Stormchild (22 page)

I said nothing at first. Instead I just stared through red-rimmed eyes at the pink sparks of sun-reflecting snow in that far distance, and I thought with what innocent delight Jackie Potten would have greeted this landfall. “It’s a funny old world,” I said at last, and raised my beaker in response to my brother’s compliment. The sea was darkening into night, mirroring the sky’s gloom to leave those high, brilliant, snow-white peaks suspended like shards of rosy light in the dusky air. I watched till the last light drained away and we could see nothing but the strange southern constellations hanging high between the scudding clouds.

We hove to, not wanting to make an unfamiliar coast in the darkness.
Stormchild,
as though impatient with our caution, fretted all night in the short, steep waves until the creeping dawn silhouetted the far peaks black and foreboding, and, at last, under the mountains’ ominous loom, we loosened
Stormchild’s
sheets, untied her wheel, and plunged toward the land.

PART

two

W
ater pounded against
Stormchild’s
steel cutwater, then shredded into a thousand ice-cold missiles that rattled down her decks and shattered loud on her spray hood. For hours we had been enduring such hard, cold, frightening, and wearying work. We were fighting against a head wind and a hostile sea, laboring not merely to make progress, but simply to hold our own against the malevolence of an ocean that assaulted us in close-ranked attacking ridges scummed and ribbed with white water. The crests of the ridges were flying maelstroms of wind-whipped spray that mingled with a pelting rain that slashed diagonally out of low, dark clouds. The wave ridges were coming at an angle so that
Stormchild
fought her way up their long, cold slopes, only to corkscrew off their peaks before running fast into their deep gray-green troughs. On the ridge tops the foam was sometimes so shattered into spray that I could scarcely see
Stormchild’s
bows. The wind banged and shrieked and moaned in the rigging, while green water seethed and broke dirty white in the scuppers and cockpit drains. This, as Joanna would have enjoyed telling me, was sailing.

Jackie Potten had not been waiting for me in Puerto Montt. I had dared to expect her, yet at the same time had known that I would be disappointed. I telephoned her in Kalamazoo, only to have her irritating answering machine wish me a good day. I had also telephoned Molly Tetterman, and had once again reached nothing more than a tape recorder.

“You’re not pining for the girl, are you?” David had asked me scornfully.

“That’s none of your business.”

“Oh, pardon me for living,” he said huffily. Our friendship had been strained, both of us knew it, and neither of us really knew how to restore it. David wanted me to forget Jackie, to dismiss her as though she had never existed, while I was missing her. I tried to convince myself that my hopes of any attachment to Jackie had always been as futile as they were unrealistic, but loneliness nevertheless filled me with a corrosive self-pity. The only feeling countering that poison was the growing excitement of sailing ever nearer to Nicole. Each time I woke for another cold spell of watch duty I would feel a small frisson of exhilaration at the realization that every bitter lurch of the hull and hammering blow of the sea marked a moment that took me ever closer to my daughter.

Or rather each moment should have been taking me closer, had it not been for this damned head wind and its pounding sea. We were one week and four hundred miles south of Puerto Montt as, with two reefs in the main and the number-two jib winched tight as a board, we were trying to weather Cape Raper. I could see the lowering cape, with its lighthouse, way off on
Stormchild’s
port bow, though our view of the high cliffs was intermittently obscured by the thrashing rain. Once, managing to steady my binoculars on the cliffs, I saw a wave break on the rocks and spume its white water a hundred feet into the air where it was snatched into oblivion by the howling wind.

Cape Raper was the most westerly point of the Chilean mainland and, because it was the one part of that wild coast where there was no inside channel, we were being forced to pass it at sea. Once past the cape we would still have to cross the infamous Golfo de Penas, the Gulf of Sorrows, before we could once again take advantage of the sheltered channels behind the barrier islands, though “sheltered” was hardly the right word because the waterways between and behind the barrier islands were scoured by vicious tides, prey to violent williwaws, and desperately short of good holding for
Stormchild’s
triple anchors. We had already sailed the best part of a hundred miles in such channels, protected from the ocean storms by the wooded Chonos Islands, but now, thanks to Cape Raper, we had to face the great gray open ocean that heaved at us like moving mountain ranges. Seaward of us, and having just as uncomfortable a passage as
Stormchild,
was a big rust-streaked and heavily-laden freighter that must have been carrying limestone north from the Patagonian quarries. Smoke from the freighter’s stack streamed ahead in the spray and rain, then I lost sight of her as
Stormchild
plunged off a wave crest to plummet down into a dark trough.

