by Dave Barrett
My father would have a heart attack if he saw this kind of clutter!
As we moved down the aisles, Swanson used me as a human shopping-cart. I was rapidly being buried beneath cans of peaches and pears, green beans and corn, soups and cereals; boxes of powdered milk; tins of coffee; cartons of eggs, dishwashing liquid; plastic wrap and aluminum foil. Swanson seemed to select the items randomly from the aisles—and stacked them upon me with the same indifference. The only way I even know which way to go was to follow the orangutan-gait of the man in front of me who could only be Swanson. As a joke, I suggested:
“How about this bag of Oreo Cookies... ”
Swanson, of course, acknowledged this as a “good idea”—adding them to the heap.
It occurred to me to protest in more obvious fashion, but, by this point, I feared a simple spoken word might send my food pyramid toppling to the floor.
“There,” Swanson said finally, adding a handful of beef jerky and a sock of chewing tobacco from a display case in front of the checkout stand. “We’re ready to go fishing, kid!”
And before I could maneuver my head past a box of Cheerios, Swanson shoved a wad of money in my shirt pocket and joined rank with his fellow fisher people at the magazine rack.
While I waited, I listened to a disagreement between three fishermen behind me:
“Fucking cheesehead pirates!” said the one with tobacco in his mouth. “They put a toll on me when I head down passage to Seattle in September and I’ll put a bullet under the chin-strap of the first Mountie steps foot on my deck! $500 dollars—“
“Yeah—sure it’s piracy! But that Tobin guy has a point. The Canucks kept their dams off the Fraser while we hooked up the Columbia like a frigging Christmas tree! A piece I read in the Seattle Times said we’re taking a $100 million worth of their salmon for each 35 mill they take of ours—“
“Listen to Pat here!” said the third fisherman. “You’re a regular Boy Scout, Patty, my boy! Discussing what’s fair among thieves!”
“Thieves!” said Pat. “If that be the case—then even thieves have got to be fair—at least amongst each other!”
“Screw that!” answered the first speaker—spitting tobacco juice somewhere on the floor behind me. “It’s dog-eat-dog, gents! Way of the world! If the Canucks don’t like it... I say it’s time we made ‘em our 51st state!”
There was laughter and agreement over this last comment.
Chapter Six
First Morning
Now a day had gone by and I was sitting, half asleep, at the wheel of the Western World. It was four o’ clock, opening morning of King salmon season, and I was supposed to steering us through some underwater reef I was supposed to see by watching this red light beep on and off around the depth gauge clock. Before I even had a chance to ask myself if any of this was really happening, Swanson came bouncing in the wheelhouse from out back and pried one of my hands loose from the wheel and placed three orangey pills in the palm of my hand.
“What are they?” I protested.
“Swallow ‘em!”
He handed me a styro-foam cup with cold coffee in it. There was dirt sticking to the rim of the cup.
“Take it!”
I swigged the three little pills down. One stuck to the back of my throat...
“Good,” Swanson said, flashing a yellow-toothed smile just as quick as he disappeared out back again.
Like a kid straddling a horse on his first merry-go-round, I scissored my legs around the legs of my stool. The sea heaved and sighed beneath us like one great lung. The wind howled out back. A chill crawled up the back of my neck from a draft leaking through the sliding wheelhouse door. It was still dark out: a blue dark like I was sitting in the cockpit of an airplane... taxiing around the runway awaiting a message from the control tower. The drag was in motion. The twenty-odd trawlers composing it, including us, were strung out about 70 yards apart; circling the inlet in oblong fashion as we hugged the opposing bank as long as possible before cutting across to the other side. Even though I sat here, going through the motions at the wheel, I had an uneasy sense that something was wrong.
Swanson came back inside—just in time to take the wheel from me before I ran into the trolling lines of the trawler in front of us.
“Jesus H. Christ, kid! Didn’t you see that guy in front?”
