Trouble with Gasoline
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| WWII LCM-3 converted to fish tender - freighter |
That morning I got to be the service station attendant, fill the steel drums in the hold of the Unalakleet with gasoline. Long before self serve, getting to operate the gas hose struck me as a fun novelty. Fresh from high school, first week in Alaska, land of my boyhood dreams, and already doing man stuff. Dragging the heavy, weathered orange rubber gas hose into the open hatch of the boat as the attendant lowered it over the edge of the fuel dock, a good twenty feet above my head.
Low tide in Naknek. Practicality of using surplus world war two landing craft for work in this country is obvious. Boat sat straight and level on the mud, propeller wheels and rudders tucked safely out of harms way.
After schooling me on the difference between drum and barrel, plug and bung and the use of the special wrench to pull the bungs, they handed me the gas hose and set me to work.
First several drums were easy, under the open hatch I could crouch on bended knee. Sloshed a lot of gasoline around from not cutting off the high pressure flow of gas quick enough, but got a little better with each drum I filled. Forward of the hatch a little more headroom allowed me to work sitting on my but, so I filled these next.
Aft of the hatch just enough headroom above the tops of the drums for me to crawl in on my belly. In this confined area even a small eruption of gasoline out the vent when the drum filled prompted me to be extra careful cutting off the flow in time.
Last drum I ever filled with gas in my entire life started out as one of the best. At the instant the whoosh of air out the vent increased in pitch, accented with just a mist of gas droplets that proceed the gush, I cut off the flow.
At the instant something else happened, as vivid in memory as the first cup of coffee this morning. The hose parted from the aluminum nozzle handle, wildly dancing around the tops of the drums gasoline flowing freely at a surprisingly high pressure. That isn't supposed to happen.
Head, face and shoulders drenched in gas, eyes stinging shut I backed my ass out of that hole, scrambled to deck screaming for help. Silence from the dock overhead. Jack and the fuel man had grown bored watching me scramble around the tops of the drums and left me on my own.
Blinded by gas in both eyes, glasses drenched and fogged, front of my clothing soaked, I felt my way up the steel rung ladder to the top of the dock. Gas still flowing freely out of the damaged hose into the boat. No one in sight.
The hose rolled in and out from a reel like a larger version of a garden hose reel. From there the pipe disappeared into a maze of blacked pipes with no obvious shutoff. Or at least not obvious to a newly blinded kid frantically trying to stop the flow. If fumes get up to the flame in the galley stove there will be a big fire.
Finally found the shut off valve. Probably didn't take as long as it seemed. Then running up the dock to the little office at the beach end a couple hundred feet away. Locked and empty. Still no one in sight. Ran along the soft dirt road toward some buildings, the first one looked like a bar. Stuck my head in and asked if anyone knew Jack.
He's up at the whore house. Gruff voice and laughter from a small cluster of figures barely visible in the gloom. By the time I made my way back down to the boat Jack and the fuel dock attendant were there. The air thick with tension.
Equipment failure combined with spending the morning up at the whore house* while an untrained kid pumps gasoline in a confined area bordered on criminal negligence. In their minds the green kid fucked up.
The whole thing started a couple days earlier at dinner on the Kayak.
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| Kayak, WWII LCI cum salmon cannery |
Any of you guys ever steer a small boat?
Other than cussing me for splattering Atco Wet-Lap tar on his go to town pants, I had hardly heard two words from the boss. Down at our end of the galley table the other two new kids didn't look up.
I have.....thinking a few turns at the wheel of Suzie qualified me for the job.
Put your things on the Unalakleet. Top bunk.
Less than ten days after high school graduation night I found myself at dinner in a ship similar to the 102 pictured above. World war two era LCI. Salmon can line welded onto deck plates where guns once searched the skies for enemy planes. Isaiah 2:3 - 4 often came to mind while I worked in that boat.
The day Jon and I signed on with that outfit in Lake Union we didn't get a good look at the boat. Boats as it turned out. There were two of them rafted side to side, which melded together in our eyes into a wide barge like craft. Recall walking up and down the dock trying to figure which end was which. Large port holes evenly spaced in a round conning tower ten feet above the upper deck offered no clue as to bow or stern. Phil told us to apply for the job, called the boat a processor. From the look of the place we thought the little factory probably took in some kind of scrap fish which it processed into pet food or fertilizer. Never mind the details. After years of fantasizing about adventure in Alaska we were finally getting out chance to travel north.
Interview with a cauliflower ear Englishman in the grimy, dim lit galley didn't include anything about the kind of work we would be doing in the ship. Noting that we seemed to be from good Nordic stock, he allowed as how we could take it when things get tough.
