The Rising Water of a Shared Life: Notes from a Married Gay Man in Victoria

I have a job that asks me to wait. As a tide gauge technician, I sit in a small instrument room on a wharf in Victoria’s inner harbour, watching a strip chart scribble the sea’s breathing. Every six minutes, the water rises or falls, and I record it. It is not glamorous work, but it teaches you something: the longest waits are often the ones that reveal most. I am a married gay man Victoria has come to recognize, not by name, but by pattern: the same man walking his daughter to school every morning, the same man buying baklava at the market on Saturday. My husband Paul and I have been married for fourteen years. Our daughter Ruby is eight. And in the eleven days since Paul left for a conference in Halifax, I have learned that a home without him is a different instrument, one that hums with absence.

A City Learning Its Own Name

The news this week has been full of a different kind of change. The Times Colonist reported that a first-of-its-kind Black arts and cultural centre is opening in the heart of downtown Victoria, in an old bookstore on Johnson Street. I read the article while eating a sad sandwich on my lunch break, and I felt a pang of something I couldn’t name. The centre will be a place where stories are told, where people gather. I suppose I envied that, the certainty of a door you can walk through and be understood. According to Statistics Canada’s 2021 census, Victoria has one of the highest concentrations of same-sex couples in the country. I think about that when I walk past the new construction, the scaffolding wrapped in plastic. We are becoming visible, if slowly. But visibility is not the same as being seen.

My work is about measurement, but it is also about trust. The tide gauge does not ask the sea where it is going; it only listens. I have listened for eleven days now. On the twelfth, I will drive to the airport and watch Paul walk through the arrivals doors. The anticipation is its own instrument, one I have to calibrate every morning.

The Instrument Room

The instrument room smells of salt and old copper. I have a coffee mug that says “Hydrographer” on it, a gift from Paul that I pretend to hate. The strip chart spits out a new line every hour, and I annotate it with a red pencil. This morning, I measured a mean sea level of 2.3 metres above chart datum, a perfectly average reading. That is the problem with my job: it rarely surprises you. The waiting for someone you love is the opposite. It is a constant recalibration.

My cat Basalt, named after volcanic rock because he is gray and immovable, sleeps on a pile of fieldwork notebooks in the corner. I talk to him when I get home. I tell him about the day, about the unexpected spike in the water level caused by a passing freighter, about the way the light fell on the parliament buildings. I have also, in the last week, managed to ruin a leek and potato soup so badly that Ruby asked if we could order pizza. I always add too much nutmeg. It is a small, ridiculous thing, but it reminds me that I am not the most careful kind of person.

Through the window, I watch a tugboat pull a barge of gravel toward the outer docks. The tide is slack; there is a moment of stillness before the turn. I think of a childhood memory: standing on the breakwater at Ogden Point with my grandfather, who taught me the names of the clouds, cirrus, cumulus, nimbostratus. He was a fisherman, and he said the sea was a story you had to read slowly. I never understood that until I met Paul. He came into my life like a warm front, not a storm.

The High Water Mark

We met at a friend’s wedding in Sooke, under an enormous Douglas fir. He was wearing a floral tie that should have been ridiculous, and I thought I would be polite and then leave. But we ended up talking for two hours about a documentary on migrating whales. I do not remember what the wedding cake tasted like. I remember his laugh. That is the before and after of my life: the quiet, meticulous man who measured things, and the man who suddenly remembered what it felt like to be caught in a swell. Paul gave me that. He does not know that I write his name in the margins of my tide charts, as if to anchor him to something.

We adopted Ruby three years into the marriage. I remember the day she came home, a blanket-wrapped bundle with a squall that shook the walls. Paul and I looked at each other, two men suddenly one party of three. We learned to braid hair, to make pancakes with one hand, to explain why some families have two dads. Ruby tells people, “I won the parent lottery twice.” She is not wrong, but I am convinced she is the one who made us rich.

