The next morning, the batteries arrived as promised, and we did the trundling and hoisting thing in reverse. By ten o’clock, we were ready to leave. There was one last stop to make before we headed up the final leg to the Nahwitti Bar and Cape Scott. Sointula, the funky, failed Finnish settlement where we’d first gotten the idea of buying a boat, was just across Broughton Strait, a half-hour hop. We’d spend a day there, then head north to Port Hardy. The electrical system was reborn; I’d never have to deal with Phil again; life was good.
Sointula is in love with a memory. To an outsider like me, the community has a wistful feel, permeated by a sense of failure and decay. And perhaps that’s all it is, a sense and nothing more, but for me, the bright cottages dotting the crescent of beach near the harbour, the well-maintained houses farther inland, even the new construction near the Co-op store that anchors the village can’t dispel the impact of the bleached ribs of ruined storehouses and abandoned boatsheds along the shore. Fishing boats dissolve, infinitely slowly, into the mudflats, reduced to a backbone and rusted engine mounts.
There are plenty of failed settlements along the Vancouver Island coast — Cape Scott, where we were headed, had its doomed Danes, determined to farm in a place blanketed by fog and scoured by year-long winds — but Sointula is the best known. Even if you don’t know the history, the names of places and people remind you that something unusual happened here, and the fact that a functioning community replaced the utopian experiment somehow sets Sointula apart from a town like Port McNeill, where Europeans came to log and fish and get on with their lives, not to remake society.
Sointula’s utopia was Finnish and it failed not because the resource base wasn’t there but for lack of sustained leadership (always a conundrum when your community is founded on harmony and equality). Fisheries, the mainstay of any coastal community, didn’t show serious signs of faltering until the 1990s, although the industry has been in free fall since then, with commercial salmon boats being “retired” by the thousands amid an orgy of finger-pointing. The list of culprits is long, and interaction between them makes things far worse: depending on your affiliation and knowledge, you can take your pick from overfishing, government mismanagement, habitat loss from logging and industrial expansion, pollution, and the effects of climate change on ocean conditions. And, of course, salmon farms.
When a few local entrepreneurs began farming Pacific salmon in net cages along the coast in the 1980s, nobody took much notice, but consolidation of ownership, a switch to Atlantic (that is, non-native) salmon, and massive expansion of net-pen farming in the 1990s gave people another salmon threat to worry about. By around 2005, large-scale farming of Atlantic salmon by a handful of Norwegian companies had, in the public mind, risen high on the list of suspects in the decline of the wild fishery. And when researchers found irrefutable evidence that the salmon in net cages were amplifying the numbers of sea lice, a naturally occurring (and loathsome-looking) parasite on salmon, to the point where baby salmon migrating past the cages were starting to die, people mourning the decline of wild salmon had an enemy to take shots at.
The heavy artillery was deployed in the Broughton Archipelago, just north and west of Sointula. There were lots of salmon farms there (and we’d already passed plenty further south). Alexandra Morton, a biologist living in the archipelago, raised the alarm about louse-infected pink salmon, and the interactions between salmon farms and wild salmon became a feeding trough for scientists and activists looking for funding and for media looking for a story. Sorting the science from the rhetoric became thankless and near-impossible. Few were interested in the buts or the details; salmon farming was a canvas with only two possible colours, black or white.
Alexandra Morton lived in Sointula now. As we neared the harbour, I wondered how an ex-utopian, ex-fishing community would take to having such a famous face in their midst. Now, when I had more or less agreed to go to work analyzing the impact of salmon farms on sockeye from the Fraser River, a six-month job that would have me poring over piles of data and interviewing people on both sides of the controversy, I realized I didn’t really want to know. Salmon farms and disappearing sockeye would come soon enough. First, I had to get around Cape Scott and down the west coast; now, I just wanted to walk around Sointula with my wife and dog, enjoying the beaches and the cottages and the bleached bones of fishboats like any other tourist.
“Rough Bay Harbour, this is Vera.”
Or was it Rough Bay Marina? I throttled back just outside the breakwater and waited for the harbour master to come back on the VHF. Announcing yourself on Channel 66 before landing is the normal drill; someone will respond, take down the name and length of your boat, and assign a spot. I tried again.
“Rough Bay, this is Vera.” I began to feel silly. Charley jumped up on the cockpit coaming and sniffed hard.
“Maybe we just tie up anywhere. There’s lots of space,” said Hatsumi.
“You talking to me?” said a voice on Channel 66.
“Screw it,” I said, pointing to an open spot across from a derelict tug. “Let’s go over there.”
