Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  “What tips you off is the number of kids in the school. It’s at the point where one family can make the difference, one way or the other. Every year you watch the numbers — who’s moving in, who’s leaving. There’s thirty-five houses for sale right now.”

  “How do you know all this? I mean, about school numbers?”

  The man laughed. He had a neat moustache, close-cut grey hair, good posture. The long socks beneath his neatly pressed cargo shorts gave him a military air.

  “I was the school principal,” he said.

  Out back, his tired-looking wife filled our propane tanks in a near-empty lumber yard that had become a parking lot for old boats, the kind of mildewed fibreglass cruisers and fishing boats you knew would never float again. A few four-by-eight plywood sheets and some bags of concrete were all that was left of the building materials side of the business. Four enormous cellphone repeater dishes loomed over us, the only landmark left. Tahsis itself had no cell service.

  Back at Westview Marina, a string of cottages had commanding views of the mudflats across the estuary of the Tahsis River. In front of one of them, roses struggled to find the light through the branches of a Douglas fir, trying, like Tahsis, to stay alive.

  We made friends with the couple tied up across from us. Tahsis was the first place on the west side of the island where there’d been more than one or two cruising boats. Neil and his wife, Alice, had slogged north from Portland, Oregon, to Barkley Sound, as they did every year, a thirty-two-hour no-sleep nail-biter that, for them, got the worst stretch of the trip over with in a hurry. Neil and I exchanged books we’d already finished, and for the first time, I found myself forced to choose between titles. You didn’t run into many people with books on Buddhism and Bach’s cello suites. I don’t usually ask people what they do for a living when I’m travelling, but I winkled it out of Neil: he and his wife operated a psychiatric and counselling clinic for trauma victims, mainly refugees. I would never have known.

  It was “Steak Night” at the marina café, and we joined Neil and Alice for dinner. The steaks, grilled outside on a barbecue, were serviceable, but what really endeared me to the place was the fact that our dog was welcomed in.

  “Him?” said a durable-looking woman wreathed in smoke from the grill. “No problem.”

  Charley had a brief discussion with a German shepherd, agreed to the conditions, and flopped down under Hatsumi’s chair. The bigger dog’s owner was an affable paramedic who’d grown up in Tahsis. The German shepherd was a replacement for a dog who’d been killed by a cougar while the two were walking together at the edge of town. After dinner, we moved across the dock to an outdoor fire pit that fronted a gift shop, where an indifferent folksinger sang the same song over and over again, and sparks from the fire burned holes in my pants. Behind this cozy scene, sport fishermen laboured around a brightly lit cleaning table, like a team of large, casually dressed surgeons. As we walked back to Vera in the warm evening rain, three more of them huddled in the stern of a twenty-foot boat, fussing with one of the gleaming engines. The boat leaned crazily, and the men were getting rained on, but they had beer, an engine to fix, and the next day’s fishing to look forward to. They were pretty happy.

  ***

  After the steaks and the singing, I was ready to go to work, to finally get started on the trial itself. I had the feeling that, like the trip we were on, the home stretch was coming. The trial — such as it was before the deal to settle was made — seemed to consist of two days in court for the plaintiff’s star witness, the neurologist-professor. Was my father in the courtroom? He must have been, and it must have been excruciating for him as the professor was led through his report, sentence by damning sentence. His eyes must have rolled when the witness misspelled septicemia for the judge:

  “Let me just spell it for you. S-e-p-t-o-c-e-m-i-a.” Later on, he got “parietal” wrong too (“Gee, I can’t spell, my lord”), and the lawyer had to spell it for him.

  Spelling was the least of this man’s blunders. By page ten of the transcript, he was confidently describing a ventriculogram for the plaintiff’s lawyer — except that the procedure he came up with involved injecting air into the spinal space, not the ventricles. He was hopelessly confused; that would have been the spinal tap from hell. None of this would get challenged, of course, until cross-examination, so the tag team pressed on, the witness strenuously repeating phrases like “critically ill,” and “grave, grave significance,” and “this unfortunate child.” In one paragraph, he said “very significant neurological sign” four times.

