I Was Tango Uniform
Johnathan
Last December, after king crab season ended, Time Bandit’s crew and Andy and I took a short break over Christmas. My girlfriend at the time flew down from Homer to be with me. One evening we rode my Harley to a local bar. We were minding our own business, enjoying a few drinks, when three guys I did not know parked themselves beside us at the bar and started hitting on her like I was not there. She brushed them off politely but she made it clear that she wanted them to leave her alone. I let her handle it.
These guys left the bar and came back more stoned or drunk than before. They would not leave her alone. She is beautiful, admittedly, but this went way beyond that sort of attraction. They were looking for a fight. With a few out-of-bounds remarks from them, she went quickly from uncomfortable to angry. The situation was heating up fast. They started to pump up their aggression. My girlfriend gets hit on often. Most guys get the message and move on. These guys were not taking no for an answer.
I do not get mad easily. But when I do, I can fight to the death. I am focused and I can smite an army with the jawbone of an ass, as Ezekiel said, I think.
It came to that. I took one guy down on the floor and held my fist in his face. I said, “I don’t want it to be this way.” He said okay.
I turned around and he got off the floor and punched me from behind. The whole bar began fighting. I tried to stay out of it. The three guys who had bothered my girlfriend went outside. We turned back to face the bar. They came back in and a big sonofabitch grabbed her hair and slammed her forehead against the bar and said he would find her, rape her, and kill her.
I told him, “It’s time for you to leave.”
The bartender was on the phone to the police when I was taking these guys outside. The fight was quick. I threw the would-be rapist/killer down on the ground and pulled his head back and kicked as hard as I could. Blood flew everywhere. He went limp. His two friends jumped me and hammered away; I have a head as hard as a helmet; you can pound the shit out of me for hours and you will not knock me out. I was wearing them out, and in a real fight that does not take long. My girlfriend screamed and scratched and punched. She fought like a wildcat. She bought me a few seconds to run over and slam-kick the big sonofabitch in the face with my boot. The only thing that moved on him was the blood from his ears.
The police arrived and handcuffed my girlfriend and me. As it turned out, I had kicked the rapist dude into a coma, but the coma could not have been that bad; it gave his brain a rest. He was out of the hospital in three days. I was held in jail over Christmas and New Year’s. At the arraignment a woman judge told me that I was looking at 92 months to 120 months. I counted twice to make certain and said, “TEN YEARS!! For a guy defending himself?”
I was Tango Uniform—Tits Up, in other words, Fucked.
I just hate being in jail. It is my greatest fear.
I worried that Mom would find out what happened. I felt bad for her. She came down from Oregon to visit me, and I felt ashamed. She said she loved me, and there was nothing I could ever do that would make her love me less, and that made me feel worse. Once the district attorney reviewed the evidence and testimonies and checked up on the men I had fought, he dropped all charges against me. I was free to go. It seemed that my so-called victims had outstanding felony warrants. Who had started the fight was never in doubt. Still, it was the worst trouble I was ever in.
I do not know what I could have done differently. Maybe I should have left earlier, before the fight got going, but I do not like to be chased out of bars by loudmouth women haters. And I do not go into bars looking for fights. I watch out for some people and avoid them if I can. After all, I am getting older. One thing I can say: I never fought with knives or guns. Not once. If you carry a gun, you are only going to get shot. I learned that when a guy at a party asked me to take him to buy some liquor. We were driving around and he said, “Liquor stores are closed. Stop. Stop over there. I’m going to get some booze.”
I said, “What a weirdo.”
He smashed the front window and grabbed a case of beer. Back in my car he asked if he could check out a pistol I kept between the seats. While he was robbing the liquor store I had emptied the bullets. I said OK. He stuck it against my ribs. I beat his ass and left him on the highway. I quit carrying guns after that.
This is what I think of now: It is dark.