“Of course!” I said. “I was following him just like you said I was supposed—“
“Scoot,” Swanson said, meaning I had to lean my stool against the wall in this cramped corner of the wheelhouse. As Swanson worked the throttle up and down, his crippled shoulder kept jabbing close to my face. A thin trickle of tobacco juice was dribbling down the side of chin and the stench from his armpits was almost unbearable.
“Damn it!” Swanson cursed, jamming the throttle back into gear. I jerked my head back from his jabbing shoulder, smacking the back of my skull against the wall.
“Hey!” I said, rubbing the sore spot with one of my hands. “If you need me to move or something—“
Swanson signaled me to shut up, then flipped through several channels on the CB radio overhead and issued a few unanswered calls.
“Fucking williwaw... ” Swanson mumbled to himself.
“Williwaw!” I repeated. “What’s a fucking williwaw?”
Ignoring my lame attempt at a joke, Swanson dropped into the hull of the Western World, using the 5-step ladder leading down from the hatch.
It was the second time this morning Swanson had to re-adjust our course.
I swilled down the rest of the contents of my styro-foam cup, dirt and all.
I don’t know what had gotten into me this morning. My coordination was all off; it was as though I’d woken up and suddenly discovered I was left-handed. Just seeing the other trawlers following each other in such neat 70-yard lengths should have been enough to tell me where to be and what to do. If I was too far behind, I needed to speed up... too close slow down.
Simple stuff.
Something a third-grader ought to be able to do.
A minute later, we were gain on the trawler in front again.
“Swanson” I whispered aloud.
I watched as the fisherman on the trawler in front of us came out of wheelhouse, waving his arms in distress. I thought of throwing the throttle into neutral, and then remembered that the trawler behind us was only fifty yards away.
Now the fisherman in the trawler in front was frantic: hopping around the rear of his trawler like a bee trapped in a jar. The fisherman’s arm flapping intensified. I threw my arms up in a gesture of helplessness. He pointed towards center of the inlet.
“O.K.!” I shouted back, though only I could hear.
I steered towards the center of the inlet. Now I began to worry that the trawler behind us would take our position in the drag. With the drag linked as tight as it was, we’d wind up stuck in the middle of the inlet, absently swirling around with no way of getting back in the loop.
A rodeo clown surrounded by a herd of angry bulls.
“Swanson!” I called out at the top of my lungs.
Charging out back, I tried the same method of distress signaling the fisherman in front had used on the fisherman at the wheel of the trawler behind us now. But the trawler kept right on coming, the pilot unresponsive to my petition. For all I knew, he wasn’t a real person at all, but the silhouette of a paper mache replica propped there to fool me.
“Asshole!”
I returned to the wheelhouse. I could feel Swanson hammering in the engine room directly beneath my boots. After several unanswered calls, I realized that the blare of the diesel engine so close to his ear must have drowned out all my pleas for help.
When Swanson did resurface, I’d steered us out to that spot in the middle of the inlet. Swanson didn’t notice at first, concerned primarily with wiping the black engine grease off his arms and hands. He mentioned something about the idle being off kilter again when he suddenly realized our position and bolted out back with a
loud cry.
Immediately I realized I’d done something wrong.
“The lines! The lines!” Swanson cried as he came charging back inside. He slapped my hands from the wheel and straightened our course again.
“You ran the two trolling lines together! I told you you can’t turn too sharp or you’ll tangle the lines up!”
“No you didn’t,” I said. “All you ever said was to follow—“
“Common sense!” Swanson screamed, throwing his arms up as he ran out back to look at the damage done once more.
“Bastard... ” I mockingly scolded myself with a line from a black-and-white movie I couldn’t remember the title of. “Now look at what you’ve done? Are you satisfied? Satisfied?”
“Look,” Swanson said, returning to the wheelhouse to jerk me from the wheel.
He brought me out back.
“But the wheel? What if—“
“Never mind!” Swanson interrupted, his plyer-like grip on my elbow. “It’ll guide itself now. Pay attention.”
