by Chris Riley
“This boat here,” I said to Danny, “she’s nothing but good luck, buddy. She’s gonna get us onto the crab soon, and then we’ll be working our asses off.”
The gray sky and thick fog of the morning thinned out as we headed southeast, toward the Gulf of Alaska. But the smell of brine still sat heavy in the air and grew thicker once we passed the sheltered inlets south of Kodiak. Teeming with life, these miniature bays serve as excellent catchalls for kelp and the various critters of the ocean. Over the rail, I spotted three sea lions crossing our bow as we rounded the point near Chiniak Head. We were now heading into the rougher waters of the Gulf.
“Ride’s gonna be different soon, Danny,” I said, sliding on my gloves. “Now we’ll see if you’ve got any sea legs.”
Danny smiled in return. “What do we do, master chief?” He slid on a pair of gloves and adjusted his hat.
“We’re gonna double-check the gear, make sure everything’s good and secure. Then we’ll get you started on making bait.” I crossed the deck to the stack of seven-bys, all one hundred and eighty of them, and began looking over their chains. Regular procedure on our boat was to make sure no slack had built up on the pots or anything else we needed secured on deck before we got ourselves into rougher waters. Although the present conditions were nice and smooth, the weather in Alaska could flip-flop at a moment’s notice. Best practice was to be prepared.
Long before we left Anchorage, I taught Danny some of the basics of such preparation. First, though, was how to tie knots. The most common knots used on our ship were the bowline, clove hitch, and carrick bend. I even taught Danny how to splice together two lengths of rope. Splicing was simple enough on its own, as were the knots, and Danny had picked up both these skills without much trouble. However, there is a common problem with learning various knots that I call the “phenomenon of application.” Most people have little difficulty learning how to tie a knot while sitting at a table—that’s easy. But when they have to tie that same knot in different settings, onto different parts of a structure, and particularly during a nasty storm—with ten-foot waves crashing over the deck and onto their heads—it is a different story entirely. Suddenly, you don’t have the faintest idea where to begin. Danny had quickly learned the basics of knot-tying, at a table, but it actually took him quite a while before he could apply them effectively. So while on deck, I made sure he got plenty of practice.
Once we finished checking tie downs, chains, floorboards, and everything else on deck, I gave Danny instructions to start bringing up the boxes of herring from the freezers below. As he continued to work, I went up to the wheelhouse to consult with the captain. I passed both Salazar and Loni in the galley, stacking things away, preparing for rougher seas themselves. They were talking about their families back home, and it made me smile; the two of them were so different in just about every way.
Loni had a large family—a wife of fifteen years, along with four kids—and lived in Puyallup, Washington. He had three brothers and two sisters, each with families of their own living in and around Seattle. On Saturday nights, it was virtually impossible to find a place to sit at that man’s house. Either because of the warmth of Samoan culture, or his open personality, or perhaps a combination of both, family gatherings were simply the way it was for Loni. I don’t think he would have known what to do with himself without a big family at home.
Salazar, on the other hand, lived alone in a one-bedroom studio in Bellingham, Washington. I had seen Salazar’s home. It matched his simple character: a single room with a single window overlooking the side of an apartment complex. He had one plant and a calico named Georgina. That was about it, aside from his toys, which were an electronic drum set and a five-thousand-dollar stereo system. Salazar was big on music. This usually quiet guy would talk your ear off if you asked him a question about jazz, rock, reggae, or even calypso. Music was his life, eternal bachelor that he was. As for family, his closest relative was a brother living in San Diego, California, whom he hadn’t seen since their mother’s funeral, years past.
I know that Salazar entertained the idea of getting married and having kids. On more than one occasion, he’d mentioned how nice it would be. But Salazar was so damn shy around women, it seemed unlikely that he’d ever meet one to settle down with. Again, he was so different from Loni. But there they were, making sense of their lives in the galley. Finding commonalities through conversation, as any crabber knows, is a cherished pastime after spending days, weeks, even months away from home. Smiling, I headed up the stairs past the galley.