I can only guess that I have drifted southeast of Augustine Island; I started fishing 45 miles south of the line. It is unlikely that the rip turned me directly south out the Kennedy Entrance and into the Gulf of Alaska; if that had happened I would have encountered—and probably seen lights on—one of the Barren Islands, like Ushagat or the two Amatulis. I could have reason to breathe easier. Those islands can be treacherous without smooth sandy beaches and gentle surf to welcome ashore boats like mine. The downside is the alternative to missing the Entrance. I am moving into, if I am not already in, the entrance to the Shelikof Strait. My course has to be one or the other.
The real point is, I do not know where I am. I have no way to find out. At daylight I might be able to sight a feature that will orient me, but in this darkness, my only hope is for light, or rescue.
On my hands and knees I look for the flare kit, which I think I stored in a locker under the bunk I have been lying on. I pull open the hatch and feel around with my hand until I find a flashlight, which is nearly out of power, with a tenuous dim orange glow at its business end, but the beam allows me to see into the locker. I pull out my Ruger Super Red Hawk, a .44 magnum with bullets in a black Mexican holster and belt. And I find a knife. I open the flare kit. I know better than to hope for a parachute flare. I am not disappointed. These flares—there are three—are simple signal versions consisting of shotgun shells loaded with the flare; they are shot from a plastic pistol frame. They lift up in the air about fifty yards and come down with gravity and burn a bright red for twenty seconds before the sea extinguishes them. If a searcher is looking in my direction and sees that small light, I am rescued; a flare on the sea calls for immediate response from all boats that see it; but if a searcher turns his eyes away for even a second, the flare might as well be invisible. In other words, these signal flares provide a means to reach out to someone on the water but not much of one. I should be more optimistic. The night is black, and a flare is bright; even twenty seconds can be enough. That said, when should I fire the first flare? I look for a light on the water. I see nothing for 360 degrees around the Fishing Fever.
On the deck I balance the flare gun in my hand. What comes to mind is the unbelievable profligacy the crew and Andy and I showed last season opilio fishing on the Bering around the Pribilofs. One night—a night as dark as this one now—we were heading back to Dutch with full tanks, in high spirits, and in a rough sea, when Richard mentioned that he had brought on board $1,000 worth of out-of-date flares, in numbers close to 200, some parachute and some signal flares. That gave me an idea. On our plotter I can see where other crab boats were located around us, those passing us, and those moving across our course. The plotter’s program identifies the boats by name on the screen, and when I checked the plotter, I saw F/V Jennifer A, a crab boat owned by Ian Pitzman, who I grew up with, heading toward us from about three miles out.
We radioed the Coast Guard on Channel 16 that we would be conducting a flare drill.
The crew gathered up armfuls of flares out of Richard’s cache. Neal the Eel modified his flares by removing the parachutes and stuffing the tubes with seal bombs. I turned off the deck lights, including our sodiums on the boom. Jennifer A, of course, knew our distance and direction relative to them, and who we were. But Pitzman would not be able to see us with his own eyes. We planned to attack with a full salvo at the moment we came abreast of their starboard side. The crew took up battle stations on the rail, like pirates about to take down a king’s ship.
I navigated as close as I dared, without making Pitzman uncomfortable, and at the moment w
e crossed, I yelled on the loudhailer. “It’s war!” and the crew let loose a barrage that crossed Jennifer A’s decks and lit the night sky an eerie bright red; seal bombs exploded with loud claps and puffs of smoke.
Immediately, Pitzman was shouting bloody murder on the single sideband. What in hell did we think we were doing? We were laughing too hard to reply. Pitzman’s crew returned fire, pitifully, we thought, with a couple of signal flares, and by then we had passed each other, and the fight was over. We talked about the attack for the rest of the night.
What I would give for a parachute flare now.
I aim the flare gun at a 45-degree angle and pull the trigger. I feel the recoil in my hand as the flare lifts across the night sky. It creates a pitiful streak and plops into the sea. It burns for a few seconds and goes out. This then is my connection, my communication network, and my outreach to the world. I shake my head and go back inside the wheelhouse.
