The Year of Broken Glass (2 page)

“You delivering tomorrow?” Willow asks, rising with his empty plate to the sink.

“Depends if there's much in the traps today.”

“Wind's up,” he says, leaning over the sink and looking out the window at the alders and firs swaying beyond the house.

“I think it'll ease by midday,” I say, standing to join him. “That's a westerly blowing the cold air in. See in the trees which way the wind's coming from? Opposite the sun. That'll blow the rest of the clouds off, then it'll probably die down.” I reach out and tousle his hair like I often did when he was young and his head was at hand height. He looks me in the eye for a moment, close, and I can't believe how far from my ship I've thrown him. My only son. But there are no words for this, only a stone of sadness in my throat, so I turn, take my thermos of coffee from the counter and leave by the kitchen door.

I wish it were a door leading not out to our driveway, to this cold wind blowing in off the strait, but to a room. A provided room perhaps in a community centre or church. In that room I wish there were a gathering of people like me, a twelve-step group for those living with no-hope. I'd walk into that room, take a Stevia-sweetened muffin from the tray of goodies, and pour myself some organic black tea, unpasteurized milk and honey. I'd sit down, listen, and when it's asked if there is anyone new who would like to share I'd rise up, clear my throat, and say,
Hi. My name is Francis, Francis Wichbaun, and I'm tired of the end of the world.

•

There isn't much in the traps. There hasn't been for years now. Still I come out every week and haul up whatever crab might have wandered in over the two-week soak I've given my fifteen-pot strings of gear. Over the years of fishing the Sunshine Coast I've developed a system. The commercial licence I bought with my boat, the
Gulf Prevailer
, allows me to fish 225 traps. So I keep 300 in the water at all times. Because who's ever going to check? I have 150 here in the inlet and 150 in the sandy shallows of Thormanby Island, a small island two and a half nautical miles off the Halfmoon Bay government dock, which is just up the road from our house. So, ten strings on the inside and ten on the outside. Starting Mondays I haul two to four strings a day, weather depending. Each night I hang my catch in old milk crates from the dock and the crab live in there, piled on top of each other as only hearty crustaceans can.

I hate crab. Mostly I think they've been the ruin of me, little private devils that sucked me in with their abundance and commanding market value when I first began fishing, only to all but disappear and sink to an abysmal value the very year I'd finally gathered enough money and gumption to put a down payment on this $450,000 licence and worthless tin can of a boat I've signed my life away to. Of course the reality is they're just crab. I sucked myself in. And despite all Anna's petitioning and tears, I refuse to sell and put the money toward a decent house because I don't know what else I would do with myself. I've found, among other things, that I'm a seaman, through and through.

On Fridays I deliver my catch, of whatever quantity, to Vancouver. I take the early ferry with the crab crammed into their crates, heavy sea water-soaked wool blankets draped over them to keep the heat out. It's the most primitive of systems, but it works. On Saturdays I run the boat up to the mouth of Sechelt Inlet, through Skookumchuck Narrows, down Agamemnon Channel, past Francis Point and through Welcome Pass to Halfmoon Bay, or vice versa, but not before spending the night in Vancouver with Jin Su and Emily. I leave the house Friday morning, before dawn, and don't come back until the following night. Anna knows I make my delivery, pick up supplies in Steveston, then run the boat between the inlet and the strait, but she never asks how it went, and I suppose she assumes I sleep on the boat or in the truck, or cruise at night, and I of course don't suggest otherwise.

A flock of seagulls comes from shore and swarms the boat, diving at the old bait I empty from the traps and toss overboard into the cold water. They hover above me, screeching and shitting all over the deck, and I'm reminded of the legotross as I wrestle the crab from their grips on the traps' steel mesh. I check them for their sex, throw the females back to the sea and measure the males for size. Most are juvenile, too small to be legally harvested, which I suspect hasn't stopped the other crabber working this bay from selling them to one of the cash buyers in Richmond, but I still play by some of the rules so throw them overboard, too, hurling the occasional crab at the demanding gulls.

It's a hard job, crabbing. The traps are a good one hundred pounds empty; the crabs are cantankerous at best; the rotten squid and clam I swap out of the bait cups reeks; and much of the year the weather is changeable and cold. But I work at my own pace, and I work alone. One of the things I've come to realize since meeting Jin Su is that I want and need to spend a fair bit of time alone. Often, once I've nearly finished setting a string out, I shut the engine down and leave the last trap on deck with the end of the float line tied off to the starboard rail. I sit back on deck if the weather is fair, or in my little aft cabin if it's not, and listen. To the birds ruffling and screeching in the wind, water lapping the hull. I like the space the sea affords, the instant openness of casting off from the grid of wires and roads which is the human world.

