Lunch with the boys / stories and laughtor in the galley

Never expected to run into cousin Tom out in Kodiak


If a guy was in a hurry the stairway at the corner of the deck a few feet aft of where I landed could easily be managed in a single move, hands on the well worn pipe rails on each side to control the glide to the deck below, only brushing a step or two with the slick bottom of your shoes on the way down.  Each side of the raised deck was fitted with the same stairway, very steep so as to take up the smallest possible amount of space, but still with steps that could be negotiated like stairs rather than a straight climb on ladder rungs.   With the heavy bag on my shoulder and the steps still damp from the morning frost, now melted, a more careful approach was in order, hanging on to the grip with my left hand, right on the rail I found each thick black painted diamond plate step, one at a time, landing  on deck without mishap.  The first thing I heard, rising above the sound of the rattling gen set in the room below was the sound of Tom and Jon’s rambunctious laughter echoing through the open door that lead into the galley and crew accommodation. Laughter that instantly connected my mind to family gatherings from childhood days, adults doing whatever they do off on the edge of our kind world, the real action happening in the basement or back yard somewhere, time and place in an altered state of suspension.

“Hay guys, glad to finally be here, Tommy!!  Never thought I would run into you out in this country, thought you would be hanging out on the farm back in Enid.  Glad to see you.”

Our family never went in for the man hug thing, so there was none of the sappy dramatic hugs with shoulder pats and grunts of “how you doing man!” It was just another day in the life around the boats, and now it was time to enjoy lunch.

“We thought you missed the flight,” Phil greeted me as I stepped over the high threshold where the heavy galley door slid in a brightly worn metal lined track, “how did you get in from the airport?”

“I caught a ride in the shuttle van, figured you guys didn’t have a car here in town or weren’t sure when we would land after all the flight delays yesterday.”

“That’s funny,” Phil went on between bits of a bologna sandwich, “ I borrowed the pickup from the plant manager and drove out there looking for you.  I even stuck my head into the back of the van and looked around.  Didn’t see you anywhere.”

He didn’t seem annoyed that he had driven all the way out to the airport for nothing.

“I don’t know, maybe I was over in the pisser or something,” I allowed figuring that adding a possible explanation for the mix up was better than saying that if he had really been there it would have been impossible to miss him in the tiny group of people milling around waiting for the baggage to come out of the belly of the airplane.

A slight mime of peering into the van accompanied his description and my mind generated the picture, his heavy body hunching over slightly, one arm up on the open door, round face with slightly sharp nose under thinning hair peering into the van while I sat in a fog of fantasies left over from a thousand childhood imaginings of trips north for fun and adventure.    Funny how memory works, that imaginary image is as vivid in my mind today as the file containing what I believe really happened.  At the time I couldn't imagine how we missed each other, even wondered if he had really been there at all, but now was hardly the time to belabor trivial issues.

“No matter, the ride in on the van was quick and easy, and it looks like I am here in tome for lunch.”

Sandwich fixings, white bread and a couple kinds of lunch meat were piled on a couple platters on the table, mayonnaise and mustard in the lower ring of the home made lazy Susan that dominated the center of the triangular galley table.  It was quite a contraption, three round shelves attached to a one inch galvanized pipe that fit into flanges screwed to the table at the bottom and the underside of a deck beam overhead.  Each level was rimmed with a bent plywood edge, then a second plywood ring into which opening in the shape of commonly needed table accessories had been cut, creating little compartments that kept these items close at hand, out of the way while also restrained from flying around the room when the boat began to thrash about in the sea.  The first level had deeper compartments, extending almost half way up the jars and bottles of heavier items, next level up was a bit lower, just right for the can of Darigold butter that was a galley table staple, and the Carnation canned cow, also a standard boat item, and a couple smaller jam jars and a squirt bottle of honey.  Top level just right for salt and pepper shakers, open box of sugar cubes, and of course as is the case with any kind of storage system, every available space was stuffed with pins and note pads, playing cards and all the thousand other little things that seem to appear almost on their own whenever a little storage cubbyhole is close at hand.

