Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  I was too tired, finally, to care. And as for not actually seeing Cape Scott, to hell with it. Even the name, it turned out, was a disappointment when I looked it up later in Walbran. This Scott was hardly the hero of the Antarctic; instead, he was a Bombay merchant who helped outfit a British sea-trading expedition in 1786. No matter, we were finally “around the corner.”

  ***

  Winter Harbour isn’t technically the end of the road on Vancouver Island, but it’s probably the most northerly settlement you can drive to fairly easily — it’s straight across the island from Port Hardy. That made it perfect for sport fishermen, who could haul their boats across on trailers, tie up at the dock for a few weeks, and sleep in a tent or one of the small fishing lodges. Nothing fancy, but Winter Harbour was where I finally realized how big the sport-fishing business was.

  The smell was the giveaway. There it was again, the sickly reek of fresh intestines that emanated this time from a cleaning table and weigh station on the next dock. The public docks were ramshackle, a listing, cobbled-together collection of blind alleys supported by logs and littered with bleached and crumbling plastic furniture. Seagulls fought over offal, and the bloated, pop-eyed carcass of a red snapper circled endlessly between the docks. Vera and the only other large boat, a converted fishing vessel full of good old boys from Washington, were tied to an eroding concrete slab anchored by absurdly long pilings: the tides in Winter Harbour were obviously huge. The tops of the pilings were bearded with grass.

  By mid-afternoon, the docks began to repopulate as fishermen streaked in from the grounds, often several miles offshore, where they’d spent most of the day. The two main lodges, Outpost and Qualicum Rivers, relied on twenty-foot open aluminum boats with a rudimentary cabin like a telephone booth. Bench seats, two big outboards, no radar — in the hands of a competent guide, a boat like this got the customers out and back quickly, but at the cost of a fearful pounding. If the weather blew up, they would be sitting ducks.

  While Hatsumi tried to sleep off the effects of my decision-making, I sat in the cockpit as the fleet filed past Vera’s stern to tie up at the lodge’s dock. Winter Harbour felt like a grand place. It was the first safe haven we’d seen for ten hours. We spent a second day there, waiting, as usual, for good weather, but also just to avoid making any decisions. Our dock was managed by one of the charter companies; in their rudimentary store, I asked one of the men from the big Seattle boat whether the fishing was good.

  “Oh, excellent.” He nodded enthusiastically. “We’re getting so many, it’s all catch and release for us now. But hey, they’re all Washington fish anyway, you know?” He pronounced it Warshington.

  This was a common refrain, sung by both sides: American fishermen were convinced Canadians were catching “their” fish, and vice versa. With five highly migratory salmon species heading for home rivers from Alaska to California, there was a lot of mixing going on. These guys were probably right, but claiming ownership over a fish that spent most of its life offshore seemed kind of small-minded to me.

  “Well,” I told him, steering clear of the ownership issue, “if you get one that doesn’t make it, we’ll take it off your hands.”

  Two hours later, the man appeared at Vera holding a bloody bag containing a thick fillet of chinook salmon. We salted half of it and ate the rest raw, thinly sliced, with ponzu sauce and grated onion. Canadian or American, it melted in our mouths. When I went over later to thank the men again, they insisted I join them for drinks. Their boat was called Miss American Pie. We sat around a big table, where the four men fed me whiskey and skillfully extracted information. How old was I? How many times had I been married? Marriage seemed to be a favoured topic.

  “I been through three old ladies,” said one. Another of the men, returning from a walk to the single pay phone that everyone lined up to use, shook his head in wonderment.

  “The wife, you know what she actually said? She misses me!” He adjusted his ball cap and started in on a beer. “No, wait. She said, ‘I wish you were here.’ I guess that’s not the same thing, huh?”

  Probably the missus didn’t really know where Winter Harbour was. When I’d gotten through to family members on the same phone, more than one had said, “Winter Harbour? I’ll have to look it up.” That wouldn’t last; three days from now, everybody with a TV would know where Winter Harbour was.

