Letting Go
this closeness—my breath
in your hair, my arms your shield
and I am newborn
In the winter of 2003, while visiting my mother in England, I dreamed I was standing on a pebble beach at Echachis Island. Heavy grey waves sucked rockslides down the seething beach and out to sea. The waves surged back again, gulping at the shoreline with wolfish hunger. The edge began to fall away as I stood there. I should have stepped back, but in the way of dreams, my friend Miriam appeared at my shoulder and began explaining how life would be once my baby was born. She didn’t notice the waves. I woke from the dream in a state of mild terror, turning on the light and digging through my suitcase for my date book. Bleary-eyed, I began counting backwards through the days, realizing that my dream’s message was, in fact, relevant.
The reason I could be expecting a baby had to do with my new situation, which had begun several years after I’d moved to Maltby Slough. One day I drove into the harbour on my way to town, in my little white Boston Whaler with my large white dog at the bow, nose into the wind, fluffy tail held high. Cutting in front of my boat came another white Boston Whaler, this one with a male driver and a black dog at the bow, nose into the wind, tail held high. Seriously? I grumbled. Who’s that?
Maltby Slough had been a personal haven for several years. But change, it seemed, was underway. It wasn’t long before I met the Boston Whaler’s owner and his loyal dog, Relic. Marcel was a diver and fellow water dweller. And for the next four years we commuted by boat between each other’s floathouses—each in a different inlet. But on a spring day in 2003, we combined households, filling the new storage boxes I’d built and rearranging my space—six hundred square feet, all told. I wondered how we would fit, in more than one sense of the phrase. The day after my dream, I called Marcel from England to share the unexpected news that I was pregnant. As international phone calls go, it was a quiet one.
The heart is a roomy place, given to expansion. My feelings for my wild home didn’t have to shrink to accommodate a partner and a child. Inversely, they seemed boundless in their elasticity. Before having a child, I didn’t sigh over baby photos and coo at the cuteness of them. Even in my thirties, my biological clock didn’t send messages of alarm. When Marcel and I finally moved in together, it wasn’t with the aim of becoming parents; more, it was an expression of trust, in each other and in the future. So when I discovered I was pregnant at thirty-five, I was thankful—not only for the biological stretching of skin, muscle, ligament—but also for the way my psyche expanded to include such fierce maternal love and protectiveness. What I didn’t expect, however, was the way those protective arms could become restraints.
It started gently, with the distress I felt when my daughter, Toby, cried. It pained me to think she could be unhappy. The feeling took flight when I picked up a newspaper and saw photos of the Russian hostage crisis: 331 people killed by Chechen rebels, 186 of them children. It was early September 2004. Sunlight warmed the house but horror ran through me. Dead children! This was monstrous! It didn’t matter if the children were mine or not. My job was to protect them and already I was failing. What was war but humans killing each other’s children? That week we were staying at a friend’s house on land, but in memory I was living in a war zone.
The future became a suddenly bleak place. Over the phone, my mother referred to the “terrible responsibility” of motherhood. Now I could see what she meant. My mind reeled with the seemingly impossible mission of delivering a child safely to adulthood. Even breast milk is now laced with PCBs and other toxins. Was I poisoning my baby as I fed her? Or was I inoculating her against an already poisoned world?
But it was the dominant aspect of the floathouse—the water—that became my biggest adversary. In Maltby Slough, the ebb and flow of the tide created a constant water flow under my house. It was like living on a river. When I looked overboard from my house, I saw dark water, moving fast—twenty feet deep, but seemingly bottomless. Once, my cellphone accidentally slipped in. I watched its glowing green digits for about five seconds. After that, nothing.
We took Toby home on a glorious early autumn day, the kind that makes you feel as if the best of summer has only just arrived. We all enjoyed the boat ride home, the low-slanting sun so warm on our faces, me gripping my precious cargo through the cotton sling. At home, I carried Toby out of the boat and stepped from the garden dock to the floathouse, a distance of about two feet. When I looked down, dark water swirled beneath me, nothing reflected in it, nothing revealed by it. I thought of the baby—my baby—falling, sinking, vanishing beneath that wordless surface. The water showed me how quickly an infant could be destroyed. About five seconds. After that, nothing.
Fear began to prick at me when anyone else took Toby outside. I couldn’t bear to look at the gap between the floats. I wanted to shadow every person who took her in their arms, watching to make sure they held her tightly enough. Don’t let anything get your child, my shadow self whispered.
