River Odyssey (3 page)

By suppertime I had decided. When I told Ziegfried and Sheba that I was going to search for my father they listened quietly and didn’t say anything for a while, although Sheba threw me an approving look. When Ziegfried finally spoke, he revealed that he had anticipated my decision. He had already turned his genius towards the task.

“It’s just six hundred miles, Al, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Montreal. The river flows a maximum of seven knots with the retreating tide. I figure it will take you a month tops. A week or so upstream, you do what you have to do, and a week back. Then, we stock for the Pacific. A month tops, Al.”

My mouth dropped. “Sail up the St. Lawrence River?”

“Sure. Why not? Freighters do it every day.”

Wow. It had never crossed my mind to sail my submarine up a river. Could we sail into the heart of a city like Montreal, just like that? What about the people everywhere? What about the river traffic? Where would we hide the sub? My mind raced through the potential obstacles: river currents, shallow water, ocean freighters in narrow channels, bustling cities. Where would we sleep? How would we avoid being seen? It seemed like a heck of a challenge to me.

Cool.

ZIEGFRIED SAID IT
was “ironic” I had left school at fourteen and had been studying ever since. I never really thought about it. All I knew was that you couldn’t go to sea, stay safe, not get lost and find anything interesting at all if you didn’t read about it first. That was just common sense. And then, once you decided to go somewhere, every scrap of information you got your hands on became important and interesting. I never knew, for instance, that the tide could travel hundreds of miles up a river. And it did a lot more than that; it brought seals, dolphins, whales, ocean-liners, freighters and submarines with it. I discovered that in the first book I pulled from Sheba’s bookshelf,
Rivers of the World.

Sheba kept books all over the house. She was a compulsive reader. Every month she ordered them from a store in St. John’s that brought them in from around the world. Her favourite topics were ecology, anthropology, geography, mysticism and religion. She also ordered books on spells, mushrooms, flowers and other growing things, but these books never made it out of the kitchen, and Ziegfried and I were kind of afraid to touch them. When she saw me standing by the shelf, she came over, reached up for a small book and handed it to me.

“What’s this?”

“Jacques Cartier.”

“Oh.”

“Do you know how old Cartier was when he went to sea?” she asked with her song-like voice.

“How old?”

“Thirteen.”

“Oh.”

I tucked the book under my arm. I was fourteen when I went to sea.

The next day, Ziegfried and I carried water, fruit, canned food and fuel down to the sub. Sheba was busy in the kitchen baking cookies, bread and pizza—fresh food for the trip. Travelling in a submarine wasn’t very expensive when there was just one of you and your crew was a dog and seagull. The biggest cost was diesel fuel, but diesel goes a long way in a streamlined vessel with an efficient motor. I had eight thousand dollars left from my share of the treasure I had found in Louisbourg harbour on our first voyage. We sold the gold coins to a private collector for eighteen thousand dollars and split it fifty-fifty. Ziegfried wanted me to keep it all but I refused. Sheba said I should start taking photographs on my journeys and keep a journal so that I could sell stories to travel and geographic magazines. It could be a way to pay for future explorations. That sounded like a good idea to me.

Over the winter we had constructed solar panels and a wind turbine for the sub, two exciting new sources of power designed specifically for sailing in the Pacific, where the sun was strong and distances far. But we hadn’t tested them yet and would wait until the river voyage was over. When they were installed, the sub would have five distinct sources of power: diesel engine, electric battery, stationary bicycle, solar panels and a wind turbine. Ziegfried had designed all of the systems and I helped him build them. When the sub was out of water Ziegfried was absolute boss. He was master-designer and I was just his assistant. I was alternately cutting, filing, sanding, polishing metal, glass and wood, endlessly splicing wire, and cleaning up. Ziegfried made every decision concerning the construction and safety of the sub, including when she would go back in the water. No one could change his mind about that even a tiny bit, no one. Once the sub was in the water, however, I became her captain again and I was in charge. Only I decided where and when she sailed. It was a strange shift of roles but it happened naturally and it worked well.

Ziegfried lowered the provisions into the sub and I stashed them into the corners and hung them from the rafters, spreading them as evenly as possible. While we worked, I asked him if he had discovered anything interesting when he was scouting on the point. He raised his head as if he had been expecting me to ask.

“I did, in fact.”

“Really? What?”

He looked at me with an awkward smile. It wasn’t something he would like to say in front of Sheba.

“Iron.”

“Iron? What do you mean?”

“In the rock. There’s an unusually large quantity of iron in some of the rocks.”

“So?”

“Well… ”

“What?”

He took a deep breath. “If you have one rock that’s mostly iron and another that’s mostly sandstone, and the sun heats them both up, then, the sun goes down … ”

“Yes?”

“Well, the rocks are going to cool down at different rates.”

“Okay. So?”

“Well, if you have mist in the air to catch and reflect light, such as the light of the moon and stars, or a passing ship, then that patch of unstable air above the rocks could potentially trap the light and create a light phenomenon.”

“Oh. You mean … it might
look
like a ghost.”

“Well, yes, it could, if what you saw was just light.”

“Oh.”

“That’s the theory anyway. But I don’t think Sheba is very interested in theories, do you?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

Ziegfried always had a logical explanation for things.

“But how would you explain that the light had personality, that it looked sad?”

