The Lead Line / unexpected call from Kodiak

Like a serpent slithering across rocky ground, the old boat works her way toward safety and shelter eighty long miles over an unseen horizon, the heart of the darkest of all possible nights.

Three guys, dressed in layers of wool and flannel, ragged cuff-less shirt sleeves showing three inches of soiled thermals, sat wedged  between heavy oak table rail, backs against vertical planked bulkheads in the galley mess room, keeping the night and storm at bay with coffee and companionship; courage bolstered with tales and stories of warmer times and better places.  Stories filled with humor and laughter, comfort on a dark winter night at sea.

     

The next several posts were written back in the nineties.  I started out to jot down a few old family stories from our uncle Simon, ended up telling one of my own.

One February in the 1970s I flew out to Kodiak, Alaska to help bring an old wooden fishing boat back to Seattle at the end of a fall - winter shrimp fishing season.  

Owned by an older generation in our extended family, the Commander loomed large in the imaginations of cousin Jon and me growing up.    Memory being what it is, the following story combines childhood day dreams with real events from that winter.  Parts of the story are intentionally fictionalized, other inconsistencies with actual events are nothing more than an artifact of my reasonably functional memory.

As Aunt Norma used to say, "if it didn't happen that way, it should have. . . .

THE LEAD LINE

 Shelves piled high, parts and pieces from long forgotten projects, garden tools jostled for room next to rusted lid paint cans, their companion brushes dried and useless since some long past afternoon when the last dab of brown latex had been pushed into the far corner of the roof the old man built over the tiny outdoor patio that overlooked a wide lawn and a stand of straight trunk fir trees.

But now, final projects had been set aside, many years had slipped away since the old man made his last trip off shore to work the fishing grounds in a stout work boat.
  Time had finally come when the old folks, aunt and uncle on my father’s side of the family, needed to move on to late stage living arrangements.  Long since retired from the fishing business myself, cousin Simone had asked us over to help sort through the remnants of her parents well lived lives to help set up a yard sale the day after the move.  The women  sent me out to the old man’s tool closet, where I stumbled across vivid memories of other times and places  lurking in every shadow.

A tool caught my eye, instantly opening a window through forty years, to the little beach house along the peaceful tree lined shores of Lake Washington,  the old man rummaging through a box of tools,  as he fumbled with a loose hinge on a laundry room cabinet.  Muttering impatiently, scattering junk here and there he finally came up with a new looking screw driver.  It was a Crapsman, which was a sort of family name we used in those days, play on words for the Sears house brand.   Holding it up to the light with a gnarled hand that was larger than one would expect on a fellow of modest overall frame, he announced, “This one cost me six hundred dollars.  That’s how much I paid those dinging people last year, and this screw driver is the only thing I can find that we got there.”

Lower down, on another self there was a little bench grinder that opened another window further back into childhood days.  Time had added a tad of rust and a few layers of now chipped paint to the handle and thumbscrew bracket with  which it could be tightened over the end of the work bench, similar to the old meat grinders the grandparents generation used to use for their sausages and minced meat pies.  Sticking a price tag on the wooden part of iron handle, I gave it a couple turns, setting the worn grey wheel spinning with a whine of the gears that instantly pulled me into a windowless basement work shop, bare yellowing light bulb with a long string pull over a work bench piled with junk and treasures.  Cousin Jon and I, two little boys playing.  That room held endless delight, the smell of oil and oakum and bilge water stained ropes never failed to spark the imagination of boys always on the lookout for adventure, longing for the days when we could get out in the boats with the men.  Misty scenes of Alaska and the far off fishing grounds that colored the old man’s stories swirled in our minds as I manned the hand crank on that old grinder, setting the wheel spinning at a terrific speed while Jon held a nail or bolt up against the abrasive wheel with a grimy little hand, showering sparks in a wondrous spray in every direction. As thrilling for us as fourth of July over Green Lake. Remembering other things we did there, I chuckled to myself visualizing the old man muttering and cursing under his breath as he surveyed our handy work, finding a Jabsco water pump that we took apart, and partly rebuilt on the bench one day while we tripped happily on a fantasy voyage in the old JB, west coast top house dragger named for the long-gone grandfather on that side of the family, the Jon Bingaman Edwards.  Missing screws we had not been able to find that had bounced into the shadows under the table, the gasket broken with clumsy little fingers.  The distinctive smell from the thumb crumpled tube of Permatex form a gasket, cap forgotten when we had been called up to lunch and a through scolding as aunt Norma tried in vain to wash the sticky black goo from our hands at the great high sink in the bathroom with a bar of Lava soap.

Simon may well have been annoyed when he found the mess, but years later the memories of our boy’s play in the tool room helped save my ass. Standing on my head inches from spinning engine pulleys in my own little fishing boat, thrashed by a raging gale at sea, the damned impeller on the bilge pump went shithouse in the worst possible moment.  Remembering the parts and pieces of the old man’s pump scattered across the oil-stained bench top in that little basement room guided my fingers to a quick fix before the water rose to an unsafe level in the boat.

Tossing the six hundred dollar screw driver in the fifty cent box, and the grinder onto the table set aside for the individually priced items, I turned back into the closet to grab some cans of nuts and bolts with the idea of putting them together in a box with a sign marked two dollars each.  In the far corner of a shelf at about eye level, behind a quart jar filled with old fish hooks and things, a much more interesting object suddenly grabbed my attention.  About the size of a coffee mug, it was a dull gray lead weight.  At first I took to be a sinker for an old fashioned fishing line.  Relic of the days when the rocky banks in the salt chuck around here were teeming with ling cod and a guy could always snag a few with nothing more than a spool of eighth inch line wound around a carved wood spindle and a few polished copper tubing lures armed with rusted fish hooks.  Still thinking about pricing for the yard sale, it rested in the palm of my hand a moment before I began to realize what it really was.    Cast in a cylindrical shape with a deep indented area in the bottom, sides tapering slightly to a loop at the top, it could only be one thing.  Back in the days before electronic depth sounding equipment, a lead weight like this one was an important tool on the boats.  With a line marked at measured intervals and lard packed in the indentation on the underside, the depth of water and composition of the bottom were measured.   Almost as if the warmth of my hand energized something deep in the solid lead an image started bubbling up from the lower reaches of my mind. 

