by Carl Safina
DURING MARK’S TURN at the rollers—gaffing, swinging—he occasionally pulls off an unused piece of bait, tossing it to the waiting birds. A fulmar comes hovering so close in the stiff wind, hanging in midair, that Mark pushes it away with the gaff. Watching the fulmars pace the pilothouse as we move to the next string, I am impressed anew by the shaping forces of hunger and harshness, and by how much the harshness that challenges life is what causes the beauty. Birds fly because they must escape predators and search for food. Trees grow skyward because they compete fiercely with other trees for light. Living things need something to push off of. Each of us needs challenges to give us the right shape. The heavenly weightlessness of space weakens the bones of astronauts—a demonstration of the principle that we need grounding to support ourselves, that to achieve and maintain strength we need to conquer forces that tend to hold us down. The weightless, painless paradise that we conjure as “heaven”—where all is given, no thing is contested, nothing carries danger or threatens loss, and no effort can bring gain or cause change—could never create the beauty of a bird, the sleek speed of a dolphin, the love of a child, the compassion, intellect, and inventiveness of the human spirit. We could not exist in paradise. Our minds would unravel and we would wither and dull to nothing, and expire. Blessed are our enemies and challengers. Here is the great paradox of the flesh: without the things that can kill us, we could not survive. Without challenges to our very existence, we could never have come to be.
SABLEFISH SLEEK AND SUPPLE continue coming aboard as did the first ones, so many thousands of hooks ago. The second-to-last string was the best yet. And the fish are big. The crew and Mark are disappointed that the weather is preventing them from setting the gear again on this spot. Running the boat toward the last string of hooks, Mark in the wheelhouse is listening to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as increasing winds orchestrate the shape of the world outside.
The hours slip away. The day slides by. The evening grays with age, then dims and fades. But the work persists. A little before sunset, around ten P.M., we begin hauling the last string. The real becomes surreal as the labor proceeds. The fishermen eat more than their share of ibuprofen pills, ignoring their bodies’ warnings that they are exceeding their physical limits.
I’m sure I couldn’t hack this work. I just wouldn’t have what it takes to labor this hard under these conditions. Most people would jump at the chance to make $100,000 in four months. Most people would be spit out after the first day, or broken after the first week. This is something like climbing Mount Everest. You are drawn by the romance and ambition and the dream, but when you get there you realize that it is all about enduring pain and isolation.
Cal, not yet two dozen years old, says, “It’s hard to believe we used to work like this all the time.”
Shaun says, “Work twenty, sleep four, work twenty. Jesus, I don’t know how I did it.”
Cal laughs. “Ha! We’re getting t’ be old men already.”
Elder statesman of the deck crew, Tim says to me, “This kind of work is very hard when you are young, but as you get older, it’s also very hard.” He adds, “There is less wasted motion as you get older, though.” The work takes other things out of you. Tim talks to me about being away from loved ones for months. Missing birthdays and holidays. Not everybody can bear that. His brother, in the Russian crab fishery for the last eight years, barely got home in time to see his child born.
The crew is a perpetual-motion machine. The work grinds on for hours with a kind of industrial monotony. Except that this is not the inside of a factory—we’re in the Gulf of Alaska, doing something authentic and suffused with splendor and power. And we’re in some danger because anything real entails real risks.
What is it that seems romantic about this kind of difficult, dangerous, repetitive work? Is there a purity that attracts us? If you’re not inured to all the killing, it can get to you. And even if you are inured, the work can kill you. This is not so much pure as genuine. This work is what it appears to be. Not long ago, everything was real. Now the real seems too hard, because the fake has come to substitute for real experiences. And so we orbit the genuine because we recognize the value of authenticity, which we call the romantic. But we experience it only vicariously because we are unwilling to shoulder the risk and effort required to really be in it.
THE WIND’S WHISTLING in the riggings intensifies, and the boat is rolling more heavily. Mark has been on this boat in breaking thirty-foot seas. He says the birds scarcely notice such weather. “The birds will just be sitting on the water, paddling into the oncoming seas. When a big breaking comber threatens to smash them, they simply lift off over the white water and plunk down again in the next trough.”
