The Fisher Queen Read online

  “I love maps,” I murmured, bending close to the mass of spidery lines and numbers and convolutions and thousands of tiny islands between the 300-mile-long, pod-shaped bulk of Vancouver Island 20 miles to the west and the convoluted BC coastline reaching 1,200 miles to Alaska and the Bering Sea. “This is so cool, I can hardly wait.”

  “Charts, Syl, they’re called charts. And tomorrow I’m going to start showing you how to tie gear if everything goes okay.”

  Sointula

  Everything did not go okay, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care that Paul’s self-proclaimed Taylor Curse had struck again, spewing four quarts of oil from a cracked valve onto the engine room floor, sending dashboard gauges spinning. I just got out of the way so he could yank up the floorboard in the middle of the cabin and jump down into the engine room without killing himself or me. I didn’t care that the autopilot still kept pulling to starboard even after we’d paid $600 to get it fixed before we left home—I just clambered onto the skipper’s seat and steered for the nearest harbour. I didn’t care that we had to do an emergency run into Campbell River even though we’d already stopped in Kelsey Bay the night before to tie up and walk the four miles round trip for a beer at the only bar. I just prided myself that I could keep up with his six-foot strides. I didn’t care that he spent two hours cursing and banging in the engine room. I just sat on the day bunk/couch/dining room reading Coast Salish legends and a book on Eastern religions I’d bought in Campbell River for a dollar, and handed him tools and coffee as his grimy hand poked up through the hole in the floor. I didn’t care that I didn’t get to learn how to tie gear yet. I just puttered and read and cooked and told stories and studied charts and stayed out of the way.

  What I did care about was two days of glorious newness. I cared about watching the endless humpbacked islands slide by, the longhouses and totem poles hugging the beach in Alert Bay, the perfect moon shell found on a broken-booze-bottle beach, exploring a new place on my own. That delicious anonymous state with all senses wide open to the world. Padding through the London fog for the midnight performance of Sweeney Todd, weaving in and out of adobe galleries in Santa Fe, floating on the jade-green waters of the Seven Sacred Pools in Maui, caressing brocades in a Cairo souk.

  I wanted to see and touch and hear and taste and smell everything. I wanted to know how everything worked. I was in that exquisite state of childhood curiosity that explores for the joy of it. Everything was fascinating—a bug, a boat, a brilliant sunset—and I roved to the end of whatever leash I was on—time, weather, responsibility and, occasionally, safety.

  Though I had been transplanted here at the age of six from the smoke-choked industrial north of England, I was no stranger to the wilderness and working in a man’s world. Dad had made sure of that. Even though my younger sibs and I grew up in Vancouver, and our father was a successful construction-business owner, I could fish by age 8, pitch a tent by 10 and build log fences and furniture by 13 at our family getaway in the BC Cariboo. My mother’s voice imploring from the one-room rustic cabin, “For God’s sake, Laimon, she’s just a little girl.” It seemed perfectly natural to whitewater canoe in the morning and go to a hip nightclub at night, to work as an engineering design draftsman and knit sweaters for my boyfriends.

  It reminded me of going trolling for trout with my dad the first time. I wore my mother’s fear and worry trapped between the layers of clothing she had trowelled on me. Unable to bend my knees properly, I had slid off the log bridge on the way to the lakeshore, in the pre-dawn haze of sleepiness, and into the creek. Unable to sit upright, I had lain partially submerged like a baby seal ’til Dad sighed and shook his head, rumbling, “That woman,” his ham-sized hand reaching down to pluck me from the stream.

  But I wasn’t six anymore, and if I went overboard I’d die. So the machine had to stretch and bend and lift and pull, faultlessly. There were no do-overs in this business. If something went wrong, the best that could happen was injury, usually serious. I couldn’t afford to be a baby seal—there would be no ham-hand to pluck me from the sea. In 10 minutes I’d be dead from exposure anyway, or dragged under by my filling gumboots.

  The crucible was honing me like a spear point. It’s what we were designed to do before we became domestic pets. We were meant to tolerate and endure pain, exhaustion, extremes, to connect with our bodies, to use them like a tool.

