K. Lorraine Kiidumae

 

Another August

 “…And let’s go off sailing, my dear, with our spirits intertwined. Your body is just an old sandbar in a speeding hourglass of time.”   From “I Am Full of Love Tonight” by Hafiz

 

There were about a dozen live-aboard boats at Pier 32 on Granville Island, and most of us were there that evening when the accident happened. Everyone who lives aboard has a story: Most of us wanted to go offshore, but there were a few whose wives had taken everything but their boats; a few who had fallen on hard times; a few with broken hearts, temporarily lost; and a few bohemians whose dream it had always been to live on a boat. Before the night of the accident, none of us yet knew why Devon Finn was there.

Afterwards, I remembered the silence, except for the sound of the halyards clinking against the masts of the boats rocking to and fro. There was the sharp taste of salt in the sea air in the deep-summer heat, and the smell of kelp and seaweed along the shoreline mixed with the fishy scent of bile left on the docks by the sea otters. And I was left to wonder why I did what I did. Or didn’t do.

I remember too that it was a Sunday because on Sunday nights, after everyone had returned from their weekend boating ventures, we gathered on the dock in folding chairs, drinks in hand, appetizers making their rounds, and we told our sailing yarns and played “Topper.” It was like telling ghost stories around the campfire, spooky stories that would make the crackle or lick of the flames cause you to jump. We’d tell stories like the one about the Irishman who got lost on his way home through the moors and it started to rain so he took shelter for the night under a tree. But when he woke in the morning there was no tree and beneath and all around him the ground was dry. Or it might be a story about how you looked up in the fog and suddenly a mooring buoy was there, appearing on the other side of Bowen Island, just as it begins to get dark and the fog is rolling in, sleet filling the air, visibility fading. Or it could be a story about one of us sucking seaweed into our engine intake and our motor dying in Active Pass just as a ferry rounds the turn towards us, blasting its horn to get out of the way.

Whoever thought they had a better story that week would pipe in and say, ‘I can top that!’ And then they’d proceed to tell the story. There were usually only a few big stories each week and at the end of the night we’d all decide, inebriated as we were, who we’d dub as “Topper” for the week. And so, my first thought was, when I saw that Chevy plunging through in the air, ‘Nothing’s going to top this.’

Devon Finn was a bit of a recluse and never, not even once, ever joined in with us on the dock for our Sunday night “Topper” game. But one week, a few months before that August evening when the Chevy flew through the guard rail, we heard that Devon Finn had rescued a jumper off the Granville Street Bridge who happened to land right next to his boat while he was out for a sail in his dinghy one afternoon. And so, we all called him “Topper” that week anyway, even though he hadn’t been playing the game; not to his face, just amongst ourselves.

Sometimes, one has to ponder though, at the wonder of providence, in where that car happened to be. Had it been a few feet over, it may have landed on one of the floating homes next door to the marina. As it was, it dropped cleanly dead of centre into an open square of water, like a giant whale that had breached and then dived back under with a splash.

And, one has to wonder at that car landing where it did, directly in front of Devon Finn, someone who was a natural rescuer, who had just been decorated as a hero by the Vancouver Police Department for saving that jumper under the Granville Street Bridge.

Devon Finn lived on his Catalina 42 sloop, Tierra del Fuego, with his 85-pound Bull Mastiff pup, Rosie. He moored his boat in a slip a few over from me, where I lived aboard Dancing on the Sea, a forty-five foot Gulfstar ketch, with my partner Hawkins, who was away for a few weeks with his father, salmon fishing on a skippered charter on the far side of the Strait of Georgia.

Devon Finn had been there less than a year when the accident happened, and none of us on the dock knew him well, because he was a bit of a loner, a recluse as I said. We’d all heard a bit of his story though, from his days at the Bluewater Cruising Association, and knew he’d sailed around The Horn. Cape Horn.

I’d been the only one out on the dock to catch his mooring lines the night he moved in at Pier 32 and later that evening I’d looked over to see if he was settled in. I saw him there, lying sprawled out on the dock face down, his running shoes on his big feet awkwardly clinging for a grip, flashlight balancing precariously in one hand as he fished through the water with the other. He’d dropped his keys into the shallow end on the other side of the dock.