Talk of boats in storms reminds Cal of the Finback. As Cal and I go into the galley to fix some food, Cal tells of the boat his cousin and a couple of other people outfitted in Honolulu for fishing in Alaska. It was mid-March. About two-thirds of the way from Hawaii to the Aleutians they got into very heavy seas, with confused, high winds from varying directions. “In the middle of the night, the boat—same size as this one—got lifted by a really big wave that broke over it real hard. Collapsed the whole shelter deck. Blew out all of the cabin windows, stripped all the life rafts, took the antennas—completely shredded everything. My cousin Chris got thrown out of his bunk to the far side of the cabin, and another person suddenly landed on top of him in the dark. The other guy wasn’t moving, so Chris wasn’t even sure who it was. They had cold seawater running over them. And they started getting electrocuted by all the shorts from the wiring. Then floodwater killed all the power. Floating boards in the engine room pinched off the fuel line. Without the engine, they couldn’t reposition the boat. They were sort of floating sideways to the oncoming seas, drifting in the pitch dark.
“Wind was howling through the inside of the place, water sloshing all through the boat. The only thing left serviceable was the emergency pump. In chest-deep water in the dark engine room, they tried getting the pump started. They finally got the pump going, and all huddled around, spraying ether in the pump’s motor, trying to keep it running.” They got the majority of water pumped out, and by daylight they fixed the main power, and got the engine started again. There was so much rope and line drifting back by the propeller they were concerned it might seize the wheel. So at dawn they were out on the deck, trying to cut all the lines to free up the prop so they could get under way.
“When the EPIRB had gotten swept off the boat it started transmitting. So the Coast Guard was notified. But then the boat motored away. When the Coast Guard couldn’t find the boat and abandoned the search, they notified the crew’s families. They told my cousin’s parents that he had been lost at sea. A few days after that, the guys showed up back in Honolulu. They spent a month rebuilding the whole boat, and then turned around for Alaska. They were five weeks late for the beginning of the fishing season.”
At midnight Cal and I emerge onto the Masonic’s own heaving deck. Now the middle of the boat is almost constantly awash with waves rushing in through the scuppers, sliding across the boards and back out into the other side of night. A dark wind is howling. It’s unnerving.
Under the deck lights, we are carrying hot burritos, sandwiches, just-baked apple pie with ice cream, insulated containers of hot coffee and tea, and candy bars. Everyone else chows heartily. The rolling seas, and a touch of foreboding dread, are dampening my appetite. Except for Cal, who has been below to cook, Mac—who came in to put on a dry shirt—is the only crew member who has been off the deck in the last twenty-two hours. No one has had anything that could be called a break. At almost two in the morning, the last hook clicks through the rollers.
The seas have built to a dark and formidable presence, and I realize it’s the fish who have caught all of us. The gulls and fulmars have remained alongside, illuminated by the boat’s halo, yakkering at us. But the albatrosses have receded into the wailing, tilted night.
Mark consul
ts his tide and current book and considers the wind and wave conditions that will probably accompany our run in. He has two choices; running west of Tugidak Island, which entails slowly quartering into the wind and seas, or running with seas astern—a smoother ride—around Sitkinak Island and into the Sitkinak Strait. But if the predicted gale comes up early, the strait will get very nasty. If the bigger blow holds off, the latter route is shorter and more comfortable. Both routes lead into Alitak Bay, near the remote southern extremity of Kodiak Island. Mark eventually decides on the longer, less comfortable route that is safer in case of worse weather.
The run is about thirty miles to the islands and another thirty miles into Alitak. But in these weather conditions the boat goes slowly; we will make only around seven knots, a veritable crawl.
Mark and the crew will take two-hour turns in the wheelhouse. They draw cards; Mac gets first shift. He has been working for almost twenty-two hours but says he’s glad to get the first turn because afterward he can sleep straight through.
Climbing into his bunk, Shaun pronounces, “Oh, my bunk is my friend. Yes. My bunk—is my friend.” A time for work, a time to dream.
The bow raises a white-noise hiss as it cleaves the heaving seas. During hours in the rack, I feel the sea change when we alter course, from pounding into a quartering sea on our port bow to having the sea following us on our port stern. I finally sleep well for a while.