  Even as a toddler, I would insist, “I do it, Mummy.” I had been so impatient to learn how to write and read before Grade 1 that I had enlisted my parents in a special-education program I’d devised, where they would form words by making follow-the-dots letters so I could feel like I was printing like a big girl. I hypothesized that as soon as I learned to print I would naturally be able to read and enter the magical worlds between each set of covers. I was rarely seen as pushy. Nature had taken care of that by bestowing me with a sunny disposition, multiple dimples and a loving, trusting heart . . . maybe too loving and trusting.

  To really explore the world around me now, I had to view it from every possible angle. It required setting aside adult decorum and, often, personal hygiene issues. It required I be oblivious to the reactions of other adults and have a readiness to grab any opportunity that came along. It often required that I be very still and quiet and move in slow motion to sneak up on things and absorb every drop, every molecule, of the experience. The book I was reading on Eastern religions said what I had intuited long ago: Be Here Now.

  After two days and 300 miles, we tied up to the pristine wharf at Sointula on Malcolm Island. The bountiful land was settled in the 1880s by Finns who were part of the wave of Scandinavian immigrants escaping poverty and desperate for land. Some homesteaded in the American Midwest, and some of the most tenacious founded utopian communities on the remote and primeval northwest coast of Canada. Finns went to Georgia Strait, Danes to Cape Scott at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and Norwegians to Bella Coola on the mainland.

  Paul and I were here to replace more damaged engine parts and fish out the sea-born plastic bags that had been sucked into the heat exchanger valve just below the water line. The innocuous shreds had damn near melted down the engine. But not even another floor removal and swear-fest could disturb a day so beautiful that things had come loose and now fluttered around inside me.

  I felt spring-loaded, like my heels couldn’t stand touching the ground. I knew there was something amazing very close by and I was going to find it. Paul was in the hardware store getting engine things, and the leash was off, though it didn’t get much safer than Saturday afternoon in a fishing village descended from utopian Finnish settlers. The sturdy, ruddy-cheeked descendants were a picture of communal industry. Everyone was busy, brisk and friendly, and I felt like I was inside a giant wooden cuckoo clock: all moving parts and window boxes.

  The wharves were like sturdy welcoming arms reaching out to sea, a stalwart mamma gathering her children home and safe, protecting them from the turbulent world. Even the private docks showed the Nordic propensity to build to last an eternity.

  Drifting to the wharf edge, I marvelled at the clarity of the water (I’m sure the inhabitants would not tolerate anything less) and leaned forward to follow the lines of mighty pylons. The moment wood met water, life exploded into shape and colour. This was the treasure I was looking for. Already on my hands and knees, I leaned over as far as gravity would let me. Nature had created a marine Monet, an impressionist painting of a garden beyond imagination. If Monet could create such shimmering watery scenes from ponds and water lilies, what could he have done with this extravaganza?

  Somehow, the water seemed clearer than air and acted like a magnifying glass, intensifying colour, shape and shadow. It was dazzling and hypnotic, everything in gentle motion like graceful Balinese dancers, and just as exotic. Pearly foot-long sea cucumbers, starfish like ochre suns, anemones like shaving brushes in a southwest desert. I had to remind myself that these were not gardens of alien flowers but herds of earthly animals.


  They drew me down and in, as I eased myself flat on my belly, oblivious to what might be smearing my clothes or whose path I was blocking. It was not that I didn’t care; I just didn’t notice. The closer I got, the more I could see. And I had to see everything.

  I imagined these creatures chose the high-rise housing of the pylons because it put them in the stream of whatever it was they ate. Like a buffet on a conveyor belt. And no danger of being baked before the tide rose. They clung and clustered with no thought to personal boundaries, though what territorial instincts were at play, who could tell? For all I knew it could have been all-out invertebrate warfare down there. People said that even a nuclear cloud had its own terrible beauty.

  Coming from Vancouver, the marine mecca for scuba diving, I’d seen a million photos of our fabled underwater world, but nothing could have prepared me for the real thing. I now understood why divers risked their lives in our treacherous waters. But here, everything was benign beauty.

