Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  Dr. Harvey: “I wouldn’t expect the pediatrician to go and do something to treat it without consulting me if he thought it was increased intracranial pressure.”

  Lawyer: “Thank you.”

  Dr. Harvey: “With one qualification.”

  Lawyer: “Yes?”

  Dr. Harvey: “If it is a dire emergency, if he is there and nobody else is there, then he is going to do the best he can.”

  There were pages and pages of this. Reading them in this lonely anchorage, where night and fog had now fallen upon Vera like a shroud, made me wonder, How alone had he felt, closeted in that room with two lawyers and a stenographer? Was he still defiant, sure of himself and his training? Reading his testimony, I sensed something I had heard so many times as a child that it had become second nature — the physician’s credo. My father applied it to everything. It was this: “First, do no harm.” He had a horror of making things worse through medical intervention. Dinner-table stories featured ghastly medical disasters where the patient would have been better off left alone. He’d seen too many botched surgeries. “Nature will take care of it,” and “Stay away from surgeons,” were staples of my upbringing. Once, when I was around ten, I broke my arm falling off a metal grid while scraping the hull of one of our boats. It was two days before he reluctantly took me for an X-ray and a cast. He designed the cast himself, though, so I could remove it when I wanted to go swimming off the boat.

  The lawyers couldn’t know this; all they saw was a doctor who was content to wait until whichever was worst, the meningitis or the building pressure, showed its hand. He told them clearly: “I was extremely anxious not to interfere. I thought it was absolutely paramount to get rid of that infection. If I did something surgical at that time and the infection blew up again, people would be saying why didn’t you — you should have known. You have difficult choices, and this was a difficult choice.”

  The rock and the hard place. Nahwitti Bar and Cape Scott.

  The two lawyers sparred, like hockey players fighting in the corner for the puck, while my father skated reluctantly behind them knowing it would squirt loose and he would have to take another swipe at it. When it did, it was the lumbar puncture that slid and hopped over their sticks as the lawyers tried to determine whether this was where the goal would be scored in the only game that mattered to them, in court. Finally, they agreed that, yes, my father would expect to be consulted if another doctor planned to do a lumbar puncture.

  He stayed feisty till the end; he wouldn’t give in. A lumbar puncture and stopped breathing “doesn’t mean that the prognosis is terrible.” He just refused to predict, because, “Well, it goes on forever.”

  His examination for discovery seemed to have gone on forever too, but it finally ended, with a lame attempt to get him to comment on the mother’s accusations about Billy being a vegetable, Billy being replaceable by another child, the shotgun. The newspapers would love these stories when the trial was opened to the media months later, but my father brushed them off. I can even imagine a little smile. It looked like he was ready for a fight.

  When I’d finished his examination, I noticed, inserted at the end, a collection of loose-leaf pages covered in a handwriting I realized was his lawyer’s. Page and line numbers on the left, notes on the right — here was what the lawyer had made of the transcript I’d just finished reading. A few of Mr. Thackray’s notes had stars beside them, all drawn the same: five rapid strokes of the pen to produce a happy and oddly human figure, tilted to one side, one arm lifted to the note it was meant to highlight. Only once does he resort to capital letters, rewriting in full the words of my father: “You have difficult choices, and this was a difficult choice.”

  Pan-Pan

  Early the next morning, the hoped-for chink in the enemy’s armour revealed itself: the wind at Solander Island was a reasonable thirteen knots and not forecast to rise above twenty-five. Brisk, but not a deal-killer.

  “We’re out of here,” I said, and although it was foggy (fog and low winds often seem to go together), we knew the way out by now, and by seven, we were already farther than we’d got the day before. Once again, the starter had failed to respond on the first try; once again, I reminded myself that sooner or later it would stop working altogether. The fog kept us in our own little universe until we finally rounded Cape Cook a respectful mile offshore. As predicted, the sea humped and roughened near Solander Island, and the wind increased enough to have us hanging on even when seated in the cockpit. It was as though the invisible peninsula was letting us know it was there, waiting for us to make the slightest mistake. Somewhere off to the left, I knew, there were cliffs that soared straight up into the warty forehead of this improbable land mass; on the chart, I counted fourteen peaks higher than a thousand metres. If we could see the Brooks Peninsula, I thought, it would look like Tahiti.