  We drank. Before the alcohol completely dulled my senses, I came to understand that the four men had fished together since elementary school. One of them showed me photographs of grandchildren with buzz cuts; he was the successful one, who’d bought the Miss American Pie off the quietest of the three, the one who was tending the barbecue and refilling my glass. He had been a commercial fisherman. It sounded like a weird relationship to me, loaded with simmering resentments, but they all seemed happy enough. Tomorrow, the skipper told me, they would head up to Sea Otter Cove, which we’d passed, unseen, on the way down. But they wouldn’t go around Cape Scott.

  “Not in this boat,” he said, flipping a side of salmon.

  I made an excuse about tending to my own wife and stumbled out, followed by knowing, manly laughter.

  The next day, we wandered along the old boardwalk that ran in front of the few houses in Winter Harbour. The weathered cedar was springy underfoot. All the houses had their own small docks and cleaning stations. One was hung with a collage of rusted implements: a paintbrush, a buoy, some chain. The bulk of the visitors had created a village in a cleared area behind the Qualicum Rivers Lodge; in the evening, the smell of grilling salmon and steaks hung over a collection of tents and trailers. We saw a few wives, but this was mostly a guy thing.

  We followed the path to the exquisite cobble beach at Botel Bay, but it was late July, bear-fattening time. After passing too many piles of fresh-looking bear scat, we collared Charley and headed back to Vera, where the only other mammal was the sea otter who hung out near the dock, crunching crabs and urchins. The day went by. Water rose and fell, the shelving beach covered and uncovered. I sat in the cockpit and read.

  “I guess we have to go tomorrow,” I said, putting down my book. “And we have to decide about the Brooks Peninsula.” Brooks was the next major challenge. “Do we go around it or not?”

  There wasn’t any answer. I peeked below. Hatsumi and Charley were asleep again, cuddled like lovers. It was still only late afternoon, and I’d had my rest. Time for another dip in the pool of pain.

  ***

  Why not see what the nurses had to remember? The outcome might be a foregone conclusion, but this was still a detective story, and the nurses were important characters. I dug out their examinations for discovery, which were slender. Maybe there was something in there, even a snippet, about the questions that had been nagging me since my marathon slog through the hospital records in Port McNeill: Where was my father on Labour Day, when Billy started to go downhill? What did he know, and when?

  Nurse Chambers was first, and Mr. Thackray got little from her beyond establishing that in 1976 it was not standard practice for a nurse to record whether a doctor came to see a patient. She remembered little about her regular shift the night before Labour Day, including whether she made any attempt to contact Dr. Harvey (in fact, the record says she did, at 10:30). Was she the nurse who showed Billy’s mother her notes? No. She didn’t remember any details of Billy’s “fight for his life.”

  This reticence wasn’t surprising when you remembered that the hospital itself was also named in the lawsuit. Nurses were part of the hospital, so I didn’t expect them to stick their necks out.

  And so to Nurse Wong. Her recollection of the number of calls to Dr. Harvey was “at least five.” Alas, none of them were recorded on the chart. So the only known attempt was Nurse Chambers’s call, which she herself didn’t actually remember.

  That left Dr. Beamish and Dr. Harvey. In the best detective-story tradition, I decided to leave the star witness fo
r last, so I started with the luckless pediatrician who’d been called in to cover for Billy’s regular doctor over the Labour Day weekend.

  Dr. Beamish certainly had his own voice. To the opening question, “Are you a defendant in this action and sworn to tell the truth?” his answer was, “I guess so, yeah.” He didn’t remember much of what happened in 1976 (none of the doctors or nurses did; Billy was one of thousands of patients. Dr. Beamish couldn’t even remember if Billy was a boy or a girl). But his opinion of Billy’s condition before surgery was the same as mine: prematurity, early respiratory problems, a suspiciously large head, and intraventricular hemorrhage.

  Then the examining lawyer went straight to the night before Labour Day. What was Dr. Beamish worried about? Infection and increasing pressure. Examining the child’s eyes was difficult, but he found papilledema, swelling of the optic disc. This could mean increasing pressure inside the brain. The problem was, Billy’s symptoms could have also have been caused by infection, which was the reason the shunt had been removed in the first place. Which was it, pressure or infection? Maybe both?