  I hardly noticed I had squirmed forward in little increments. When I couldn’t hold my torso like a plank anymore, I braced myself against the top of the pylons with my hand. I moved as slowly and unconsciously as my watery cousins. Personally, I thought they got all the looks in the family. The only thing I did notice after a while was that my head was throbbing and my neck was locked up again. That was about the same time I heard Paul say, “What the hell are you doing now?” and realized I was hanging upside down from my waist at the edge of a bustling commercial dock. Getting back up was not nearly as easy as slithering down, and I felt a tug on my waistband that hauled me back onto my knees. My “thank you” was swallowed up in a torrent of description, and besides, I could have gotten back up myself anyway.

  As he muttered and banged the afternoon away in The Dungeon, trying to repair the damage from the oil incident and some other evil engine event, I wrote another entry in my daily journal. I had vowed to keep it faithfully. I did, as I had all my travel journals, and later added it to the velvet box that would become my personal time machine.

  Now names of the jumbled islands from the Inside and Discovery Passages tumbled onto the page from the folded chart as I marked our progress north, fraught with breakdowns. Lasqueti, Hornby, Quadra, Sonora, East and West Thurlow, Hardwicke, Malcolm. Discovery Passage bore the name of Captain Vancouver’s sailing ship that had brought Europeans to the Salish world between Vancouver Island and the fjordy mainland.

  I tried to keep writing through the rolly slop out of Sointula, and though my stomach stayed right where it was meant to, the pen wouldn’t, and I had to stow my journal in its prescribed spot in the chart rack under the loran. It was only an hour’s run directly across the narrow strait to scraggy little Port McNeill, but we were thrown around a bit and many a hapless sailor would have lost his lunch. Even Paul was queasy the first few days of every season. Some people never got over it, puking themselves inside out before running or being dragged off a fishboat. The local seasick saying was that for the first week you’re scared you’re gonna die, and for the second, you’re scared you won’t. I had inherited a freakishly stable inner ear from my sturdy Nordic father, who had braved the north Atlantic one January in the mid ’50s on a rickety tramp steamer to Halifax from Bristol. My aristocratic Florentine mother, on the other hand, would barf at the sight of the sea or in any moving object, as would my poor younger sister.

  The only sea-related issues I had was what I called the Land Wavies, which didn’t make me barf, just kept me wavering as if I was still on board but settled down as soon as I’d slept. My non-barfiness also contributed to my being a keeper and a prized female deckhand. Prized because we were famed to be cleaner, smarter, tougher, soberer, pleasanter than our male counterparts and we worked like bloody demons. The question, though, was always this: would she or wouldn’t she? Is she or isn’t she? Ten percent if she didn’t, and 15 percent if she did.

  Paul had the ideal situation: a potentially top-notch deckhand who would and did without that unfortunate issue of keeping her existence, or the reason for the extra five percent, from The Wife . . . For all intents and purposes I was a wife, and therefore only got 10 percent. Not much if you’re trying to conjure up enough money to go back to university, especially when 10 percent of nothing is nothing.

  I may have been a willing and hearty bedmate, but my fantasies of highjinks on the high seas were already fading like fog as Paul insisted on sleeping on the day bunk “to keep an eye on things.” Meanwhile, I was firmly directed to one of the two narrow bunks on the port side of the curving, wedge-shaped space of the bow, three steps down from our main living area, right below the wheelhouse and behind the bulwarks that separated it from the engine room. To complete this palatial bedroom was a cupboard along the opposite bow wall, a narrow two-foot bench with a lid that doubled as a locker, and a teeny-tiny toilet that you pumped to swish away the unmentionables straight out to the chuck. All this in the space of an apartment-size walk-in closet.

  We were four days out and now tied up at the government Fisheries dock in Port McNeill for another long night of frantic engine repairs. As I reached again for my journal, I stood transfixed by the sultry moon and sea of stars framed in the fo’c’sle window. I was struck by how much I wanted Paul’s body next to me at night. Felt the first worry over the latest reports of bad weather and poor fishing; the first pangs of a loneliness that would grow tall inside me then work itself in deep.

