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HOLDFAST -- AT HOME IN THE NATURAL WORLD |
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DEAD RECKONING Dead reckoning is navigation by deductive logic. When you can't see the stars, when you don't have any landmarks, you can sometimes figure out where you are by knowing where you started, how long you have traveled, and what course you have taken. Columbus used dead reckoning to find the Caribbean four times, measuring his speed with rhyming chants, an hourglass, and the beating of his pulse -- but that doesn't mean it's easy. With dead reckoning, everything depends on knowing where you were in the first place -- the last well- determined position, the Coast Guard says. Then you need to know what direction you are going in, which is not always clear at sea where wind and currents pull a boat off course. You need to know how fast you are moving, and this is tricky too; there is speed -- how fast you are going relative to the water, and then there is speed made good -- speed relative to the earth. When everything is moving under you, the difference between what you intend and what you actually accomplish can be the width of a shoal. "So can you point through the window and tell me where to start?" I had asked the clerk in the marine supply store in Prince Rupert harbor. He gave me a long look, but he closed the cash register drawer, walked to the window, and pointed. "Right there, between those two islands. See the channel?" In fact, there were a dozen islands and as many channels. "No," I said. Reading his face, I could see questions that reflected the doubt in my own mind. Deductive reckoning, ded. reckoning, dead reckoning. I lean against my truck, trying to remember everything I once knew about finding my way. My daughter is bending over brand new marine charts spread on the hood. She is penciling in vectors, drawing a careful zigzag line through passages between scattered islands. The harbor smells of gasoline and fish-packing plants -- salty seaweed drying on the rocks, gutted fish, bubbly lines of gills and pale sausagy intestines drifting on the tide. These are smells I know and love. I do not want to leave this harbor. Erin looks up from the charts. "We can do this," she says. I sit down on the dock. This is so complicated. We were supposed to have launched on inland water and motored up passages between islands entirely protected from the sea. Among inland passages, weather would be no threat, and finding our way along fjords would be as easy as walking a ditch. But the back road to the launch site is closed for bridge repairs, and here we are in a deep-sea port instead -- the northernmost harbor on the British Columbia coast -- plotting an alternative course that will take us miles into the Pacific before we eventually arrive at the inland passages. We can buoy-hop for some of the time, but we're going to have to do most of this by dead reckoning because we don't know these waters and we have no way to tell one island from another. There will be reefs in the lee of the islands, but worse yet, on the long reach when we round the headland at the entrance, it's wide open ocean. I'm not convinced this is wise. "We'll take our time loading up -- launching the boat, stowing gear, getting gas," Erin says. "We'll take a run around the harbor. We'll stop and reconsider before each step, and both of us have veto power. Either one of us says no, that's it." I bristle at being the one who needs to be reassured -- that's a mother's job, not her daughter's -- and really, my preference would be to sit down and cry for a little while here and think this over. But I'll go along with her plan: If we're going to make this run, I want to make it in daylight, and if we're not, I want time to find a camp. Erin backs the trailer down the ramp. Honestly, this might be the dumbest thing I've ever done. Loosening the winch, I unhook the boat and take hold of the bowline. Erin backs in until the trailer is completely submerged and bubbles rise from the taillights; then she hits the brakes. Slowly the boat floats backward off the trailer. I know better than to take a twenty-foot fiberglass skiff into the open sea. I tie the boat to the dock. Erin accelerates up the ramp and parks the rig in the parking lot. She walks back down the ramp, carrying four food buckets at once. If conditions are perfect, this'll be easy, but with wind or fog? I carry down the chart case and an extra anchor. Erin jumps in the boat and starts to stow gear in the cabin. This is the north Pacific, not some little pond. I hand in two kayaks and Erin straps each one to the rail. My daughter is twenty-four years old. She helped drive this boat in the inland passages last summer. She is experienced and skilled. I hand her the kayak paddles. But she's the same person who sideswiped the ticket booth at the drive-in movie when she was sixteen, and never even knew it. Looking around to be sure we haven't forgotten anything, I lock the truck and carry down the dry bags. I cast off the lines and lower myself into the boat. I guess the worst that could happen is we would drown. Erin looks at me, sits a minute on my silence, waits another minute. Then she whoops and turns the key. The engine never starts on the first crank. Two hundred horsepower sits there looking stupid. A couple of fishermen lean out the window of their seiner and whistle. But on the second crank, the engine churns and spits