blur. My glasses misted over.

  “Where are we?” When I peered below, all I could see of Hatsumi was the soles of her shoes, poking through the bathroom door. Small bottles of Japanese cosmetics rolled past her. As I watched, the rest of my wife emerged. She was clutching Charley, still in his orange life jacket, and her face was white.

  “Sorry to bother you, but I really need a position. I can’t see the opening to Bull Channel.”

  “Can’t look at the computer,” she croaked. “Get sick.”

  This was the first year we had used electronic charts. We had them on a laptop and were still getting used to the seductive belief that you knew exactly where you were. But the laptop was jammed somewhere secure now, so we were back to the old system of paper charts. I took a quick look at the radar, which confirmed that the shore of Lasqueti was only a half mile away, before my own gorge rose.

  “Well, use the old GPS then, just get me a fix, a lat-long. Come on, I can’t leave the wheel.”

  More heaving.

  “We’re on a fucking lee shore!” I reminded myself that alarm in my voice would only increase hers. “Honey.”

  The lee shore is, or should be, very high on the sailor’s list of to-avoids. A lee shore is a shore you’re being blown onto; a lee shore you couldn’t even see, I was finding out, was extra frightening. In a westerly wind, the entire west coast of Vancouver Island is the ultimate lee shore. That’s why it’s called the Graveyard of the Pacific. And that’s where we were going.

  “I’m trying,” I heard faintly from below, and she was, on her knees and clawing at the chart table where the elderly GPS was fixed. Finally, a shaking hand fluttered a hastily folded chart at me; I grabbed it, found Hatsumi’s weakly pencilled dot-and-circle that represented our position.

  “Holy shit.”

  I spun the wheel. If we hadn’t been socked in, I would be seeing breaking waves on the island’s distinctive black cliffs. Any closer, I might soon be hearing them. I started the engine and put the bow back into the waves, on a course that should take us clear of the rocks even as we went sideways. We settled in for more uncomfortable slogging. It was pouring now. It took another hour, and several more nauseating fixes, before I finally saw the entrance to Bull Passage. It really was framed in surf.

  “Just a little longer,” I said to Hatsumi, who had finally rejoined me in the cockpit. She was still white as the sail I couldn’t get down. We went wide around the corner, then hard over into Bull Passage. The rolling ceased, the engine stopped gulping, and, by bringing the main in tight, I was finally able to wrestle it down. Even the rain stopped. Just like that, the coast proved, once again, that your punishment can end abruptly, leaving you wondering what just happened. I shut down the engine, let the jib out again, and went below to put on some cobweb-blowing music. The life-affirming, C major blast of the opening of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto poured out of the cabin, bounced off the straining jib, and ascended to the heavens.

  “Hah!” I said. “Whiskey Golf, but still. We made it. I hope the guys cleared a space for us at the dock.” Vera surged ahead, steam rose from the drying decks, and Beethoven caromed off the cliffs on either side.

  ***

  “The guys” were Gordon and Bruce Jones — the Jones Boys — brothers who had operated a shellfish hatchery and farm in Skerry Bay on Lasqueti Island for thirty-five years. Both were stocky, eccentric, generous, and ferociously strong. Although I had known them for twenty years, I still found them impossible to categorize, and I won’t attempt it here. For the four years we’d been cruising these waters, we’d shown up at the farm in Vera, and every year, it became harder to untie and continue on our way. Bruce Jones’s explanation for this was always delivered with widespread arms that took in the cluttered docks, the mussel rafts, a boat they’d salvaged off a rock, Bruce’s house perched on the cliff above with its hot tub that had been empty for twenty years — and the explanation was always the same.

  “It’s the Lasqueti Triangle!”

  “We’ll stay a few more days this time,” I said.

