Even on a hot summer day in August, with the water as smooth as glass, the Atlantic can kill a human being in a matter of minutes. The ocean doesn’t really care how well you can swim, it will find another way to get you. Hypothermia, specifically. Mom and Dad had used and then explained that word to me many times over the past month; it described something we absolutely had to avoid. You get hypothermia when your body temperature drops so low that you freeze to death. Anyone who falls into the North Atlantic’s frigid water has less than ten minutes to get back out. So dry suits are a must. They’re made of rubber and are skin-tight, and they seal up your body completely, so that if you fall in you are not exposed to the water. While dry suits give you enough time to save yourself, they can’t protect you forever: you must get out of the water as soon as possible. Mom and Dad and I had many times practiced what we would do if one of us was pitched out into the ocean. The person overboard hangs on to one of the other boats, while the two remaining kayakers pick up the capsized vessel, drain it, and then help the swimmer back into the cockpit. Everything must be done at top speed.
But there seemed little need for such desperate measures when we pushed off that day. We glided out from the launching spot near the causeway, did little semicircles on the eerily still water and headed under the bridge.
The northern shore of big Random Island was on our right, dotted with homes, while the mainland coast of Newfoundland was on our left, more than a kilometre away. We were moving east in Smith Sound, heading for the far end of Random, a part of the trip that would probably take us a few days. About halfway along, the population would start to dwindle and then completely disappear. Then we’d hit the Thoroughfare, the winds, and the Atlantic, and rocky little Ireland’s Eye would appear in the distance. That’s when we’d make a run for it.
Though here in the narrow Sound we seemed sheltered, Dad had made it clear many times that we shouldn’t expect things to go smoothly at any location, because in Newfoundland bad weather can appear without warning.
I tried to keep that in mind, but bad weather just didn’t seem like even a remote possibility that day. As we floated forward, the motorboats buzzing past, the birds hanging quietly in the blue sky, problems seemed far away. An hour ticked slowly by and I started to relax. Even Mom seemed content. Ireland’s Eye was still three or four days in the distance, and who was that old Newfoundlander anyway? Probably just an ordinary fisherman. I had never believed in ghosts, why should I start now, just because some geezer was full of old wives’ tales? I laughed to myself and put my back into the kayaking, skimming along past Mom and Dad, challenging them to a little race.
It had been late morning when we started, so by a little past noon we began searching for a place to stop for lunch. We were well out into the Sound by then and it was widening, the villages on the faraway mainland side appearing and disappearing, getting less frequent and harder to make out. We hugged the shore of Random Island for safety, and though we continued to see the odd collection of houses on flat spots there, much of the land was growing steeper as we travelled, and the trees (coniferous, I recalled from science class) that stuck up in the moss and rocks were tall and green, as thick as a rug in places. At a cove where we spotted a stream spouting out of the rugged cliff, we pulled in and made a difficult landing. Here there was about three metres of flat rock for us to rest on while we ate.
Mom was giving us a break in the food department during this trip. She got up early every day at home and made me a pretty involved lunch, heavy on the healthy stuff. Dad and I often ran into each other at the fridge in the middle of the night, searching for something a bit more substantial. (Sometimes he tried to tell me he was really just up for a pee and happened to notice the fridge on the way by.) But Mom promised to let us eat what we wanted on the Rock. So, though potato chips and chocolate bars were as scarce around our house as dinosaurs, Dad and I had loaded up on them for Newfoundland.
We ate our sandwiches, laughed as we stood below a cool spring of water with our mouths wide open, and then gloried in the demolition of the saltiest, greasiest three-hundred-gram bag of chips in Canada. But within an hour, true to the rigorous schedule I had prepared myself for, we were off again.
It wasn’t long after that that I started seeing something in the water. I had pushed on ahead of Mom and Dad so I could pause for a moment to give my rapidly cramping hands a chance to rest while the parental units caught up. I leaned forward and while looking at my aching fingers caught a glimpse of something coming towards me from the depths. Way down below the surface I could see a mushroom-shaped bag of some sort, the weirdest bag I’d ever seen. You could see through it and it looked as though it had veins; it moved as if it were alive, but just barely. As I peered into the water, mesmerized by it, my kayak continued to float forward. Suddenly there were hundreds, no, thousands of these shimmering things, some right next to me, others a little lower and more even deeper; down as far as you could see they congregated, masses of them. I started feeling afraid.
“Jellyfish,” said Dad, smiling as he skimmed towards me.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” added Mom, pulling up along the other side. “Look, you can try to pick them up but they always get away.” She reached in and tried to lift one out. It flopped over her paddle, looking solid and liquid at the same time, and fell back into the water.