and Erin is backing away from the dock and we are actually going to do this. It's four o'clock in the afternoon. The sky is overcast. It's sixty degrees Fahrenheit. The wind is ten knots from the northwest. There is a line of fog at the western horizon. With the Prince Rupert channel marker bearing 145 degrees, distant 200 yards, we take departure. The bay is black, littered with piles of seaweed and fish offal, amputated logs, scuffed and yellow, and buoys marking crab pots. "Flotsam and jetsam," I shout over the thrum of the engine, but Erin laughs. "You've got it wrong," she shouts. "Jetsam is what you throw overboard to keep from sinking. Flotsam is what floats on the water after you've sunk." I stand in the stern in a cloud of gasoline fumes, absorbing the vocabulary lesson. Gradually, the harbor goes hazy and the mountains fade from green to gray. When I look ahead, all I see is a confusion of islands and leads that might be passages or might be bays. Behind us, our wake parts the sea neatly into two curling walls, and between the walls, the prop churns the water into a wide white path clearly drawn on the sea. I remember teaching our children to read maps this way -- not asking them to plot a trip on the map, but showing them how to mark where we had been. Two little kids strapped in the backseat of the car, leaning over a triple-A map, holding yellow markers in their fists. Erin has the charts spread out, all ordered near to far. Between shoals in the passage, she picks a way carefully from buoy to buoy, turning to meet the wakes of incoming trawlers. Then we're crossing a bay, motoring slowly to the southwest, squinting into light that gleams on the swell, hiding deadheads and drift nets. We pass a small Tlingit village, then steer around the bedded reefs of an island and move into another channel. A seiner churns by, trailing diesel fumes and a strand of seagulls. I have put myself in charge of spotting buoys, the markers that connect the charts to the sea. This is the issue -- right here. Deductive logic is fine, as far as it goes. But you can't figure everything out in advance, plotting your course on the chart and then chugging along the pencil line as if it were the real thing. Now and then, you have to get a fix, you have to learn where you are, not by where you expect to be, but by what your senses tell you, what you learn from the shape of the horizon. With binoculars, I pick up a pillar buoy dead ahead. But now we motor from the protection of the island into the open sea. The bow rises on each swell and drops with a thud into each trough, lifting a screen of water that smacks on the windshield. Erin eases off the throttle, slowing the boat, raising my pulse, skidding up the back of each wave, then sliding the boat off the side and plowing through the slick. She must know I'm afraid, because she points to a peak vague on the horizon and then to a headland marked on the chart. "Do you see the mountain there?" she asks. "When we're to the lee of that, we're in protected water. After that, it's a cruise." When did this happen, that Erin knows how to do this better than I do? How did it happen that she has coaxed me into making this trip, when last I looked I was giving her M&M's to bribe her up a mountain trail? Why should she be unafraid, when my heart is scrabbling against my ribs like a rat in a box? Erin's paying attention now, ducking her head to look through the swath of windshield where a wiper is swatting back and forth. Here in the entrance to the sound, the tide is running out and the swells are rolling in. Where the forces collide, they throw the wreckage of waves high into the air and the boat dives and pivots in the chop. Erin heads into the biggest waves, altering course to keep water from washing in on her stern, doing her best to keep slop from throwing the boat around and smacking over the bow. I think I see the blow of a whale, but it might be sea spray, and I don't look twice. I don't want to lose concentration on the task at hand, even though it's Erin who is handling the boat and my main responsibility now is to be afraid for both of us. I've just about decided we are rooted to this pitching place, when suddenly the seas are calm and I'm surprised by the smell of hemlock and the warmth of the breeze. I can see individual trees on what had been a vaguely dark shore, and there are gulls on the rocks, pecking at their feet. I take off my raincoat and stow it in the cabin. Erin looks around carefully, then turns again to the charts. Now that we're inland, the challenge is to find the way through a maze of channels and inlets to the particular island where we will meet the others tomorrow. Dusk is coming on, but it will be a long dusk in the northern summer. Slowly now, no hurry. If it gets dark we'll just find an anchorage and layover for the night. I feel the calm of the water working on me, settling in my shoulders, and the weepy exhaustion and exultation that come with relief. It's slack low tide, so the passage is a trough eighteen feet below the shoreline, and fallen trees jut over the water, trailing ropes of bullwhip kelp. We motor past islands perched high on basalt pedestals topped with hemlocks and huckleberries. Through a narrow passage we motor slowly, the engine noise echoing off granite cliffs, then around a hidden reef and into an inlet and on north. The darker it gets, the more closely I scan the shore for moorages, studying the charts to learn if