After the Christmas break last year, I joined the crew back in Dutch to prepare for the opilio season opening on January 15, when the crabs’ “in-fill,” which means the solid meat in their legs, thickens. The Bering Sea at that time of year is a drama waiting to play out. There is never a script. But the backdrop for everything that happens is made of ice and sleet, freezing temperatures, Arctic ice pack, mean and cutting winds, and high seas.
Opilio season is the crab fisherman’s ultimate test. The worst accidents and most harrowing incidents call for heightened vigilance, stoicism, and discipline; in this environment, even small errors can spiral downward into unforeseen and lethal threats. The authorities prepare for the worst: the Coast Guard moves a fourteen-man team with a rescue helicopter to a temporary base on St. Paul Island; the Alaska Wildlife State Police stations its boat, the Stimson, a converted 156-foot crabber, in the port at St. Paul, ready to be called out for emergencies.
Before leaving Dutch, our crew, Andy, and I spent a couple of leisurely days resetting the pots with smaller openings and repairing those that had taken a beating in the king crab season. After several years of decline, opies are coming back. With an IFQ of 400,000 pounds, we were confident this season would be safe, short, and happy. We attended the same rituals as before at Latitudes and the Unisea Sports Bar; we ate Chinese food and stocked our cupboards, and we stuffed four tons of herring in the forward reefers. We planned to catch our own cod. An opie can sniff out nothing faster than fresh bleeding cod.
We were contracted to deliver 90 percent of our opies to the 316-foot Stellar Sea seafoods processing vessel anchored off St. Paul as a convenience to us and to comply with the rationalization program’s goal of distributing the proceeds of crab fishing to varying areas of Alaska. Nearly 142 workers live on the Peter Pan Seafoods vessel and work eighteen hours a day for $7.15 an hour, every day, in what must be one of the worst jobs on the planet.
One hard challenge of the Alaskan fishing industry is to find men and women year after year to work these miserable jobs. Last year, a friend named John “Double Wide” Nordin, a partner in a small—“We shouldn’t even be here”—specialty processor called Harbor Crown Seafoods, and one of the nicest and most generous men in the industry, had his Dutch plant humming when, in a lightning raid, INS agents and state police took away most of his key workers, who happened to be illegal immigrants from Guatemala, San Salvador, and the Philippines. These workers kept Harbor Crown’s lines moving in freezing temperatures on a hardscrabble island about as far from home as they could go. Nobody was waiting in line for the jobs. The police and INS quarantined them like diseased animals and flew them off the island, leaving Nordin as adrift in his processing of crabs as I am in Fishing Fever.
Nordin and his brother James are Americans from Seattle, but they love the country of their family’s origin. Each summer, they return to Sweden. Everything Swedish seems not just different but better to them. Alaskan moose were not good enough for brother James. He had to collide with a Swedish one. He told me he was racing down a highway in northern Sweden with a relative behind the wheel of an Audi A6 at 160 km an hour. James was messing with the climate control dial on the dash and looked up in time to see a huge moose trot into the road. He only had time to tell himself, “Aw fuck, I’m dead.” He ducked his head; bad things happened. The car T-boned the moose with the loudest explosion he had heard since his time in the U.S. Army. When the car stopped, he and the driver were alive and covered with moose hair and broken glass. The animal was dead in a ditch. The police said Nordin would have been dead, too, if the moose’s right front leg had not collided with the column on the driver’s side and thrown the animal over, instead of through, the car.
The Nordins are big men. John’s hands are the size of a grizzly’s paws. He tried fishing when he was younger, but found safety ashore and decided to stay there. He leaves the fishing to the Norwegians, toward whom he shows traditional Swedish disdain. He says, “They like to die.”
“But I’m not Norwegian and I fish for crab,” I told him.
“Anyone crazy enough to go out on that sea in winter must be Norwegian.”
