If you’re heading north out of Victoria, up Haro Strait, there’s not much mystery about where to spend the first night. The easiest place to stop is Sidney Spit, a marine park at the northern exit of the strait. But I don’t like the anchorage there. It’s shallow, and the sandy bottom shifts from year to year, building up here, eroding there so that even the latest chart is a work in progress. And I have a long memory: Sidney Spit was where the family sailboat blundered ashore all those years ago, where the famous gudgeons ripped off, the place I thought would be the last dry land I’d ever set foot on.
Today, between the effects of Canada Day and the American July 4 weekend, the spit was a zoo. I swore I could smell suntan oil as we motored past the rafted-together cruisers and dodged the big speedboats booming across from the town of Sidney on the opposite shore. No thanks.
Portland Island is the next marine park to the north. We puttered around the dogleg that hides the entrance to Princess Bay and let the anchor go near the cluster of fifteen or so boats that had arrived before us. It was only 3 p.m.; anchorages filled up early these days. With no wind to align them, the boats faced every which way, as though waiting for instructions.
Portland Island is perennially popular. It’s close to several Canadian marinas and directly on the run north for boaters out of Seattle. A half-hour walk from the gentle crescent beach in Princess Bay takes you to the trickier anchorage on the other side of the island, at Royal Cove, past the arthritic apple and pear trees of a long-gone homestead. Charley would have given anything for a run around the stone foundations poking through the field like the stubs of long-gone teeth, but I had something else in mind.
We clambered into the dinghy and rowed away from Vera toward a small cut in the fringing rocks. A plastic screw-top container between my feet clunked back and forth with every stroke of the oars, and the late afternoon sun glanced off the glassy water and warmed our faces. The water was clear and shallow, maybe a dozen feet deep.
“Over there, I think. That little opening — there’ll be some current. I think they should drift around a little, don’t you?”
Hatsumi nodded and picked up the container of ashes. A cup or so from each of my parents, held back from the bulk of their remains after a struggle with the rightness of consigning my parents to two different deeps. Most of their ashes had already been released together into the ocean near Victoria. Oceanographically speaking, I told myself, the two locations were all part of the same basin; theoretically, some microscopic part of their ashes could even travel from one place to the other. Less scientifically, I figured that my parents simply wouldn’t mind, and Portland Island had special meaning because it was the last place they had travelled to together by boat. Among their papers I’d found the record my mother had kept.
“Powered to Portland Island,” it said in her microscopic handwriting. “Tide in Baynes Channel too strong.” They only stayed a day, but my mother, finding the silver lining as usual, called it “hot and heavenly.” She rowed around and sketched. My father apparently slept a lot. Then they powered back home. It was July 1982; the visit from the sheriff was still five years away.
I could picture her rowing to the spot where we were now. It felt right. I shipped the oars, and we both peered down at a dense bed of eelgrass, a forest of green ribbons leaning gently shoreward as Princess Bay filled on the rising tide. We sat there, going imperceptibly up, the water licking higher on the pebbly beach and Vera slowly rising behind us, pulling sand-shedding loops of chain off the bottom.
Hatsumi handed me the open jar. We leaned over as far as we dared and I submerged the container. A representative sample of my parents slid out and into the current, the two handfuls of ashes fanning into a twinkling curtain that drifted down to settle on the eelgrass. For a minute or so, the emerald fronds were white, and then the ashes were gone, washed away by the currents and my own tears.
***
Sitting in a busy anchorage is usually social. Most of the other boaters, even the annoying ones, have interesting stories, and it usually takes no more than a “Nice evening!” from the dinghy to initiate a conversation that can easily turn into days spent together exploring the next fifty miles of coastline. But this night was different. We ate late, sitting in the cockpit with a bottle of wine and listening to the mutter of small outboards propelling dinghies back and forth. When the trees began to merge with the darkening sky, we went to bed, and I lay listening to the anchor chain grumbling against the bottom. I’d forgotten the night noises a boat makes at anchor even when there’s no wind to push you around: the tick-tock of a bowl rolling in its cradle, squeaks from the dinghy tethered alongside, the pops and bubblings that herald a tide change.
I awoke the next morning to two loud noises. The first was a sort of whap, like someone snapping an enormous towel. The noise was quite loud, as though the towel were right outside the boat and whoever was doing it would wait a minute or so between whaps, just enough time for me to start the slide back into sleep. Finally, I got up on one elbow and peered out the porthole. Two boat lengths away, a seal flipper rose from the water, flexed, and descended, spinning off a crescent of sparkling water beads and coming down with an extra-loud clap that probably woke up half the anchorage. If he was trying to warn boats away from Princess Bay, he’d picked an odd time to do it; more likely the flipper-slap was meant to get the attention of an attractive female. If she was there, I couldn’t see her.