“Toss your stuff in that room and grab a bowl of soup off the radar range,” Tom pointed to the first of two narrow dark varnished doors immediately forward from where I was standing.  In older style boats of this size the deck house would have been laid out with a entrance door facing aft, eighteen inches to a couple feet higher than the working deck level.  This let into a single room that served as the cooking area and table with built in benches in which can lockers for food storage were accessed through removable lids on which the guys sat around the table.  Everyone slept in the next room forward, bunks on either side, often with small port lights in the side of the house near the head of each berth, sometimes in larger vessels a middle tier of bunks may also have been included.  Usually there was enough room for the skipper, and “chief”, the name for the second in command, short for chief engineer, to have a small separate room to themselves.  Depending on the design, the wheelhouse occupied the front section of the deck houses, with a second conning area behind a half wall in the open on top of the house.  In the top house style the skippers stateroom occupied the front part of the deck house with a ladder somewhere leading straight up to a small house above.

In the Commander the raised foredeck eliminated the need for access around the exterior of a deck house, creating a lot more interior space for crew accommodation.  It might not seem like very much, but it was enough room to replace the single common sleeping area shared by six or eight guys with a row of double berth staterooms on each side of the boat.  The galley was still in about the same place as in the older designs, looking out onto the working deck behind through a pair of ten inch port holes that framed the heavy black diesel oil cook range, deep double sinks on the starboard side, built in fridge and freezer in the bulkhead that separated the cooking area from the mess room forward, dominated by the large table around which the domestic life of the fishermen centered.  The cooks stateroom, used as a food storage pantry during my trip in the boat opened off the port side of the galley.  The mess room, designate so by the sign “Certified Mess Room” carved conspicuously in block letters across the center of a heavily painted and patinaed deck beam over the table was forward of the galley. This room, reflecting the shape of the boats hull was roughly triangular with a heavy table securely bolted to the deck, big enough for a crew of ten or twelve to be served if necessary.

The individual sleeping compartments opened into the mess room, three doors on the left, two on the right, with another at the forward end which had originally been a space in which large compressed air tanks were mounted back in the day when the heavy duty, low RPM marine engine started by forcing compressed air into the cylinders to get them moving.  When that engine gave way to a new high speed diesel that had an electric starter the tanks had come out leaving a space for a sort of ward room with a couple bunks and a small table with benches around the sides.  Unused during our trip, it had been a hangout for the marine biologists from the university who used the boat on carter for salmon research in the far reaches of the Aleutian Island chain during most of the time that the boat had been in the family.

Returning from the galley with a steaming bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, I sat myself down on a heavy bench and within a second it was conversation as usual with the boys.  Not a hint of the five years and more since we all had been together.

Another thing to mention is the language we used on the boat was in no way consistent with popular images of working class guys out on their own.  It wasn’t a matter of being prudish about words, but in our family traditions people didn’t cuss nearly as much as seems to be the norm these days.  Call it putting on airs or being tight assed if you will, but each of us in our own way were into using language as a tool not only for communication but entertainment as well, and prided ourselves in being able to articulate most feelings and thoughts by choosing descriptive words rather than just stutter out a string of curses.  As I have gotten older, influenced by changes in common usage of words, my own language has drifted toward the occasional four letter word, some of which managed to wedge themselves into the telling of the tail, but at the time we were on this trip it is almost certain that I never heard Phil or Tom utter a single four letter expletive, and if Jon or I did spit out a word or two it was rare and in extreme situations.

On a boat everyone quickly stakes out a permanent place at the table.  Phil had the corner closest to the door, best seat in the house.  The exhaust stack that ran from the back end of the engine in the room directly under foot ran up through a two by two foot shaft that allowed for air flow between the enclosed engine space and the outside ten feet above.  The hot stack a few inches on the other side of the vertical tongue and groove wall warmed a guy’s back while relaxing at the table, and on the occasions when I sat there myself it was really nice.  Next to Phil, along the part of the back wall a couple feet toward the corner was Tom’s place.  The refrigerator and freezer were on the other side of that part of the wall, so no therapeutic warming, but still a comfortable smooth wall to lean on while sitting on the hard, built in bench that lined that part of the room.

 “When did you put the bulkhead and door over the entry area out there? Seems like a great idea, wonder why no one thought of doing that before?” I said pointing over my shoulder with a mayonnaise smeared butter knife.

“Some guys think the old timers did things the hard way because they were tough,” Phil observed through a bite of sandwich, “but they really were just too stupid to figure out how to do things right.”

We all chuckled at that, thinking about all the times we had heard old farts lecturing us on how tough they had it when they were younger, then refusing to listen when we suggested easier ways to get things done.

