The alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. It was pitch black and foggy. Hatsumi made a thermos of coffee while I walked Charley, whose bladder would be tested today. Then we followed the shape-shifting black blotches of the radar for the next four hours. The first leg, which took us around the invisible Cape Beale, where we finally turned south, was unsettling. The wind came from the wrong place, there was much more of it than we’d expected, and the fog made everything clammy and opaque. Vera’s windscreen wept steadily, and I had to mop my glasses with a disintegrating Kleenex every few minutes. Once, as we neared the cape, a bobbing cluster of red and green lights materialized astern and winked past us at high speed, like a squadron of fireflies. The sport-fishing boats were heading out. I checked to make sure our own running lights were working.
But the fog stayed with us for hours, even as the wind dropped. The sun was there, a pale disc climbing steadily as we ground our way south, but visibility was only a few boat lengths. I began to mutter about assholes in small boats.
“Remember that old horn?” I asked Hatsumi. She was huddled in the cockpit, staring into nothingness. “The one my dad left, that you were blowing on the Nahwitti Bar? I think we’re going to need it.”
The sporties found us as we entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Four sudden radar blips astern, closing, passing, gone. I made out, for an instant, a ghostly white shape. Off Port Renfrew, a lousy anchorage but a popular marina for fishing boats, the radar screen was suddenly infested. I stopped counting at seven blips and concentrated on peering into the murk. Without warning, two white speedboats came right at us, one practically on the tail of the other. I yanked Vera into a hard right, grabbed the ancient horn, and emptied my lungs through it. They had no running lights, no radar. I screamed uselessly at their sterns, letting out two months of fear and frustration that nobody but my shocked wife and cowering dog could hear.
“Fucking assholes!”
We’d made it through tidal bores and river bars, past lurking rocks and through dense, soul-sapping fog. This was not how I wanted it to end, with some cretin’s Bayliner wedged in my rigging.
“Motherfuckers!” I was shaking.
After Port Renfrew, we were left alone. The fog finally burned off, giving way to a hot sun and a fresh breeze behind us. We sailed now, rolling down Juan de Fuca with the suddenly brilliant Olympic Mountains seeming to herd us home. It didn’t feel like the Graveyard of the Pacific.
But there were more hazards. From here south to Becher Bay, where we planned to spend the night, military area WH (Whiskey Hotel) ran across the international boundary to within a mile of the Canadian shore, and the entire thing was bordered by designated shipping lanes. We were in big-ship territory, and some of them had guns.
“The hell with it,” I said. “If we’re in the way, they can come over here and tell us.” We were already close to the Canadian shore but still inside the test area. Unlike Whiskey Golf, where all the testing is underwater, Whiskey Hotel is a surface range. I heard a distant noise: parp, parp and grabbed the binoculars. Silhouetted against the fog bank that clung to the base of the American Olympics was a gunship. Nearby, a smaller vessel encrusted with antennae watched and waited. Two miles ahead, I could see their target, an anchored hulk. We sailed slowly out of hearing, past the confused chop at the mouth of Jordan River. Nobody came after us.
“Must be the end of the ebb,” said Hatsumi, and I was suddenly absurdly happy for her. A statement like that was a long way from the pedal boats in Inokashira Park. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The wind fell to the point where we wouldn’t even make Becher Bay under sail by nightfall, so we motored the rest of the way, rounding the corner by dinner time. We anchored between the docks of two waterfront mansions, over a rocky bottom that ground relentlessly against the chain. Perversely, there seemed to be more wind inside Becher Bay than outside in Juan de Fuca. But a night here wouldn’t kill us. We were only a couple of hours from Victoria.
“We did it,” I said. “Almost.”
Hatsumi looked haunted. I poured her some wine and went on deck to wrestle the kayak into the water. It was cold and blowing hard. I wished we were tied up to a dock, not anchored; emotionally, the trip was over for both of us. Hatsumi handed Charley down to me and we set out to look for a landing place on the rocky shore.
“Won’t be long,” I said.
I really wanted to get out, away from this cold, crappy anchorage where there were no other boats and where the wind and the current grabbed Vera like a tag team, twisting her this way and that. And the worst of it was, we still had to get past Race Rocks.
I had forgotten about Race Rocks, a collection of lumps that was home to one of B.C.’s oldest lighthouses (it was first switched on in 1860) and, since 1998, one of the first official Marine Protected Areas in Canada. Race Rocks was notorious for weather so bad the place became invisible; one of its first keepers had died after nine days of flying the Union Jack at half-mast to try to attract the attention of passing ships. In good visibility, the shortcut through Race Passage was supposed to be fine, but you had to time it with the current, which shot through like a river. Going around the outside meant going way around. We worried about it for a while, read some guidebooks, and went to bed.
The wind moaned all night and was still whistling into Becher Bay the next morning. I knew it was foggy before I even got out of bed; I could hear the fog signal. I double-checked the tide tables: we needed to go now, fog or no fog. It took fifteen minutes to chase down the anchor because Vera had swung and circled all night, as though replaying the twists and turns of our circumnavigation. We left at full flood, trusting to chart plotter and radar, and even with the tide on our side, it was slow going in the lumpy seas. To work our way safely around Race Rocks would take another hour.
