The Fisher Queen (4 page)

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.

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.

For most of us, it wasn't just a way to make money or run from conformity; it was the call of the wild, the last great frontier of our great country that still rang with the ancient songs lodged deep in our bones. We were here to be a part of something so much greater than the domesticated life of the urban treadmill and to continue the tradition of our courageous ancestors and people throughout history who had chosen the unknown, the devil they didn't know, over the safety of the mundane. Something that would last who knows how long, but probably not as long as we hoped.

The Cauldron had gone from a simmer to a bubble overnight with a marine forecast for a bit of a boil by that night. The clanging of riggings and uneasy shifting of boats before first light dragged us from our separate beds to make the 22-mile run from Port McNeill to Port Hardy before things got nasty. I was not by nature an early riser, but I loved the simple choreography of morning we had already fallen into: Paul would start the engine and turn up the oil stove in the galley to boil water; I would dress quickly and come upstairs to make coffee; he would start up all the radios and electronics; I would make sure everything was secured inside and out using a checklist I had devised; he would untie the bow and stern line and pull up the bumpers hanging on ropes that protected the hull from the float; I would untie the midships line and wait for his signal from the wheelhouse to push the boat out a bit then jump on deck with the rope.

I was a vertical-learning-curve kind of girl and had always detested standing on the sidelines of anything, so I asked Paul for more and more to do so I could feel useful and a part of things. He would mete out tasks and information bit by bit: what an underwater pinnacle looked like on the depth sounder, steering left to go right and right to go left, how to light the cantankerous oil stove, that a little port left in the bottle meant that starboard was on the right, how to read the tide book for highs and lows, and the brief slacks in between when you could safely run the narrows and shallows. I chafed under the slowness of my learning and always snuck in a little extra something. It was hard for him to stay mad at me when something was beyond me, like tying gear, because I was so damn smart and earnest about it and it did take more of the workload off him. At times, though, I slid right past competent worker to over-eager puppy and, occasionally, into just plain stupid risk-taker. Like when he had told me in no uncertain terms to never pull up the trolling poles alone because they were too heavy and came out of the cabin to find me dangling six feet above the deck, still hanging onto the rope and slowly swinging back and forth.

We slipped out of Port McNeill's choppy bay and around the corner of Malcolm Island, coffee and cigs firmly in hand, and into a mounting lump that signalled our first foray out of the sheltered Inside Passage into the relatively open waters of Broughton Strait. By Port Hardy, we would be in Queen Charlotte Strait and full on to the winds and water finally let loose and funnelling down the coast from Alaska, diverted and maddened by the Queen Charlotte Islands, which would wait another 30 years to be renamed Haida Gwaii.

It kicked up fast and mean, so we ran full throttle with stabilizers up to squeeze out the
Central Isle
's maxed-out running speed of eight knots. The stabilizers were used primarily while fishing at a two-knot speed to ease the boat's movement, but they were also used to run in heavy, dangerous seas, although they slowed the boat considerably. Fishermen often gambled the risks and benefits in a high-stakes decision to sacrifice speed or stability.

But these were hardly ideal conditions and eight knots is pretty slow even for a troller. Knots and nautical miles are hangers-on from the days of the old sailing ships, when a sea mile was based on one minute of latitude. The length of one minute of latitude is 1.85 kilometres, or 1.15 miles. A vessel travelling at one knot along a line travels one minute of latitude in one hour. The nautical mile is about one minute of latitude along any line. Originally, sailing ship speed was calculated by how many knots on a rope attached to a board flung overboard would pass a mark on the stern in 30 seconds measured by a sand-filled hourglass.

This was the kind of information I devoured while running, along with the stash of books under my bunk and anything else that caught my interest. It was the best way to sublimate our pitching and rolling, Paul's almost-daily temper tantrums in the engine room and his brooding over the early reports of lousy fishing. Besides, I really couldn't do anything else when it was rough. I'd either wreck something or myself or both. The most productive thing I could do was read or journal or daydream, or endlessly study the charts. The view didn't exactly inspire: everything a dark, mean-looking grey. The lump turned into sharp, crested waves. Spray came over the bow and splattered the wheelhouse windows. Even the coastline seemed to cower like a scared dog.

Before I dove into my book, I thought I'd check in with The Skipper, and slid off the day bunk to crab-walk the six feet to where he stood steering and staring intently through the spray-mottled windows in the wheelhouse—a silly name, as it was just the front end of the same space as the galley. I gripped the dashboard shelf edge and planted my feet far apart to stay put and spoke matter-of-factly, as if we were lounging in our apartment kitchen back home instead of bouncing around on the northern ocean.

“Would you like something to eat or more coffee or something?”

“Uh, it's a bit rough through here until we get to Hardy in a couple of hours.”

“How about a sandwich? You can't go without anything.”

“No thanks.”

“Crackers and cheese? I put some in the kitchen sink before we left and I won't cut anything, just break off a chunk.”

“Okay fine. Can you get another pack of cigarettes from the cupboard too? God, I've got to cut down. What are you reading?” He stole a quick glance at the day bunk to the striking black and green cover. “
Daughters
of what?”

“
Copper Woman
. It's written by a woman named Ann Cameron who lives on the Sunshine Coast and interviewed all these Native elders about their myths and legends and wrote this incredible book. I've just read a couple, but they're amazing. Reminds me of when I was volunteer-teaching West Coast Ethnology once a week at the Vancouver Museum to school kids with Connie. You know her—my Cree friend in North Van. When I was recovering from the car accident, after I could walk around. God, I'll never forget the look on their faces when I showed up in my big neck brace for the orientation.”

“Pretty brave. Did they ever charge the guy who hit you?”

“Just a sec. I'm gonna get the crackers and cheese and bring them up here,” I said, and crabbed over to the sink, grabbed the goods and some paper towel and crabbed back.

“Here, I'll put yours right in front of you. And no, they never did charge him. His top-notch lawyer got him off. Since he was driving a company car he didn't even have to pay higher premiums. Anyway, the next story in the book is about a terrible sea monster called Sisiutl, and facing your fears.”

“Well, let's hope we don't meet him today,” he said, taking a bite of cheese and turning up the marine radio for the continuous weather forecast.

We pulled into the relief of Hardy Bay about the time most people in the other world were sipping morning coffee in their pyjamas. I had been up for hours and had already rodeo-rode a rising gale and got my first dose of the frontier town of Port Hardy. Everything and everybody seemed as restless and rough as the weather, stirred up by the swirling masses of men and the occasional woman who carved a life from the seas and woods and rocks. Fishermen, loggers and miners kept to their own kind, and even within those tribes, there were smaller packs. No self-respecting troller Swivelhead would hang out with a gillnet Ragpicker or a Circlejerk Insaner purse-seiner. And nobody went near the draggers, whose massive apparatus scraped the ocean bottom raw, or the dog fishermen, who smelled like hell's privy. Part of this was the human tendency to run with our own kind, but the truth was, we were all competing for the same fish. 'Specially this year when catch numbers were coming in low and there were rumours of hikes in fuel and interest rates and rumblings about sport-fishing camps and fish farms appearing in sheltered inlets and bays all over the coast.