  I could see his reasoning. You take the shunt out because it’s infected. That might easily cause pressure to build. But then again, the pressure could be caused by the original infection. So he waited and watched. He doesn’t remember whether he called Dr. Harvey.

  “From my notes, I would think that, ah, there was still some time, there’s still time that I, I can wait.”

  But things got worse. Dr. Beamish returned at 5 a.m. to confront a seizure, dilated pupils, no response to pain. Dr. Harvey arrived soon after, so “I assume I did call him.” That would make sense: Beamish returns, sees things starting to slide, calls my father sometime between 5:00 and 5:30. Dr. Harvey arrived just before six.

  But into the tiny gap between those two events, the phone call and my father’s arrival at St. Joe’s, lumbered the elephant that wrecked everything — as far as the lawyers were concerned. Because Dr. Beamish hadn’t just waited and twiddled his thumbs. He’d done a lumbar puncture. Immediately, the plaintiff’s lawyer pointed out that an LP is contraindicated when there’s evidence of increased pressure. Dr. Beamish’s answer, not unexpectedly, was that the benefits outweighed the risks. He’d done the LP to check for meningitis. He couldn’t recall whether he discussed it with my father, now pulling on his pants in the bedroom with the phone cradled to his ear.

  The cerebrospinal fluid he withdrew through the LP was clear, meaning, “I would say it’s not an infection.” So the problem was pressure. Great — but then Billy stopped breathing. They got him started again, then Dr. Beamish put a needle through the burr hole in Billy’s head to reduce the pressure (a procedure called a ventricular tap). A lot was happening, and fast.

  Where was my father? I checked the timing in the hospital records. Dr. Beamish arrived at 5:00 a.m. The LP was done at 5:10. Breathing stopped at 5:30. The life-saving ventricular tap was done at 5:45. And my father arrived ten minutes later. If those timings were reasonably accurate, there would have been time for a quick phone call before the LP, and a longer one after it, but there were no records of any. The ventricular tap was probably being done as my father stepped into his car. We didn’t live far from the hospital. By the time he arrived ten minutes later, Billy was responsive again.

  Of course, Dr. Beamish couldn’t remember any of it.

  ***

  It had been a horrible day. My little floating family had survived a stupid snap decision I’d made in the fog and dark of the early hours yesterday, so today probably hadn’t been the best time to go back to the early hours of Labour Day, 1976, and poke again at the people who’d been forced to make a judgment call of their own. I was exhausted.

  But we’d made it, and Billy had too. I didn’t know then how our experience going across the Nahwitti Bar would affect me later but, based on what I’d learned so far about Billy’s struggle, the decisions made by his doctors and nurses on Labour Day seemed a lot smarter, more reasoned, and definitely more professional than my own.

  All Alone with Nowhere to Go

  For the sailor, the western side of Vancouver Island has four major navigational challenges: Cape Scott (behind us now, thank God), Brooks Peninsula (coming up), Estevan Point (south of Nootka Sound), and finally the seventy-two-mile stretch between Barkley Sound and Victoria. The first two are the worst, and the fear factor recedes as you go south. Estevan Point is a smaller bump than Brooks, and the long day back to Victoria is a worry only because all of the anchorages on the way are in bays where you wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep.

  The Brooks Peninsula and Estevan Point are classic headlands, and they do the usual unpleasant headland things to sea conditions. Brooks was especially notorious for making mariners miserable, and even the most cursory glance at a chart tells you why. While most of the west coast of Vancouver Island is perforated by long inlets (the one we were sheltering in now, for example, cuts almost all the way across the island), Brooks protrudes ten miles into the Pacific, an almost perfectly rectangular shelf defended by cliffs. It’s a geological afterthought, accessible only by boat and helicopter. To me, it looked like a particularly ugly mole, the kind of thing you have to watch out for when you’re shaving.