“Screw it,” I said. “Let’s go through the passage. It’s not the Nahwitti Bar.” We turned, the current caught us, and in ten confused minutes we were through, running an invisible gauntlet between the rocky shore and the demented whistle of the fog signal. And like that, the picture changed dramatically, as though one backdrop had hastily been substituted for another. The water flattened, Vera slowed down, and suddenly we could see. When I looked astern, there was a fog bank, with the red beanie of the Race Rocks light poking through it. It was as though we had left an entire world behind.
“By the way, good morning,” I said. “Let’s stay the night in the Inner Harbour. A treat. What do you say?”
“Yes,” said Hatsumi. “Yes! ”
“Then tell me how to get there.”
I watched the prison at William Head slide by on our left while Hatsumi pulled out the chart of Victoria Harbour. The prison looked like a pleasant place, unless you were locked inside and watching a green sailboat chug past. Every now and then, someone would make a break from William Head, astride a log or a jerry-built raft, but they never got far. Now I knew why.
What would my father have made of all this? For two months, he’d been popping up, unbidden. Whatever schedule his visits had been following, it hadn’t been mine. Now, though, with Race Rocks receding behind us and our sailing adventure all but over, I realized that my parallel adventure with my father’s past wasn’t quite done yet. Now, on my own terms, I wanted a word. Try an overture, see what happened.
“Remember that time you took us into the O.R. to watch you do a ventriculogram?” I said.
“Sure.” He wasn’t up on the bow this time or perched on the stern rail. He was right beside me, next to the wheel. He grabbed the smooth stainless steel and gave it a weak, experimental tug. “I’m not sure I’d like one of these things,” he said. “They take up too much room.”
“I’ve gotta agree with you on that one,” I said. “We never had a wheel, did we?”
“Never needed one.”
“But you did need to show your sons how to do a ventriculogram.”
“I thought you might be interested in what your old man did for a living.”
“Did the guy live?”
“You think I can remember that? But yeah, probably.”
“Were you disappointed none of us went into medicine?”
It took him a while to answer. We were closing in on Victoria now. Finally, he said, “At first, yeah. Then later . . .”
“You mean, after all the stuff that happened?”
“Even before that. Trust me, you made the right decision.”
He didn’t sound unhappy, or even cranky. For the first time since he’d popped up that chilly morning in Princess Bay, he didn’t seem cold either. He watched the land stream past and his knobby fingers worked slowly at the buttons of his red wool jacket. I knew I should say something — reassure him, even thank him. At least help him get that damn jacket off. But the things that came to me all sounded trite, or maudlin, and when I finally opened my mouth, a seaplane emerged from the harbour, engines screaming and climbing fast. I craned my neck to watch it pass over us, so close I could see the rivets on its white fuselage. By the time I could be heard again, my father was gone.
***
Entering Victoria Harbour was surprisingly easy; all we had to do was stay on the right side of the well-marked seaplane lane. It was high summer again, the end of August, and we tied up right off the tourist-clogged causeway that ran beneath the Empress Hotel. Buskers played banjos and violins, street artists scribbled awkward renditions of tourists, and Hatsumi, responding to some deep instinct, fell to flaking the mainsail. A lugubrious older man stood over me as I retied a line. He looked like an elderly beagle waiting for its owner to return.
“Where have you come from?” He had a thick German accent. I figured he was a tourist.
“Bamfield,” I said. “Well, not directly, we stayed somewhere else last night.” Who cared about the details? This guy wouldn’t know what I was talking about.
“I am going there,” he said. “In the next days. Then we continue around the island.”
I stared up at him. Probably I looked surprised.
“Just we are waiting for the wind a little bit to settle down.”
“You have a boat,” I said.
“Oh yes. Every year, I do this.” He nodded morosely. “The wife, she is just now doing shopping.”
You’re going around the island in reverse? At the end of the season? I hope you have radar, I thought. And a good engine. And a strong stomach. Because you’re nuts.
“Better you than me,” I said.
Hatsumi and I passed the rest of the day in a kind of daze. I led Charley through a forest of tourist-calves to find flower beds to pee in. We took a harbour ferry across to the liveaboard marina on the other side of the harbour, where we fantasized about buying a bigger boat and moving in. After dinner, I listened half-heartedly to the weather forecast (another gale in Juan de Fuca) and decided to deal with it tomorrow. That evening, Chris and his wife, Karen, stopped by on their way back from chemotherapy in Vancouver. Two ferry trips and a day spent sitting with tubes in his arm, yet here he was, clambering aboard to welcome us back. I was profoundly happy to see him.
“You just came to see the engine,” I said.
“I don’t need to. I know it’s fixed.”
The next day was windy as promised, thirty knots finding us the moment we rounded the massive breakwater that protects Victoria Harbour. Even under reduced sail, Vera galloped past beaches and mansions like a dog straining at the leash. It was the best sail of the entire trip, and it only lasted an hour. When we shot through Enterprise Channel and came in sight of the breakwater that marks the Oak Bay Marina, I found myself wondering, What would happen if we just kept on going? If we turned right instead of left, back up Haro Strait again? Would my father reappear at Portland Island, as though nothing had happened?
But a lot had happened in the last two months. Hatsumi and I had finished what we’d started, and my own obsession with my father’s collapse had led me to a place where I was unlikely ever to run into his ghost again. I swung the wheel. Vera came through the eye of the wind, we did the usual things with winches and jib sheets, the sails filled again, and we headed home.