River bars are dangerous. The United States Coast Guard has actually created regulated “navigation areas” for all coastal river bars in Washington and Oregon, with warning signage that can include flashing lights and radio bulletins when conditions are especially unsafe. Both New Zealand and Australia are notorious for river bars, and people of a morbid bent can choose from a long list of YouTube compilations of boats fighting their way through fields of standing waves, shooting into the air or wallowing sickeningly before pitchpoling end over end. Most were filmed by onlookers on land, but the camera still shakes. I never looked at them before we left on our circumnavigation, and when I see them now, I always think, Well, at least you can see where you’re going before you turn upside down. Because when we found ourselves on the Nahwitti Bar, it was still dark, and the fog was so thick you couldn’t see the next wave.
Bars are created when rivers that carry a lot of sand dump their contents into the ocean. As someone who had written a book called The End of the River, I might have been expected to know a lot about river bars, but I didn’t. In that book, I was more concerned with the body of the river and the fish in it, and what happened to rivers when you dammed them or dumped waste in them or sucked most of their water out to grow lettuce and grapes. The meeting place between river and ocean was a special case, and the only one I’d ever paid much attention to was the São Francisco River in northern Brazil, where a chain of dams had had the paradoxical effect of actually intercepting a lot of the silt that would normally have made it to the ocean to form a bar.
The unlucky São Francisco was being strangled; the Nahwitti River clearly wasn’t, and it had a formidable bar. Even before we’d reached Bull Harbour, back in Goletas Channel, the evidence of the bar had appeared on our depth sounder. Goletas was a freeway, unobstructed and deep — a monotonous three hundred metres. At that depth, Vera’s depth sounder gave up trying to read an echo off the bottom; it just blinked “Last” over and over, as though to say, “Why don’t you just turn me off? You’re not going to run into anything. There’s nothing down there but hatchet fish and ooze.”
But, just after Bull Harbour, Goletas ends abruptly. The bottom jumps up at you. “Whoa!” goes the depth sounder, waking up with a start. You’ve just stubbed your toe on the Nahwitti Bar.
And that shallowness is the problem with river bars like the Nahwitti. Not because there isn’t enough water for the boat to float in — Vera needed around five feet, and the Nahwitti Bar never got that shallow. The problem arises because the water over the bar is in nearly constant motion. First, there’s current, which is the net movement of water and reflects the state of the tide. Second, there’s wind, which pushes the surface water ahead of it. And finally, there’s swell, the long rollers that have travelled across the Pacific to end up at the mouth of the Nahwitti River. All three of these water-movers combine to guarantee a net directional flow of water over the shallow bar.
Why does this matter? Because when moving water encounters a shallow spot, it gets stuck, dragging on the bottom and falling over itself. On a beach, the onrushing waves get bigger and bigger as they drag more and more, and then they break and collapse. If they’re big enough, you can ride them on a board. Over a bar, the same thing happens, producing what would look, from the air, like a beach without a shore. Breaking waves, surf, the lot. If you go across when wind, current, and swell gang up, you’ll be in trouble.
Around the Nahwitti, even a cursory look at the chart told me it would be shallow — thirty to fifty feet — for at least two miles after we first tripped over the leading edge, which would happen shortly after we exited Bull Harbour. But there was another fifteen miles to go, around the top of Vancouver Island, before we would round Cape Scott, and it was relatively shallow there too. The water wouldn’t start to get deep again until we were through the turbulence that was marked by the cheerful little wave symbols on the chart. The place was a boater’s worst nightmare.
***
And now here we were in the middle of it. Once our illusions about the “inside route” had been rudely snatched away and I’d made the idiotic decision to chance the bar at the worst possible moment in its tidal cycle, it took us thirty minutes to grind over it. By then, I was puking water. Even throttled back, we were making eight knots as the current helped push us up and over each wave. Vera was like a cringing dog kicked from behind. Down below, lockers opened and vomited out their own contents: cosmetics, a bottle of chili sauce, lemons. Hatsumi hung onto the chart table, and I hung onto the wheel.
Finally, the oily rollers ahead began to look less threatening. I found I could change course, get us pointed closer to the direction Hatsumi kept calling to me. On one of my trips to the rail, I looked up after vomiting over the side and saw a sea otter on his back not twenty feet away, feet in the air, an incurious look on his whiskered face. “Don’t look at me,” he seemed to be saying.