I stared down at the jellyfish again. They were hanging there in the depths of the ocean, looking half-dead. What would it be like to dive in, I thought. Down, down, past millions of jellyfish. The light from above would grow dimmer, until it was total darkness. All you would see would be these glowing, pulsing jellies surrounding you. You’d be in their world, dark and spooky and suffocating. I kept staring at the water, looking as far into it as I could.
Way down in the depths, miles down it seemed, something was moving towards me. A chill went through my body in the heat of the day as it started to come into focus: a human head, severed from its body, was flying towards me from the depths of the Atlantic. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. As it rose, I slowly began to see its features. It was the face of an old man, turned in my direction. Up from the depths he floated, his face and body dripping with jellyfish. Suddenly I realized who it was: it was the old Newfoundlander who had whispered into my ear! I cried out and jerked away from the surface of the water. The kayak rocked violently.
“Whoa!” said Dad, as he grabbed the hull and steadied it. “What’s the problem here?”
“Down there, the old man from the landing!”
“Down there?” Dad asked, looking at me like I was nuts.
I gathered myself and peered tentatively over the edge of my kayak into the water. There was nothing there but a sea of beautiful, harmless jellyfish, floating quietly around us.
“I think you saw a red one.”
“A red one?”
“The red ones can be kind of scary at first. They look like some sort of monster if you’re not used to them.”
“I think they’re beautiful,” said Mom as she skimmed by. She had no idea that I had been spooked by them. I glanced at Dad. Neither he nor I was about to tell her. “Look!” she cried. “There’s one right by your kayak, Dylan.”
And there it was, a red jellyfish, with a face.
By late that afternoon we had made such progress that we were nearly halfway around the northern shore of Random Island. We were moving at an amazing rate, actually approaching the end of population on either side of us. Snooks Harbour and Waterville were behind, Britannia and Burgoyne’s Cove were nearing. We had already gone a long way past the spot we had picked out for our first night’s stay, so we brought our kayaks together in a triangle in mid-channel, pulled out our plastic-wrapped maps, and searched for another place to pitch our tent. We decided on a tiny island about three kilometres ahead. The sun was getting low, but we thought we could make it with time to spare.
Half an hour later, sprinting towards our destination, the last villages vanishing behind us, we started hearing a strange sound. It was mechanical, like a large machine grinding something up and then hurling it over a cliff in a thundering cascade. At first it was a distant sound, but each time we heard it, it was louder, echoing across the water in the darkening surroundings of this uninhabited territory; I imagined an evil giant of some sort, doing some terrible deed. We kept pushing forward, anxious to get to the island before total darkness. We looked all around as we moved, searching for the source of this spooky sound.
Slowly it became clear that it was coming from the top of a steep embankment to our left, on the mainland side. But we couldn’t make out what was happening under the darkening sky. For a while, it appeared the sound had stopped. Then suddenly it came again, erupting almost on top of us. We looked up and saw a rain of rocks hurtling towards the kayaks. I almost screamed.
“It’s a slate quarry,” said my father, so calmly that his voice startled me. I could have sworn he was as anxious as me. At the top of the cliff a dumptruck had come into view, unloading the rocks—it was obvious that many wouldn’t even hit the water, let alone come within a hundred metres of our kayaks. In the distance behind the truck, the quarry hummed, grinding slate.
Still, as we moved towards our little island, which we could now see dimly ahead of us, that quarry seemed an eerie place. Imagine working there, I thought, likely with just a few others, late at night out here in the wilderness, where you could shout and your voice would vanish, echoing down the channel and out into the Atlantic Ocean.
By the time we reached the island the sound of the slate quarry had disappeared into the night. Again we had a shaky landing but managed to get out of our boats without falling in. The fingerless leather gloves on my hands were covered with salt from the water and when I stood I nearly buckled. I was looking forward to sleep.
But there was a great deal to do before that sort of comfort. We had to get all the provisions, many wrapped in waterproof coverings, out of the sealed hatches in the kayaks, find the tent, locate a good spot to erect it, get it up, and then start a fire and make supper. Roasted marshmallows had been promised for dessert.
An hour later we were sitting around the fire, our hamburgers and canned peas almost ready, looking out over the grey quiet of Random Island and the channel. You could barely make out the land from the water, and a mist seemed to hang over everything. It was so silent that it felt like Mom and Dad and I were the only people in the world.
“That’s the ocean, that way,” said Mom, motioning with a cooking fork.
“So that’s where we’re headed?”
“In that general direction, my son, but not quite all the way to England. The last time I flew to London it made my arms pretty tired, so you can imagine kayaking the whole way.”
