In the United States, the men who fish the sea are still of a type other callings have rendered tame and dependent. Even with all the power winches and hydraulic gurdies a fishing boat now can carry, the work is heavier and longer than most men can bear. It also requires wit and intelligence along with sea-sense, since as seafood stocks diminish more skill is required to seek them out. American fishing boats remain small, both against the foreign fishing operations and against the sea itself. In New England, the fleet is old and demoralized by the massive foreign overfishing of Georges Bank and adjacent grounds. The abundant fisheries for shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico, tuna t)ff California, and the menhadden off the Carolinas and Virginia are vital each in its way, but they fish only a single species, in relatively placid water.
This leaves the newly aggressive and varied fishery that centers in Kodiak and extends via Dutch Harbor into the Bering Sea. The men who work it lead lives closer to death than most Americans. As with fishermen in all northern waters, they endure as a matter of course the drench and wind and cold. On violently unstable decks which require enormous energy merely to keep balance, they handle machinery that by a slip can eat relentlessly an arm or leg, with nets that can sweep them over the side into water too cold for survival, using hooks and knives that can slice to the bone through layers of clothing. They harvest more major species than all the other mainline American fisheries combined, in waters more treacherous than even the North Atlantic. Unique among American fishermen, they see the present as a springboard rather than a roadblock.
You who mourn the lost self-confidence and self-sufficiency of the American frontier, look here.
Part 1: 1963 SUMMER
CHAPTER 1
Fishing
FROM Dutch Harbor we bucked into a forty-knot northwester for fourteen hours to reach the grounds. One of my new crewmates offered me some thick rubber bands cut from an inner tube. I watched him adjust his own to squeeze the legs of his rain pants against his boots, but I was too seasick to follow suit.
Outside it was black night. Shadowy waves swelled higher than our heads, hail slashed under the mast lights, the wind roared and whined, and seawater foamed across the deck. The other men lit cigarettes and went into it. I followed. I had traveled on many ships and knew well that the sea was vast and brutal, but I had never worked on a deck this close to the waves. The awe I felt was unexpected, at the smallness of the fishing boat and at the hugeness of the water around us. Soon I was bending over a tub with knees pressed into it for balance as I stuffed chunks of herring into perforated plastic jars and retched helplessly from the smell.
Up came the first of our thousand-pound-plus steel pots, swaying with all its wicked weight. Frank and Dale grabbed the sides as it banged against the boat and guided it crashing into place on the deck rack. The pot held about sixty big purple king crabs and twice as many undersized ones and females. They crawled against each other sluggishly and stuck together as we leaned in and flung them out two to a hand.
A wave swept the side and drenched us. It hit my knees with such force that I had to grab the rail for support and cold water filled my boots where I had neglected to fasten the rubber bands. Leiv, the skipper, thrust his bearded face from the wheelhouse as his Norwegian “Har har” roared against the wind. “Hey, dot’ll vake you bastards, eh?” The others cursed back cheerfully.
Everything in the operation was based on speed and economy, with no time accounted for rest. In five minutes the first pot was emptied, rebaited, and sent plunging back to the seafloor, and the line of the next was being payed in through the hydraulic crab block to be coiled on deck. The simple effort of maintaining balance was work in itself. The block might pull the ton-weights, yet the remaining bull work was tremendous. We pushed for what I judged to be at least three hours. The clock showed we had only been working for forty minutes. The distance back to the warm room ashore of nautical daydreams was infinite beyond imagining. When you’ve committed yourself out there, you’re stuck.
During the next week in the Bering Sea the wind sometimes subsided, sometimes gusted to eighty knots, while the sea ranged from crashing to glassy. Since we were fishing for the largest possible share of the king crab quota, we took only what rest we needed desperately: sometimes only two hours a night. “I know just how far to drive my men,” says one successful crab skipper from Kodiak who started his career on deck. “Farther than they think they can go. Just to that point where they’ll let the gear start smashing them. Sometimes we haul gear for forty hours without a break.” Said a halibut skipper when I asked if it was true that his crew slept only four hours a night for the twenty days running of a trip: “I tried three, but after a while it slowed us down.”