  Skerry means rocky in Gaelic, and the Jones Boys’ shellfish operation filled half of Skerry Bay with a jumble of outbuildings and floating structures that reminded me of the floathouse communities I’d visited in Thailand. “Whatever worked” seemed to be the principle here, and whatever didn’t work was stored somewhere on the theory that, someday, it could be made to. I say floating structures because sometimes it was hard to tell what you were stepping on: it might well be a dock, but it could also be a barge that, through disuse, had turned into a sort of dock, or a workshop so full of spare parts you couldn’t actually work in it. Lines of demarcation were indistinct, so watching your step was important. Most of the floating space that wasn’t actually being used to process shellfish or raise their feed was simply another place to store whatever drifted in from where we’d just been. I wasn’t in the least surprised when, one year, I found the fuselage of a small yellow airplane tucked in behind a shed. The wings, I noticed later, were leaning against the side of Bruce’s house. They didn’t seem out of place.

  We slid past the black turtle-humps of Rabbit and Bull islands, turned left into Bull Harbour, and motored down into Skerry Bay. Through the binoculars, the farm looked as cluttered as ever. A few sailboats were anchored outside the bay, and I wondered what their owners made of the scene inside, the sudden, high-speed comings and goings of workboats, the dogs barking, the diesel generator in its shaking shed on the point, grinding away until ten o’clock at night. In addition to caretaking the nearby provincial park on Jedediah Island and running a full-time shellfish hatchery, Gordon and Bruce were the local responders for the Canadian Coast Guard, so people anchored off the farm had to be prepared for the sudden middle of the night throat-clearing of the Pac 1’s twin diesels, the firefly pinpoints of the Jones Boys’ headlamps as they jumped aboard, the dazzling eye of the searchlight, and the unapologetic wake of the big workboat churning through a sleeping anchorage.

  We managed to avoid the two horrifying rocks in Skerry Bay (Bruce: “Why should we mark them? They’re so obvious!”) and nosed in between a work launch and what looked like an aluminum party boat, twenty-five feet long, with a cabin and wide decks for lounging around on a lake and drinking. This one seemed to have sat on the bottom for a year or so; there would be another Jones story there, I knew. The dogs reached us first, and Charley was off before we had even tied up, racing up the dock with Fergie, a rangy and limping part-coyote somebody had dragged out of a ditch near Calgary. The last I saw of Charley was his orange life jacket disappearing up the ramp. Next was the barrel-shaped Simba, a crumbling, waist-high senior citizen with a grey muzzle, friendly, exhausted eyes, and a lump the size of a grapefruit hanging from his abdomen. Last year, there’d been one of those lumps on his shoulder. Maybe it had migrated. Simba let out some face-saving foghorn sounds, then began the painful process of subsiding on the dock while Bruce brought up the rear.

  “What took you so long?” he said. “Look, we even cleared a special space for you.”

  “It was nasty,” I said. The southeaster had followed us into Skerry Bay, but the sun was out now. Vera sparkled with salt. Tied up snugly to the dock, with the cliffs breaking much of the wind, it seemed like a nice day again.

  “You’re a sailboat. You love wind!”

  Bruce and Gordon had pulled so many sailboats off the rocks that their op
inion of recreational sailors was somewhere down around kayakers, which they called “speed bumps.” I didn’t take any of it seriously; I knew they had grown up cruising Desolation Sound in their parents’ sailboat, and there were two bright red Jones-made fibreglass kayaks on the roof of the shed next to me. I joined Bruce on a wooden park bench (where had that come from?) while Simba completed the operation of lying down at our feet, keeling over like a collapsing tripod. As if to confirm Bruce’s low opinion, a sailboat puttered down one side of Skerry Bay and up the other, miraculously missing both rocks.

  “He better not try anchoring down there,” said Bruce. “The end of the bay is planted in geoducks.” Geoducks (pronounced gooeyducks) were enormous clams, I knew that much. But despite many visits, I still understood little of what was going on here. What I saw above sea level made a kind of sense, but so much of it was underwater. The mussels hanging from their rafts, the vast, bubbling, sunken swimming pools of green stuff tethered below Gordon’s “apartment” at the top of the hill, the circular cages farther out in the bay that might once have belonged in a salmon farm, that might contain something alive and needing feeding, or that might just be gathering weed. And now geoduck clams. I rowed out to them later and found myself gliding over a small city of geoduck-houses, each one a length of white PVC pipe jammed into the sand.