When I entered the wheelhouse, I found Fred and Dave hovering over a map.
“I’m thinking we’ll try this spot right here,” the captain said, pointing to an area roughly thirty miles southeast of Tugidak Island. “There’s a shelf that yielded some good crab a few years back. I’d like to check it out again.”
Dave nodded and puffed on a cigar. That was Dave’s tradition: a stogie on the way out, and one on the way in. He had family too—three boys, each about the age of Danny and me. I always assumed they didn’t have much of a relationship with their dad. Dave’s life, from what I knew of it, wasn’t particularly unique and far from glamorous. During the off-season, he was known to be a chronic drunk. His wife had left him years before—maybe she finally got fed up with him smacking her around. His only sober periods, in fact, were when he was fishing. Dave wouldn’t drink a drop of liquor while on board the Angie Piper. I suppose that might have been what was unique about the guy. Nevertheless, I had known Dave for four years, and during that time I concluded that he’d turned out the way I’d imagined every bully encountered in high school would. However, he wasn’t always so one-dimensional. Despite his abrasive nature, there were times when he was good to be around—even borderline pleasant. That was usually when we were on the crab. And in those four years, the man had taught me a lot about fishing. He was a good instructor, for all his “evil darkness,” as Loni had said. One could safely say, in the spirit of fairness, that Dave was a complicated man.
“If we fish here,” continued the captain, “we’ll still have the bays to anchor up in when the storms hit. The forecast …. It’s already looking bad.”
Fishing in these parts was different from fishing for king crab in the vast Bering Sea, where hundreds of lonely, bleak miles kept a boat and her crew in constant threat from the onslaughts of wicked storms or meandering ice packs. For us, many of the hotspots for tanner crab were near and around the various bays of Kodiak Island. A common strategy was to drop gear at a preferred location, and then head back into the safety of a bay when a storm came in. Your pots stayed out and soaked. Even without the storms, many boats ran their gear using this strategy. It offered a reprieve from the dangers of the Gulf of Alaska, not to mention rest and hot meals for the crew. This tactic broke the monotonous drudgery of endlessly turning gear: picking up pots, sorting the catch, re-baiting and dropping pots—over and over again, out upon the abhorrent dullness of a frigid sea—until a man was ready to slip into the realms of insanity.
But then again, that was crabbing.
“Excuse me, Captain,” I interrupted. “Danny and I just double-checked the gear and the deck. All is good. I’m gonna show him how to make bait now, if that’s okay.”
“Go to it, Ed. Get him chopping and filling them jars.” Fred sat back into his captain’s chair and took a drink from a large coffee mug. “I expect we’ll be dropping gear tomorrow morning, early. So let’s be ready.”
“Sure thing, Captain.”
“Hey, Ed?” Fred said, stopping me just after I turned to walk away. “I’m excited to see how well Danny’s gonna do. That boy sure is strong.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” I replied. “Not only is Danny strong as a horse, but he’s a working machine.” That was the honest-to-god truth. Danny was a Clydesdale, equipped for hard labor, built for the long run. And the best thing about him was that he was just like his father. He loved to work. Whenever he stayed with
us, Danny always liked helping my mother clean the house. As he got older, he would often get after the younger kids when they made a mess. It cracked me up watching him scold those kids, pointing his finger at them and mumbling. Half the time they didn’t understand what the hell he was saying.
I smiled and walked downstairs into the hall, past the galley where Salazar and Loni were now discussing the nuances of classical music—Loni could talk to anyone about anything. Then I went out on deck, where Danny stood next to several cardboard boxes. I could see that he was ready to get busy again.
“Okay, Danny, let’s chop this stuff up already.” I opened the first box—twenty-five pounds of frozen herring—and dumped its contents into the grinder. The grinder itself was essentially a miniature wood chipper. You’d push the fish through the funnel on top and a mush of meat and bones would get deposited into a large metal box—instant cat food. From there, you simply scooped the mush into small plastic jars—each perforated with tiny holes to allow for “seeping,” or chumming of the crab—and hang them on a bar above the table.
