Dad fished for shrimp, halibut, salmon, cod, and crab. They were all one catch to him, but he reserved a special place in his heart for king crab. Dad was confident in his abilities, but he was never flashy. He did what he did. Money to make a living motivated him, but his passion was fish. He liked being the guy who figured out what the fish were thinking. Filling up the boat was his joy. Men get fishing or they do not get it. Dad got it. Waiting for the next crab pot to rise to the surface drove him crazy with anticipation. He would tell us boys, “We have one reason to be alive, and that’s to kill all the fish we can, and if you have a problem with that, if you don’t want to work day and night to do it, you probably should get off this boat.”
Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, Dad ordered Andy and me to put on “Gumby” survival suits on the beach at the end of the Spit. The Gumbys are constructed of thick red neoprene with feet and hands and a hood to protect men from a deadly cold sea. That day the wind was blowing up ten-foot waves off the Spit. The cold water would kill us in five or ten minutes without the Gumbys on. Dad ordered us to swim out to a skiff that was anchored a hundred yards offshore. The problem was, we could not swim in men’s survival suits. We were boys. But we did as we were told. The waves threw us back on the beach. We fell in the water, and rocks pounded me on the head. I almost drowned trying to swim past the surf. The tide gripped Andy and pulled him farther out into the Bay toward open water. He panicked and was shouting for help. He thought he was going to drown. Dad was yelling at him, “Swim, you bastard! Swim!”
“I can’t make it,” Andy screamed back at him.
“Don’t you ever quit, don’t you ever quit!” Dad shouted.
“Come get me!” Andy shouted.
“No,” said our dad. “Until you are dead, you never quit.”
Tourists on the Spit who saw Andy’s thrashings alerted the harbormaster who raced his skiff out to save Andy, who said that was the first time he was afraid of the sea.
Since that time, none of us Hillstrand boys ever quit—anything!
Dad taught me another hard lesson. My mother had already warned me about stealing. When I was five I stole a candy bar, and she made me take it back and apologize to the storeowner. Six years went by, and some kids stole one of our 25-horsepower Evinrude outboard engines. With what my brothers and I viewed as perfect logic, in turn I stole a pair of oars. It was only fair. My father was enraged when he found out. And I lied to him about it. He kicked my ass and shoved me out the door. “I didn’t raise a family of liars or thieves,” he shouted at my back. “You are no longer my son. You are out of the family.” I was eleven. I slept overnight in a culvert in the freezing cold, as wet as a drowned rat. I went back home the next day because I had nowhere else to go and I was hungry.
Like it or not, he made us who we are.
Not long after my overnight in the culvert, I asked him how many beers would make me drunk, and he said, “Let’s find out.” He started drinking with me. It was cool getting drunk with your dad. The second time I was drunk, I downed a bottle of blackberry brandy. Dad was furious because he thought my friends had pressured me. He did not want his sons to be followers. For him, nuance and that moment’s frame of mind meant everything. He did not mind that we grew pot out on the Spit. It was all the same to him, and we grew pot by the bagfuls. Grandma Jo sniffed out the plants, pulled them out by the roots, and took them to her house in her pickup truck and burned them in an oil-drum fire. We laughed imagining her standing by the drum, watching the flames, getting stoned.
Dad challenged us to make us better. He expected more of us. And yet he never refused us the freedom to be boys. My brothers and I were driving vans in town at ten and eleven years old. The Homer cop pulled us over and called our dad. Driving was a thrill, but Andy and I needed to find other things to go fast in. I went flying with friends with licenses, and I would hang out at the Homer airport and clean out lockers for free rides. If I had become a pilot, I would be dead now. I would have pushed the envelope too far, like I still do with motorcycles. When I was a teenager, I slid my first motorcycle under a Toyota. I raced motorcycles full throttle. I knew no other way. I drove my next bike, a street bike, through a stop sign at ninety at a T-bone intersection and went right under a car. Today, I own a Harley Fat Boy with a nitrous boost that generates 300 horsepower. I took the Harley out with a crabbing buddy, Phil Harris, who rides with no wind-screen and no helmet. He was going ninety miles an hour down the highway lighting up one cigarette after another with a powerful butane lighter. That is what I call dedication. This spring I discharged the nitrous and was going 130 mph when I hit a turtle crossing the road. It scared the hell out of me but the rush cleared my mind of life’s usual bullshit.
