Chapter 16
The coast guard arrives two weeks after the tsunami.
Ruth watches from her porch as they speed through the channel toward town: a red-and-white lifeboat, towers of antennae, a
fluttering Canadian flag. They toss up a wake that crashes onto her beach.
Walker and Henry are out on Galene, again. Much like yesterday and the day before that, Annie has needed distracting. This morning, her eyes were puffy and
her cheeks tear-stained. Ruth sent her on a mission to forage for mushrooms and berries. She’s too far away now to see the
officers roll in.
Ruth walks to town on her own. Her heart races and her breathing is irregular. She makes it to the beach as three men come
ashore on an inflatable skiff, wading through ankle-deep water with crates on their shoulders.
“Ma’am,” the first officer says, shaking Ruth’s hand. His grip seems dainty, given the circumstances. He wears a navy-blue
uniform and tightly laced leather boots. “Officer Yetman.”
“I’m Harvey Dennison, from CTV,” says a willowy man in a charcoal cable-knit sweater. He holds a small notepad.
“Wish we weren’t so late reaching you folks,” Yetman says. “But what a mess.”
Others drift down toward the beach: Danika Sherneck, the owner of Lucky convenience, and the Canada Post mail carrier, Tom Hynes.
He’s still in the shoulder sling Ruth gave him to stabilize his broken humerus.
His teenaged daughter Sylvia’s gash on her left cheek is healing.
Maggie Babcock’s three-year-old, Sam, is perched on her hip.
The last time Ruth saw him for a checkup, his pockets were full of acorns.
Maggie puts Sam down next to a washed-up square of Astroturf. Sam pulls at the rubbery strands. “It’s not real grass, sweetie.
You can’t pick it,” Maggie says, lifting him back up.
The logging crew is stationed at the opposite end of the beach. Ruth can make out Isaac, surrounded by his logs and trucks.
Evan at his side, both wearing matching work coveralls. They don’t appear to be coming over.
A second officer, with a scruffy beard and hollows under his eyes, deposits a crate on the sand with a thump. “I’m Captain
Harrison Reddick,” he says to everyone and no one in particular. “We’ll need a dry spot for these supplies.”
“You can use my building.” Danika points him toward the husk of her store.
“Can you describe what used to be in that spot?” Harvey says while he flips to a new page in his notebook. “Did you lose everything?”
“There’s a tarp over there we can put underneath the stuff,” Danika says to Reddick. “I’ll get it.”
“Let’s finish the interview first,” Dennison says, clicking his pen.
Danika stares at him blankly.
Ruth has the sense that these officers will be of very little help today. It’s useful to have some additional supplies, of
course. But that lifeboat isn’t big enough for evacuations. They’ll probably be leaving shortly. Other families drift in:
the Wrights, the Vanderleests, the Fowlers. The people who have always kept Hale’s afloat, because they’re the ones who know
how to contend with the elements.
They’d been naive about nature’s true power, though, hadn’t they?
The officers give more marching orders about unloading the supplies, words about water purification, questions about food storage. Ruth is attentive, but what’s their endgame? Leave everyone here?
Now Reddick is going on about hand washing to a small collection of folks still listening.
None of that matters to Ruth.
All she cares about is what they can do for Annie.
Isaac isn’t willing to go over there yet.
He stands next to the carcass of the wharf with Evan and his head engineer, Ed Hollingsworth. They don’t need to be rescued.
More pressing issues consume him: the lack of salvageable loading equipment and no barge. Logs bundled with dog wire lie on
the truck beds, not going anywhere. He smokes an increasing number of cigarettes and doubts they brought any of those. His
mind hammers on the problem of the dwindling company accounts, the looming inability to make payroll. And then what?
Celeste’s ghost is busy knocking on his chest. She would have hated this: his chain-smoking after he’d quit. The insane workaholism
he’s been using to cope without her, let alone the fact he’s still cutting down all the goddamn trees.
God, he misses her.
He met her twenty-two years ago. She was sitting on the concrete steps of his office, wearing cargo shorts and hiking boots,
tortoiseshell sunglasses, and had her nose in a National Geographic with a stack of loose papers in her lap.
Instead of saying hello, he asked her what she was reading.
She held her sunglasses up to reveal her eyes. “Did you know the human body loses buoyancy thirty feet down in the water?”
“I did not.”
“If you dive that deep, you sink.” Her irises were strikingly dark and her pupils large, even though it was sunny. He’d never
seen her before. He knew everyone in Hale’s Landing.
“You enter free fall,” she added.
“I’m Isaac.”
