Russell always said, “He’d give you the shirt off his back if he liked you. Hell, he’d give you everything except his cowboy boots, and I’m not sure I’d want to put them on.”
Russell did not share Johnathan’s propensity to fight. “He absolutely goes to it. I’ve seen him. He tries to avoid a fight. And when he can’t, he turns into something that is very ugly. You stay the hell out of his way.” Russell said.
But he trusted Johnathan with his life.
It was seven o’clock in the morning on the Bering Sea two years ago. Johnathan, serving as the captain of the Debra D, was in the wheelhouse figuring out where he wanted to look for crabs, while the crew, including Russell, were resting below in the knowledge that in another few hours they were going to be up working for three or four days straight. Russell was in his bunk. The boat rolled to starboard 30 degrees, back and forth, with the heavy seas. At one extreme, he would be nearly standing up in his bunk, then back down so that he was nearly standing on his head. Russell felt safe with Johnathan in the wheelhouse. Even when he was off duty and asleep in his stateroom, Johnathan would wake up every couple of hours to smoke a few cigarettes and would check the boat. He could feel the boat; he sensed small changes in his subconscious mind, like a slight change in the engine’s rpms. He would smoke only three cigarettes and go back to bed.
Suddenly the boat rolled and did not come back. Russell jumped out of bed and ran up the stairs to the wheelhouse. He had one foot on the stairs and one on the bulkhead at the top of the stairs. He stuck his head up and looked across at Johnathan in the wheelhouse chair.
“Wow,” Johnathan said. “I’ve never seen the boat do this before.”
Russell thought, That’s not what you want to hear the skipper say.
He ran below for his survival suit. The boat was laid over on its side and was not recovering. In a calm voice Johnathan ordered Russell and the crew to take their survival suits with them down to the deck and find out what was causing this catastrophic list. The minute they reached the deck, they saw that a rogue wave had slammed the boat and unshackled 10,000 pounds of frozen cod hanging bait, shoving it from the starboard side, where it was counterweighted by fuel oil tanks, to the port side.
“John told us what to do,” said Russell.
They swung two crab pots over port side with the crane. The starboard rail was under water and the pots acted as outriggers, shifting enough weight to bring the boat back to only a 20-degree list, which enabled the crew to sort the bait and move the pots around to bring the boat back to an even keel.
But they were not out of trouble. They were in twenty-foot waves. The crane was sticking over port side, and another rogue wave could have wrapped the crane boom around the wheelhouse. The crew moved the bait—the hardest and fastest work they had done in their lives. Russell believed that Johnathan had saved their lives. “He was cool as a cucumber. He cracked jokes and kept up our morale as this was going on. He was constantly telling us that we were going to be all right. He did not panic once. On the other hand, I was a bucket of shit. I thought this was the end and wanted to get the life raft out right now.”
Back at fishing camp an hour went by without hearing from Johnathan. Russell had a feeling in the pit of his stomach that something more was involved in Johnathan’s delay; any easy excuse or explanation did not ring true. He paid attention to his sixth sense. Over a lifetime it had rarely betrayed him. He knew what he had to do. He did not know the best way to go about it. He could notify the Coast Guard, ask them to take a look. It was mid evening by now and growing dark in the Alaskan twilight. He could not have sat on the dock. Waiting was not his style. The Coast Guard might begin to search in daylight but Russell was not going to hang around for them to get started in the morning. He asked Dino for his boat, Rivers End (or what the men in the camp called Livers End) to take a look for himself. Dino’s boat could make 20 knots; Dino would want to go with him. But Russell wanted to go alone. It was better that way. He decided not to ask him, but just take his boat.
He reached into a trailer for a hooded sweatshirt and a slicker. He walked a couple hundred yards to the cannery’s loading dock on the river. The tide was going out. An early rising half moon pushed up from the horizon. The mud-bottomed river flowed twenty feet below the dock. Slimers with billowy hair nets under their caps and rubber aprons leaned against stainless steel tables heading and gutting sockeye with sharp knives and sliding their bodies down a slick ramp where they were being packed in bins under ice; the salmon would leave the dock by truck for a processing plant that would flash freeze the fish before being flown overnight to Tokyo. The workers quietly concentrated on the speed of their knives and the nozzles that washed away the slime. The fish gleamed like chrome in the glare of sodium lights.
