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Sailing Home: A Journey Through Time, Place and Memory (Harper $32)
After his marriage collapsed and he'd chucked his tenured teaching job in Montreal, Vancouver-born poet and editor Gary Geddes bought a 31-foot sloop called The Groasis and learned to sail it-slowly-to produce Sailing Home: A Journey Through Time, Place and Memory (Harper $32).
My literary predecessors were legion-such as James Cook, Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra and George Vancouver-so I planned to maintain a respectful distance from their journals.
There were three female exceptions.
Kathrene Pinkerton, whose Three's a Crew (1940) was published the year I was born, recounts her adventures upcoast with her husband Robert and daughter Bobs. I was particularly fond of this book because it casts Kathrene and family as duffers with even less knowledge of the sea than I possessed, although Robert had some mechanical competence and Kathrene was capable of fine writing and acute observation.
M. Wylie Blanchet, a widow with several children, cruised the Inside Passage over several summers, condensing her experiences into a minor classic called The Curve of Time (1968).
The third member of the trio was Beth Hill, whose Upcoast Summers, published in 1985, pieces together the 1933-1941 journals of Francis Barrow, who travelled the coast with his wife Amy and two black spaniels and managed to record encounters with 227 coastal residents.
If these upbeat, affectionate accounts had a downside, it was in their implicit reminders that sailing is more enjoyably done with company and that the working population of the remote coast that I was setting out to find-farmers, loggers, fishermen-had almost disappeared.
As inspiring as these books were to me as I gunkholed my way up the Inside Passage, where hazards are innumerable and support can be minimal, I wanted to do something different. For me, a trip up the coast would be not so much a discovery as a recovery narrative, a way of getting in touch with people and places and events from my own past.
I felt that I knew and, in some ways, owned the coast already.
My grandfather had drowned off Point Atkinson, his body never recovered. My mother swam alongside the boat for miles in Howe Sound as a young woman before dying of cancer at age thirty-four. My father had been part of the rescue team at the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver. He and I had fished together commercially in Rivers Inlet. I had spent several summers on the waterfront, loading trucks and boxcars at the B.C. Sugar Refinery in Vancouver, working at my uncle's boat rentals in Whytecliffe and, later, driving water-taxi between Westview and Texada Island.
The lure of the coast is such that people will try to travel it in anything that floats, including bathtubs, canoes, leaky rowboats, ancient hulks with dangerously high superstructures, kayaks, houseboats made of plastic, rotting clinker-built trollers, concrete sailboats, perhaps even bamboo rafts if, as seems likely, Asian and Polynesian navigators actually made it to the West Coast.
My own expectations were modest: I wanted a sailboat that was roomy, seaworthy and cheap, but with devastatingly beautiful lines and an exotic track record. One of my friends recommended I phone an acquaintance in Victoria who did legal work for the artistic community and might know where to begin. This proved an interesting lead.
If I were prepared to give up the idea of sailing, the voice said, and willing to do some basic carpentry work, I might be able to use one of the two gillnetters currently serving as props in the Scott Hicks movie of David Guterson's stunning novel, Snow Falling on Cedars. The price was right and my earliest experiences in boats on the coast had taken place on my father's gillnetter in Rivers Inlet, so this was a tempting offer. However, I was determined to sail as much as I could and I wanted a boat with a real rather than a fictional history. I also knew better than to try composing my modest memoir in the shadow of such excellence. Eventually, boat and owner came together as if the hand of fate had intervened, though you'll have to wait for that part of the story.
Sailing Home is not for professional seamen or the archetypal beautiful person on a yacht; rather, it's for the rest of mankind, those of us who, with warts and failures and impossible dreams, have tried to go back, with or without a boat, tried to find that intimate space, or state of mind, called home.
When I set sail at the tail end of the second millennium, I was joining the ranks not only of intrepid mariners, but also of complete novices such as Charles Darwin, who emptied the contents of his stomach over the gunwales during three-and-a-half years at sea on the Beagle, and a religious crusader named Jeff Bauchmann rescued off Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island on July 3, 1999 with no charts or maritime experience, only the two hundred bibles he was planning to deliver to Russia. When the Canadian Coast Guard picked him up, he was heading in the wrong direction. Although my missionary zeal was of a different kind, and my library of offerings to the Russians would have had considerably more variety, I certainly knew the feeling of being way off course.
First I had to learn to read a chart ("No, Gary, asterisks are not decorative. They're symbolic; they represent rocks.";), figure out how to handle a headstrong boat, and learn to navigate in a sea teeming with personal and tribal ghosts.
I was, from the outset, a sort of floating anachronism, crawling across the surface of the sea on my belly, because so much coastal travel is now done by air. My speed, five nautical miles per hour, seemed good to me; I needed to slow down, decompress, take stock, to look long and hard at the places of my desire and, perhaps, see them again for the first time.
