Chapter 18
Riding down the winding stream of the Drain felt a little like cruising down the very large and very wet throat of a sea monster. I wasn’t sure if we were being swallowed or fur-ball-hacked back up. That quiet little river had a stronger current than I had ever imagined. The current pushed and tugged on Fogopogo like the big old dory monster was nothing but a crumple of soggy toilet paper.
It got worse as we left the mouth of the Drain and began moving into the open sea. The waves fought us at first, as if the ocean was trying to slap us uppity dry-landers back to shore. The water didn’t look rough in the growing dawn light, but there were currents moving deep down below the surface that were talking to the dory in a way we couldn’t ignore.
“Work those grinders for me while I row now,” Granddad Angus called out to me. He slid his backup pair of oars into the oarlocks and started rowing, while Warren steered with the rudder. “Keep her hard a’port, Warren.”
“Right, Angus,” Warren replied.
“I thought port was to the left,” I joked.
I told the joke because it was the only way I could unclench my teeth and my jaw was beginning to hurt. I had never been out to sea in a dory before now, and it scared me a little. That was something that had changed in Deeper Harbour since Dad was a boy. Back then children grew up close to the water and learned the ways of the sea at a very early age. Granddad Angus had Dad out in a dory on his tenth birthday.
The waves weren’t that rough, but the dory monster heaved and rolled just the same and my stomach heaved and rolled along with it. I was beginning to have second thoughts about that plate of fried eggs I had eaten before leaving. Dulsie didn’t look too good either. The green in her face wasn’t all face paint, as near as I could tell.
“You’re feeling a little seasick, are you?” Granddad Angus called out.
“I feel like I’m about to heave my toes up through my eye teeth,” I told him. “If this is seasick, I’m seasick with a capital C. We ought to land this dory.”
I wasn’t joking. At this point in the game I was ready to give up and go home and pack my bags for Ottawa. I told Granddad Angus just that.
“The human spirit is like a boat on a wave,” Granddad Angus said. “The wave will toss you up and roll you down and the only thing you can do is ride out the trough and pray for the crest. As bad as you feel now I guarantee you will feel ten times better tomorrow.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
“This isn’t a dory anymore,” Granddad Angus went on. “It’s a story and a legend just waiting to be born. We’ve built a sea monster and we’re in this just as deep as we can get. There’s no backing out now.”
That’s the part that bothered me. The whole “deep” business. I mean, it wasn’t as if we were going to dog-paddle our way out of the Atlantic Ocean if this sea monster went and sank on us.
I was scared. There was no other word for it.
Pure chicken-cluck scared.
“What if we capsize again?”
“We’re not going to capsize,” Granddad Angus assured me. “That only happened because we panicked.”
I still wasn’t convinced.
This was Granddad Angus, a man who had made a lifetime out of doing stupid things. Who in their right mind would listen to him?
“This is stupid, stupid, stupid,” I said for about the four thousandth time.
“Of course it’s stupid,” Warren said. “It’s supposed to be stupid. Anyone who has never done anything stupid in their life has never tried anything new.”
All three of us looked at Warren in total surprise. We had come to expect words of caution and common sense from Warren and here he was sounding almost like some sort of a daredevil.
“Albert Einstein said it before I did,” Warren explained, with a sheepish shrug. “I have a stamp with him on it.”
“My dad used to say something like that to me,” Granddad Angus said. “‘If you’ve never been lost, you’ve never really rowed far enough away from the shore.’”
Which made even less sense to me.
“This is stupid with a capital stupid, squared to an unlimited infinity of stupid,” I said. “I want to go home.”
“Do you mean Deeper Harbour or Ottawa?” Granddad Angus asked.
I thought about that.
He had a point.
“We’re almost there, aren’t we?” I said.
“The harbour is just ahead,” Granddad Angus said. “Just around that big stony point.”
When we rounded the point I could see the harbour, but from a perspective I’d never had before. Not this early in the morning. Not all new and all fresh like it was. It was almost as if I had somehow grown myself a whole new set of eyes.
I’d grown up here and I’d learned to skip a stone and throw a ball and ride a bike all within a stone’s throw of this sleepy little coastal town. But looking at it this morning, from the belly of a homemade sea monster, everything looked strangely different. The harbour was peaceful and welcoming and I could see all the wonderful details that a tourist might notice.
Sure, there was no McDonald’s.
Sure, there was no movie theatre.
Sure, there weren’t any tourist attractions.
The fog curled and clotted about buildings that leaned like old, tired men. The paint was peeling and the only signs of life were a few early fishermen who looked up and probably blinked a few times while trying to decide if a sea monster was worth catching or throwing back. Even the seagulls looked more than a little bored with the way the tide of time seemed to stand so still around this sleepy little harbour town.
But there was something quiet and precious and forever in the way that our little town clung there like a barnacle upon a wave-worn rock. There was something that caught in my throat like a swallow of surprise birthday party.
Then one of the fishermen stood up and pointed.
Granddad Angus woofed through his birchbark moose call.
A fishing boat blew its sounding horn, long and low and clear.
Maybe that fishing boat was saying hello. Maybe that fishing boat was warning us to stay away from its fishing grounds. Maybe that old boat was just clearing something from its throat.
But it was the figure standing alone on the wharf that caught my attention.
A figure that stood there as if whoever it was had been standing there all morning just waiting for us to pedal-paddle into the harbour.
I couldn’t see him clearly enough to be certain, but I could feel him deep in my heart. I was sure it was my dad, standing there watching me sail in the belly of a moose-hide and crow-feather sea monster.
He was holding something in his hand, high above his head.
“That person’s got a cell phone,” Dulsie said with more than a little certainty. “I’m pretty sure whoever that is, they’re making a Fogopogo video.”
“Everybody say cheese,” Granddad Angus said.
And underneath the moose hide and the chicken wire and the crow feathers, we all smiled.
Whoever it was, standing on the wharf, waved before turning away.
By the end of the day we had our own YouTube video.
It was a blurry, out-of-focus, shaky-handed video that showed something that might have been a sea monster or might have been a giant floating whale booger. It showed just enough to give the impression that the video was showing something very out of the ordinary.
We had actual video coverage.
The word was getting out.