Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  Before going to bed, we wrestled the dinghy onto Vera’s foredeck, tied it firmly down, and set the alarm for 4:45.

  “Are you nervous?” asked Hatsumi.

  “No,” I lied. “Anxious to get going, though. It seems like we’ve been thinking about this damn bar for the last month. I’ll just be glad when it’s over.” Then, still hedging, I said, “We’ll listen to the weather forecast tomorrow morning and take it from there, okay?” I crawled into bed with the portable VHF radio and tried not to listen to the faint thunder of the waves in Roller Bay. Charley curled up at our feet, and Hatsumi mumbled something into her pillow.

  “What?”

  “Maybe I’ll have a panic attack,” she said.

  I lay back and tried everything. Counting sheep. Counting fish. Meditating. A glorious morning, magnificent Cape Scott saluting us. None of it worked. So I got up again, got dressed, lit the oil lamp, and sat down with someone who knew all about rocks and hard places. I’d been through the three acts of Billy’s travails. Now it was time to raise the curtain on a different play: my father’s trial.

  ***

  Billy’s family was officially upset in 1976, when the first shunt was put in. The evidence of just how upset they were arrived at my father’s house in an envelope, dated December 5, 1984, an early Christmas present. Billy was now nine; my father was seventy-four.

  There were four defendants: three doctors plus the Victoria General Hospital, but my father’s name was first, and that’s the way all the publicity would go. The writ claimed that most of Billy’s problems at age five resulted from injuries to his brain and nervous system over a four-day period when he was ten months old (the Labour Day episode). It was the classic “bad baby” lawsuit: doctors’ negligence causes brain damage that’s responsible for the child’s later problems.

  Next to the copy of the writ was a letter from the Canadian Medical Protective Association, which told my father what to do next: write a narrative account, “from first to last.” Just what a retired surgeon would love to do. But he had the narrative ready in a week, plus his old office files. Whatever was in those files, it was all he had to go on, because he didn’t remember a thing about Billy. That wasn’t surprising; it would be like asking a retired mechanic to give you the details on the brake job he did on your 1976 Volvo.

  The next letter in the file was from his new lawyer, Mr. Thackray, directing him to think harder about what, if anything, passed between him and Dr. Beamish on the morning Billy stopped breathing. Right from the start, the LP that Dr. Beamish did that night was critical. My father shot back, “I do have views about lumbar puncture in general, and this one in particular.” In other words, “not a great idea.” Over the next year or so, documents kept coming in, and the correspondence between doctor and lawyer got fatter. Finally, they had dates: examination for discovery in a year, followed by trial a year after that. In all, three years of waiting and worrying and trying to remember.

  Examination for discovery — was there ever a better name? A prospective witness is sat down with his lawyer and peppered with questions from the other side’s lawyer. That’s the examination part. The discovery comes about in the way the witness answers or evades. Weaknesses emerge (are “discovered”) and become the basis for a trial strategy. Examinations seemed to me to be the first opportunity for advocates to enter the ring, circle cautiously, and begin to take the measure of their opponents.

  Discovery transcripts can make surprisingly entertaining reading, and I had six of them. My father’s was the fattest, a spiral-bound inch of paper; Billy’s mother’s weighed in at about half of his; Dr. Beamish the lumbar puncturer’s was slimmer still. Then two nurses (down to about a quarter of an inch now) and finally the slimmest of all, for the third doctor, a perfunctory thirteen pages. I read that one first.

  Poor Dr. Parsons. Billy wasn’t even his patient. Dr. Parsons had been covering for Dr. Beamish. He would have been in his mid-sixties when he was suddenly asked to look at a vomiting hydrocephalic boy, putting him in his seventies when he found himself in a closed room with two lawyers. His stonewalling was almost comic. Maybe he really didn’t recall, maybe he just didn’t care.

  Plaintiff’s lawyer: “I take it you can’t recall whether you ever discussed this patient with Dr. Harvey during the day?”

  Dr. Parsons: “Mm, mmm.”

  Dr. Parsons’s lawyer: “I think the answer is no.”

  Dr. Parsons: “No.”

