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
Water 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 Archipiélago 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 Archipiélago 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.