Like Andy says, “When we were five years old, Dad taught us everything about how to ride bikes except how to use the brakes.” We thought of danger merely as a higher form of fun. A popular book today is titled The Dangerous Book for Boys; we did not need to read about danger. We lived it without knowing what it was; we knew how it felt, and it felt fine. Andy found a beehive one time that I wanted to set on fire. I was ready to douse it with a coffee can of gasoline, when he ran past me and slammed the hive with a two-by-four. Of course the bees buzzed after us. They could fly a whole lot faster than we could run, which surprised me at the time. And they were mad. We were running down the road pulling bees off our faces.
We also battled, nearly constantly, with rocks. We used garbage can lids for shields. We threw so many rocks at each other I think we changed the shape of the Spit. Inevitably, some rocks hit their targets. One summer, our mom was continually driving us to the Homer hospital’s emergency room for stitches. On one visit, the doctor asked her, “Mrs. Hillstrand, you’ve seen this done enough times. Why don’t you do it and save yourself the trip?”
We laid claim to my grandfather’s old boat, Try Again, to play on. It was wrecked and listing on its side in the mud off the Spit, and we waded to it at low tide. When the tide flowed we were at sea covering continents in our dreams. We were pirates. With wooden swords, rocks, and garbage can lid shields, we ruled our imaginary world. We fended off anyone who dared to challenge our supremacy. Other boys liked to join our gang. Even as kids, we had reputations that worried mothers, especially mothers of girls, but our bad ways drew kids like drunks to an open bottle.
That reputation may have started when word got around that we had nearly drowned. Three of us, Andy, my youngest brother Neal, and I stole a twelve-foot, fiberglass, pumpkin seed sailboat that my dad had run over when someone parked it and two others like it illegally in his slip; the one that survived his rage had hairline cracks in its hull, and those cracks were soon our undoing.
We had spied the boat earlier in the morning, and as the day wore on, the thought of taking it for a joyride became irresistible. We talked about what our dad would do if he caught us, but the more we talked, the more certain we were that we would take the boat for a spin. It did not dawn on us that we did not know how to sail. And we set off. We were wearing jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps, and no life jackets. We pointed the bow in the direction of the other side of the bay, where we hung out in secret coves, sometimes camping for three or four nights at a time living off mussels, crow, squirrel, Dungeness crabs, and fish.
Two hundred yards off the Spit, the cracks started to leak, then gush water. The boat capsized. We were thrown out. We treaded freezing cold water. Our baseball hats floated away. We wanted to scream for help but we did not want anyone to find out that we had capsized the boat. Our true dilemma was the choice between drowning and dishonor. From the deck of the Land’s End Inn our grandma had seen us tip over. We watched her run for help. We did not know how long we could hold out. Our body temperatures were dropping fast in 42-degree water. We were facing the Spit and just starting to panic, when a woman’s voice rang out behind us. I turned around. There, twenty yards away, was our Sunday school teacher, out of the blue, going by us in her skiff, out for an aftern
oon of pleasure boating. She pulled us aboard, shivering and ragged wet, and with the capsized boat’s painter tied to her boat’s stern she towed the boat to shore as if nothing had happened. Like the stranger told me, one of the angels over my head was watching us that day.
Dad loved to hunt, which meant we hunted with him. We were younger than ten when he gave us our first guns—over-and-under .22s and .410s. Neal was into guns; he had taped shotgun shells to the end of his BB gun, using the BB as a firing pin. He had the most powerful BB gun in the world. He shot a raccoon with it. Neal, whom we called Diabolical and Neal the Eel, for carrying live eels in his pockets for snacks, had a hunger for combustibles. Once, he wondered what would happen if he threw a coffee can of gasoline on an open fire. The flame roared back at him. He spilled gas on his shirt and burst into flames. He ran around in circles, and we tackled him and rolled him in the dirt, but his burns sent him to the hospital anyway. Neal was always disappearing. He made himself scarce when Dad started yelling. He wandered quietly away. He fell out of the car on a trip to Buffalo. Neal once glued his eyes shut with super glue. He chopped down a tree that I was standing in. When he was fourteen, he hid in an arcade one night with a pillowcase and a crow-bar. He jimmied open the vending machines and filled the case with $250 in quarters, which he dragged home, leaving a trail of quarters for six blocks. He would not say whether he won the money or had stolen it. We gave him the benefit of the doubt, but we knew the truth. We called him Diabolical because as boys we thought he possessed the greatest criminal mind of the last century.