When the INS rounded up his workers last year, Nordin was not flaunting immigration laws. He checks his workers out but does not investigate them. Hiring for his plant in Dutch Harbor, where no labor pool exists to draw from, costs Nordin money that can only be recouped over a full season of labor. Knowingly hiring illegals makes no sense. When he is in Seattle, he scrutinizes potential workers in a typically honest, straightforward manner. He advertises online and in the local newspapers. When recruits show up at his Seattle offices for interviews, he wants to put the fear of God into them by describing his rules—no drinking—the weather, and the miserable working conditions on Dutch. He looks at their I.D.s and then swears and yells at them to draw the worst picture of what lies ahead. After a ten-minute break, he calls them back into a conference room. By that time, one in three have cleared out. Nordin says, “I fly them up, house them, give them four meals a day, do their laundry, and then fly them home. I don’t want them there, at my expense, only to want to go home before they have done the work they contracted for, at my expense.” He pays them premium wages, just as he pays us boat owners more than the larger canneries. In return, he insists on hard work and first-quality fish and crabs. His kindnesses are often repaid; five boats deliver to him and no one else. Some boat captains have pledged to sell to Nordin for less money if the big processors try to run him out of business.
What Nordin seems to have found is a niche where quality trumps price. It makes a certain kind of sense. Every time anyone turns around, fewer boats are catching less of everything: crab, cod, octopi, and pollock. The big processors designed their plants in the Derby days to rush through as many as a half million pounds of fish or crabs a day, but now that capacity is wasted. Nordin arrived in Dutch with a stronger sales department and fish that he swears could have been caught, for their quality, on a hook and line. His company does not have to convince buyers. They need what he is selling.
But that is now. When he started his cannery on Dutch with his partner Ken Dorris, the conventional wisdom held that he was crazy. The big processors, like Unisea and Trident and the Japanese-owned Alyeska and Westward Seafoods, could snuff him out of business. But he is too small for them to bother with. They are the Bismarck compared to his Little Toot. And John intends to keep a low profile; wisely, he wants to grow in his niche, not compete in theirs.
The state set the quotas for opies last year at 36.6 million pounds and 3 million for their larger cousins, the elusive baradai crab, which are fished in the same season. Time Bandit’s quotas were 10,000 for baradai and 250,000 for opies. That, by contrast, was against 92,000 of king crabs we caught in the fall. To catch the opies and baradai, Time Bandit was carrying 137 pots, weighing 110,000 pounds, when we set out from Dutch on January 15.
Andy was pumped to get our quotas quickly and get back home. He had shit to shovel. He told me, “Let’s bet everything on black—Time Bandit black.” He was in charge o
f the boat and the planning. He looked over the results of opie fishing from the previous year. He thought he knew where they could be found. We trusted his judgment, and his enthusiasm was infectious. He planned to take us about 240 miles northwest of Dutch to St. Paul Island and a secret opie ground he knew about just east of the island.
As we were leaving Dutch Harbor, the hulk of the SeaLand, a container carrier that had foundered in murderous Bering Sea waters and had been towed into the harbor, lay like a dead leviathan half on its side in shallow water. Andy sat in the captain’s chair with me beside him. I was going along for the ride and to be with my brother. I thought that I might work the deck, but at my age, I am used to the comforts and warmth of the wheelhouse when the sun comes through the windows. I could stay home. But with the sea in my blood I would not miss going out one more time every time.
The one time I did sit out a whole crab season on land—two years ago, because Time Bandit was in dry dock for repairs—I felt dead. My soul left me. Sitting in town, knowing Andy and my friends (and the crabs) were out at sea on other boats, I was like a salmon that does not make it up the river. That winter, I missed the fishing like a kid misses Christmas. Each year when that first pot comes up, I am like a little boy who cannot sleep with excitement. I feel like Santa gave me my first banana-seat bike when that first pot is full.
We were six hours out of Dutch when the state authorities—I do not recall whether it was Fish & Game or the State Wildlife Police—reported over VHF Channel 16 that our delivery vessel, Stellar Sea, had reported a fire in its engine room. A Coast Guard cutter was being called out to assist and investigate.
Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs Page 18