“Think you can handle this, buddy?” I asked.
“No problem, Ed,” Danny replied, with a smile. “I can chop fish now.”
“Yep. You sure can, Danny. You can chop fish.” Making bait is a tedious, mind-numbing, hand-aching process—so naturally, Danny took right to it.
After a few minutes, I left my friend there at the table and went inside to use the head. Down the hall again, toward the staterooms, I encountered Dave standing near the steps below the wheelhouse. He stood in the shadows, staring at me as I approached, the cigar in his mouth burning brightly like a distant sun hovering in the blackness of space.
“Hey, Ed?” he said, mimicking the captain’s voice.
I turned and looked at him, waiting. I knew from the look on his sallow face and in his cold eyes—from my own experience with him, and with guys just like him back in high school—that what he was about to say would be sheer ugliness.
“You think you’re pretty cute, don’t you?” he continued.
“What do you mean?” My voice rattled with nervous laughter. Adrenaline was running in my veins like a school of salmon up a river. Was this what it was like to be one of his sons? Did he bully them like he was bullying me?
“You know what I mean.” He took a drag from his cigar, and then blew smoke into my face. “You really think that boy of yours—that ‘Danny-boy,’ as Loni likes to call him—is gonna survive out here?”
“Yeah, I think he will.” I thrust my hands into my coat pockets, aware of how much they were shaking. I’d been in this position before, many times, and always, it was so damn tiring, so exhausting facing a bully: looking him in the eye, standing under him, being bombarded with threats and insults. It zapped the energy right out of me.
“You haven’t seen anything, yet, Captain.” Now he was mimicking my voice, mocking my conversation with Fred. My response was to stand in silence, there in the hall, the dark shadows of the Angie Piper enveloping me. “Well, we’ll see about that,” he added. “Don’t forget what I said about this being your last season. Start counting your days on this boat, Ed.”
He brushed past me, his shoulder knocking me like a linebacker’s, jolting me against the wall as he barreled down the hall and outside. What was up with that guy? Again, I wondered why he hated Danny so much. Or why he apparently hated me now, as well. But also, why had he bet on that arm-wrestling match back in the bar? I’d seen Dave angered many times before, but he always seemed rather tolerant of me, even when I was the greenhorn. Something about Danny really got the man’s goat.
After my encounter with Dave, I went straight to the head, where I contemplated my predicament. I could talk to the captain, who knew about Dave’s dislike but maybe not the extent of it. Then again, that might only make things worse. Or could it get any worse? I was confused, and scared, and worried. And as I sat there, trying to take a shit in a bathroom that rocked back and forth—a situation I never could get comfortable with—I thought about Danny. My friend had been picked on his whole life. But unlike me, he never seemed to care. Danny had this resilience to the pressure about him; things just rolled off his back like melted butter. And it wasn’t that he was too stupid to understand what was happening when people were being mean to him, either. Nor was he immune to fear. No, my friend wasn’t fearless. It’s just that, for Danny, most of the time his fear existed only in the present, the moment at hand. He didn’t hold on to anxiety—about anything—like the rest of us “normal folks” did.
On the way back from the bathroom, I grabbed more bait jars from below and then met Danny at the grinder. He was already halfway through his fourth box of herring and had a good pile of fish pâté built up in the steel container. A dozen seagulls circled above us, attracted to the strong odor. Within the hour, twice as many of those creatures would be trailing us, perching on the rails, scrounging for the first scraps of the season.
“How’s it going over here?” I asked. Since we had been riding through the rougher seas of the Gulf for a few hours now, I expected that if Danny would have a problem with being sick, he would start to show signs. Making piles of bloody chum with foul-smelling herring would certainly contribute, as one would expect.
“Chopping fish, Ed.”
“I can see that, buddy.” I dumped the bait jars into a large tote next to him. “So are you feeling sick yet?”