“Makes me think of old Kimo,” I went on, “did you ever meet that guy Tom?”

“No, when was that?”

“Back in the U.W. research days, when Jon and I got sent down here to help with odd jobs unloading all the shit they used to bring back from Adak.  We must have been in the ninth grade or so, maybe it was before you moved out from Oklahoma.”

Jon added, “the last year he was on the boat was when they came in with the boat almost plugged with coils of copper wire scrounged off of hulks that had been sunk during the war?”

The wire had been coiled into manageable sized bungles and tossed onto fires to burn off the insulation.  “You should have heard our mothers squawk when we got home covered in that inky junk after helping pile the wire onto pallets so it could go to the junk man.”

Imagine the toxic stench that must have gone up in the air around those fires, and still been mixed in with the charred mess clinging to the copper.  By now a half century has ticked away and everyone involved in the venture went on to live out their days apparently unharmed.

Phil added,  “that load of copper was probably worth as much as the whole boat.”

“Well anyway,” I went on with the story about the old guy who was the cook in those days.  “Kimo showed up to work every morning with a case of Lucky Logger under his arm, had a little folding canvas camp stool he kept back in the galley where he sat all morning, the box of beer on one side and a five gallon bucket for the empties on the other.  I think he had it down to a science; the soup was ready when the empty cans reached the top of the bucket.  Whenever we could Jon and I snuck away from the work on deck to be entertained by his stories.”

I could almost see the old boy, glazed eye and shaky hand opening another can of beer with the church key that used to hang from a string tied to one of the drawer handles. 

“I’ll always remember the time Jon asked him how he got out to the head in rough weather.”

“He answered slowly, as if reveling a deep secrete shared with only a select few, ‘Well boys,’  he said with a bit of a lisp, slurred further with the pile of empty cans topping the trash bucket, ‘when we are at sea I eat only saltine crackers.  Then I just clean out the galley with a whisk broom.’  Sweeping the air with his free hand he closed the story with another deep draft of his beer, and got up to open some cans of peaches to put out for our lunch.”

After another round of laughter Jon went on, “What about the one where a guy’s head was snipped off and rolled around deck like a cabbage?”

“He was telling us about long line fishing.”  Lowering his voice and affecting the lisp he went on, “’well boys, it was like this.  We were hauling gear off of Yakobi Island.  The sea was rough and the skipper was having trouble keeping the boat over the line but we were picking up a few fish.  The deck was slick with slime and some of the checkers were already full of halibut.’  Snap and fizz as a hole was punched in a fresh can. ‘This one young fellow on the boat, always a know it all kept stepping over the line between the roller and the gurdy wheel.  I warned him not to ever do that.  A hook will come over and catch your rain coat and pull you into the wheel as sure as you are a foot tall.  He only laughed at me.”

Jon stopped for a moment for another bit of his thick salami sandwich, dunked into his bowl of chicken noodle soup, same kind as had been simmering on the stove the day the old boy first told us the story, then went back into his best Kimo voice, ’I was gutting fish in the checker on the far side of the hatch when I heard a sudden gurgling sound and looked up.  The kid's luck ran out, stepped over the line one time too many, a hook caught his coat and he went into the gurdy wheel before anyone could get it stopped.  The line wrapped around his neck and in an instant his head was sliced clean off  his shoulders and there it was, boys, rolling around the hatch like a cabbage.”

“I think I believed it at the time.” I added through another round of laughter.  “Even so, when I was seining last year I certainly never stepped over the purse line, and even with the troll wire I often hear Kimo’s voice and pull my hands further from the gurdy when the wire is spooling on-board, so maybe the added feature of a severed head rolling around like a cabbage helped drive the message home better than just a mild suggestion that lines coming into pullers or winches can be dangerous.”

Tom added that he had read about deck hands loosing an arm in the gurdy wheel while hauling halibut, so there could be more than a little truth in the story.

“Wonder what ever happened to that guy?”

“Who, Kimo?”  Jon asked then went on, “My dad told me he saw him around Fisherman’s Wharf a few years ago,  He looked as old as time, had a thin mustache waxed straight out like Salvador Dali.”  Jon had a great smile, and used to kind of half laugh and grin as he pulled pictures from the air over his head and reformed them through his expressive mouth.  “He had bought a five gallon can of some kind of black tar gunk and a little machine to press it into tooth past tubes, and was selling it as the latest miracle water seal product.” 