We made fast, and while Charley rocketed up the dock, I had a closer look at the old tug. The hull paint was long gone, and the iron cladding was curling off the wormy-looking wood in rusty leaves, like scales on a dried-out fish. Someone had rigged up a steering station on top, a thick metal column to which were bolted a rusty wheel, a throttle and shift lever, and two incongruously shiny searchlights. The captain’s seat, lashed to the top of the metal ladder, was a rusted-out metal chair that looked as though it came out of a high school auditorium.
There were few pleasure boats in Rough Bay. Most of the vessels were work boats: fishing vessels with blunt, business-like bows and foot-high licence numbers painted on their cabin sides, or battering rams with rusted teeth for butting logs into position. Behind us, a gillnetter called Ocean Buster steamed around the breakwater, dug into a long turn, and disappeared into the maze of wharves on the opposite side of the bay. Charley was already challenging a fisherman walking along the dock.
“Does he like cookies?” the guy asked, grinning. Without breaking stride, he dug a dog biscuit out of his pocket and tossed it to Charley.
“Does the pope wear a funny hat?” he said over his shoulder.
I knew I would like Sointula.
Captain Walbran was no help for the name of Rough Bay, a shallow but dramatic indentation in the elongated south shore of Malcolm Island, like a bite out of the middle of a croissant. By mid-afternoon, the answer was self-evident: any kind of wind from the south swept straight into Rough Bay, whipping the shallows into nasty whitecaps. Rough Bay was . . . rough. Even with the breakwater around the harbour, the outermost boats rolled wickedly and snatched at their lines. Land was the place to be. We hiked up the brand new gangplank being finished off by a couple of cheerful contractors (“You’re the first to use it. Put that in your logbook!”) and set off for the village a few kilometres away. The town’s Finnish past announced itself immediately with the Tarkanen Boat Yard, where a fifty-foot fibreglass seiner was hauled out. I caught the tang of epoxy resin.
The next stretch of road was scattered with beachfront houses, some of them new and expensive-looking, others no more than cedar-shake cottages facing the southwesters. A spanking new tennis court looked out over the strait. Did Finns play tennis? Probably not, but retirees did. Charley lunged and strained at a couple of deer grazing at the edge of the court.
I began to see bumper stickers on fences or gates: “Salmon Are Sacred.” This was the first time I’d heard of salmon worship. Japanese Shinto held that all things possess a spirit and might thus be considered sacred — was this the evidence of some obscure Shinto sect, come to Sointula to spread the word? If so, they had spray cans, because I started to see Salmon Are Sacred on walls too. Then I saw a T-shirt displayed on a tree trunk next to a sheaf of leaflets, and a painting lashed to a pair of nearby hemlocks. It was a knock-off of Munch’s The Scream, with the yawning, bug-eyed creature standing not on a bridge but in front of a salmon cage and brandishing a fish. I thought it was pretty good.
It wasn’t hard to figure out who lived here. Beside the little maroon-coloured cottage on the beach was a vegetable patch, and Alexandra Morton was bent over in it. The nemesis of fish farmers and bureaucrats was hoeing her garden. Was this the time to drop in and introduce myself? This was Sointula on a sunny summer day, not a Vancouver meeting room full of media. Half an hour in the lettuce beds and I might have a unique perspective on one of the better-known activists in the country. Turn right, let Charley off the leash to make the introduction for me, that’s all I had to do.
But I kept walking. This was my holiday, and her backyard. Discussions about farmed salmon and sea lice could wait for the fall. We made a loop at the village, a little farther down the road, past the ferry dock and the Co-op store that’s the hub of the community. The restaurant on the pier, which I remembered as loud and lively five years ago, now had an emptied-out, downsized look. We doubled back to the harbour, found the very spot where, five years before, we’d gotten the idea of buying a boat, and took each other’s picture. I felt slightly silly, standing next to an unremarkable piece of wharf, but a turning point is a turning point.
The past attended to, we explored the other side of Rough Bay, where the ghosts of Finns and fishermen are everywhere. The tide was out, and a dozen collapsing float homes and boat sheds seemed beached on the muddy shore. Most were falling apart, the roofs lumpy and green with moss and the peeling window frames like gaping sockets in a bleached cedar skull. A fence enclosing the back of one of the old homes had sagged open into a snaggle-toothed fan. One shack was reduced to a skeleton, the remaining gable framing a view of the other side of the bay. Ghosts would have no trouble passing through these walls.
We passed more derelict boats along the curving shore of Rough Bay, as though this was the place they had come to die. The New Joy, a pocket troller, still sat upright against a rock wall, as though waiting for owners who would never return. Just down the beach, another fishing boat was no more than a few ribs and a driveshaft. I bent down and sniffed the wood; you could still smell the diesel soaked into it. But there were metal boats in this graveyard too, flat-bottomed aluminum skiffs with outboard motors still attached, pulled high and left to oxidize behind the grass.