  We did see it, finally, the fog grudgingly thinning once we had rounded Solander. The west-facing shore was all black cliffs and log-strewn beaches below the improbably green hills. There was Banks Reef — could that be Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society? The man who accompanied Lieutenant Commander Cook, as botanist and naturalist, on Cook’s voyage around the world in 1768? We were under power, so I could easily consult Walbran. It was. Solander Rock, which we had finally rounded, turned out to be named after Banks’s easygoing assistant, the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander.

  It was nice to find a few scientific names among the endless list of British and Spanish naval men and royalty that filled so much of Walbran’s addictive book. Joseph Banks became scientific royalty himself, politically unassailable in his later career, with a finger in every pie. His reef, well out from shore, was white with breaking waves, and the rocks looked like the stubs of an eighteenth-century sailor’s rotten teeth. It terrified me.

  The retreating fog was like a curtain lifting. We began to see seabirds: guillemots and, a first for me, a pair of tufted puffins, their sturdy black bodies an afterthought to enormous orange beaks. They reminded me of the false nose and Groucho Marx glasses we used to play with as children.

  Once around the peninsula, the wind fell to nothing and the sun began a long game of hide and seek with holes in the fog. The Pacific swell was more or less coming from behind us now, and we surfed an undulating sea of mercury that, when the sun was out, threw back a dazzling reflection of towering white clouds and blue sky. The horizon, at those moments, became a wavering silver ribbon. Vera was on autopilot now, and the motion was lulling and seductive — or would have been had we not entered the stretch of coastline where there were exposed rock pinnacles as much as five miles out to sea. The chart looked as though a waiter had leaned over my shoulder and murmured, “Some ground pepper with that?”

  Between the corner of the Brooks Peninsula and the Bunsby Islands, where we had decided to spend a few days, we had to find our way through a minefield of reefs. Some of them we saw, poking evilly into a bank of low-lying fog. Some of them we only thought we saw.

  “Oh my God!” Hatsumi shrieked. Charley and I jumped. There wasn’t supposed to be a rock this close, and definitely not to starboard. But this rock was smooth, and it moved, flexing through the oily surface in a glistening grey hump that was long gone before I could grab the binoculars.

  “That was big,” she said. “Same as Vera, maybe more.” I found my marine mammal book and keyed it out from the profiles of surfacing whales: it was a humpback, long teetering on the endangered list and now making a strong recovery. I realized that the orcas we’d seen yesterday in Brooks Bay, and now this humpback, were the first whales I’d seen for years that were unmolested by high-speed whale-watching boats. We wouldn’t start seeing those again until farther south, in the more tourist-oriented Clayoquot Sound.

  We approached the Bunsby Islands through a corridor of sentinel reefs, straining for a sight of something corporeal in this strange, limpid landscape. The fog lifted obligingly to sho
w us the tricky entrance, and by the time we had anchored in Scow Cove, it was hot, and we could smell an intoxicating mixture of ocean and wet rocks and trees. Charley drew it in, quivering.

  “Let’s go,” I said, wrestling the kayak off the foredeck and letting it fall overboard with a smack. “We’re in heaven again.”

  How different this place was from Klaskish Basin, just the other side of the peninsula. Sheltered between islands rather than in a secretive notch, the place felt more open (a bit too open, as we found out later). The cedars still came to the water, but there were humped, mossy rocks too, and enough pocket beaches that Charley and I had our pick of landing spots. I even saw a few oysters, which meant the water got just warm enough for them to spawn. But there was fresh bear scat on this beach too, so we had to be careful.

  I squatted over a tide line of rotting kelp on a gravel beach while Charley tossed sticks for himself in sheer exultation at being on solid ground. Higher up, the gravel was infiltrated by sea asparagus, then tufts of grass, then an abrupt curtain of salal and the wall of cedars beyond. A nurse log sprouted its own exuberant ecosystem; the place was teeming with life. Overhead, eagles wheeled and cried, a peculiar fingernails-on-blackboard sound I always found at odds with their heft and power. There were ravens here too.

