The Year of Broken Glass Read online

  Copyright © Joe Denham, 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].

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  TYPOGRAPHY & COVER DESIGN: Carleton Wilson

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Denham, Joe, 1975–

  The year of broken glass / Joe Denham.

  ISBN 978-0-88971-252-2 (paper)

  ISBN 978-0-88971-285-0 (ebook)

  version 1.0

  I. Title.

  PS8557.E536Y32 2011  813’.6  2011-900044-X

  For August and Isabelle

  Shine on all the fishermen

  with nothing in their nets.

  – Joni Mitchell

  MIRIAM WAKES EARLY, before sunrise, knowing this will be the day the floats wash in. Three days ago, the Velella velella heaped up so thick she couldn’t walk anywhere close to the tide line, thousands of blue jellies rotting black in the mid-spring sun. Then the garbage. All the way from China, from Japan, condoms and candy wrappers, Styrofoams and plastics.

  Now, this morning, the full moon pulls the flood tide high up the beach and the last of the dissipating westerly pushes the floats in. The mundane and the prized, the poorly blown and the perfect, all of them precious to Miriam. All of them totems of human utility, of history, of time. Of an element fired and forged, worked and then relinquished, by chance, back to the deep wilderness of the open ocean.

  She slips her warmest wool sweater on, ties her hair back and stretches a small LED headlamp over her forehead. Poseidon rubs his thick purring body against her leg, noses her hands as she pulls on her gumboots. “Coming?” she asks, stroking his silky fur. Then she steps outside, into the cool pre-dawn blue, and heads across the apple orchard toward the sea, the white cat bounding through the tall grass beside her.

  I’M TIRED OF the end of the world.

  Every morning excluding Sundays—that’s family day, not God’s day—Pamela Penner’s voice works away at the hem of my dream till it’s sufficiently frayed and the threads unravel. This morning I was dreaming Jin Su and I were on a big old Taiwanese ketch with all sails unfurled in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A massive flock of albatross began to swarm the boat overhead, mewling in a great chorus over the creak of the canvas sails flexing in the wind. Everywhere around us the wide open blue, the sun bright on Jin Su, the groundswell serene. Then Pamela Penner’s voice, it’s 6 a.m., early morning news, something about Obama, the Middle East, as the albatross stomachs tear open and my childhood lego spills out, assembles mid-descent into flapping, screeching legotross, and I’m awake.

  “Can you believe this guy actually dressed up in drag so he could use his deceased wife’s membership at the Y?” Pamela reports. “Well he is back on the singles scene,” her co-anchor pipes in. “I understand competition is fierce these days. I suppose he figured he’d better get those pecs…” That’s when I press the snooze button.

  Dawn’s a different blue, huddled, dark, and it’s sifting in through the white cotton curtains. The air I breathe is unseasonably cold for the third week in April. Must be a hard westerly blowing. Might be one of those days. Anna stirs beside me, sniffles, then rolls onto her side and pulls the duvet over her head, as she always does. I swing my legs to the floor, lift to sitting, and tuck the duvet into her back.

  In the kitchen I cook up scrambled eggs and toast. I can’t get the legotross and Jin Su and the drag-dressing widower out of my mind. Last fall only two million of the estimated eleven million expected sockeye returned to the Fraser River. Whole runs disappeared. Now there’s a smoke-and-mirrors judicial inquiry and some talk about maybe acknowledging that parasitic or viral contamination from the open-net fish farms up and down the coast might be a factor. There’s some talk of industry, and the wild fish remaining, and change. And here I am, thirty-four years of age, falling asleep to an article in The Walrus about the city of plastic floating in the North Pacific Gyre, dreaming of legotross and waking once more to Pamela Penner. A once-young idealist, turned workaday fisherman, cooking eggs (organic, local, free-run, of course) in my rented kitchen for myself and my eleven-year-old son, Willow, who’s gotten up to share breakfast with me, as he often does, before I head out to sea with my disillusionments and deceits.

