Time Bandit

by Andy Hillstrand

  Usually, I leave these “housekeeping” chores for the afternoons, but after Russell’s call, I could not sit in the house a minute longer.

  I have reason to be worried even if it turns out that Johnathan is only late getting in. Our friend, the president of our Bering Sea Crab Co-op, Chris Heuker, drowned two weeks ago in Bristol Bay, and nobody knows for certain what happened. He was fishing alone, like Johnathan is today. Chris also had a small boat, like Johnathan’s Fishing Fever. He was a lifelong fisherman, smart, and skilled. He could have had a heart attack. He could have been running the boat from the aft fishing station, again the same as Johnathan on Fishing Fever, with throttles and a wheel on the transom only inches from the water with nothing to hold on to. A rogue might have thrown Chris off balance.

  Maybe he fell overboard and his boat continued on. Alone in the cold water without a survival suit, drowning was inevitable. He had nobody to rescue him; he could not call for help. Johnathan and I felt saddened by the loss of Chris. We felt terrible for his family. He was the father of teenage boys. He was a great guy and a dedicated, professional co-op manager, and because he was also a fisherman since he was a teenager, fishing was in his blood. Whatever caused his death I am willing to bet he died doing what he loved to do.

  After I hung up the phone with Russell, I told Sabrina, “It’s about Johnathan.”

  “What now?” she asked in a tired, been-there-before tone.

  I told her.

  “What can you do?” she asked.

  “Worry,” I said. “He’s my brother.”

  She has told me, time and again, “Andy, I would never want to be clinging to a cliff beside Johnathan and have you decide which of us to save. I know who it would be. I’m okay with it not being me.” She would usually pause here. “This is not a criticism. It is a fact. And you can’t deny it.”

  I don’t. I love Sabrina; I love Johnathan. Just because she does not get into the same perilous scrapes as Johnathan doesn’t mean I love her less. In her hypothetical situation, I could not say whom I would save. It is not fair to ask. Sabrina wasn’t really asking. She knows. She has had to become a realist. I am a fisherman, an optimist who lives on heapings of denial. We inhabit different planets where philosophies are concerned. She is a fisherman’s wife and she has saved my life by making me examine mine. She slowly and painfully came around to understand that when a woman marries a fisherman she shares her man with the sea and with a boat, and barring death and childbirth, he is not coming home until the fishing is done. Actually, forget childbirth. One time, Sabrina nearly died from toxic shock syndrome and I could not get home. She did not expect me to. Like in the military, generals do not stop the war when soldiers’ wives are delivering their babies. Maybe a woman strikes a bad bargain when she marries someone like me. The divorce rate of fishermen is high because some women do not understand the men they married. They think they can change them and tame them. They will get them to leave the sea. Right there they have started out wrong. Sabrina knew she would never take me off the sea.

  I pat Rio’s withers and grab a fistful of his mane, then jump onto his bare back. Together we leave the stall for the paddock. I lean over and open the gate and we head in the direction of the pond, shining in the moonlight. The night is summer-still and hot. Frogs croak in the end of the pond that water lilies have overgrown. There is something so stable about this place, this farm life. I have not regretted moving here for a single moment.

  After Dad died Sabrina and I made the move. The timing was no coincidence. Sabrina liked my dad, maybe even loved him, but she saw his faults clearly. She did not like how he treated me. When my brothers and I bought the boat from him, she thought we paid him more than another buyer would have paid. People in Homer believed we had our lives handed to us on a silver platter; in truth, we worked harder than anyone else for our dad, who never helped us. He trained us to survive in the water and taught us to work hard, never to complain, and never quit, but he was a slave driver. Over time, Sabrina grew resentful of him and his ways. He scared her with his drinking. She grew to hate the drunken Christmas arguments and him kicking his sons out of the house. Our children were afraid of him. He said he loved me only three times in his life. In spite of this, I could not leave him. I loved him no matter what.