David, sharing the watch with me, gripped a safety bar tight. There was a wariness in his eyes, almost as though, in the great wilderness of wind and water, he was perceiving the wrath of God. We were both dog-tired, both sore, both of us bruised and suffering from the minor injuries of hard sailing: fingers pinched in winches, palms skinned by ropes, and small cuts abraded by salt water. But at least
Stormchild
was taking the seas well; she sailed sweet and true, despite her crew’s weariness.

Our last proper rest had been in the fishing town of Puerto Montt, where we had cleared customs and received our ninety-day entrance visas. Then, obedient to Chile’s cruising regulations, we had sought a sailing permit from the
Armada,
the Chilean Navy. We had been told to expect a stultifying bureaucracy, but the demise of military government had left the whole process perfunctory. “You’re supposed to radio us every day and tell us your position,” a black-uniformed
Armada
officer, Captain Hernandez, told us in perfect English, “but I wouldn’t bother, because I don’t think anyone really cares where you’re going. Where are you going, by the way?”

For a heartbeat I had considered lying in case the Genesis community had contacts within the
Armada,
but Hernandez’s friendly manner made the thought instantly ridiculous, so I had told him of our plans to explore the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo.

“Good God, why?”

“Bird-watching,” I lied, for it did not seem entirely sensible to admit that we risked an armed confrontation with a group of survival-minded environmentalists, who, I believed, had murdered my wife and were even now holding my daughter against her will.

“We’ve come to see the green-backed firecrown hummingbird.” David convincingly embellished my lie.

“I’m hardly an expert,”—Hernandez seemed to find nothing particularly strange in the idea of men sailing thousands of miles to spot a bird—”but you might have better luck farther south. Still, I’m sure half the joy of bird-watching lies in the search, yes?”

As Captain Hernandez began to prepare our official papers I wandered to the wall opposite his desk to examine the large scale charts that were pasted together to make a continuous map. I peered very closely at the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo and particularly at the Isla Tormentos, and saw that someone had inked a small square mark on the shore of the island exactly where I had presumed any settlement might have been built. I tried not to betray any particular interest as I turned towards Hernandez. “Are we likely to find any fishing villages in the islands? I’m thinking of places where we can find provisions?”

Hernandez banged his rubber stamp on our permit, then offered me a dismissive shake of his head. “There’s no fishing village for a hundred miles, only a community of hippies on Tormentos. They’re an odd lot. They sail off and make a damn nuisance of themselves to the Japanese, but they keep well out of our hair. No bird fouls its own nest, eh?”

“Indeed.”

Hernandez had crossed to the wall of charts and tapped the inked mark, thus confirming my suspicions of where the Genesis community was hiding. “I doubt if the hippies will be of much use to you if you run short of supplies,” he said scathingly. “They seem to live, how do you say—low on the hog. For all we know they may all be dead by now. The winters there are hard, very hard. Not that you need worry. There’s plenty of fresh water in the islands and as many fish as you can catch.” He ceremoniously presented me with
Stormchild’s
sailing permit and wished us both luck.

We went back to
Stormchild
where I copied onto my own chart the location of the Genesis community’s settlement. At last, after all the supposition and imaginings, we had a destination. I had found Nicole.

And now, one week later, we were being buffeted by the great seas and drenched by the rain and whip-lashed by the salt spray as we struggled against a pernicious south wind to round Cape Raper and gain the Gulf of Sorrows, beyond which we would discover whether the hippies, low on their hog, still lived. I was nearing Nicole.

As we crossed the Gulf of Sorrows the wind and seas became atrocious. We had come to Patagonia in its summer season, but the weather was like a bad northern winter, and our journey had deteriorated into a sodden hell. Squall after squall savaged across the water, the wind rarely dropped below Force Seven and never once veered from due south, and thus it took us three days to claw our way southward across the Gulf. It was three days of hard tacking into a scouring, soaking, dispiriting bitch of a wind, and the misery worsened when I could not find the entrance to the channel that would eventually lead us to the Desolate Straits and to the Isle of Torments. For two whole days we beat up and down that wind-shredded coast till at last a tuna boat radioed us directions.

