READ Magazine | Wayne Johnston

EXCERPT THE NAVIGATOR OF NEW YORK
A novel by Wayne Johnston

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In the spring of 1886, in a letter sent just before he went south from Battle Harbour, Labrador, on his way back from an expedition, my father wrote that he was moving to New York. In fact, he was going straight there and, when he found a house, would send for the two of us. He said he had made a “great decision.” He planned, as soon as possible, to lead a polar expedition of his own. For so long, he had taken direction from “lesser men,” obeyed commands that he knew were “ill-advised,” kept silent when he should have spoken up. He said he had spent “as much time in the polar regions as any man alive.” (Nothing to write home about, Edward said, even if it was true, which it

wasn’t.) But as so many of the others had done, he must, for the time being, make New York his port. “New York is to explorers what Paris is to artists,” he said.

The next day, the horse and carriage were found on top of Signal Hill. Her death was officially declared to be an accidental drowning. But the story, which some children were only too glad to let me overhear, was that she had climbed down the steep slope that faced the sea, down to a grassy ledge, from which she jumped into a narrow channel of water between the shore and the ice that stretched off to the meeting place of sea and sky.

•••

“It’s time you really saw the sea,” Aunt Daphne said one day.

She and I drove in my mother’s cabriolet, pulled by Pete, to the top of Signal Hill. As we ascended, I looked behind me at the city, which from that height assumed the shape it had on maps. We lived on the edge of civilization. North of St. John’s there were settlements with names, but you could not call them towns. St. John’s was on the edge of a frontier that had not changed since it was fixed four hundred years ago. I imagined what it looked like from the sea, the last light on the coast as you went north, the last one worth investigating anyway. The forest behind the outlying houses was as dense as the forest in the core. In the woods between neighbourhoods, men set snares for rabbits, hunted birds with rifles within a hundred feet of schoolyards. Not outside the city but at some impossible-to-pinpoint place inside it, civilization left off and wilderness began.
Halfway up the hill, the road reached a plateau on which there were two hospitals, both strictly quarantined, one for diphtheria and fever, and one for smallpox. The road gave them as wide a berth as was permitted by the tolts of rock. I looked up at the blockhouse, from which mercantile flags were hoisted whenever ships making for St. John’s came into view. The purpose of the flags was to alert waterfront firms that their ships were coming, giving them time to prepare for docking and unloading.

“I saw the sea for the first time when I was twelve years old,” Aunt Daphne said. She described how one day, in defiance of her parents and her teachers, she first went up on Signal Hill. It was not to see the sea, she said. She went with some other girls, whose real goal was to see the gallows, about which they had heard so many stories. But they went off course and wound up on the summit of the hill.

“The open sea,” she said. “I had known all along that it was there. But that’s like knowing that the pyramids are there.”
We crested the hill, and Aunt Daphne brought Pete to a halt. I saw the open Atlantic.

“Well,” she said, turning her face sideways, shouting above the roar of the wind that suddenly was everywhere.

“It’s so flat,” I said.

She smiled. I could think of nothing else to say. Sky. Wind. Light. Air. Cold. Grey. Far. Salt. Smell. Now all these words meant something they had never meant before, and the word sea contained them all. The word sea spread outward in my mind, flooding all its chambers until, by that one word, every word I knew was changed. I would find, the next day, that from having seen the sea, I was better able to smell and taste it, too, no matter where in the city I was — indoors, outdoors, at home, at school, in my bedroom late at night.

Excerpted from The Navigator of New York by Wayne Johnston Copyright 2002 by Wayne Johnston. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.