Almost as an afterthought, but knowing how close Johnathan and Andy were as brothers—Andy was the first person whom Johnathan called on the single sideband radio to ask him advice when the Debra D nearly capsized, and Andy, who was in the general area at the time, threw the throttles to the firewall to get Time Bandit over to the Debra D as fast as possible in case his brother needed to be rescued—Russell decided to call Andy and tell him. He checked his wristwatch for the three-hour time difference. And he dialed. Andy’s wife, Sabrina, answered, and Russell exchanged pleasantries but he had an edge in his voice he could not hide. When Andy came on, he told him. Andy breathed out a long sigh. Russell could imagine him scratching his head. He had experienced this before, probably many times, with Johnathan getting into trouble. He asked what Russell planned to do, saying, “I can’t get there, Russ. You’ll have to shoulder this yourself.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Russell. “I just thought you’d want to know.”
“I do. By the time I get there he’ll be found or…”
“I’ll find out what happened,” said Russell.
“Call me one way or another every couple of hours,” said Andy. “Good luck. And Russ? Thanks.”
He Was Our Lodestone
Johnathan
I am still drifting on the Fishing Fever. But not like I was, and that could be a good sign. I may be in a slack tide, between flow and ebb. But tidal streams, currents, and the wind could be propelling me slowly to the southwest. Without a depth sounder, in the dark, I will not know if I am close to shore. I might have drifted out of the influence of tides in the Cook Inlet and into the Gulf of Alaska, where the rips are treacherous.
The wind has kicked up. The sky lowered in the last couple hours and is darkening now. A front is moving through from the north and west, where weather originates in this part of the world. One phenomenon that explains why the Bering Sea has the most unpredictable and violent storms on the planet, is that frigid weather fronts blow down from the Arctic as warm fronts press up from the Pacific. They collide on the north side of the Aleutian chain, which is the Bering Sea. The Shelikof Strait acts as a funnel for the winds generated by the monster fronts of the Pacific and Bering seas. Winds howl up the Strait off the land with a ferocious suction. For some reason, Alaskans call the winds Williwaws. They can blow 130 mph at their peak.
I never explain these natural phenomena to myself. I understood them once and forgot what I knew, intentionally, the better to ignore the danger. Just off Cape Douglas, currents from four directions meet—from the Kennedy Entrance, the Cook Inlet, the Kachemak Bay, and the Gulf of Alaska. The mountains behind Cape Douglas rise up from the sea in walls of ice and snow. It is a sight once seen you will never forget. The winds blow over the ice and snow and down on the waters below the Cape. It is 10 degrees colder there and winds blow 20 to 30 mph harder. The snow and ice become like tiny nicking blades against your skin. The waves, blown by the Williwaws, stack up in high and frequent sets. They build one against another, higher and higher. In a meteorological instant—as few as three or four hours—a fisherman can be in a fight for his life. The turbulence of the waters goes well beyond what any human who has not experienced it can imagine.
/> For something to do, I page through a book put out by the Alaska Fish & Game Department, which for some reason devotes several pages to the Beaufort Scale, which categorizes seas that fishermen can expect to experience in the Bering Sea. A Force 12 is the highest: “Sea is completely white with driving spray; winds are at 64 knots; visibility is very seriously affected; the air is filled with foam and spray.” A Force 10 on the Beaufort Scale demonstrates the following weather: “Waves 29–41 feet, with very high waves with long overhanging crests; the resulting foam, in great patches, is blown in dense white streaks along the wind’s direction; on the whole, sea surface takes a white appearance, bumbling of the sea is heavy and shock-like, with visibility affected.” A Force 9 shows “winds of 41–47 knots with sea waves of 23–32 feet, with dense streaks of foam along the direction of the wind, and wave crests begin to topple, tumble, and roll over.” For us on the Bering, while we have experienced Force 12 seas occasionally, and see Force 10 now and then, the routine for us is Force 8, which becomes a Force 9 or 10, and when a Force 11 happens, we are neither shocked nor surprised.