As if it were my duty, I began to visit the dark water in my mind’s eye every night before going to sleep. By coming to terms with its potential, I reasoned, I could ward off the darkness. The water, like the evil eye, could strike me if I wasn’t paying attention. I kept my nocturnal visits secret and saw them as a way of fabricating a charm—a protective amulet to guard against the dark water. I hid my fear from everyone. But it guided my actions, tainted my thoughts. One day, I woke to a morning of perfection, the rising breath of the water shot through with sunlight. From my upstairs window, I saw a troupe of river otters swimming underwater, bubbles streaming in their wake. As their supple bodies arrowed past, I sighed, wanting to share the moment with Toby. But I didn’t want to take her near the water’s edge because… because…. With sudden clarity, I saw the trap I was falling into. Fear was coming first. Toby didn’t see otters that morning, but I promised she would see them the next time. Somewhere between the dark water and the bright water, there had to lie a balance.
Part of growing up is knowing where home is. But the floathouse was a limited environment. I wanted Toby’s sense of home to be broader, inclusive of inlets and mountains and stars and people and history. As winter fell away, I began to show her what home meant, one outing at a time.
Boating with a baby is an awkward activity. First there are infant life jackets, never a popular item. Then there are hands; I needed four, but only had two. Landing on shore includes throwing anchor, lifting the motor and tying shore lines. If the tide is ebbing, it’s important to prevent the boat from getting stranded. All of these things are formulaic, but babies are known for their ability to disrupt even the best-planned events. I dusted off the baby backpack we’d been given and tried to simplify my system of anchoring.
Marcel’s work as a diver and boat driver meant that he was often unreachable by cellphone in the event of an emergency. For that reason, our mother-daughter boating outings started small. At high tide we went to Aquila Island, adjacent to the floathouse, to admire the lush forest and point out specifics (ferns, lichen, cedar bark). Soon after, we went to Meares Island, boating to Ginnard Creek waterfall where it cascades into the inlet (splish-splash!). And once Toby was able to sit up, we began to visit a small islet we called Cathie’s rock. The grassy knoll on Cathie’s rock was a vantage point from which to see our world (home, channel, island). But the islet offered something else, an eagle feather dangling from a weathered tripod of sticks. The feather was important, the part of learning that included people and history.
Before I lived in Maltby Slough, the bay was home to Mike and Cathie and their daughter, April. They were role models to me in the ways of wilderness living. Quiet and determined, Cathie insisted on living by example: appreciating nature, living humbly, leaving no trace. But when April was ten, Cathie began treatment for leukemia. And before April was twelve, Cathie died. For some time we’d been communicating only by letter, as her strength ebbed. Her love of nature sustained her and she wrote of spring sweeping over the mudflats, the blossoming of salmonberry flowers and the arrival of rufous hummingbirds. She’d begun to meditate, hanging an eagle feather at a small grassy island. I liked to picture her there, even though she was less and less able to leave the house.
Cathie’s life ended in the spring, several years before I moved to Maltby Slough. I was sweeping the floor of the Stone Island cabin when I was overcome by a feeling of certainty that she had died. I stood in the middle of the room next to my dust pile, staring out of the window at the water as sadness washed over me. But I wasn’t yet a parent. I saw death only from the viewpoint of those left behind.
I took Toby to Cathie’s rock one windy spring day when she was seven months old. She was at the age of sitting up and reaching forward, almost crawling. It was finally spring, clear and sunny, but with a gale force northwester galloping across the blue sky. At winter’s end, being indoors is akin to being underground, the body craving escape from dankness and confinement, the mind dreaming of light and air. Up in the canopy, branches bent low and the wind breathed in monophonic plainsong, punctuated by sudden sustained crescendos. The floathouse shifted and tugged on its mooring lines and I didn’t have to be in Browning Passage to picture the expanse of frothing whitecaps I would see there. Of my options, Cathie’s rock seemed the safest bet for an outing. I pulled out warm clothes, a blanket and a thermos. I put on our life jackets and wrestled Toby into the baby backpack before pulling it onto my shoulders. As a precaution against drowning I left the hip belt and Toby’s shoulder straps unfastened. Then I pulled the door closed and got into the boat.
We approached the lee of the island on water that was mostly calm, but occasionally feathered by gusts. The tide was flooding, so I didn’t need a stern anchor. A tumble of rocks made an intertidal stairway of sorts. It also provided plenty of nooks in which to lodge my makeshift shore anchor—a perfectly round, fifteen-pound lead weight. A shore anchor needs to be easy to throw, something you can chuck first, then use for pulling the boat to land. This lead fishing weight worked well for me—heavy enough to stay where it landed, but not so heavy that I couldn’t throw it a few metres.