  Both lawyers: “No.”

  Nobody was going to shed much light on the “failure to monitor” question from this corner. The last words were, “Thank you, Dr. Parsons. You can go back to Sooke — I mean Sidney.” I could almost see the lawyer rolling his eyes.

  Billy’s mother’s examination was done before my father’s, so I decided I’d better read hers next. I tried hard to be impartial, to keep my composure. But my own highlighter was out by page 9:

  “If anything went wrong with [Billy], he could help me get a so-called normal child and said he would be a vegetable and not to expect very much when he came home.”

  That didn’t sound like anyone I knew, and doctors don’t talk about vegetables. Anyway, he would have been pretty wrong if he had, because on the very next page Billy’s mom was describing her son as “very verbal and photogenic.” He had even appeared on TV. Next came the odd assertion that my father had told her Billy “wasn’t hydrocephalus.” That sounded like another clanger to me. Her feelings about doctors came out easily:

  “I still do feel victimized by doctors. . . . When I adopted Billy, I was told by no doctor that it was a risk to adopt this little boy.”

  Now that, I knew, wasn’t going to stand up. The pediatrician’s warnings about hasty adoption were on the record; I’d read them.

  None of this interview can have been pleasant. The mother did her best to present some pretty traumatic events while Mr. Thackray painted a picture of marital breakups, a single mother working in what she called “a laundry situation,” a boyfriend that came and went, frequent moves. But she stuck to her story that my father “said Billy is not hydrocephalic.” Nobody suggested his head size was large, even for a premie? I counted six instances of “not that I can remember” in two pages.

  Point by point, Mr. Thackray compared her statements with the written record. Billy’s mother stuck to her guns. And she wanted to tell the story of Labour Day. Everything had been fine, fine, fine, up until the Labour Day mess. The fretting, vomiting baby, the long weekend stretching out, the hallway vigil, and the elusive doctors. And finally, the early morning news that “Dr. Harvey wants to put the shunt back in. I told him Dr. Harvey couldn’t touch him without I saw my boy.”

  But by the time the anxious parents reached the hospital, Billy was in the operating room. “The nurse came up to me and said to me that I don’t want to upset you but don’t expect him to come back.” And, “approximately two weeks later this black intern, I don’t know his name, he said to me I was here the night everything went wrong with Billy and I just want you to know that your little boy fought for his life and I have never seen anyone fight for his life like that little sick boy did.”

  It got weird. News travelled. A nurse’s grandson’s wife spoke to Billy’s mother. The grandson’s wife was Billy’s mother’s friend. I was having trouble following.

  “Things went wrong,” the nurse’s grandson’s wife said. And the nurse herself (this would be the grandmother, I think), said that “they left him unattended and uncared for.” Nurses who had cared for Billy flocked to “say goodbye” to him because they were “all told that night they didn’t expect Billy to live.” But, unfortunately, no names. Even the nurse who “sat her down,” explained everything, and got her started on the idea of a lawsuit didn’t seem to have a name.

  And so back to my father, who, Billy’s mother said, “never called me back.” At the hospital, “he would walk right by me. H
e wouldn’t even say hello. The nurses explained to me he has a terrible bedside manner and he is embarrassed.”

  Embarrassed? The only time I ever saw him embarrassed was when one of our boats hit the dock.

  Finally, as the waiting and watching dragged on, there was a telephone conversation, when “things got a little bit verbal. That’s when it was brought up that Billy was a vegetable. I made a comment back that if my son died, I would be at his back door with a shotgun and then I hung up.”

  The reporters had loved that one. The vegetable and the shotgun, I still remembered the headlines. And asking myself, “Why not the front door?”

  Now the examination turned to life after Labour Day, entering the minefield of Billy’s precocious “verbal ability.” For Billy’s mother, this meant that he was “quite a chatterer.” For Mr. Thackray, Billy’s appearances on local radio talk shows, and articles about him in the newspapers, seemed to be evidence of a parent open to the idea of a little publicity for her exceptional child. For him, a little ode that Billy wrote (it was called, “My Mom”) and managed to get read over the radio, was unlikely to have been penned by a carrot.