“I have no doubt that that is what you felt, Al, but your feelings were a reaction to what you saw, truth be told. You must learn to separate your feelings from the object under investigation; otherwise you might be tempted to say that a butterfly is happy and a frog is bored.”

“Oh.”

It wasn’t the first time I found myself somewhere between Ziegfried’s brilliant, logical mind and Sheba’s magical, instinctual understanding, but it was probably the first time I found Sheba’s view more convincing. After all, how could he explain the fact that she had been woken by the ghost in the middle of the night? And besides, I had seen it for myself, and it looked like more than light to me.

We went to sea the next day. We never had time to send for proper charts. No matter, I thought, we had detailed maps of the river, with soundings marked in fathoms. And we had sonar. We ought to be fine with those. We did have charts for the Strait of Belle Isle and the water around Anticosti Island.

In the twilight I untied the ropes, climbed into the sub and flipped the engine switch. The engine purred softly, like a sleeping goat. Its vibration came up through the floor as the sub rocked gently from side to side. Seaweed and Hollie took their places by the observation window in the floor of the bow. We were supposed to be going to the Pacific, I knew, but that journey would have to wait.

Sheba and Ziegfried saw us off with hugs but no tears. We’d be back soon enough. It was just a short journey to Montreal. I would find my father, say whatever needed to be said, and sail back. Yet Sheba wore a serious expression on her face. She had read my cards after supper. “Something terrible is going to happen,” she said. “But you will be all right. And you will return richer than before.”

“A month tops, Al,” said Ziegfried, then gave me one of his crushing bear hugs.

I stood in the portal and saluted them both as we motored out of the tiny cove. They stood and waved. They looked like giants to me.

WE SAILED NORTH
out of Bonavista Bay, around the Fogo Islands and westward towards Dark Cove, my home. I had never met my grandfather on the water before but that was the most practical thing to do and he would respect that. I wanted to ask him where I might find my father. I knew he would be out in the early morning; I just hoped he would be alone in his boat.

He was.

I kept the hull underwater anyway as I approached, leaving only two feet of the portal showing. I didn’t want other fishermen to spot the sub. Only my grandparents and Sheba knew where it was from. The coastguard would take it from me if they ever caught me. They would want to inspect it and that would take forever and likely I would never get it back. Nor did I have any kind of captain’s or pilot’s license. I was an outlaw by the laws of the land.

He looked lonely in the boat pulling traps by himself. If I hadn’t gone to sea as an explorer that’s exactly where I would be right now, standing beside him like his shadow, working silently all day because my grandfather never spoke on the boat when he was working.

He seemed surprisingly happy to see me. He stood up with his hands on his hips and smiled as we approached. I didn’t think I had ever seen him smile before. It made him look younger.

“Well, look at this!”

“Hi, Grandpa!”

“Aren’t
you
as quiet as a ghost on the water; I never heard you coming.”

“I was careful of the lines.”

He nodded. He was still smiling.

“Heading to Australia, are you?”

“Not yet. I’m sailing to Montreal first.”

“Montreal?
Are you going to go in that thing?”

“Yup.”

“Well… I suppose you could. But why on earth do you want to go to Montreal?”

“Uhhhh … I figured I might have a look around for my father.”

The smile washed off my grandfather’s face. “Oh, well, now there’s a waste of a trip. Nothing good’s going to come of that.”

I felt the same way. I just didn’t want to tell him that.

“Sheba says it’s unfinished business.”

“Unfinished business? Yes, well, I suppose it is that, isn’t it?”

“Do you think I’d find him on the dockyards probably?”

“More than likely. He wasn’t one to move around much once he settled. Wasn’t like you. Unfinished business is it? Seems to me you’re going to open a can of worms there, Alfred. He’s not like you, you know. Better be straight about that before you start.”

I didn’t really want to ask the next question. It just kind of jumped out.

“What was he like?”

My grandfather dropped his head to think. I waited for his answer, wishing I hadn’t asked.

“He’s not like you.”

Fair enough. I wasn’t expecting him to be like me anyway. And if my grandfather had bad things to say about my father, I didn’t want to hear them either. I didn’t even
want
to go looking for him; I was just following Sheba’s advice, and it probably wasn’t a good idea in the first place. Maybe stopping by to see my grandfather wasn’t a good idea either. I just wanted to get to Montreal, get it over with, get back and prepare for the Pacific. What a waste of time.

After we said goodbye I sailed an hour west of Dark Cove, submerged to a hundred feet, shut everything off, turned the lights low and climbed into bed. Seaweed had flown to shore to mingle with the local birds. He was a sociable bird. Hollie made himself cozy on his blanket and I heard him chew his rubber ball, lick his paws, bite his tail, wrestle with his rope, lick his paws again and sigh. Only then did I fall asleep.

Ten hours later I woke and stretched. Hollie stretched too. I put the kettle on for tea, rose to the surface, opened the hatch and waited for Seaweed. It was misty in the twilight and the sub was invisible from shore, even for a seagull. But Seaweed would remember exactly where we had gone down. He had an amazing ability to find us, no matter what. Most often when we surfaced he was already on the hull before I opened the hatch. And sometimes, like tonight, he returned with friends—a couple of tough-looking seagulls. Were they expecting to stay? I sure hoped not. Nope. When I started the engine, the gulls flew off into the mist.