AT EIGHT A.M. Tim is standing in the galley when I open my own eyes. In the bunk next to mine, Shaun seems to writhe in discomfort, turning fitfully and groaning, twisting and stretching his back in different directions. He wakes briefly, grumbling about leg cramps.
Tim talks to me in whispers as the others sleep in their adjacent bunks. Mainly, he speaks again of missing loved ones for months at a time.
I step into the morning. The sea is considerably lower here. The sky is bright overcast, with enough blue to lend the sea a silver lining in places. We’ve slipped in under the weather front, ahead of the full gale.
To the starboard, to the east, lies a low, long island, an austere, treeless place. Every now and then we pass thick pieces of drifting Bull Kelp torn from their coastal fastenings and adrift. The occasional piece of floating timber poses a further hazard; Tim knows of one boat that got holed by a floating log.
Shaun comes to take his turn in the wheelhouse, listening to the Rolling Stones singing “It’s hard to survive the pain of love.” Shaun’s nodding head suggests that he relates strongly; he loves fishing.
We’ve left the albatrosses and most fulmars behind. But other birds replace them: Pelagic Cormorants, Tufted Puffins, a few phalaropes, the lilting, tilting Sooty Shearwaters raking the horizon. All come and pass silently. Philip Levine’s poetry speaks again: “No one could score their sense or harmony before they faded in the wind and sun.”
We steam back around Tugidak on our way into Alitak Bay. I enjoy the scenery—the sight of land itself seems a novelty—and the strange music of the place-names in this strange place.
When Mark relieves him, Shaun puts his bare feet up in the wheelhouse and sips a mug of tea. He’s glad to be coming in safely. Mark admits, “It’s a relief to come in. In our last derby it blew fifty. Of the twenty-four hours we could fish, we lost sixteen hours to the weather. We’d often have to sit in port in nice weather, then hear gale warnings and have to head out into it. It was so destructive to morale.” One wonders what the crew looked like in the derby years at the end of a trip. Right now Mark looks like all of us. Like hell. He is unshaven and uncombed, wears dirty clothes, and has bloodshot eyes.
More land appears ahead and to port. Kodiak’s brown body shoulders its way into view through the haze. Its famed giant Grizzly Bears fit the persona bestowed by the visage of the land itself: fierce and self contained. A truly austere wilderness. Though the calendar informs us that this is May’s latter half, the brownish monotony of the slopes is just starting to crack the grip of winter with the merest early spring green.
Crab traps, marked by buoys, are set off Kodiak’s gray beaches. We now are steaming into a wide bay whose mouth is covered by hundreds and hundreds of Sooty Shearwaters, and various murres and murrelets. Yet just inside the mouth of the bay, all the birds suddenly vanish. For the first time, I see no birds ahead. Instead, the view through binoculars reveals only two fishing boats, a wild beach littered with driftwood, grassland withdrawing hugely into high hills, and beyond them snowcapped peaks brushed by streaming clouds. This place shows the enormousness of terrain at the extremes of human habitation. The span of uncarved land. A place where you can still sense both permanence and potential.
THE FISH-PACKING and -shipping plant is in the first cove inside Alitak Bay, called Lazy Bay. It was built for salmon canning and is very much an outpost beyond the edge of civilization. I don’t say that to be melodramatic. The whole island to the north looks unpeopled as far as we can see. No road links this place to anywhere. No town supplies workers. This plant is as isolated and remote as just about anything on land anywhere. Wherever you’re headed to, you can’t get there from here.
Shaun tells me that fishermen themselves built the plant with their own hands, in the old days. He says that back then, fishermen were really tough. He says, “The desolation, the twenty-five-day trips for halibut—I would not have been able to handle it. I would not have been able to cut the cheese.”
Gulls (one with a long-liner’s hook stuck in its bill) are hanging around the docks, and several eagles grip the pilings. I’m in the boat’s baiting station, where the sides and overhead are closed off, and though half the sky is blocked from view I casually count nine Bald Eagles in the air. While I’m standing on the deck in a coat, woolen hat, and gloves, Cal, working to tie the boat up, is shirtless. The wheelhouse window of the only other boat here has a sticker saying I’D RATHER BE FISHING—AND I DON’T EVEN LIKE IT.