The love I share with Jin Su is like this. An open, uncharted, unsounded ocean. We've come together as two adults, with clarity and desire. Anna fell in love with a handsome, networking, ambitious young activist who promised her the world because he was too naive and self-assured to understand that the world wasn't his for the offering. Now she rattles at the bars of the cage created by being married to a man fallen from that self-constructed precipice to where I am now, sitting quietly on my boat, happy in my solitude, looking out over these inlet waters and steep, rugged mountain ranges.

The wind gusts up and I look into its cold flare. Something floating to the north on the choppy, dark-blue water catches the sunlight and shines and glimmers like a mirror. I retrieve my binoculars from the cabin and spy what looks like a light-blue, translucent ball through them. An old glass fishing float adrift, I assume. Although this is an unheard-of rarity in waters this far inland, my first thought is not to bother with it.

Jin Su gave birth to our daughter Emily on the first of January this year. Anna and I had taken Willow to her parents in Sicamous for the holidays, a tradition we established when Willow was born. The previous winter I had thought over Christmas dinner with Anna's folks to use the elevated holiday price for live crab as an excuse to bus home early on Boxing Day and be with Jin Su, at the time a new and unfamiliar lover overwhelming my thoughts and desires, my ability to be present in any place or time without her. I used the ensuing snowstorm to postpone my returning to retrieve her and Willow for two weeks while Jin Su and I huddled in the shelter of each other in the middle of the snow-hushed city. I did the same this past season, so Emily was born into my hands, wailing with her otherworldly fire, in Jin Su's little apartment in South Vancouver in the early hours of January first, dawn just breaking over the city of glass.

And ever since that day, glass is what I've broken. Unwittingly I've sent countless drinking glasses from the kitchen counter to the tile floor, shattering. I broke the tempered glass above our covered sundeck while cleaning it of cedar debris, the bathroom window while playing baseball with Willow in the yard, and Anna's stained-glass lamp, bashing into it with my head. I dropped to the tile two of the three thirty-litre glass jugs we use to retrieve pristine drinking water from the public artesian well in nearby Gibsons, and the last I tossed empty into the back seat of my SuperCab where it bounced off a tote of mending wire spools and smashed out the rear window. I've taken to wearing contacts—I'm nearsighted—which I hate, and have tucked my glasses away at the back of Anna's underwear drawer, hopefully safe from the jinx that's come upon me.

So my first thought is to consider the retrieval of the distant float to be futile, as I'll more than likely smash it to bits just trying to bring it aboard. I look again through the binoculars (it's a miracle they've thus far been spared) and of course I can't resist. So I set the last trap and buoy line out and fire up the engine. As I approach the float I drive the boat just beyond it, turn perpendicular to the northerly chop, then shut the engine down and step out on deck as the boat drifts slowly downwind. It's of the lightest blue and opalescent like oil, and as the orb of it bobs on the rippling water a rainbow of colour seems to swirl upon its inner surface. I imagine all sorts of shatterings as I drift to within arm's reach, dip my hands in, and cradle it onto the boat.

Held close, its opalescence disappears and it seems a grimy, time-worn ball of thick blue glass. Amazing—assuming that it wasn't set adrift in the inlet, but travelled in from the Georgia Strait and likely the open Pacific beyond—that it made it through those waters and the narrow, tumultuous mouth of the Skookumchuck intact. How old is this thing? And where did it come from? It's almost hypnotic, this ball of flotsam, as I turn it round and round in my warming hands, dismissing my previous fear for its integrity in my care, certain it has weathered worse. There's a large insignia stamped into the glass: a strange-looking serpentine fish with a forked, triple-finned tail, each fin splayed out and conjoined with the others at its base like a fan. It's like no fish I've ever seen or heard of, like something from another world.

•

Back at the dock Svend pokes his head out of his aft-deck engine room as I pull the
Prevailer
into the berth beside his. He takes the bow line and helps me tie off as I leap to the dock. “Not much,” he comments, surveying my measly two crates of Dungeness. “It's hardly worth it, eh?” Svend says this all the time. He's been fishing for decades and acquired his licence in the early days of the fishery when the government more or less gave them out for free; before restrictions, tax structure and black-market laundering drove the values far beyond real-world worth. When the crab price tanked half a decade ago and the elevated licence values didn't, Svend decided to trade his crab licence for the prawn licence he now holds. As dollar smart as that move has proven to be, it's left Svend at the dock, idly tinkering on his boat all but fifty to seventy days mid-summer, and although he will not confess to it, it's evident he yearns to be out year-round like he used to. His little
hardly seems worth it
's are just the reiterations of a lonely, bored bachelor trying to convince himself to feel otherwise.

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.