The water performance of the different salmon also varies. A line fisherman knows whether he has a king or a coho before either surfaces, because a king characteristically makes a first strike at the bait (which he mistakes for a live fish) to stun it. A hooked coho leaps from the water, while a king is more likely to sound. Neither of these two large salmon nor sockeyes play on top of the water while swimming free, as do the finning and jumping pinks and chums. As noted by Jones Henry, a jumping pink arcs straight out of the water and down again, while a chum jumps a narrower angle and flaps his tail once or twice. But again, don’t count on any of it.
Man as sophisticated predator likes to elevate his kill of exceptionally spirited creatures. It helps explain his blood lust. For years Ernest Hemingway had us convinced that a bull’s bravest calling is to participate in the corrida, where he is mutilated into a furious state and then murdered by a courageous and graceful man in costume. I used to buy that. But it is no longer so clear to me that the hunted creature, whose odds of getting away are about one in five hundred, and odds of escaping unmaimed even less, shares the mystical communion. Nevertheless, I remain guilty of loving to catch salmon. And I feel an affinity for the doomed creatures as I bring them in either as individuals on a hook or in the abundance of a seine. My own rationalization is that they are part of my food chain. After all, by eating hamburger I silently consent to the trussing and slitting of steer, so why not the fishing of salmon on their way to inevitable death? I can still work to prevent the depletion of a wild stock through overharvest, and I can still hate the slaughter of creatures for entertainment on whatever mystic level. But Nature made me a carnivore, just as she gave bears and eagles the taste for salmon and gave salmon the instinct to feed on herring. I am a predator once removed from the jungle, and so are you.
The natives of the Pacific Northwest had no more compunction about living off salmon than did the bears. The Haida and Tlingit tribes which occupied (and still do in diminished numbers) the river-cut coasts from present Vancouver to present Yakutat had cultures based on salmon fishing rather than hunting. If the runs fell off, the tribe migrated to a new set of waterways and sometimes starved before finding new grounds. The oils in chinooks and cohos made them perfect for smoking, and the lack of oil made chums equally good for sun drying. (Chum salmon acquired their second name because they were dried to feed dog teams.) Both methods permitted the storage of a food supply throughout the winter and also the accumulation of fish as the property that sometimes led to extravagant potlatches. Farther north, the salmon was prized by the Aleuts and Koniags and the Eskimos who inhabited western Alaska from Kodiak and the Aleutians up past the Yukon River and the Arctic Circle. The splendid fish sustained tribes along river systems far from the coast. The Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805 stumbled starving from the Rockies into the Snake River country of present Idaho, and would have made it no closer to the Pacific had it not been for the dried salmon of the Nez Percé Indians.
The first white men to think in terms of salmon were the Russian fur traders who in the eighteenth century began to sail from Siberia. In 1785 a group of Alexander Shelikof’s men wintered on lower Kodiak Island by the Karluk River, and here began a Russian traffic in salt salmon. In the late 1820s the Hudson’s Bay Company began exporting salt salmon from the Columbia River, and soon other commercial salteries were established in Puget Sound and the Fraser River. The site of the first salmon cannery was the Sacramento River, in the 1850s. After the Civil War the pioneer of this enterprise, William Hume, moved north to the Columbia River. Others followed, establishing scores of canneries progressively northward as each river became overfished. By 1901 there were seventy canneries along the Canadian coast that separates Washington from Alaska. In Alaska itself, the first cannery opened in 1878. For two decades starting in 1882, the Karluk River on Kodiak Island had such huge runs of sockeyes that it supported one of the largest fish-cannery complexes ever built.
The farther north and into the wilderness the salmon entrepreneurs went, the wilder was the life of following the salmon. The money was sometimes big. A few cannerymen made fortunes. More went bust. The men who caught the fish and those who cleaned them survived from season to season, a rough lot living in a world of bull work, small expectations, and extravagant steam-letting. Whether the history and mythology of the salmon fisheries is yet recognized outside Alaska as part of the American saga equal to the railroad push, the gold rushes, and the Pony Express, and whether or not it produced a Paul Bunyan or a John Henry, it was still a hairy time, a legendary time.