During the first week of my initiation into king-crabbing, a man on one boat lost a finger and a man on another lost the bridge of his nose when a heavy hook flew out of control. The seas smashed in the windows of two pilothouses. On my boat, a vacancy had been created the trip before when two hydraulic bars converged at the wrong moment to crush a man’s thigh.
The life of a fisherman is rougher and more dangerous than that of any other seafarer. Compared to them, the sailors on modern tankers and freighters, and the Navy salts of the great electronic warships, are clock-punchers who live in luxury. (Less so the small-boatmen of the Coast Guard when the time comes for a rescue.)
Do men go fishing for any reason besides money? In many parts of the world it remains a subsistence profession. An answer for would-be Ishmaels like myself: “It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.” Actually, most fishermen are locked in by tradition and geography. Fathers take their sons to sea and teach them the skills and survival reflexes, and the life’s pattern is set. Even American fishermen—those in the environs of Gloucester, Crisfield, Pascagoula, San Pedro, and Anacortes, for example—show a strong pattern of repeated generations. It is almost uniquely in Alaska that the fisheries are so new that their history is counted in decades rather than generations, and the fishermen—many with college educations—have no excuse but their own free choice.
But why then, even in Alaska, given the alternatives available to Americans, would a man settle in a place of storm and cold like Kodiak, commit himself to a decade of hock for the price of a boat and gear, and thus consciously condemn himself to a lifetime of hardship to feed his family? Some go broke. The men who make it have a varied income depending on luck, tenacity, and skill. Some highliners (those who bring in the biggest catches) may have a spectacular income as a direct result of their driving labor. Each category returns to Alaska season after season to take its chances instead of finding some way to stay ashore dry and safe in an office or a welding shop.
Not to be coy about it any longer, seafaring enters the blood, and no form of it more than fishing. Stick a seasoned fisherman ashore and watch his restlessness when the boats gear up at the start of the season. Watch a crippled old fisherman caress the boats with his eyes. Does a retired machinist or accountant ever long after his lathe or ledgers in the same way, or fill the air with such reminiscences of shop and office?
Here I stand on the Bering Sea crab boat, green-faced and wretched, my hands deep in stinking bait that I can’t smell without growing sick, my feet encased in cold water, a hundred miles from shore and at least sixteen toil-filled hours from my next brief sleep. I’m hardly joyous, and I would welcome a respite, but I wouldn’t trade places with you. I stare at the surging water and I feel the wind. But for the little boat I would be extinguished. If a wave swept me overboard, the cold water would suck away my life in four or five minutes. I am living on a brink, tasting real salt as it stings into my face, alive each second as seldom on shore. Do you think this is nothing? More likely you wish you were out there also. Life back by the time clocks may be more comfortable, but how often in your day do you associate face to face with the primal forces? A fisherman with water in his boots yearns to be dry, daydreams of a warm hearth or barroom. But, after he has s
niffed the clean and destructive infinity of the ocean, dry land becomes ever after a place of interim passage.
I first felt the essence of fishing in a mosquito-filled bay of Kodiak Island. I had ridden out from Kodiak town as a passenger on a salmon tender (which has since hit the rocks and sunk in the manner of fishing boats in northern waters, mercifully with no loss of life). A tender buys fish on the scene and carries them to the cannery, so our job was to await deliveries from the local seine boats. It was a day of rain and smoky mists. The Stonehengelike rocks of Kalsin Bay were dimmed to the substance of cardboard cutouts, as were the green forested mountains beyond the shore. We waited, nursing mug after mug of coffee, listening to the cry of birds and smelling an occasional whiff of spruce generated by the wet air.