  We bought the farm four years ago. Hobby Horse Acres, as we call it, is about as far from an ocean as anyone can be in the continental United States. We have twelve acres and a pond surrounded by woods, stalls for the horses, riding arenas both indoors and out, and trails. I am proud of the indoor arena, which we built this year; we want the horse-riding business to operate come rain or shine, winter and summer. I should explain, we—Sabrina and I—enjoy the work and wouldn’t have it any other way, but Hobby Horse Acres is a struggling business that we plan to make a success through hard work and persistence. From my own perspective, the farm keeps me humble and honest and gives me a different view of life from the sea and commercial fishing. Living and working this far away from the dangers of the sea offers me balance. I should thank horseshit for saving my sanity if not my life.

  We found horses the way most people find things—by happenstance. If someone had told me twenty years ago that I would be living on a farm in Indiana raising horses and teaching kids how to ride, I would have laughed. But that was before our daughter Cassie turned eight. We were living in Homer at the time; she told us she wanted a horse for her birthday. All eight-year-old girls want a horse. I wished she had wanted a skiff or for me to take her fishing. And like good parents, we bought her a horse that she named Champ.

  That first year after Champ was installed, I was fishing all summer and Sabrina was driving Cassie and her horse to 4H meetings and barrel-racing competitions. Two years went by, and I began to take off the summers to give Sabrina a rest and go to the events with Cassie. I was interested for her as a father. But horses failed to seize my interest, until one day I met a natural horseman, a so-called Whisperer, who asked me if I would like to really get to know horses. Really? I had no idea what he meant. He showed me what horses are as creatures, and about them being the ultimate flight animal. Once I understood how a horse thinks I could understand his universe; I approached horses differently, as if we were suddenly equals. I respected him and he understood me. I think that some people deal with horses as if they are machines to be put in gear and driven at different speeds and with maneuvers, like they were motorcycles.

  The horse as a unique creature began to intrigue me, and the more I learned about them, the more I was drawn into their world. It was quite different from the one I was used to as a crab fisherman. I enjoyed the new space, which expanded exponentially as I learned and observed. I enjoyed my new friends, the horses. They helped me gain a new perspective on just about everything, including the people I loved and those I would deal with as business associates and friends.

  Back then, when this was all new to me, after two weeks of groundwork with the Whisperer’s techniques, I won a prize barrel racing at a rodeo. In 1998, I won the Alaska reserve state championship, and for two years running I was state champion. I realized that horses are thousand-pound animals that I did not have to fight. Once you ride a horse and everything is working, it is a beautiful experience and as close to flying, on the ground, as you will ever get. Horses became important in my life. I stopped competitive barrel racing when I reached the understanding that the competition was all about me and not about the horse. The more I learned about them, the more I needed this knowledge. I was learning to be a better person through horsemanship. If I can read body language in a horse without talking to it—by the set of his jaw, his ears, how his eyes blink, where his tail is at—I can look at people’s faces and know what they are signaling with their eyes and mouth. I realized that I could help other horse owners with their horses. Now, I look forward to teaching about horses with the same enthusiasm that I once looked forward to fishing.

  And yet…and yet—isn’t there always an “and yet”
? In spite of my contentment here, I look forward to Alaska; fishing will never leave my blood, just as it will always be a central part of me. As much as I love the horses and this farm, I feel fully liberated and even wild only when I am on the boat at sea. Nothing will change that. Like tides in my veins, the tug of the land competes with the draw of the sea, and I exist somewhere between.

  As much as I love them, horses do not pay for groceries; crabs do.

  The aesthetic of fishing never reached me at the same depth as it did Johnathan, who has moments when he even demonstrates a poet’s soul when he talks about fish and fishing. He appreciates the beauty of simple things, like the glory of a sockeye’s coloring. My daughter Chelsey, who is twenty-six years old, educated and smart, and a new mother of a boy, my grandson Dylan, inherited some of this sensibility.