I lay back and began a satisfying early morning reverie about all the harbour seals undoubtedly cruising around the boats anchored in Princess Bay, what a spectacular view they had of all the things that caused the owners to lose sleep — rusty chain, anchors clinging by their fingernails, corroded thru-hull fittings about to cave in and let the ocean inside in a silent, insidious rush.
Then I heard the second sound. It wasn’t another seal. It was a sneeze. A human sneeze, loud enough and so much like a roar you might think the flipper-slapper had a terrible cold. The problem was, I knew the sneezer.
“I’m freezing,” said a voice from the cockpit.
“Well, I can’t do anything about that,” I said.
“Wha . . . ?” said Hatsumi. “What time?”
“Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll deal with it.” My feet hit the cold cabin sole, and I rummaged around for clothes. I always leave my clothes within easy reach in case I have to get up in the middle of the night and do something heroic.
“It’s warmer down here, you know,” I called up to the cockpit.
“I don’t want to come down,” said my father. “I like it fine up here.” He sneezed again. The sound bounced off the rocks at the head of the bay, as though there was some kind of early-morning sneezing contest going on.
“Except for it being freezing,” I said and started up the steps.
He was tucked in behind the steering wheel, under the dew-soaked Canadian ensign hanging limply from the backstay.
“You know you’re supposed to take the flag in at dusk,” he said. He was wearing the vile brown acrylic pants we’d tried so hard to steal and replace and the oversized fuzzy slippers we’d bought to keep his edematous feet warm in the care home. He clutched a blue hospital blanket around his small shoulders; peeking out from underneath was his favourite red-and-white woollen jacket. It went with the flag.
“Nobody seems to do that anymore,” I said, waving at the rest of the boats. Sodden flags were everywhere, a mass affront to nautical etiquette. “Things have changed since you were here last. Look at all those inflatable dinghies. Like bagels.”
“We never had an inflatable dinghy,” he said. “Or an outboard motor.” He ran his bony fingers through white hair that obviously hadn’t been cut since I’d seen him last.
“Sure we did,” I said. “Not that it ever seemed to work. Frou-Frou, remember? Sidney Spit? Near-death out by Zero Rock?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He began to pick slowly at the skin on the back of one hand. A few flakes drifted onto the cockpit floor. “How did you know we came here, your mother and I?” he asked finally.
“Because she wrote it up in a notebook. Apparently, you slept all day. And some people kept you awake at night, singing. It must have been awful.”
“I warned you about going through my things.”
“You died,” I reminded him. “What did you expect me to do, shred it all? Believe me, that would have taken weeks. And if you pay someone to do it, they read the stuff as they go.”
“Mm.” He picked some more at the hand holding the blanket.
“I’ve got some skin cream down below, you know. Do you want me to ask Hatsumi to dig it out?”
“Who are you talking to?” My wife was up now, puttering in the galley at the bottom of the steps.
“Just my dad,” I said.
“Say hi to him for me. And turn on the propane, okay?” She went back to fiddling with the stove.
“It’s horribly cold here,” said my father. “I can’t stand it much longer. What else did you find in my papers?”
“Oh . . . you know. Some letters. Your old LeCoultre watch. About a million boxes of negatives.”
“That’s it?”
“Maybe some stuff about, you know, the thing that happened.”
He stopped picking at his hand and looked at me hard. I thought his eyes looked a little red. He’d missed some places shaving. “That’s not your business,” he said.
“It is now.” I thought about all the times we could have talked about the trial and didn’t. But that was the way he’d wanted it. “You might as well know,” I said. “I kept the lot. Not just the manuscript you wrote, but the hospital records, the examinations, the trial, everything.” I waited for the explosion, but he just stared at his hands and then slowly began picking at the dry spots again.
Finally, he said, “I helped a lot of people.”
“I know that. Maybe now you can help me. You’re the expert. I’m just a fish biologist. All that technical stuff — I’d hate to get it wrong.”
“I’ll need to think about it.” I could smell eggs frying and coffee. He was right, it was chilly out here with the seals and the dew. On the neighbouring boat, a hatch squeaked open, and my father turned sharply.
“I want to go,” he said.
“Well, you know where to find me.”
I peered over the side, where a school of young salmon was making its way past Vera’s mothering hull. I wondered if they were the Fraser River sockeye whose troubles would be keeping me solvent once this trip was over. The school moved in a series of shuffles, like an uncoordinated robot. But finally, it was gone. And so was my visitor.