Dinner up town / Weathered in for a few days / fisher's life in the out ports

“You know, most of those old Norwegians  have secret passions.”

  George commented after a gentleman silently stepped past our little group hanging out on dock six at the terminal in Seattle.  The picture of the successful old timer skipper in our eyes, somewhat passed middle age dressed in impeccably spotless gray Filson wool jacket and dark Woolrich trousers, clean Western Chief fisherman’s deck slippers, city dressed perfumed wife in a church pillbox hat on his arm, we watched the couple cross the net mending lot and climb into the shiny new Buick that seemed to be mandatory transportation for those guys.   

A group of us, unlikely fishermen, recently escaped from universities where we had studied more for the love of learning and draft deferments than of training for careers, were spending a few pleasant weeks trying to cobble old wood fishing boats together, getting ready for the upcoming salmon season out beyond the Straights of Juan de Fuca.  We were on a kind of classic spirit quest from which many of us never completely returned.   Our mentor George, about a decade older, had been in the fishing business since he was a teenager.  The story was that he took an open skiff with an outboard motor from Tacoma all the way to south eastern Alaska at the age of sixteen, chasing king salmon with sport fishing poles for the summer and making enough money to buy a regular fishing boat of his own.  In addition to having what seemed to us like an almost magical knack for finding and catching the elusive salmon on the grounds off shore, he was also a writer.  Took a literature degree down at UPS in the mid sixties, when the passions of our generation were anything but hidden.  Poets and painters, writers and liras in those days when we got high on philosophy and poetry as much as the little purple pills that drew back the thin curtains of ordinary reality.  I heard that one guy we knew had concluded a suicide pact with a friend at one time, planning drastic action if either of them had the misfortune of living past the age of thirty; art and love being more important than the quiet desperation that seemed to permeate the drudgery of the older generations lives.

We hung on every word George parsed out to us in those days.  Painting his thoughts with a very dry linguistic palette, dramatic pauses sharpening the color of his words with carefully timed moments of silence in which the listener had the opportunity to consider a verity of possible meanings, filling in details as they related to his own experience.  At sea during the fishing season, when our community conversations ran one speaker at a time over the squawky little radios each of us had screwed to the ceilings of the tiny wheel houses in our boats, George’s transmissions were usually highlighted by moments of silence, when his thumb was still on the mic’ button, holding court in the fleet by keeping the channel open, while he sorted through the files in his mind for the exact combination of words to make his point in the most precise way possible.  It was as if he were not only making insightful comments, but almost inventing the very language he was using as he went along.  He was a brilliant guy, entertaining and instructive on a variety of levels.

George probably knew things about the old Norski skipper who shuffled past us on the dock that day, but in my mind the comment opened other pictures as well.  Three or four years earlier I had been working on the grounds crew over at the university, earning tuition money on a work study program, when one old boy talked about his last season working in the boats.  “We lay at the dock out at Sand Point for three weeks.  Hell, most of the time we just sat around the galley table drinking whiskey out of water glasses.  When I got home from that the old lady wouldn’t let me go fishing ever again, so I ended up working here.”  The grounds crew took a leisurely attitude and I always remember this particular fellow, at the end of each day coming back into the greenhouse where the crew checked in and out, saying “I didn’t do a damned thing today, but I will give it hell tomorrow.”

I also thought of our own family and the possible contrast between expected behavior at home with Mamma, where straight laced religious traditions set a very different standard than the somewhat less restrictive attitude that may have prevailed when the boys were out on their own in the boats.  The denomination in which we were raised forbid worldly things, chief among them the use of tobacco and alcohol, even something as banal as attending a movie in a theater was frowned upon and women were technically forbidden to use makeup or jewelry.  It is not hard to run amok from that set of rules.  Things that wouldn’t be judged as unusual in any way by folks who practice moderation as contrasted from restriction could be viewed as expressions of George’s “secret passions.”    Whether or not it is true, there is a common notion that folks from restrictive backgrounds tend to cut loose with wild abandon when they do manage to get free from the home community, and there is no doubt in my mind that this probably occurred on occasion within our little extended family circle as well.