A single scene onto which a thousand others layered together, extending in both directions of time from the original moment as if I were viewing a huge photo archive all in an instant. Two 40 watt low voltage light globes painting a tiny pool of dim yellow light in a wood paneled triangle shaped room, heavy green topped table, scattered with debris from a midnight repast, pail pie crusts in china saucers, strong coffee steaming in heavy mugs with the sounds of a late winter gale shrieking through the wires and rigging overhead.  An aging wooden fishing boat, hull creaking and groaning at every seam and joint, huge seas driven by eighty mile an hour wind gusts rising at the stern. Like a serpent slithering across rocky country, the old boat works her way toward safety and shelter eighty long miles over an unseen horizon, the heart of the darkest of all possible nights.

Three guys, dressed in layers of wool and flannel, ragged cuff-less shirt sleeves showing three inches of soiled thermals, sat wedged  between heavy oak table rail, backs against vertical planked bulkheads in the galley mess room, keeping the night and storm at bay with coffee and companionship; courage bolstered with tales and stories of warmer times and better places.  Stories filled with humor and laughter, comfort on a dark winter night at sea. In my memory the scene was almost in symphonic form, each of the images that fluttered out of the lead seemed to be built on a framework of salty description and colorful characters laid on a canvas of fascinating times and events from the days of our fathers and grandfathers, then suddenly there would be open space, a counterpoint in which an elaborate tale was told with very dry brush, sparse single word references to which the listener used personal feelings and experiences to fill in ten thousand words of his own.   One colorful story told around that table, vividly painted by my cousin Phil, featured the grandfather’s generation using a lead heaving line like the one I was holding in my hand.

Could this lump of lead, dabbed with a few splashes of paint, marked from uncounted bumps on the ocean bottom be a veteran of these legendary fishing trips a hundred years ago?  Possible.  Also possible that it had come out of a thrift shop just last year. But that didn’t matter.  In the oral tradition truth runs deeper than factual representations of every detail.  Like a writer of fiction, who may well be the consummate liar yet manages to capture truths about the human condition that are missing from dry historical accounts, a skilled story teller paints vivid images meant to recreate the essence of an event, even if a few things need to be rearranged in the process to give the story life.  This is very different from how the bull shitter, or “bull peddlers” as the old man used to call them, plies his trade.  The honest story teller may well combine elements of fact with the occasional hyperbole or even a touch of fiction, like the “six hundred dollar screw driver”, to give the listener the best possible feeling for what really happened, using the fewest possible words.  Bullshit, on the other hand is spinning yarns that are intentionally deceptive, usually overplaying the role the bull shitter had in the scheme of things.

The real history of this particular lump of lead didn’t matter.   Relics like this are a kind of talisman, reminders that the stories of the grandfathers, their lives and adventures need to be retold or recorded while the memories of those who heard the original telling remain.  Old ways quickly fade into shadow.  Shared experiences, the strongest tools of the oral historian, are lost through lifestyle changes, rendering artifacts from earlier times into useless bits of junk.  Like the faces in forgotten photo albums, so familiar in their day, changed by time into anonymous images on a flea market table, staring with hope and wonder into an unknown future.

Figuring the history of the lead wouldn’t mean anything to the yard sale shoppers who were already beginning to paw through piles of stuff around the place, I tossed it under the right front seat of my old work van for safe keeping.  Over the next couple of years it rode around with me, half forgotten, but always taking up a small space in one corner of my mind. Occasionally, almost as if it were calling to me from behind an old pair of work boots and dented flashlight, its stories rolled across my mind, a running narration like the fragment of a tune that keeps playing in your head.  Taking on a life of their own, bits and parts of these stories and pictures slowly layered themselves together into a single frame, painting a picture that began around eight o’clock on a bleak January morning sometime in the mid nineteen seventies; the  red telephone mounted on the wall next to the kitchen door was ringing.

First light saw the southeasterly gale that had raked through the town over night began to lay down.  Rain soaked streaks of wind still chased the last of the winter blackened leaves up old streets and alleys, rattling windows and garbage cans, whistling through half rotten fences, clutching at the corners and eves of the houses.  Heavy plastic sheeting stretched  over nine pain single glass garden window snapped and rattled in the gusts a foot behind my head as I relaxed over a plate of sausage and eggs, steaming home fries washed down with lots of black coffee, toast slathered with butter and mom’s frozen strawberry jam.

September in Puget Sound country had been warm that year.  Back yard garden winding down for the season, potatoes dug from spare tire mounds, bagged in thrift shop dresses and hung in the little cellar under the kitchen.  Early Girl tomatoes pungent, deep red on the vines, sliced thin with mayonnaise, salt and pepper in pita halves.  Our little salmon trolling boat, the Shirley B, lashed to the boards behind the immovable rip-rap down at Squallicum, in for the winter.

A hundred miles to the west on the ocean, where I had been salmon fishing in a depression era back yard built boat since May, seasonal changes came hard on the heals of a late August southeast gale.  Two or three balmy days with offshore breezes carrying the allure of dry land to the nose quickly gave way to dank fogs and uncomfortable sea. The latter being standard working conditions for the commercial salmon troller notwithstanding, my heart and mind felt a strong pull toward the straights and home.  Home, from the tiny working deck in a 33’ wood boat scratching along the salmon grounds a few miles off the rugged northern Washington coast can have a mystical quality almost to the level of paradise in the heart of the pious.

 Still remember the morning I decided to pull the plug on the fishing season that year.  Clearing the entrance to the harbor at Neah Bay,  in the pre-dawn gloom, a steep ebb driven ocean swell pushing up the straight on a cold westerly wind rolled the round belly Shirley B onto her right side, little cascade of salty foam topping the rail as it rolled under.  For the moment it took her to right herself, the far wall in my tiny wheel house became the floor where I placed my foot for balance, reaching for the tide and current table book with the free hand that wasn’t hanging on to the half open drop window on the uphill side of the room.  Almost two more hours on the ebb, great condition for running the three or four miles out past Tatoosh, where there were a few September fat Coho to be had along the Old Man’s drag a few miles beyond.  That is  if this nasty westerly sea wasn’t in the way.  Working conditions on the ocean for fishing that day would be just fine as soon as I got past the current.  On the other hand a guy could swing the boat around to the northeast, roll along with the sea until the tide change, then pull the stabilizers, lash the poles up into the cross-trees, and ride the biggest flood tide of the month all the way back to Bellingham.  With a little luck, I could be home in time for dinner.

