After the unexpected meeting with my father at Portland Island, we sailed an unambitious few hours further north to Genoa Bay. With all the scramble of planning and packing, we needed a few lazy days before the jump across Georgia Strait to Desolation Sound. Genoa Bay was familiar and predictable, a notch in the southeast shore of Vancouver Island with a marina and plenty of anchoring space — a good place for Charley to work on his sea legs. We dropped anchor in mid-afternoon and were immediately surrounded by a flotilla of Canada geese. They paddled around Vera, muttering, while Charley vibrated and sniffed. One of them, apart and alone, was crippled, a leg twisted up and out of the water so that the bird advanced erratically, like one of the mechanical swans in Inokashira Park. I wondered how long it would last.
The sun sank behind its hill, Charley paced, and the water calmed and turned a muddy emerald. The geese had left; now we were surrounded by a constellation of floating seaweed, arbutus leaves, a paper plate. I decided to wash away the scramble and stress of leaving with something clear and sparkling.
“Hand me Lolita, would you?” I called down.
“Excuse me?”
I kept forgetting, Hatsumi’s cultural legacy was as far away from mine, as though we were raised on separate planets.
“That book, the one with the ankles in bobby sox on the cover.”
I like to reread Nabokov every few years — Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin — for the sheer sensual pleasure of his prose. I didn’t need much this time, just a quick hit. By page thirty-five, I had found Humbert Humbert’s description of his mother’s demise: “She died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”
“And English wasn’t even his first language!” I said to Charley. I put Lolita down. Charley was starting to look longingly at a scruffy pocket of beach. Almost overnight, the transporting of our dog from boat to beach and back, a chore I’d watched other boaters submit to for years and sworn I would never, ever consent to, had become my new job. Maybe it was because the crunching sound of a boat on the gravel of a new beach seemed hard-wired into me, or just that I was a better rower than my wife. Two days into the trip, and Charley’s bladder and bowels had slotted into my routine.
“Let’s do it,” I said, pulling the dinghy alongside, lowering myself in, holding out my arms. “Come on, jump, I’ve seen you go twice this far.” But I still had to lift him, grabbing the handle on his life jacket and swinging him down like a flailing fluorescent briefcase. Charley’s back legs were catapults, the thigh muscles like drumsticks on a Thanksgiving turkey. His default behaviour when lifted was to jump free. Carrying Charley up a few steps usually meant being kicked in the testicles. This time, he treaded air until landing in the dinghy, then scrambled to the bow and stood precariously balanced on the stem, a hairy figurehead with eyebrows. The closer the beach came, the more he wriggled; halfway there, he toppled over the side and began to swim in outraged circles, his front legs pawing at the water like a boxer working a punching bag. I yarded him back in, and he shot back to the bow, dripping but defiant. As soon as the boat touched the shore, he sproinged off vertically, like a kangaroo.
The only beach in Genoa Bay had an abandoned look, muddy and littered with ghostly crab moults and shreds of blue fibreglass encrusted in mussels. A rotting dock had come to rest under the trees, draped in rusted cables and carpeted in moss. I found a dryish spot and sat down while Charley raced around on the mud, looking for the perfect spot to urinate. When he was finished, he tried to sneak a fish head into the dinghy.
“She’ll kill you,” I said, flinging the thing away and shoving off.
We spent an uneventful night at anchor, the boat at rest in its allotted position in the bay as though we were curled up in one of those sailing-book diagrams of the yacht at rest, tethered to the elegant swoop of chain that led to the neatly buried anchor. I knew it couldn’t last and found myself recalling an anchoring story I’d heard from David Bruce, a complicated man who dives under people’s boats to replace the zinc anodes that corrode and fall off twice a year. I think he collects stories down there too. He was standing on the dock in his diving suit, dripping, when he told me this one.
“You remember those kerosene lamps we used to hang on the forestay as anchor lights at night?”
I did. As a child, it had been my job to light the sooty clunking thing at dusk, snap it to the jib halyard (the rope you pulled on to raise the foresail), and pull it up twenty feet or so. The lamp would bang around all night, keeping everyone awake.
“Well, this guy decided to put a really long shock cord on his lamp so it would stay quiet.”