the bottom is rock or sand. I climb onto the bow and coil the anchor line. We see eagles now, immense dark birds with heads and tails that disappear against the cloud cover: eagles sitting on snags, or on rocks, or soaring under overhanging trees. As we round a narrow point, there, on high ground, is a black wolf. Erin cuts the engine and we coast to a stop, silence catching up to us and sliding over our heads. The wolf abruptly turns and disappears. We stare at the place it had been -- the matted grass, the algae-slicked rock, a pocket of sand. Then I climb down from the bow while Erin comes out of the cockpit. We meet in a long hug, as if we were meeting in an airport, as if we had each come from very far away to get to this place. *** Venus has risen over the mountains by the time we reach the island we're seeking. It's too dark to set up camp. At tomorrow's high tide, we'll off-load the gear onto the island and pitch the tent on the point. Frank and Jonathan will fly in, and we'll put out the crab traps and fish for salmon and kayak in and out of bays. But for tonight, we'll have to sleep onboard. Erin brings the boat slowly into the narrow passage where we will set anchor. When the boat is in just the right place, I drop the bow anchor and signal Erin to put the boat in reverse. As she backs the boat away, I payout line until I feel the anchor grab. A hard tug to be sure it's set, and I let the boat pull out the rest of the line. "That's it," I call, and Erin turns off the engine. She walks to the stern and lowers the second anchor. While I pull in rope at the bow, she pays out the stern line until the boat is midway between the two anchors. Erin tests the anchor's set, throws out more line, and wraps the rope around a cleat. I secure the forward anchor, leaving enough slack in the lines that the rising tide can't lift the boat and carry it away with its anchors hanging below like fishing lures; but not so much slack that currents can wash the boat onto rocks and damage the propeller. Setting an anchor is something I know how to do. The slow motion dance, the forward and back of it, the partnership, the soft movement of the tides past a boat at rest, the sureness of our hold on the earth -- there's a joy in this, a kind of homemaking, and when the anchors are set and the engine is finally quiet, silence settles around us like snow and a sea lion exhales somewhere in the passage. We tie our kayaks to long lines and push them overboard. Shoving aside the rest of the gear, we spread sleeping bags on the deck and slide in. Evening. Bedtime. It's a time for mothers to be mothers, this time when darkness gathers. Stories. A song maybe. Plans. An extra blanket, tucked under a child's feet. How many times have I put Erin to bed on the edge of water? Tonight, the salt-drenched air, the smell of hemlock hanging over the bay, the trace of gasoline, the silence, makes me think of so many other nights. When Erin was young, we camped at the edge of rivers. When the sun dropped low enough to throw the canyon into shadow, I knelt in the doorway of the tent, holding Erin's fuzzy, floppy-footed pajamas. With one hand on each of my shoulders for balance, she put one foot in, then the other, then I zipped her up, one long zipper from her foot to her neck. Then I would pick her up and carry her to the edge of the water. She sat on my lap, or her father's, and we watched nighthawks hunting insects low over the water, swooping skyward until they almost stalled, then dropping to the river, making a sound like a bullfrog. Later, stars cast flicking lights on currents and riffles, and bats came out to hunt. We counted bats together and when we got to ten, it was time for Erin and her brother to go to bed, tucked in a tent with the breeze blowing through. I thought then that I knew what would happen next. That Erin would grow up and I would grow older. I thought I had it figured -- time moves in a linear progression, and no matter how much Erin changed, I would always be twenty-seven years older and that much wiser. But experience sometimes tells against the theories, and the course line is not always the course made good. It never occurred to me that when my daughter grew to be an adult, we would be grown-ups together; that she would learn things I couldn't teach, would love the water even more than I do. It never occurred to me that some day I would look to her to keep me safe. It's okay, I guess. It's good. I'm just surprised is all. Much later, I'm awakened by a splash and the hollow knock of a kayak against the hull of the boat. Erin's sleeping bag is empty. The night is black and moonless, the sky dazzling with stars. Wrapping my sweater around my shoulders, I stand up to look over the rail. I can see Erin's silhouette in a kayak, paddling slowly around the star-littered bay. Every time she dips the paddle, glittering light streams off the blade and swirls in the eddy of her stroke. Her bowline glistens where it touches water. Pushing through bioluminescent plankton and jellyfish, the kayak leaves a luminous path in its wake, a hundred galaxies blinking on and off, a million stars sparkling like the Milky Way. My daughter, kayaking on the night sky, so many miles from port. How astonishing to find ourselves in this place. I know where we began. I know how long we have been going in this direction. Maybe what I didn't understand was how quickly we have traveled.
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