Mystical qualities of home and the delights of town life had worn off by mid-winter, by now the fisher part of my brain enjoyed spinning fantasies of life on the salmon banks with a similar level of fond anticipation.   Dabbing the last of the yellow egg yolk from my plate with a crust of toast, coffee mug in hand I shuffled across the room toward the ringing telephone.   One more ring won’t hurt while I get a splash more coffee from the Melita pot that always sat on the front burner of the white porcelain stove.  The voice on the other end sounded familiar but who is it?  Roger?  No, we had been thinking of going out this week to get loads of horse manure for our gardens, but this guy had a different inflection that began to open another picture of the face barking into the other end of the line.  Almost Basset, but he rarely called on the telephone. 

“Shrimp prices are good now,” the voice continued when it hit me; holy cow!  It’s Phil calling from somewhere in Alaska!  What the heck is he doing out in Alaska in the middle of the winter?  “Tom and Jon and I are running the Commander in Kodiak, dragging for shrimp.  The season ends in a couple weeks and the other guy on the boat lives here in town, so we need you to help run her back to Seattle.  Why not catch a flight out tomorrow and make the trip with us?”

“It is a well-known fact that February is the best month to cross the Gulf,” he was saying while I took another sip of coffee.  My brain has always been slow to shift gears. Thirty seconds ago I was planning an exciting day shoveling a couple truckloads of fertilizer, now suddenly I was trying to wrap my mind around the notion of taking a flight north for cold weather fishing and a scenic cruise down the coast from Kodiak to Seattle. 
 Now I could see him clearly, soft looking big hands framed in the signature fisherman’s ragged cuff faded jacket holding the heavy black telephone handset to his large, thin hair round head.  A big guy, he had an ebullient style of storytelling that reminded me of John Madden barking out color commentary behind the voice over drone on a televised football game.  And he had every bit as much to say on almost any topic that came to mind.  Entertaining and informative in a variety of ways, selection of language delivery style and well timed punch lines that turned almost any issue into an occasion for humor.  He was heavily built with an air of being even larger in my eyes than his actual bulk, slightly hunched heavy body over a desk in the fish plant office, speaking through an always ironic, slightly crooked grin, “it will be cold but not much wind this time of year.  And besides,” he went on, “the price of shrimp is good now, and you can make some money on a couple of short trips before we head south.” 

If someone had asked me where I thought Phil was that morning the answer probably would have been that he was down in the Green Lake neighborhood at the Vitamilk dairy, where he worked as a mechanic keeping an aging fleet of milk delivery trucks on the road.  Almost as far back as I could remember he could be found on duty there, greasy overalls and shoes, tinkering with the old trucks in a small corrugated steel shop.  His younger brother Jon used to pick me up after school some times in his mother’s Karman Gia, buzz down Roosevelt from the north end where we lived to hang out at the shop where we were endlessly entertained by Phil’s jokes and stories.  Sometimes telling us things in cryptic style, like one time when he saw Jon and I scrounging around in a pile of interesting looking junk over in the dried weeds at the edge of a parking area along the Wallingford side of Lake Union.  “Keep your eyes open boys, there’s money laying around all over the place, all you have to do is reach down and pick it up.” 

We thought he meant stray quarters and the occasional five dollar bill, and he sure must be lucky, we hardly ever found money.  If Phil said so there must be a lot more around than we noticed, and were resolved to be more diligent.  It wasn’t until forty years later when I was trying to scrounge around back alleys and estate sales for junk and treasures that could be resold for a profit that I suddenly realized what he really meant.

He was at least ten years older than us, maybe more.  We always felt much more at ease with him than our parents, even though he didn’t hesitate to yell at us when we needed to be calmed down.  I can still see him standing in front of a heavy vice welded to the steel top of the bench that spanned the back of the room of the little milk company shop when we came in one day, cutting copper tubing into inch and a quarter lengths.  Quickly buffing of the edges of the last cut with an old bastard file, he turned to the milk truck that was in the bay, hood open and engine partly dismantled, and fitted the bit of tubing into one of the fuse slots on the firewall, matching three other fuses that had been replaced with his system upgrade.  Looking back at us boys with his signature wry grin he said, “That’s why they could never fire me from this job, no one else could ever keep these trucks running.”

A decade had drifted by since then, hard to believe how quickly days and years melt away.  After going to school, and moving up to Bellingham, I rarely saw any of those guys, had no idea what they were up to.  Phil must have left the employ of the dairy repair shop to follow some of his other plans and dreams, which were never on short supply.  The reason that I didn’t immediately recognize the sound of his voice on the telephone in the context of shrimp dragging in Alaska was that I hadn’t been aware that he or Tom for that matter were interested in the fishing business at all.  His old man once told me, with a hint of disgust in his voice that Phil would much rather scrounge a living around the waterfront than go out in the boats.  Tom, son of another of my father’s sisters, had grown up in the mid west working on an Oklahoma farm every summer, and I had always kind of assumed he would return to that kind of work when he got out of the service.  So when a guy started talking about being with Tom in Kodiak dragging for shrimp, there were a few other characters I knew in those days that I thought of first.

  When Jon and I were back in school, Phil had seemed more interested in having a tug boat.  Along with Dave, another cousin, he had even bought a small tug, retired from Foss and painted it black with a new name, Paradox.  Jon and I thought it was very cool, even got to go ride along one long afternoon when they ran it from Lake Union up to Everett to be hauled out.  Ran out of diesel two hundred yards off the dock when we got there, shouting distance to Dave who had driven up to get us.  By then it was dark, so he turned the headlights of his car on facing out on the water, and while Phil and Jon steadied an old out board motor over the stern, holding it in place with their bare hands, the heavy old tug inched her way into the mooring slip while the old fellow who had also come along on the ride, a retired boat skipper of some kind, shouted steering instructions from the wheel house.  It was moving too slow for the boat’s rudder to be effective, so they had to try to angle the motor one way or another for course corrections.  Finally we got close enough to the dock to get a line across and haul her in the rest of the way by hand.  I never knew exactly what they intended to do with that boat, or where it finally ended its career.  The plan may have been to get into the trade of towing cargo out to Alaska, but the business never quite got off the ground.  Much later I found out that Dave had gone to work for Foss, and as I was learning that morning on the telephone, Phil had taken on the job of running the family fishing boat, the Commander.

