Port Hardy was where we got the first whiff of what I call the fisheries smell. Not fish smell, which, when it exists, tells you the product has already gone bad. What we smelled at Port Hardy, and at many harbours on the west coast after that, was actually the smell of fresh guts. In Port Hardy, where we tied up at the end of the Quarterdeck Marina, it came from both sides: the sport fishermen at the marina and the processing plant at Keltic Seafoods, across Hardy Bay. Wherever the smell originated, Hatsumi hated it. For a while, she held lemon slices to her nose. Then she tried tying a wet cloth around her head. Then she just pulled the hatch closed. But Charley was in heaven.
Keltic Seafoods was the latest incarnation of a processing facility that had been rolling with the punches of west coast fisheries since 1966. After a large food company closed it down in 1999, laid-off employees and local investors resurrected the place, which was now processing whatever came in the door: turbot, pollock, sardines, dogfish, shellfish, halibut, salmon. The sporties stuck with salmon and halibut, and Port Hardy was the first place where I began to get an inkling of why the sport-fishing lobby was beginning to be listened to.
For years, commercial fishermen had suspected that the salmon fishery had fallen off the regulators’ table because, statistically, it simply didn’t pay anymore. In economic terms, commercial salmon fishermen weren’t worth worrying about. It was a vicious circle; once the resource had dwindled far enough, the incentive to spend money on research and management dwindled too. I doubt if it was a conspiracy, but it looked like good news for sports fishermen, who pumped more dollars into the economy.
Or so they claimed — everybody claimed something. All I knew was that, in Port Hardy, the fish guts came at us from both camps. The thrum of charter seaplane flights bringing fresh sportsmen from Dusseldorf and Duluth went right through Vera; my teeth buzzed. When we walked into town, we passed a party of sportsmen embracing for the camera in front of Codfather Charters, their fat salmon laid out on the dock.
“A good day’s work!” One of them fist-pumped a beer. There was shoulder-punching. Further on, another charter group clustered around a gutting table, joshing while their guide worked through a queue of salmon corpses with a fillet knife.
***
Early the next morning, when I took Charley ashore, the docks were coming alive with coffee-clutching sport fishermen heading out for the first bite, stamping their feet and coughing while their outboard motors rattled in clouds of vapour. Hatsumi and I had argued about the Nahwitti Bar the night before; maybe I envied these sport fishermen, who were just out for a good time in local waters, catching their limit and turning back for drinks and congratulations. Things weren’t always so rosy with them though, as we would learn firsthand in Winter Harbour a week later.
The hot fishing grounds were just around the corner from Port Hardy, and we counted twenty-two boats already strung out at Duval Point, before the straight run northwest up the gut of Goletas Channel. As usual, the wind was on the nose, and we powered away from the anglers into fifteen knots of it, past grey gravel beaches under a grey sky. Even the trees looked grey, and the only signs of life were eagles and a couple of dolphins. Four months earlier, when there really was nobody out here but the occasional commercial fisherman, a sharp-eyed Canadian forces patrol plane crew caught a pair of smugglers on infrared-radar video. The miscreants ferried thirty-seven hockey bags stuffed with more than a tonne of cocaine from their unlit sailboat to one of the islets Vera was crawling slowly past. The sailboat and its crew were nabbed in Port Hardy. They had come all the way from Panama.
For a few minutes, the sun appeared over what the newspaper reports had called a “remote stretch of British Columbia coastline,” and every wave that smacked Vera’s bow created its own little rainbow. But by the time we found the entrance to Bull Harbour three hours later, it was raining and the headlands loomed in and out of a thin, dispiriting fog. For the first time, we began to feel the Pacific swell, the water rising and settling uneasily beneath Vera as we turned and headed into the long notch that almost bisected Hope Island. The end of Bull Harbour, I had already been told, was so close to the northern shore of Hope Island you could hear the Pacific breakers hurling themselves at Roller Bay. We groped our way in.
“At least there’ll be other boats there,” I said. “We’ll hang out, talk to them, see when they’re going over the bar.”
I was talking to Hatsumi, but really I was reassuring myself. And I needed to, because Bull Harbour wasn’t full of yachties. There was only one other boat, a bedraggled forty-foot cement ketch from Ucluelet, its stern festooned with fat, faded fenders. We anchored within easy rowing distance, turned off the engine, and listened to the susurration of invisible surf. Six houses and an enormous satellite dish guarded the spit that separates Bull Harbour from the open Pacific; apart from the public dock on the east shore, there was no sign of habitation. The fog thickened. A loon called. You could hear a pin drop.