  His explanation, despite the gaffes, was pretty compelling. By the end of it, I was rooting for Billy. Who wouldn’t? Unfortunately, the finger was being pointed at my father. It was a disheartening conclusion, and the page I was reading was marked with one of my father’s inimitable bookmarks, a shaft of exposed photographic paper. This one was all black.

  The plaintiff’s lawyer lobbed a few soft questions; like a tennis player expecting a set-up, the witness slammed them away. Apgar scores? “Not that important.” (Wham!) Neonatal hypoxia? “Never that severe.” (Thunk!) One expert’s opinion that there was brain damage from the hydrocephalus itself? “He’s a good pediatrician, not a neurologist.” Shot whistles down the line, catches the far corner, takes out a ballboy. Game over.

  The cross-examination that followed was more interesting. At last the gloves were off. That game-winning shot, replayed in pitiless slow motion, now wobbled out of bounds. Mr. Thackray became suddenly unavuncular, more terrier-like. He started, of course, with the misdescription of a ventriculogram, a public poke at credibility that would undermine anyone’s confidence. Soon he was reducing the expert’s argument about hydrocephalus being benign to a string of uhs and dashes in the transcript. It got a little unpleasant (“I am not a neurosurgeon, I am a child neurologist”); at one point, the witness was stammering about “viral bacteria.” And then complaining, after a particularly nasty broadside in which he was caught contradicting himself about the degree of complications from birth, “It’s just the way questions are asked.”

  To which the Mr. Thackray replied, “I am not trying to make it easy for you.”

  It got nastier, until I really thought I was reading a movie script, not a transcript of a real trial.

  “She simply told you the child was okay in that first month, didn’t she?”

  “What she said, what she didn’t say, it’s so hard for me to . . .”

  Thackray piled it on. The witness’s timing of the meningitis was all wrong, his timing of the shunt problem was wrong. The shunt didn’t fail; it was infected. The expert’s report was based on “what was given to me.” He had no idea of the way Apgar scores are normally reported and interpreted (“Usually it comes with a form which tells us”). After a page of remorseless questioning, the witness agreed the Apgars “looked bad.” Finally, an admission that there was significant neonatal stress. And then, thank God, adjournment.

  When court reconvened two days later, the poor man felt compelled to re-apologize for getting the ventriculogram wrong. “I should have known and it’s just one of these things. The test I described, it’s called a neuro-encephalogram.”

  Wrong again. There is no such thing as a neuro-encephalogram. But there is a pneumoencephalogram, which is exactly the nasty procedure he had described. Replaced by CT scanning, a “pneumo” really hurt, and it took a long time to recover from. In the 1973 movie The Exorcist, the possessed girl gets a pneumo before she’s shipped off to an exorcist. She screams a lot.

  Mr. Thackray steps up again. Right off, he confirms that the damning report was based not on the hospital records but on the doctor’s summaries (their consultation notes). In other words, I had read more aboard my boat than this man had in his office. And he’d never seen Billy’s records from the first days of his life, when he had trouble breathing, when his incubator failed, when Billy was put on the respirat
or with a tube down his trachea.

  One by one, the symptoms of brain damage before Labour Day were brought out and admitted to. Here, the lawyer read the witness his own words and forced him to take them back. It was like a movie again, the lawyer producing information the witness had never seen. And at one point, Thackray even tricked him, getting him to okay a “normal” ratio of red and white blood cells as being ten to one (it’s more like seven hundred to one). Here I found my father’s aggrieved highlighting in three colours, with a note: “He doesn’t know!” Nor did he know Billy was on phenobarbital (“doesn’t know phenobarb used in jaundice”). Or how shunt valves work (more outraged scribbles from Dr. Harvey). Again and again, the expert witness was forced to admit that he never looked at the nurses’ records, the day-to-day history. “Well, I was given the consultations of the doctors.” Exactly the thing I had been worried about.