  On and on it went . . . and then it just petered out, at 111 pages and four hours. It wasn’t flattering to Billy’s mother. There were plenty of inconsistencies with the written record. The mutterings of “the black intern” and the nurses were unverifiable. The most charitable thing you could say was that Billy’s mother had made up her mind to adopt a struggling, premature infant and that no amount of alarm-raising was going to undo her confidence in him.

  But the unflattering portrait and the inconsistencies weren’t what would decide this case. Billy had brain damage. His mother loved him fiercely and had shouldered his care for a decade. He’d nearly died on Labour Day, and there were expert witnesses prepared to say that the actions of at least one of his doctors were ill-advised. The fact that so many of Billy’s problems were textbook examples of the effects of lack of oxygen at birth wouldn’t mean much in the face of all this emotion. My father and his science versus Billy’s mom and her shotgun? I seriously wondered if I should bother to read the rest.

  So I didn’t, not that night. Hatsumi and Charley were both fast asleep, cuddled under the duvet. I could hear them breathing gently. I did a quick check for dead men on the floor and went out on deck. Bull Harbour was still as the grave and completely fogged in. Roller Bay breathed heavily in the night, like a giant biding its time.

  A sailboat alone in a strange anchorage in the middle of the night can be a little island in a sea of wonder, but tonight, Bull Harbour was a frightening place. Standing on Vera’s deck, the anchor light the palest of moons in a halo of mist, I felt intensely alone. Maybe reading the words of my father’s accusers hadn’t been the smartest thing to do, but it might have helped bring us a little closer. He probably read the same account in his overheated study, surrounded by his books and his music, but I’m willing to bet the experience placed him in a private little Bull Harbour of his own. We both had a tricky passage coming up.

  Crossing the Bar

  River bars are dangerous. The United States Coast Guard has actually created regulated “navigation areas” for all coastal river bars in Washington and Oregon, with warning signage that can include flashing lights and radio bulletins when conditions are especially unsafe. Both New Zealand and Australia are notorious for river bars, and people of a morbid bent can choose from a long list of YouTube compilations of boats fighting their way through fields of standing waves, shooting into the air or wallowing sickeningly before pitchpoling end over end. Most were filmed by onlookers on land, but the camera still shakes. I never looked at them before we left on our circumnavigation, and when I see them now, I always think, Well, at least you can see where you’re going before you turn upside down. Because when we found ourselves on the Nahwitti Bar, it was still dark, and the fog was so thick you couldn’t see the next wave.

  Bars are created when rivers that carry a lot of sand dump their contents into the ocean. As someone who had written a book called The End of the River, I might have been expected to know a lot about river bars, but I didn’t. In that book, I was more concerned with the body of the river and the fish in it, and what happened to rivers when you dammed them or dumped waste in them or sucked most of their water out to grow lettuce and grapes. The meeting place between river and ocean was a special case, and the only one I’d ever paid much attention to was the São Francisco River in northern Brazil, where a chain of dams had had the paradoxical effect of actually intercepting a lot of the silt that would normally have made it to the ocean to form a bar.

  The unlucky São Francisco was being strangled; the Nahwitti River clearly wasn’t, and it had a formidable bar. Even before we’d reached Bull Harbour, back in Goletas Channel, the evidence of the bar had appeared on our depth sounder. Goletas was a freeway, unobstructed and deep — a monotonous three hundred metres. At that depth, Vera’s depth sounder gave up trying to read an echo off the bottom; it just blinked “Last” over and over, as though to say, “Why don’t you just turn me off? You’re not going to run into anything. There’s nothing down there but hatchet fish and ooze.”

  But, just after Bull Harbour, Goletas ends abruptly. The bottom jumps up at you. “Whoa!” goes the depth sounder, waking up with a start. You’ve just stubbed your toe on the Nahwitti Bar.

