Salmon Trolling in the Seventies the .22

Occasionally one can hear the rattle of gunfire echoing  down the beach from somewhere beyond the end of our street.
  Pretty sure who the shooter is, I asked the neighbor  who lives up that way about it one day recently.  She told me that a target range is set up a couple hundred feet beyond the end of the street in an open field. Seemed safe enough, but the guy doing the shooting, a maintenance man for the home owners at the end of the street raised questions in her mind.  "Seems like a nice enough guy, but he sure is paranoid. Always telling my husband how much he needs to have some guns."

I happen to know that the shooter makes at least part of his living buying and selling guns and stoking fears of home invasion and assault are probably a standard part of his sales pitch rather than genuine paranoia. Nevertheless, the conversation got me to thinking about  whether it is the paranoid individual who is drawn to gun ownership, or if just having fire arms around tends to generated paranoid fantasies.

No doubt there is literature on the subject, but in the vein of this blog, old man spinning yarns about youthful days, I'll share the experience out of which that question formed in my mind forty years ago.  

Sometime in the seventies I bought a sweet little .22 Ruger semi automatic pistol. Come to think of it it was the first and only fire arm I ever purchased or owned.  Between my brother and the kids there have always been some sort of guns around and I had taken fire arms safety to get my hunting license as a preteen and spent lots of happy hours with my brother and other kids shooting .22s, so having my new little toy didn't strike me different from any other tool or supply for use in the commercial fishing boat, which was my trade in those days. 

The trade, trolling for salmon in the ocean off the west coast of Washington State, involved dragging an elaborate web of fishing lures through the water behind an aging wood fishing boat in which I lived and worked during the late spring and summer months each year.    From a cockpit in the stern of the boat the fisher spends long days constantly working through the gear to pick the occasional fish and otherwise keep the lures and bate fresh and active.  Naturally there is a by-catch to be cleared from the hooks.  We had Whole Earth Catalog in those days, and of course everyone wanted to live off the land eating macrobiotic from the hippie era, but I have to confess that my overall approach to wildlife management on the fishing grounds seems a bit primitive to the way I think now.  I justified the purchase of the .22 Ruger to use on sharks.  Sometimes a large blue shark would hit one of my salmon plugs, which usually resulted in a broken or cut leader, cuts to my hands from fighting the fish and the lose of a five dollar salmon plug.  Not only the loss of the retail value, but all plugs don't fish equally.  One plug out of a dozen may produce more fish than the other eleven combined, and god dam if every time one of those huge sharks came up on a leader, it had that good plug snagged in its jaw.  Using a gaff hook and a quick flick of the wrist a hook can be popped out of a fish's jaw, but it takes a moment of calm, where the boat rolls under and the lines slack for an instant and the fish on the line relaxes.  I could get a king salmon to relax by singing Just a Closer Walk With Thee, but sharks not so much.  However, I reasoned that a couple quick rounds of hot lead into the side of a sharks head would take the fight right out of them long enough to retrieve my plug from the saw tooth jaws.  Pay for the forty dollar investment in the gun in an afternoon fishing the prairie in August. 

Before going on with the paranoia angle, it should be noted that I only shot one shark and gave up on the idea altogether. Other than beer cans up at a gravel pit outside Neah Bay somewhere, I hadn't used the gun until sometime in August.  Warmer waters had brought a few blue sharks into our area.  Sure enough, one of my long leaders came up taught with the shadow of a large shark pulling out from the boat at a ninety degree angle.  Now is the big chance.  Getting the gun within reach of my right hand, I horsed the thing in closer to the boat, then took a couple wraps of sixty pound test mono-filament  leader   around my gloved left hand, leveled the gun with my right and popped off a quick round.  If the toe of my boot had not been tucked under a metal bracket four inches above the deck, I may have been dragged out of the boat when that shark took off for Hawaii. Lost the hot plug of the day, but escaped with my life.  

The paranoid story happened earlier that summer.  In the boat alone, fishing the forty fathom curve off Carol Island in May, the fleet had all edged into twenty fathoms to anchor for the night.  Sleeping on anchor can be relaxing, but usually not. The boat rolls and bounces, waves sloshing against the hull next to ones ear on the pillow, and the anchor rode creaks and snaps as the boat rises and falls on the waves.  On this particular occasion an odd current had pulled the boat up onto the anchor line, so that instead of it leading out ahead of the bow roller, the rope came back at an angle, hitting the side of the boat next to where I was sleeping, rap, rap, rap, as it pulled tight when the boat rose over the six foot lump that was running that night.

The sound prompted a dream, in which the sound of the anchor line echoing through the wood hull  became a creature of some kind, reaching up from the depths, rapping on the side of the boat with bony nickles, reaching over the gunwale with the other hand, feeling around the deck for a victim to snatch out of the boat into the dark sea below.

"I've got a gun down here.  I'll come on deck shooting if you don't leave me alone." dream voice, probably speaking in my sleep echoed through my tiny galley, before I dragged myself out of bed and scrambled up onto deck in my underwear to find out what was happening.  Nothing especially unusual about the boat angling in the current with a tide change or whatever, and pulling against the anchor line like  that.  I probably rolled out another ten fathoms of scope, climbed back down to the galley, set the stove to boil water in an hour and a half with it would be time to get up, and settled into the worm bunk for one last little nap of the short night on the grounds.

At least one other time that summer I had dreams in which some sort of wild west scenario played out on the screen of my sleep mind, very much out of character from typical dream experiences before.  I ended up thinking that even though my conscious mind saw the gun as just a fun little toy for plinking beer cans or whatever, something below the surface had been affected in a way that fits with the popular usage of the term paranoid.  Its like the old cliche, if the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems tend to look like nails.  With a loaded firearm within easy reach, ones mind may tend to look for problems to solve with hot lead.

This is not meant to suggest that there are not lots of folks for whom gun ownership is a fun and safe hobby. Whether or not an armed citizenry can protect our constitutional rights, one has to wonder where they have been as corporate run government has gutted the country, imposing a virtual police state mentality, but that is an entirely different topic.  My point is just that at least in my personal experience, the fact that a gun was in my possession prompted aggressively paranoid dreams that were very much out of character for my thinking at the time.