‘Here,’ I said, grabbing the boat hook from the bow of my boat. I poked around in the water while he held up the flashlight. I snapped up the keys in one quick swoop.

‘Thanks,’ he said, flushing red. He turned back and looked towards me and then hopped onto his boat, tripping on the step as the toe of his shoe caught the rail.

 

*

 

For the first few weeks after that, I’d just nod and say, ‘How do,’ when I walked past, giving him time to settle in because I could see that he was painfully shy. He’d look back at me with a bashful reserve, give a nod in return. Eventually, though, I started to feel uncomfortable about not speaking to him and decided to go up and break the ice. The day I did so I found Rosie, bobbing on the bow of Tierra del Fuego, so big she spread out almost to the railing, like a giant sea lion. Devon Finn was standing with his head poked out of his hatch and I said, ‘Aren’t you afraid she’ll jump in?’

He shoved the lenses of his sunglasses up with his thick middle finger, to be polite, peered at me shyly, squinnying his eyes to see. He looked up at me, a little startled. ‘Nah, not a chance,’ he said. ‘She’s afraid of the water.’

I looked closely then and saw a burly man with sorrowful, soft brown eyes that betrayed an immense hurt beneath them, especially from the way his facial muscles quivered when he crossed his arms, looked down, and turned his head away. He was big and thick all over—fingers, neck, and torso—and looked like he could break a man’s neck like a pencil. But he was gentle and lumbering, soft underneath, and his eyes betrayed his vulnerability.

‘I’m Melanie,’ I said, holding out a hand to him. ‘But around here, everyone calls me Mel.’

I thought he looked and sounded a little like Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston put together—tall and broad-shouldered with a deep reassuring voice. I half-expected him to say his name was Atticus or The Omega Man. He said his name with that grown, serious expression, like Gregory Peck, and he did sound like The Omega Man too—like he was the last person on earth and all alone in the world and trying to stuff down his feelings, like it was all he could do to keep himself going, to get through the day, or as though it were an effort to carry on a conversation where he had to pretend to be normal or happy. Something told me there’d be a story hiding there in his life and I was determined to find out what it was.

A few weeks later, I was lounging in the cockpit of my ketch one sunny afternoon and heard shouting coming from an approaching boat. Someone standing at the bow was pointing towards Devon Finn’s sailboat. I picked up the words “dog in water!” Leaping to the dock, I yelled for Devon Finn to join me as I ran to the end of the slip.

Rosie was hanging by the neck at the end of her leash, tied to the bowsprit a half-a-foot or so above the surface, desperately paddling with her massive paws to keep her head above water. Devon Finn didn’t hear me. I hopped into his cockpit and poked my head into his salon. There he was, lying on the floor on his back, with a headlamp on his forehead, his head poked inside the door of the engine room, tools surrounding him. The odour of bilge and diesel lingered in the air. He was wearing grease-stained clothing—an oversized black t-shirt and ragged jeans.

We rushed outside and, kneeling on the dock, each of us grabbed Rosie under the armpits to hoist her out of the sea.

By now the commotion had attracted the attention of the patrolling Harbour Police. Their boat nosed up close just as we were hauling Rosie back up onto the dock. One of the three cops on the bridge called out to us: ‘I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to throw it back. It’s too small, and besides, Mastiffs are out of season right now.’

We both chuckled. It was the first time I’d ever seen him smile.

Rosie ran back and forth on the dock frantically, yelping and shaking the water out of her fur, all over us. We were both soaking wet, and Rosie hopped onto the bow of Tierra del Fuego and spread herself out on the bow in the sun.

‘Come in,’ Devon said, pointing towards the hatch in the cockpit. ‘Let’s dry ourselves off, and I’ll make us some tea. It’s the least I can do after you rescued my dog.’

Devon Finn put the kettle on down below and handed me a towel, then dipped into the aft stateroom at the other end of the boat to clean himself up.

I sat on the settee, looking around while I towel-dried my shirt and the ends of my hair. Above the chart table was a map of Chile, with a red line tracing a route that ended at the southernmost tip of South America, in the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego—Cape Horn. I’d heard the waters around The Horn are some of the most dangerous on earth, with powerful winds producing large rogue waves, strong currents. Icebergs that funnel into a narrow passage between Antarctica and South America—a sailor’s graveyard they say.