My notion of a seiner had been formed among the forty-to fifty-eight-foot boats with bridges and masts moored to the Kodiak harbor floats, whose fantails held big skiffs resting on high stacks of cork and web. Instead, all I had seen was an open dory with a mere dinghy astern, which had been plying along the shore since daybreak. Eventually the dory headed for the tender. Two crewmen sat hunched against the rain. The third, apparently the skipper, stood holding a tiller attached to an inside-mounted outboard motor, a concentrated scowl of command on his face. Water rested like cobwebs in his thick, curly hair. His oilskin pants hung by a single suspender, and a soggy cigarette dangled from his lips. The bottom of the dory was a jumble of salmon, buckets, bags, and other gear. The skipper brought his boat alongside and stepped grandly aboard the tender for a mug-up, while his two crewmen grabbed the salmon by their tails and tossed them into a bucket for the tender’s scale.
The captain of the tender introduced me to the dory’s skipper, Dick, and, before I had a chance to back out, suggested I ride with him to see a siwash operation, the most primitive kind of all. The rockingdory had barely a place for my feet. Dick took us toward shore, then grunted that they might as well eat. Each of the three took a damp bag from a plastic bucket and settled by himself, while I sat grousing over my luck as a proper fine white seiner entered the bay and headed for the tender.
Suddenly Dick rose. His eyes narrowed toward a patch of water, while his hands started the motor and the lunch bag flopped unheeded. In a second, the other two also crouched at attention, Dave astern by the heap of nets and corks, Ron in the skiff, where he started a few-horse-power motor. The boat headed slowly toward the spot Dick watched. The water was calm, broken only by patterns of rain. As we came closer to shore, the water turned dark from reflections of the trees, and mosquitos settled over us. I was the only one who slapped; the others were too engrossed.
A salmon leapt, wriggled suspended for an instant in silver silhouette, splashed back. Down came Dick’s hand. Instantly, Dave threw off the tow line, and Ron in the skiff headed out, pulling the net in a circle around the spot where the fish had jumped. For the next several minutes, with snap and precision, the three performed a continuous chain of work that encircled a school of salmon with the net, then drew the net into a smaller and smaller circle by pulling it back into the boat until the fish had been pursed into a bag alongside. On a large seiner a powered winch and a hydraulic block would have pulled a longer and deeper seine. In Dick’s little open boat, but for the small collective horsepower of two outboards and a net of synthetic fibers, the three men fished as they might have fished two thousand years ago.
I entered the cycle to help “pull web.” It was heavy, wet work, and all of us were soon drenched and panting. As the seine came in, Dave piled the corks on one side, Ron the leads on the other. The web, handled by Dick and me, fell between. As the circle narrowed, we began to see dark moving shapes. Each grip of web became heavier. It was the weight of fish. The frenzy of their swimming transmitted itself in vibrations. The surface within the purse began to boil with tails and heads. Whenever part of a salmon flipped above water its body glinted silver. We pulled and grunted, straining arms and backs. Slowly a whole bag of big silver fish rose to the gunwale, so heavy it tilted the boat. As we eased them aboard, they spilled over our legs, leaping and flapping with such collective strength that it felt like a tide pulling us off balance. There they lay around us. Their tails thumped the deck boards, their bright skins glistened.
The abundance and vitality of it blew my mind. I was hooked. For hours and hours I watched the water as intensely as the rest, my blood rising at the sight of each flash that might betray unseen schools of fish, eagerly gripping up the web even though I was soon dizzy with fatigue. I had stumbled into good company and had touched the gut way on the reason why, besides for money and necessity, men go on the seas to fish.
CHAPTER 2
Kodiak
THE island of Kodiak combines with adjacent islands to form a 170-by-40-mile mass of mountains separated by waterways and surrounded by foggy storms. The island series faces the Pacific Ocean with its western side parallel to the Alaskan mainland within sight of distant snow mountains. Kodiak lies in a latitude which also cuts through northern Scotland and Labrador. Within Alaska, it is located approximately halfway along the 2000-mile coastal arc that stretches from Ketchikan in the southeastern tip to Attu in the far-western Aleutians.
