The Fisher Queen (17 page)

When I tiptoed past the day bunk to the fo'c'sle, clothes under my arm, Paul stirred in his sleep. I paused to watch his weary face and was aware for the first time of the gulf of years between us, his dark good looks and electric sexiness receding in the hardened eyes and deeply etched lines. I longed to lie with him, to caress him to wakefulness, but I wouldn't risk another rejection that I would never understand. Instead, I dressed in clothes fresh from the previous day's laundry and stowed my sad little bundle deep in the corner of the storage bin beside my bunk, under the extra canned goods and gear. I knew I would never wear them again.

By the time I finished tidying up, the sun was coming out and Paul sleepily offered to go to shore with me to look for glass balls. Used as floats on Japanese nets, they were now quite rare, travelling thousands of miles over the Pacific to west coast beaches. Everything was light and bright with chatter about glass balls and beaches as we ate a quick salmon sandwich and prepared for our favourite event: exploring somewhere new.

Paul rowed us into shore on a slack wind and I was thankful for the smooth ride into the postcard beach. We dragged the skiff up the beach and couldn't find anything to anchor the bow rope, the glistening crescent was swept so clean and white. Grass-covered bluffs on either side of a sandy spit filled with twisted trees and sand dunes led like a corridor to the stunningly beautiful beach of Guise Bay that opened its long graceful arms to the west coast. Speechless, we stood on the bluff and absorbed the almost unearthly beauty of sand and sea and dense, deep forest, luminous in the warm southeast breeze.

As we descended the spit into the low dunes leading to the beach, I noticed tall crooked slats of weathered wood marking an irregular arc across the dunes and almost tripped over the corner of something half-buried. Kneeling down, I brushed away the sand to reveal a small square metal plaque that told us this was the site of a Danish settlement in the late 1800s. The slats were remnants of a wooden fence windbreak built to halt the drifting sand.

Exploring the dense woods that rimmed the beach, we found tumbledown old cabins, some still used as shelters by campers. Lovely wildflowers, maybe the descendants of gardens, grew everywhere: cobalt lupines, lavender columbines, bright-faced daisies. We followed another small wood sign on to the Hanson Lagoon trail, some of it on a raised wooden boardwalk that led for 10 miles through the forest to Hanson's Lagoon, farther down the coast where the settlers lived and farmed as well. We walked a couple of miles on the trail, mostly in silent single file, relieved to be away from the confines of boat life and enjoying the free swinging movement of our bodies. I felt drawn to know more about the settlers, what had brought them to this incredibly wild and remote place and what drove them away.

Since there wasn't another human in sight and it had been blowing for two days, we had a chance of finding a glass ball amid the satiny bleached logs that ringed the fine, hard-packed sand. Excited as a kid on an Easter egg hunt, I found five little beauties the size of large oranges, tinted in delicate shades of aquamarine and fern green. They fit in the front-zipped pocket of my anorak.

By the time we wandered back to our skiff in the opposite bay, the breakers were three feet high and curling into the beach from the powerful incoming tide. We studiously timed the skiff shove-off and counted the waves for the second time that day. Careful to not get our sneakers wet in the surf, we rejected wave after wave, until we were certain we had our break, pushed hard and leapt in with precision technique, ready to start rowing like mad. The wave had other ideas, and an instant later we were hit by surf that sent me flying off the bow and Paul off the stern into the chuck. We staggered back to shore laughing our guts out and very refreshed by the icy sea water. Since we were already soaked to the skin we just waded past the surf, clambered aboard the skiff and rowed to the boat. Luckily, the glass balls were tied around my waist in my anorak and made it through the adventure.

Thankful for the afternoon sun, we stripped on deck and hung our clothes on the boom and fell into each other's arms, still laughing until our lips met in a sudden flurry of kisses that flung us to the deck.

At sunset, as I sat on the hatch cover reading
The Three Ways of Asian Wisdom
, our old friend the humpback rolled past us on his way to dinner. I thought of the Danish settlers and their moss-covered dreams, Buddhism's eternal now, of Sisiutl rising from the waters to test our courage and authenticity, of the song that says
all we are is dust in the wind
. And as the Milky Way blazed its way across the night, I knew for certain one thing: there were no atheists at sea.

As much as a 20-ton fishboat can
tiptoe, that's what we did, in the pre-dawn run to Winter Harbour. The restless greys of wind, waves and cloud were a perfect backdrop to the inside of our cabin and my psyche. The taste of death still sharp on our tongues, we went about the business of thwarting the Grim Reaper with a carefully calculated approach to navigating Scott Channel, working out the tides, depths and winds to tip the odds more in our favour. Pale and silent, we stood in the wheelhouse, hyper-alert and vigilant, as the outgoing low tide swept us through the channel and revealed the obstacle course of rocks we had to skim by as we hugged the close shore.

