Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  We sat in the warm sun while Charley snapped at horse flies. A big jet crawled overhead, a sparkling point of silver trailing twin contrails. Where was it headed? Tokyo? Hong Kong? I thumbed through Captain Walbran’s book. Klaskish Inlet had been named seventy years before the Brooks Peninsula; back then, the inlet was known as Port Brooks (to the English) and Puerto de Brucks (to the Spaniards Galiano and Valdes). On the matter of what the Indigenous peoples called this lonely spot, or what use they had made of it, Walbran was silent.

  I swatted flies and thought about these long-ago explorers and how they stumbled into this place — on August 5, said Walbran, so the weather would have been similar to today’s. Had they too been taking shelter? I imagined their ship anchored uneasily outside while her boats felt their way along the riverlike seam, then the hours of careful soundings before the larger vessel cautiously followed. They must have towed her in.

  We tried to round Brooks the next morning, despite a gale warning and an ominous report of thirty-five knots at Solander Island by 4 a.m.

  “It’s always thirty-five at Solander Island,” I said peevishly. We’d gotten up early, made coffee, secured the lockers. Outflow winds barrelling through the mountains at the head of the inlet had rocked Vera all night. “What the hell, let’s try it. We can always turn around.”

  Outside Klaskish Inlet, the wind was already rising at 6 a.m., and by the time we’d sailed an hour, clawing slowly toward the peninsula that was invisible under a grey, depressing sky, Vera’s decks were awash, and it would clearly be another two hours before we could even think of making a wide, cautious turn around Cape Cook. It was a simple enough problem: we had to backtrack, almost into the wind, to get enough sea room to avoid being crowded onto the uncaring face of the Brooks Peninsula. With the wind rising as the day went on, the safety margin would just keep shrinking.

  “So much for that,” I said, turning Vera up through the eye of the wind and all the way around onto a broad reach. She galloped back to Puerto de Brucks like a dog racing for home, but our spirits sank as we dropped the anchor and shut down the engine. It was as silent as the grave. And still only eight in the morning.

  “Breakfast?” I said brightly. But Hatsumi looked defeated.

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” I said. I didn’t tell her that something else was worrying me. When I’d started the engine, the first push of the button had produced nothing but a faint click. One thing at a time, I decided, although a failing starter circuit was the last thing we needed out here. Sails were nice things to have, but an engine could keep you off the rocks.

  “No people,” said Hatsumi in a small voice. She handed me a fried egg. “Drives me crazy.”

  “No kidding. Not exactly Kugayama, is it?” From Kugayama to Klaskish Basin: there was a dislocation. But I couldn’t find any way to make it better for her.

  “We just have to learn to wait,” I said lamely. It was true, though. Getting around Brooks Peninsula — like getting around Cape Scott or through Johnstone Strait — was a fight, a lopsided one. The only way you could expect to win was to look for your enemy’s weakness. In our case, that meant waiting for a break in the weather. So we listened, on and off throughout the day, to the Coast Guard broadcasts on the VHF radio, infuriatingly faint in our closed-in little world.

  VHF weather reports follow a script, of which the actual forecast is only a part, and not always the part you’re desperate to hear. Often, the real-time report from a lighthouse or a weather buoy is what you base your decision on; in this case, the Solander Island light was what mattered. So we sat glued to the crackling radio as Vera swung slowly at anchor and the signal built and faded, waiting out the reports for all the places that didn’t matter, grinding slowly through the list of “local and lighthouse reports” until finally — finally! — here it was:

  “Solander Island. Winds northwest whistle pop grrr whooshhh . . .”

  The silver jet crawled across the blue dome of our prison. Same time as yesterday, probably the same destination and the same plane.

  “Come on, Charley,” I said, heaving myself up. I released him on weed-covered rocks and floated in the shallows while he snooped around. It was warm again. Flies buzzed and the cedars released their summer smell. Again, the idea that we were anchored in an alpine lake was hard to shake. But the moment didn’t last long. By lunchtime, the fog began to settle into the basin, sifting down over our little bowl until only the lower branches of the trees were visible. Vera ceased swinging and the place became unearthly still and silent.