  He sits at our old oak veneer table and picks at one of the delaminated strips lifted and peeling. “Don’t,” I say, sliding his plate across the table as he flips his long blond bangs out of his eyes and looks up at me, saying nothing. So I say nothing back. We’re both like this. Silent. Men of few words. Though I suspect that Willow is, as I am, a man of many thoughts. So we both sit here at our eggs together, thinking.

  A decade ago, an article like the one I read last night about the albatross would have set me searing. Willow was an infant, Anna was beginning her master’s in environmental ethics at UBC, and I, recently graduated with a degree in sociology, was riding the wave of new-millennium environmentalism from issue to issue, outrage to outrage, like everyone we hung out with at the time. But now everybody knows about the albatross, about the massive whirlpool of plastic. And they know about the 386 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere. They recycle, eat organic and use non-disposable grocery bags. Some even supplement their grid power with solar panels, or install solar hot-water heaters on their roofs. Some drive hybrids, while others don’t drive. I read recently about a group of artists who flew in carbon-dumping jet planes to Midway Atoll so they could view for themselves the carcasses of baby albatross with piles of bottle caps and flecks of plastic amongst the brittle bones. So they might be inspired.

  On my thirtieth birthday, after a long night of drinking at the bar, I drove my pickup clear off the road, full speed, down a forty-foot embankment and into the base of a cedar tree, the only thing between my truck and the bedroom wall of two little girls, Claire and Christina. When I came to, blood gushing from the gash in my forehead (I still have a long horizontal scar just below my hairline), it was to the sound of their panicked screams. Shortly after, scared shitless, I walked into my first AA meeting. I’ve been sober ever since.

  And how’s that been? Sad. Uninspired. I hadn’t realized how much I relied upon the euphoric binges, even the glow-over of the nightly Scotch-and-sodas, to keep my doubts at bay, to keep me searching, seeking, hoping. There’s a distance around the thirty-fifth latitudes, north and south, where very little wind blows. The subtropical high. It’s also known as the horse latitudes. Back in the days when trade ships crossed the high seas with only their sails to power them, it’s believed the crew would throw horses and other livestock overboard to preserve drinking water if the absence of wind left them stranded for too long. That’s how my sobriety has been these past five years. The horse latitudes of my life.

  “You delivering tomorrow?” Willow asks, rising with his empty plate to the sink.

  “Depends if there’s much in the traps today.”

  “Wind’s up,” he says, leaning over the sink and looking out the window at the alders and firs swaying beyond the house.

  “I think it’ll ease b
y midday,” I say, standing to join him. “That’s a westerly blowing the cold air in. See in the trees which way the wind’s coming from? Opposite the sun. That’ll blow the rest of the clouds off, then it’ll probably die down.” I reach out and tousle his hair like I often did when he was young and his head was at hand height. He looks me in the eye for a moment, close, and I can’t believe how far from my ship I’ve thrown him. My only son. But there are no words for this, only a stone of sadness in my throat, so I turn, take my thermos of coffee from the counter and leave by the kitchen door.

  I wish it were a door leading not out to our driveway, to this cold wind blowing in off the strait, but to a room. A provided room perhaps in a community centre or church. In that room I wish there were a gathering of people like me, a twelve-step group for those living with no-hope. I’d walk into that room, take a Stevia-sweetened muffin from the tray of goodies, and pour myself some organic black tea, unpasteurized milk and honey. I’d sit down, listen, and when it’s asked if there is anyone new who would like to share I’d rise up, clear my throat, and say, Hi. My name is Francis, Francis Wichbaun, and I’m tired of the end of the world.