Back at the harbour, I stopped in at the wharfinger’s office to pay for our moorage while Hatsumi fed coins into the shower across the parking lot. The office was papered with curling snapshots of fishermen and their boats, and within minutes the tsunami of sentiment I thought I’d ducked by walking on past Alexandra Morton’s house had caught up with me.
“I’m a third-generation fisherman,” the woman told me, her pen poised over the receipt book. “And I can tell you, it’s dying here. The department is just figuring out new ways to make it impossible to fish.” She looked out the window over the docks. An eagle swept by close overhead with a fish wriggling in its beak.
“But there are still boats going out,” I said, remembering the Ocean Buster that had followed us in around the breakwater. “What are they catching?”
“Chinook. But now the sockeye are coming.” She looked up at the sky and her voice broke. “They’re coming, I can feel it.”
“Yeah, but last year was a disaster, wasn’t it?”
“Not this year. This year’ll be good. I can feel it,” she said again. (She was right. The return of Fraser River sockeye that year was huge, catching everyone off guard after the disaster of the year before.) This was my cue, the moment for me to identify myself as a biologist, someone who’d be back in Sointula in six months with a contract and a tape recorder. But she beat me to it.
“Thank God there’s someone to speak for us,” she said.
“Yes.”
Another woman in the office looked up and nodded. “She’s got that, you know, charisma? That’s what we need in this fight.”
What could I say? If I introduced myself now, I’d never get away. Hatsumi would run out of quarters before I was finished.
“It’s dying here,” the harbour master said again. “Every year, more boats on the beach. We just want it to be the way it used to be.”
Don’t we all, I thought. I stuffed my biological baggage firmly out of sight and shook her hand. Better now than later, because reviewing fish farm effects was a thankless job. Neither side liked grey areas, and either one could come down hard on you if you identified one that wasn’t to their liking.
“Get some of those sockeye,” I said and went out to find my wife, whose own country was far more fished-out than this one. In Japan, it was rare to find a protected bay without a small aquatic city of nets and cages. I found her reading an enormous bronze plaque erected at the entrance to the parking lot. There were three such, each with three columns: boat, crewman killed, and date. The dates ran from 1937 to 2001, and I counted thirty-one names. Half of them were Finns, two had the same last name. Brothers? Or father and son? One boat, the Ocean Star, lost five men in 1966.
Beached boats, decaying boathouses, and the bones of all these men somewhere at the bottom of the sea. Theirs was the past that the woman in the wharfinger’s office refused to let go of, and if it took a high-profile activist to somehow stop time and get it back, who was I to question their motives? I was right to have stayed out of it, to go back to my waiting piles of data. Facts are emotionless, and that’s what I would be paid to analyze. The story told by the ruins and the memorials to missing fishermen were the same up and down the coast: people died for the fishing, and now we’d somehow managed to kill off the fish themselves.
Back down at Vera, someone had tied up behind us. Our new neighbour was taking his black and white tabby for a strange, stop-and-start walk along the dock. I asked him about his boat.
“Used to be a gillnetter,” he told me. “I found it in the bushes, rebuilt it myself. Kind of a retirement project.”
“Retirement from what?”
“Commercial fishing. I spent thirty years in the Charlottes. All that time, I told myself all I wanted was a hidey-hole away from the wind.” He gestured at the whitecaps in Rough Bay. “And there’s still too much of it!” His cat leapt onto the derelict tug and disappeared into the chaos of the wheelhouse. “Jeez. I gotta go rescue him. Last time he fell in, we had to net him like a salmon.”
I lay on my stomach and watched a school of coon-stripe shrimp on one of the pilings that secured the dock. Do shrimp form schools? Probably not, but this group was definitely interacting. It seemed to me they were having a kind of meeting, as though the piling was a wrap-around boardroom table. The longer I peered into their world, the more of them I counted, and once my eyes adapted, I saw that the creosote-black pole was studded with their greenish bodies. Now and then, one of them would do the shrimp equivalent of getting up from the table and stretching its legs. They swam horizontally, front legs extended as though readying for an embrace, propelled by the flutter of paired swimmerets that allowed them to go backward and forward with equal speed and ease. Sometimes they took a brief yoga break, flinging all of their appendages straight out and sinking, perfectly motionless, until I lost sight of them.
I suppose that a competent crustacean biologist could have told me what all these behaviours meant, but I was happy just to feel the sun on my back and watch. As always, when confronted with one of nature’s marvels, I found myself guiltily unable to summon up much interest in how it worked, or what it meant. Wonder was enough.