Rudy Anich, a man in his seventies who still fishes the salmon in Kodiak waters, recalled his salad days in the twenties and thirties when he fished both Puget Sound and Kodiak. He spoke slowly and gracefully as he steered his seiner Naknek Made from the Kodiak boat harbor to the fuel pier. “Well,” he said, “from all the gripping and pulling web with your hands, your fingers would be locked tight each morning. Couldn’t open them, couldn’t hold a thing. We learned from the old-timers to urinate on our hands, and that would start them moving. Whether it was the warmth or something else, I don’t know, but it helped the pain and started them opening. Your thumb and forefinger would open first, you’d start gripping web with those. But oh, pulling in those first couple of sets! Men would cry in the morning as they hooked their claws in that cold web and pulled. And of course there was no refrigeration. If the cannery tender brought us meat, we’d have to scrape the mold and maggots off it. You’d make a stew and she’d be white with maggots.” Part of a boat’s regular dried stores would be quantities of raisins. The boat crews would keep five fifty-gallon cans going with a fermentation process to produce raisinjack. “We’d drink it with each meal, gallons of it, about eighteen percent alcohol. Keep us drunker than a skunk. That way we kept working, and didn’t feel the work so bad. But, young kids were so strong from pulling those enormous nets by hand! At one time, I could do pushups on one hand balanced by two fingers, keep doing them easy as breathing. I remember one kid, Murphy, weighed only a hundred forty pounds, he’d eat fifty pancakes at one sitting. I don’t mean little ones. We’d all shovel in the food like that whenever we stopped long enough to eat. You’d bum it off soon enough.”
Hank toughs it a bit for a youth of the sixties and seventies. He follows the pace of his crewmates to exhaustion, and he faces the primal wind and water. But technology eases his way. His boots and rain gear, thanks to chemistry, are less likely to stink, stiffen, remain clammy, or crack apart than those of past fishermen he never knew, so that he is warmer and drier than ever they were. He does not have to row his skiff when making a set. His engine, being diesel, will not explode in his face and bum his boat from under him. Radio gives him a voice to people beyond the wilderness, and aircraft the means to reach him in the event of emergency. (Disaster, of course, still leaves him on his own.) The nets he pulls are made of synthetic fabrics that weigh less than cotton web, both of themselves and because they do not absorb water. He even no longer must dry his net to keep it from rotting. And, above all, to bring the tons of net and fish aboard during each set, he need not use his arms and back for every inch of the way: a hydraulic power block does the heaviest pulling for him. This development, invented by a fisherman named Mario Puretic, was introduced to the salmon fleets in 1955 and perfected by 1958. It might be the single most important development in fishing since the contrivance of the first net many years B.C., freeing fishermen from being beasts of burden just as the tractor freed farmers.
The fish business has never been a sure thing, even now with the wisdom of biologists. Salmon may return to the stream of their hatching, and they may follow a mystically predictable route around this cape or that point. But where they go as adults in the great ocean remains their secret. Therefore mainly unknown are those creatures, currents, temperatures, and food supplies which act together to decimate or preserve them. Biologists can predict through valid pragmatic devices, and canneries can tool for big or small seasons,
but it all depends on what comes into the boats. Fishermen must still wait for their salmon at the gateways, never knowing for sure whether the season will be one of feast or of famine until they haul their nets and lines from beneath the surface.
