The Year of Broken Glass Read online

  I climb back aboard the Prevailer and toss my crates of Dungeness into the small gap of water between the boat and the dock, then tie them off just inches from the bottom, all the while smirking with the pleasure of what I did bring in from the inlet today. Svend stands watching, his hands at his hips on either side of his paunch, and finally asks, “What are you grinning about?” I tie the last crate off, then return to the cabin to retrieve the float.

  Svend climbs aboard to get a better look. “Huh,” he says, rubbing his moustache. “What do you figure?” I ask, but he just shakes his head as I hand him the float. I do this with a little hesitation, though I know Svend to be of a steadiness of hand rivalled only by that of my Opa Hein’s. Standing beside him, watching him inspect its surprising heft and dulled gleam, I see the trick of light which again rolls an oily rainbow inside the glass. He begins scouring away at the crusty film of sea scuzz that sticks to much of its surface as though it’s been baked on. “This thing might be really nice underneath all this,” he says.

  In the cabin I restart the engine, flick on the washdown hose and grab the bottle of liquid laundry soap I use when scrubbing down the deck at day’s end. I give Svend a clean cloth and a cap-full of the detergent, and while I scour the boat he works away at the float. By the time I’m finished, he is, too, and what he has in his hands is something altogether more beautiful than I’d anticipated. It sparkles. The sunlight caught inside enhances its opalescent swirling, and it casts like a prism a small rainbow on the buffed aluminum deck at our feet.

  “Something this nice might even be worth a few pennies,” Svend says as he hands it to me. “Who knows kid, it may have been a good day’s fishing after all.”

  •

  With motherhood and our settling in Halfmoon Bay, Anna’s focus has shifted from fighting greenwashing corporations and exploitive international trade agreements to pharmaceutical companies and fish farms, but the underlying posture of resistance hasn’t changed. She works part-time, for a pittance, for the Raincoast Research Society helping Alexandra Morton—a renegade cetacean biologist turned sea-louse scientist and environmental activist—with her limited PR. With the rest of her time, when she’s not caring for Willow and gardening, Anna googles obsessively, digging up endless dirt on vaccines.

  I always know when she’s been at it most of the day. She’ll be tight-lipped, smouldering through dinner, her blonde curls wound up into a bun on the top of her head, a golden halo. Once Willow is asleep she’ll regale me with a litany about adjuvants, MMR, pertussis, HPV and Gardasil. She’s been at it all winter about Gulf War Syndrome and the adjuvant in the H1N1 vaccine, squalene. There are colour printouts on her study wall of hundreds of shark carcasses strewn across African beaches, their bodies drained of the oil and abandoned to rot in the sun.

  I went down to the seniors hall and got shot up as soon as the vaccine was available, though I haven’t told Anna. I’d have taken Willow down too if I thought I could get away with it, but her defiance is an unquestionable, impenetrable wall. Ferris, she’d say. You’re just like the rest of them. You’ve bought into their bullshit just like your mother. Ferris is what people call me. Ferris Wishbone. Every spring, when I was a child, there was this travelling carnival that wheeled into Qualicum Beach and set up for the weekend with its gravitron, tilt-a-whirl, ring toss and bumper cars. Each year my mother took us over from Lasqueti Island, where I grew up, so we wouldn’t be deprived of what was once her favourite thing as a child. When I was twelve she finally gave me ten bucks and said I could go alone, so I gorged myself on cotton candy and caramel apples, convinced the prettiest girl in class to ride the Ferris wheel with me, and on our fourth or fifth roll over the crest I puked pink bile and apple chunks all over her and the middle-aged couple in the carriage beneath us.

  Wishbone is a bit more convoluted. My father Carl was born in Germany to Claus and Annette Wichbaun. They immigrated to Canada after the war and raised Carl and his sister in Windsor, Ontario. Claus worked as a machinist and was proud to be the first Wichbaun to send his son to college, which is where my father read Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo and built a great disgust for his German blood and heritage. Then he read Orwell and Salinger and Huxley and his disgust went universal. So he headed west and ended up at a hippie commune on Lasqueti Island, home to draft dodgers and weed growers, the disillusioned, disenfranchised and disgusted, like himself. Being comprised primarily of small-time criminals on the lam, the Lasquetians were prone to assuming and assigning themselves aliases: new-age goddess culture names like Zen and Ocean and Windchild. My father Carl became Cosmo. And, as though to rid himself finally of his last vestige of German-ness aside from his blood and every flesh-and-bone feature, Wichbaun became Wishbone. Legally.