We all laughed hilariously at the image of the little old fellow, skinny and half drunk peddling the goop around the docks.

“Cliff felt sorry for the old man and bought a couple of tubes and used it to seal a leak around the stack,” pointing to the deck over the place he was sitting for emphasis, Jon went on,  “a few days later, in the middle of the gulf they smelled smoke and ran up to have a look.  Kimo’s miracle water seal had gotten too hot near the stack and caught on fire, lucky the whole place didn’t go up on flames.”

We hooted with laughter again.  The atmosphere around the table was hilarious.  Not sure if it was the general atmosphere, the new guy flying in to help with the trip home signifying the end of a grueling season cooped up in that boat, or just the combination of three guys with a natural talent for picking words and descriptive phrases in combinations that always seemed to come out funny.  Even the most banal incidents came to life in these guys stories, related with a bit of a twist and gestures that ended in belly laugh punch lines that would be extremely difficult to recreate in writing.

“It’s been horrible here this winter, just look at my hands.” Phil held out his rough paw for inspection.  “Can’t wait to get home and warm up, been cold the whole time.” Then changing the topic he went on, “How was the flight across from Anchorage?”

“It was great, scattered clouds and fairly smooth flying, no problems landing.”

“Wien Air Alaska can be really bad,” he went on, “the last time I flew in I was sure we were going to crash.  The darned thing came down too fast and it hit the runway so hard that the oxygen masks all popped out of the overhead bins.  Then it just rolled up the runway without slowing down at all.  I watched the terminal building whiz past in a shot, but there wasn’t any sound from the engines, either reversing thrust or revving up to take off again.  The thing was rattling and shaking, speeding toward certain death at the end of the runway.  Then at the very last minute they managed to get the thing in gear and we all were pushed hard against the seats in front as full brakes and thrust screeched it to a stop.  Some of the pilots flying for that airline are totally insane.”

The way he told it, the image of a plane full of terrified passengers, heads pressed back against the seat backs with yellow plastic oxygen cups dangling in their faces, seconds away from a gruesome death struck us as hilariously funny.  Phil’s humor may even have been partly unintentional, certainly not contrived or memorized in the form of a classic joke format, story ending with a punch line after which laughter is supposed to erupt.  With him, and to a somewhat lesser extent the old man Simon, it was a combination of cadence in delivery, selection of simple but descriptive words along with the nonverbal parts of speech that were just naturally funny.

Jon sided his way forward, around the narrow front of the table from his place opposite mine to check on the stove.  Bending over the carburetor, a fuel metering device mounted outside the fire box on the left side of the range, he called back to us, “this dinging thing is red hot again and it is only set on three.”

Tom turned to me, “we call it the radar range, because it is always so hot that things cook in just a few minutes.  Have to watch it all the time unless it is on the lowest setting.”

The galley stove, heart of the domestic life in a small fishing boat, especially in winter, was the center of all cooking as well as the furnace that kept our little world warm and dry against the elements.  Boat galleys always had strings running across one way or another for drying clothing and towels, even though many of boat has gone up in flames from something getting too close to the fire.  Models vary in detail, and smaller boats are fitted with smaller versions of the basic style of stove, but they are all about the same.  Built along the same principle as a wood fired kitchen range, boat stoves have a fire box on one side under a cast iron cook top.  Diesel oil, either pumped directly into the stove with some kind of pressure sensitive impulse pump, or by gravity feed from a small day tank mounted on a deck above, enters a metering device that controls the amount of oil entering the bottom of the fire box.  Larger versions like our galley stove employed a rat cage fan that was mounted outside the bottom of the fire box, also controllable with a rheostat knob, on low with the stove was just idling away between meals, cranked up for extra heat when it was time to boil the coffee water or cook something in the oven.   Far from perfect, prone to producing inky sooty smoke, some of which managed to coat the interior of the boat with a yellowing film on all the white painted surfaces, these stoves provide an even, steady heat that doesn’t change a whole lot, certainly not quickly like one expects from throwing the switch on an electric range, but they can be extremely efficient for cooking, even in the often harsh conditions in a tiny boat galley.  From the beginning of the season until the last line is lashed to the piling back in Ballard the stove is never turned off.  In fact, back in these days one friend of mine who lived part time on his boat all winter told me it had been five years since his stove had been cold. 