A ship went past in the far distance some time ago making about 30 knots northeast, toward either Anchorage or Kenai. I have a plastic signal-flare gun onboard, but I have not checked its condition; its shells are twelve years old. Some of my fishing camp buddies must be wondering why they have not heard from me. On other days when I am red salmon fishing, I check in from time to time to tell them what I am catching, and they must have assumed by now that I landed on hot fishing, that I am loading up and so busy I cannot talk on the radio. How would they know I do not have a working radio? We watch out for one another, but we are self-sufficient. We do not worry about friends. We know that they are capable, experienced hands who can get themselves out of most jams.
Earlier, I jumped down into the tank and chose a sockeye to eat for lunch. I had planned on a barbecue. Salmon can be eaten without adding another thing—no butter, no salt or spices, no nothing—and its juices taste great. This one was fat bellied, a female filled with roe. Her skin was slick and silvery. I held her in both hands. Back on the deck, I gutted and filleted her and set aside the roe. The meat was firm and bright red, a beautiful color that bears testimony to the wild open seas that salmon travel with vigor and enviable freedom.
I had the foresight yesterday to bring aboard a small bag of self-lighting charcoal, the kind you light a match with. I had wired a rusted, broken, three-legged Weber grill to the starboard rail in the stern out my way when I was picking salmon and cranking the reel. I lit the charcoal bag with my Bic. Flames erupted from the bag and nearly set my hair on fire. In only minutes I had a barbecue in the making and my mouth was watering. The charcoal was burning bright in blue flames fanned by the breezes of the Inlet. And then by accident I caught my boot on the Weber’s leg, and the charcoal spilled over the deck. I quickly kicked the coals out a scupper. They hissed like angry snakes on the cold sea. I looked at the salmon fillets with yearning and put them back on ice.
With lunch a miss, I look through cabinets unopened in two years to discover a Sony shortwave radio under the instrument console. I find AA batteries and I search the dial for a weather station. As I tune the radio, I catch Dido’s song, White Flag, with its refrain, “I will go down with this ship.” I spook; she is a miserable quitter and a bad omen to a fisherman. No one goes down with the ship willingly, in advance, like she says she wants to do. You fight to your last breath to stay alive. Her message is a travesty. What kind of a signal does she send young people? Quit?
Truly, this coincidence of my situation and hearing this song freaks me out. I throw the radio overboard like it is a bomb. It will do me no good; I am at the mercy of nature that no radio announcement is going to change. I need another boat to come close enough to see me waving my arms. The only announcement that will do me a bit of good is a sign from another boat that it has seen me. My heart is pounding. I am glad the radio is gone. Weird occurrences like that have explanations, like a spirit from beyond trying to tell me something I don’t want to hear.
That reminds me of the day our dad died. At the time, I was screwing a woman in a motel room, and suddenly, I could feel him in the room like his spirit was watching me. I quit what I was doing. I was embarrassed. The woman asked me what was wrong. I said nothing. I was thinking, My dad died. I did not learn about his death until the following day. I lay there staring at the ceiling. I truly believe in spirits. No one who works on the sea can help but have strong spiritual beliefs.
Sometimes, these take the form of superstitions, and I respect that. I feel small in the universe when I am at sea in an 80-knot blow. I am staring into the abyss. The edge of the earth is over the horizon. I have not yet gone off that edge, but I have seen it. I know my insignificance. I acknowledge that something out there unseen is much larger than me. And I live or I die according to the whim of that presence. That is all there really is. That is what the sea has taught me.
Dad died unexpectedly during a medical emergency flight from Homer to Anchorage. He had been fighting pneumonia. The news devastated my brothers and me. Andy and I visited his body at the funeral home in Homer. My stepmother did not allow the undertaker to embalm him. She is an environmentalist. The funeral director wanted to sell us a coffin for $15,000. We decided on the spot to build one. The director said, “I’ll give you a piece of advice, young men. Most people, when they try to build a coffin, build it too small. That makes eternity uncomfortable for the dearly deceased. And the relatives end up coming in here and buying a coffin. You could save yourself the trouble….”