  “Ahhhh-choo!”

  It was more a roar than a sneeze, and there weren’t many people who sneezed like that. It was strangely muffled too, and I had to look hard in the direction of the sound until I could spot him. He was standing in the clearing where I’d taken Charley to pee, holding the red-and-white checked jacket around himself like a blanket.

  “We could talk to him,” said Hatsumi.

  “You can see him?”

  “Of course I can see him.”

  “It’s lonely here,” called my father. That’s what he’d said, every day, near the end. “What are you doing in this terrible place?”

  “I don’t want to talk to him,” I said.

  “Then turn on the shortwave radio,” Hatsumi said. “Maybe we can talk to someone that way. It’s about time you tried.”

  She was right about that.

  “I’m trying to get us out of here,” I called. “You had a shortwave radio, didn’t you? When you were a kid? Well, watch this.”

  ***

  Shortwave (or “high frequency” or just “ham”) radio wasn’t found on a lot of cruising boats, but Vera had come equipped with one of these dial-encrusted monsters. I’d spun those dials a few times when we first got the boat, randomly intercepting excited whisperings in Mandarin, Colombian pop music, the plummy tones of the BBC, and a lot of pops, tweets, whistles, and dishwasher noises. But I didn’t understand the first thing about how it worked, and listening was pointless if you couldn’t transmit. To do that, with our particular radio at least, you needed a ham licence.

  But determining, unequivocally, that I needed a licence, and finding out how to get one took months. There just wasn’t a simple answer. So-called amateur radio (the proper name for ham) might be capable of life-saving, globe-spanning feats of communication, but its practitioners were thwarted by simple English. Finally, I went for the bargain-basement option: buy a study guide from the Radio Amateurs of Canada and pay $25 for a locally accredited ham to administer the 100-question multiple choice exam.

  The study guide was an inch thick, not counting appendices on elementary math. How could an inch be boiled down to 100 questions, of which I had to get 80 percent correct to receive my licence? In desperation I turned to the Internet, where I was delighted to find the entire bank of 973 possible questions. After three days cramming, there were still 500 questions I kept flunking. There was only one way to get through this hell: forget understanding everything, just memorize the answers, all 973 of them.

  Which I did. Two infuriating weeks later, I tossed my cheat sheets in the recycle box and went to see my examiner, Barry Mann. He met me at the door to his apartment wearing a red T-shirt over jeans and slippers. I wondered if he was a typical ham — the receding hair, clipped beard, and pallor certainly fit with the image I had of people hunched over knobs and dials in a darkened room. I followed Barry into his tiny kitchen, where the exam was laid out on a breakfast table next to a coffee mug jammed full of pencils with plump, virginal eraser-ends. Maybe he anticipated a lot of indecision on my part, or an unusually heavy hand. A Mozart string quartet murmured from a small stereo on a shelf next to a framed sepia portrait of a naked youth, knees drawn up pensively at the edge of a lake. Barry fiddled with an espresso machine.

  “No thanks,” I said. More caffeine would send me into Barry’s bathroom. “And look, I like Mozart,
but it’s kind of distracting. Those formulas, you know?” I was itching to spill them. Barry clicked the radio off.

  “Take your time.” He padded silently into another room. I heard the mouse-scampering of computer keys. Thirty minutes later, Barry ran my completed pages through a scanner while a shortwave radio mumbled from one corner. There were radios everywhere, perched on brackets or winking from windowsills and all connected to a Christmas tree of antennae. A cluster of handhelds was arranged next to the scanner like some kind of electronic ikebana. I shamelessly snooped in his bookcase while he fussed with the answer-key software.

  Barry whistled. “Ninety-eight percent,” he said.