It was a scary and glorious misadventure. In due course, tide-lines would became song-lines; life-jackets merge with book-jackets; boat and book share something we refer to, quaintly, as a launch.
[Gary Geddes / BCBW 2001]
My literary predecessors were legion-such as James Cook, Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra and George Vancouver-so I planned to maintain a respectful distance from their journals.
There were three female exceptions.
Kathrene Pinkerton, whose Three's a Crew (1940) was published the year I was born, recounts her adventures upcoast with her husband Robert and daughter Bobs. I was particularly fond of this book because it casts Kathrene and family as duffers with even less knowledge of the sea than I possessed, although Robert had some mechanical competence and Kathrene was capable of fine writing and acute observation.
M. Wylie Blanchet, a widow with several children, cruised the Inside Passage over several summers, condensing her experiences into a minor classic called The Curve of Time (1968).
The third member of the trio was Beth Hill, whose Upcoast Summers, published in 1985, pieces together the 1933-1941 journals of Francis Barrow, who travelled the coast with his wife Amy and two black spaniels and managed to record encounters with 227 coastal residents.
If these upbeat, affectionate accounts had a downside, it was in their implicit reminders that sailing is more enjoyably done with company and that the working population of the remote coast that I was setting out to find-farmers, loggers, fishermen-had almost disappeared.
As inspiring as these books were to me as I gunkholed my way up the Inside Passage, where hazards are innumerable and support can be minimal, I wanted to do something different. For me, a trip up the coast would be not so much a discovery as a recovery narrative, a way of getting in touch with people and places and events from my own past.
I felt that I knew and, in some ways, owned the coast already.
My grandfather had drowned off Point Atkinson, his body never recovered. My mother swam alongside the boat for miles in Howe Sound as a young woman before dying of cancer at age thirty-four. My father had been part of the rescue team at the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver. He and I had fished together commercially in Rivers Inlet. I had spent several summers on the waterfront, loading trucks and boxcars at the B.C. Sugar Refinery in Vancouver, working at my uncle's boat rentals in Whytecliffe and, later, driving water-taxi between Westview and Texada Island.
The lure of the coast is such that people will try to travel it in anything that floats, including bathtubs, canoes, leaky rowboats, ancient hulks with dangerously high superstructures, kayaks, houseboats made of plastic, rotting clinker-built trollers, concrete sailboats, perhaps even bamboo rafts if, as seems likely, Asian and Polynesian navigators actually made it to the West Coast.
My own expectations were modest: I wanted a sailboat that was roomy, seaworthy and cheap, but with devastatingly beautiful lines and an exotic track record. One of my friends recommended I phone an acquaintance in Victoria who did legal work for the artistic community and might know where to begin. This proved an interesting lead.
If I were prepared to give up the idea of sailing, the voice said, and willing to do some basic carpentry work, I might be able to use one of the two gillnetters currently serving as props in the Scott Hicks movie of David Guterson's stunning novel, Snow Falling on Cedars. The price was right and my earliest experiences in boats on the coast had taken place on my father's gillnetter in Rivers Inlet, so this was a tempting offer. However, I was determined to sail as much as I could and I wanted a boat with a real rather than a fictional history. I also knew better than to try composing my modest memoir in the shadow of such excellence. Eventually, boat and owner came together as if the hand of fate had intervened, though you'll have to wait for that part of the story.
Sailing Home is not for professional seamen or the archetypal beautiful person on a yacht; rather, it's for the rest of mankind, those of us who, with warts and failures and impossible dreams, have tried to go back, with or without a boat, tried to find that intimate space, or state of mind, called home.
When I set sail at the tail end of the second millennium, I was joining the ranks not only of intrepid mariners, but also of complete novices such as Charles Darwin, who emptied the contents of his stomach over the gunwales during three-and-a-half years at sea on the Beagle, and a religious crusader named Jeff Bauchmann rescued off Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island on July 3, 1999 with no charts or maritime experience, only the two hundred bibles he was planning to deliver to Russia. When the Canadian Coast Guard picked him up, he was heading in the wrong direction. Although my missionary zeal was of a different kind, and my library of offerings to the Russians would have had considerably more variety, I certainly knew the feeling of being way off course.
First I had to learn to read a chart ("No, Gary, asterisks are not decorative. They're symbolic; they represent rocks.";), figure out how to handle a headstrong boat, and learn to navigate in a sea teeming with personal and tribal ghosts.
I was, from the outset, a sort of floating anachronism, crawling across the surface of the sea on my belly, because so much coastal travel is now done by air. My speed, five nautical miles per hour, seemed good to me; I needed to slow down, decompress, take stock, to look long and hard at the places of my desire and, perhaps, see them again for the first time.
It was a scary and glorious misadventure. In due course, tide-lines would became song-lines; life-jackets merge with book-jackets; boat and book share something we refer to, quaintly, as a launch.
[Gary Geddes / BCBW 2001]
Submitted on June 24, 2003 in By David.