We did not exactly build Dad a coffin, but we did not buy him one either. We built him a boat with a bow and a propeller and rope handles made of fishing line. We christened her The Journey and we designed her length at 6 foot 9 inch, which gave Dad plenty of legroom. We painted the “hull” black like the Time Bandit, and we wrote on the sides sayings like “Here’s Johnny!” and signed our names. Building the coffin helped us to grieve and made us tighter as brothers. As we worked with saws and hammers, we told stories, like one in particular that made us laugh. It typified my dad. One day he was in the front yard fighting with a guy who was on top of him pounding away. Andy and I ran out of the house in our underwear to pull him off. I was carrying a baseball bat ready to kill the guy, but we separated them.
The guy was furious. “I’m going to call the cops on you.”
My dad calmly told him, “You want their number?”
The guy looked suspiciously at Dad, who told him, “It’s F-UC-K Y-O-U.”
I loved the old man. There was nobody like that guy.
Andy and I picked up his body at the morgue. He was lying on a table, and we froze at the sight of him lying there vulnerable, like he never was in life. I said, “OK, let’s do what needs to be done.” We dressed him in work clothes and a Time Bandit jacket and wrapped him in blankets. We drove his body home in my Chevy pickup. Before we nailed the lid shut on the coffin, we put in a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, a Louis L’Amour paperback, a pack of Luckies, which had killed him, and notes that we wrote to him that we slipped into his pockets. A thousand people attended his wake, and nearly everybody cried. He could be generous and charming when he wanted to be, and people remembered his thoughtfulness.
The next day, we placed his casket aboard his boat Bandit, and with Time Bandit following in its wake, we sailed to the southern side of the Kachemak Bay, where Dad and my stepmother lived and where he asked to be interred. We dragged his coffin up the side of a hill, but before we could bury him, we had to dig a grave. We found an area of topsoil on the side of a cliff overlooking the water, but when we started digging we hit bedrock and his casket would not fit. My stepmother suggested a solution. She said, “I climbed over him many a night when he was passed out drunk, so just leave him there. It’ll be like old times.” Laughing and crying we finally buried him surrounded by solid rock with his head facing north.
Our old man was cut from a
rough mold. His name was John Wesley Hillstrand. A fisherman through and through, he was tough, uncompromising, and profane. He worked as hard as he drank, and when he was drunk, he could be mean, but sober he was loving and even charismatic. With five young sons, he had his work cut out at home when he was not toiling on the sea.
We loved him. He was and, even now that he has passed away, is still our lodestone. As boys we thought he was fun to watch from a safe distance. For instance, at the fuel dock in Kodiak men looking for crew jobs would wait for Dad to bring in his seine boat. They knew from his reputation that he fired one or two deckhands after each trip, and by waiting for him to return to Kodiak, they could take their jobs. He fired fifty hands one summer on the same boat.
When his hat came off, man…it was like a signal flare lifting off in the air. We would laugh but never so that he could see us. One time he was screaming and cussing, probably at us, when a seagull flying by shit in his mouth. My brothers and I howled with laughter, and this once, he saw our point. As a perfectionist and a great fisherman, he saw black and white, with no gray. He would meet someone new and he would proclaim, “I don’t like you,” in three minutes if that was how he felt.
He owned the 91-foot Sea Wife, the 86-foot Invader, and both Bandit and Time Bandit, and he skippered them back when fishing on the Bering Sea went beyond dangerous. This was before boats were designed to carry tons of water in the middle crab tanks. In those days the Coast Guard did not look for crews of boats that sank. Boats went out on the Bering with no depth sounders, no EPIRBs, and no life rafts. (Dad was unusual in those days for carrying onboard his boats a twenty-four-man Northwest Airlines life raft.) For him not to have died before his time was a miracle.
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