There were a few books on the chart table—one about the navigational stars and the star Polaris—how to find the “North Star,” and another—In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat. I flipped through and read something about an experiment with a cat being simultaneously both alive and dead that made no sense to me.

I noticed a photograph fastened to the teak wall above the chart table. It looked to be of happier times—a woman, blondish, and tall, like Devon Finn, with a long, freckled face. Standing in front of Tierra del Fuego with her, in what looked from the terrain to be some northern port along the coast of Chile, was a boy, dark-haired, like Devon, tall too, with the same strong, angular cheek bones. Devon Finn stood behind them, smiling, like I’d never seen him do before. He and the boy each held up large Lagostino lobsters.

‘Do you think this could apply to people too,’ I asked, flipping through Schrodinger’s Cat when he poked his head around the corner. He’d showered and changed into fresh clothes—a faded brown shirt and grey denim jeans.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. He seemed irritated by the thought. ‘It’s a mind experiment, not reality.’

‘Well, yes, but theoretically?’ I said.

‘It’s only a theory that proves quantum superposition,’ he explained, condescendingly.

‘Can you tell me why is it that highly intelligent men seem to abhor speculation?’ I said. ‘I mean, isn’t that the height of a mind that thinks?’

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking sheepish. Then he smiled for the second time that day.

He poured some tea into dark blue ceramic mugs with white anchors, and sat down across from me. Neither of us spoke for a few moments.

‘So, what do you do when you’re not out sailing around the Gulf Islands?’ he said.

I told him I worked for a company that organized events for large conferences but our dream—Hawkins and mine—was to go offshore. To just head out and turn left and keep on going down the west coast to Mexico and then, who knew where.

            Devon waited, as if he wanted me to go on, but I couldn’t think of what else to say.

‘So you want to escape the bourgeoisie life then, evade a fate of mediocrity?’

‘It’s more than that,’ I said. ‘I want a life of adventure. I want to feel self-sufficient. And free. But yes, it helps to have the dream on those days when life feels hopelessly ordinary.’

‘Alfie days I call them—you know, as in ‘what’s it all about Alfie?’ he said. ‘Ah yes, we all start off in life thinking it’s all about money, chasing the dream, whatever it is, and then we get to a stage where we ask ourselves, what exactly is the point? We want to be true to ourselves, we want our lives to have meaning. How does that saying go? In our heart of hearts, we all know who we are and what we want. So, we go and throw it all away—money, marriages, houses, the lot. And then we get a little older and we find out, I mean, that there is no Goddamned point. We realize we were right in the first place. That it really is all about money—money, now that is what gives you freedom.’

‘Is that what happened to you?’ I said. ‘I hear you sailed around Cape Horn.’ I pointed to the map pinned above the chart table.

He got up and pulled two large plastic glasses from the cupboard, poured in some Scotch whiskey and Drambuie, a handful of ice out of the freezer, and made us each a Rusty Nail.

He told me he used to be a pilot, in Vancouver, flying for Canadian Pacific Airlines, 747s, 767s. He didn’t mention it, but I remembered then that someone at Bluewater Cruising told me he started out in the Royal Canadian Air Force then joined the Navy. He retired from the airlines, at forty-three—joined the Bluewater Cruising Association. His dream was to sail around Cape Horn.

I’d seen a slide show once, at Bluewater Cruising, put on by someone who wanted to sail around the Horn. I thought that was the last thing I would ever want to do.

‘I mean, why wouldn’t you have just gone through the Panama Canal?’ This was my chance, I thought, to try and find out what his story was.

‘It was amazing. Before I went I hadn’t been able to do anything. I was depressed. I could barely make myself eat. I felt like I had nothing left to live for. I’d stand on the dock and look down and I felt fear. Of what I didn’t know. But when I sailed around the Horn there was something to be afraid of. That was real. Real fear. I felt alive again.’