  And that shallowness is the problem with river bars like the Nahwitti. Not because there isn’t enough water for the boat to float in — Vera needed around five feet, and the Nahwitti Bar never got that shallow. The problem arises because the water over the bar is in nearly constant motion. First, there’s current, which is the net movement of water and reflects the state of the tide. Second, there’s wind, which pushes the surface water ahead of it. And finally, there’s swell, the long rollers that have travelled across the Pacific to end up at the mouth of the Nahwitti River. All three of these water-movers combine to guarantee a net directional flow of water over the shallow bar.

  Why does this matter? Because when moving water encounters a shallow spot, it gets stuck, dragging on the bottom and falling over itself. On a beach, the onrushing waves get bigger and bigger as they drag more and more, and then they break and collapse. If they’re big enough, you can ride them on a board. Over a bar, the same thing happens, producing what would look, from the air, like a beach without a shore. Breaking waves, surf, the lot. If you go across when wind, current, and swell gang up, you’ll be in trouble.

  Around the Nahwitti, even a cursory look at the chart told me it would be shallow — thirty to fifty feet — for at least two miles after we first tripped over the leading edge, which would happen shortly after we exited Bull Harbour. But there was another fifteen miles to go, around the top of Vancouver Island, before we would round Cape Scott, and it was relatively shallow there too. The water wouldn’t start to get deep again until we were through the turbulence that was marked by the cheerful little wave symbols on the chart. The place was a boater’s worst nightmare.

  ***

  And now here we were in the middle of it. Once our illusions about the “inside route” had been rudely snatched away and I’d made the idiotic decision to chance the bar at the worst possible moment in its tidal cycle, it took us thirty minutes to grind over it. By then, I was puking water. Even throttled back, we were making eight knots as the current helped push us up and over each wave. Vera was like a cringing dog kicked from behind. Down below, lockers opened and vomited out their own contents: cosmetics, a bottle of chili sauce, lemons. Hatsumi hung onto the chart table, and I hung onto the wheel.

  Finally, the oily rollers ahead began to look less threatening. I found I could change course, get us pointed closer to the direction Hatsumi kept calling to me. On one of my trips to the rail, I looked up after vomiting over the side and saw a sea otter on his back not twenty feet away, feet in the air, an incurious look on his whiskered face. “Don’t look at me,
” he seemed to be saying.

  Once we were over the bar, the character of the sea changed. The waves behind us had seemed deliberate, focused, implacable, but now we entered what so many writers have described as a “confused” sea. It’s a good term. Around Cape Scott, in fact anywhere close to shore along the west coast, the Pacific swell has begun to catch on the bottom, and to twist this way and that in response to local currents. It’s not the lazy roller coaster you envision when thinking of an offshore voyage. It’s more like a washing machine.

  For the next three hours, Vera lurched past the invisible shore while we struggled to keep our footing. I vomited some more. When my bladder would hold out no longer, I urinated down the cockpit drain, or at least in its vicinity. There wasn’t a breath of wind. I put Vera on autopilot and finally sat down, clinging to a lifeline and sipping the coffee Hatsumi had made four hours earlier. From time to time, a tiny seabird would bob in and out of the mist, riding comfortably. “This is our place,” they seemed to be saying.

  We rounded Cape Scott at nine o’clock, exactly at slack tide. “How about that?” I said to Charley. But we never saw land. An hour or so later, holes in the fog revealed islets, kelp beds, a white flash of surf, before closing again. Finally, a rising wind began to chase the clouds and fog away, and we were able to sail listlessly past Sea Otter Cove and south toward Quatsino Sound, the first of the rock-speckled entrances to the long fjords that cut into the west coast. But it was poor sailing, and the boat rolled sickeningly. When we encountered a pack of sport-fishing boats around the entrance to Winter Harbour, around lunchtime, we took the sails down and powered the rest of the way.

  Hatsumi collapsed on a cabin berth and went immediately to sleep, surrounded by a jumble of foul weather gear, boots, trampled charts, and lemons. A packet of my father’s documents had broken loose from somewhere, littering the cabin floor with scholarly articles. After sloshing away the remains of vomit and urine with a bucket of sea water, I sat down in the cockpit and looked around. The folly of what I’d just put us through began to settle in. How many foolish decisions had been made by intelligent, well-prepared people who thought they had every base covered? We had been in real trouble back there, and it was my fault.