Our mothers would have considered it low debauchery that we had dinner and a few weak screw drivers a time or two in a local watering hole a half block up from the head of the floats while we waited out the bad weather in Kodiak over the next few days after unloading our little trip.  But it was actually just an opportunity to go some place warm and comfortable where a guy could be around someone other than the same three or four shipmates on the boat.  Jon and I didn’t have more to drink than we would have had during average Monday Night Football game at home, or an afternoon working on some old car in the back yard with a couple friends and a half rack of Bud next to the tool box, which would have scandalized our mothers as well.

Usually the morning after a fishing trip I love to go up town and have breakfast in a restaurant.  Nothing quite like a mess of hash browns and easy over egg, sausage on the side, brought to the table by a chatty waitress to contrast with another meal in the grubby little boat galley.  But when we ambled out of our staterooms on the Commander to the sight of blowing snow and bitter cold the warmth of the radar range and home cooking seemed much more inviting than the trek up the icy dock towards the cafe. 

Phil had the news paper at his place at the corner of the table when I came out.  “Did you get some rest in there?”

“Slept like a baby, didn’t want to get up but I have to take a piss like a race horse.”

“Weather is savage outside, we won’t be going anywhere for at least two or three days, so there will be lots of time to sleep if you want.”

Tom grunted from behind his book, and I stepped out into the cold of the unheated entry room, across to the even colder head.  The port hole in the heat was always open, hooked to the deck beam overhead and the frigid wind from outside swirled around in there making it feel like stepping into the freezer rather than the bathroom.  Just do the business and button up before the damned little boy freezes.

Back in the galley Jon worked at the stove.  Emptying a bag of frozen hash browns into a large cake pan that he slipped under the über hot top of the oven, he began cracking a dozen eggs into the large well seasoned cast iron frying pan over the hot part of the stove.  The sausages were done, simmering in their fat off on a cooler area of the stove, and using a trick we learned from Tommy many years before, he began spooning the hot fat over the eggs, basting them to perfection.  At the time that Tom showed us his country eggs we were appalled.  Eggs cooked in the slimy grease from the sausage?  Yuck!  But it works OK, no broken yokes from clumsy egg flipping, and most of the hot fat rolls off the eggs so they aren’t really that greasy on the plate.

Without a constant source of 110 power toast on the boat has to be done on the radar range like everything else.  The oven works well, although in an instant the bread can go from golden brown to dry black cinder.  Another technique that works tolerable well is to sprinkle a dash of salt over the top of the stove, in the area away from the circle of maximum heat above the fire box.  The salt holds the slices of bread just enough above the stove top to keep it from searing to the iron, and with a bit of attention and a single flip one can come up with a close approximation of warm toast to go with the breakfast.

Several kinds of jam and a couple cans of Darigold sweet cream butter were always within easy reach, in the lower and middle shelves of the lazy Susan at the table, I always selected strawberry.  Nothing quite like the combination of flavors, runny egg with a hunk of sausage, ketchup on the hash brown and jam toast soaked in melted butter.  Maybe not so good for you, but who knows?  Uncle Simon ate like that every day of his life and lived on into his nineties, others I have known minced along on vegetables and whole grains and dropped off at earlier stages of life anyway.

“We have to patch up some holes in the net before we go out,” Phil observed after wiping the last of the egg and sausage residue from his plate with a bit of toast.

“Couple of pretty good rips in the left wing,” Tom replied, “must have caught a couple of heavy rocks or something.  Maybe I will climb down into the engine room later this morning and change oil in the main.”   

But there was no hurry to get anything done fast, and the conversation turned toward reminiscing about childhood days.  “Wonder what ever happened to that kid who used to live across the alley from 4230 Brooklyn?” 

“Don’t know Paul, haven’t seen him since we moved out of there when I was in the fifth grade.” 

“I kind of remember them,” Tom added, “Asian running a laundry wasn’t it? We only drove out from Oklahoma a time or two when I was little, then when I lived on the farm every summer there wasn’t time to be coming out to visit the family on the coast.”