Andy was cut from a similar pattern. He believed all dreams were possible. He wanted desperately to be an astronaut ever since he watched the moon landing on TV in sixth grade class. He built a rocket out of a zinc and tin garbage can. It was my idea to pack fireworks and explosive aerosols under the can as rocket booster propellants. Andy, with great ceremony and wearing his own version of a flight suit and helmet, climbed into the can. I lit the fuse. Andy never left the ground. But his trip to the emergency room was fast. One time, he fashioned wings out of balsa wood and newspapers, like a homemade kite, and attached them to his arms with string. He looked like a bat with headlines. We had our doubts, but the thought of him crashing was delicious. He climbed the tallest tree. He flapped his arms and jumped. There was no miracle that day, except that he did not kill himself. He only broke an arm.
We could beat up on each other. But if an outsider threatened us, Andy descended with fury. He has been there for us our whole lives, like the time I rolled a car off the Spit road. I did not want the police to revoke my license. I did not have insurance. I called Andy from the wreck site to come before the police arrived. In only minutes, without a question asked, he was greeting the authorities with a story that they did not believe but could not officially prove was a lie.
When Dad was away fishing, we used our guns without permission. We chose sides, and pitched battles began. We quickly learned to our delight that we were able to dodge .22 bullets from a quarter mile away. At Grandma’s house we shot back and forth across an open field. To hear bullets snap overhead was cool. Fortunately, we were not good shots and no real danger to ourselves. For that, we had to wait until Dad took us mud duck hunting. Each time we returned to the skiff he ordered us to unload and hand off our guns for safety’s sake. I handed up my gun to Andy and boom! It went off next to his head. He started to laugh. It was a psychotic laugh, like he was amazed to be alive. I did not have the same reaction when he shot me. I was standing in front of him when mud ducks flew toward us, and I said to myself, “He wouldn’t shoot at them, would he?” He shot. The blast knocked me over. I picked myself up and picked pellets out of my rain gear right up my body to my face.
Oddly enough, Grandma Jo first taught us to shoot. We were eight or nine at the time, and she knew how the bears and moose frightened us when we visited the outhouse. She wanted to show us that she could protect us. Our grandfather Ernie had died by then and was buried in a grove near her homestead log house. He had killed two black bears from his front door with a .44 magnum pistol that he bequeathed Jo. While we watched, she drew the gun close to her face to aim and pulled the trigger. The recoil bucked the hammer into her head and gave her a mild concussion and powder burns.
Dad felt that killing a moose would somehow improve our character. One time I had just returned from a fishing trip and was tired. I had no desire to go hunting with my brothers and with Dad; to be honest, I had looked forward to a hotel with room service and a lady. But I went moose hunting. We flew to Emerald Lake and camped on the shore. The first day, Dad shot a moose, and I thought, Hey, this is great. We can leave now. The airplane came to pick us up. I was packed and ready. But then, the plane took off again without us. I could not believe my eyes. I said to Dad, “I thought we were leaving.”
He said, “Not until everyone shoots a moose.”
At that moment I saw a moose on a hill. I started running after it with my rifle, firing as I ran. I chased that damned animal until I could not stand up; at one point I nearly ran off a cliff. I was yelling at it I was so angry, and the more I yelled the faster it ran. The moose got away, and on that trip I never did bag a moose. Dad finally let us go home.
He organized these hunts down to the last pretzel. One time he brought along the sons of a friend. He planned out the stores, enough for each boy. There were seven oranges and seven apples and seven steaks, and so on. He put on the menu things I did not like, like liverwurst. I would rather eat moss and leaves. My brothers and I went for a hike with Dad, and while we were tromping around the mountains his friend’s sons, whom we called the Cabelas Brothers (after the well-known outdoor outfitter) because of their spanky hunting outfits, ate all the oranges. The old man was beside himself. I thought, there goes the hat. He was so pissed off he kicked them out of camp.