I didn’t believe for a minute, even knew for an absolute fact that the weather in the gulf of Alaska at that time of year was very unlikely to resemble the image Phil was painting for me on the telephone.  In this corner of the world winter storms are generated out in that country, great sweeps of wind and cloud spiral around low pressure fronts, rotating in a counter clock wise direction as they move toward the south east out of the gulf of Alaska in an unending succession all winter long.  One after another, sometimes with little more than a few brief hours of higher pressure between storms.  It keeps the coastal forests green and lush, huge trees braced against the winds all the way from Yakutat bay in Alaska to San Francisco and beyond, but makes for tough going at sea during the dark months of winter.  But who could argue with Phil’s predicted image of a placid sea, gentle swell rolling in from the northwest under a still, leaden sky as we trundled across three hundred miles of open water before getting to the comparative safety of the inside passage where we would slide on down to Seattle in ease and comfort.  That the trip was hardly likely to unfold as predicted didn’t detract from the beauty of the story.  The imagery was clear and simple, seasoned with his trademark ironic humor, fitting into the context of the conversation with an almost astonishing economy of words.   Almost like looking at a Tomas Heart Benton painting, the world doesn’t actually look anything like that, but there is more truth in the distortions than can be packed into a hundred photographs.  We all had been at sea on days like Phil was describing, there were even a couple of very brief windows during our trip that more or less fit the prediction, but as is always the case with these kind of things in more parts of our life than traveling on the ocean in an old fishing boat, the calm was only a prelude to a series of raging gales.

None of that mattered to me.  We would be in the old Commander, built from the best old-growth timbers back in the day when real wood was still in abundance.  Deep and stout, veteran of ten thousand gales all along the coasts between Mexico and Attu Island out at the western most reaches of Alaska, there was no doubt in my mind that she could blast her way through anything.  How could I refuse?  It had been a dream of mine to go with the crew on that boat since grade school days.  When the time came that I was old enough to work with the crew, there had been another summer job out in Alaska that fit my schedule with school better.  Then when university years ended, I got into running my own small fishing boat, and had never even approached Simon about a job with the Commander.  Now I was being offered not only the chance to live out the boyhood dreams of adventure, but also go with a crew of close family, guys that had always been like brothers to me even though the previous few years had seen little or no contact with any of them.  I never did ask any of the business questions; don’t know to this day what the price of shrimp actually was at the time, or what share of the catch I would be paid.  As the next few weeks unfolded it was clear that both Phil and Tom had spent some considerable part of the time since I had last seen them working in the Commander, but I let each of the stories they told stand on their own without trying to fill in boring details about actual dates and times various events unfolded.

It had been a few years since I had been out to Kodiak, but Phil’s description of where to find them sounded familiar. The last time I had been through that town, must have been the summer of sixty eight, we tied up to a dock near the fish plant where the Commander was going to be tomorrow night for a few hours rest and recreation, taking a break from the long grind of travel between Bristol Bay and Yakutat.  Only four years after the tsunami, there was a snag of some kind along that stretch of wharf, invisible at high water.  Probably the reason why our skipper found a convenient parking place for the hundred fifty foot long pile of junk, relic of World War Two, in which we were traveling.    Everyone on the boat had hiked the half mile up town to get drunk as soon as the lines were fast to the pilings and the engines and gen set shut down, so no one was on watch as the old tub settled down onto the snag.  Some of us kids, still too young to get into the bar had been outfitted with a little bottle of rot gut whiskey from one of the older guys.  We had huddled  behind a dumpster, near the back door of the bar, passing it around still in the brown paper bag so no one would notice, while the rest of the crew enjoyed the afternoon inside at the bar.  A few hours later, at the appointed time we all drifted back out to the wharf where the old Bearing was lashed to the pilings to find a small crowd of gawkers gathered in front of an undeniably hilarious spectacle.

The little ship was a sight in itself.  World war surplus hull with antique salmon canning machinery welded onto decks where guns had bristled, then the entire main deck covered over with a plywood roof.  I used to think of her in terms of the old biblical phrase of paradise, swards beat into plow sheers.  There was stuff and junk lashed everywhere, giving much more of an impression of a Gypsy wagon than a working sea going vessel.  If this wasn’t enough, now she was laying over at a thirty degree list away from the dock, one inch mooring lines stretched as tight as piano strings.   Some folks in the crowd suggested she was flooding and on the verge of sinking, others thought she had hung up on something as the tide dropped during our absence.  We had to get on board and find out, but the first challenge was getting there.  Leaning away from the dock so far, we couldn’t just jump across the gulf, so a long two by twelve plank had to be located to bridge the gap.  The skipper, Bejorn had not yet appeared.  Sandy, the chief  was really in charge of the crew anyway, so he and Scott and I scrambled aboard to find out what the heck was going on.  With the gen set shut down she was totally dark and eerie inside, especially when we didn’t know if the hold was half full of water and she might turn turtle and sink at any second.  That fear was relieved with a quick flash light search down the engine room companionway, showing that the bilges were dry.  So she wasn’t sinking at the dock.  Damn!  A flight back to Seattle the first of August, free for the rest of the summer in the height of hippy heaven would have been fun.  We knew we were missing Sky River music festival, and warm evenings smoking pot on the lawn along the edge of the campus in the U district.  Oh well, back to work.  Sandy told us to stand by the lines while he fired up the engines and tried to walk us off the snag.  In a few minutes he had powered up the generator and both main engines, throwing the starboard shaft into foreword and the port side in reverse, should move the back of the boat almost directly sideways away from the dock   At first she just churned water, so feeling no change in the list from his place in the engine room, Sandy changed directions on each shaft and gave near full power.  Suddenly breaking loose from whatever it was that had caught the bottom she rolled back into the dock with a smash accompanied by the sound of breaking glass that seemed to echo off the hills above the town.  As I adjusted the tie up lines from the forepeak deck I heard the laughter of two old gaffers nearby, declaring as they walked away shaking their heads that they would never go to sea in that piece of shit.  I half way agreed.  Those old ships had been hard to love, but not so with the Commander.  She may not have had all the grace and beauty we see in her class of boat these days, but she was a damn sight more attractive than the plywood superstructure covering navy utilitarian gray of the cannery boats.  I had always wanted to return to that country in a boat that didn’t make me feel ashamed to be a part of, and finally my time had come.