  Cosmo died when I was fourteen. To be honest I’m not one of those people who lost a parent early on and is forever traumatized as a result. The fact is I knew my father very little. By the time I was in grade school at False Bay elementary, a little one-room schoolhouse on the north end of Lasqueti, Cosmo was rarely home. He’d appear occasionally to clean out, take a break from the sea (by then he was running drugs by boat across the border to the Olympic Peninsula) and the endless Lasqueti party. He’d go upstairs to my parents’ room to sleep it off and my mother would feed him soups and herbal teas. The closest I remember being to him is when I’d climb to the top of the wooden ladder which led to their loft and lift my ear to the tiny interstice between the door and the floor, listening to the deep and resonant, laboured sound of his breathing.

  When he blew his heart out on a mountain of coke in the late ’80s I don’t think anyone was surprised. My mother, still young and very beautiful, in no time attracted the attention of an ultra-rich investment banker from New York who kept a palatial property on the southwest of the island, a perfectly secluded bay of pebbles and sand he flew into once a summer by float plane via Vancouver International. They courted for years, on Lasqueti and in New York, and when I was finally off to university, they married.

  So when Anna hurls a comment at me like, You’ve bought into their bullshit just like your mother, which she does almost nightly these days, it takes aim at the fact that my mother, a born and raised back-to-the-lander, is now the divorcee of a small-time Bernie Madoff with scruples, living in a Manhattan apartment on his alimony payments and what’s left of her inheritance now that Oma and Opa have died and their quarter-section on the south end of Lasqueti has been sold off. But there’s a whole subtext beneath such a comment that takes aim at me too.

  We were at the University of British Columbia together when we met, in the time of Ani DiFranco and the organics explosion—a time and place where a couple of years of liberal arts education could sweep a beautiful, athletic, small-town girl in her time of easy influence into the seedy, new-age Y2K dustbin where genuine hippie heritage like mine was like street cred and a young man like me was a prince. God knows I played the part, because let’s face it, pretty much all of a healthy young man’s socializing in his early twenties is about getting laid, and I’d found the ace up my sleeve. So Anna fell in love with me before I knew who I was. And before I’d figured that out, or anything about anything out, she was pregnant.

  I took a job on a small commercial crab boat at the mouth of the Fraser River, which Anna liked, as it fit the wild-man-of-the-land-and-sea image I’d sold her. After she finished her master’s we moved from the city to Roberts Creek. It was 2001, housing was cheap, the price of crab was upwards of six dollars a pound, and Willow was weaned. I’d say we were happy. I was commuting to the Sand Heads crabbing grounds three days on, three days off, and had taken a lease as a skipper on a little twenty-five-foot aluminum day skiff by then. So we had money and friends, and we would still share a bottle of wine once Willow was down for the night, making love to cap off the evening more often than not. When gentrification and the housing bubble made Roberts Creek unaffordable and undesirable, we set our sights up the coast on Halfmoon Bay and found th
e rental we still live in now. With my mother’s financial assistance, by way of a co-signature on a high interest commercial bank loan, I bought the Gulf Prevailer.

  For the who-the-fuck-am-I-and-how-shall-I-carry-forth anxiety that comes on with early parenthood, I did nothing, till I told my long-time crab buyer to go fuck himself, and walked into a competing buyer’s office across town. Which is where I found Jin Su, working behind the receptionist’s desk, small and lovely, and every bit the answer to a question I’d forgotten even to ask.

  •

  Anna’s in the bath reading and Willow’s in bed. It’s actually been good between us lately. I’ve learned to let her snide comments slide off my back, more or less, so excluding her little freak-outs whenever I break glass, it’s been calm. Tonight I nearly broke her crystal two-in-one salt and pepper shaker. Anna has all these “heirloom” things all over the house that she was given when her grandma died, mostly semi-antique junk, though ever since I’ve become the proverbial bull in the china shop they’re suddenly priceless gems to her.