  •

  There isn’t much in the traps. There hasn’t been for years now. Still I come out every week and haul up whatever crab might have wandered in over the two-week soak I’ve given my fifteen-pot strings of gear. Over the years of fishing the Sunshine Coast I’ve developed a system. The commercial licence I bought with my boat, the Gulf Prevailer, allows me to fish 225 traps. So I keep 300 in the water at all times. Because who’s ever going to check? I have 150 here in the inlet and 150 in the sandy shallows of Thormanby Island, a small island two and a half nautical miles off the Halfmoon Bay government dock, which is just up the road from our house. So, ten strings on the inside and ten on the outside. Starting Mondays I haul two to four strings a day, weather depending. Each night I hang my catch in old milk crates from the dock and the crab live in there, piled on top of each other as only hearty crustaceans can.

  I hate crab. Mostly I think they’ve been the ruin of me, little private devils that sucked me in with their abundance and commanding market value when I first began fishing, only to all but disappear and sink to an abysmal value the very year I’d finally gathered enough money and gumption to put a down payment on this $450,000 licence and worthless tin can of a boat I’ve signed my life away to. Of course the reality is they’re just crab. I sucked myself in. And despite all Anna’s petitioning and tears, I refuse to sell and put the money toward a decent house because I don’t know what else I would do with myself. I’ve found, among other things, that I’m a seaman, through and through.

  On Fridays I deliver my catch, of whatever quantity, to Vancouver. I take the early ferry with the crab crammed into their crates, heavy sea water-soaked wool blankets draped over them to keep the heat out. It’s the most primitive of systems, but it works. On Saturdays I run the boat up to the mouth of Sechelt Inlet, through Skookumchuck Narrows, down Agamemnon Channel, past Francis Point and through Welcome Pass to Halfmoon Bay, or vice versa, but not before spending the night in Vancouver with Jin Su and Emily. I leave the house Friday morning, before dawn, and don’t come back until the following night. Anna knows I make my delivery, pick up supplies in Steveston, then run the boat between the inlet and the strait, but she never asks how it went, and I suppose she assumes I sleep on the boat or in the truck, or cruise at night, and I of course don’t suggest otherwise.

  A flock of seagulls comes from shore and swarms the boat, diving at the old bait I empty from the traps and toss overboard into the cold water. They hover above me, screeching and shitting all over the deck, and I’m reminded of the legotross as I wrestle the crab from their grips on the traps’ steel mesh. I check them for their sex, throw the females back to the sea and measure the males for size. Most are juvenile, too small to be legally harvested, which I suspect hasn’t stopped the other crabber working this bay from selling them to one of the cash buyers in Richmond, but I still play by some of the rules so throw them overboard, too, hurling the occasional crab at the demanding gulls.

  It’s a hard job, crabbing. The traps are a good one hundred pounds empty; the crabs are cantankerous at best; the rotten squid and clam I swap out of the bait cups reeks; and much of the year the weather is changeable and cold. But I work at my own pace, and I work alone. One of the things I’ve come to realize since meeting Jin Su is that I want and need to spend a fair bit of time alone. Often, once I’ve nearly finished setting a string out, I shut the engine down and leave the last trap on deck with the end of the float line tied off to the starboard rail. I sit back on deck if the weather is fair, or in my little aft cabin if it’s not, and listen. To the birds ruffling and screeching in the wind, water lapping the hull. I like the space the sea affords, the instant openness of casting off from the grid of wires and roads which is the human world.

  The love I share with Jin Su is like this. An open, uncharted, unsounded ocean. We’ve come together as two adults, with clarity and desire. Anna fell in love with a handsome, networking, ambitious young activist who promised her the world because he was too naive and self-assured to understand that the world wasn’t his for the offering. Now she rattles at the bars of the cage created by being married to a man fallen from that self-constructed precipice to where I am now, sitting quietly on my boat, happy in my solitude, looking out over these inlet waters and steep, rugged mountain ranges.

  The wind gusts up and I look into its cold flare. Something floating to the north on the choppy, dark-blue water catches the sunlight and shines and glimmers like a mirror. I retrieve my binoculars from the cabin and spy what looks like a light-blue, translucent ball through them. An old glass fishing float adrift, I assume. Although this is an unheard-of rarity in waters this far inland, my first thought is not to bother with it.