‘Seeking danger to find a sense of living?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, something like that,’ he said, downing the last of his Rusty Nail. ‘When I was pounding through the waves in 45 knot winds, I could feel salt water pelting against my face, stinging at my eyes. I tacked and took turns so fast I couldn’t even feel my limbs any more. At one point I flew up from the seat, hanging onto the helm, untethered. I tightened the sails even harder, felt a rush of adrenaline. Fear. For a while I thought I might die. I’ve never felt so exhilarated. It was the happiest I’d felt in weeks. The thrill of tasting my own mortality made me want to live.’

‘Like Schrodinger’s Cat,’ I said. ‘Simultaneously both dead and alive?’

He looked up at me, as if I’d caught him out.

‘So, did you make it around, first pass then?’ I said.

‘Oh, God no!’ It took him three tries, he said—the first time he turned back. ‘Dismasted in the Tierra del Fuego. Bloody-well pitch-poled on the second pass. That’s when huge seas can cause a boat to surf down a wave, trip its bow on the following wave, and be upended stern over bow.’

            ‘Yeah, I know what it means,’ I said. ‘Sounds pretty horrifying to me.’

            ‘In my case,’ he said, ‘a gigantic wave lifted my boat and dropped it upside down. We were dismasted in the north edge of the Drake Passage. The seas were tempestuous, and the waves a sheer vertical drop! I thought we were going to die!’

I asked him who “we” was.

‘My mate and I—we met doing the Swiftsure,’ he said. ‘Anyway, we were suddenly hit by a strong wind and it took us right down, and we were heeled over to starboard. Next minute we were ass over tea kettle! Mast snapped after we pitch-poled and we were rescued at sea. But, the third time,’ he said, ‘I took my son with me, and we were three times lucky. We made it.’

He told me then how on his first pass attempting The Horn he went with his wife and son. Todd was still young then, he said, and right when they reached the peak his wife became frozen with fear for her own life, and for the life of her son. He was forced to turn back. They’d almost made it too, but on the day that they tried to round Cape Horn she was fierce and fought hard, the winds were at a Force 10—40 to 45 knots—and right after he’d cried out in glee, just as they were set to round her, his wife, Linda, wanted to turn back.

He went back out, alone with a mate, the one from the Swiftsure, a year or two later, he said, and that’s when he pitch-poled.

‘Drifted that way for days,’ Devon said. ‘Once the sails were under water we bobbed around there like a cork and so our lives were no longer in danger, but all our instruments, sails too, were destroyed. It was a few years before I was able to make that final pass.’

‘What made you want to do it again then?’ I said, ‘Risk your life like that?’

He said his son was older then, almost nineteen, and his wife no longer had the stomach for it, so the two of them went out alone, it was a proud moment—father and son.

Afterwards, they sold the boat and retired to a farm in the interior of BC. He’d decided it was time to play things safe, enjoy the rest of his days. And then one summer there was a tractor roll-over and his son was dead.

            I tried to imagine the horror of that moment, the funeral, burying your own child. I couldn’t think of what to say. I’d dug down and he’d told me everything so easily and now it all seemed too much.

            ‘Do you believe in fate and destiny?’ I said. ‘I mean, as though things happen for a reason?’ It seemed the only hopeful way to look at it.

  ‘Nah, I don’t believe in any of that spiritual stuff. I think sometimes things just happen. And the only people who say things happen for a reason seem to be the ones who have never had anything really bad happen to them. No, life is like that. When it’s your time, it’s your time. That’s it. That’s all there is.’

Devon topped up our Rusty Nails with a splash of Scotch, a little more ice.

‘Moving to the farm,’ he said, ‘Wanna know what made me do it? I promised Linda. We were getting through some stuff…a rocky patch in our marriage…even before the Horn. I told her if she’d just let me take Todd with me, around Cape Horn, afterwards I’d give it all up. And the funny thing was I loved it. The farm. The peace and tranquility, the wide-open spaces, the scent of the hay. All of it. Like living in the middle of an Andrew Wyeth painting. Well, what’s that saying? I guess sometimes you have to do one thing in order to discover it’s the opposite thing you really want. In the end, it was Linda who hated the farm, after she’d made me promise that’s where we’d go. Between that and Todd getting killed, well, it all just did her in. Ate her up until she got cancer, then that ate her through and took her.’ He sipped on his Rusty Nail. Sat pensive for a long while. ‘In the end, I think she was actually glad to go.’