Once we were over the bar, the character of the sea changed. The waves behind us had seemed deliberate, focused, implacable, but now we entered what so many writers have described as a “confused” sea. It’s a good term. Around Cape Scott, in fact anywhere close to shore along the west coast, the Pacific swell has begun to catch on the bottom, and to twist this way and that in response to local currents. It’s not the lazy roller coaster you envision when thinking of an offshore voyage. It’s more like a washing machine.
For the next three hours, Vera lurched past the invisible shore while we struggled to keep our footing. I vomited some more. When my bladder would hold out no longer, I urinated down the cockpit drain, or at least in its vicinity. There wasn’t a breath of wind. I put Vera on autopilot and finally sat down, clinging to a lifeline and sipping the coffee Hatsumi had made four hours earlier. From time to time, a tiny seabird would bob in and out of the mist, riding comfortably. “This is our place,” they seemed to be saying.
We rounded Cape Scott at nine o’clock, exactly at slack tide. “How about that?” I said to Charley. But we never saw land. An hour or so later, holes in the fog revealed islets, kelp beds, a white flash of surf, before closing again. Finally, a rising wind began to chase the clouds and fog away, and we were able to sail listlessly past Sea Otter Cove and south toward Quatsino Sound, the first of the rock-speckled entrances to the long fjords that cut into the west coast. But it was poor sailing, and the boat rolled sickeningly. When we encountered a pack of sport-fishing boats around the entrance to Winter Harbour, around lunchtime, we took the sails down and powered the rest of the way.
Hatsumi collapsed on a cabin berth and went immediately to sleep, surrounded by a jumble of foul weather gear, boots, trampled charts, and lemons. A packet of my father’s documents had broken loose from somewhere, littering the cabin floor with scholarly articles. After sloshing away the remains of vomit and urine with a bucket of sea water, I sat down in the cockpit and looked around. The folly of what I’d just put us through began to settle in. How many foolish decisions had been made by intelligent, well-prepared people who thought they had every base covered? We had been in real trouble back there, and it was my fault.
I was too tired, finally, to care. And as for not actually seeing Cape Scott, to hell with it. Even the name, it turned out, was a disappointment when I looked it up later in Walbran. This Scott was hardly the hero of the Antarctic; instead, he was a Bombay merchant who helped outfit a British sea-trading expedition in 1786. No matter, we were finally “around the corner.”
***
Winter Harbour isn’t technically the end of the road on Vancouver Island, but it’s probably the most northerly settlement you can drive to fairly easily — it’s straight across the island from Port Hardy. That made it perfect for sport fishermen, who could haul their boats across on trailers, tie up at the dock for a few weeks, and sleep in a tent or one of the small fishing lodges. Nothing fancy, but Winter Harbour was where I finally realized how big the sport-fishing business was.
The smell was the giveaway. There it was again, the sickly reek of fresh intestines that emanated this time from a cleaning table and weigh station on the next dock. The public docks were ramshackle, a listing, cobbled-together collection of blind alleys supported by logs and littered with bleached and crumbling plastic furniture. Seagulls fought over offal, and the bloated, pop-eyed carcass of a red snapper circled endlessly between the docks. Vera and the only other large boat, a converted fishing vessel full of good old boys from Washington, were tied to an eroding concrete slab anchored by absurdly long pilings: the tides in Winter Harbour were obviously huge. The tops of the pilings were bearded with grass.
By mid-afternoon, the docks began to repopulate as fishermen streaked in from the grounds, often several miles offshore, where they’d spent most of the day. The two main lodges, Outpost and Qualicum Rivers, relied on twenty-foot open aluminum boats with a rudimentary cabin like a telephone booth. Bench seats, two big outboards, no radar — in the hands of a competent guide, a boat like this got the customers out and back quickly, but at the cost of a fearful pounding. If the weather blew up, they would be sitting ducks.
While Hatsumi tried to sleep off the effects of my decision-making, I sat in the cockpit as the fleet filed past Vera’s stern to tie up at the lodge’s dock. Winter Harbour felt like a grand place. It was the first safe haven we’d seen for ten hours. We spent a second day there, waiting, as usual, for good weather, but also just to avoid making any decisions. Our dock was managed by one of the charter companies; in their rudimentary store, I asked one of the men from the big Seattle boat whether the fishing was good.
