On the Broken Shore
James Macmanus
In memory of my parents, Niall and Fiona.
Don’t give your heart
On the broken shore
Where seals and sea dreams
Sing love’s song
For wind and wave
Will take your heart
And drown your dreams
On the broken shore
Anon. translated from the Gaelic by Leo Kemp
Table of Contents
The teak tree had been 25 metres in height and weighed four tonnes when it fell to a chainsaw somewhere in the deep south of Brazil. It had been stripped of its branches, hauled from the rainforest and trucked to the port of São Paulo in a shipment of 400 similar sized hardwood trunks.
He knew this because in the madness of his grief he had spent hours researching the three month journey of that single tree from the rainforest to the coastal waters of Cape Cod.
He worked out how old the tree had been, how many years of rain and sunlight had nurtured it, and how and when it had been logged.
Most hardwood from the rainforest was trucked overland to Central and North America. He knew that just as he knew this consignment from the south of the country was sent to São Paulo to take the cheaper sea route to North America. At the port it had been loaded into a container which had been hoisted on to the deck of a cargo vessel.
Ninety miles out in the Atlantic off the New England coast en route to Boston the ballast had shifted in a storm. One, just one, container had broken its deck moorings and gone overboard. The end-gate locking mechanism had snapped and ten prime teak trunks spilt into the sea. Four days later one, just one, had found its way into the path of his Zodiac boat. He was left only with the mystery of the cruel fate that had chosen it to be the instrument of his son’s death.
Cruellest of all it was his fault. Well, that’s what she thought anyway.
He’d taken Julian on his first seal-watching trip to Monomoy Island, a couple of miles off the Cape Cod coast, although the distance from shore kept shifting, and the latest storms had almost turned the eight miles of sand and scrub into a peninsula.
It was September three years ago, a calm day after the holiday crowds had gone. The Cape was winding down. Julian had been on at him to go for months. His mother said the Atlantic was the Atlantic whether you were twenty yards from shore or twenty miles. And it was no place for a boy. But Julian was his father’s son, and alongside all the passions of a 10-year-old – the Boston Red Sox, the endless planning that he and his friends put into catapult attacks on the seagull population of Falmouth Heights Beach, – was a desire to see what Dad really did on his research trips.
‘Lowering microphones into the water, Dad? Why? What for?’
‘Good question,’ said his mother.
It was a calm day, but the swell had strengthened as they passed Gansett Point and headed north-west up the coast past the villages and beaches that carry Native American and pilgrim history in their names: Washburn, Maushop, Popponesset, Mashpee, Cotuit, Wianno.
About a mile off Point Gammon, with Hyannis point in clear view, their boat had struck a semi-submerged object almost invisible in the water. The Zodiac had been moving fast, maybe 15 knots, and had slid over it, but the propeller shaft of the outboard motor had caught the trunk and flipped them over. They had both gone into the water.
Julian’s lifejacket had been on, and he should have been fine, but his head had struck something hard, maybe the outboard motor, maybe the teak trunk, as he hit the water. He never recovered consciousness. He died in the Boston general hospital three days later. Double cranial fracture and brain haemorrhage, said the doctors. He hadn’t stood a chance.
Julian’s school, like probably every other one in the United States, had campaigned on all the great environmental issues of the day: Save the Rainforest, Stop the Whale Culling, Recycle your Household Waste. Posters had been made, letters written to Congressmen and company executives, and plays performed on the school stage. It was what schools do so well. And Julian had helped create the rainforest poster, a 36-square-foot laminated