“You should have been there the time Justin set up the fortune teller table in the basement, remember that Jon?” 

“Funniest thing we had ever seen, that kid turning white and running for his life.” 

Filling in the details I went on, “It all started when we noticed that the heating element in clothes dryer made an eerie glow through the glass door when it was dark in the laundry area.  About the same time we had discovered a fun trick to do with burned out light bulbs.  Break the glass away, twist the exposed wires together, then carefully screw it back into the socket.  Flip the switch and zap, a wonderful little flash of light accompanied by a pop and spatter of tiny bits of glass that scatter harmlessly around the room.  The pop wasn’t loud enough to draw attention from adults upstairs, but it was nevertheless hoots of fun.”

The basement in that house was divided into two bedrooms across the front with a separate furnace room in about the middle.  On the south side there was another partition wall separating Simon’s tool room from the larger area left open in which the washer and dryer stood along the back wall.  A laundry shoot opened in the ceiling that led straight up through the main floor all the way to the unused third floor of the house.  We may have been tempted, but at least while I was around no one tried to climb up the shoot as a sneaky way to go from floor to floor.  It was a bit small, and we were a bit wild and crazy, but not quite that much.  It was fun to drop things down into the cart that was always parked under the opening, but for the most part we steered well clear of the soiled laundry.  After all Norma was keeping a small nursing home going on the second floor, and gosh only knows what one would find lurking in the piles of sheets and towels.

“The place had old style light fixtures, same as here on the boat, turned on and off with short lengths of ball chain, only there a system of long strings attached to each fixture led through screen door latch eyes to the hall by the furnace room, so that the lights could all be turned on form one place before entering the area.  That must have been what gave Justin the idea for the fortune teller setup.

“The first step was to prepare several broken light bulb bombs, placing them in each of the fixtures in the room.  Then we redirected the strings to a staging area behind the laundry cart where someone could be hide and control the fireworks.  Another string was laid carefully across the floor to a blanket draped over the dryer, so that on a signal it would be slipped off reveling the glowing window in the door, very spooky.  Old towels and blankets were tacked over the basement windows to create the appropriate gloom for the stunt, and a small lamp set up on the card table, also draped with a covering for maximum effect, which along with the white towel turban Justin fit for himself completed the scene.

“Everything was set and ready, except for one thing.  The three of us set up the whole thing, and as much fun as it was to pull the strings and rehearse the scenario, popping off light bombs and uncovering the face of doom dryer window, we needed a Ginny pig who was not in on all the special effects to get the complete experience.  With the potentially dangerous exploding broken light bulbs, not to mention that we had to tap into the supply of fresh bulbs when we ran out of old burned out globes, we could hardly bring the grownups down into our cellar of terrors.  But who else was there? 

“Had to be Perry.  He was the only other kid around.  He had what seemed to us like a bunch of younger brothers and sisters, but they were much younger and didn’t come across the alley to play.  So, while Jon and I positioned ourselves in the control booth, behind carefully placed blankets over an extra table, Justin went up across the alley to get the victim.  Making up a story about finding a secret book on fortune telling, adding that Jon and Paul got in trouble and had to stay in Jon’s room for the rest of the morning, Justin brought Perry down into the basement.

“It was all carefully planned and rehearsed.  The three of us went through the script together deciding when to pull the strings on various lamp sockets that were pre loaded with our little bombs to high light the fortune teller’ story that naturally included warnings of dangerous goblins and ghouls.  At the climax, Justin’s voice went cold with terror as he warned, ‘don’t look over your shoulder; there is the face of doom peering at us right now!’ 

“Perry had been placed at the table opposite Justin, facing toward the furnace room wall with so that the exploding lights and dryer were behind him in the room.  Just as he began to turn around on Justin’s warning Jon pulled the string attached to the blanket over the dryer window, revealing the ruddy glow inside, distorted by the thick glass in the door it did make a great effect in the gloomy atmosphere of the room.  With a shout of terror Perry ran from the house as we hooted with laughter.

