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It is busy in Ganges, our local town, with visitors celebrating Canada Day, July 1st. Here is a memory from our Pacific voyages about what Canada means for me.
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| At last the moon shows beneath the clouds, a sign that the long gale is coming to an end and we can resume our voyage to Australia. It took us a whole 24 hours of sailing to make up the distance we had lost while hove to and drifting slowly back to New Caledonia. |
We are four hundred miles off the east
coast of Australia, the wind is gusting to forty knots and our
schooner is hove-to in chaotic seas. This is the forth day of this
gale and we are more than ready to move on to the end of our long voyage across the Pacific from our home in the Gulf Islands of
British Columbia. I sit on my night watch, wedged into the cockpit,
listen to my daughter Anne's music on the headphones and watch our
big traditional gaff-rigged schooner poke her bowsprit high into the
dark sky, heel lee rail under and slide away from the punch of the
next breaking wave. She has been performing this dangerous dance for
what seems like forever and has never missed a beat. So far.
Perhaps it is the music that sets my
mind to wandering, a collection of tunes from 'Great Big Sea' about the 'Bluenose', the
Myra River, about a vessel like mine running before a gale in the
Atlantic, but I begin to think what it really means to be Canadian.
Those songs are from the other side of the continent from my home,
but like most wanderers I have a larger view of my country than I
would have back on my island. There I might feel that Toronto was on
the far side of the moon and Halifax in another orbit altogether, but
now, hanging on until morning’s light, I am deeply touched by
'Farewell to Nova Scotia' singing in my ears.
The wind direction has shifted at last
and is rapidly building a wicked cross sea. The regular wave pattern
is now broken and chopped and this presents a new challenge. Our
schooner staggers, looses her stride, smacks her broad stern hard
down on the back of a wave and then shrugs, finds a new furrow in the
seascape and carries on. I think of all those nameless east-coast
fishermen from the past who stood on deck in seas like these and observed carefully how their schooners swam among the waves. They
thought about how they would improve the design of the next boat they
would build, perhaps a little flatter curve to the turn of the bilge,
a steeper run to the stern. Slowly the design evolved that is keeping
my ship and family safe from harm. ``Good old boat!``, I give the
deck a pat just as a slosh of warm salt water trickles down my neck.
I stand to check for shipping, catch the full roar of wind in
rigging and crash of waves and then settle back to the music in my
ears.
I am thinking about that country of
mine far back around the curve of the earth: about those things we
pretty much take for granted; our communities, our system of
government, our social programs that reach out to support all of us;
even those obvious things like the railways that were built for us by
preceding generations. They were built by people like that nameless
fisherman, like the creators of the music now playing in my ears.
Step by step, piece by piece, like designing and building a boat, a
lot of dedicated folk pouring out their lives to build a better
country. A fair and generous community that we could be proud of,
that could ride out storms and carry us and future generations safely
home.
At last the moon breaks through the
clouds and the wind is definitely easing. A few more difficult hours
of bone shaking seas and by morning’s light we will hoist our sails
again and resume our voyage westward.
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