All trace of my sarcastic mood was obliterated as we came out on deck. Protected by the cover of the wheelhouse, the sea had seemed distinctly separate from me: much the way a road seems separate from the driver of a car. But out here on deck the sea lurched, whipped, and bucked about like the live creature that it is. It slipped by in great continuous rolls; some of it washing across deck, temporarily obscuring the surface we stood upon. If it wasn’t for the handle Swanson had on me, I might well have gone over.
“Stand more flat-footed!” Swanson yelled, his mouth inches from my ear so some of his tobacco juice splattered on my face. “Get off your goddamn heels, man!”
The wind in the middle of the inlet was terrific. It ripped at the exposed flesh of hands and face. A flap of loosely furled steadying sail flapped spastically at the same level as my head so I had to lean over to hear Swanson speak.
“Now hear me once!” Swanson began, still holding the back of the elbow and still splattering tobacco juice on the side of my face. “I ain’t got time to be repeating things to you!”
I nodded my head like a small boy to police officer. I tried to shove my freezing hands into the front pockets of my jeans, but Swanson shook my arm so violently I could not.
“There’s two sets of lines! One’s supposed to run out to the left of the wake, the other’s supposed to run out to the right of the wake. One to the left, one to the right. If the trawler’s turned too sharp to the left or too sharp to the right the trolling lines will cross.”
Swanson paused, gesturing to the larger-than-life example staring us straight in the face.
“Like that!”
“Yes, I see that now... ” I replied.
“Good.”
He followed me back to the wheelhouse and informed our fellow fishermen over the CB radio of the little trouble were experiencing:
“Hey, wha- -going on--? Saw you drifting ou--. Must got—greeny—on—helm?”
The voices coming over the wire crackled, hissed, and squelched in and out as though being monitored by a censor.
“Green as they come!” Swanson answered, then flipped channel clear over to the other end of the dial so all that came across the air waves was a cold gray static.
“Comprende’?” Swanson said, looking at me and through me at the same time. “Next time we’re out of the drag for the day. No ifs, ands or buts. Comprende’?”
“Comprende’.”
I was greatly relieved when Swanson shut off the CB radio.
“One thing,” I said, before Swanson set himself to bringing in the lines, untangling them, and restringing each one. “If I follow in a direct path behind the other trawler, I’ll tailgate—“
“Weave!” Swanson interrupted. “Weave, goddamn it. But for Christ’s sake, kid—not too sharp!”
And before I could even say oh or ah
Swanson was out there... hopping around in the cockpit at the extreme rear of the Western World like a man balanced atop a swaying fence... manually working the lines... the only thing between him, the ocean, mountains and sky... being two-feet of wood-siding he braced his shins against each time the boat pitched.
“Weave,” I whispered aloud, a trace of a smile forming on my face.
Morning was on its way.
Chapter Seven
$4 Dollars a Pound
At eleven o’ clock on our third day out Swanson ordered me out back to work the lines.
“I ain’t paying you to sit on that stool like some kid on a Disneyland ride! I’m paying you to be a puller.”
By now the idle had been properly timed. Swanson had even gone to the trouble of stringing a three-cornered piece of plywood in our wake as a drag board:
“We want to keep her down to two knots. Ain’t no other way of going about it with Kings. The big bastards stay way down low... scratching their bellies along the bottom.”
We were thirty miles south of Elfin Cove, free-trolling down Lisianski Inlet, en route to Pelican, Alaska. We’d left the spitting rain and williwaw winds miles behind us. The sky was a salty, distant blue. The steep red-shaled cliffs, which had helped produce the violent gusts of wind that first morning, were replaced by long rolling hills of Sitka Spruce and Western Hemlock. Dogwood, alder and various berry bushes crowded down to shoreline, providing cover for hundreds of hidden streams emptying out at water’s edge. Sea otters lounged in beds of kelp along the bank. The clatter of their rock utensils, chiseling away on the shells of abalone for the succulent meat inside, carried clear across one side of Lisianski Inlet to the other. Mist curled up off the water and hovered a few feet above it in places. The nearest trawler was about 300 yards in front, another a half-mile behind going down the other way.