  “Don’t go too far,” I called out to Charley. Squeaky-voiced or not, eagles had been known to take a run at small dogs. Back in the safety of Vera’s cockpit, we spent the rest of the hot afternoon doing all the boat chores that had taken a back seat to navigation anxiety. I transcribed several days’ worth of notes, forcing myself to listen to whatever I’d blathered into the digital recorder. Black flies arrived and were snapped at; a shoal of sardines erupted suddenly at the surface, chased by something bigger underneath; six kayakers glided silently past. I baked two loaves of bread, freed up sticking fittings, and nipped a garbage mutiny in the bud.

  “It won’t fit,” complained Hatsumi, on her hands and knees pummelling a large white plastic bag into a too-small opening.

  “How did we manage to produce that much garbage?” I asked. “Since Winter Harbour?”

  It could have been worse. The first year we cruised, we brought everything ashore: kitchen scraps, tin cans, wine bottles. At least we had now learned to jettison what sank or degraded or could get eaten. We still had to pack our own effluvia around, though, gradually filling the dreaded “holding tank” that every vessel was now required to carry, counting the days and nights until bitter experience dictated we had deposited our fifteen gallons of bodily waste and it was time for one of us (me) to go forward, lift up the mattress on my side of the bed, insert the pump handle, and yank it back and forth until the polyethylene box beneath it was empty. In Canada, you were supposed to be three miles offshore when you did this, but, while I doubt many people let fly in a marina or at anchor anymore, I do wonder how many steam three miles out just to blow their tanks.

  That night we contributed a rockfish carcass to the marine recycling service, one of several I’d jigged up absurdly easily from the dinghy. Hatsumi steamed it in sake and ginger and sweet rice vinegar, and for the first time in weeks, we crawled into bed with a feeling of accomplishment, and some relief. Cape Scott and Brooks were done; it was all downhill now. It was a noisy night, though, the anchor chain catching repeatedly on what felt like a miniature version of the Rockies fifty feet below us. We stayed put, because there was little wind, but it still sounded as though Neptune was down there trying to jump rope with our chain.

  The real wind came the next day, a northwest gale blowing straight into Brooks Bay. By ten in the morning, our protected cove didn’t feel so protected anymore, the wind finding its way in and whipping the water into whitecaps. The chain-grabbing and hobby-horsing became more than a mild annoyance; every now and then, there was a sound like an underwater gunshot, and Vera’s bow shook. I ran forward and put my foot on the chain, which was trembling like a live thing. I stared hard at a fixed point on land. My foot began to jump, and the tree I was concentrating on began to walk slowly forward. I raced back to start the engine.

  “We’re dragging!” I yelled and pushed the starter button. Click. Again and again. Finally, it responded. Hatsumi took the controls. We yelled at each other as couples will when their yacht and everything in it is drifting backward onto a remote beach. I got the anchor up, and Vera sprinted ahead to find shelter behind the hook of land where we should have anchored in the first place. When the anchor left the bottom, there had been no resistance. It had worked itself completely free.

  Once the dust had settled and we had re-re-anchored (“Not there, there!”), I spent a frustrating hour tracing the starter system and pulling apart the instrument panel to try to figure out why it was balking. In a sailboat, when you need your engine, you usually need it now. Upside down in the engine room, I heard the automatic bilge pump suddenly turn on and found that the stuffing box, the wonderfully low-tech packing of wax-impregnated flax that keeps the ocean from coming in around your propeller shaft, was leaking badly. Entropy was coming at us from all sides. I retightened the packing gland using two enormous wrenches while squatting on the engine transmission, a platform about the size of a loaf of bread.

  “Beer would be good,” I said. “I’ll deal with the starter later.”

  The wind whistled relentlessly around the cove all day. In Brooks Bay, totally open to the northwest, the conditions would be savage. That evening, the owners of the only other boat in Scow Cove, an aluminum trawler so big I’d taken it at first for a research vessel, putted over and introduced themselves. He was Conrad; she was Kate.