“I’m going to talk to that guy.” I could see the man in the other sailboat fussing with his main mast. “Coming?”
Hatsumi shook her head. I bundled Charley into the dinghy and rowed over. Except for the beach that fronted the houses, the shoreline was clotted with moss-hung cedars whose lower branches extended over the still water in a kind of shroud. Gerry Schreiber was sanding his mast and touching up paint spots. He was alone. It didn’t take long to realize that he knew a lot more about these waters than I did. He had to — he’d arrived the day before from the north, after working his way clockwise around Cape Scott. He planned to spend the next few weeks cruising in the Broughtons, then go back the way he’d come — the way we were going now — all the way to Ucluelet. With an itinerary like that, he had to be knowledgeable. Or crazy.
“It’s my holiday,” he said. “I do it most years.” He was full of stories, and on closer inspection, his boat wasn’t shabby at all, just eccentric. The mainsail he was working around looked brand new.
“So, we’re heading across the bar tomorrow,” I said. “As far as I can tell, it won’t be windy.” I desperately wanted to come out and ask him, what should we do? But pride and the image of poor spooked Patrick high-tailing it out of Port McNeill kept me from disgracing myself.
“We thought we’d take the inside route.” I permitted myself this overture, at least. The inside route was becoming the popular alternative to actually crossing the bar itself; if you tucked in close to the rocks, found the right spot, and threaded through the kelp along the shore, you could sneak past the bar on the inside. This meant you could time your departure from Bull Harbour so that you reached Cape Scott at slack tide. You didn’t have to play the zero-sum game of trying to cross both the bar and Cape Scott at slack, which wasn’t physically possible given the top speed of most boats. In my pre-voyage preparation, I’d read more and more accounts of people cutting through along the shore.
But not Gerry. “I’ve never done it,” he said. “Just make sure you get to the cape at slack.”
That seemed to be all the advice I was going to get. I repackaged it for Hatsumi, who was sitting morosely in the cabin with the tide tables and a bottle of wine in front of her.
“Good news,” I said. “We’re doing the right thing. He agrees, Cape Scott is the critical one, so all we have to do is make sure we hit it as close as possible to slack tide.”
“Where are all the other people?” she said.
“How would I know? Now, what time is slack at Cape Scott?”
“Nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” she said. “Look it up yourself.”
I must have looked it up a dozen times already. I knew it was nine, and I knew the Nahwitti Bar would be slack even later, at ten or so, but we’d decided that didn’t matter because we had just taken the bar out of the equation. Instead of being caught between a rock and a hard place, we’d eliminated the hard place.
“We’ll have to get out of here by five,” I said. Twelve hours to kill. A gillnetter came through the gap, tied up at the public dock, and blasted its horn. Five minutes later, we watched a pickup truck pull out from one of the houses and reappear at the dock. Unloading ensued, then another blast, and the fish boat took off again into the rain. After dinner, I rowed Charley to the dock to try to get him to pee, but he only patrolled the beach, toying infuriatingly with sticks and rotting crab shells.
“You’re going to regret this,” I told him. “Tomorrow morning, forget it, we won’t be stopping until the end of the day.” I even urinated myself, spattering the rocks to give him the idea, but he just sidled away. He wasn’t the only nervous mammal around here.
Before going to bed, we wrestled the dinghy onto Vera’s foredeck, tied it firmly down, and set the alarm for 4:45.
“Are you nervous?” asked Hatsumi.
“No,” I lied. “Anxious to get going, though. It seems like we’ve been thinking about this damn bar for the last month. I’ll just be glad when it’s over.” Then, still hedging, I said, “We’ll listen to the weather forecast tomorrow morning and take it from there, okay?” I crawled into bed with the portable VHF radio and tried not to listen to the faint thunder of the waves in Roller Bay. Charley curled up at our feet, and Hatsumi mumbled something into her pillow.
“What?”
“Maybe I’ll have a panic attack,” she said.
I lay back and tried everything. Counting sheep. Counting fish. Meditating. A glorious morning, magnificent Cape Scott saluting us. None of it worked. So I got up again, got dressed, lit the oil lamp, and sat down with someone who knew all about rocks and hard places. I’d been through the three acts of Billy’s travails. Now it was time to raise the curtain on a different play: my father’s trial.