          After a time he said, ‘I mean, we did it, though. The Horn. That was our dream. Despite the odds we conquered her. And then Todd died riding a tractor. So what did it all mean? What did it matter? In the end, to anyone?’ He paused. ‘Maybe nothing ever really means anything.’

I guzzled two mouthfuls of my drink. I hadn’t had any lunch and we were both sounding a little drunk. I was feeling shaky. I wanted to reach out to him but how could I? I barely knew him. And he was wrestling with something not even a lifetime could absolve.

*

It was a few weeks later when the accident happened. I was sitting on the dock in a folding plastic chair, talking on my cell phone. The dock was bobbing gently from the movement of boats and kayaks, and the Aquabus going by. The sun was shining. It was an hour or so before dinnertime and I was smiling at that moment, I do remember that, at something whomever I was speaking to was saying. I heard the gunning of an engine, the screech of tires on pavement, the crack of lumber splitting in two. I turned to look, the cell phone still against my ear, the smile still on my lips, and saw the underbelly of a large car—a dark blue sedan-type of car with a long body, which hovered in the air for a second before smashing into the water below. The impact rocked the dock. I leapt up to see.

It’s amazing how quickly your mind reels in situations like that. I spun my head around to check on Devon Finn, who had just hopped aboard his boat with a bag of groceries. He was moored at the end of the dock, directly beside where the car landed, between his boat and one of the floating homes next door. I saw him standing in the cockpit, watching it all happen. I don’t know if it was my imagination, but I thought I could see his eyes open wide to look as he saw that enormous thing hovering there.

I heard the clang of the brass ship’s bell at the top of the on-ramp, as someone rang it over and over again while screaming for help. George, our resident Great Blue Heron, generally silent, began a screaming ‘awk, awk, awk’ as he took flight from his perch atop the piling where he always sat.

Devon Finn was there in a flash. He pulled his t-shirt off and then his tan boat shoes. As he ran towards the end of the dock, pell-mell, there was a crunch as he stepped on a string of small lights tacked along the edge of the dock, still there from last Christmas, and a few of the bulbs cracked and cut his foot. He skipped on one leg and pulled the glass out, and it started to bleed. But even that did not deter him. He rushed towards the edge, leaving one bloody footprint behind with each step. The car was still there, bobbing on the surface. He dove into the water as the car began to sink down, down, for what seemed like more than several minutes.

After Devon Finn made a few dives he helped an old man struggle out of the car just as it started to sink. The old man had a full head of grey hair, and he looked to be about eighty. He called out for his wife. Devon Finn pulled him onto the dock and sat him there, then dived back in. The old man removed his clothing and someone gave him a towel. He sat in his underwear watching, towel over his shoulders, staring at the dock, the boats, and the yachties. His shoulders were hunched, knees to his chin, shivering; grey suit in a sopping pile beside him, black leather dress shoes by his feet.

It was as though that hot August air had stood still and there wasn’t a sound, other than Devon Finn’s descent and ascent into the water, gasping for breath between dives as he went up and down, searching.

Now, I was a natural swimmer too, just like Devon Finn. I used to swim a mile three times a week. Once, I swam a few miles from the shore out to a small island at Harrison Lake and back, just for something to do. Just to prove I could do it. And so, after I’d rushed from the dock to the scene of the accident, I stood looking down into the water below, and I kept thinking I should do something. That I should dive in and see if I could find whoever was down there. But the water was so muddy from the car landing on the bottom I couldn’t imagine anyone actually being down there. I couldn’t muster up the sense of urgency, the adrenalin, to dive in. I stood, not able to move, or to jump in and help, and all I could think of was how that salt water must be stinging Devon Finn’s foot.

Still, I couldn’t bring myself to jump in. People were collecting now on the dock,   watching. I counted the seconds, breathlessly. I kept picturing the little gimballed brass hourglass that sat on the stove in the galley on Dancing on the Sea. I tried to remember how long it was, how many minutes, that a person can stay under water before they’ve lost so much oxygen they’re likely to get brain damage. And I kept thinking I should go and get that hourglass and time things as they were happening.