  After a flurry of journaling and a bracing cup of tea, I flopped belly down on the floor and hung my head over the hole to hand him a wrench as he continued his hand-to-hand combat with the Cummins.

  “Hey, I forgot to tell you, I had the strangest thing happen yesterday when I was steering while you were ripping the pilot to bits on the hatch cover.”

  “Uh, yeah? What?”

  “It was so weird. I was just sitting there, keeping the compass marker right where you told me and watching for logs and junk in the water. And I was just staring out at the grey horizon and the grey sky and the grey water and it was so calm in the channel.”

  “Hmm-hmmmm . . . Oh shit! Ah, sorry, go on.”

  “I wasn’t really thinking of anything and I felt so peaceful and calm, and all of a sudden this song I wrote when I was a kid in high school just started floating through my head—I could hear my voice and my guitar. I heard it clear as day and I haven’t even thought of it for probably 10 years. I couldn’t have remembered the words to save my life and suddenly there it was, like a little concert in my head.”

  “Yuh, I’ve had things like that happen before. All kinds of strange stuff happens in your head when you’re out on the water. What’s the song about? Can you hand me the Phillips screwdriver? No, the other one; I mean the longer one. God, this piece-of-shit boat is driving me nuts. We’re going to have to go into Port Hardy tomorrow to get a new heat exchanger valve and get the pilot checked. One more day down the tubes to the Taylor Curse.”

  I offered another grubby screwdriver that looked like it could lever up a tank. “Yeah, that’s the one, thanks. You were saying?”

  “Just a sec, my neck is bugging me. I gotta lay on my side. Okay. It was about the ocean being the Mother of everything. ’Member I told you about those guys I met a few years ago through my social worker friends who worked at that Indian residence between Ucluelet and Tofino? Who were going to use my songs for a documentary about environmental issues on the BC coast?”

  “Uhhhh, yuh. Hang on, I have to bang this rusty nut to get it loose. Okay, go ahead. So, what about the song? ”

  “Well, okay, I could sing it for you.”

  Pretty Lady, lovely Lady

  Oh Mother

  Mother of us all

  One sad day, I went to the shoreline

  So lonely and afraid, I could have cried

  Then She called to me, with a voice like a choir

  A thousand seagulls, soaring higher

  And though your waves may toss

  And though your fury kills


  You’re Mankind’s Mother

  And always will

  One by one you’ll claim us

  Back to your womb, from when we came

  Lying in our eternal sleep

  With you once again

  And though your waves may toss . . .

  And I did, every word. On my belly with my head hanging down into the engine room, as the skies darkened, and the seagulls stilled, with the faint sounds of Elton John and drunken conversations floating down from the bar up the hill. While Paul sat back on his heels, grimy hands at rest. His upturned face lit from more than the bare bulb hanging from its cord on the engine room wall.

  Port Hardy

  The Cauldron of the northern BC coast is just what the meteorologists’ name implies: a bubbling, primeval soup of massive tides; deadly reefs, shelves and pinnacles; towering mountains; sudden shallows; torturous narrows; and open seas all the way north to Alaska and west to Japan. Frigid Bering Sea currents and air hurl themselves into the balmy south Pacific waters and trade winds sweeping up from Japan and Mexico. A combination of any of these at any time can explode into a roiling boil and create storms of epic proportions. Winds of 200 miles per hour have been clocked at Cape Scott at the northern tip of Vancouver Island—seas that would swallow a four-storey building.

  Scientists from all over the world come to study this phenomenon of nature’s unfathomable power. It’s a restless, unpredictable, untameable world that terrifies some and enchants others. It reminds us daily who is really in charge. It seduces us with gentle beauty then explodes into terrifying rages. Some people can’t bear feeling so insignificant and others find it a blessed relief. This is no place for control freaks and egotists, but it is just the right place for the wild hearts, the romantics and the eccentrics. There is space and tolerance and sometimes affection for even the squarest pegs.