The Year of Broken Glass

Copyright © Joe Denham, 2011

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TYPOGRAPHY & COVER DESIGN:
Carleton Wilson

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Denham, Joe, 1975–

The year of broken glass / Joe Denham.

ISBN 978-0-88971-252-2 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-88971-285-0 (ebook)

version 1.0

I. Title.

PS8557.E536Y32 2011
  
813'.6
  
2011-900044-X

For August and Isabelle

Shine on all the fishermen

with nothing in their nets.

– Joni Mitchell

MIRIAM WAKES EARLY, before sunrise, knowing this will be the day the floats wash in. Three days ago, the
Velella velella
heaped up so thick she couldn't walk anywhere close to the tide line, thousands of blue jellies rotting black in the mid-spring sun. Then the garbage. All the way from China, from Japan, condoms and candy wrappers, Styrofoams and plastics.

Now, this morning, the full moon pulls the flood tide high up the beach and the last of the dissipating westerly pushes the floats in. The mundane and the prized, the poorly blown and the perfect, all of them precious to Miriam. All of them totems of human utility, of history, of time. Of an element fired and forged, worked and then relinquished, by chance, back to the deep wilderness of the open ocean.

She slips her warmest wool sweater on, ties her hair back and stretches a small LED headlamp over her forehead. Poseidon rubs his thick purring body against her leg, noses her hands as she pulls on her gumboots. “Coming?” she asks, stroking his silky fur. Then she steps outside, into the cool pre-dawn blue, and heads across the apple orchard toward the sea, the white cat bounding through the tall grass beside her.

I'M TIRED OF the end of the world.

Every morning excluding Sundays—that's family day, not God's day—Pamela Penner's voice works away at the hem of my dream till it's sufficiently frayed and the threads unravel. This morning I was dreaming Jin Su and I were on a big old Taiwanese ketch with all sails unfurled in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A massive flock of albatross began to swarm the boat overhead, mewling in a great chorus over the creak of the canvas sails flexing in the wind. Everywhere around us the wide open blue, the sun bright on Jin Su, the groundswell serene. Then Pamela Penner's voice, it's 6 a.m., early morning news, something about Obama, the Middle East, as the albatross stomachs tear open and my childhood lego spills out, assembles mid-descent into flapping, screeching legotross, and I'm awake.

“Can you believe this guy actually dressed up in drag so he could use his deceased wife's membership at the Y?” Pamela reports. “Well he
is
back on the singles scene,” her co-anchor pipes in. “I understand competition is fierce these days. I suppose he figured he'd better get those pecs…” That's when I press the snooze button.

Dawn's a different blue, huddled, dark, and it's sifting in through the white cotton curtains. The air I breathe is unseasonably cold for the third week in April. Must be a hard westerly blowing. Might be one of those days. Anna stirs beside me, sniffles, then rolls onto her side and pulls the duvet over her head, as she always does. I swing my legs to the floor, lift to sitting, and tuck the duvet into her back.

In the kitchen I cook up scrambled eggs and toast. I can't get the legotross and Jin Su and the drag-dressing widower out of my mind. Last fall only two million of the estimated eleven million expected sockeye returned to the Fraser River. Whole runs disappeared. Now there's a smoke-and-mirrors judicial inquiry and some talk about maybe acknowledging that parasitic or viral contamination from the open-net fish farms up and down the coast might be a factor. There's some talk of industry, and the wild fish remaining, and change. And here I am, thirty-four years of age, falling asleep to an article in
The Walrus
about the city of plastic floating in the North Pacific Gyre, dreaming of legotross and waking once more to Pamela Penner. A once-young idealist, turned workaday fisherman, cooking eggs (organic, local, free-run, of course) in my rented kitchen for myself and my eleven-year-old son, Willow, who's gotten up to share breakfast with me, as he often does, before I head out to sea with my disillusionments and deceits.

He sits at our old oak veneer table and picks at one of the delaminated strips lifted and peeling. “Don't,” I say, sliding his plate across the table as he flips his long blond bangs out of his eyes and looks up at me, saying nothing. So I say nothing back. We're both like this. Silent. Men of few words. Though I suspect that Willow is, as I am, a man of many thoughts. So we both sit here at our eggs together, thinking.

A decade ago, an article like the one I read last night about the albatross would have set me searing. Willow was an infant, Anna was beginning her master's in environmental ethics at UBC, and I, recently graduated with a degree in sociology, was riding the wave of new-millennium environmentalism from issue to issue, outrage to outrage, like everyone we hung out with at the time. But now everybody knows about the albatross, about the massive whirlpool of plastic. And they know about the 386 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere. They recycle, eat organic and use non-disposable grocery bags. Some even supplement their grid power with solar panels, or install solar hot-water heaters on their roofs. Some drive hybrids, while others don't drive. I read recently about a group of artists who flew in carbon-dumping jet planes to Midway Atoll so they could view for themselves the carcasses of baby albatross with piles of bottle caps and flecks of plastic amongst the brittle bones. So they might be inspired.

On my thirtieth birthday, after a long night of drinking at the bar, I drove my pickup clear off the road, full speed, down a forty-foot embankment and into the base of a cedar tree, the only thing between my truck and the bedroom wall of two little girls, Claire and Christina. When I came to, blood gushing from the gash in my forehead (I still have a long horizontal scar just below my hairline), it was to the sound of their panicked screams. Shortly after, scared shitless, I walked into my first AA meeting. I've been sober ever since.

And how's that been? Sad. Uninspired. I hadn't realized how much I relied upon the euphoric binges, even the glow-over of the nightly Scotch-and-sodas, to keep my doubts at bay, to keep me searching, seeking, hoping. There's a distance around the thirty-fifth latitudes, north and south, where very little wind blows. The subtropical high. It's also known as the horse latitudes. Back in the days when trade ships crossed the high seas with only their sails to power them, it's believed the crew would throw horses and other livestock overboard to preserve drinking water if the absence of wind left them stranded for too long. That's how my sobriety has been these past five years. The horse latitudes of my life.