The conversation continued to flow easily as we finished a couple sandwiches each, washed down with dark boat coffee from heavy porcelain restaurant china.  They boys laughed as they told me about how the radar range got its name, always cranked hot even at the lowest settings.  Then someone went on to tell about a couple boats working the area with Norwegian crews, who seemed totally impervious to poor weather conditions, going out into the teeth of raging gales without a care.  Mention of fierce weather brought on the story about the boat was found fetched up on a reef, battered but still floating after weathering a tremendous storm.  It was the classic missing crew tail, galley table still set with coffee mugs, pot of stew on the stove but no one at home.  In the severe weather, high wind and ice covering everything when the boat hit the rocks they must have figured that she would be battered to bits in short order and in attempted to deploy the life raft were just blown away.  As it turned out the reef had been flat on top and as the tide dropped the boat rode out much of the storm high and dry, safe from the battering waves, and came through the ordeal more or less intact.
      That led into a rant about some Gulf built boats, we called them benders, either based on the name of the yard from which they were spawned, or possibly their flimsy construction that would easily bend if stressed.  Not only were they light built for the conditions here in the North Country, but were ugly to boot.  For a long time when ever one of us saw a boat we really didn’t like for one reason or another it was dubbed a bender boat.

“Did you hear about the plane crash we saw?”  Tom asked when another round of laughter died down.

“No, when was that?” By now I had finished my food and was shuffling back from the galley with fresh coffee in hand.

“Couple years ago, we were running up Grenville on the way north with the whole summer crew aboard.”

Fourteen or fifteen hours south of Ketchikan the rout between the Puget Sound country and Alaska known as the inside passage winds its way through a deep narrow channel between Pitt Island and the mainland of British Columbia.  Hardly more than a mile wide in places the heavily forested hillsides rise sharply on both sides of the fifty odd mile stretch of water, often filling with a low ceiling of clouds that obscure the steep ridges on either side.  In the same way that a smell can suddenly paint vivid pictures from the past across the mind, mentioning of Grenville always takes me to the instant that I first experienced that place.  Mid September, the first year Jon and I worked in the cannery boats.  The air had begun to make that subtle change where the days are still balmy, memories of August in the afternoon but fog tends to fill the low places in the wee hours with the smell of October and Thanksgiving close on its heels.  It was time for one of the small ships, the Bearing, to run back to Seattle with the hold about half full of cases of salmon we had canned out west of Kodiak during August.  The boss, Jack arranged flights out of Yakutat for everyone in the crew except the skipper Bjorn and mate Sandy.  One of the women, Crystal came along for the ride and Jon, Lurch and I had been selected to come as well to help stand watches with the older guys on the trip.  Jack issued a stern warning to Sandy and Bjorn to keep out of Ketchikan.  This was partly because neither of them held the appropriate coast guard license to be running that sized ship, but there was also a concern over keeping the boys sober enough to get the thing back to town in a reasonable amount of time.  Bjorn preferred to run down the coast off shore a few miles anyway, but he did poke our nose into two or three places on the inside along the way for a bit of sightseeing.  I came on watch at midnight when we were just approaching the northern end of Grenville from open water, and except for a quick look over Sandy’s shoulder when he checked the big chart table at the back of the room with a quick flash of a dim light, I had no idea where we were going.  The kids job on this trip was to help keep the older guys awake and lend an extra set of eyes on the long watches as the boat inched her way down the coast.  It is always handy to have someone fetch coffee and snacks, watch for lights and buoys and do the periodic checks around the boat to make sure everything is ok.  For us it was a great school in the skills of reading charts radar, learning as much as we could about point to point navigation.