  Willow and I were jousting with the broom and the mop in the kitchen when I accidentally swatted the shaker from the shelf above the stove. It bounced off the stovetop and Willow caught it mid-flight while I just stood there, wincing as it flew, already anticipating Anna’s tirade about my carelessness and juvenility. Sword fighting in the fucking kitchen! Of course I would counter that, given the heaviness beset upon him by our marriage—we’ve never actually had a wedding, though we’ve always considered ourselves man and wife, and if ours is not a marriage, what is?—times of lightness and play need to be indulged in and encouraged with our son as much and as often as possible, good riddance to heirloom trinkets.

  I’m out on the front porch smoking some of Anna’s homegrown tobacco, the westerly subsided now and the night warm beneath the late-April stars, the scent of new growth and old rot rising from the alder-bottom beyond our house. I can’t stop thinking about the float I found earlier today. Before I left the boat I packed it in an old tote with rags and crab floats for padding. When I arrived home I stowed it high in the rafters of the garage where Anna wouldn’t find it. Svend had been adamant about the fact that it might be worth a bit of cash, and if so it will be money I’ll give to Jin Su.

  “Thirty thousand,” Svend says, as I answer the vibing cellphone in my hand. I think about this for a second before understanding that he’s referring to the float’s value. “You’re shitting me,” I reply, trying not to raise my voice with the exhilaration that sum brings. “I’m not. I’ve been on the computer for hours now. There’s this guy, Stu Farnsworth, he’s the big fishing float guru. Anyway, he’s got an ‘Antique Floats Wanted’ page on his website, and on it he’s got pictures and drawings and descriptions of all these rare floats he’s always on the lookout for. Most fetch from five hundred bucks to five grand. But there’s this one grouping of seven or eight different emblems, and that fish on your float is one of them. Those ones he’s offering up to thirty grand for!”

  Svend is so excited his voice is leaping through the phone into my ear. An old fisherman, forever in love with the thrill of the big haul. “You know, I’m thinking,” he continues. “Who do you sell your crab to?” I know it’s a rhetorical question, and I’m not sure where he’s going with it, but I answer: “Nelson Chow.” To which Svend replies with another obvious question. “And what’s he?”

  “He’s a fucking fish buyer Svend. Why, you think he’s looking to get into the glass fishing float market or what?” I’m a bit exasperated, a bit excited, and I want to know his point.

  “He’s a middle man, kid. Now I’ve been surfing around for hours looking into this thing, and it turns out Stu Farnsworth isn’t the only person buying floats online. In fact, there are as many people buying them as there are people selling. Or more. There’s pages of these things up for bid on eBay.”

  I’m starting to get where he’s going with this. It’s sort of a knee-jerk reflex for most fishermen to want to cut out the middle man. We spend countless hours on the docks and at coffee shops scheming ways to get our catch directly to market. The prawns Svend catches and sells to the buyers in Vancouver for five bucks a pound sell for fifteen dollars or more once they make it to Toronto and LA. They sell for upwards of fifty dollars a pound in Japan. The middle men are making more money from their cushy offices moving our product than we are risking our lives out on the water fishing for it. It’s an old story. And it’s an age-old desire for fishermen to want to find a way to bypass them and keep for ourselves the inequitable slice they take from the pie. “Somebody, somewhere, is paying a pretty penny for these things Ferris.” We’re both hanging on the line, digesting the implications and the possibilities. Through the open window beside me I hear Anna rising from the bath. “I’ve got to go Svend,” I say.

  “Do you know of anyone?” he asks. “Anyone who might know about these things?” I picture hundreds of glass fishing floats still held in their twine encasements, strung together like beads on a string, swirling and clonking in the breeze like a great wind chime beneath Fairwin’ Verge’s treehouse.

  “Yes,” I say. “I think I might.”