CHAPTER 7
Hang Tough
AGUST was nearly over, and they had found only a couple of brailer sets since the one of Hank’s initiation. They now ate hamburger or fish rather than roasts. True, on most days they delivered four or five hundred fish to the tender (one day only thirty) at forty-four cents each for pinks and seventy-five each for the chums, which were twice as big. However, with the division of proceeds into 11-percent crew shares and with the cost of fuel and supplies, Jones was mainly breaking even, and nobody had made an adequate winter stake. “Have to fuckin’ longshore next winter to pay the booze,” Ivan grumbled.
Jones was a man of calm demeanor except in the heat of a set, but the strain began to show on his face. After all, his was the investment and the mortgages. At the end of each thin week, as the allotted weeks of the season diminished, he looked older, partly from the grayness of his stubble as it grew out before the Saturday shave but also from the hours of squinting and straining for the sight of fish. Jones did not like to waste his men or other resources, so his habit was to search, even for hours, until he saw sure signs of fish, rather than to set on the mere chance of fish as many other skippers did. Now, however, they all became restless if the search took too long, so that they sometimes persuaded him to set in areas of previous good hauls, regardless. It seldom produced enough fish to reward their effort.
Mid-August brought fogs and blows. There were days when the mountains might have been plains for all they saw as they worked the nets, times when the wind penetrated Hank’s oilskins and every pullover he could find. The others worked without ever altering their basic clothes. For a few days the sky opened and the sun beat down, while the temperature rose gradually from fifty to seventy-five. Hank found the heat exhilarating. He stripped to his back and reveled in the prickle of sunburn. The others acted like old men, remaining dressed as before. They in fact only changed if a garment started to rot from gurry or to tear apart. During the first weeks on the grounds Hanks own sour odor bothered him at night, especially as it drifted from his long johns. But by the second week the smell was barely noticeable. He had also settled in so well that he no longer even thought of whistling.
When Hank helped Steve mend web, Steve sometimes handed him the needle, even when it slowed the work and produced less perfect meshes. He took tricks at the wheel whenever Jones Henry wanted to duck below, and nobody needed to monitor. Sven was glad to teach him things on deck, although he was as possessive of his stove as Ivan was of his skiff. After a while, Ivan consented to let him join the skiff as second man. This opened an entire new literature of duties. He learned to work the leed while Ivan handled the tiller, and to help maneuver the skiff in a tight place by the way he threw his weight on the taut cork line. However, Ivan never relinquished the steering or other skilled jobs, and Hank’s major skiff duty was plunging. He liked the skiff. Sometimes seals and otters swam close, and they saw more of the shore than aboard the boat, although whenever they came close to land blankets of mosquitoes descended.
His favorite part of the skiff job came when they brought back the encircled net. He heaved the line to Steve, then leaped back aboard the Rondelay with split-second timing, often while both vessels were in violent motion and geysers of spray shot up between them. As soon as he touched deck he hustled with the others to rig the two purse lines and speed them aboard before the fish panicked out. He could work the winch himself if Jones was occupied, and, after weeks of practice, could coil the hundreds of feet of a purse line at high speed without fouling it into twists and “assholes.” Then, when they finished stacking the seine and hauling the catch, he leaped back into the skiff to help Ivan recover the leed. Eventually, in calm weather, with many cautions and instructions, Ivan began to let him bring the skiff back home, even to the delicate maneuver of nosing the bow into the stern of the Rondelay for tiedown. All in all, he was becoming an equal hand among them.
Thus with all his duties, which seemed to continue after the others had finished theirs, Hank started to chafe at washing the dishes and all Sven’s greasy pots under the miserable cold-water pump. Before he came aboard the others had taken turns. At first he tried random grumbles. Finally, once when they had all fished especially hard and he had pulled his weight without question, he declared after eating that he figured it was somebody else’s turn. Jones Henry replied without hesitation that cleanup was his job until somebody greener yet, heaven forbid, signed aboard the Rondelay.