  The spirit of the sea touched her directly a few years ago. At the time—she was just twenty-one, on the night before her grandfather’s death. She swears that the Time Bandit—yes, the boat my father designed and loved—knew he was going to leave this life. She had taken over the watch on the Time Bandit, which was tendering salmon in Bristol Bay. Our brother David was in command. Alone that night in the wheelhouse, Chelsey was doing all that she could to stay alert. An electronic plotter identified the presence of other boats within a radius of forty-eight miles, and David had told her to wake him if a boat appeared within two miles. Suddenly, a boat did appear on the screen identified as the F/V Guardian. On the plotter, Chelsey estimated its distance as three miles. It was pitch black out and the boat was on autopilot. Chelsey was daydreaming of an upcoming trip to Europe.

  In reality the Guardian was less than two miles away and closing fast.

  Chelsey squinted in binoculars through the dark, when distances are most deceiving. Through the glare of the sodium lights on the deck she thought the Guardian looked still closer but she was not sure. She did not know how to read the navigational screen. “It just didn’t seem right,” she told me later. “But it didn’t seem like an emergency, either.”

  She went downstairs to wake up a crewman named Chance, who had just gone to bed. She asked him to take a look. Chance saw the Guardian was right in front of Time Bandit. Chelsey pulled back on the throttles. She slipped the engines in neutral, instead of reverse. And Time Bandit moved forward with inertia bringing the two boats together “like two magnets in the sea.” Chance threw the Time Bandit in reverse too late. The boats collided, “like the Titanic in a small way.” Chelsey was looking at the Guardian through binoculars even as the two boats screeched in contact. Time Bandit’s bow was crushed to the tune of $60,000 in damage. Chelsey prayed to be taken away from her guilt. Eight hours went by in agonizing radio silence before I called her on SatPhone. I was crying; this was the only time she had heard me cry. She supposed it was about the boat accident. Then I told her that her grandfather was dead. Of course, until that moment, she had no idea that timing was an amazing coincidence.

  The next morning, Chelsey climbed onto the platform behind Time Bandit’s wheelhouse and sobbed. She felt to blame. She had let down the man whose heart was in Time Bandit more than anyone’s. Suddenly out of that gloom, whales swam in a line on the surface beside the boat and snorted through their blowholes. The whales, she believed, were signaling to her that it was OK. She said to the wind, “Grandpa, thank you, thank you.” It was the most profound experience of her young life.

  After that, she talked to me about her feelings for the sea. She surprised me when she said, “When I am out there and vulnerable, I am more spiritual than I ever am. The ocean is so powerful and real. If Mother Nature gets mad, I am at her mercy.” And what about crabbers like me, her father? “Fishermen live with the notion they can be erased at any moment; they are forced into a camaraderie of survival. On a boat, they know that they have to work together to survive. Alone, they will die. Crabbing is the extreme version of fishing. Crab fishermen are dashing just for what they do. They know that they lay their lives on the line every time they get on a boat, but they can be reassured that their crew will rush to their rescue. This forms a brotherhood. Other men respect them for what they will do. They defer to them in some instinctual way. They envy this brotherhood for its exclusivity. It is very primal, this overcoming of obstacles again and again. It runs in a fisherman’s blood. He lives and breathes to do that. More than anything, it is a way of life.”

  I wish I had that ability to put in those words what I do.

  When she told me that, Chelsey was telling me how she had framed a concept of what I do. She asked if I thought that crab fishing has dignity? I did not know what to tell her. I know it is dirty, dangerous, hard work, if that is what she meant by dignity.

  She read me an article she had found on the Internet starting with a quote, odd though it seemed to me, from the father of Communism, Karl Marx, who once observed that “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.” Fishing for crab is not the same as writing an epic poem, but I would agree with the sentiment of that quote. Plying the sea is an essential activity of my nature, as it is of Johnathan’s. The article went on. Certain jobs, like crabbing, come with their own “masculine mythology and way of being in the world.” Jobs that involve numbers on spreadsheets, for instance, do not come with a code of dignity. Chelsey might be right about that. Nobody at my office, which is Time Bandit, ever asks, “I wonder what kind of work I’ll be given today? Yeeeaaaaa! A spreadsheet?”