“I know.” She bundled up the papers and tried to stand. The pen holding her hair in a loose bun slipped out, and in grabbing
for the pen, the papers also fell in a fluttery stack.
Isaac collected them while she collected herself, and for some reason, he already felt reverential toward her. Even when,
over oysters at the dock, she came out with the fact that she knew all about Hale Timber, that she was there to oppose his
clear-cutting practices, that she was a botanist from the University of British Columbia and logging issues were related to
her PhD dissertation. Even then, he was lost in the soft fuzz on her earlobes and the way her hair—-pulled back up into place—-curled
at the nape of her neck. She explained her research with a lot of hand movements, leafed through her papers to show him spreadsheets
of calculations from a comparative logging firm, which had moved to selective cutting and still increased its revenues.
“Do you want to get dessert?” he asked, because it would have been unreasonable, that soon, to ask if she’d relocate to Hale’s
Landing and maybe move in with him and keep having these conversations while he kissed her.
She agreed to sticky toffee pudding; eventually, she agreed to Hale’s, and him, and to finishing her PhD remotely. Isaac was
willing to move on her ideas because they made financial sense and, in an indescribable way, Celeste ensured life made sense. She was pregnant a year later and diagnosed with her first round of breast cancer after Evan was born.
Isaac now understands the buoyancy of the human body—-the lack thereof—-and the true meaning of free fall, the way pressure
can compress the air in your lungs, how grief can squeeze you and reduce the space around your inner organs while you sink.
He let Evan down when Celeste died. He let everyone down. The company went into arrears and he lost some of his best employees because he failed to pay them while he was drinking and smoking himself into oblivion.
He can’t buckle now. Not again.
The demand for lumber is going to be unprecedented. They have to get the logs off the trucks, to start. Then cross the hundred
kilometres between Hale’s Landing and the nearest functional mill. The coast guard isn’t going to help with that.
“The sawmill’s up and running in Dean Channel,” Isaac says. “Got word this morning.”
“There was a massive tsunami, for god’s sake.” Ed Hollings-worth isn’t one to mince words. He’s a tall string bean of a man
with a receding hairline and a permanent frown. “Our loading equipment is toast. No barge.”
“Let’s see what the coast guard has to say,” Evan says.
The base of Isaac’s spine tweaks. “We can’t go into the red. Everyone will lose their jobs.”
“I know, Dad.”
“We have to be responsible.” Celeste would want him to go easy, but Isaac feels himself ratcheting. “It’s the legacy of this
whole town. This isn’t just you and me. Look around.”
“So how are you going to deliver it?” Ed presses, eyebrows arched.
Isaac lets out a long sigh. “We have one truck we can use to get a load out on the backroads. What about a heavy-lift helicopter
for the rest?”
“You can’t get a helicopter right now. All we’ve got is that one coast guard boat. Plus, it’s over twenty thousand board feet
there,” Ed says. “It’s too much.”
“A log boom?” Isaac pushes. They haven’t used booms in years, since they cleared the mountainsides along the channel. They’ve
used the barge instead. Isaac racks his brain about what they’d need to scrounge up to make it happen again: diesel, chains,
cables.
“Tide and wind will destroy a boom on a good day,” Ed says. “You have a tug skipper up your sleeve?”
Beside them, the flat sea pulls the tide back out. Sedge grass arches in the breeze. Isaac doesn’t like the ocean anymore.
It makes him feel tired in a way nothing else does. He doesn’t sail, doesn’t like to fish, hasn’t skippered a boat since his
twenties. He doesn’t like the sway of it, the unpredictability.
“There’s an old tug in a yard off Juniper Street. And a side winder in the shipyard. I’ll bet we could tow a boom if the weather
holds,” Evan says quietly.
The idea coalesces in Isaac’s mind. “Evan, you can skipper the tug.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never towed booms.”
“You’ll be excellent at it.” Isaac claps him on the shoulder. “I know it.”
“But—-” Evan frowns.
“You want a million dollars of logs crashing onto the beach, Isaac?” Ed interrupts. He widens his stance and crosses his arms.
“That’s madness.”
“Do you have a better plan?” Isaac counters.
Evan scrubs his face with his hands. “I’m going to go over and see what they’re saying.”
Ed exhales hard and recrosses his arms in the other direction.
“You look like a strong lad.” Reddick puts a hand on Evan’s shoulder as he arrives. “We have more to unload.”
Within a few minutes, Evan is carrying canisters of propane off the coast guard skiff, then bags of potatoes and a case of
instant soup mix.
Ruth tears the clear packing tape off another crate that’s labelled MEDICAL. One at a time, she pulls out tensor bandages,