As soon as Phil rang off I stubbed through the clear plastic finger ring on the rotary telephone, grinding out the numbers for my wife’s work to tell her the great news.  Sometimes wives can be slow to accept the wisdom of dropping everything and flying out to spend several weeks on a fishing boat with the boys, but Karen seemed as upbeat about the trip as I.  She probably thought it was about time I got off my butt and did some productive work.  The only job I had at the time was chasing the elusive king salmon, and his more numerous but less valuable cousins the Coho up and down the coast of Washington and Oregon in a small old wooden fishing boat.  Between May and September each year there was good money to be made.  All a guy had to do was get his boat out to the fishing grounds off shore where salmon stopped to fatten up on their migratory rout between the northern reaches of the Pacific and the mountain streams of their birth and death along the coast.  The price of fish was strong in those days, and the cost of living was lower than at any time during the later stages of my life.  We may not have had as much stuff, but imagine living without car payments, or credit cards and a home mortgage that even when corrected for inflation was hardly more than a third of what most folks consider reasonable these days.  Of course, as a green kid I had no idea how good things really were, and I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground in the fishing business.  Damn lucky not to have killed myself in that boat.  The distance between those potentially lucrative fishing grounds and the quiet inner harbors in small coastal towns, where the pretty little fishing boats gently tug at their mooring lines during the winter months is deceptively far.  I also had a long ways to go before mastering the complicated mix of skill and personal determination it takes to cobble together an aging, nearly worn out boat and keep it running long enough between repairs to make very much money.  There has always been something missing in that area for me, and so I blithely drifted through the seasons only vaguely aware of the fish that went by while I was enjoying just one more day of partying on the beach.

The darker months of the year were mostly occupied with maintenance and repairs on the boat, usually carried out at a snail’s pace.  Running the boat could be a full time job, out on the coast or in Alaska during the part of the year when salmon seasons were open, and spending the rest of the time maintaining and repairing the boat and equipment.  Many of the older guys who didn’t waste half the season fucking off in town had money to spend most of the off season in Mexico or Hawaii, but I was content to have relaxed breakfasts at home, then head down to the boat harbor every day for a few hours and work on boat projects.  I pretended it was my job, and usually did at least something around the boat seven days a week, but in reality the off season included quite a bit of free time.  As one friend put it recently, commenting on how many of us who indulged ourselves with alternate life styles in the sixties and seventies and now realize we cannot retire like other folks of a certain age, “We retired first!”  In the end there was little to show for the time except a few stories that no one wants to hear.

After making another call to the airline to reserve my seat for the flight north, I settled back in my place at the kitchen table to make a list for the day.  Wind still rattled the windows over the breakfast nook, in which I had built a table and benches, just like a boat galley.  I wasn’t completely unaware that a lack of experience limited my own progress in the fish business, and the opportunity to spend a few weeks working with the cousins in a bigger boat with good equipment meant a lot more than the companionship with guys I hadn’t seen in a while.  It would be an extremely valuable learning experience, a graduate course in my line of work.  Traditional life styles like fishing are usually taught from father and uncles to sons and daughters, family members working together, not only training up the kids, but also saving on the expense of hiring deckhands who would have to be paid a full share of the catch.  By the time a young person steps behind the wheel of their own boat, or moves up to be skipper in the family boat, usually around the age of forty, there would have been many years working on deck under the guidance of grandfathers, uncles and dads.  Not only does this kind of training teach the technical aspects of running the boat and handling gear, but it also instills an understanding of the energy and determination it takes to run the boat and feed the families back at home.

I had come into the business by a totally different rout.  My family tradition would have put me into business or teaching, possibly the clergy.  My father was a small town preacher, struggling through a series of church jobs during the years when the family was growing.  Always being the new kid, whose dad worked in “what church?” left me feeling as the perpetual outsider.  Not only that but I also lived in fear of having to follow in my old man’s footsteps, which seemed like a very unpleasant lifestyle to me.  Sunday school taught that the Lord may call anyone’s name at any time, and if you heard your name being called you had to drop everything and pack a bag for seminary.  To a little kid, the job of preacher seemed pretty bad, and everyone who was in the profession kept talking about having been called into service of the Lord, so I naturally assumed that no one would choose to do it of their own free will.  With the story of Jonah as a warning to those who tried to skulk out of the call, one naturally dreaded hearing the voice from the dark beyond.  Sometimes a seagull screech came to my ears as the sound of my name and for an instant my heart fluttered for a moment before realizing the bird call didn't signal the end of my life happy and free in the open air.   

Always assuming that college would follow high school, along with the added motivation of deferments from the military draft kept me hacking away in school for the better part of five years after high school.  A degree in fine art with a lot of philosophy credits filling in the gaps does not look interesting on one’s resume.  It’s like this kid named Alpherie said over lunch one day freshman year.  Miming an open newspaper over the student union coffee shop table, "let's see now, not many job listings for philosophers in here today."  Just as well really; didn't take long before to come to the conclusion that most of what I tried to read was either incomprehensible to my dim mind or was little more than complicated wishes and fantasies that had little to do with the reality of anyone's life.  

Going back to early childhood, Jon and I spun never ending fishing fantasies, each of us with his own as well as shared scenarios whenever we were together.    I can hear his voice in my head now, almost as if he were in the room, he said it so often, "we will pay for the boat in the first year, and from then on it's all profit."  Between junior and senior year in high school, he flew out to western Alaska somewhere to spend a few weeks with the boys in the Commander. By then we had started to notice that the girls in our church youth groups looked a lot better than our beloved little boats anyway, but I got the distinct impression that his enthusiasm for our old fishing fantasies seemed somewhat subdued after that trip.  The following spring we got ourselves into summer work out in Bristol bay on floating salmon canneries, but after that one season he found work  on the beach until going into the service.  Desperately homesick, hating every second in that filthy little ship where we worked the summer of sixty-six,  I realized by about November that it had been the time of my life and I couldn't wait for the next season.  Hopelessly addicted to the double life, open air in wild country all summer, settled domestic routine in town during the dark months, the transition from deck hand in the cannery to the wheel house of my own little salmon trolling boat when college years ended seemed natural.
   Working in the floating canneries  had given me a reasonable education in point to point navigation along the coast, so reading charts and getting a boat from one place to another wasn’t so much of a problem. I had moderate mechanical skills, and a basic if limited understanding of how to maintain an old wooden boat hull.  The tricky part was to get the boat from the quiet waters in the inner harbor out to the grounds where a guy could actually catch a pile of salmon to pay the bills.  Fish were not marked on the charts, and not having been trained by an older generation who in turn were trained by their fathers and grand fathers, I had absolutely no idea what to do in this department.  Falling in with some other guys who were more or less in the same place as I helped to some degree, blind chasing after the blind, and we did manage to learn some of the skills of the trade.  Sea sickness, made worse by not completely unrealistic fear in a little boat without the best equipment tended to hamper my professional growth in the business.  If the first time a guy clears the bar in a small boat crashing its way out toward the grounds he can look up from the barf rail and see Dad and Grand Dad relaxing in the wheel house, sipping coffee and chatting together as if it were just another day in the office, he will have a bit more confidence in the boat and her capabilities even when it seems as if the damned thing is turning on her head as each lump of salt chuck rolls under the keel.