“Nope. Why would I feel sick?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because we’re on a swaying boat, and you’re working with a pile of bloody chum.”
“You mean seasick?” he replied. Sarcasm was often lost on my friend.
“Yeah, I mean seasick. Are you seasick? Right now? Do you feel like you need to hurl?”
“Nope.” He picked up another chunk of iced herring and shoved it into the grinder. “I don’t think Navy SEALs get seasick, Ed. So I won’t get sick either.”
And like that, Danny had his sea legs. Not once did he get sick, and he stayed in balance with the listing of the boat, only stumbling once or twice. Perhaps my initial assumptions were correct, that a kid like him was immune to vertigo. Or maybe it was because Danny never worried about it.
Chapter 10
“Now we gonna see what kind of man you are, Danny-boy!” The entire crew was full of excitement, and Loni was freely expressing it. Roughly twenty hours since we had left Kodiak, we were ready to drop gear. As planned, the captain had picked a spot a few hours south of Tugidak Island, and was toiling with the decision to either test the area with a single line of pots, known as prospecting, or to simply dump our entire load. He told us we’d drop forty of the steel cages at a minimum.
“We gonna see you work real hard, that’s for sure.” Loni laughed with sheer glee as he unfolded a brand-new set of raingear. “Time to catch us some crab, boys.”
Crammed together in the ready-room, we struggled to don our clothing and essential gear for working on deck. Using Duct Tape, we sealed our jacket sleeves tightly against our wrists. Our thick rubber boots covered wool socks, doubled for added cushion and warmth. And bulky raingear sealed us from head to toe. Last came the gloves—the first of many pairs we would wear out during the season. Handling tanner crab, with their spiny legs and prickly carapaces, often tore right through a well-worn glove, if you happened to be careless. And after working eighteen hours straight, bent over at the waist, you grew more careless with each passing minute. I can’t count how many gloves we’ve gone through on the Angie Piper.
After suiting up, we bustled through the door and out onto the deck—a parade of orange and yellow raingear taking the first steps of dropping crab pots into the mighty Gulf of Alaska. The seas were rough, with icy swells pushing high across our bow. A few enormous waves known as “poop sweepers” had already poured over the rail prior to us walking outside. How did we know this? Streams of foam rushed to our starboard scuppers as the Angie Piper swayed forward—a clear enough sign for everyone. Except Danny, of
course.
I really did wonder how my friend was going to handle being out there. It crossed my mind that it might terrify him to realize what was expected of a crab fisherman. Once he comprehended the full, potential threat of working the most dangerous job in the world, would he freeze with fear like so many other men and women? Would he quit on the spot, and then hole up in his bunk, waiting to get dropped off at the nearest port? Of course not. Who the hell was I kidding? Danny was the first one out the door, his childlike grin spread across his face.
“From here on out, you’re gonna be our deck ape, Danny.” I had to shout to be heard. The noise surrounding our boat—the clank of support chains, the bang of boom cables clinging to metal rigging, the growl of the diesel engine running half open, the roar of the ocean, the howl of a thirty-plus knot wind—these sounds all took center stage in a concert of chaos. Damn, it felt good to be fishing again. Pausing briefly, I took a huge breath of ocean air, savoring the raw taste of a salty mist sweeping around me.
“Deck ape?” Danny asked, walking straight to the bait table. Snapped out of my moment of elation, I followed my friend. The “bait table” was all that Danny knew about fishing right now. The chopping and scooping of herring was his comfort zone, and until I told him otherwise, he would just hang out there at that table, processing bait. For sure, this was Danny’s one observable weakness. He wasn’t ambitious, a go-getter who required little or no hand-holding or instruction. Danny was not the type to figure out how to run a deck on his own, simply by watching the other crewmembers. But I had long ago prepared myself for this reality. I knew how to teach Danny. What he did have over most other people was that once he started working, he wouldn’t stop until you told him to. Danny would work himself to death if you let him. That made him the perfect deck ape.