The Kodiak mountains, lower than those of the mainland, average 2500 feet with a few (which remain snow-capped) reaching 4300 feet. Streams that originate in the higher country have eroded so far into the land that at places only a mountain or two separate the bays of the western from the eastern side. The differences between parts of the island are tremendous. Mean annual rainfall in Kodiak town is sixty inches (compared to thirty-nine inches in rainy Seattle), with ninety inches in some of the eastern bays and as little as twenty-four inches on parts of the western side. Although the axis of the island covers only two degrees of latitude—the distance between Baltimore and New York or between Topeka and Omaha—the north is covered with spruce while the south is bare of all but scrub. Each of the bays has a nature of its own. Huge brown bear feed along the flat streambeds of one, hilly spruce forests hide all else in another, and around a third the treeless land ends at the water in hundred-foot hardrock bluffs. The surrounding waters hold not only salmon, halibut, cod, rockfish, herring, crab, and shrimp but also their predators the whale, the seal, sea lions, and otters.
The island is far off and lonely, yielding only a bit of shoreland here and there for settlements. The nontransient late-1970s population is some 9000 (but growing) of whom about 5000 live in the area of Kodiak town, 3000 at the nearby Coast Guard Base, and a thousand in the six native villages of Karluk, Larsen Bay, Port Lions, Ouzinkie, Old Harbor, and Akhiok. In the early 1960s the population of Kodiak town was 2800 and that of the then-Navy Base about the same.
After the probable Bering landbridge migration from Asia, Koniag Indians lived for hundreds of generations in the coves and bays of the island, drawing their food from the abundant salmon and other sea creatures. Two centuries ago, in 1784, Russian fur traders established the first white settlements, first in Three Saints Bay, then in the wide natural harbor that now serves the town of Kodiak. The Russian influence remains principally in the Orthodox faith practiced by most of the natives; each village has a church, heavy inside with icons and the odor of incense, whose onion domes or boxlike approximations dominate the other buildings.
Within living memory, two catastrophies have altered life on the island. In 1912, Mount Katmai erupted on the mainland sixty miles away and covered the island with two feet of volcanic ash. The terrible black air of the fallout buried houses and made people suffocate. Layers of the ash remain today in the soil and beneath the lichens of old spruce trees. In 1964, the earthquake that uprooted Anchorage streets not far to the north generated a tsunami that swept away the boats and harbor buildings of Kodiak town and destroyed two villages (no longer inhabited). The aftermath in Kodiak town was a new layout of stores, canneries, and piers unrecognizable to a prequake visitor.
It rains and blows in Kodiak most of the time. The lower
mountains are covered by thick scrub, which grows high and mossy green in the summer, then dries to brown under the winter snow. Fogs cling to the mountains, often erasing them from sight.
The names of the island, mostly Indian and Russian with an occasional blunt title in English, are as wild and beautiful as some of the places they represent. To fishermen, the words roll off the tongue like those of boats and wives: the major fishing bays of Uganik, Uyak, Olga, Alitak, Sitkalidak, Kiliuda, Ugak, Chiniak, Marmot, and Kizhuyak; such waterways as the wide Shelikof Strait which separates the island from the mainland and often forms a wind tunnel of terrible velocity, and Kupreanoff Strait, with its treacherous Whale Passage; such suggestive locations of the seafaring condition as Terror Bay, Tombstone Rocks, and Deadman Bay; the uninhabited Afognak Island to the north, with its huge virgin forest; the low and barren Tugidak and Sitinak islands to the south.
It was in the straits at Whale Pass, in the waterway that separates Afognak Island from Kodiak Island, that Hank Crawford first got his taste—he thought at the time it was his fill—of the local fishing condition.
This was August 1963, but by then he was an Alaskan of nearly three months standing. Hank had finished his exams at Johns Hopkins University and flown west all in the same thrust, en route to a western bay of Kodiak Island to take a cannery job arranged through a family friend. He made smooth connections from Baltimore to Chicago to Seattle to Anchorage, but there the thrust ended. The sun might have been shining in a blue sky on the purple Chugach Mountains surrounding Anchorage, but in Kodiak 250 miles south the fogs and winds were reported too severe for a landing. The weather lasted three days.
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