“Later we went over and brought the boy back to show him the trick.  We really wished there had been more kids to scare, but no one else was around and we were running out of light bulbs anyway.  Could only do so many of those before someone figured out where all the spare lights went and we would be in trouble for sure.”

Tom laughed, “That damned Justin, came across to the grown-ups as goody-goody boy, but always into more mischief than the rest of us combined.  I’m surprised you guys pulled it off with a straight face.  Usually when kids try stunts like that someone spoils the it all by laughing.”

Phil came back in from the head toward the end of the story and sat back down in his place.  “You know the old man and his brothers used to pull stunts on each other when they were on the fox farm.”  

“He was just a kid when the family sent him up to spend the winter, alone in the little cabin with an older brother, tending the foxes that were kept in high sided chicken wire cages.

“It must have been a huge job for them to make the cages for the foxes in that wild muskeg forest.  The old man told me the little buggers could dig under the fence if it were just planted in the ground, so they had to have cages that were wired together top, side and bottom.  A breeding pair of foxes cost a small fortune and they had to constantly be working on the fences to keep the animals inside.

“My favorite story,” Phil went on, “was the time when the old man’s brother had taken the skiff into town and shot a deer from the boat on the way back.  Apparently the beach where the skiff was pulled up and stored was out of sight from the cabin, so the brother created a fake head wound with an old rag soaked in blood from the deer, before walking back towards the cabin where Simon had been alone all day.

“If you have ever been in those dark woods on a southeast island you know it is creepy even in the summer time.  Winter, dark and cold with snow on the ground and a guy will start believing the woods are closing in from all sides, spooky.

“At any rate, the brother, not sure which one it was, fired off three or four rounds from his rifle as he got close to the cabin, and when Simon ran out to see what was going on he found his brother, bloody rag held to his forehead, presumably covering a fresh wound.”

“Indians!” he gasped before dragging himself into the cabin where he collapsed in a heap in the middle of the floor. 

“Take the shot gun, they ducked for cover when I fired back at them, but they are probably going to sneak up on the cabin to finish us off.”

“Terrified, the old man ran to the place where the trail from the beach passed a big burnt out stump where he took a stand against the impending attack.  It was getting dark and very cold, snowing a bit which made it all the harder to see who may be creeping up the overgrown trail.  There he waited for a long time, until well after dark before he decided the damned Indians could just as well have his scalp, or whatever the local natives did to enemies, he was going back in to get warmed up and have some grub.

“Coming back into the light and warmth of the little cabin he was shocked to find his  brother, blood washed off his head, sitting at the table reading the news paper he had bought in town, warm and dry.  The old man is still mad about that fifty years later!”

“Where was that place?” I asked.  All my life I heard uncle Simon telling bits and pieces of stories about the fox farm days, when the family sent him up to work sometimes all by himself for weeks at a stretch.  Other than the fact that it was to raise foxes for the fur trade, and that it was in Alaska somewhere, many of the actual details of the operation never made it into the narration.

“McFarland Islands, about ten miles or so south of Hydaburg, really not very far north of the Canadian border down there.”  Phil went on, “I’ve been past there in the boat, but never tried to find the place myself, probably so overgrown now that you couldn’t see anything anyway.  When the depression hit in the thirties the market for fox fur tanked and they got out of the business.  The older brothers had been running big fishing boats throughout those years anyway, and the dad built a couple of boats at their place on  Vashon, so the farm wasn’t the families only income.  All those guys ended up with more money than God, and I think a lot of the original capitol came from those foxes.”

The conversation trailed off and Phil went up to his cabin, Jon and I decided to put on our coats and hats and head up to the store to pick up a few things we needed, and Tom pulled on his coveralls, and disappeared down the engine room ladder as we shut the door and climbed over the side onto the float for the walk up town.