“Oh, excellent.” He nodded enthusiastically. “We’re getting so many, it’s all catch and release for us now. But hey, they’re all Washington fish anyway, you know?” He pronounced it Warshington.
This was a common refrain, sung by both sides: American fishermen were convinced Canadians were catching “their” fish, and vice versa. With five highly migratory salmon species heading for home rivers from Alaska to California, there was a lot of mixing going on. These guys were probably right, but claiming ownership over a fish that spent most of its life offshore seemed kind of small-minded to me.
“Well,” I told him, steering clear of the ownership issue, “if you get one that doesn’t make it, we’ll take it off your hands.”
Two hours later, the man appeared at Vera holding a bloody bag containing a thick fillet of chinook salmon. We salted half of it and ate the rest raw, thinly sliced, with ponzu sauce and grated onion. Canadian or American, it melted in our mouths. When I went over later to thank the men again, they insisted I join them for drinks. Their boat was called Miss American Pie. We sat around a big table, where the four men fed me whiskey and skillfully extracted information. How old was I? How many times had I been married? Marriage seemed to be a favoured topic.
“I been through three old ladies,” said one. Another of the men, returning from a walk to the single pay phone that everyone lined up to use, shook his head in wonderment.
“The wife, you know what she actually said? She misses me!” He adjusted his ball cap and started in on a beer. “No, wait. She said, ‘I wish you were here.’ I guess that’s not the same thing, huh?”
Probably the missus didn’t really know where Winter Harbour was. When I’d gotten through to family members on the same phone, more than one had said, “Winter Harbour? I’ll have to look it up.” That wouldn’t last; three days from now, everybody with a TV would know where Winter Harbour was.
We drank. Before the alcohol completely dulled my senses, I came to understand that the four men had fished together since elementary school. One of them showed me photographs of grandchildren with buzz cuts; he was the successful one, who’d bought the Miss American Pie off the quietest of the three, the one who was tending the barbecue and refilling my glass. He had been a commercial fisherman. It sounded like a weird relationship to me, loaded with simmering resentments, but they all seemed happy enough. Tomorrow, the skipper told me, they would head up to Sea Otter Cove, which we’d passed, unseen, on the way down. But they wouldn’t go around Cape Scott.
“Not in this boat,” he said, flipping a side of salmon.
I made an excuse about tending to my own wife and stumbled out, followed by knowing, manly laughter.
The next day, we wandered along the old boardwalk that ran in front of the few houses in Winter Harbour. The weathered cedar was springy underfoot. All the houses had their own small docks and cleaning stations. One was hung with a collage of rusted implements: a paintbrush, a buoy, some chain. The bulk of the visitors had created a village in a cleared area behind the Qualicum Rivers Lodge; in the evening, the smell of grilling salmon and steaks hung over a collection of tents and trailers. We saw a few wives, but this was mostly a guy thing.
We followed the path to the exquisite cobble beach at Botel Bay, but it was late July, bear-fattening time. After passing too many piles of fresh-looking bear scat, we collared Charley and headed back to Vera, where the only other mammal was the sea otter who hung out near the dock, crunching crabs and urchins. The day went by. Water rose and fell, the shelving beach covered and uncovered. I sat in the cockpit and read.
“I guess we have to go tomorrow,” I said, putting down my book. “And we have to decide about the Brooks Peninsula.” Brooks was the next major challenge. “Do we go around it or not?”
There wasn’t any answer. I peeked below. Hatsumi and Charley were asleep again, cuddled like lovers. It was still only late afternoon, and I’d had my rest. Time for another dip in the pool of pain.
***
Why not see what the nurses had to remember? The outcome might be a foregone conclusion, but this was still a detective story, and the nurses were important characters. I dug out their examinations for discovery, which were slender. Maybe there was something in there, even a snippet, about the questions that had been nagging me since my marathon slog through the hospital records in Port McNeill: Where was my father on Labour Day, when Billy started to go downhill? What did he know, and when?
Nurse Chambers was first, and Mr. Thackray got little from her beyond establishing that in 1976 it was not standard practice for a nurse to record whether a doctor came to see a patient. She remembered little about her regular shift the night before Labour Day, including whether she made any attempt to contact Dr. Harvey (in fact, the record says she did, at 10:30). Was she the nurse who showed Billy’s mother her notes? No. She didn’t remember any details of Billy’s “fight for his life.”