We also hunted for the famous brown bears in Kodiak. One time, as we neared the island on Bandit, a bear was swimming the Shelikof Strait twenty miles at sea from the direction of Ninagiak Island off Katmai National Monument toward Kodiak. The big animal looked beat; it tried to climb into our boat, and we went out of our way to avoid it. On that bear hunt, Andy got separated from us. We had no idea where to find him. He spent the night in a tree with brown bears prowling around under him. One time, when we were younger, Andy was sixty feet up in a tree with his gun waiting for a bear to walk by. We chopped down the tree, and Andy tried to fly again. He stuck out his tongue. And when he hit the ground, he nearly bit it off. Blood was everywhere.
My brothers and I started working on fishing boats when we were eight, and it could not have been too soon. I used to sit on the beach while Dad let me watch him sail out. I was mad about that. I wanted to work because I wanted to fish. Fishing is my oldest memory. I must have been two, and my brothers and I were aboard Dad’s fishing boat. We were out with him doing what we could do, which was not much, but it was fishing anyway. Andy was crying in a bunk, and I tried to get to him to comfort him. My dad was running the boat. I reached Andy’s bunk, and Dad told me, “I’m going to kill you if you don’t get away from there.” I could not see why he would not let me go over to Andy. But I did comfort him. After that, Dad kept me on land until I was eight. Out of the blue he told me one morning, “Come on, let’s go fishing.” That was my first working trip. As the bait boy I received one share of the catch, which meant $79 that my mother put in a savings account. I was suddenly rich beyond my imaginings. From then on, I worked for hours each day. If the fishing season was open, Andy and I fished. By the age of ten, I was working each summer with no time off. I did not know anything else. Dad said we were going fishing, and we loved it. We were like puppies. That was how fishing got in our blood. When we cut loose from Dad after we were teenagers, we looked around and we knew of nothing else with the same potential for fast money and such ample joy. Even at that tender age, we beat the older fishermen out on the fisheries. Our fish were bigger than their fish, and we caught more than they caught. That
’s what life was about. We competed through and through. Fishing hooked me entirely.
If we could not fish at sea, as boys, we fished off the Spit. The Kachemak Bay was out our back door. We caught fish, made a fire in the rocks, and baked it. And what remained of our catch we sold to the fish market in Homer for $1 a crab and $5 a salmon. One time with Dad and Mom’s help we built a raft on the beach of scrap and driftwood. The finished craft weighed more than a battle tank. It sank to the bottom at the first launch. Dad felt sorry for us, I guess, because soon after he built us a hydroplane speedboat that looked sleek and dangerous, powered by two 50-horsepower Mercury engines. It was twelve feet long with a eighth-of-an-inch plywood hull. We drove with a recklessness that scared even him. He knew we would kill ourselves if we continued racing it, and he dug a hole with a backhoe and buried the boat. Even we understood why he did it. He told us, “I have given you boys every means at my disposal to kill yourselves, and you have failed.”
We did not think about luck when we went fishing. We thought of fishing as catching fish. One time, as usual, tourists were throwing lines into the waters off the Spit, frustrated when no fish were biting. Homer promotes itself as “the halibut fishing capital of the world,” and catching nothing does not conform to the ambitions of visitors who mob the Spit in the summers. Several men watched Andy and me throw a net into the water. They seemed to be amused by our boyish naïveté, I suppose. In no time, salmon filled our net. One guy slammed his pole down on the ground in disgust. Another time, we waited at midnight while visitors were combat fishing king salmon off the Spit in what we called “the fishing hole,” a specific pool where the salmon returned each year. The town of Homer had decided to open this fishery at midnight. Watching the fishermen was fun. The men took it too seriously. They threw large sharp hooks into the pool in the hopes of snagging one of the frenzied fish, which would bite at anything that entered the water. They jerked back the lines with such violence that the hooks flew out of the salmons’ mouths and planted themselves in the fishermen. The town fathers panicked over this carnage and from then on, stationed two ambulances at the ready by the pool. We threw a couple hooks, caught as many kings as we wanted, and walked off. The visitors hated us.
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