***

Later that afternoon I got up from a delightfully extended nap to find the galley empty, no dinner simmering on the radar range, no one home.  During the first lunch together I had been schooled on the local watering holes, one dive bar to avoid and another place at the front of the local strip mall down town cluster where a guy could get a decent dinner without risking bumping elbows with a somewhat tougher element of drunks.  Realizing that I had not discussed the use of the diesel generator that putted along in the engine room most of the time, should it be shut down when everyone left the boat or left to run on its own.  In the cannery boats there had been a strict rule that the machines were never left to run unattended, occasionally a low oil pressure alarm would sound and quick action needed to turn it off and find the source of the problem in order to avert an expensive engine overhaul. Figuring that we would only be an hour or two for dinner, and that the huge bank of batteries that provided back up power could manage two or three forty watt light globes left burning while we were away, I shut the little diesel down and headed up to find the guys in the restaurant.   

After the dry cold, picking my way up the floats and across the street and parking lot, stepping carefully around slick ice patches, the steamy glare and din in the restaurant seemed like paradise.  Of course with the sudden change in temperature and atmosphere my glasses instantly fogged and I was blind as a bat, trying to come into the place without being taken for a drunk stumbling over tables or people.  When the scene cleared I saw Phil at a large round table in an area near a fire place, jawing with what I took to be a few other boat skippers.  In those days it seemed that most of the guys who ran the boats wore semi dressy leather jackets as a mark of their status, while deck hands came out in their clean wool shirts and jackets.  One guy, who I later learned was Terrible Ted had an insulated jump suite off set with a colorful knit cap that has several brightly colored pom-poms jiggling as he regaled the group with one bullshit story after another. 

Tom and Jon waved me over from a booth on the other side of the place.  On the boat we ate as much as we wanted, the cost of groceries being figured into the overall costs of doing business.  The crew wages come as a percentage of the amount left over after boat expenses are deducted from the total value of the catch.  The pay day for that part of the deal would come later, after the bookkeepers dug through things, but for walking around money we had a bit of cash each from the sale of flat fish sorted out of the shrimp, which Phil sold to crabbers as bait.  A fresh hundred dollar bill was burning a hole in my wallet, and buying myself a big steak dinner seemed like a decent reward for dealing with that pile of slimy critters during the trip.

The earlier reminiscing about the times when Norm and Simon had the big house on Brooklyn Avenue started us talking about those days again.  “Didn’t you watch an old man die on the roof of the church at the end of the block, Jon?”  Tom started the line of conversation.

“Yah, it was pretty weird, although I was just a little kid and didn’t really know what was happening.”   Taking a sip of his drink to refresh memory, Jon went on, “the old guy was nailing roofing on the church, seemed so very high to me and I stood across the street watching, from the shade of the next building.  It was summer; very hot day and the guy just slumped down and didn’t move.  After a few minutes I ran home and told my mom and she came down and had a look.  Must have called the ambulance, that part I don’t remember, but later we found out he had dropped dead on the spot.  Heat stroke or something.”  

“He shouldn’t have been up there in the heat.” Tom pronounced the obvious solution to the problem, and moved on to recollections of fun childhood days around that old place. “It seemed like magic there, high square house several steps above the street with the little strip of grass banked up on one side of the red painted steps.  Wonder why they always painted steps and porches red in those days anyway?”

Funny how memory works.  The impression can be that the entire history of your life is carefully filed there in the head, retrievable in its entirety if one only digs in the right places.  Much more likely that only the tiniest bits and pieces of things are kept on file, the strategy being to rely on creative imagination to fill in the gaps.  The vast majority of our lives are just repeating the same basic behaviors over and over again anyway, no need to keep any of that stuff in long term memory.  Only the settings and an occasional unique incident interrupts the norm, and if the mind holds a bit of these events that is clearly enough.  As so it is with memories of the wonderful old house in the U. District back in the fifties. 

