Following the Curve of Time

By Cathy Converse. TouchWood, 208 pp, $24.95, hardcover

Although Cathy Converse’s Following the Curve of Time doesn’t entirely succeed, it is an important addition to the growing library of books about life on the B.C. coast.

That Converse falls short of illuminating the life of her subject—
M. Wylie Blanchet, author of the West Coast cruising classic The Curve of Time, first published in 1961—is not surprising. Blanchet was private to the point of being reclusive, and left little written legacy beyond that one book and a posthumously published children’s story. “She lacked social graces and preferred solitude to spending time with neighbours or her community,” Converse writes, “and as she grew older she cherished her privacy even more.”

Compounding the Blanchet enigma is that even though the original Curve of Time is essentially autobiographical, it is not psychologically revealing. “Capi” Blanchet’s calm prose deals well with the land- and seascapes of the Inside Passage and the North Coast fiords; with the joys and inconveniences of hosting five children and a dog on a 7.6-metre wooden boat, the Caprice; and with maritime disasters narrowly averted. But we don’t learn much about why she loved the boating life, or why she was raising her brood alone.

Converse’s biography fills in many of the blanks. We learn of Blanchet’s childhood in Quebec, full of sailing excursions on the St. Lawrence and other tomboy enthusiasms; of her marriage to the depressed and fastidious Geoffrey Blanchet; and of his death while on a solo voyage on the Caprice. His body was never found.

What we don’t learn is the impact of this tragedy on Blanchet. She never remarried, yet it may be telling that she kept the boat. Nor do we discover why some of her children were dismissive, even skeptical, of her writing career. Her daughter Elizabeth, who inherited some of her writing talent, once said, “A lot of what is in that book is bunk, I ought to know, I was there.” Converse, however, never ferrets out what was “bunk”, or why.

Nonetheless, Blanchet’s biographer succeeds in pointing us back to a classic seafaring story—and to a time before GPS receivers and cellphones, when every West Coast voyage was one of risk and discovery.