  It went on. I forced myself through it, knowing that these preliminary “victories” for my father would in the end get steam-rollered but still enjoying the discrediting of this guy. There was much discussion of where Billy’s seizures came from (if from the frontal lobe, where the EEG — brain wave records — seem to point to, that was an area unlikely to be affected by the lumbar puncture). Again, the lawyer made the witness eat his own words about the EEGs; his own data showed the frontal lobe was exactly where they came from. My father’s highlighter was heavy here, and I knew why: he prided himself on reading and interpreting his own EEGs. No neurologist necessary.

  After two days of trial, the star witness seemed shaken, if not discredited. I later found a note my father wrote to his lawyer, saying, “Any good neurologist would have been convulsed with laughter.” In my father’s simple view, Thackray had just demolished one expert witness; surely he could have done the same to the plaintiff?

  I found myself flummoxed too. Because those two days of trial were all I could find transcripts for. There was no defence. As far as I could tell, the scheduled fifteen-day trial was over after two. It was like watching someone from your team tackle a runner, cause a fumble, scoop the ball up, and break for the goal line — and then the game is, unaccountably, called. Why?

  Maquinna’s Ghost

  We stayed a second day in Tahsis. I liked the place. There was a good walk up the steep hill to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, where Charley could relieve himself in an ecclesiastical setting. I also had to do something about the balky starter switch, which lurked in the back of my mind, clicking. Lying in bed that night and listening to the gentle hiss of rain on the water, it came to me: I would install a shunt! Simply bypass the starter button so that if it balked at a critical moment, all I had to do was open the hatch and flip a second switch.

  The marina had a decently stocked repair shop. The next morning, I hot-wired the starter motor, tucked the new switch where it couldn’t be activated accidentally, and voilà. Surgery my father would have been proud of. But he stayed away.

  We left Tahsis in fog so thick we couldn’t even see Vera’s bow. I knew it was a straight shot out into the main inlet, but we still needed radar, GPS, and binoculars to get there. Ten minutes out, we were in the clear; behind us, Tahsis receded under a thick white cloud. Suddenly, six sport-fishing boats materialized out of it, fanning apart to blast by, like a squadron of fighter planes. No radar, no running lights. As though on cue, the VHF Coast Guard channel broadcast the news that the sport-fishing skiff from Winter Harbour had been found.

  The Qualicum Rivers Nine had finally been spotted the day before, five days after disappearing, by another fishing guide from Winter Harbour. It was upside down in the middle of Brooks Bay. Only the tip of the bow was showing; not enough for the search planes’ radar. Divers found one life jacket floating nearby; the other three were still in a locker on board. The ignition key was in the off position, so they had probably been jigging for halibut when the boat flipped.

  I thought about that: three middle-aged guys braced against the wicked chop, perhaps joshing with the guide, cradling their rods and intent on any signal from a hundred feet down. Come on, baby, bite! But the monster — the rogue wave — came from above.

  The search for the men was soon called off. High winds, freezing water, ten miles from shore with no life jackets — by any measure, their time had run out. An EPIRB — a radio beacon that could be triggered by the boat’s rolling over — might have led searchers to them faster, but radio beacons aren’t mandatory on such craft.

  There wouldn’t be much sailing today. Long and narrow, Tahsis Inlet runs almost straight north-south, and we had a dozen miles with the wind dead ahead in a channel only a half mile wide. Where the Tsowwin River entered the inlet, the sandbank off the estuary squeezed the channel enough to take three knots off our speed. The river cut deeply into the mountains at right angles to the inlet. Passing the Tsowwin was like gazing briefly into a lone, illuminated window — grass flats, silvered driftwood, the gentle V of the valley and the fog-shrouded mountain beyond. We bulled slowly through while, in the other direction, a conga line of nine sea otters, head to tail, hitched a ride with the current heading back toward Tahsis.