Devon Finn broke the surface of the sea, pulled himself to the dock, bare-chested, his shorts dripping, vigorously shook the water from his face, his hair, his eyes. ‘She’s not in the front seat!’ he screamed.

 ‘What’s left when she’s gone?’ the old man muttered to himself, but he looked almost serene, like someone sitting on a blanket in the sand at the beach.

Devon Finn squatted forward, tried to catch his breath, hands resting on his knees, gasping. He wiped the droplets dribbling into his eyes, salt stinging, took a startled look at the old man, yelled back ‘I’m going to find her!’ as he dove back in.

Later the old man would say that for them it was always August. It was August when they met and fell in love in Warsaw all those years ago. It was August when they married almost three years later amid the apple blossoms in the Town Square. And it was another August when the official stamped their visas as they entered into Canada, their new home, new life, leaving behind the Old World.

But, in life, it seems there are more happy beginnings than endings, and it was another August when their dark blue Chevy sedan sped through the guard rail at Pier 32 that day, plunging below into twenty feet of water.

Devon Finn broke to the surface once again and called out in a strained panting voice, ‘Where was she sitting?!’ The old man said she was in the back seat. Devon made a few more dives, and I just kept thinking so much time had gone by, by then, that that sand in the hourglass had to be used up by now.

I realized then that I was not the sort of person who saved lives. I wondered what makes a person willingly drop everything, without thought or regard for their own life, to save a perfect stranger. And I thought it must be some sort of moral code—what they considered to be proper and right, and that they might not be able to live with themselves if they didn’t try to save that life.

            After a minute Devon Finn came up and said, ‘I’ve found her!’

A neighbour rushed out, one of the men who lived in one of the floating houses next door. He was a lawyer, and a diver. He called out that he would get his gear on and he ran and got an air tank, while we waited for the Coast Guard, hovercraft, and ambulance.

The diver went down and in a matter of seconds, it seemed, Devon Finn came back up alongside of him, holding a woman in his arms. She looked old too, and a little plumped up and puffy, like someone who drank too much, but I thought it may just be that she had inhaled too much water. Devon Finn laid her out on the dock and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while we all watched and waited for an ambulance to arrive.

After a moment or two Devon Finn cried out, ‘She’s breathing!’ and everyone clapped and cheered.

Devon Finn held her there, this woman, whose name we learned was Eva, spread out across his big thick arms, suspended somewhere, between life and death, until the paramedics arrived.

Later, we discovered in the papers that the couple rescued from the car were Hungarian Jews, refugees, who had survived the Second World War, the Holocaust, the concentration camps, and occupation by the Red Army. We read too that Eva’s brothers and sisters used to make fun of her because she liked to sing, so she sang when she was driving a trolley late at night in Hungary. Someone connected to the opera heard her and the papers said she could have become a world travelling opera singer. But she gave it all up to marry the man she loved.

            The old man said he had wanted to treat his wife to dinner at the water’s edge, there on Granville Island, for their wedding anniversary. They were pleased, he said, when they got there, to find an open parking spot in the row right next to the water.

He remembered that day, as the nose of their vehicle approached the railing, that he pressed his foot down on what he thought was the brake, but his foot must have slipped and hit the gas. All he knew for sure was that in an instant their vehicle was plunging into the water. His survivor’s instinct took over immediately, he said. He unbuckled himself and somehow managed to open the door.

Later, in the hospital, Eva died from complications and her heart gave out on her. There were rumours of a fight, that someone heard screaming right before the acceleration into the sea. But nothing ever came of this, so who’s to say whether or not it was true?

 

*

 

Thirty. It was thirty. Thirty minutes. It took thirty minutes for the sand to all fall into the other half of the hourglass. How many minutes did Eva float around in the back of the car, bobbing in the water like an astronaut, suspended with no escape, down beneath the murky water? Afterwards, I thought of her, as she struggled to get her breath, and I heard her voice, clear as a bell, coming up from beneath the sea.

The sand in the hourglass ran out that August day, after fifty-five years of marriage and, on the twenty-third of August, the old man buried her, and he said he wished she had survived, not him.

            ‘Fuck. Just fuck!’ Devon Finn said when he heard the news that Eva had died. He went down below, into the cockpit of his boat, and slammed the wooden hatch shut.