Now, at least for this one trip, I was going out with the branch of the family that was steeped in the classic traditions of the trade.  By tomorrow night it would be dinner with the boys, sitting around the big, sturdy galley table in the Commander.  If we took a couple of weeks to scrape up the last of the quota of shrimp for the season and get ready for the run home, and another six or seven days traveling, I would be back in town sometime during the first week of March, still eight weeks or more to get ready for salmon fishing out at Neah Bay on the first of May.  Lots of time.  Besides, at twenty something time passes much slower than it seems to in later stages of life, and from an early morning in the depths of late January the spring fishing season is very far away over the western horizon.

A half hour later I was carefully feathering the choke and hand throttle in the nineteen sixty pick-up truck threading my way along the route through my favorite back streets of town, heading toward the small boat harbor.  The rain had slacked off to just a few drops occasionally splattering on the windshield carried with the waning gusts of wind left over from the front that passed through the over during the wee hours.  Only two or three other rigs were pulled up in the lot near the ramp leading steeply down to level of the water, where the local fleet was lashed to the grid of floating docks that rose and fell with the tide.  On windy mornings halyards snapping against aluminum masts of the sail boat fleet that was clustered on the other side of the basin greeted the ear with a somewhat annoying chorus that was, softened a bit by the base section of haul up lines thumping here and there in the work boat section, heavier lines against honest wood masts and booms.  Stronger gusts occasionally raised a moan through ropes and wires, always topped by the ever present gulls plying their trade, wheeling and diving in the wind from positions along the tops of the huge boulders that formed the breakwater separating the frail boats from the strong waves that rolled up the bay ahead of the winter gales.

From the platform at the top of the ramp I always looked for my boats trolling poles out in the field of work boat masts and poles. Laying over a few degrees to the leeward, one pole coming up at a slightly skewed angle from the other, she had a distinctive look to my eye that was at once beautiful, yet  just a bit lacking in style and grace.  She was almost a classic west coast double end trolling boat. Almost but not quite.  Like the subtle nuances of shape and movement that separate a beautiful woman from the average ordinary face in the crowd to the eyes of a young man, the lines and proportions of boats have an esthetic that is not easy to describe.  When she sits in the water just right, sheer line from bow to stern balanced with a corresponding curve in the deck house, stern well proportioned with just a hint of upturn, the pleasure to my eye went beyond intellectual appreciation of form and design.  A visceral experience, like a painting that jumps off the canvas into the heart, moving not because some professor or critic told you to appreciate the work of a master, but because the artist, even if unknown and unlisted managed to do something too wonderful for words.  That is the way a beautiful boat is, it just feels good to watch it move, especially beautiful if she can be seen working her way through a big sea, each element of form and design executing a specific function in a harsh environment.  For me, the appeal of the fish business was the boats.  Always had been, remained so to the end of my misspent career on the water.  Boats as fascinating objects in themselves, separate from the often tedious and always exhausting work that has to be completed on their decks and in their engine rooms and fish holds.  I loved the idea of the boat.  An enclosed capsule, a life support system filled with mechanical and domestic systems, miniature living apartments tucked neatly into the hull and deck house, engine and machinery compacted and set to work in the harshest of conditions.  My passion was definitely not for fishing, although there are extremes of emotion, positive and negative in that business that are hard to match in lines of work one finds up on the beach.  In those days, I coped with the hardships of learning the fishing business because it was the only way that I would ever be able to have a boat.  Not like most boat owners who spend their lives languishing through seemingly endless days in a line of work they loath, all the while fantasizing about getting away for a weekend in the boat a couple times a year.  Having the fishing boat meant that I shared my life with the thing.  Went to work in her every day of the year, winter was a time to get her in shape for the season, and from May through September she was my home, it was a lifetime of boyhood day dreams and fantasies being lived out, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with regret and longing for that stable job and regular paycheck.  But not on a day like today, with the fresh positive ion charged south east wind in my face, gulls calling overhead and a song of Kodiak and the trip with the boys swirling around my head.

Coming around the corner onto the float where my little boat was tied up I always visualized the first day I saw her, in the same place looking a bit lonely in bad need of a paint job.  In those days a stroll up and down the fishing boat moorage of in every town along the coast was the first stop for entertainment and enjoyment.  My buddy Roger had scraped up a tiny investment fund and purchased a functional if not beautiful trolling boat the previous year, and my general interest in looking around the docks had been heightened a bit by searching through the For Sale signs that always appear on boats in the fall.  That was the year that my college deferment from the draft had run out and my number came up in the system, suggesting the likelihood of a very different kind of adventure.  Avoiding this eventuality had been a constant concern for the previous half decade, and while it seemed to be a lonely struggle I was recently interested to find that a significant percentage of the guys in my generation managed to side step the disaster one way or another.  Sometime during the dark months of that previous winter my attempt at dancing around the problem finally reached a successful conclusion, and in celebration I dropped out of university in mid winter quarter and gone to work in the small ship where I had spent the preceding three summers processing salmon in Bristol Bay.  After a couple months refitting the ship at the dock in Seattle, and nearly a month slowly working our way up the coast to Big Creek near Egigik, then the canning season, I was more than ready to get back to Seattle around the first of August.  Within a week we had purchased a Corvair van, utility with no windows in the back which is best for a camper.  It came with cool shelves all down one side and it was easy enough to put a bed across the back, and with a camp stove and a bag of groceries we were totally self sufficient.  In a flash we were out in LaPush and found Roger in his little trolling boat.  Fishing had put him into a state of total manic excitement.  Hair and beard in dreads, long before the uptown rich kids caught on to the fad.  He hadn’t bothered to shower for six weeks, probably hadn’t been out of his clothes.  With a two pound coffee can full of pot next to the compass, and a few groceries in a rusted cooler under the hatch, we were off together chasing Coho between LaPush and the cape, running in and out every day and drinking cheap beer and smoking joints with a big bunch of hippies around bonfires on the beach in front of the little town throughout the seemingly endless August evenings.  In those pre iPod days everyone sang songs together, someone always had a guitar and our voices rose with the sparks from the driftwood fires.  Fun of a kind that is unknown to younger generations these days.