Those were years of golden childhood when there is no time.  Jon, always the mischievous little black haired boy who I remember for making me crawl on hands and knees past the dentist’s office up around the corner on 43^rd, for fear that they would see him and invite us in for a checkup.  His sister Simone the steady, rational voice of calm, used to say that they called her little brother Jon because that was the only swear word allowed in our particular religious sect.  “John Sake!” We heard our mother’s exclaim when ever they were too frustrated with our behavior for words.  Then there was Phil the near adult who could drive cars and have all the fun, kept us kids in total stitches of laughter whenever he was around.  I remember the time that Jon and I took three hours to walk a few blocks home from church and it was Phil who found us before our Dad’s.  He yelled plenty but we were not afraid that he would tan our asses like the old men were ready to do if they found us first.  In those days us kids were in a separate world of our own, occasionally coming into contact with the adults, but avoiding them as much as possible.  Our part of the house was the basement and the cement courtyard in back and the alley beyond the small single story brick house in which two or three male clients for Norma’s nursing home they ran in the place lived.  Jon knew how to get in the basements and roof tops of several buildings around there, and between those places and the short cuts in and out of buildings along the Ave, and the University campus the next block over we were in a wonderland of fun every day. 

“Remember that old lady named Mary?” Tom’s voice brought me back from the vague day dreaming about those days to remembering one of the nursing home clients who lived on the second floor of the house.

“You mean the one with something wrong with her tongue?”

Jon chimed in, “it was totally gross, hung out of her mouth half way to her belly button.  At least what’s what it looked like to us kids.”

“I remember the time we had to take her tray in for dinner.”  I took up the story, the image of that tongue burned into my memory, probably stretched several inches with the passing years.  “Whenever we came down the hallway she always called out, ‘Come on in Jonny’ but we scooted past as quietly as we could.  But one evening Norma made us take the dinner tray up, so Jon set us up to be safe from the stench of the place.  Probably didn’t smell much at all, I’m sure that Norma kept those ladies very clean.  But in the imagination of little boys, can run wild.  So when we got up the back stairs, out of sight from the kitchen, Jon went to the utility closet and got two large cans of Lysol spray.  The plan was for me to advance from the door to the bed with the tray, while Jon hid himself behind me holding a can of disinfectant on each side fogging the entire area with a mist of Lysol.  We were protected in a bubble of spray all the way to the bed, then a quick retreat.  It didn’t work quite as well as expected, and the poor old woman kept asking what we were doing, but we did manage to deliver her dinner and get out without contamination.  That is if you don’t count berating in fresh Lysol spray as contamination.

Acknowledging that our behavior was terrible, we laughed raucously over the incident anyway.  Then, checking his watch Jon got up to call his wife at home, and Tom drifted on over to the table where Phil was swapping lies with a few guys.  I was cutting through the bar on my way back from the pisser when a familiar voice stopped me in my tracks.

At the end of an all too long night with a friend from the cannery boat days who happened to be in the place, I made my way out into the chill of the night and began navigating my way back through the parking lot and across the street to the ramp leading down to the floats below.  The tide, which can be huge in Alaska was at extreme low, the ramp looking like a cliff nearly straight down when I reeled to the top edge and stopped to get my bearings.  “No more whiskey for me” I vowed venturing over the brink, hanging on to the rail with both hands.  Somehow I made it down and back to the boat.  More than one hapless fisherman has lost his life coming back to the boats drunk late at night, missed his footing, and gone into the water between the boats and dock.  Unable to get back out, weighted down with heavy clothing it is lights out.  Probably more dangerous in the harbor than facing storms at sea.

I made it home, almost felt a Calvinist cleansing for the transgressions as Tom chewed out in the galley, pissed off at me for shutting the generator down when I left the boat to go uptown for dinner six hours before. Turned out that the refrigerator and freezer did not shut down when the 110 power was cut.  Continuing to run through some kind of power inverter, they quickly drained the batteries, which could have left us in a world of hurt trying to get them recharged on jury rigged shore power lines.  Outside the port hole in my little room the wind and snow continued to swirl around the dock light outside, too much drink swirled around my head, fitful sleep was interrupted with images of those tattooed girls, titties shaking in front of my nose, mixed with the down home conversations they had with Cal, combination of whore and sister that seemed to create an unresolved conflict, dreams that seem to take more energy than a hard day’s work on deck.  Finally deep sleep and a late morning staggering to the stove for that first cup of head ache reliving coffee.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced; stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.