A few other things went wrong also. There were days when they called jokes back and forth, then days, especially close to the end of the week as the season wore on, when they snarled at each other over petty things. Jones sometimes shouted when they moved too slowly, sometimes almost screamed. It surprised Hank that Big Steve, particularly, took it. He himself had little choice. As the excitement of fishing on the Rondelay became routine, Hank wished for occasional privacy. On a day too stormy to fish, there was not even room to stretch without knocking a bunk or a shoulder. At night, Steve and Ivan snored like hogs.
And Ivan, who slept head-in directly across from him with feet no more than two yards from his face, had feet that stank above any other odor in the cabin. Hank decided to be cool about it: one weekend at the cannery store he bought three new pairs of socks and left them on Ivan’s bunk.
Ivan placed them on the engine cover when he crawled in to sleep, obviously assuming they belonged to someone else. So Hank presented them to him. “I got socks,” said Ivan, looking up from his bunk with the innocence of a man at peace. Hank made a joke of it as he explained the reason. He might better have made a filthy suggestion. Slowly, Ivan put on his boots and went outside. Hank turned to the others, but Steve frowned reproachfully, and both Sven and Jones looked away. Hank went on deck in the dark. Ivan was standing in his skiff with arms folded. He gave no answer to Hank’s awkward apology.
After this, Hank ceased to exist for Ivan: he stood in the skiff, hands dangling, as Ivan assumed all the jobs himself. If he started to work the plunger, Ivan removed it from his hands as impersonally as he would have picked it from the rack, and if he hauled on the leed his hands would be flicked off like the jellyfish.
It grew worse. Once, as the others gathered around Jones Henry at the wheel to search out jumpers, Hank joined them in time to hear Ivan declare in his deep voice: “Let a sissy college kid aboard and next thing, everybody takes baths instead of catches fish!”
That night, as Hank scrubbed the hold with Steve after delivering the fish, he asked what he could do.
Steve took the question seriously, lowering the pressure hose as he pondered. “Well, you got contacts at the cannery. Old Ivan, he likes Demarrara, that’s the black rum. But don’t give him none unless I’m around. You never shoot a bear with a BB gun.”
Their normal weekend routine started with offloading to the tender, followed by a long scrubdown with disinfectant of all the boards in the hold, then a personal shower and shave aboard the tender. (Only Steve and Hank let their beards grow. The others accumulated a week’s stubble as an expedient and were glad to be rid of it.) They ate and slept as they traveled through the inlets, and tied to the cannery floats by Saturday afternoon. After performing any repairs necessary to the engine, seine, skiff, or whatever, they spent the evening visiting back and forth between the boats. Hank still had Elsie, who clung to his arm as they partied from deck to deck. The Sunday routine: stock groceries, take fuel, return to the grounds in late afternoon, anchor, eat, sleep until about first light, seine in the water by the six o’clock opening, and start a new week of fishing.
That Saturday, Hank found his Demarrara, after a long search by many words of mouth, in one of the Filipino bunkhouses. Two bottles cost him thirty dollars apiece.
Ivan examined the
labels and held one of the bottles to the light. “What you do, stuff socks inside?”
“Open the fucker and pass it around,” said Steve.
With only two bottles among them it wasn’t much of a drunk as such things go, but it took Ivan through the necessary phases. By the end of the first bottle his dark silence toward Hank had ended, replaced by an angry roar. “Som’ bitch, if a man ain’t free to wear his feet like he wants, ain’t free to keep a man’s feet”—the huge hand banged on the engine cover—”then kids who don’t like it can piss off the boat and go live with the goddam women who keep their feet in buckets of water!” Hank tried to explain, but Jones winked and shook his head. As Ivan’s fists began to emphasize his words, Big Steve shifted casually to place himself between Ivan and Hank. The support filled Hank with gratitude. He endured the tirade, which enumerated his every mistake aboard the Rondelay, including the loss once of a dozen forty-four-cent humpies (“five hundred sockeye fuckers worth two dollars apiece,” as Ivan put it), and the hours each of them had sacrificed to teach him what little he knew.
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