  We would spend the night somewhere in Nootka Sound. Of all the place names on this famous coast, Nootka may be the most familiar. Before I even knew exactly where it was, the name brought to mind explorers, swirling mists, angry rocks, Indigenous people in conical cedar hats. Friendly Cove, to give the main anchorage and settlement its English name rather than its real one, Yuquot, was where Captain Cook and his men became the first documented Europeans to land in British Columbia. The Resolution and the Discovery anchored there in 1778. British names, of course, abound; I didn’t have to go to Walbran to recognize HMS Bounty’s master William Bligh, who has a large island named after him.

  The sea otters that seemed to be monitoring Vera’s progress since Cape Scott should have been direct descendants of the ones that watched Cook’s vessels arrive but, strictly speaking, they weren’t. Once Cook’s party demonstrated the profits to be had from otter pelts, later traders managed to extirpate the species in B.C. waters. Between 1799 and 1801, around 10,000 otters were being taken from B.C. and Alaskan waters every year. The ones we were enjoying now were transplants, the descendants of eighty-nine Alaskan otters released south of the Brooks Peninsula in 1969. There are around 3,000 otters along the coast now; not enough to restart a hunt, but a few were being shot and skinned, illegally, every year. I was glad we didn’t find any of these grisly remains. For now, the biggest threat to the animals was oil spills.

  We ended up in Friendly Cove, although it wasn’t our first choice. Protection from wind and swell looked much better in Santa Gertrudis Cove, a notch just north. The Spanish name, like so many here, reflected the stalemate between British and Spanish traders in the area. Ten years after Cook landed, the Spanish built a permanent settlement in Yuquot (they called it Santa Cruz de Nutka), but they lost interest and dismantled their fort as the otter pelts ran out. They were gone by 1795.

  But the entrance to Santa Gertrudis defeated us. It was high tide, so the many rocks we needed to avoid were underwater. Even the vaunted GPS threw up its hands, offering seriously conflicting locations on two different electronic charting systems. Suddenly, Vera felt like a sumo wrestler in an airplane aisle. I lost my nerve, yelled at my wife, went into reverse, and backed out exactly the way we had come in.

  In Friendly Cove, we were the only boat anchored, although the public dock was humming. The Uchuck III had just arrived, disgorging seventy families of the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation for their annual summer residence on the grassy isthmus that separated Friendly Cove from Yuquot Point, on the outside coast. This place is the site of historic Yuquot, the summer home of Chief Maquinna and his Nootka people (their winter village was in Tahsis). It’s now a National Historic Site (although, when I looked a little deeper into that one, it turned out that the original designation in 1923 was to recognize Cook’s historic landi
ng. It wasn’t until 1997 that the Mowachaht/Muchalaht persuaded the Canadian government to “re-designate” the site to reflect First Nations history).

  A cultural and interpretive centre was in the planning stages, and tourism was being developed, beginning with a half-dozen rental cabins. The whole effort was poked and prodded into being by a couple of Gold River entrepreneurs, both of whom we managed to meet. The first of these people we were obliged to find if we wanted to stay overnight; the second one found us when we tried to stay in the wrong place.

  Margarita James was in charge of the band office and collected the twelve-dollar overnight fee. If we had tried to come at a more chaotic time for her, we couldn’t have managed it, because seventy tents were being erected on the freshly mowed meadow. A small fleet of off-road buggies was hauling supplies and equipment over the long roadway from the Uchuck’s drop-off, and already the area was strewn with ice boxes, lawn chairs, piles of firewood, backpacks, garbage bags, blankets, and wheelbarrows. Racing through it all were the kids, giddy in the brilliant afternoon sun. The sound of more firewood being chainsawed blew in from the long crescent of beach that looked south.

  A few of the kids sidled up to check us out. One little girl wore white sneakers with flashing red lights. She sat on the edge of a picnic table, swinging her feet.