In the backpack, excitement was running high. Loud squeaks vied with the noise of motor and wind. A fist was wrapped around my ponytail and two plump legs flailed against my back. I lifted the motor, then sat on the bow, pulling on the shore anchor to bring the boat closer to land. In the slippery intertidal, I struggled to keep my footing under the top-heavy load. I picked my way up the rocks, arms out for balance, examining the placement of the anchor. With an incoming tide, I didn’t have to worry about the boat being stranded, but I needed to move the lead weight higher, above tide’s reach. I tugged on the weight. In the way of such things, it rolled deeper into the crevice. I tugged harder, leaning sideways to change the angle of pull. The backpack slid sideways too, threatening to disgorge its contents. Squeaks became squawks, and the beginnings of a wail rang out over my head. I shrugged the load back into position and began a chorus of “This Little Pig” as I heaved on the rope, dislodging the anchor and stumbling as it came free. Another wail began, the rapidly ascending note of which inspired a great sense of urgency in me. Hefting the lead weight, I threw it uphill with a grunt, gave the line a quick tug and climbed the rocks with as much velocity as I could muster. On the grassy knoll, I jogged here and there, cavorting until the wails subsided and—crisis averted—it seemed safe to sit down.
We sat in the lee of some huckleberry bushes and enjoyed the sun, the mossy grass and an early, exuberant hummingbird. The needs of infants are capricious and hard to identify, both for the baby and the parent. Seven months into parenthood my learning curve was still steep. Using Toby’s facial expressions as my guide, we swung between snuggling, singing and playing peekaboo with the blanket. Our life jackets made a corral of sorts, protecting against sharp rocks and the sudden downward slope of the knoll. Out on the water, brushstrokes of wind painted the surface with swaths of shadow, evaporating with the passage of each gust. From time to time a passing gust would be inspired to tear at my hair, but mostly we were sheltered, soaking up the sun. I scanned the landscape for signs of wolves and wondered, as always, about cougars. Might predators be attracted to the plentiful mice, whose tunnels criss-crossed the grass in every direction? Might a predator have walked here at low tide and still be concealed in the trees? It was hard to look at my bite-sized child and not feel the need to remove every hazard. As my attention vacillated between peekaboo and scouting, I imagined my mother with me at this stage. In Trinidad, the dangers were smaller—scorpions, centipedes, snakes—but just as potentially fatal, if not more so. My mother now lived in England, where she and Toby had met, recently, for the first time. I’d been touched by the dimensions a child could add to a relationship: the sudden sense of connection that comes with the revolving generational wheel.
A gust of wind whipped my hair, interrupting my musings. And a clunking sound caught my attention. I sat up, wondering at the source of the sound. When I heard it again, I ran to the edge of the slope, just in time to see my boat being pushed by the force of a gust and my lead ball anchor, the source of earlier troubles, being pulled down the rocks, into the water—splish-splash!
I ran toward the boat. It was drifting—anchor and all. But a wail from the blanket tugged me to a standstill. Where before I would have leaped down the rocks and swum out to the boat, now I hesitated, glancing back at the hilltop rising up between my child and me. I scanned again for danger, even though the real danger lay in losing the boat. But as if restrained by a magnetic field, I found I couldn’t move forward. Precious seconds evaporated. I wanted to go after the boat, but I couldn’t leave my baby. Those seconds were all it took for the boat to drift too far away, the lead ball bouncing along the soft mudflat. I closed my eyes. Defeat rang in my ears. Seven months in and already I’d failed in my duty to keep us safe. It was windy! We shouldn’t have come! I was careless with anchoring because it was difficult with Toby in the backpack. And now we were marooned. And what was going to happen to my boat? What had I been thinking?
I ran back up the hill, wondering what I would see. Might Toby have fallen over? Might she have somehow crawled forwards, inching toward the steep rocky slope? Would I arrive in time to avert a disaster? I held my breath, but when she came into view she was smiling and waving. I waved back at her, exhaling with relief. She wasn’t waving at me, though. Her gaze was drawn elsewhere. I turned to find out who she was looking at and saw that she wasn’t waving hello at all, she was waving bye-bye—waving bye-bye to the boat. I collapsed onto the blanket, laughing and pulling her into my arms. We always waved goodbye to Marcel’s boat when he left in the mornings, but we did it together. Now, she was (literally) taking matters into her own hands. We sat in the grass in the sun, watching the boat grow smaller and further away, in thrall to the joy of waving. I guessed the boat would continue drifting north past the house, past the island and out toward open water. There it would be exposed to the full force of the northwester and be pushed across the mudflats to some shallow and muddy place where it would be annoyingly difficult to retrieve. Powerless to change anything, I had to stop fretting. Marcel would come home eventually. We would hear the roar of his boat motor as he came into the bay and could surely hail him from the island.