  Of that 98 percent, I understood maybe 40. We filled out and faxed some forms, and I became VA7BJH, licensed to transmit. A week or so later, I got a diploma in the mail. I didn’t frame it. But I had written down the frequency for one of the boaters’ networks that operated daily, providing a shortwave meeting place for anybody with the right radio and a licence. Now, marooned in Klaskish Basin, I dug out the information: six o-clock, 3,010 kilohertz.

  “Here goes,” I said. While Hatsumi fried onions, I perched next to the radio, fiddled with the tuner, and listened. And there they were! A moderator, a roll call of sorts, and then a string of little narratives, each from a different boat. An ethereal gaggle of boaters had just joined us in Klaskish Basin. Their voices came from all around Vancouver Island, and most of them were clear and strong, totally unlike the feeble whisperings of VHF. With this radio, I knew, we could as easily listen to someone in Fiji, but being connected to these local people, whose reports were edifying, or rueful, or exasperated, was just what both of us needed. Several called from the Gulf Islands, so far behind us now they seemed a distant memory; others were closing in on Alaska.

  “Listen,” I said suddenly. “This guy’s in the Bunsby Islands. That’s practically next door!” If the weather showed us its belly, even for a day, the Bunsby group was where we would spend the next night.

  “Call them,” said Hatsumi. She was grinning now. “Go on, do it. Let them know we’re here.”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “You took that course, didn’t you?”

  Everyone on the Boaters’ Net sounded ferociously competent, hailing and signing off with their call signs, relaying each other’s messages, even leaving the air, some of them, with the phrase “Seventy-threes, everyone.” What the hell did seventy-threes mean? Before I could look it up in the long list of coded signals, Hatsumi nudged me again. I clutched the microphone, waited for a break, and said, reading from my scribbled notes, “Ah, Victor Alpha Seven, Bravo Juliet Hotel.” Bravo Juliet Hotel was tricky to say, I found.

  “I, ah, don’t have you on my list.” The moderator sounded puzzled. But he was speaking to me! To VA7BJH afloat in a fog bowl and surrounded by frying smells. Barry would have been so proud.

  “What’s your vessel’s name?”

  I spelled it out for him, and my own.

  “And your crew, who are you travelling with?”

  “My crew? I don’t . . . oh, I get you. My wife, Hatsumi.”

  “Ah, you’re going to have to spell that one for me . . .”

  And so we became part of the B.C. Boaters’ Net. When I finally signed off, we didn’t feel so alone. I looked up “seventy-threes”; it meant “best regards.”

  The whole experience reminded me of the delight my father had taken, as a boy, in constructing his own shortwave radios and listening hungrily for a voice from England or Australia. In the end, he always seemed to end up with CFCN, the “Voice of the Prairie,” but he was as satisfied with that as I was with the B.C. Boaters’ Net. I was so happy I climbed into the cockpit to tell him.

  But he wasn’t standing in the clearing anymore. So instead, I spent the evening reading about him.

  The Examination of an Elderly Surgeon

  It was pretty clear that the case was going to focus on Labour Day; no matter how provocative the circumstances of Billy’s first few weeks of life, this suit was about malpractice and blame. You couldn’t pin Billy’s prematurity and respiratory distress on anybody, so you had to blame his problems on something else. The lawyers needed something concrete. They chose Labour Day.

  I’d read Dr. Beamish’s grudging explanation of why he did a lumbar puncture. How he made that decision was a mystery that might only be cleared up by my father’s examination for discovery, so that’s what I turned to next.

  He started out professorial. His lawyer jumped in to remind him not to keep saying, “Right,” while the opposing lawyer talked.

  Mr. Thackray: “Just try and wait until he shuts up.”

  Dr. Harvey: “Right.”

  Billy had “communicating hydrocephalus,” something that could be dealt with by a shunt, that didn’t involve a tricky tumour, that might or might not turn out to be self-limiting. He was pretty clear about the diagnosis and found it “hardly possible” that he would have told Billy’s mother the shunt was temporary. “I can’t imagine anybody saying, ‘He doesn’t need it anymore,’ and taking it out.”