 

A few days later, I heard voices outside underneath the moon. ‘Porpoises! A pod of about two hundred Dahl’s Porpoises swam alongside us in the wake of our boat!’ someone said.

It was another August for us too…down on the docks, and it was Topper night again. Hawkins hadn’t come home from his fishing trip yet, so I decided to go out and join in, even though I hadn’t been anywhere and had no stories to tell.

Fifteen minutes later Devon Finn lumbered out onto the dock in a bit of a stupor, carrying his bottles of Scotch and Drambuie, a plastic cup filled with ice. He didn’t say hello, or anything, as he plunked down in the deck chair next to me, but he had this way of looking at me that made me feel like at that moment there wasn’t a person who mattered more to him in the world than I did. I could see beneath the lenses on his sunglasses that his eyes were glistened with tears. The trauma of the accident seemed to have broken him open, unravelled him.

The dock rocked gently with the movement of boats coming in, halyards clinking softly as we sipped our drinks. I stretched my bare legs out under the heat of the last sliver of sun. Devon unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it back to soak it in.

There were cocktails and summer laughter as sailing stories were shared amongst those of us seated down on the dock, and we marveled at the colourful hues of the setting sun and how the silvery glass on the high-rises on the other side of the water was made golden by the sunlight, and how it created a soft warm pink in the sky—‘red sky at night, sailor’s delight,’ someone said.

Devon Finn told us he was born right there, in Vancouver, and never grew tired of its beauty. He spoke of how magical it had been sailing during the typhoons that year, the torrential rains pouring in like a sieve from the Pacific Ocean. 

‘So, I hear you went around The Horn,’ someone said.

            Devon Finn didn’t say anything for the longest time. A balmy, saline wind was gusting up, and it whiffed through and blew his soft bangs up in the breeze, then back down again.

Those deep, brown, sorrowful eyes looked straight into mine, as though he were afraid of what I might think of him with what he was about to say. He looked down into his drink. He leaned forward in the deck chair, feet astride. His lower jaw tightened. The buttons of his white cotton shirt were still opened, and it hung around his hips, exposing his tanned torso. A trickle of perspiration beaded down the back of his shirt between his shoulder blades.

            ‘Yeah, I did. Went out there to fight my demons,’ Devon Finn said after a time.

            ‘How do you mean?’ whoever had asked the question said.

            And then he says he cheated on his wife, Linda, and afterwards, he had to channel that energy somewhere else. ‘For some people it’s money, for me it was The Cape, man against nature, man against himself—same difference—in the end we’re really fighting against ourselves,’ he said, looking straight at me. ‘We’re all fighting against ourselves because we all need something—I don’t know, what’s that saying—neither the best things we do nor the worst are fully conscious.’

I touched him gently on his forearm. He looked up at me, expectant. ‘Don’t. Just don’t,’ I said.

The glitter of the new moon was waning above us. I looked up and thought, wow, just wow and then I heard a giant splash. We looked down to the other end of the dock. There was Rosie, swimming the dog paddle madly towards us.

‘I forgot to tell you. Rosie isn’t afraid of the water anymore,’ he said.

With that, he rose silently and walked across to the other side of the dock, tossing his empty whisky bottle into the plastic garbage can, and whistled for Rosie. I took her by the collar and followed him to his boat.

He stepped aboard and Rosie jumped up onto her perch. Devon stopped and turned to me. He leaned forward and held my face in his large hands and drew me towards him, kissing me gently, first on one cheek, then the other, and said good night

 

*

 

Afterwards, in the papers, it was the rich lawyer from next door who got written up in the press and was given all the credit, because he was the one they saw carrying Eva up the ramp when the police, ambulance, and hovercraft had arrived. But the rest of us down on the docks knew it was Devon Finn who deserved all the credit, that he was the real hero, diving down there without any gear on, without any regard for himself. But Devon Finn didn’t care anyway, he wasn’t one for notoriety, he didn’t even want to be interviewed by the press, so he remained that way—the unsung hero of Pier 32—long after he disappeared one day, he and Tierra del Fiego, gone, just like Eva, disappearing slowly into the murky waters beyond, somewhere into neverness.