Swanson had granted me the “privilege” of attending the wheel these first 48-hours so I could get acquainted with my side duties about the Western World. First order of the day was to light the oil-burner stove in the hull and start a pot of coffee. Because Swanson had forgotten to get a new damper for the stovepipe’s flue, it would become next to impossible to light it on blustery mornings. Between shifts, it was my duty to cook breakfast and dinners. Because there were better things I could be doing than standing around a stove all day, Swanson instructed me to cook things like canned beans and ravioli in the cans the came in: eating their contents out of the same cans to avoid dishes. He showed me how slow cook salmon: stuffing its open belly with chopped onions, potatoes, radishes—whatever—then wrapping the fish in aluminum foil and cooking it at a low temperature (in case extra work above deck kept us away from out regular meal hours). What Swanson hadn’t taught me—or neglected to emphasize—were precautions I should take while performing these or any other seemingly obvious procedures. The night before, in haste to return to a task I was simultaneously engaged in above deck, I’d forgotten to remove the lid off a can of Boston Bakes Beans before setting it on the burner and... upon returning to the stove after correcting the difficulty above... had practically blown my head off while attempting to open the heated contents after the fact.
But with the exception of the can of Boston Baked Beans and the tangling of the lines on opening morning, my first 48-hours had passed with little incident. Swanson’s remark about the Disneyland ride wasn’t far from the truth. At times I felt as though I was on an enchanted carnival ride: porpoises, like shiny metal torpedoes, played games of crisscross across our moving bow-point; humpback whales breached a hundred yards to stern like babes from a mother’s womb; great pods of herring broke the sea’s surface in shimmering waves of silver. And if this natural spectacle wasn’t enough, the Western World’s wheelhouse came equipped with all the accessories: a quadraphonic stereo with graphic equalizer and headphones; an impressive collection of mostly “stuck in the 70’s” CDs and cassette tapes ranging from, on one side muscle-rockers like Creedence Clearwater Revival, ZZ Top and Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” to, on the flip side, country western faves like George Jones, Tammy Wynette and a Hank Wi
lliam’s Jr. version of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” And on the dashboard, in a plastic bag Swanson referred to as the “glad bag,” the pot. Mother Nature’s Dramamine and a fisherman’s best friend! A half-ounce of it! Wonderful green sticky stuff that stayed stuck to your fingertips when you plucked it from the bag.
As I sauntered out back, expecting a leisurely stretch before moving to my new task, Swanson was in process of pounding the brains of a sixty-pound King salmon into breakfast porridge with the back of his gaff. The sixty-pound King had knocked itself and its dozen smaller comrades out of the 20-gallon picnic cooler (we used as a temporary storage bin before glazing the catch in the ice holds below deck).
“You-stinking-son-of-a-bitch!” Swanson shrieked, gesticulating each word separately between blows.
The salmon was a good four feet long. The smaller gaff Swanson had brought the fish aboard with was lodged in the salmon’s side just beneath the gills. It hurked and jerked and pogoed its dime bright body across the slippery deck in defiance of Swanson’s assault. I looked on in disbelief as two of the King’s comrades were kicked across deck by Swanson’s boots and flip-flopped to freedom over the two-inch high stretch of sluice railing. I made a tentative step forward... in hopes of retrieving the rest of the catch from a similar fate... then jumped back inside when Swanson and the sixty-pounder came whirling my way like two cocks in a cockfight.
Swanson was a man possessed. His gaff was an obscene blur as it came down on the head of the salmon again and again and again. I noticed--in a kind of horror--that Swanson’s lips were set in the same savage sneer as the salmon’s; his beady eyes burned with the same wild indignation; his forehead gathered in a white knot. The hitch of Swanson’s high shoulder gave his body the look of a jackhammer-gone wild.