Chapter One ~ Preparing for the Voyage

His childhood was a dory with a hidden leak, a mess on the deck when it was least expected. He only recalled a few images, peeling paint on a bannister, the orange bleeding through from the past into the estranging time of beatings on the playground, the steps themselves foothills of a mountain he'd never be able to climb. He'd found a cigarette on the sidewalk and a candy by the porch. His hands were reluctant and his feet clumsy, and the salt air slicked his skin and ruined him for inland climates where he'd spent most of the money he'd made in his life.

His teens, when he should have been carelessly hanging from the brickwork of the justice building for a photo, he'd spent pushing a load of laundry into the window of an empty house. He'd found and lost a girl who still hung like a picture over his bed, and although they didn't talk he knew she hadn't aged. Even while wrinkles wrapped themselves around the back of his hands, he knew she was sleek muscles and a giggle when the eastern storms blew rain in from the coast. Somewhere out there Jennie was laughing, and he could see her calm gaze over the ocean while his was on her.

Everyone said his twenties would be the envy of all who came after him, but he'd spent his time being afraid to set a mousetrap in case he didn't catch a mouse. He'd worried that one of the matches in the box wouldn't light, and he'd kept his hands trapped under his thighs. His twenties were such a disappointment that he rushed into his thirties, only to find at thirty-five that he couldn't stay awake the entire night without consequences.

The thirties became the best years, he belatedly realized. When he struggled there was someone to struggle with him, if even only for a little while. He lost his grip on the painter a few times, but the boat didn't drift as far offshore as it had when he was young. He thought, for a brief moment that he would be able to hold a small hand in his, comfort a crying face turned toward the brightly lit window of a normal person's life, but the careening car of his fate had torn her small hands away. His knuckles had become swollen with the grip he'd wished for, and his eyes squinted at the stop lights in the distance which defined how fast he could move and how far he would be allowed to go.

His forties meant that he needed reading glasses for smaller print. With half a hull buried in the sand, his life was rotting at the joins. He'd spent twenty years sitting at a desk, a model of a sailing yacht an arm's length away. He'd ignore snide jokes at his expense, brush away the dead spiders and flies his colleagues used to crew his model, and concentrated instead on the old dream. The boat he'd spent months attempting to right on the Lunenburg coast was far away, and even the various canoe trips he'd taken in order to keep his hand on a tiller were but preparation for a larger boat and a longer voyage.

He'd watched videos on YouTube so he knew what to expect. He knew the bow could thrash into the waves until it seemed like it was going to dig its own grave, or that the boat might heel so far that the taffrail would drag in the sea, but a sailor had to possess confidence in his ship. The early sailors weren't swimmers, and instead banked their life on staying aboard, and although he'd taken swimming lessons, he tried to keep that more important notion in mind. If he were kilometres off shore having no choice might be more effective than swimming.

He'd begun to pepper his conversation with nautical expressions as his retirement neared, and the supervisor had him in her office to explain that people were losing track of what he was saying.

"It's the idiomatic expressions," she said. "You can't just say that people who have been recently married have 'tied a reef knot' or that you are just 'pulling someone's lanyard' when you're teasing. It's unprofessional. And worse, it's incomprehensible."

"To be fair," he had answered, "every language has its lingo. Even the IT people, or those consultants you had in for a pep talk last Thursday." That was a calculated hit. He knew just as everyone else did that they were efficiency people, pulled in at the behest of main office so they could force someone to walk the plank.

"Just try to trim it down." She left before the discussion became even longer than it had been. Sam grinned at her back.

"And I wonder what idiom that is, 'trim it down.' Some kind of lawnmower-man talk."

"Who are you talking to?"

Kelly had been hired from the temp pool directly out of high school, and even though that was several years earlier she'd proved to be efficient enough at her job to get on everyone's bad side.

"I thought you could hear me." Sam leaned against his desk. "You should get your hearing checked."

He didn't mean to troll, but for some reason Kelly brought it out in all of them. It was her pressed skirts, her tendency to roll her r's like she'd lived in France, and the fact that she had at least a dozen crosses that she wore with different outfits.

"It's fine. What did you want?"

"Staples. We're always out of staples."

Sam would have fought if someone told him he'd end up in an office, but at least no one had ever predicted that he'd help people worse off than himself. He was as far adrift from his origin as possible, for he lived in the inland desert of Kamloops and worked for INTRN, the private company which supplied counselors for government agencies and some industry clients. Every day he listened to people curse their bosses, describe the depression they felt emanated from their job, and doubt his ability to help anyone.

He was especially interested in those who admired his ship, although not when they stretched out an arm to pick her up. An older client shared his interest and he fought his company's insurance so that he could have a full complement of sessions. He met with the man every week for two hour talks as they swapped nautical terminology and stories of desperation and glory that one who'd been on a boat would understand. They were both landlubber posers, but for a brief moment he felt like they'd got one over on the boss, that they'd found the pirates gold in the delight of spinning yarns. He took to smuggling rum into his desk drawer although he did little more than pull it out significantly when conversation grew too combative.