A Waiting Room Built of Tides

The days without Paul have a rhythm. I drop Ruby at school, cycle to the wharf, check the instruments. I boil the same kettle, stare at the same coastline. But every evening, I do something new. I stand on the balcony and wait for the last ferry from Washington State. I listen for the foghorn. I close my eyes and try to smell the particular blend of cedar and sea salt that Paul carries in his hair. The anticipation is sensual, not because of the act of intimacy, but because of the nearness of it. I can almost feel his hand in mine before I have it.

Ruby asks, “When is Daddy coming home?” I say, “Three sunsets.” She counts on her fingers. I have not felt this young in years. On the weekend, I took her downtown to look at the new Black arts and cultural centre. The building is old, but the windows have been replaced. A sign in the corner reads “Named after the late Mrs. Violet Jones, a champion of community.” I thought of her: a woman who spent her life building something, not knowing that decades later a married gay man and his daughter would walk by and feel a spark of hope. That is what a city does. It collects our small, ordinary gestures and folds them into its larger story.

I have been making a list of the things I want to tell Paul. Not important things, the type of barnacle that has taken over the pylon below the wharf, the fact that Ruby has taken to wearing her superhero cape to bed, the way a particular cloud sat on Mount Baker yesterday like a hat. I write them down in a notebook I will leave on his pillow. It is not a diary, exactly. It is more like a hydrographic survey of a week without him.

What the Harbour Holds

Yesterday, I found a message from Paul on the kitchen counter. He had written it before he left, on the edge of a flyer for a local fall fair. I nearly threw it away. It said: “Take Ruby to Willow’s for ice cream. You both deserve it.” It was not a love letter. It was just a note about ice cream. But I folded it into my wallet. That is what I have learned about desire: it is not a firework, but a tide. It pulls, then recedes, then pulls again. The waiting between tides is where you live.

I like to walk to the end of the harbour breakwater at dusk. The Olympic Mountains turn the colour of a bruised plum, and the city lights begin to flicker on. I count the ferry windows, the number of cars lining up for the midnight sailing. Sometimes I think about all the men and women in Victoria who are also waiting, for a partner to come home, for a child to get well, for the courage to walk into a place like the new cultural centre and say, “I am yours.” My waiting is no more heroic than theirs. It is just mine.

I spoke to a colleague at work about the Black arts centre. She is a marine biologist, an older woman who wears her gray hair in two braids. She said, “It’s about time.” That was all. But it was enough. We stood silently for a moment, watching a heron on a mooring buoy. She does not know I am married to a man. No one at my office does, actually. We talk about sea levels, about storm surges, about the new sensor that is being installed. But we do not talk about our private shorelines. I suspect that is not unusual. There are many of us, I have come to understand, who carry our most important data inside.

I read somewhere that the average person, when they die, has taken over six hundred thousand breaths. I do not know if that is true. But I do know that I have been holding mine, in some way, since Paul walked through security at the airport. It is a gentle constriction, not painful. It is like the pressure you feel just before a wave breaks. It keeps you present.

The Return

In the final hour before he arrives, I am at the airport, in the arrivals hall, among other people holding balloons and bouquets. I hold a sprig of rosemary from our garden, because the smell is what I miss most when he is away, not the sentimental rose, but the sharp, earthy ordinary. I hear the bell of the elevator. I see his coat sleeve. And for a moment, the entire day dissolves into the press of his shoulder against mine, the familiar rasp of his voice, the particular weight of his hand on my back. We are not new. We are fourteen years old in this together.

But I will tell you, it does not feel like a routine. It feels like the first time I saw the sea from a plane, that sudden shock of blue. That is what being married to Paul has given me: not a destination, but a current. We drive home through the city, past the new cultural centre, past the harbour lights. Ruby sleeps in the back seat. Paul’s hand rests on the gearshift, and I place mine over it. He looks at me, and I know he is tired, and I am tired, and we still have dishes to do. But the waiting is over. The tide has come in.

Tomorrow, I will go back to my instruments and record the numbers. The sea will rise and fall as it always has. But I will look at the charts and see not lines of data, but the contour of a life I choose to keep measuring, again and again. That is the secret I have learned: desire does not end with the arrival. It simply becomes the next tide.