Hammond Innes - High Stand

By now the movement had become most unpleasant, a roll and a swoop that combined with the cold, the cramped space that confined our movements and the resinous cedar smell of the logs to produce a sickening sensation that was near to nausea. We weren’t actually seasick, thank God, though Brian’s face became very white and he yawned a lot. The truth was, I suppose, we had nothing to bring up. We hadn’t eaten anything at all for over two days, which was just as well perhaps since there was no way we could empty any movement of our bowels over the side. For myself, I felt constipated and no longer in the least hungry. But thirsty, yes. I presume it was the salt in the air, and nausea. My mouth felt dry and rough, my body at rimes breaking out into a cold sweat that had me shivering violently.

Miriam seemed the least affected. I think because her mind was locked in on her thoughts, and her memories. She might have slept around occasionally, in an effort to fill the vacuum of her marriage, but the deep affection she had for Tom had always been apparent. Most of the time she seemed asleep — at least, she lay very still, curled up in a foetal ball as though to protect herself — and when she was awake she sat with her eyes wide, staring at nothing. She didn’t talk, though her voice was firm and quite decisive when asked a direct question; when, for instance, we had been deciding whether to swim for it or not. Her answer to that had been quite simple: ‘You don’t have to worry about me. I’m a good swimmer and can probably last longer in the water than either of you. So whatever you decide …’ And she had left it to us.

That second day at sea, cooped up in the bottom of the barge under a vast weight of cedar logs, seemed interminable, time dragging, the cold unabated by occasional glimmers of sunshine.

Whenever these occurred I would climb the rungs and hang there, my face just above the cold, wet steel of the deck, my eyes desperately searching the opaque brilliance of the humidity, searching for the shadowy shape of a passing ship, and always my hopes dashed. I saw nothing, except once. Once I was lucky and caught a glimpse of the coast away to the east of us.

It was only a brief sighting, and at the time I had no means of knowing where it was. But now, looking at the chart, it is quite obvious it must have been the Brooks Peninsula, which sticks out from the mountainous bulk of Vancouver Island a good ten miles between Brooks Bay and Kyuquot Sound. It looked to be about three, maybe four miles off. The time was then 10.17 according to the entry in my diary.

It was almost ten hours later, at 20.04, that I had my first sight of a shore light. I had poked my head above deck because I had been woken by the deep bay of a big ship’s foghorn sounding off at intervals between the higher pitch of our tug’s warning note. I nearly missed the light ashore, my eyes fixed on the sudden sight of a vessel coming out of the fog into good visibility and passing so close I could hear the sound of her engines. She was all lit up, rows of portholes, and above them a blaze of lights that showed a great bow wave creaming back to the white water at her wake. She must have been a cruise ship thundering down from Alaska on her way back to California. She was going far too fast for our purpose, and anyway, she was past us.

And then, just as I was about to duck down to tell the others what it was, for the sound of her passage was loud against the hull and they were both peering up at me interrogatively — just at that moment I caught the powerful beam of a light swinging in an arc behind the brilliance of the vessel’s stern. After that there was nothing, my eyes following the stern of the big ship now well past us, still blazing with light. They would just be sitting down to dinner and there would be wine and jugs of iced water. I licked my lips, wondering for the umpteenth time what the hell I was doing here, why I had been fool enough…

And then, suddenly, there it was again, stabbing out of the blackness well astern of the cruise ship, a powerful beam reaching a white finger of light into a bank of fog, then coming clear as it swung steadily across the ship, reaching out and momentarily illuminating the tug, swinging past it and suddenly blinding me, then on to vanish into fog again. And with the light came the distant sound of what I thought at first was a diaphone, but later identified as a horn. It was a double blast at intervals of about forty seconds and I guessed, quite correctly, that it was sounding two every minute.

I must have watched the beam pass over us at least half a dozen times before I lost it, and the lights of the ship, as the fog rolled over us again. But I could still hear the foghorn. I had been counting the interval between the flashes. It was a powerful light, undoubtedly a lighthouse, and it was flashing white every fifteen seconds, perhaps a little more. If only I had had a chart I would have known where I was.

In fact, it was the San Rafael lighthouse at Friendly Cove in the south-eastern corner of Nootka Island, and Brian identified it as such. Having explored this part of the coast when visiting his grandfather’s old home, he reckoned we ought to be about halfway down it, probably opposite where Cook had landed on his third and fateful voyage, the first landing on the Canadian west coast by an Englishman. ‘If it’s the lighthouse I think,’ he said, ‘then it marks the entrance to Cook Channel and the fjords leading up to the forestry centres of Tahsis and Gold River. But better wait till we’re in the Juan de Fuca Strait.’ That was after I had suggested taking over the barge now and trying to raise the lighthouse on the VHF set. There was a bit of a wind and it was blowing onshore, variable, but quite strong in the gusts, and the ride should be making. ‘It’s about three miles off, maybe less, and we’ll be pushed into the land quite fast.’

But he shook his head. ‘Not fast enough. And apart from that one ship, and it’s past us now, I haven’t heard anything passing us close.’ He wanted us to wait until we were in the Juan de Fuca Strait. ‘There’ll be plenty of ships around us then.’

The logic of it was unanswerable and I would have agreed if it hadn’t been for Miriam. She had scrambled up the log butts and had seen the lights, had watched the fog roll in again, blotting out even the lights of the tug. ‘And suppose the fog holds. Suppose there’s fog all the way to Seattle, to the moment we tie up at the SVL Timber quay. We’ll never see another ship. And it’ll be daylight.’ And she added, her voice trembling with urgency: ‘We’ll never get a chance like this.’

Brian started to reason with her, but she wasn’t in a reasoning frame of mind. She was very close to hysteria and it was only then I began to realize what those eighteen days cooped up in that lonely lakeside hut had done to her. ‘You can wait if you like. Not me. There’s a lighthouse there. I saw it. There’ll be lighthouse keepers, a village, people — honest, straightforward, ordinary people.’ Her voice was quite wild, the words tumbling over themselves. ‘If you won’t cut the tow loose I’m going to swim for it.’ She was staring at Brian, her eyes very large as she looked into his face.

He wasn’t going to budge. I could see that. And so could she. ‘All right,’ she said and unzipped her anorak.

She was literally starting to strip off. ‘For God’s sake, Miriam!’ I had my hand on her arm, restraining her, my voice tense. ‘Don’t be silly. You’d never make it.’ I could feel her trembling.

Brian tried again, his tone gentler than I had ever heard it before, but it made no difference. Nothing he could say, no pleading from me, had any effect. Her mind was made up and nothing would budge it. She had seen a light ashore and developed a mental block, so that she didn’t seem to hear what we were saying, and it gradually dawned on us then that if we didn’t do what she wanted and cut the tow, we should have to restrain her physically.