We escaped the great ocean waves into a network of channels that were bounded by sheer black cliffs, which, during a rare moment when the clouds lifted, I measured with the sextant and found to be over four hundred feet high. The great rock faces cast the narrow seaways into a perpetual gloom through which waterfalls plumed and fell in white smoking streaks. Sometimes it rained so hard that it was difficult to tell where the waterfalls began and the sky ended, and always there was a pervasive mist that permeated
Stormchild
’s cabins so that every surface on the boat became damp and slimy with mold. Even the air seemed sodden.

We motored south in this gloomy, dank world, into which the ocean waves reached to swell and suck green water against the broken black rocks. The tides had a rise and fall as fierce as any in the English channel, yet these tides seemed to follow no set pattern by which we could forecast their surge, for the moon’s metronomic tug on the water was confused into craziness by the complexity of the coast’s labyrinthine channels. In places, where boulders protruded close beneath the water’s surface, the confusion hatched whirlpools and tidal rips that waited in vicious ambush. The whirlpools were glossy, silent, green-black slides inviting a boat to destruction, while the rips looked as though a demented blender was thrashing madly just beneath the waves to explode white spray fifteen or twenty feet into the rain-filled wind. We dared not risk sailing blind into such dangers by traveling at night, so instead we would pick what seemed like a sheltered cove and try to find a lodgement for our heavy anchors which usually just dragged across rock or snagged in the thick floating beds of kelp. One of us would then have to use the dinghy to carry mooring lines ashore, which, because there were rarely shelving beaches, inevitably meant a dangerous scramble across slippery, fissured, weed-slick rocks and an inevitable soaking as a wave surged ice-cold water up the boulders. Whichever of us did that singularly unpleasant mooring duty would then row frantically back to
Stormchild
to be revived in front of the saloon’s small diesel heater. “Christ, but I’m too old for this sort of caper,” David said one night as he shivered half naked in front of the heater’s feeble warmth.

“We used to do it for amusement, remember?”

“We used to do a lot of things for amusement that we can’t do now,” he said gloomily, then he turned a dinghy-sailor’s accusing eye on me. “Isn’t yachting supposed to be fun? Isn’t that what you cruising sailors always tell me? How you relish the adventures of far waters? I do assure you, Tim, that however wet and cold I make myself in the
Holy Ghost
”—the
Holy Ghost
was David’s irreverent name for his beloved racing dinghy—”there is always a welcoming fire and a decent pint of bitter waiting in the Stave and Anchor.” He glanced up at the chronometer mounted on the saloon bulkhead and made a swift calculation of what time it would be at home. “I suppose they’re just closing up the bar now,” he said wistfully, “and John will have a fire going, and a decent fug of pipe smoke, and we’re stuck in Patagonia.”

Even moored with two lines fore and another two aft, and with our heaviest anchors clutching what grip they could find, we were not at peace. If either of us had miscalculated the length of the mooring lines, and the tide then dropped or rose too fiercely, we would have an unpleasant half hour on deck rerigging the thrumming ropes in the wild, wet darkness. Night winds whistled and howled through the towering gulfs, bringing thick mists or flying clouds that poured sudden downbursts of violent rain on
Stormchild
’s teak deck. Worst of all were the
rafagas
—the sudden gales of deflected wind that, spilling and driving themselves down the sheer cliffs, would strike the water vertically with the speed and force of a hurricane.

Under the impact of the
rafagas
the water would be flattened into a white sheet of shivering foam that was as terrifying to watch as it was to endure.
Stormchild
was hit twice, and both times she was laid right onto her starboard beam as plates and cups spilled in a shattering stream from behind the galley fiddles. David and I, clutching like grim death to whatever handholds we could seize, stared at each other and waited for the inevitable disaster. The first time an awful scraping sound, just audible over the insane shrieking of the wind, betrayed that the big anchors were dragging across rock, but then, slowly, painfully, miraculously, our boat righted herself. In the second knockdown Joanna’s portrait, which I had believed to be firmly fixed in its frame, had somehow come loose and its glass had shattered on the saloon floor. I could not work out whether that omen was good or bad. The next morning, when I retrieved the big plough anchor, I discovered its shank had been bent like a hairpin.