  He wasn’t defensive, just confident. And he did go on. Where the other doctors were stingy with information, he tended to expound. Only my father would have described the effect of hydrocephalus on the many bones of the skull this way: “They open out like a flower, you know.” He went on for a full page about shunt complications; I could imagine his lawyer twisting in his seat. He seemed so innocent on those early pages, carefully explaining why you had to wait a few days between the ventriculogram and the shunt insertion:

  “If you were to immediately shove a ventricular catheter into that situation, you might be getting just air out, for example, and as you know it is not a good thing to pump air into a venous system.”

  As you know — I loved that. I finally felt I was getting to know him. On why he examined the child daily after the first surgery, he said, “I did the plumbing, you might say, and my chief responsibility was to make sure the shunt was functioning properly.”

  Why was he being so forthcoming? So entertaining? But once the questions turned to meningitis and sorting out the conundrums of cause and effect (shunt can cause meningitis, meningitis can cause hydrocephalus, a deadly circle), his fuse shortened.

  Lawyer: “Was there any additional damage to the child’s brain because of the meningitis that developed after the shunt, that you are aware of?”

  Dr. Harvey: “There isn’t anybody who could answer that question.”

  I was struck by the elasticity of the division of labour, especially for an infant patient with so many problems and specialists. Here the surgeon deferred to the pediatrician; there, the mechanics took over and it was up to the surgeon to decide what to do. When I read, halfway through the examination, “Dr. Beamish is a far better judge on that than I could have been,” I wondered if, by the end of the examination, that deference would be under a magnifying glass and starting to smoulder.

  And so we arrived inevitably at Labour Day. The plaintiff’s lawyer made much of the timing of Billy’s shunt removal (“Could it not have been put off ’till after the long weekend?”), and I wished I could have reached through the pages and into the examination room and said to this man’s face, “He didn’t take holidays. He probably had no conception of Labour Day. Growing up, neither did I.”

  Lawyer: “What was your procedure for holidays?”

  Dr. Harvey: “Just to be there. I was home. It was like any other time. If I had a very sick child on my hands, the holiday weekend had nothing to do with it.” That was my childhood.

  No time for reminiscing, though, because we were into the nasty stuff now. The shunt was out. For how long? My father answered this way: “The longer you can go, the more likely you are to get a clean field.” In other words, once the shunt had been removed, it was a race between dwindling infection and increasing pressure. A race, and for B
illy and his doctors, a waiting game while the rest of the city headed for the beach. And so the plaintiff’s lawyer probed, and my father carried imperturbably on, so obviously telling the truth that I wanted to reach in there, give him a shake, and tell him: “You can fudge it a little, you know, everybody else does.”

  “What was your normal practice?” they asked. That he would have checked on the child, that he expected the nurses to call him if necessary. That a visit might be recorded or might not. He could so easily have said, “Of course I visited; there’s just no record of it,” but he didn’t. All he would say was, “It’s likely I would have.”

  He explained the options (there was only one, a ventricular tap to relieve pressure) and the drawbacks (repeated entry through an already-infected burr hole). But “in the presence of meningitis and septicemia, your hand is stayed.” So, to determine if the pressure buildup might be due to meningitis, you first had to do a lumbar puncture. When the lawyer asked if he would have been considering these questions at midnight, he said, “I don’t even know if I was awake at midnight.”

  Did he think he was somehow immune from what a skilled lawyer could do with a statement like that? That he was Harvey Cushing reincarnated? The plaintiff’s lawyer pressed on about increased pressure and whether my father would have been called or attended. Uncertainties swirled like dust devils. “At some point,” my father admits, “the pressure is more important than the possibility of spreading infection by anything you do, so I’ll stick a needle into that ventricle and release some of the pressure.”

  Because the allegation was “failure to monitor,” much depended on the understanding between surgeon and pediatricians. The plaintiff’s lawyer was determined to know what my father expected in the way of communication.