I may have been the picture of stoic calm, but I was in pitched battle with every part of me that fought not to be in this place again. I had to beat the flashes and fears back, or I would never be able to go on. Beat them back as I had done during that fateful canoe trip through the Fraser Canyon. Three hours after I had been trapped under the canoe, I had to get back in it, cross the river to find safety for the night and then paddle another two days down the river to get home. I had seen others bested by the terrors and never venture out on the water again.

The gift of our glorious afternoon in Guise Bay had been replaced by a sinister little Jack-in-the-Box as we rounded the point and met the west coast waves full on. These weren't the horrifying mountains of yesterday, but a dirty slop that bucked and rolled us as we ground our way to Winter Harbour. Every once in a while a thought would dart in to let me know I really should consider being afraid, to which I would inwardly snort and remind myself that we had already experienced the worst and still lived to tell the tale, and this? This was just annoying. We had savvied up quick about Cape Scott, and after the heart-pounding approach the previous afternoon we knew the nature of this beast and how to appease it.

I knew Paul wasn't being reckless this time; we wouldn't be running and fishing in bad conditions if we weren't so desperate. In spite of all the uncertainties and terrors, I loved this life and was smitten by its power to strip us humans of our uppityness and constantly remind us of our place: a grain of sand, a drop of water in an endless sea.

To distract ourselves from the relentless pounding, we invented a music game we called Stump the Lump. We were both music lovers, and since the boat stereo had been stolen from Paul's VW Jetta earlier that spring along with the Blaupunkt car stereo, and since the insurance wouldn't cover the boat stereo and we didn't have the money to replace it before we left, we had learned to live without it. The Jetta was a reminder of how lucrative fishing had been until just two years ago—as were travel, art school, good restaurants, designer clothes and other fineries.

As I gripped the dashboard to keep upright, I would sing a melody. Paul had to guess the song title and artist, and if correct, he would then play a melody on his harmonica while I steered and guessed. This amused us for several hours until we started to get worn out by the rough ride, which worsened the closer we got to the point at the northern opening to Quatsino Sound that would eventually lead to Winter Harbour.

Our choice was either to ride farther south into the open roiling waters past the rocks and islets of the sound and then double back to run to the inlet that wound its way inland to harbour, or cut the trip shorter and risk the narrow channel of huge crashing waves and rocks between the point and Kains Island lighthouse and run straight into the inlet. Longer and awful, or shorter and hellish.

After my eyes popped out of my sockets at the sight of the channel, Paul asked me if I was scared. I decided on “a little” considering the nightmare we'd been through just 24 hours ago and how worn out we were from the trip down. I was pissed that he was even considering the channel option, as he didn't know it very well. He seemed almost relieved that one of us had admitted to being afraid and rounded the islands to surf our way to the back of the Sound and through the five miles of twisting, lowland inlets freckled with humpbacked islands covered to the glassy water's edge by dense evergreens and salal shrubs. I never got over the dramatic shift from chaos to calm, freezing to furnace, once we were out of the wind and into sheltered waters. One minute I was shivering in layers of wool and rubber, and the next, tearing my clothes off as the mercury shot up. Today was a miracle of peaceful warmth.

Until we rounded a corner and the clamour of two fish camps and hundreds of boats came at us across the water like a gale. Paul was right. Half the fleet must have been jammed into the bay of this miniscule hamlet, a haven for ships since the 1800s. Winter Harbour had the only fish camps for almost another hundred miles down the west coast, offering fishermen the options of selling to BC Packers, the Fisherman's Co-op or the occasional cash buyer who hung around just outside the harbour and sold for higher prices but supplied no fuel or ice. In those cases, fishermen could buy ice from the camps, if it was available; preference was always given to fishermen who sold to the camps too. Cash buyers were a good option for day catches, or if you were leaving the grounds for a while, but you never wanted to push your loyalty luck with BC Packers.

With a population of 20, Winter Harbour was connected by a network of publicly accessible logging roads that serviced the northern end of Vancouver Island, linking frontier communities like Coal Harbour, Port Alice and Holberg, which traditionally relied on logging and fishing but were already beginning the shift to eco-tourism and sport fishing. An ancient network of trails by First Nations, then the Scandinavian settlers, criss-crossed the region, and recovery was already underway to reopen many of them.

As in many coastal towns and villages I'd seen, the homes and sheds were jumbled close together along the waterfront, many on stilts, and were joined by a boardwalk that ran the length of the village over the mud flats and water. As we motored toward the BC Packers camp to tie up and check in for ice, fuel and water, I knew that boardwalk would be my sanity in the weeks to come.

I was struck by the realization that these were the round piney hills my father had logged 25 years earlier out of Holberg, the largest floating lumber camp in the world, and cringed to think he had been part of the destruction of the old-growth forests that had covered most of northern Vancouver Island. I was indeed my father's daughter, here participating in the destruction of the salmon industry. I shook away the irony and prepared to drop the bumpers and tie up to the fourth troller out from the finger float.