The Year of Broken Glass by Joe Denham

and that Fairwin’ made no mention before bed of that evening and what, in my inexcusable lust, I’d instigated between us. Recasting it all in my mind as I have this morning I feel a touch shameful and every bit the fool, and it has put in question for me the very premise of my being here. What is it that I’m after, the float or Ferris? It’s disorienting, everything that’s occurred in the past twenty-four hours, and I feel as though I can’t trust my own sense of direction, like I’m a ship unanchored, unpowered and drifting. So I resolve to slow down, to get in touch with Arnault Vericombe, and to keep his myth to myself until I’m able to do so.
    ARNAULT WON’T ANSWER. I try his numbers several times without success as Fairwin’ and I hike down to Boat Cove to harvest oysters. Fairwin’ barters with the other islanders for what he can’t find or catch in the forest or sea. The rice we ate for breakfast, for instance, he trades for each fall with salmon he cures in a small smoker below his fort. It’s his one transgression, he says, the rice that forms the main carbohydrate staple of his diet, grown and shipped up from California. Otherwise, his is the five-mile diet, and those five travelled by foot or by oar.
    We each carry with us two plastic five-gallon buckets procured from the Blue Roof Bar and Grill in False Bay. After an hour and a half’s walking we reach the bay, a beach of jagged and barnacled rock giving off to a long littoral sand-flat. There are old Salmon Enhancement Project signs along the roadside fence bordering the ravine and the little creek trickling down to Boat Cove. Once the object of some of the locals’ best intentions and efforts, the creek is now clogged with blowdown along its length, the mouth jammed with stormed-in driftwood. I remember when spawning-ground enhancement work was the new idea, it was going to save the salmon, and for a time every environmentally concerned citizen was out there cleaning creek beds of debris, building fish ladders, digging, planting, fencing. Then it was on to the next thing. Water quality, clearcuts, organic gardening, emissions… Now, some twenty years after these signs were set in the ground so hopefully and proudly signifying our efforts at atonement, the salmon are nearing extinction.
    If only Arnault’s prophecy were true. If only everything, if only anything, were that simple. Though I have always believed that indeed there are more things in heaven and earth, dear Horatio… and so I haven’t ever gone to the extremes of Fairwin’ Verge, my über-hippie hermit friend picking his way adeptly over the beach, filling his bucket with some of the hundreds of oysters clinging to and strewn amongst the rocks. He says this will be one of the last harvesting days before the algae blooms turn the bivalves toxic, so he’s stocking up.
    For my part, I walk more tentatively over the inhospitable rocks. I suppose the past fifteen years living with Horace’s money, on beaches of fine sand, in luxury, have left me soft. I fill each bucket half-full, not wanting my arms stretched down to my ankles by the time we’ve ascended back to the fort. Which I suppose is emblematic of our varied approaches, Fairwin’s and mine, of the different lengths (pardon the pun) we are willing to go to.
    Fairwin’ has chosen a life beyond reproach. He told me last night, as we were discussing the failure at Copenhagen this past winter, that his years alone on the lights gave him the clarity to see that we were beyond hope. There was something, some frenzy we stirred in one another that kept and would always keep us from coming anywhere close to the collective acuity necessary to come to terms with ourselves, and to live on the earth with dignity. His chosen path, he said, is the result of that understanding. Because, he said, given the slightest entry point the comforts of modernity are