Like Red Stewart’s Maggie May, things started looking a bit different in the colder morning light of September, real world looming once again just over the horizon.  One stormy morning when the ocean was too rough for Roger to take the little Dad’s Dream out fishing my wife and I took off in the Corvair to have a look around Bellingham.  We both were going to start classes at the college there in a couple of weeks and needed to check in with the registrar, and line up a place to live. The boat harbor was always the best place to park the camper car for the night, and as always I had to walk the docks before bed to check out the boats.  Suddenly there she was, the Shirley B.  Backed into the slip, lashed to the boards with what were obviously trash heap scrounged bits of line and cable.  At that moment, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  A double ender, that is her stern was pointed similar to the bow, about thirty six feet long, good size for a salmon trolling boat, one step bigger than the Roger’s boat that did the job out on the grounds reasonably well, but not quite as good as some of the older guys boats we saw delivering a lot more fish than we could manage to scrape up every day.  She had a small deck house, well proportioned to her length and height, with the galley and bunks in the area below the fore deck.  Riding light in the stern without ice and fish in the hold, dried chipped paint and hatches propped open an inch or two for ventilation told me she had not been out fishing that season at all.  Four rusted roofing nails held  a torn bit of cardboard to the sliding back door on the wheel house on which, “For Sale or Trade, $5,000” was scrawled in red crayon.  Instantly falling in love I climbed on board to have a better look around.  Letting myself down through the manhole in the main hatch into the dusky fish hold, I found a surprisingly huge room compared to Roger’s boat that appeared to be only a bit smaller from the outside.  It was deep enough for a guy to stand under the hatch, and looking up through the opening in the bulkhead that separated the fish hold from the engine room and galley,  I could see a perfect little setup, stove on the left, a couple bunks on the right with a table that neatly folded up over a set of shelves.  The bilges were full of cement, the ends of the deck beams and tops of the frames felt mostly solid to the probing tip of my pocket knife, and the deck machinery looked functional if a bit on the antique side, wench made with the wheel break drum of an ancient car of some kind.

Beautiful in my eyes, she nevertheless did have a hint of the home made project about her.  And homemade she was in every sense of the word.  I found out more about her history later, after my father in law lent us the money to buy the thing.  Built in a back yard on the south side of town during the depths of the depression in the mid 1930’s, she had been put together without benefit of professional design, no drawings or prints of any kind.  Fritz, one of the boys who had built her with his older brother Gus told me, “I was working for the W.P.A. at the time, digging hiking trails up in the national park, and my brother was seining.”

They decided on building a troller because it was the best way they could get into the business on a limited budget.  Trolling for salmon, catching the fish individually with a large number of baited hooks that are pulled through the water at very slow speed, takes less equipment and a smaller boat than seining.  The troller also gets a better price for the fish because they are cleaned and iced on board the boat which makes a higher quality product in the market.  Gus had an image in his mind of what the boat should look like, and carved a ‘half model’ that out of a block of wood in lieu of purchasing expensive, professionally drawn prints for the boat’s hull.  The model was carved to scale, and represented one side of the hull, sliced down the middle from bow to stern.  Since the right and left side of a hull have to be exact mirror images of one another, only one side needs to be designed for the building plan.  I am sure that this design system, building the full sized boat from a carefully carved model has traditional roots that date back to the earliest times of carvel boat hull construction.   In a more sophisticated boat yard the shipwrights will work from drawings, which may have been generated from a model, that show the exact measurements at intervals along the entire length of the hull.  These blue prints are then translated into full sized drawings, in a process called lofting, from which templates are cut in the exact shape of frames and timbers that form the hull.  The templates are then used to mark out the actual timbers that form the foundation, keel and other dead wood parts on which the entire hull is then framed and planked.  It is doubtful that the back yard at the Brandt house had a lofting shed, so the hull was built using nothing more than the half model and the boy’s determination and skill.  I never did find out where they learned how to build boats, which is a lot more complicated than hammering an outhouse or chicken coop, but she was very stout, tough little work boat, many a long year hunting salmon along the coast between Oregon and South East Alaska.

“She didn’t come out exactly like the model Gus carved, but it wasn’t so bad,” Fritz, the younger brother who was helper on the job allowed.  It was one of those magic times in Neah Bay when a little fleet of boats anchor behind the jetty waiting out a storm and everyone is in a party mood for a few hours, contrasting a scary ride in from the grounds with the comfort and safety of the anchorage.    Rafted together for a few hours, we downed a few “Oly sandwiches” as Fritz called the popular band of beer, watching  the lights of the little village along the beach begun to twinkle  and reflect across the water while the low clouds were torn to shreds in the timber over the hills that separated us from the open ocean a few miles to the west.   “Looked like a brick shithouse on deck the first year though.”  He had a one of a kind Popeye way of expressing himself.  “The only engine we could afford was a heavy one lung piece of shit that stood so tall that the floor of the wheel house had to be the same level as the foreword deck.” Crushing the beer can and watching it disappear beneath the green water alongside the boat he went on,  “At the end of the first season we had enough money to get a three cylinder gas engine that wasn’t so tall and cut the wheel house down two feet.”

“She rides like a duck on the ocean, and we used to catch a lot of fish with her too.  In ’38 we got into a jag of kings out on the forty mile banks and filled her up with nine thousand pounds in three days.”  I was amazed, but not incredulous.  He went on, “the dammed rudder fell off on the way in and we had to take one of the poles down and lash it to the stern cleat.  Steered all the way back to Bellingham that way.”