***
Billy’s family was officially upset in 1976, when the first shunt was put in. The evidence of just how upset they were arrived at my father’s house in an envelope, dated December 5, 1984, an early Christmas present. Billy was now nine; my father was seventy-four.
There were four defendants: three doctors plus the Victoria General Hospital, but my father’s name was first, and that’s the way all the publicity would go. The writ claimed that most of Billy’s problems at age five resulted from injuries to his brain and nervous system over a four-day period when he was ten months old (the Labour Day episode). It was the classic “bad baby” lawsuit: doctors’ negligence causes brain damage that’s responsible for the child’s later problems.
Next to the copy of the writ was a letter from the Canadian Medical Protective Association, which told my father what to do next: write a narrative account, “from first to last.” Just what a retired surgeon would love to do. But he had the narrative ready in a week, plus his old office files. Whatever was in those files, it was all he had to go on, because he didn’t remember a thing about Billy. That wasn’t surprising; it would be like asking a retired mechanic to give you the details on the brake job he did on your 1976 Volvo.
The next letter in the file was from his new lawyer, Mr. Thackray, directing him to think harder about what, if anything, passed between him and Dr. Beamish on the morning Billy stopped breathing. Right from the start, the LP that Dr. Beamish did that night was critical. My father shot back, “I do have views about lumbar puncture in general, and this one in particular.” In other words, “not a great idea.” Over the next year or so, documents kept coming in, and the correspondence between doctor and lawyer got fatter. Finally, they had dates: examination for discovery in a year, followed by trial a year after that. In all, three years of waiting and worrying and trying to remember.
Examination for discovery — was there ever a better name? A prospective witness is sat down with his lawyer and peppered with questions from the other side’s lawyer. That’s the examination part. The discovery comes about in the way the witness answers or evades. Weaknesses emerge (are “discovered”) and become the basis for a trial strategy. Examinations seemed to me to be the first opportunity for advocates to enter the ring, circle cautiously, and begin to take the measure of their opponents.
Discovery transcripts can make surprisingly entertaining reading, and I had six of them. My father’s was the fattest, a spiral-bound inch of paper; Billy’s mother’s weighed in at about half of his; Dr. Beamish the lumbar puncturer’s was slimmer still. Then two nurses (down to about a quarter of an inch now) and finally the slimmest of all, for the third doctor, a perfunctory thirteen pages. I read that one first.
Poor Dr. Parsons. Billy wasn’t even his patient. Dr. Parsons had been covering for Dr. Beamish. He would have been in his mid-sixties when he was suddenly asked to look at a vomiting hydrocephalic boy, putting him in his seventies when he found himself in a closed room with two lawyers. His stonewalling was almost comic. Maybe he really didn’t recall, maybe he just didn’t care.
Plaintiff’s lawyer: “I take it you can’t recall whether you ever discussed this patient with Dr. Harvey during the day?”
Dr. Parsons: “Mm, mmm.”
Dr. Parsons’s lawyer: “I think the answer is no.”
Dr. Parsons: “No.”
Both lawyers: “No.”
Nobody was going to shed much light on the “failure to monitor” question from this corner. The last words were, “Thank you, Dr. Parsons. You can go back to Sooke — I mean Sidney.” I could almost see the lawyer rolling his eyes.
Billy’s mother’s examination was done before my father’s, so I decided I’d better read hers next. I tried hard to be impartial, to keep my composure. But my own highlighter was out by page 9:
“If anything went wrong with [Billy], he could help me get a so-called normal child and said he would be a vegetable and not to expect very much when he came home.”
That didn’t sound like anyone I knew, and doctors don’t talk about vegetables. Anyway, he would have been pretty wrong if he had, because on the very next page Billy’s mom was describing her son as “very verbal and photogenic.” He had even appeared on TV. Next came the odd assertion that my father had told her Billy “wasn’t hydrocephalus.” That sounded like another clanger to me. Her feelings about doctors came out easily:
“I still do feel victimized by doctors. . . . When I adopted Billy, I was told by no doctor that it was a risk to adopt this little boy.”
Now that, I knew, wasn’t going to stand up. The pediatrician’s warnings about hasty adoption were on the record; I’d read them.
None of this interview can have been pleasant. The mother did her best to present some pretty traumatic events while Mr. Thackray painted a picture of marital breakups, a single mother working in what she called “a laundry situation,” a boyfriend that came and went, frequent moves. But she stuck to her story that my father “said Billy is not hydrocephalic.” Nobody suggested his head size was large, even for a premie? I counted six instances of “not that I can remember” in two pages.