While the boat blew away from us, Toby and I explored the island further, ending up at the eagle feather. The simple sticks had weathered to grey and the feather was stripped of lustre by the unstoppable winter winds. But even so, as it bobbed and turned in the air, it captured our full attention—Toby reaching out to it with both hands, while I put my thoughts of the drifting boat on pause. Before having a baby, when I’d come to visit the feather, I’d dedicated myself to thoughts of Cathie. I remembered her observations of nature and shared my own. I pictured her shy smile and told her I missed her.
But sitting there with a baby in my lap I saw a new and bitter sorrow in Cathie’s death, that of a mother parting from her child. The fluttering feather spoke of impermanence, the lack of certainty in life. I was pierced by the reality of leaving behind a child, the unfinished business of parenting. With time, even the best memories fade. What if my child went through life not knowing how greatly I loved her? I tightened my hold on Toby and thought about my father’s death five years earlier. His importance to me was something I could only tell her about, nothing she could feel or know for herself. What if I, like Cathie, had to rely on someone else to tell Toby about me? Would I like their choice of words? Would they remember my successes without mentioning my failures? What if they described me only as a writer? What about all the other parts of me? The concept of letting go seemed exquisitely painful once a child was involved.
I wondered, suddenly, about my own mother. She didn’t speak about herself much. Did I know enough about her? I knew that when I was two, she went alone into the Pacaraima Mountains of Guyana. A missionary walked her to the remote Amerindian village of Kurukubaru and left her there, returning for her three weeks later. Her paintings from that time in Guyana are of cloud-shadowed blue hillscapes, women, children and scenes of Amerindian village life. The paintings convey her love of landscape and interest in people, but they don’t tell the story of a woman torn between art and adventure on one hand, and a brood of five children on the other. I imagine the emancipation she must have felt while painting—the hunger to make up for lost time. How many other stories was I missing out on? How lacking was my sense of her? As my mother aged, now entering her eighties, the unique and wild experiences of her life were coalescing, gathering into an essence she would take with her when she died.
Children and adventure. My attention wavered and I couldn’t help scanning for the boat. I looked up as it was passing the floathouse. Any minute now it would drift around the corner and be lost from sight…. I felt myself pulled to action, but the feather fluttered, reminding me to let go. I thought again of my mother, of the memories she would take with her and those she would leave behind. Thoughts and memories are unique to each individual, only becoming mutual where they intersect with those of others. Perhaps explanations weren’t needed, after all. Being stranded at Cathie’s rock showed Toby a choice I’d taken: for safety’s sake, we could have stayed at home; for the love of the outdoors, we’d taken a risk, one that I hoped would end well. How would this reflect on me? Any conclusions she would draw would be her own—more meaningful for being so. A parent can’t change those perceptions; it would be disingenuous to try. For the rest, holding Toby on my lap, I felt the fierce, universal love that comes with bearing a child. If her future held the happenstance of parenthood, she wouldn’t need anyone else to tell her how I felt. She would know.
We’d been gazing at the feather for some time when a strange thing happened. The boat had drifted down the channel past the floathouse. But at a distance of about five hundred metres it was caught by counter-gusts coming from Browning Passage. It began to be pushed southwest. Surprised, I charted the course it was taking—a wide circle that seemed, incredibly, to lead right back to Cathie’s rock.
We sat on the knoll to watch the boat’s progress. At two hundred metres, Toby began waving—this time hello. I held my breath. At twenty metres, Toby was ecstatic, waving and burbling with glee. Daring to hope for the best, I put our life jackets on and put Toby in the backpack. At five metres I waded out barelegged to the boat. I threw my boots and pants on board and swung the backpack over the gunwales, putting Toby down in the boat. I climbed aboard, pulling up the wayward shore anchor, and within a few minutes we were motoring. We neared the floathouse in full voice (this little pig went wee wee wee all the way home!) just as Marcel’s boat came around the point.
I’ll never know the combination of wind and current that took my boat away and brought it back. Things like that just happen out here, part of the magic. And included in the magic was a lesson I needed to learn. When I first saw that little hand waving, I was chanting self-chastisements. But when I realized what Toby was doing, the stress fell away and I was able to enjoy her delight. And I saw that what I should fear, more than the dark water, was destroying a child’s delight. It’s children who remind us how to find joy in simple things. And if we can’t encourage joy in children, we become, simply, keepers.
I want my daughter to share my love for the water and the wild. But the wild has dangers, as does civilization, as does life. I have to show her the beauty and the danger; guard her without seeming to guard her; watch the dark water in private. I have to be honest about my fears without burdening her with the guilt of them. It’s been done by my mother before me, and it has been done by mothers through the ages. I’ve even done it myself, on a windy, blue-skied day at Cathie’s rock, where—at that moment in time—a wind-stripped feather, a vanishing boat and a waving child taught me so much about letting go.