  The Brooks Peninsula messes everything up, catching and bending the Pacific swell, getting in the way of currents. The air mass following the contour of Vancouver Island has to play catch-up around the Brooks Peninsula, which means that the weather forecasts for the area often end with the caveat, “except Brooks Peninsula.” Going around Cape Cook and Solander Island, the outermost corners of the peninsula, the wind speed frequently doubles. The day I’m writing this, in late November, there’s a storm warning out, which is bad enough (thirty-four to forty-seven knots) that nobody in their right mind would leave port. But the caveat for Brooks Peninsula is “hurricane force warning” — an unimaginable sixty-five knots.

  That day, the forecast was for fifteen knots, rising to twenty-five at Cape Cook. We decided to try it. We left Winter Harbour in mid-morning, hours after the sport fishermen but taking the same route many of them would follow into Brooks Bay. If Vancouver Island was your side, and the peninsula a cocked arm, Brooks Bay was an armpit, and in a northwester, it became a trap. We had such a wind, and we dithered as we got closer, heading far enough offshore to avoid the five o’clock shadow of rocks that guarded the coast but not committing to Cape Cook either. Vera seemed to appreciate the chance to sail, and we lurched south under the big genoa jib, struggling to get used to the swell that had begun to lift us as soon as we left Quatsino Sound. It was sunny and clear, and Brooks Peninsula was visible almost immediately, a green panhandle with a mane of brilliant white low cloud.

  That cloud rang a bell.

  “Take the wheel?”

  I clambered below and dug out a weather manual for Vancouver Island. “A ‘cap’ on the Brooks Peninsula,” the book cautioned, “usually means a gale is coming.” Vera rolled south, settling into the first decent sailing wind we’d had since before the gale that blew us into Loughborough Inlet. For a while longer, I could still see the distinctive cone of Solander Island guarding the tip of the peninsula before the island, then the rest of the whole promontory, began to slip behind the clouds. Now Vera was really flying. The sea whitened. We wound the genoa into a half-reef, Hatsumi wrestling with the wheel while I threw my weight into the winch handle and tried not to somersault over it when the boat rolled.

  Then the peninsula disappeared.

  “Those guys who gave us the salmon the other night,” I said. “They said there was a spectacular anchorage this side of the peninsula. Want to have a look? Try Brooks again tomorrow?”

  We both wanted to. By the time we made it to Solander Island, it would be a full gale, probably with zero visibility. So we altered course, heading for the armpit of Klaskish Inlet while trying to keep from being driven into the cliffs. By turning east, we were putting our
selves on a lee shore, a situation that always makes me touchy. “Don’t you get it?” I would snap to Hatsumi in our first year of sailing. “We’re going sideways. It’s a goddamn lee shore.”

  I didn’t have to snap at her now; we were too busy threading the rocks, and she now knew as much as I did about lee shores. Two orcas cruised past as we closed in on Klaskish Inlet, and a momentary white flash dead ahead looked like a third.

  “You’re off course,” said Hatsumi. That white flash was Hughes Rock, more than two miles off the coast. I began to wonder whether I liked navigating out here. The entrance was clotted with islets, and although our new GPS told us exactly where we were, I clung to an atavistic need to see for myself, using a much-folded paper chart to match up the landmarks with the lurching landscape. The navigation light I was searching for on shore turned out to be a spindly thing on a pole, more like a garden light than the white-painted concrete tower I’d been looking for, but once we’d passed it, the wind was blocked, and we motored cautiously toward what one of the guidebooks called “the best-kept secret on the west coast” — Klaskish Basin.

  It was like going up a river. The entrance to the basin was almost invisible until you were practically in it, but the cedar-lined channel was deep. When it opened up, we were alone in what might as well have been a lake. We anchored across from the only conceivable landing for Charley, a trickle of stream with just enough of a clearing that I could run the kayak next to a rock, let him off, and float around until he’d done his thing or gotten eaten by a bear. The broad estuary of the Klaskish River, moss-green and open beneath an old clear-cut, was too far away to reach by rowboat. We were enclosed by forested hills shot with the silvered trunks of fire-killed trees, like a greying beard. And we were very alone.