Cornish arrived there at 13.39 when the tug was seaward of the Hakai Passage on a course that diverged from the Calvert Island coastline. At 16.00 it was almost due west of Pearl Rocks. The fog was still very thick and Cornish, anticipating the speed and distance run by the tow correctly, had switched his radar scan to very close range, expecting tug and barge to appear in the North Passage between Pearl Rocks and Calvert Island, or just to the west of Watch Rock about five miles away at the other end of the Rankin Shoals.
In fact, at 16.00 we were almost twenty miles west of the shoals.
Two hours later, with the fog still thick, it was almost dark, and it wasn’t until then that the cutter came out from behind Pearl Rocks and began a long-distance radar scan. But it had missed the opportunity to pick us up and identify the tow, for by then we were approaching the offshore shipping lane for Prince Rupert and the North and had several vessels within a few miles of us.
That was the position as night fell and the cold increased. A wind had sprung up, waves slapping noisily at the bows, the tow line jerking and the three of us huddled together for warmth. I remember being conscious of Miriam’s body close against me, Brian’s too, and we were all of us shivering, the breeze and the damp cutting through our clothing, eating into our bones.
Some time shortly after midnight we must have passed Cape Scott at the north-eastern tip of Vancouver Island, nothing near us now except endless forest and the occasional logging camp. I thought we were in Queen Charlotte Strait, heading for Alert Bay and the start of the Narrows, and that we would soon be off Port Hardy. Puzzled by the barge’s increasing movement, I climbed the rungs and poked my head out above the line of the deck. There was a light in the wheelhouse, blurred with vaporized moisture, nothing else — nothing visible at all, the night intensely black. Once I slithered out onto the deck and crawled to the side, so that I could look for’ard, but the fog was so dense I couldn’t even see the bows, let alone the lights of the tug.
Wind and waves increased steadily until the barge developed a corkscrew motion interrupted periodically by the snatch of the towline. Cold and worried, we let time pass, uncertain what to do. No point in cutting the tow if there was no other vessel in sight and, though I poked my head out above the level of the deck at regular intervals, there was no sign of a coast, no lights, no other vessels, just utter blackness and the fog clinging to the barge’s towing lights in a blur of ectoplasmic white.
It was shortly after four that Miriam woke me to say she thought she saw a star. By the time I had sorted myself out and got my head above the level of the deck the fog had gone, the night sky diamond bright, everything very clear — the barge’s light, the tug’s too, I could even make out the line of the towing hawser dipping into the waves and the whole shape of the tug at the far end of it. But nothing else. No lights where the shore should be. It seemed as though we were being towed through a void. Yet the position of the North Star showed that we were steaming just east of south, the course we should be on for the Narrows.
Now the voyage took on a nightmare quality. We weren’t where we should be and I was completely lost. I had no means of knowing that we had altered course at least 45° to the eastward on reaching Cape Scott shortly after midnight, and that before that we had been heading west of south. Instead I began to feel as the Flying Dutchman must have felt, the voyage going on and on without end. I suppose at some point I reached the conclusion that we were on the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island, but I wasn’t conscious of it as a decision, there was no calculation, it just suddenly became apparent to me, and for a time I kept the knowledge to myself.
When I finally told the others the sun was up, but still no sign of the coast and the only ship an empty ore carrier headed north and a long way past us. All to the east was shrouded in fog, a dense bank of it that presented a dark, lowering wall. Once, and once only, I thought I saw something — a darker shadow, high up like a mountain thrusting the wet blanket of the fog skyward. It was there for perhaps an hour, and then it was gone, and by midday we were in fog again, with nothing visible beyond the grey, enclosing walls of it, only the shadowy shape of the tug ahead.
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…