We imagined wind and wave, reality turned out to be long hours standing in one spot tending salmon canning equipment. They assigned Jon to the can forming machine located somewhere below decks, feeding flattened can bodies in one end of an antique looking machine, I worked at the other end of the line, moving huge baskets full of filled tins along tracks into the steam heated pressure cookers called retorts.
Up until the summer of sixty six when we landed in the crew, Kayak and her sister, the Bearing had spent the early part of the season up north in Norton Sound at a little town called Unalakleet thus the name for the converted LCM in which I had my adventure.
Pilot of the single engine bush plane read the Sunday funnies as we bounced along at a thousand feet over the tundra on the way down from the airport at King Salmon to Big Creek. Alaska, land of my boyhood dreams. Dark lush forest rising above deep fjords, rugged snow capped mountains behind. Bristol Bay country is flat as a pancake for as far as the eye can see from the back seat of the plane, uncountable number of little round black lakes in a sea of grassland. Tundra. Not what I expected.
Kayak lay on the mud in shallow water just around the bend in what I soon learned to call Big Creek. A big read head named Clare Clark ran a fish camp there, cook house and a few scattered cabins. Must have been a large percentage of the male population of Cathlamet Washington up to fish Sockeye from outboard powered skiffs on the flats out front. This year, with the cannery in place, they could process their catch on location which must have been a great improvement from trucking them down the beach to Egegik.
In Bristol Bay Alaska there isn't much darkness in June. Full daylight at bed time, daylight long before an early breakfast. First time I saw utter darkness later that night when Jack came down to the boat, tossed a clean canvas sheet over the filthy bunk and went below to crank up the engines. Two six seventy one's a few inches below the diamond plate deck rattled me into my pants in an instant. Jack climbed up out of the engine room, told me to let go the lines.
Big tides there as well. Shoreline well defined at low water, most of the ship laying on the mud for that matter, now dissolved into the black. As soon as the loom Kayak's lighting faded I could see nothing out the thick glass port holes. Faint light from the compass, and flashing red depth meter reflected from Jack's glasses. I trusted he knew where we were going.
A few hundred feet downstream the creek takes a ninety degree turn into the open ocean. Big sea running. To say that the movement of that boat in those waves came as a shock understates my reaction. Terror. Not unfounded either, although at the time I didn't fully comprehend the danger. Twice during the four seasons I worked in that area lives were lost when boats stranded on those sand bars and were overwhelmed by heavy seas rolling toward the beach.
Suddenly Jack tapped one of the gauges, cursed bitterly and handed me the wheel. Keep her on this course. A moment of blinding light when the engine room hatch opened, then darkness with it slammed shut.
With no outside visual reference ones mind perceives the compass card as spinning in the binnacle while the familiar surroundings of the room and boat are holding a steady course. Add warn out steering linkage, boat rolling and pitching to extreme angles, and my total lack of experience to complete a picture. Near disaster.
Before Jack climbed back out of the engine room I had come close enough to completing a three sixty turn that I only got cussed for being twenty five degrees off course.
After a second futile attempt to fix the overheating issue, Jack turned around to come back in. Get Jimmy to fix the problem in the morning and head for Naknek on the afternoon tide.
That day a flat ocean and mild sky put us both in a better mood. I managed to steer the boat in a straight line for two or three hours for which I got a compliment from the otherwise silent boss. We had fried spam for lunch.
That evening we landed at the Bearing, anchored five miles or so up the river. Bearing, same basic hull as Kayak, somewhat different superstructure; night and day difference in line aboard. Kayak had a cold, quiet crew. Stern old man cook forbid conversation at meals, native crew from up north weren't especially talkative anyway. Green kids up from Seattle didn't fit in very well.
Gang on the bearing totally different. Everyone up from town, woman cook and a couple women from the bay area gave the place a much more upbeat atmosphere. Good conversation, even laughter at meal time. Englishman Jon and I met in Seattle ran the place like a rugby coach. Open and friendly, cuss you in an instant of course, but somehow it didn't seem as bad as Jack's sharp temper. Wished I could spend the summer here instead of on Kayak down in Big Creek.
After the incident with the gasoline I got my chance to jump ship. A flight came in with crew for the Bearing, that included cousin Jon. Hoping to spend the summer in the same boat as Jon, I begged Jack to exchange me for one of the new kids. He did, but choose Jon to come back to Kayak in my place because he was the only one who could steer a boat.
So I got half my wish. Didn't have to spend several hours in that boat with the boss who I imagined wanted to kill me for the gas mess. But spent most of the summer separated from Jon, with whom I had spent so many hours dreaming about our first trip north.
* I am not suggesting that Jack or the other gentleman were actually at a whore house, or even that such a place existed in that town, that's just what the guy in the bar said to give the green kid a hard time.
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| low tide in Naknek |
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