The water at the dock is loaded with juvenile herring, the schools moving up and down in the water, toward and away from the surface. The individual moving fish make silvery S-curves. The pilings are festooned with large white anemones on stalks two feet long. They grow below the range of the lowest tide. Packed above them, in the intertidal range, are Blue Mussels. The tidal range is wide, about fifteen feet.
Masonic is carrying twenty-three thousand pounds of Sablefish bodies, about five thousand fish. The boat can hold eighty-five thousand pounds of fish, but Mark says, “Pretty good for three days.” We also have about half a ton of gutted Pacific Halibut.
Four men come to unload the boat with a crane and bucket. They are weathered and leathered and all look like Alaskan Natives, perhaps Aleut—but actually these guys are Mexicans and Filipinos. The fish are embedded layer upon layer in fine ice, and the men in the hold have to get to them with shovels, digging them out carefully, as though it is an archaeological expedition into the Ice Age. Watching the men unloading, Tim says, “They come out a lot faster than they go in.”
Masonic’s crew will spend several hours cleaning up, brushing every possible surface until the blood-splattered, herring-and-squid-smeared decks smell lemon fresh.
Somebody has put a pair of pink flamingos on the hillside next to the plant. They remind me of the two pink plastic flamingos on Tern Island, where at this moment people lathered in sunblock are working in bathing suits and shorts and birds are panting miserably in the heat.
I climb up the hill behind the fish plant. From here the world looks bigger than ever. The land stretches massively to the north with absolutely no hint of human presence. The plant below is the only human structure visible to the far ridges and distant shores. No photograph could capture this scene, because trying to engulf what is visual requires turning yourself through a full circle. An odd sense of desolation suddenly clamps in. I hear breaking surf on the other side of a ridge top, but when I climb the ridge to get a view of the ocean I am surprised that the “surf” sound is instead only the roaring of wind gusting across an even farther ridge. As t
he saying goes, “Beyond the mountains are more mountains.” I think about all of us who’ve come from so far away; I think of where we’re from, of leaving, and of home. To imagine being elsewhere is part of being human—and uniquely enables human beings to both envision the future and squander the moment.
An intermittent drizzle begins as I deny my humanity by forcing my attention to the present, taking my lesson from the sparrows, who are singing their sweet songs of sad exuberance. In the foreshortened spring and summer, they embody all the hope and hopelessness of the universal effort to remain alive. They purge my sense of desolation and keep me in well-connected company. Savannah Sparrow, Golden-crowned Sparrow, Fox Sparrow, and Rosy Finch (I’ve never seen the Golden-crowned or the Rosy Finch before). Like us, those among sparrows who succeed best will push dying off to the end of their natural life spans, rather than have it interrupt them right in the middle of something special. Bees bumble-buzz the open ground searching out the scant flowers. On a hill I find a burped-up owl pellet with what looks like lemming bones in it, and fur.
Looking down at the isolated packing houses and docks that seem to have sprung up here like a plant growing from a crack in a rock, it seems incredible that anybody came here to establish this outpost. It’s hard to imagine getting the building materials and machinery here. It’s hard to imagine merely working here. Some people have astonishing nerve. A magpie flits across a nearby slope.
When I come down the hill I remark to Cal about the view and how desolate the place seemed, and before I can tell him of my conversion by sparrows, he interrupts to correct me, saving, “It’s remote, but not desolate.” That’s what I was about to tell him.
THERE’S A GREEN SAILBOAT in the harbor, about a hundred yards from shore. A young man and a woman are jigging Pacific Cod at a furious pace. These don’t command near as high a price as the Sablefish that we’ve been catching on the Masonic. But they are worth money, and you can catch them near shore from a much smaller boat. The adventurous couple is working three lines between them. Every time they pull a line up, it has one to three thrashing cod on it. The young man and woman are catching these Pacific Cod like New Englanders caught Atlantic Cod three hundred years ago. New Englanders thought you could never fish them out. And as they did deplete them they insistently denied that fishing boats had anything to do with it; though the scarcity of the 1980s and ’90s was unprecedented in the five-hundred-year-old fishery, they blamed “natural cycles” instead. Here, everybody seems quite aware that you can fish them out. In fact, any slow fishing is usually blamed on a boat having been through a little earlier. Their sober pragmatism and conservative approach is a major reason Alaska still has large numbers of fish. Reality breeds contentment.