  Jin Su gave birth to our daughter Emily on the first of January this year. Anna and I had taken Willow to her parents in Sicamous for the holidays, a tradition we established when Willow was born. The previous winter I had thought over Christmas dinner with Anna’s folks to use the elevated holiday price for live crab as an excuse to bus home early on Boxing Day and be with Jin Su, at the time a new and unfamiliar lover overwhelming my thoughts and desires, my ability to be present in any place or time without her. I used the ensuing snowstorm to postpone my returning to retrieve her and Willow for two weeks while Jin Su and I huddled in the shelter of each other in the middle of the snow-hushed city. I did the same this past season, so Emily was born into my hands, wailing with her otherworldly fire, in Jin Su’s little apartment in South Vancouver in the early hours of January first, dawn just breaking over the city of glass.

  And ever since that day, glass is what I’ve broken. Unwittingly I’ve sent countless drinking glasses from the kitchen counter to the tile floor, shattering. I broke the tempered glass above our covered sundeck while cleaning it of cedar debris, the bathroom window while playing baseball with Willow in the yard, and Anna’s stained-glass lamp, bashing into it with my head. I dropped to the tile two of the three thirty-litre glass jugs we use to retrieve pristine drinking water from the public artesian well in nearby Gibsons, and the last I tossed empty into the back seat of my SuperCab where it bounced off a tote of mending wire spools and smashed out the rear window. I’ve taken to wearing contacts—I’m nearsighted—which I hate, and have tucked my glasses away at the back of Anna’s underwear drawer, hopefully safe from the jinx that’s come upon me.

  So my first thought is to consider the retrieval of the distant float to be futile, as I’ll more than likely smash it to bits just trying to bring it aboard. I look again through the binoculars (it’s a miracle they’ve thus far been spared) and of course I can’t resist. So I set the last trap and buoy line out and fire up the engine. As I approach the float I drive the boat just beyond it, turn perpendicular to the northerly chop, then shut the engine down and step out on deck as the boat drifts slowly downwind. It’s of th
e lightest blue and opalescent like oil, and as the orb of it bobs on the rippling water a rainbow of colour seems to swirl upon its inner surface. I imagine all sorts of shatterings as I drift to within arm’s reach, dip my hands in, and cradle it onto the boat.

  Held close, its opalescence disappears and it seems a grimy, time-worn ball of thick blue glass. Amazing—assuming that it wasn’t set adrift in the inlet, but travelled in from the Georgia Strait and likely the open Pacific beyond—that it made it through those waters and the narrow, tumultuous mouth of the Skookumchuck intact. How old is this thing? And where did it come from? It’s almost hypnotic, this ball of flotsam, as I turn it round and round in my warming hands, dismissing my previous fear for its integrity in my care, certain it has weathered worse. There’s a large insignia stamped into the glass: a strange-looking serpentine fish with a forked, triple-finned tail, each fin splayed out and conjoined with the others at its base like a fan. It’s like no fish I’ve ever seen or heard of, like something from another world.

  •

  Back at the dock Svend pokes his head out of his aft-deck engine room as I pull the Prevailer into the berth beside his. He takes the bow line and helps me tie off as I leap to the dock. “Not much,” he comments, surveying my measly two crates of Dungeness. “It’s hardly worth it, eh?” Svend says this all the time. He’s been fishing for decades and acquired his licence in the early days of the fishery when the government more or less gave them out for free; before restrictions, tax structure and black-market laundering drove the values far beyond real-world worth. When the crab price tanked half a decade ago and the elevated licence values didn’t, Svend decided to trade his crab licence for the prawn licence he now holds. As dollar smart as that move has proven to be, it’s left Svend at the dock, idly tinkering on his boat all but fifty to seventy days mid-summer, and although he will not confess to it, it’s evident he yearns to be out year-round like he used to. His little hardly seems worth it’s are just the reiterations of a lonely, bored bachelor trying to convince himself to feel otherwise.