Point by point, Mr. Thackray compared her statements with the written record. Billy’s mother stuck to her guns. And she wanted to tell the story of Labour Day. Everything had been fine, fine, fine, up until the Labour Day mess. The fretting, vomiting baby, the long weekend stretching out, the hallway vigil, and the elusive doctors. And finally, the early morning news that “Dr. Harvey wants to put the shunt back in. I told him Dr. Harvey couldn’t touch him without I saw my boy.”
But by the time the anxious parents reached the hospital, Billy was in the operating room. “The nurse came up to me and said to me that I don’t want to upset you but don’t expect him to come back.” And, “approximately two weeks later this black intern, I don’t know his name, he said to me I was here the night everything went wrong with Billy and I just want you to know that your little boy fought for his life and I have never seen anyone fight for his life like that little sick boy did.”
It got weird. News travelled. A nurse’s grandson’s wife spoke to Billy’s mother. The grandson’s wife was Billy’s mother’s friend. I was having trouble following.
“Things went wrong,” the nurse’s grandson’s wife said. And the nurse herself (this would be the grandmother, I think), said that “they left him unattended and uncared for.” Nurses who had cared for Billy flocked to “say goodbye” to him because they were “all told that night they didn’t expect Billy to live.” But, unfortunately, no names. Even the nurse who “sat her down,” explained everything, and got her started on the idea of a lawsuit didn’t seem to have a name.
And so back to my father, who, Billy’s mother said, “never called me back.” At the hospital, “he would walk right by me. He wouldn’t even say hello. The nurses explained to me he has a terrible bedside manner and he is embarrassed.”
Embarrassed? The only time I ever saw him embarrassed was when one of our boats hit the dock.
Finally, as the waiting and watching dragged on, there was a telephone conversation, when “things got a little bit verbal. That’s when it was brought up that Billy was a vegetable. I made a comment back that if my son died, I would be at his back door with a shotgun and then I hung up.”
The reporters had loved that one. The vegetable and the shotgun, I still remembered the headlines. And asking myself, “Why not the front door?”
Now the examination turned to life after Labour Day, entering the minefield of Billy’s precocious “verbal ability.” For Billy’s mother, this meant that he was “quite a chatterer.” For Mr. Thackray, Billy’s appearances on local radio talk shows, and articles about him in the newspapers, seemed to be evidence of a parent open to the idea of a little publicity for her exceptional child. For him, a little ode that Billy wrote (it was called, “My Mom”) and managed to get read over the radio, was unlikely to have been penned by a carrot.
On and on it went . . . and then it just petered out, at 111 pages and four hours. It wasn’t flattering to Billy’s mother. There were plenty of inconsistencies with the written record. The mutterings of “the black intern” and the nurses were unverifiable. The most charitable thing you could say was that Billy’s mother had made up her mind to adopt a struggling, premature infant and that no amount of alarm-raising was going to undo her confidence in him.
But the unflattering portrait and the inconsistencies weren’t what would decide this case. Billy had brain damage. His mother loved him fiercely and had shouldered his care for a decade. He’d nearly died on Labour Day, and there were expert witnesses prepared to say that the actions of at least one of his doctors were ill-advised. The fact that so many of Billy’s problems were textbook examples of the effects of lack of oxygen at birth wouldn’t mean much in the face of all this emotion. My father and his science versus Billy’s mom and her shotgun? I seriously wondered if I should bother to read the rest.
So I didn’t, not that night. Hatsumi and Charley were both fast asleep, cuddled under the duvet. I could hear them breathing gently. I did a quick check for dead men on the floor and went out on deck. Bull Harbour was still as the grave and completely fogged in. Roller Bay breathed heavily in the night, like a giant biding its time.
A sailboat alone in a strange anchorage in the middle of the night can be a little island in a sea of wonder, but tonight, Bull Harbour was a frightening place. Standing on Vera’s deck, the anchor light the palest of moons in a halo of mist, I felt intensely alone. Maybe reading the words of my father’s accusers hadn’t been the smartest thing to do, but it might have helped bring us a little closer. He probably read the same account in his overheated study, surrounded by his books and his music, but I’m willing to bet the experience placed him in a private little Bull Harbour of his own. We both had a tricky passage coming up.