The next part of the story was even more interesting in that it gives a rare look at a part of history that is usually lost in the translation from experience to written text or remembered stories.  “We got eleven cents a pound for the load, straight across red and white king along with the mediums and smalls.  We didn’t keep any Coho or humpies to make room for the big slabs we were pulling.”   Pausing for a long draw on his ever present Chesterfield straight, I mused on the seemingly low price for the fish.  Current dock price for large red king salmon was a bit over two dollars, with about a twenty or thirty percent discount for white king.  We always felt ripped off for the reduction for whites, the salmon that are the same in every way except that the meat is a pale pink that turns almost completely white when smoked or cooked.  It may be a tad oilier than the red, which adds to the flavor whether it is roasted or smoked.  But the customer clamors for the darker red color in salmon, so the whites have traditionally been discounted.  I was wondering if he got his story crossed, and it had been eleven cents for the whites and a higher price for the reds when he exhaled, took another sip from his beer and went on.  “Came to a thousand dollars.  Seems like nothing now, but in those days a guy working in the mill would be lucky to bring home six hundred.  At the end of that season I had saved enough to buy a house over on Peabody Street for nine hundred dollars cash.”

Up until at least the mid nineteen seventies king salmon prices kept up with real estate, and given the extremely unlikely scenario of catching four hundred big ones in the first couple days of a trip, when the ice supply could keep up with the production it was still possible to repeat the legend.  The story haunted me to the point where I had a reoccurring dream in those years in which we were buying a new home, telling the real estate agent that I had caught the fish to buy the place up off the coast of Vancouver Island.  But these dreams came during the safety of mid-winter layup, and by the time summer fishing season rolled around the best I could manage was to scratch along close to the coast on our side of the line, never once venturing up across the straights toward the hallowed forty mile banks.  Nevertheless every time I walked down the dock and stood in the spot where I first saw the little old boat tugging at her tie up lines, old car tire bumpers squeaking with the harbor surge, caught a hint of her perfume on the breeze, my heart was transformed for an instant back to the first moment I saw her, that unique honeymoon feeling of longing and anticipation, dreams and possibilities passed over me like a sea washing over her bow during an outbound crossing the bar at Westport.  Today it didn’t last long, I was on my way north to spend time in a real fishing boat, one I had loved since long before the little Shirley came into my life, and a guy always feels as if it is sort of OK to have another go with an old girlfriend without retribution, especially if it is the first time to consummate a youthful crush.

On a normal winter work day the first thing on the schedule would have been to go down into the galley and fire up the cook stove and pour water into the coffee pot so I could have a bit of a mug up later.  Doing this always brought to my mind the picture of Uncle Simon pumping his coffee pot full of fresh water and setting it on the propane fire in the Suzi, the power cruiser he got as compensation for selling his fishing boat sometime in the late 1950’s.  As soon as he pulled away from the float in Lake Union and put one of the kids on the wheel, or while waiting for traffic to move at the locks you could see him fooling around the galley stove, rustling up coffee and tearing open a package of sticky Danish pastry so everyone could have a snack.

            This morning there was no time for relaxing in the galley.  Tie up lines needed to be doubled up and protected from chaffing on the sides of the boat and dock.  Automatic bilge pump intake inspected and bilges cleared of junk that can clog a pump or jam the float switch that activated the pump when set in automatic mode.  Battery terminals checked, sprayed with WD-40, with a spritz to every other accessible electrical connection as well, just to make sure.  An inferred heat lamp, powered from the 110vac power cord that lead from the dock through a crack in the bottom of the back door jam into the engine room space, burned all winter to help with moisture control.  Putting a new lamp in the clip on work light fixture I directed it at the front of the engine where it warmed the expansion tank without danger of overheating anything potentially flammable. 

Satisfied that the boat would be alright on her own for a few weeks I dumped the wad of stale clothing that was still in the old duffel bag.  Companion  of many similar trips back during college years when I flew north each summer, the bag was now retired, hanging from a nail at the far end of my little bunk, convenient place to toss soiled laundry during fishing trips.  Now I grabbed a few fishing shirts from the clean clothes locker under the bunk, cuffs cut off and ragged as a safety measure.  Exposed buttons around fishing gear could get a guy dragged overboard in an instant while working the gear on deck.  Rain gear, also made with nothing on the outside that will get snagged, loose fitting bibs with a hooded top coat were hanging behind the chair in the wheel house, and the Extra-Toughs, “Alaskan running shoes” on the floor where they had been since the last of the ice came up from the hold at the end of September.  Everything else that needed to be packed for the trip would be at home, so I slid the door closed, put a few drops of oil into the pad lock to keep it working in the marine environment, and headed back up the dock to the pickup.

Grinding my way up the short steep half block that connected the truck route to the port with the nearby neighborhood streets the buoyant mood that had washed over me during Phil’s call began to darken.  There were two voices in my head in those days and they usually disagreed about how we should be living.  Game face boy, feeling a rush of excitement like a race horse in the starting gate was up for adventure, eager to get out of town and into the boat with the cousins in Alaska.  Homeboy, always the voice of reason and practicality, pointed out that we had an internal agreement to spend winters shuffling around town where life is not only more pleasant but a whole lot safer as well.  Just the winter before last when I was working down at a local fish plant unloading draggers there was the Yakina, big steel boat that usually came in with good loads fishing up off the northern end of Vancouver Island.  One week when we were expecting a long day’s work pitching her trip off there was no work that day, the good looking young skipper didn’t call in to the office with his estimated catch and time of arrival on the expected day or the next.  Three or four days later folks began to worry, but they were never seen again. 

But that was a freak accident.  How many people are lost to highway wrecks every year, yet it would be crazy to stay out of cars and buses out of fear of the big crash that could possibly happen.  And besides, this trip is going to be totally different.  A chance to live out family traditions that go back into the mists of time and legend; Friends and cousins working and having fun together out on the open ocean.  Diesel may have replaced sale and ores, but the call to go a Viking still had at least a thin stream in our blood, and this may well be the only chance I would ever have to spend time in the boat with these guys.  By the time the long floor shift lever clicked up to third gear at the top of the short hill where I always admired the beautifully restored turn of the century house before making my left turn, the little debate was resolved.  We were on our way with a song in our heart.

Photo credit Sea Quail.  Same size and general construction vessel as Commander, great shot of how these boats travel into a rough sea.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

All Rights Reserved