  FAIRWIN’S TREEHOUSE, OR “Fairwin’s Fort,” as it’s known on the island, sits high in the mid-section of a massive thousand-year-old Douglas fir near the top of Mount Tremeton, the highest point on Lasqueti. A steep staircase winds up the trunk leading to an octagonal structure enwrapping the tree, its timber floor-system set on massive forty-five-degree braces spanning from the building’s outer perimeter back to the trunk. Long strings of fishing floats hang in threes from each outer point of the octagon, bejewelling the dark tree and Fairwin’s Fort to scale. Svend’s never seen anything like it. He stands beneath, hands jammed in his jean pockets, looking up in awe and perplexity, shaking his head as though to say, Why would anyone bother? And most wouldn’t. But Fairwin’s another sort.

  Farevin Verge spent his working years as a lighthouse keeper up and down the west coast of BC, from the fortress on Triple Island to the estate-like grounds of Cape Scott, to his final posting as the last keeper of the Sisters Island light, a humble light tower and living quarters built on a tiny upsurge of igneous two miles northwest of Lasqueti’s northern tip.

  The feds switched the Sisters station over to unmanned automation in the early ’90s, so after thirty years of isolation on the lights, his only companionship that of the CBC and his books, Farevin took early retirement and settled on this: a life built high in a majestic tree, with materials of scrap and salvage, driftwood and blowdown, fed by the sea, the forest, and a trickling spring of pristine groundwater.

  It wasn’t long before the Lasquetians (all 350 of them) made the reclusive, elusive Farevin one of their many subjects of community gossip, coining him Fairwin’, as in “Fairwind”—tongue-in-cheek for his gruff demeanour and weather-worn, windblown appearance.

  I place my treasured blue float (still packed safely in its tote) at my feet, then reach up on my tiptoes to grab and swing a dangling strand of floats so they knock and clang, announcing our arrival. “Fairwin’,” I call out, my bellow dampened yet carrying through the old trees. There is little understory in the Lasqueti forest, the island overrun by the flock of sheep set feral when the Lasqueti Wool and Dye Company died with my Oma and Opa. With no animals of prey to speak of the sheep population has increased to the point of infestation, so the forest floor is one of sheep-shit-speckled moss and loam, and sapling shoots gnawed of leafage. A massive culling is in order, but the year-round community, ninety percent of whom make at least a portion of their living off the annual marijuana crop, oppose it. The sheep’s understory thinning makes for easy bushwhacking and planting, and although the Lasqueti forest of the future will consequently be devoid of its beautiful fir and cedar, for now it’s the best of both worlds.

  “Ferris Wishbone, you’ve your father’s timbre,” calls Fairwin’ in response, not down from the tree, but up from the last leg of the goat path Svend and
I have just climbed. I turn to watch him—looking much older than when I last saw him—climb toward us, a basket of nettles in one hand and an old urn filled with water in the other. He ascends, puts his load to the ground and, as he has never done before, embraces me. “How long has it been?” Fairwin’ asks, letting me free, and I almost sense a quaver of sadness, an audible tear in his voice. Nine years, I think. Nine years since I was last on Lasqueti. He introduces himself to Svend, who shakes his hand heartily and introduces himself in return. “You’ve brought me something?” Fairwin’ asks, looking down at my tote, the lid duct taped shut. “Let’s take it up,” I nod. And we do, 101 steps up the winding staircase into Fairwin’s fort.

  •

  Six hours later we’re driving west through Cathedral Grove, a token highway-side stand of vestigial old-growth fir preserved as park and viewing for the four million tourists who pass through this way to Pacific Rim National Park, Ucluelet and Tofino each year. Dusk is sifting down through the tiers of their splayed branches, the dash light of the mid-seventies Dodge Dart I’m driving starting to cast its dim green hue on my hands as I steer through the trees.

  One look at the insignia stamped on my float and Fairwin’ was alight with an idea. “I know a woman,” he’d said. “Miriam Maynard. She owns a lodge out in Tofino, the Glass Globe beach house. She’s a major beachcombing buff. I met her at a workshop there years ago.” Fairwin’s far less excitable than Svend, so though he was enthusiastic, his voice was calm. “A workshop?” I asked, amused by the idea of Fairwin’ in attendance at any gathering of people, much less a workshop. “Yes. A beachcombing workshop. She gave a bit of a talk that weekend on some of the more rare and sought-after floats to be found.”