Mom seemed to have fully regained her sense of humour.
“Ireland’s Eye is out there,” said Dad quietly, as if it were some ghost lurking in the night. He may have put a little extra drama into it.
“It is? Where?”
“I’m not sure. Let me see…maybe that’s it. See where Random Island turns…up there to the right? Well, look out into the ocean from that turn…. Something’s out there.”
I peered into the night, leaning over so far I nearly singed my jacket in the fire. There was something out there all right, a dark shadow way off in the distance. I strained my eyes and for an instant I thought I could see smoke drifting upward. But how could I detect anything like that from this far?
“I doubt we can see it from here,” said Mom. “You two are fantasizing.”
“You’re probably right,” agreed Dad.
But I disagreed. “I can. I can see Ireland’s Eye. And there’s smoke coming from it.”
“Well, if there’s smoke coming from it, my boy,” said Mom, “then it’s on fire and we’d better find ourselves another destination. There hasn’t been any smoke coming from there for nearly forty years.”
“Maybe it’s a campfire.”
“And maybe Mickey Mouse and his friends are there too, with Goofy and the whole gang,” whispered Mom, pretending she was deadly serious. Then she poked me in the ribs.
“It could be a campfire,” said Dad, “but I doubt it. Not too many people go out to the Eye anymore. There used to be drug smugglers dealing out there, because no one could catch them so far away from the mainland, but all the books say the police have pretty well cleaned that up. I hate to say it, Dylan, but you’re probably just seeing things.”
“Those are the smoke rings of your mind, sweetie,” said Mom and plopped a burger onto my plate.
Maybe.
We stopped thinking about Ireland’s Eye and discussed tomorrow’s leg of the trip. We had made extremely good time due to the calm weather. Dad had calculated that we would get to the launching point from Random Island either late in our third day or early in the fourth. Now he was thinking, because the evening seemed so still, that with another perfect day we might get there by tomorrow night.
It was completely dark now, and beyond the warmth and glow of our fire we could see almost nothing. The light of the moon only allowed us to make out dim shorelines. If it wasn’t for the sound of the waves gently hitting our little island in the quiet, we could have been anywhere, and anything could have been going on around us. A thousand ghosts and goblins could have been staring at us, a sea monster could be eyeing us from nearby. Even the few trees on the mainland a kilometre away weren’t being rustled by wind.
But out of the darkness a sound suddenly broke the silence. It was unlike anything I had ever heard before and it came from somewhere out in the channel. Dad stood up, knocking the last bit of his burger into the fire.
“What is it?” I shouted, my voice sounding so loud and so petrified in the silence that I was scared twice: once by the sound and again by myself. It was a hissing sound, like something of gigantic size breathing out in a threatening way. And then there was a crash as it splashed into the water. It sounded huge.
“Quiet!” said Dad. We all waited in the silence. Then that sound came again. Phoosh! And then the crash.
“It’s a minke,” said Dad dramatically.
“A minke! What the hell is a minke!”
“Dylan!” said Mom. “What the hell kind of language is that?”
Oh god, a minke! Mink-ee. It sounded like some sort of villain from Star Trek or something. A minke was coming after us in the night, just the three of us all alone in the wilderness where no one would even hear us scream!
“A minke is a whale,” explained Mom in a monotone. She wasn’t looking at me, almost as if she was afraid that I had turned into a lunatic. “Uh…we told you about minkes before we left.” She sounded concerned.
They had, too. But I was getting so spooked I was forgetting things. A minke is a small dark-skinned whale with a bit of white on it, and can be up to nine metres long when fully grown. They are common in Newfoundland, especially in channels like the one we were in. You are more likely to see them than humpbacks and fin whales, which are much bigger. Humpbacks make an enormous noise when they appear and sometimes lift the whole front of their bodies out of the water; they’re about the size of a house trailer. Fins are even bigger trailers. We were obviously getting into whale territory and I wished I had seen this one, but there would be more, probably as early as tomorrow. I could hardly wait, because even that minke had sounded like some sort of monster of the deep.
I must have fallen asleep within two minutes of my head hitting one of the inflatable pillows we had brought along. And then another dream came. This time my grandfather was standing on the wharf at North Sydney watching Mom and Dad and me leaving for Newfoundland. He was in a huge cheering crowd and everyone was waving except him. He was talking, and I could hear him clearly, though all around people were shouting and whistling and throwing confetti. I kept pointing him out to Mom and Dad but they only laughed at what I said, either because they couldn’t hear me or because they knew Grandpa was dead.
“Remember me, Dylan,” said Grandpa, with tears in his eyes. “Remember me.”