Moving down into the channel the little radar screed showed a dramatically narrow line of black, open water, between very bright blobs of solid mountain, but the depth meter showed lots of water and a quick look over Sandy’s shoulder when he checked the chart, reassured me that we were traveling down the main road, safe and sound.  The fog was thick by then, traffic in the channel was light that night, occasionally we could see an approaching vessel on the radar but only got a gloomy view of their lights, fuzzy in mists as they churned their way past a few yards on our port side.  At about two o’clock I was sent below to the galley for our favorite pick me up, coffee with a pack of Nestles Quick powder stirred in for flavor.  It was a steel ship, relic of our father’s war with heavy rubber gasketted water tight doors at each side of the wheel house that opened onto small porches, or wings  surrounded by a neck high steel shield, each with an aft facing ladder leading to the deck below.  A couple hours earlier, when I came up for the watch, we had been out on the open ocean, sharp fresh sea breeze blowing across the face, the little ship rolling free in a low swell.  Stepping  through the door into the night stunned me for a moment.  The steep hillside, heavily wooded less than a quarter mile in front of my face, in the still air and fog carrying the scent of the woods to my nostrils just as strong as if I were laying on my back under the trees on a warm September afternoon.  As old familiar smells often will, my mind and heart was instantly filled with dreams and longings, pictures and memories of things that were, will be and should have been.  Ten thousand different forest smells intensified by clear ocean air we had been breathing in for a couple days running down the coat off shore.  An odd thrill really to be in a ship, twenty feet above the water with the sound of the engines throbbing away a couple decks below and the sound of the wake sloshing and churning along the sides, and suddenly feel as if you are in the middle of a forest glade, almost ready to duck as she churned her way right under the low overhanging branches of a big tree along the path.

That picture took less time to run through my mind than Tom took taking another gulp from his the Oveltin  jar in which he had mixed a strong draft of milk and the original product that was his favorite pick me up on the boat.  He went on, “I came off watch at noon and wend down the outside way to take a leak off the side of the boat.  While I was standing there a little Cessna buzzed over just under the clouds that filled the top of the channel.  Almost seemed like he would take the antennas off the top of the mast.  The plane seemed to sputter for an instant as it went over, then it disappeared around the corner a mile or so ahead of us for a few seconds.  The next thing it came into view again and suddenly dropped into the water like a rock.”

“I ran back into the wheel house shouting to the two old Norwegians on watch if they had seen the crash, they saw nothing of course, but we roused everyone on board and in less than ten minutes the wreck came into view, wing tip and part of the tale just above the surface, a guy clinging to the wreckage.  As we pulled alongside he began shouting that his wife was still in the cockpit.”

“There was a guy on the crew who had scuba gear, which he strapped on as quick as possible, while the rest of us tried to string a line around the wreckage to keep it from sinking before he get the woman out.  It was too heavy for us to lift with the boom, but we did manage to keep it on the surface just long enough for Bob to go under and get the body.  She was stone dead.”

“We wrapped her up in a tarp and lashed it to the side rail while Cliff called ahead to the Coast Guard in Ketchikan to report the crash.”

Since it happened in Canada, I wondered why it hadn’t been an issue for the authorities there to deal with, but didn’t ever ask that question.

“In the mean time the old boy who was flying the plane had been wrapped in blankets, given dry clothes to warm him up.  When I came in from helping with the body he was sitting right here at the table, and didn’t move or even say much all the way into town.”

No wonder the poor fellow was traumatized.  Plane ditched and lost, wife laying dead on deck under a nasty old tarpaulin, still feeling the icy fingers of his own death from which a near miracle of a rescue snatched him at the last possible moment.  The water around this country is very cold and even in a heavily traveled channel a guy couldn’t hold out long floating on his own.  Without survival suite, or even a life jacket that would at least keep the body floating for a while after the plane went down, if Tom hadn’t headed natures call at that particular moment on that particular side of the boat, he may well never have been found.  Just another case of a flight gone missing en-route from Seattle to Ketchikan.

“As soon as we tied up in Ketchikan the cops came on board to recover the body and interview the pilot.  He just sat here with a blank look on his face, refusing to get up and go out on deck, they had to come in and get him.  He claimed that head winds used more fuel than expected and the plane went down when it ran out, but I think he felt guilty myself.”  Tom allowed with a more somber, almost judgmental tone.  “I think he just forgot to gas up, and then was too stubborn to stop off along the way, gambling that he could make it in on fumes.  Seemed more worried about his own ass than losing the wife.”

I wasn’t there, and reserved judgment.  It had been a traumatic experience for everyone, most of all the poor sap who lost his wife and came within five minutes or less of losing his own life too.  The emotional impact of these things is not that easy to predict, and from the way the story was related to me it sounded perfectly understandable that the guy would sit in a state of shock, unable to come to immediate terms with what had happened or why.

The heavy tread and shouts of the fish plant crew on deck outside rousted us from the comfort of our memories.  Empty bowls and mugs landed in the sink on the way out the door, and we all stepped into the chilly sunlight on deck to get down to the business of filling the hold with fresh flaked ice to keep the shrimp we planned to catch refrigerated until we made it back into town to unload.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

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