THE DREAM

    

The day looked perfect. One of the rare early fall days when the entire sky and water take on an almost magic glow.  Couldn't be better traveling conditions for the run down to Cypress Island,
where Tom and I planned to scout out a grove of trees.  He thought might work for the boat length poles we needed for our type of commercial salmon fishing.  Climbing over the rail of the Shirley B with .22 rifle, he allowed as how the best time for hunting deer in the islands is a couple weeks before opening day.  Safer to hunt out of season, not so many short sighted shop clerks from town stalking the woods with loaded guns.

 In a seven knot, double end wood trolling boat the run down to Cypress must have taken a couple hours.  At Tom's direction,  I powered down the machine and headed in toward the beach.  A short crescent of shingle with the memory of a logging camp dock,  line of pilings supporting a narrow walkway.  A guy had to line up off the end of the pier to avoid a rock pile on the north side of the place, other than that it was wide open with a clean bottom.  Lines looped  around  pilings fore and aft and Tom's assurance that there is enough water at low tide, we left the boat unattended while we hiked up into the woods exploring.

After dinner back down  on the boat, Tom and I headed out the logging road that led from the landing up into the interior of the island.  This time he brought along the  gun.  .22 pump action with a scope.  Dusk had set in, and the surroundings,  familiar from the days hikes, became hard to make out, but after spotting one buck that blended in with his background too well for Tom to get a shot, he completed his mission with a volly of shots with the gun resting on my shoulder, followed by a wild chase up a steep hill side in the now almost total darkness.

A quarter mile up from the boat along the old road the cabin of the local land owners stood un-occupied.  Tom spoke about a couple of brothers who owned all the land around there in the first person, and I kind of assumed that we had permission to be there, but possibly he just knew when they were not going to be around and took advantage of the convenient location to get a sock of venison in the freezer for winter eating.

We carried the deer back to the land owner's cabin where Tom planned to stay the night.  I stumbled on through the dark the quarter mile along the road to the boat, where I settled into my little bunk, only sound to be heard in the still air from a boat humming up Bellingham Chanel a couple miles over mirror still water. 

Sometime later I came suddenly awake with the creepiest feeling.  In a dream, some malevolent creature had crept out of the woods, perched itself on one of the pilings that loomed low tide tall over the boat, giving me the evil eye through the twelve inch square sky light that was the only window into my tiny boat galley.  In the dream, I had crawled out of my bunk, ever so careful not to look up at the thing. Crept up on deck and let go the lines, backed the boat out a hundred yards, set the anchor and returned to the comforts of the bunk.  The sense of relief felt at putting distance between me and the unseen thing on the piling quickly evaporated as I realized that the feeling of being watched from above felt stronger than ever now that I was fully awake.  I slept the rest of the night listening to the anchor chain rattle, just like the dream.

In later life, I've kind of grown out of it, but vivid dreams were a common part of my life in those days, and while the almost complete skepticism of older age had not yet set in, I seriously doubted the creature on the piling existed outside my imagination.  Chalking the whole thing up to a sub conscious warning  that a guy is vulnerable to south easterly winds that blow almost directly into that section of beach, I shrugged the whole thing off as nothing more than a half funny memory.  Dreaming that I moved the boat, then feeling compelled to repeat the action step for step before I could get back to sleep. 

On the other hand, a superstitious guy may well have judged the poles I took from that place to be jinxed.  I went down there a week or two after the hunting trip to cut my new poles.  The trees had to be small enough the base to fit the brackets on the sides of the boat, yet thick enough at thirty five feet up to do the job.  Looked easy enough from a distance, but selecting the specific ones to cut turned out more difficult than I anticipated.  I'd like to think that no trees were cut that turned out not to measure up to the requirements, but again memory tends to blur some of these details.  Suffice to say that by dark that day I had four new poles,  trimmed and laying along the high tide line on the beach.  Next morning I would loop a line around the little bundle, lead it to the stern of the Shirley, kick her in gear and pull the logs into the water, tow them back to Bellingham.

Not so easy.  About two in the morning the anchor chain clinked taught, south east gale sprang up from nowhere and me hanging on the hook, with that now ugly rock pile not so far down wind astern.  Boat coffee and a watchful eye for the rest of the night, then at daylight all thoughts of pulling those logs off the beach, especially working on my own, evaporated and I began inching my way back up the line toward town.  The Shirley B was a classic double end trolling boat.  Thirty three feet stem to stern, narrow with a round belly, deep draft.  Permanent ballast of concrete and rocks filled the bilges. To maximize her packing capacity for fish, this weight had been calculated to be the minimum for calm water stability.  Two or three tons of ice in the fish hold were considered mandatory for that boat to be safe, if not so comfortable in tough weather.  Bellingham bay gets gnarley on a southeaster.  Made it home, but when I went back down to get the poles I watched the forecast a bit closer.

When I hit Neah Bay that next spring the Shirley B sported four spanking new poles.  Pride goes before the fall, and my pride in the poles snapped quickly.   First to go, one bow pole snagged on the top of a piling under the ice shoot, stove pipe patch with the season only a week old.  A few days later, fishing alone, tacking up the fifty fathom curve south west of the cape, I heard a voice close aboard.  "Why don't you watch where you are going?"  Smart ass kid on deck of the dragger Traveler.

Snap, main pole on the starboard side broken on the heavy steel stabilizer pole on the dragger.  Stove pipe patch got me back in business again.  Two months later, forty fathom line off Carroll island I had a kid working on deck, pulling some really fat Coho.  Looked over at the Zonta working the same drag; just the two of us on a nice patch of fish.

 "Those two are not looking where they are going," I commented to Erick from the trolling pit.  Next tack the boats came together side to side in a horrible tangle of lines and rigging, poles snapping left and right.  Fish ringing on the bells as we drifted helplessly,  as we tried to undo the mess.

No more stove pipe patches.  Jinx or not, those poles stayed in the weeds along the side of the pole dock in La Push.  Butts supply had a stock of seasoned poles that served the boat well for the rest of her working life.  As for the phantom of the piling.  Did it get its revenge for the poles I stole, or was I just a drifty kid trying to run the boat without knowing my ass from a hole in the ground?     

Copyright 2013 - Paul Petersen

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