  “I heard you on the Boaters’ Net last night,” Conrad said.

  Conrad had made what must have been a fortune in real estate, because he’d designed and commissioned his boat himself. I admired him; his boat was as far as you could get from the usual millionaire’s yacht with its marble countertops and flat screen TVs. Conrad’s boat was both highly sophisticated and spartan, built to stay out for months, with redundant systems where anything could conceivably fail, and nothing that didn’t serve a nautical purpose. I liked Conrad, who, like many powerboaters in their seventies, had put decades into long-distance voyaging under sail before going over to the dark side. I especially liked it when he said that circumnavigating Vancouver Island was a real separator of boaters.

  “But, Conrad,” I said, “people go to Alaska all the time!”

  “Hell, you can go to Alaska in a kayak. Around the island — that’s different.” As for him, he’d already decided to go no farther north than where we were now.

  “It just gets worse,” he said. “As you already know. We’ll probably see you in Kyuquot.”

  That was fine with me. We hadn’t met anyone interesting since the lone sailor in Bull Harbour, and the idea of running into a familiar face as you progress from harbour to harbour is one of the attractions of voyaging.

  Conrad and Kate left early the next morning, and we were alone again. The wind had blown itself out overnight, and the fog that replaced it drifted over us like a moth-eaten veil before vapourizing to reveal a brilliant sunny day. A school of sardines flowed around Vera’s bow, the occasional silvery back breaking the surface with an audible plop. The only other sound was an odd one for such a place: the thrumming of an airplane, throaty, low-down, and slowly getting closer. The twin-prop de Havilland Buffalo came toward us out of the sun, a few hundred feet up, and went into a tight turn, the light catching the red markings on the bright yellow fuselage. The six Buffalos based in Comox were the coast’s search and rescue workhorses, and this one wasn’t flying over the Bunsby Islands just to admire Vera. Somebody was missing.

  I rowed back to Vera while the Buffalo completed another circle, then droned and dwindled away to the north. The people inside that plane would know every cove and reef and shipwreck along this grim coast. To them, Vera was just a shapely green yacht in an emerald pool; they would
be looking for something harder to spot. The Buffalo disappeared in the direction of the Brooks Peninsula.

  I switched on the VHF radio. We listened to the forecast together — not much wind, a good day to raise anchor and motor down to Kyuquot Sound — and then came the bad part.

  “Pan-pan. Pan-pan.” The international signal for an urgent situation, one level below “Mayday.” A twenty-foot aluminum “sport-fishing vessel” had failed to return to Winter Harbour yesterday. There were four men aboard. The name of the boat was the Qualicum Rivers Nine.

  “Qualicum Rivers? That was the fishing lodge right next to us,” I said. “We probably saw those guys on the dock.”

  “They went fishing yesterday?” Hatsumi said. “In a gale?”

  “Apparently.” I shut off the radio and we looked at each other. Yesterday, the wind had been strong enough to blow us off our anchor, and we were on the south side of Brooks, in a more or less protected anchorage. On the north side of the peninsula, in a nineteen-foot boat . . . well, we had turned back once, and it hadn’t even been a full-fledged gale.

  “I guess we should keep an eye out for them,” I said. But I didn’t think anyone would find the Qualicum Rivers Nine, or its occupants. If the boat had capsized, its wet grey hull would be near-invisible. And even if the men had been wearing life jackets, how long could they last in this freezing water?

  We were safe here, and now I felt even less like leaving. I had plenty of “work” to do — there was still about a third of my father’s trial papers to get through — but it was getting harder and harder to step back into that morass, especially after we had rounded Cape Scott and seemed to be encountering a new navigational challenge every minute. Hatsumi was feeling the additional stress too and was spending several hours each afternoon plotting out the next day’s transit. While I had been plugging through files on hydrocephalus, she had been sitting in front of her computer, surrounded by paper charts, planning our path through the upcoming rocks and inserting waypoints into her navigation software. I realized that, if something happened to me, we’d lose an expert on medical-legal conundrums from the late 1970s. If something happened to my wife, we’d be lost.