The next day, we left Kyuquot Sound behind, unexplored, and threaded our way out through rivers of fog. Once again, the engine had been reluctant to start. At least it ran fine once it got going. In fog like this, a reliable engine was non-negotiable. I couldn’t ignore this problem much longer. We were heading south to Esperanza, the next big fjord. From there we could strike east, making a long detour up Esperanza Inlet, connect to Tahsis Inlet, and descend directly into Nootka Sound. That way, we would bypass some of the confused Pacific swell that made nearshore travel so uncomfortable along the coast, and we would get to visit the mill town of Tahsis. We left Walters Cove as we had entered, by stealth, so close to the fog-hidden rocks we could smell the bird shit.
On this first leg, the view came in glimpses permitted by a break in the fog or snatched through binoculars between the drunken rolls Vera was making. When the fog did relent, the views were often startling, like Jurassic Point, where a shaft of sunlight suddenly spotlit a gentle curve of pebble beach, backed by rolling hills of an intense, golf-course green. Another wave, another roll, and the fog-curtain fell again.
The Rolling Roadstead, a protected channel just before the entrance to Esperanza Inlet, was a gorgeous, shallow corridor of beaches where the swell finally abated. We could pick out brilliantly coloured kayakers’ tents that studded a sandy spit like beads. The beaches on this side of Vancouver Island were bites taken from black rock; behind them were salal and the wall of cedars. We hung a left through spectacular Birthday Channel, beneath an eagle riding high with wingtip feathers spread, as though gripping the air. “Many rocks!” my log entry says, in a jiggly hand. Then down past the Catholic church in the village of Chenahkint and into Queen Cove for the night.
It was a clammy place in the fog, the only sounds the whine and crash of timber being torn from the surrounding hills. A school of young salmon flowed around Vera’s rudder, and I tried not to think about the job I had decided to walk away from. That night, we ate below with the propane heater purring, and I wondered how conditions were at the Brooks Peninsula. On the VHF, the search was now focusing on debris.
We had both had enough of playing pinball with rocks. Fog or no fog, the next few days would be in protected waters that were free of the sentinels that guarded the west coast. This was territory that Dave — had he fixed that water pump yet? — had known like the back of his hand as he took the Uchuck III in and out of the inlets between Kyuquot and Port Alberni. And when we left the next morning and I turned to look behind us, there she was, entering Birthday Channel not ten minutes after we’d gone through.
The Uchuck III caught up to us less than an hour later, as we passed the ancient, abandoned Indigenous settlement of Ehatisaht. We watched through the binoculars as she came on astern. She seemed to float above the water, her two long lifting booms angled out from the mast on her foredeck like the antennae of a shiny black moth. As she passed us, I saw red fuel barrels on the foredeck and passengers taking in the sun. Ehatisaht, even overgrown and obliterated, was a lovely site, the hills opening to a symmetrical valley through which the creek emptied into the sea. I peered hard, trying to imagine the village, and for a moment thought I caught something leaning in the trees. A totem? I took a picture, but when I blew it up there was nothing, just the stern of the Uchuck III slipping away.
There was plenty of evidence of more recent human activity, though. The scars left by clear-cut logging are notorious; viewed from a low-flying plane, the scale of tree-scalping on these mountainsides is profoundly depressing. But even here, chugging along at sea level, we saw many patches, maybe a few dozen acres each, where crews had moved in, taken everything, and dumped it down skids into the sea. Centre Island, where I could just make out the remains of the skids, looked hollowed out. The loggers weren’t lacking in derring-do; one old swath snaked like a ribbon along the hillside above Hecate Channel at what seemed an impossible angle. Directly beneath, a salmon farm lay fallow, the smooth galvanized decking, yellow buoys, and bright blue flotation blocks making it look for all the world like something from IKEA.
Again I wondered, which was worse, the clear-cut or the farm? So often we saw them together, and every time, I found myself asking that question. At least you could tow an offending farm somewhere else or close it down. The clear-cuts, and the havoc they wreaked on streams and hillsides, weren’t going anywhere. I decided that comparisons were a distraction. Both fish farming and logging needed to clean up their act.
Once past the farms (there were three of them in Hecate Channel, all apparently fallow), we went through the back door of Tahsis Narrows, the shortcut that would dump us practically at the landward end of Tahsis Inlet. We throttled down to find our way through, so slow that a silent squadron of kayaks actually overtook us. A lone sea otter watched us pass, toasting its toes in the sun. I took comfort in the reassuring Rorschach of the radar: old technology, stolid and simple, so unlike the gorgeous “you are exactly here!” images of the electronic charts, which I still couldn’t bring myself to trust. Radar’s shadowy pictures form and re-form with every sweep, in a way that says to me, “You can trust me. I’m working.”
Once around the corner and into Tahsis Inlet, we did the last five miles under sail, the warm wind filling in strongly behind us. By now, I was so worried about the starter button that I left the engine running in neutral while we surfed past vast log dumps to Westview Marina in Tahsis. The marina was barely distinguishable from the strung-out remnants of the lumber mill and what remained of the town centre. We followed a big RCMP cruiser through a gap in the “breakwater” that was no more than a chained-together corridor of logs and tied up at yet another version of sport-fishing nirvana.
Tahsis used to be a mill town. It had two mills, in fact. The remains of the “old” mill, now little more than a bit of pier and parking lot, sat next to the marina; the “new” mill, at the end of the estuary, had closed down ten years ago. A large section of the bay was marked “booms” and “submerged anchors and cables” on the chart, but all of that seemed to be history. Tahsis the town was still emptying. There weren’t many businesses left, although the family running the only food store was going flat out to get their new gas bar operation running. The young owner rang up our groceries while stage-directing his dubious-looking mother on which buttons to push. Their lone fuel customer, a geezer in ill-fitting jeans and a cowboy hat, waited patiently by the shiny new tanks. At the local building supply store, where we lugged our propane bottles, the owner filled me in on the town’s pulse.
“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 respirator 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?