This reticence wasn’t surprising when you remembered that the hospital itself was also named in the lawsuit. Nurses were part of the hospital, so I didn’t expect them to stick their necks out.
And so to Nurse Wong. Her recollection of the number of calls to Dr. Harvey was “at least five.” Alas, none of them were recorded on the chart. So the only known attempt was Nurse Chambers’s call, which she herself didn’t actually remember.
That left Dr. Beamish and Dr. Harvey. In the best detective-story tradition, I decided to leave the star witness for last, so I started with the luckless pediatrician who’d been called in to cover for Billy’s regular doctor over the Labour Day weekend.
Dr. Beamish certainly had his own voice. To the opening question, “Are you a defendant in this action and sworn to tell the truth?” his answer was, “I guess so, yeah.” He didn’t remember much of what happened in 1976 (none of the doctors or nurses did; Billy was one of thousands of patients. Dr. Beamish couldn’t even remember if Billy was a boy or a girl). But his opinion of Billy’s condition before surgery was the same as mine: prematurity, early respiratory problems, a suspiciously large head, and intraventricular hemorrhage.
Then the examining lawyer went straight to the night before Labour Day. What was Dr. Beamish worried about? Infection and increasing pressure. Examining the child’s eyes was difficult, but he found papilledema, swelling of the optic disc. This could mean increasing pressure inside the brain. The problem was, Billy’s symptoms could have also have been caused by infection, which was the reason the shunt had been removed in the first place. Which was it, pressure or infection? Maybe both?
I could see his reasoning. You take the shunt out because it’s infected. That might easily cause pressure to build. But then again, the pressure could be caused by the original infection. So he waited and watched. He doesn’t remember whether he called Dr. Harvey.
“From my notes, I would think that, ah, there was still some time, there’s still time that I, I can wait.”
But things got worse. Dr. Beamish returned at 5 a.m. to confront a seizure, dilated pupils, no response to pain. Dr. Harvey arrived soon after, so “I assume I did call him.” That would make sense: Beamish returns, sees things starting to slide, calls my father sometime between 5:00 and 5:30. Dr. Harvey arrived just before six.
But into the tiny gap between those two events, the phone call and my father’s arrival at St. Joe’s, lumbered the elephant that wrecked everything — as far as the lawyers were concerned. Because Dr. Beamish hadn’t just waited and twiddled his thumbs. He’d done a lumbar puncture. Immediately, the plaintiff’s lawyer pointed out that an LP is contraindicated when there’s evidence of increased pressure. Dr. Beamish’s answer, not unexpectedly, was that the benefits outweighed the risks. He’d done the LP to check for meningitis. He couldn’t recall whether he discussed it with my father, now pulling on his pants in the bedroom with the phone cradled to his ear.
The cerebrospinal fluid he withdrew through the LP was clear, meaning, “I would say it’s not an infection.” So the problem was pressure. Great — but then Billy stopped breathing. They got him started again, then Dr. Beamish put a needle through the burr hole in Billy’s head to reduce the pressure (a procedure called a ventricular tap). A lot was happening, and fast.
Where was my father? I checked the timing in the hospital records. Dr. Beamish arrived at 5:00 a.m. The LP was done at 5:10. Breathing stopped at 5:30. The life-saving ventricular tap was done at 5:45. And my father arrived ten minutes later. If those timings were reasonably accurate, there would have been time for a quick phone call before the LP, and a longer one after it, but there were no records of any. The ventricular tap was probably being done as my father stepped into his car. We didn’t live far from the hospital. By the time he arrived ten minutes later, Billy was responsive again.
Of course, Dr. Beamish couldn’t remember any of it.
***
It had been a horrible day. My little floating family had survived a stupid snap decision I’d made in the fog and dark of the early hours yesterday, so today probably hadn’t been the best time to go back to the early hours of Labour Day, 1976, and poke again at the people who’d been forced to make a judgment call of their own. I was exhausted.
But we’d made it, and Billy had too. I didn’t know then how our experience going across the Nahwitti Bar would affect me later but, based on what I’d learned so far about Billy’s struggle, the decisions made by his doctors and nurses on Labour Day seemed a lot smarter, more reasoned, and definitely more professional than my own.