  Chelsey finished with this quote: “People in other classes may define the social structure by educational attainment, income levels and job prestige, but,” Chelsey said, men like me and Johnathan ”are more likely to understand the social hierarchy on the basis of who can look out for themselves, who has the courage to be a fireman, a soldier or a cop, who has the discipline to put bread on the table every night despite difficulties.” Everyone else is a manipulator.

  The way I see my work is not that complicated; it’s what I love. Other men have golf, hunting, fishing, and other outlets to nourish their spirits. A man can do the shittiest job during the week if he can look forward to his softball team or golf on Saturdays. That is how most guys survive. When they meet someone like Johnathan and me, no matter what walk of life they come from, something in them responds. It’s like they are saying, “My God, you are doing something I’d die to do.”

  I feel good about working. I can fix things. It is as simple as that. And I can outwit, most of the time, the humble crab or the predictable salmon. I fix stuff all the time; I get it running good again. I am doing that all the time. People need me. I am needed for doing things, not just thinking things. I put the two things together to produce something that works. I know how to use my hands, and anyone who has ever worked with his hands knows me, knows what I do, and who I am. Out on Time Bandit, I am fixing stuff all the time. It is satisfying in ways other work just is not. Fixing things gives me a sense of my own worth that I can measure in simple terms. I fix what I try to fix. Like if I have to fix my wife I say, “You look good, honey. Those pants look great on you.”

  “They make me look fat, don’t they?”

  “Oh, no, honey.” See? I just fixed something.

  On Time Bandit I do not have bosses telling me what to do. Nobody is nagging me. Guys get that.

  When I meet contractors and builders, plumbers and electricians and deliverymen who fish for bass when they can, I realize how much bullshit they put up with each day—that traffic on the commute to and from work, demanding bosses, and little offices. Why do they not make a run for it? They have responsibilities, families, obligations, the love of their wives and children. And they keep quiet about the bullshit in return for two weeks of fishing each year, or whatever nourishes their souls. Fifty weeks pays for two. To these men, I am free; they are chained. When Johnathan and I finish a season, we go where the wind blows us. And when I am out fishing, I am like the cowboy who rides off into the sunset at the end o
f the movie, leaving the woman and kids, the ranch, the whole life behind. That was why our old man loved to read Louis l’Amour. The cowboy goes away…. alone or with a posse in a brotherhood of men. And that is what men are made to do. Women may not like to hear it. I am certain of that. But they acknowledge this primitive urge as a fundamental need that nothing will change.

  Some of that explains why the impulse to worry for Johnathan seems so natural and right for me. It’s part of The Code.

  It’s time to go in. I cluck my tongue and Rio nickers. He knows where I want him to go. I pat him on the neck. And as I do so, Johnathan comes back to mind. He will have me worrying the whole night. It is part of a pattern, as Sabrina says. It is hardly a revelation that family roles do not change with age. Mamma’s boy will always be. I cover for Johnathan, and always have. I have been there for him as long as he has been alive. Usually, I drag him out of the fights before they get mean, and I have finished some fights for him. I have watched out for him because that is my role. It is not his role to watch out for me. In fact, his role in the family is never to grow old. I have no one to protect if I do not have Peter Pan. And we both understand that. I once heard about two brothers in their mid-fifties who were fighting at their mother’s 80th birthday party. Why? Because one thought that their mother loved the other brother more. Well, it is what it is, and nothing is going to change it.

  It is not the mother thing between us. We are not worried that she loves us. Indeed, she might love us too much. She constantly reminds us of the dangers of what we do for a living, as if we did not know that after a lifetime of fishing for crabs. She prays for us when we are out on the Bering Sea. She asks us to please find safer work on land. Lately, she announced that she had given up that hope. She would no longer worry about us. Johnathan looked at me. He said, “That’s bad news.”