Good idea, I thought. Why didn’t we think of that?
“Anyway, the wind got up that night, the boat started to rock, and suddenly the halyard chafed through and the lantern came down onto the deck. Smash! Unzip me?”
David turned around and I yanked on the big zipper that held his dry suit together across the shoulders. It was heavy and stiff, and he had to brace his feet against my tugs. I imagined the lake of burning kerosene running down the deck, the howls as the owner rounded the cabin corner in his pyjamas.
“What’d he do?”
“This is the best part. He sees all that burning kerosene, freaks out, grabs the lamp, and throws it as far as he can. But it’s still attached by that shock cord. He said it came back at him like a comet!”
We both laughed, but afterward I kept imagining those seconds: the fireball hurtling into the night, diminishing, then suddenly expanding again, like a burning boomerang. It could so easily have been me.
***
When we got underway the next morning, the anchor came up pasted with mud and grit; the bottom we had swung over for the night was just an extension of the slimy beach Hatsumi had sluiced off Charley the night before. Mud bottoms are bliss for boaters, holding an anchor like glue. But they tend to come aboard when you leave.
Sailing was impossible along the sinuous channel of Sansum Narrows that separates Saltspring, the largest of the Canadian Gulf Islands, from Vancouver Island. Both the current and the wind were against us, so we motored through, finally raising the sails after exiting the narrows into the more open waters of Stuart Channel. Dodging a tug towing two barges kept us on our toes; although sailboats have the right of way over powerboats in most cases, tugs are one of the frightening exceptions. Tugs look slow, but to a sailboat trying to make the most of a fitful wind, they’re anything but. They can’t stop and they would rather not turn. In these waters, tugs had a way of showing up everywhere, dragging barges piled with containers, or vehicles, or booms of fresh-cut logs. They frightened me.
Our next stop, Clam Bay, was as unambitious as Genoa Bay, but there was a tidal rapid coming up, and the next convenient opening was early morning. Dodd Narrows, between Gabriola (the northernmost Gulf Island) and Vancouver Island, is narrow and crowded in summer, so any attempt to “cheat” it — to go through much before or after slack water — meant going against a substantial stream of boats. If something went wrong, you wouldn’t have much room to manoeuvre. Spending the night in Clam Bay would make it easy to hit Dodd Narrows at just the right time.
So we stopped there in mid-afternoon, after picking our way through a scattering of widely spaced navigational buoys, like the last pieces in a chess endgame. Clam Bay fronts the shallow corridor between Thetis and Penelakut Islands. They’re really the same island, separated by a dredged channel through mudflats called The Cut.
The two “islands” are geologically identical, but culturally they are worlds apart. Thetis is privately owned, chopped up into small waterfront lots and larger, interior acreages. Several of the bays are dominated by Christian summer camps. Penelakut Island, a bridge and literally a stone’s throw away, is a reserve for the Penelakut First Nation, who were confronted by a British naval expedition a decade or so after British surveyors named the island Kuper (after the captain of the surveying ship Thetis). By the final decade of the nineteenth century, “Kuper” Island had its own Catholic residential school, a holding pen for First Nations children removed from their homes throughout the Cowichan Valley. You can still see the ruins of the school from the water; it closed, to universal shame, in 1975. Penelakut Island finally got its name back in 2010.
Clam Bay is on Penelakut territory, so most people who anchor there don’t go ashore. The bay is guarded by a sandy spit and a marked shoal, between which you have to insert yourself, and I cut it too close. Eight feet, the sounder suddenly read (eight feet! Only three feet of water under the keel!), and I had to crank an embarrassing hard right to clear the unseen mound of sand. But there was plenty of room to anchor, and I curled up for an hour inside the mind of Nabokov’s monstrous anti-hero. Teenagers cannon-balled off a power cruiser across the bay, whooping and hollering, while Humbert Humbert quietly plotted his campaign for literature’s most famous bobbysoxer. The constriction of the channel we would need to negotiate our way through tomorrow, the unforgiving headlong rush of water from one basin to another, faded from my mind. But constrictions of another sort were at the heart of all those medical and legal records I was ignoring in favour of a novel I’d already read.