The dream was so awful that I was glad when I woke up. Mom and Dad were snoring away next to me and outside everything was quiet, so quiet it almost hurt my ears. Every time I went to sleep the dream came back.
The next morning we were up early, having bacon and eggs and granola for breakfast. It was another calm sunny day, so we packed up and shoved off as soon as we could, pointing our kayaks towards the horizon where Ireland’s Eye loomed.
It couldn’t have been more than five minutes before the first whale came. Phoosh! Crash!
“THERE SHE BLOWS!” yelled Dad, as excited as a kid. When I darted my head around I saw his paddle pointing towards the Random side, but no whale.
“I didn’t see it!”
“Just wait. They often come up again about a hundred metres farther on. This one was behind us so he should show up nearly even with the boats. His path is over here on this side, about fifty metres away. He’s a minke, but he’s a big one!”
My heart raced and I glued my eyes to the spot where Dad was pointing.
“About…NOW!” said Dad the whale expert. There was a long silence. We all stopped paddling.
PHOOSH.
“WOW!” I shouted. I couldn’t help myself. I had never seen anything like it. A fish one hundred times normal size broke from the water where there had only been calm, rolling up from the depths and shooting air from its blowhole. It looked like a monster.
It went down again with a crash.
I’d seen a lot of movies but never a special effect quite like this.
“That’s a whole lot of fish!” cried Dad.
“Mammal,” said Mom the teacher dryly.
“Wow!” I said again.
But that was just the start of the whales. They seemed to come in crowds after that, though all of them were minkes. We kept making good time, moving quickly towards our destination as if pushed by something. And these whales were the best in-flight film you could order. But after a while Mom started losing her enthusiasm for them, especially because Dad would furiously paddle off after them whenever they surfaced, trying to get as close as possible. I wanted to follow. The first time I tried, Mom stopped me.
“Dylan!” she shouted. “Stay with me. If your father wants to kill himself that’s up to him.”
“Kill himself?”
“Whales have no interest in hurting people, but they can do you in without even noticing you are there. They have a sonar they use to find out how deep the water is and how far it is to each shore. But these guys have been in these coves and channels so often they actually shut their sonar off. They’ve got it all scoped out. And motorboats and big ocean liners don’t bother them because those boats are so loud and so large that the whales sense them long before they see them. But kayaks? What do you think they sense when they’re near a kayak?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“They could come up from about a hundred metres below and hit you without even knowing you were there. They could break your kayak in half, and maybe you with it.”
Now even these wonderful whales were scary.
“I want you to do something for me—” But before she could finish a minke surfaced, less than the length of a football field in front of me.
“Bang your paddle on the kayak!” Mom shouted.
I looked at her and didn’t move.
“BANG YOUR PADDLE!”
Mom doesn’t often roar like that, so I started banging. “Now start heading towards the shore. That one’s coming RIGHT at you!”
Seconds after those words left her mouth the minke appeared again, up from the depths like a huge torpedo…three metres to the right of my boat! It was probably the scariest moment of my life, to that point. And my mom actually screamed.
I’d never heard her do that before.
So here I was, my mother letting go a bloodcurdling shriek, a whale three metres to starboard, and me frozen like a fish stick. But mixed in with the terror I felt was a sense of awe. I couldn’t believe the size of the minke. He was like a couple of Zambonis. He came up nonchalantly, seemed to look at me with an eyeball not much bigger than my own, blew off his steam, and then began his disappearance, a rolling sort of exit where he shows you his back before he dives. And just like that, in a second or two, he was gone, back to his world in the depths. The kayak barely rocked, as if the minke had said, “Oh, hello there. Sorry…I’ll make this smooth for you.” I sat there transfixed by what I had seen. My mother was calling to me, but it seemed as if she were in another world, or like I was dreaming and she was awake. But then I heard my father, shouting as he sped towards me.
“DYLAN! Dylan, what was that like? Dylan, what did he look like up that close?”
“Perhaps we should see if he is alive first?” That was Mom coming from the other direction, glaring at my dad.
I turned and waited for the whale to come up again behind me. Soon I saw him break the surface, his body still faced in the same direction, his motion exactly the same as before, undisturbed by his confrontation with me. I don’t know whether it was my imagination or not, but I thought he tried to look back a little, to see if I was still there. But then he was gone again.
Dad was whispering to me, “Tell me about it later.” Then he raised his voice. “Your mother is right, Dylan. You have to be more careful.”
“Oh, give it a rest,” said Mom. “Let’s move on.”
But I let them get far ahead for a while. I kept looking back, watching my whale breaking the surface with a perfect pace, until he looked tiny in the distance.