Such moments were the highlight of twenty years of counseling, after he'd started in adoptions and foster care where he spent the bulk of his time covering the agency's butt. He remembered whole weeks devoted to purging files when investigations were getting too close to the truth, and when the dreaded FIPPA requests came, he had to work nights on the shredder. This is what had been done to him, he told people, but like a cold-war spy, he more than once lost track of information because he'd hummed Wagner while working and concentrated on his own daily opera.

Once he became an in-office counselor, his colleagues became even more drab, as though they'd been dipped in mop water before taking the position. He hadn't had pleasant lunch breaks in so long that he'd become famous for banking his lunchtime and leaving early. He skipped breaks, and saw as many clients as he could on the factory floor--as he called it--although more often it was in sealed offices in pulp and paper plants that had been set aside for the purpose. When he dealt with government contracts, he needed to be in his office, so he positioned the plant so that it obscured his face. He didn't need any more letters on his file complaining of inattention.

He worried that he was merely following the footsteps of Mel, who everyone in the office had made fun of and who eventually did buy a boat, although he didn't do anything with it. Mel's eyes were fixed on the model he kept on his desk, even while he was supposed to be concentrating on the clients, and he was constantly describing his retirement when he would be sailing around the world.

"First I will sail the inner passage, get the sense of how the boat handles the currents and wind, and then I'll go farther offshore, set sail for Mexico and Baja, and then Hawaii." Although everyone else in the office had learned to ignore him, Mel knew that Sam was interested in boats, so he'd become a captive audience as Mel explained exactly how to reef a sail, and how to discern when a storm sail might work better than a sea anchor when facing a wind running across the waves.

"Once the shakedown is done, I'll sail around the world," Mel had proclaimed proudly. "Explore those hidden islands in the Pacific, the ones no one is talking about and which are barely on the charts."

Sam worried that his own dreams had become contaminated with Mel's, that he'd become corrupted from too many fantasies over the long afternoons of government workers' unhappiness. Cris had begun to encourage Mel, and she talked about how she would join him on the trip to Mexico, leaving behind the kids and husband to get a free trip and to save money.

Mel retired four years before Sam, and luckily, because Cris still worked in the department, he was able to hear frequent Mel updates. Mel had given his model to Cris once he bought a thirty-five footer, and she'd taken it home, much to Sam's relief. He didn't want any association with Mel's eagerness for the same dream.

Mel's boat was more than seaworthy for the trips he'd imagined, but he tied it to the dock on Vancouver Island, near Sidney Harbour, for three years. The first year he endured the endless rain of the Island's monsoon climate below deck, a small electric heater keeping him warm while he read, and from what Sam heard from Cris, wrote a kind of memoir.

"It's a book about pranks in school," she told him, so proud that she knew someone who'd written a book. "Kind of boy in private school thing. And he's set it up so that the proceeds go to his charity."

Mel had soon sickened of shipboard life, and he'd begun to spend the winters in a small apartment near his son's place in Edmonton. In the summer he was mostly in dock, and he'd even taken Cris out on a cruise with her husband and son. That wasn't very successful, Sam was secretly gleeful to hear, for the men had argued about the best way to get in and out of harbour, and Mel had nearly wrecked the boat.

It was increasingly clear that Mel was afraid of deep water, and the closest he came to sailing around the world was a few short trips to Pender harbour, the place where slightly more wealthy old men went to show off their boats to others who had almost identical craft. Mel spent most of his time on land, principally in a café run by a Peruvian woman. Perhaps he'd taken a shine to her--Cris wouldn't comment on that in front of Sam--but whatever happened soon Mel began to fly to Peru in the winter and before long he'd set up his charity.

When Mel first bought a boat, people around the office said he should call it, "It's Mel's." He could have bathed more often but it was also a joke because he was so concerned about what people thought. Perhaps Mel's vehement reaction to the name had stuck with Sam, for he was surprised when Mel called his charity by a similar name. Mel liked puns, and often pretended that he could do the New York Times crossword puzzle, but the name of his charity stood out: "It's Mel's Like Charity."

He didn't want to join another charity which delivered school supplies to children in Peru, or send money. Instead, he wanted to fly to Peru, although that wasted money and resources which would have been better spent contributing to the villages he would visit. His excuses aside, his motivation was obvious. Mel wanted to have hundreds of kids, and their parents, beholden to him. He wanted them to rush over and overwhelm him with thanks, to grovel at his generosity, and in other ways assure him that he was worth their expensive regard.

He came to the office asking for donations, but other than Cris, few did more than put a few socially-obligated dollars in Mel's repurposed Halloween bucket. People began to say "It Smells Like Charity" when he was in the office and the phrase stuck.

Sam wasn't surprised when Mel sold his boat, ostensibly to help with the charity. Actually Sam knew Mel had long since given up on his dream of sailing around the world. Sam was determined to take the lesson of Mel's lack of self-understanding to heart. His steps would be slow and steady, and instead of ending up in a dingy apartment in Edmonton because his son wouldn't let him move in, his charity a sad memory for those who'd thrown him some change, like Mel, he would make his own way.

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